Wendy Vogel reviews Rodrigo Valenzuela’s General Song in ArtReview 12.15.17

Rodrigo Valenzuela General Song
Upfor, Portland 6 September – 14 October

For the Chilean-born artist Rodrigo Valenzuela, physical and artistic labor have always been intertwined. After moving to the United States in 2005, Valenzuela worked for a decade in construction while he developed his artistic practice. These jobs influenced the production of several experimental videos documenting fellow workers: in Maria TV (2014), for instance, Valenzuela combines interview footage of Latinx nannies and maids with sequences in which they perform telenovela monologues, enacting their real-life frustrations through dramatic dialogue. For a 2015 exhibition at Seattle’s Frye Art Museum titled Future Ruins, Valenzuela paired these videos with the black-and-white photographic series Hedonic Reversal (2014), depicting decaying architectural structures. They are faked, however; Valenzuelamade the images through a painstaking process. He constructed scenes of destruction in his studio, photographed them, created digital scans of those images as backdrops and assembled further objects in front of them, accompanied by dusty footprints and scrawls of chalk and graphite.

Future Ruins, mounted in a gentrifying Seattle, evoked Robert Smithson’s 1967 characterization of the new Jersey Turnpike as ‘ruins in reverse’. In his catalogue interview for the exhibition, conducted over a year before President Trump vowed to ‘Make America Great Again’, Valenzuela explained his interest in artificial ruins: ‘I am not seeking to symbolize loss and nostalgia for a better past; I’m seeking to understand if there is pleasure in the ruin itself’.

General Song takes a more prosaic and politicized tone. Its title draws on Pablo