In the Fall of 2000, shortly after abandoning doctoral studies in Art History, I was invited to Mexico City by Taiyana Pimental to participate in a round-table discussion about the work of Santiago Sierra, then exhibiting at Sala 7, a project space founded by Pimental within the Museo Rufino Tamayo. During my visit, Pimental suggested that I meet Yoshua Okon – one of the founders of the artist-run space, La Panadería – who was looking for a new director of the space so that he could pursue graduate studies in Los Angeles. The meeting was held and the deal was made and a few months later, I relocated to Mexico City from New York, in an attempt to bypass the years of assistant curatorial work and, exploitative wages, and social networking necessary to advance my career in a glutted, competitive New York market.
Founded in 1993, La Panadería had become an iconic artist-run space that had enjoyed a great deal of attention in the mid the 90s during one of the many cyclical booms of Mexican art that, for over a decade, has guaranteed this city both a steady flow of visiting international artists and curators and a receptive audience for its artists abroad. The Mexican art scene, as promised, proved to be dynamic, cosmopolitan, and—while at times unbearably polarized—reflected the reality of a country whose sense of cultural identity was sufficiently complex and contradictory to problematize the kind of regionalist (sometimes xenophobic) agendas that seem to be inevitable outside of the major art centers. However, as an academically trained female curator working in a masculinist, socially exclusionary (i.e. cliquey), and somewhat anti-intellectual institution that deemed itself irreverent and countercultural (but had in fact become quite stagnant prior to my arrival), my tenure was constantly plagued not only by the conflicting interests of certain founding members of the space, but by the nagging feeling that I was fighting for somebody else’s cause. Rather than reiterate the messianic tone often utilized in discussions about art-run spaces, I’d like to elaborate on some the challenges that I encountered in Mexico, and then again in Bogotá and Vancouver and that seemed to be endemic to working from a position of institutional critique in small scenes eager to project themselves internationally.
There were certain aspects of La Panadería that seemed worth addressing from the moment I arrived. First was the very gendered nature of its institutional critique – it was a space run by men and the visual vocabulary of much of the kind of work being shown included titty shots, guns, monster trucks, and other “bad boy” and “bad taste” instances of cultural slumming. One of the first shows I curated, then, was a collaboration between New York-based artists Sharon Hayes and Andrea Geyer who conducted a series of interviews in which they asked women in Mexico to discuss gender and feminism. Each interview includes three parties: the interviewer, the interviewee and the translator. In the video documentation of each interview the only person shown is the translator in order to foreground the impact of translation on the production of knowledge and meaning. The reception of the exhibition was quite positive and Hayes and Geyer went on to continue the project in New York, Vienna, and Berlin.
Another issue was the very function of the space, which had become a permanent fixture in the Mexican art scene and, as some would say, an institution. Over the years, museums and galleries had begun to use the space as a sort of screen to filter out the most talented of a newer generation of artists, a model which I found very boring and tried to resist. It was never my mission to actively seek out ‘new talents’ (the very idea is so loaded in so many negative ways and even the term ‘emerging’ should be justified within any serious discussion); in fact I primarily worked with artists of my own generation (early-mid 30s) most of whom were already well established in their interests and practices. Moreover, as a “professional curator,” I had been implicitly hired to guarantee a smooth transition toward a more economically viable, self-sufficient space by procuring stable funding among other things. However, the space’s eight-year history brought with it a tremendous amount of baggage. Directors had come and gone and many friendships had broken up in the process, making for a space that people either loved or hated. Some argued that the natural evolution of such a space would be its ultimate inclusion into the mainstream while others, particularly those nostalgic for those early years, argued that it was necessary to keep that original spirit of rebelliousness alive. An exhibition that responded, in part, to this dilemma was a solo show by Javier Téllez, an old friend of mine from New York who was beginning to become more established in this period. My invitation to Téllez resisted the idea that with commercial success or inclusion into the museum system, an artist inevitably outgrows a low-budget, alternative space: despite his/her access to more established venues, there are still certain projects that are inappropriate to those venues and in this case, exhibiting in La Panadería afforded Téllez the opportunity to work in an informal, spontaneous manner. Nor was I motivated by a desire to garner prestige for the space, or my own curatorship, through the inclusion of bigger names, although certainly this was a potential outcome. “Aire de Mexico,” as the exhibition was called, featured a new video work of five voladores de papantla and eleven schoolchildren being stuffed into a vocho taxi that was then projected onto the front window of a green vocho rented for the duration of the exhibition. Although the exhibition was well received by those who attended (including virtually every curator from Mexico’s public museums), few members of La Panadería’s regular public showed thanks to a boycott organized by one of the space’s founding members as a protest –a very misguided and uninformed one given that Téllez’s work is all about institutional critique – against what was seen as an affront to the space’s punk-rock attitude. The failure to reach a consensus about what the space’s natural evolution should be, combined with the growing pressure of gentrification within La Condesa, the neighborhood in which La Panadería was located and which it had inevitably helped to gentrify, led to the space’s closure in September 2002, a year after I’d resigned.
