michèle faguet

Michelle Letelier (catalogue essay for Goldrausch program, Berlin 2010)

2011-02-24T02:32:00.000-08:00

Behind every creative gesture there is a particular life that help to determine the form that gesture will take as well as the manner in which it is articulated. Naturally, there are those lives that are more interesting than others in the way they connect to concerns considered to be universal, which is just another way of saying that some people’s lives are more relevant to other people’s lives. But what is shared is not a series of abstract qualities represented through self-indulgent introspection (a hackneyed assumption about what it means to make art) but the political dimension that is revealed through particular biographical anecdotes experienced by specific individuals.

Michelle Letelier’s trajectory as a visual artist begins with the Atacama Desert, a 1000km narrow strip of land that occupies a significant portion of her native Chile. It is the driest desert in the world – an inhospitable terrain that symbolically isolates an already geographically distant country from the rest of the world while connecting it to a global economy through the exploitation of the rich mineral deposits that lie just beneath its hard, flat surface. In the 19^th and early 20^th century, its principle export was sodium nitrate (used in fertilizer and gunpowder) until World War I prompted Germany to invent a synthetic version of it bringing an abrupt halt to a thriving national industry and quickly transforming once prosperous mining communities into ghost towns whose deteriorating facades today intensify an already melancholic landscape.

This poetic image of the desert was a significant reference for a previous generation of Chilean artists, known as the avanzada[1], and more recently figures in the writings of Roberto Bolaño – although his desert is situated in Mexico, the country where he lived in exile for many years. For Letelier, the desert is the place where she spent her adolescence, growing up in Chuquicamata, home to the largest open-pit copper mine in the world. (With the demise of sodium nitrate, copper replaced it as the country’s most lucrative natural resource; the nationalization of this industry by Salvador Allende directly precipitated the coup against him.) In previous works – photographs, videos, and installations – she began documenting the gradual erasure of the ‘Chuqui’ mining camp, as it was fondly called, forced to close due to environmental contamination and rising fuel costs associated with the transport of waste rock to an off-site location. The decision to relocate residents to the nearby town of Calama was accompanied by a practical – if somewhat macabre – solution of disposing the waste material from the mine onto the town itself, gradually burying it under layers of rock, with the exception of the plaza, school, and church, marked for historical preservation.

In Desarme, 2004-2007 Letelier walks through and around the near-empty “John Bradford Houses” that comprise her former neighborhood. Images of discarded and abandoned objects in now uninhabited interiors are juxtaposed with fragments of texts taken from inventories, certificates, and other documents found amidst the rubble. Carefully arranged on the floor below the video projection is an assortment of objects – like a doll, a floppy disk, a telephone book, etc. – all metonyms for a childhood spent in a small place on the map made insignificant by the crushing weight of a landscape altered and deformed by history and economic development. Similarly, in 8 (Eight), 2002 – a performance registered on video – Letelier ventured into her former bedroom in House #47, where she used coal picked up off the floor, to make drawings on the wall registering her presence during the eight years she spent in that room. Other works from this period depict images of the surrounding desert and its austere beauty as it submits to exploitation and in turn subsumes the traces of that process.

In 2007 Letelier relocated to Germany, a country whose historical ties to Chile derive not from the flight of war criminals to the Southern Cone following World War II as is typically commented, but the active recruitment in the mid 19^th century of German colonizers – desired for their presumably superior work ethic – to settle in the country’s southern provinces. Consistent with her long-term interest in “the social changes connected to the dismantling of a landscape,” her most recent work – drawings and paintings in coal and graphite – departs (in a manner less documentary than before) from an interest in the coal mining industry, whose slow decline is emblematic of an embattled and seemingly never-ending process of German reunification. In Machine Studies, 2009-2010 a series of massive mining machines appear against an empty landscape, like dinosaurs recalling a former era, while her painting series Des Hecho, 2009, utilizes aerial photography – a medium associated with military operations, surveillance, and real estate development – to represent the topography of the environmental devastation that, in a global economy, is perpetually displaced onto the periphery.

