Video, colour and sound
Tate Collection
Works with images
General Collection
Collection
<a href="https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/miguel-angel-cardenas-26472" aria-label="More by Miguel Ángel Cárdenas" data-gtm-name="header_link_artist" data-gtm-destination="page--artist">Miguel Ángel Cárdenas</a>
We are Free
Lent by the Tate Americas Foundation, courtesy of the Latin American Acquisitions Committee 2019
<p><span>We Are Free!?</span> 1981 is a colour video with sound, lasting nearly twenty-two minutes, by Colombian-born artist Miguel Angel Cárdenas. It can be shown either as a projection or on a monitor. Produced in an edition of ten with one artist’s proof, this copy is number four in the main edition. It was made in Amsterdam, where Cárdenas settled in 1963. It presents a fictional narrative that considers the struggle for gay men to live and love openly within contemporary Western society. Loosely autobiographical, the video narrates the story of two men who flee a religiously conservative, militaristic and tropical country – presumably a repressive Catholic country in Latin America – in search of a place where their relationship can thrive; however, once there, they encounter intolerance and experience disillusionment. Taking a different, more socially-engaged tone to earlier videos such as <span>The Soup is Delicious </span>1977 (Tate L04263), which are characterised by playful references to sexual obfuscation and concealment, <span>We Are Free!?</span> highlights Cárdenas’s skills in storytelling, advanced filming and editing techniques, costume design and the use of colour video to its fullest capacity. Avoiding spoken dialogue, the video often employs special effects to divide the screen into bright pairings – an echo of the composition of the artist’s early assemblages such as <span>Blue Lovers </span>1965 (Tate L04086) – to establish relationships between protagonists.</p>
time-based media video colour sound
We are Free!?
duration: 21min, 56sec
Lent by the Tate Americas Foundation, courtesy of the Latin American Acquisitions Committee 2019
<div class="text">
<p>
<i>We Are Free!?</i> 1981 is a colour video with sound, lasting nearly twenty-two minutes, by Colombian-born artist Miguel Angel Cárdenas. It can be shown either as a projection or on a monitor. Produced in an edition of ten with one artist’s proof, this copy is number four in the main edition. It was made in Amsterdam, where Cárdenas settled in 1963. It presents a fictional narrative that considers the struggle for gay men to live and love openly within contemporary Western society. Loosely autobiographical, the video narrates the story of two men who flee a religiously conservative, militaristic and tropical country – presumably a repressive Catholic country in Latin America – in search of a place where their relationship can thrive; however, once there, they encounter intolerance and experience disillusionment. Taking a different, more socially-engaged tone to earlier videos such as <i>The Soup is Delicious </i>1977 (Tate L04263), which are characterised by playful references to sexual obfuscation and concealment, <i>We Are Free!?</i> highlights Cárdenas’s skills in storytelling, advanced filming and editing techniques, costume design and the use of colour video to its fullest capacity. Avoiding spoken dialogue, the video often employs special effects to divide the screen into bright pairings – an echo of the composition of the artist’s early assemblages such as <i>Blue Lovers </i>1965 (Tate L04086) – to establish relationships between protagonists. </p>
<p>After leaving Colombia, Cárdenas became a central figure within the international artistic avant-garde in Amsterdam for his creation of pop-inflected objects and as a pioneer of video and performance art. Throughout the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s he experimented across a wide range of media, producing paintings, drawings, collage, assemblage, happenings, performances, video and TV broadcasts addressing themes of sexual desire, queerness and corporeality. His work corresponds with pop art, happenings and the new realism of the 1960s, as well as experiments with performance and new media in the 1970s and 1980s. At the same time, it is consistently invested with Cárdenas’s own personal experience and sensibilities, addressing the intersections of abstraction and assemblage through references to the body, sexuality and popular culture. His practice was characterised by an accessible, yet distinctly queer aesthetic that balances intellectual rigour and humour, with playful references to sexual obfuscation and concealment running throughout his video and sculptural pieces. Early works by Cárdenas appeared in the seminal touring exhibition <i>Pop Art and New Realism</i> at the Gemeentemuseum in 1964, The Hague, alongside pieces by artists such as Francis Bacon, Willem de Kooning, Marcel Duchamp, Roy Lichtenstein and Yves Klein. In 1972 Cárdenas co-founded the In-Out Center, the first independent art space in Amsterdam, together with fellow artists Ulises Carrión, Raúl Marroquin, Sigurdur and Kristjan Gudmundsson, among others. </p>
<p>
<i>We Are Free!?</i> was commissioned by De Appel Foundation in Amsterdam as the second in a series of artist-made videos intended to air on Dutch public television; it subsequently was shown in the exhibition <i>Video Art from Latin America</i> at the Museum of Modern Art, New York in 1982. It has been screened at various other museums and art spaces across the United States and Europe, including the International Center for Photography, New York in 1989, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid in 1998, and at Framer Framed in the Netherlands in 2016. Curators, art historians and activists increasingly cite the work as key in the histories of video art and representations of gender.</p>
<p>
<b>Further reading</b>
<br/>
<i>Niuewe Realisten</i> (New Realists), exhibition pamphlet, Gemeentemuseum, The Hague, Netherlands, 24 June–30 August 1964.<br/>Sebastian Lopez, ‘Miguel Angel Cárdenas and the Truth of the Video’, <i>Errata #3: Revista de Artes Visuales</i>, no.3, December 2010, pp.208–17. Available online at <a href="https://issuu.com/revistaerrata/docs/errata_3_cultura_digital_creaci_n">https://issuu.com/revistaerrata/docs/errata_3_cultura_digital_creaci_n</a>, accessed 15 May 2017.<br/>Blake Gopnik, ‘Miguel Ángel Cárdenas: Sex Takes a Poke at Abstraction’, 24 April 2017, <a href="https://news.artnet.com/opinion/828722-828722">https://news.artnet.com/opinion/828722-828722</a>, accessed 11 May 2017.</p>
<p>Michael Wellen/Inti Guerrero/Katy Wan<br/>May 2017</p>
</div>

Summary
2023-12-11T00:00:00
summary
SHORT_TEXT