In August 2002 I opened Espacio La Rebeca in Bogotá, partially in response to a recognition of what La Panadería had positively contributed to the history of institutional critique in Mexico, and the necessity of developing such a critique in the context of Colombia where the figure of the institution (an anachronistic and conservative one) has historically been, and continues to be, so dominant. La Rebeca was named for a public fountain in downtown Bogotá that had once been part of an elegant park before becoming a dead, neglected space and meeting point for street children (famously depicted in Luis Ospina’s Agarrando Pueblo), La Rebeca was a small, low-budget space interested in the idea of an international network of diverse, critically engaged artists that ultimately sought to work against the idea of defining communities exclusively in geographical or nationalistic terms. After many years I can openly admit that I’m suspicious of a privileging of the local. This is because it can so easily degenerate into a mechanism of exclusion when it becomes an exercise in self-preservation - a pseudo-nationalistic defense of ‘lo nuestro,’ – or simply a means of self-promotion – the packaging and exportation (for global consumption) of a local ‘artscene’ that neglects any sort of real diversity within that context. Working on the geographic periphery can easily become all about contributing to the production of a local mythology that complies with expectations that may be partially imposed from the outside but are also encouraged and reproduced by local experts, dedicated to mediating between local producers and their potential international audience by establishing the necessary institutional alliances to project their assigned territories under the guise of dialogue (when it is more like a competition of marginalized, provincial monologues). In reaction to this sort of worse-case scenario, I preferred to adhere to a more common sense, and very simple, idea that the fortification of a local scene is absolutely dependent on opening that scene up to divergent practices, histories, and points of view. How can we ever understand who we are or what we do without being challenged by difference?
For a little under three years, La Rebeca hosted monthly exhibitions of Colombian and non-Colombian artists most of whom produced new work or initiated new projects for the space. Operational, production, and travel costs were funded by grants acquired exclusively from abroad (international organizations like Daros-Latin America and the Daniel Langlois Foundation), and this was intentional both as a way of promoting the idea of redistributing global wealth but also as a means to avoid the inefficient and elitist character of local, primarily public, sources. The space’s annual budget was approximately 12,000 USD. In Colombia the national art circuit revolves almost exclusively around a series of national and regional art salons curated on the basis of submissions to an open call. Funding derives from the Ministry of Culture and is generous: for example just one of this year’s numerous regional salons will have a budget of 30,000,000 pesos or 15,000 USD. It would take the average worker lucky enough to earn minimum wage five years to earn this amount. A tenured full-time professor in the art department of the private university, Universidad de los Andes, earns this in five months. A small, artist run space could operate for over a year on this budget. Colombia is a very rich country where money is as badly distributed in the public arts sector as it is in the general population. While things have changed a good deal since then, there is still very little funding for activities outside the structure of the Salon.