In Western Europe, Berlin is the city in which the East-West divide is still clearly visible – from its massive, bleak housing blocks situated in the eastern periphery to the thousands of visual artists, musicians, and writers who have flocked here during the last decade, seeking an affordable lifestyle and cosmopolitan anonymity increasingly scarce within Western capitals. If there’s something that can be characterized as the particular smell of this historical limbo, it’s that of the burning coal still used to heat a large number of pre-war buildings in the neighborhoods of the former East as well as the old western ghettoes. Its absence inevitably signals gentrification – that curious process of destroying exactly what it is we seek, which is another form of colonization.

[1] A term coined by French born, Chilean critic and art historian Nelly Richard to refer to a seminal group of conceptual artists and writers active in the late 70s/early 80s including Carlos Leppe, Eugenio Dittborn, Lotty Rosenfeld, Diamela Eltit, and Raul Zurita among others. For further reading see: Margins and Institutions: Art in Chile Since 1973, Melbourne: Art & Text, 1986.

Notes on the New Town

2011-02-24T02:25:00.000-08:00

Prior to writing this essay, I looked back at the email correspondence Cedric and I began in the summer of 2006 after a mutual friend in Berlin suggested we meet, as I had recently begun directing an artist-run-center in Vancouver where Cedric attended art school before relocating to Malmö to pursue graduate studies. A meeting was organized during one of Cedric’s trips back home to visit family, and an exhibition proposal quickly followed, which I enthusiastically accepted because Cedric seemed to be deviating from the tenets of photoconceptualism still firmly entrenched in Vancouver. This move away from a localist practice functioned well in relation to my curatorial interests, one of which was to address the insularity and self-referentiality of that scene by opening it up to divergent practices, histories, and points of views articulated by artists from outside of it but especially by those within who had grown weary of its conventions.

It was inevitable, then, that his original plan to exhibit a series of documentary style photographs of architectural subjects along with several self-portraits and a double channel video of a trip on the Berlin s-bahn ring gradually, and rather sneakily (with Cedric repeatedly insisting that he was only slightly altering his original proposal) morphed into a massive architectural construction collaboratively produced with the artist’s brother Nathan (also a photographer) and even their father – whose engineering expertise probably kept those first structures from falling down and severely injuring some poor unsuspecting visitor. Titled “For Fools and Traitors-Nothing,” (a name I secretly relished, given my recent resignation and imminent departure from the gallery) the exhibition loosely referenced the compound built by Brother XII, an early 20^th century cult leader on Vancouver Island who mysteriously disappeared with the small fortune he had amassed from his faithful and naïve followers. Comprising the exhibition was a small cabin to be lived in, a podium to be preached from, a set of bleachers from which to survey these activities, and a walkway providing access to the gallery’s administrative office in what could have been interpreted as another opportunity for the invasion of privacy or just a wry attempt to make transparent the banal bureaucratic machinery of a small, publicly funded art space. (Or both) Additionally, small microphones were set up around the exhibit allowing spectators to eavesdrop on the conversations of others in a direct reference to the paranoia that afflicted Brother XII in his final years on the settlement and that manifested itself in the architectural landscape he constructed and obsessively managed.

Despite the radical shift of medium – from the immediacy of photography with its demands for both technical expertise and conceptual precision to the labor intensity of architectural structures that aspired to be functional but were constructed in a slow and precarious process of learning how to master structural (not just conceptual) integrity – the issues that concerned Cedric and provided the impetus for his work never really changed. The shift had began in a rather arbitrary manner: Feeling isolated and conceptually blocked in his studio in Malmö, he had constructed a platform with which to raise his work space to the same level as the impossibly high windows so that he could actually see outside. He proceeded to build new structures (all functional) on a weekly basis in what became a habitual and intuitive activity that provided a sense of relief from intellectual overexertion but began to take on a life of its own. While previous work addressed the ideological nature of architecture through images like the Palast der Republik shortly before it was demolished or construction sites for the American and Canadian embassies in Berlin – shot in a passive and contemplative manner – with this new way of working the artist delved more actively into the very materiality of what he had been photographing in a gesture that recuperated the value of manual labor and craft for its meditative qualities and subtle political implications. These architectural experiments were then registered with photographs that, although meant to have a purely documentary function (rather than becoming the work itself, as in the manner of Thomas Demand), consistently re-framed this practice within a photographic sensibility.

