Born in Argentina, Leandro Katz arrived in New York in 1965. As a poet, translator, Conceptual artist, and professor, Katz participated in experimental literary movements in Buenos Aires, Quito, Lima, and New York. Coming to the end of a winding path through South and Central America, in New York he found a thriving community of avant-garde artists and activists. He made the city his home for over 40 years.
During his travels in the summer of 1963, Katz had encountered the monumental ruins of the ancient Maya in southern Mexico, Guatemala, and Honduras. The experience shaped his relationship to language, especially as he adapted to living in the United States. Like many Conceptual artists, he developed an interest in symbolic systems of representation. His text-based works from the early 1970s share the analytical approach of friends and collaborators Mel Bochner and Lawrence Weiner. In his drawings 21 and 21 × 78 Characters, Katz arranges English texts by inventing a geometric, rather than grammatical, structure: 21 lines of 78 characters each. Similarly, in 21 Lineas I, 21 Lineas II, 21 Lineas III, and 21 Lineas IV, each drawing contains a square of typewritten Spanish words in 21 lines, where each line measures 21 centimeters. The meanings that might emerge from the words, sounds, and colors juxtaposed to fit these criteria, rather than syntactic rules, are accidental.
“I became very absorbed with the Maya because of my interest in image and text,” Katz has said. The meanings embedded in the Mayan alphabet, which was largely destroyed during the Spanish conquest, had at the time been only partially decoded. “The mystery of the Maya hieroglyphs is the question: is it a phonetic, ideographic, or pictographic system; are they things that represent things or things that represent ideas or phonetic expressions representing sounds and eventually words. I realized that I, as a poet-artist, was trying to do something similar to what they were doing: to express ideas with gestures that varied between the rational and the divinatory, between the phonetic and the sensorial.”2
These questions converge in his invented alphabets: 27 Molinos (27 Windmills), in which images of windmills that he photographed in Spain and Portugal stand in for the letters of the Latin alphabet, and his Lunar Alphabets, in which letters are replaced by the phases of the moon. With allusions to Maya astronomy and the Spanish novel Don Quixote, respectively, Katz proposes a poetic register of meanings lurking just below the level of words. His Lunar Sentence II, from 1978, reads, “When we pulverize words, what is left is neither mere noise nor arbitrary pure elements, but still other words, reflection of an invisible and yet indelible representation: this is the myth in which we now transcribe the most obscure and real powers of language.”
In 1984, Katz returned to the Yucatán region to photograph the Maya monuments. This time, his expedition retraced the journey of 19th-century explorers John Lloyd Stephens and Frederick Catherwood, the first English-speaking travelers in the region originally inhabited by the Maya. Their bestselling travelogues—including Catherwood’s painstakingly accurate drawings, made with the help of a camera lucida—popularized and romanticized the Maya in the US and Europe. But, Katz has said, “the European eye coins the culture in its own terms,” and in The Catherwood Project he set out to investigate their representations of the ancient sites by reconstructing Catherwood’s precise point of view.
Some photographs, such as Uxmal, after Catherwood [House of the Nuns, Southeast Corner] and Labná Arch, after Catherwood [East Façade], pair Catherwood’s and Katz’s images to reveal the passage of centuries and the artist’s manipulation of the image. In others, such as The Castle [Chichén Itzá] and Tulúm, a la manera de Catherwood (El Castillo) (Tulúm, after Catherwood [The Castle]), Katz acknowledges his own role in constructing these views, including his own hand holding Catherwood’s lithograph in the image. “I cannot deny my own manipulation of reality. I, too, am representing,” he said.3 Finally, photographs such as Templo de la Frondosa Cruz, Palenque (Temple of the Foliated Cross, Palenque) do not directly quote Catherwood’s representation, but replicate the dark palette and atmospheric skies of his expeditionary gaze. Now crowded with tourists rather than overgrown vegetation, the monuments, like words, refer to something shifting and elusive. Throughout his career, across many mediums, Katz has sought to uncover the many layers of meaning existing within image and text. Tilting at windmills, divining the moon, or encountering ancient ruins, we see what we want to see.