In La Rebeca, exhibitors came from many different circuits in different cities like Santiago, New York, Caracas, México, and Bogotá—reflecting my own nomadic trajectory as a curator and perhaps more importantly as a person without roots or an attachment to any one particular place. As in any other exhibition space, some shows were better than others, although I’ve never been one to measure an exhibition’s success strictly based on the public’s reception—and it’s the intensely social aspect of curating that ultimately led me to abandon it, as it often feels too much like a popularity contest based on simple formulas. Some exhibitions that were most memorable to me were: Gabriel Sierra’s amorpho, a super simple, austere showing of conceptually sophisticated objects based on the artist’s particular interest in a critical, deconstructive practice of industrial design appropriate to an economically precarious context. “La Nube Loca,” a group exhibition of Johanna Unzueta, Felipe Mujica, and Juan Céspedes that represented my particular interest in and experience with Chilean art. And finally, Phil Collins’ el mundo no escuchará: not just because of how that piece so deftly negotiated the slippery terrains of emotional and critical engagement, but because, quite simply, those two months of production were some of the happiest in recent memory.
In early 2005, a latent desire to close the space and leave Colombia was hastened by the arrival of the ‘reinsertion’ program to Teusaquillo, the neighborhood in which La Rebeca was located. A program designed to socially and economically reintegrate ex-guerilla and paramilitary soldiers who had voluntarily surrendered to the State, this badly administered, short-lived initiative transformed a previously idyllic neighborhood into one that was tense and, at times, unbearable. It became increasingly evident that my imported lifestyle was untenable, and even silly. In the end this situation provided a good pretext for La Rebeca to close its doors just in time to avoid becoming redundant or boring, stagnant or institutionalized—its absence seemingly creating just enough nostalgia to contribute to the creation of initiatives like El Bodegón in Bogotá or Lugar a Dudas in Cali. What this experience did reinforce was my cynicism toward the artworld and how frivolous art can be in certain contexts, which necessitates a real commitment to a critical (not heroic or romanticized) and contextualized practice above and beyond the careerism and commercialization of that practice or the naïve idea that art is a cause to be defended.
This is where the story takes a left turn. In 2005 I relocated to Vancouver in order to direct the Or Gallery, a historic artist-run centre that had exhibited several generations of Canadian artists from Jeff Wall to Rodney Graham to Steven Shearer. Canada had played an important role in the formation of institutional critique and artist-run initiatives beginning in the 60s with groups like General Idea so for me this move, although seemingly arbitrary, was consistent with my interests and experience in the non-profit sector (a sector much more reduced in the U.S. which is why I never returned there). In Vancouver, public funding was plentiful, even exuberant and running an alternative space there required a small fraction of the emotional and physical energy that such a project required in Mexico or Colombia. Furthermore, the artist-run system had existed since the early 80s so that artist-run centers were like small institutions that simply mirrored the activities of public galleries and museums with more modest resources and a less professional structure. For example, the director/curator of an artist-run centre in Canada must work with a board of directors usually handpicked by the previous director to promote his/her own interests. In a small, provincial city like Vancouver this means that board members probably went to art school with their director and the bond they share is untouchable, especially to someone from the outside.
Like Mexico, Vancouver has an international reputation as being an exceptionally interesting scene. A city of only 2 million inhabitants, it has produced an outstanding number of successful artists including Jeff Wall, Stan Douglas, Rodney Graham, Ken Lum, Brian Jungen, and Tim Lee, among others. They are all men and all (some willingly, other grudgingly) are part of an export product called “Vancouver Art.” Artist-run centers, public and private galleries and museums along with the State funding system managed through national, provincial, and municipal grants are all, to a varying extent, committed to promoting this export product. There is always some rhetoric about opening up the local art scene to outside perspectives and my hiring in 2005 – along with the hiring of some other non-local curators including Jenifer Papararo at the Contemporary Art Museum and Candice Hopkins at the Western Front – represented a very conscious effort to address what many felt to be the exaggerated introspection and self-referentiality of this scene. Once a critical and productive discourse that addressed the particular problems and concerns of a city geographically isolated from art centers like Toronto or New York, the idea of the local has become part of a mechanism of packaging and exportation. The inclusion of foreign artists – especially from places like Colombia and Chile where the absence of public funding or private collecting fail to make them potential sites of exportation – is irrelevant within this scheme. There are, of course, a great number of artists from Vancouver who are critical of the way things are or feel marginalized, and in fact many of them end up leaving, relocating to more cosmopolitan cities like Berlin where I also happened to move after resigning my position in 2007 and abandoning my curatorial activities to become a full-time art writer.
