This essay explores Liliana Porter’s screenprint and mixed-media works (1991–94), depicting figures and objects taken from popular culture, art, literature, and her own collection of bric-a-brac. Her works create images in which the real and the illusory coexist; these humorous pictures challenge both “reality” (what is real) and “simulation” (what is reproduced). Mutaciones con platito del Ché (1994) includes imagery of several mass-produced objects and a plate with a picture of the Cuban revolutionary Ernesto “Ché” Guevara on it, thus undermining the idea that reproduction is merely an illusion of the real. Moreover, The Traveler (1994) and The Accident (1993) present Disney characters Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck (recurring iconography in Porter’s work); Them (1993) portrays toys alongside images of Saint Gregory and the Popeye character Olive Oyl. Mutaciones con diet coca (1994)—depicting Mickey Mouse, a bust of El Negro Felipe (an escaped Cuban slave and spiritual figure in a Venezuelan cult religion), a hand-painted Coca-Cola bottle, and a doll—poses the question of how mass-produced objects can be individualized. Diálogo (1994) portrays Mickey Mouse and Alice in Wonderland’s White Rabbit in apparent conversation. Together, all these works reveal a poetic world where meaning, reality, and fiction are almost indecipherable.

Julia P. Herzberg is an art historian, independent curator, and Fulbright Senior Specialist living in New York. She completed her PhD in art history at the Graduate Center, City University of New York, in 1998, with a dissertation on Cuban artist Ana Mendieta. She is a specialist of Latin American artists living in the United States, and has curated more than twenty-five exhibitions. Herzberg was a co-curator of The Decade Show (1990), held in New York at the Museum of Contemporary Hispanic Art, the New Museum, and the Studio Museum in Harlem, and she was the curator of the official U.S. representation for the III Bienal Internacional de Pintura in Cuenca, Ecuador (1991). In addition to serving as a consulting curator at El Museo del Barrio in New York (1996–2001), she was a consulting curator for the 2003, 2006, and 2009 Bienales de La Habana, and she is a contributing and consulting editor for Arte al día Internacional. Herzberg has taught, lectured, and published extensively in the United States and abroad and received two J. William Fulbright Scholarship Board awards: one at the Pontificia Universidad Católica (2007) and another at the Universidad Diego Portales (2013), both in Santiago, Chile, and also served as a visiting professor at the Instituto de Arte, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso, Chile (2016).

Liliana Porter (b. 1941, Buenos Aires, Argentina) is a contemporary artist who works across media including printmaking, painting, drawing, photography, video, installation, drama, and public art. She has lived and worked in New York since 1964, and was a cofounder of the New York Graphic Workshop (NYGW) with Venezuelan artist José Guillermo Castillo (b. 1938; d. 1999) and her former husband Luis Camnitzer, a Uruguayan artist born in Germany in 1937. Since she began showing her work in 1959, she has been in over 450 exhibitions worldwide, including, most recently, El Museo del Barrio, New York (2019); Pérez Art Museum Miami (2018–19); the Brooklyn Museum, New York (2018); the Kitchen, New York (2018); Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2017); and the 57th Biennale di Venezia (2017). Porter was a professor at Queens College, City University of New York, from 1991 to 2007, and has won many awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship (1980), three New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowships (1985, 1996, 1999), and in 2016 received the Premio Universitario de Cultura 400 Años, an award from Universidad Nacional de Cordoba, Argentina.

This essay appeared in the catalogue for Liliana Porter’s eponymous solo exhibition held at Ruth Benzacar Galería de Arte in Buenos Aires (September 21–November 5, 1994). By that time she had already had many solo exhibitions in New York, including at the Bronx Museum of the Arts, (1992), Syracuse University (1990), the Center for Inter-American Relations (1980), and the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) (1973). The works on view reveal Porter’s emerging interest at the time in the simulacrum (a copy or representation of reality) and questioning forms of representation, as well the shift toward working with knickknacks and found objects from popular culture.