In these early works, as well as in subsequent projects, building materials were mostly salvaged from demolition and/or building sites, and in Vancouver this anecdote takes on a special significance: With its frenzied real estate market, it is a city that perpetually lives beneath construction cranes and the ubiquitous green-glass high-rise condominiums in the city center that have displaced many businesses and companies to the suburbs in a curious reversal of post WWII North American suburbanization that is just as destructive to the social fabric. Like most West Coast cities (with the notable exception of San Francisco) its architectural heritage is limited and thus highly contested: History is present in pockets of Victorian wooden houses scattered around the city – originally homes for the working class, today lucrative investments – and the industrial buildings and old department stores of the Downtown Eastside, the streets of which are home to Canada’s largest indigent community. Antique lumber, form wood, glass panels, and other discarded elements are the raw material with which the artist has constructed fictional scenarios that draw upon those vernacular elements and local anecdotes suppressed by the bland, monolithic structures that have crowded the skyline in a vain attempt to compete with the natural splendor of what is a typically Pacific Northwest landscape.

If real estate speculation is almost inevitable in a city that is too young to defend its architectural identity (already fragile given its geographical remoteness), in Berlin – a symbolic center of twentieth-century ideological struggle – it is the burden of history that weighs down so heavily spawning what seems like an incessant pattern of erasure and recuperation of the city’s contested urban and architectural topography. Its inevitability threatened since reunification, gentrification has moved at a sluggish and tentative pace in a sort of constant deferment of the prosperity that failed to stick after the initial economic boom of those early years quickly faded. Now settled permanently in Berlin, Cedric’s current construction materials have been rescued from the waste piles of new apartment building developments and from the renovation of pre-war buildings and factories. Take the bronze reflective glass that comprises the main element of the structure Cedric has built up for this exhibition. At the time of this writing I can only imagine what the construction might actually look like based on Cedric’s own speculations, given the spontaneous manner in which he builds – a product of both intuition and inexperience. Deriving from a series of air vents Cedric photographed in Prague – strangely stylized given their strictly utilitarian function – will be a sort of pavilion in the front gallery that empties out into a corridor through which the viewer must pass before accessing the remaining ground floor exhibition spaces.

Rescued from the dismantling of the former Bechstein piano factory at Moritzplatz – a company with a tumultuous history beginning with the partial destruction of a previous site during WWII followed by a dramatic decrease in sales due to the loss of its largely Jewish clientele and anti-German sentiment abroad aggravated by the Bechstein family’s very close affiliation to Hitler and the Nazi party – this bronze colored glass may also bring to mind the former Palast der Republik, whose glass façade reflected an obsession in German post-war architecture, on both sides of the wall, with transparency. According to architectural historian Deborah Ascher Barnstone, Palast architect Heinz Graffunder “[…] extolled the building’s lightness and accessibility and ‘the clear openness of the Palace for all citizens […] manifested through the optical transparency of the building mass […]’”[i] while in the Federal Republic glass was considered to be representative of a Western democratic model. Today the website of Flachglas Wernberg – a producer of the same kind of glass recycled by Cedric in this new work – makes a similar claim in its sales pitch: “The elemental characteristic of glass is transparency. Glass offers unlimited possibilities for the design of living areas and creates an atmosphere of clearness and proximity. Glass opens new spaces.”[ii]

In reality, the reflective metal coating of this particular glass produces the opposite effect – that of opacity – when exposed to sunlight, with the practical function of deflecting heat from the outside while reducing visible light transmission. Most archival photographs of the Palast seem to contradict Graffunder’s idealized image of his building by showing an opaque, copper colored block that seems rather heavy and impenetrable, architecturally speaking. If anything, the mirror effect of its façade, rather than exposing the interior of what was meant to be an important public social and cultural center built for citizens of the GDR, reflected the exterior landscape, including the Fernsehturm, constructed in 1964 as a symbol of East Germany that aggressively imposed itself onto a skyline clearly visible to the West. This effect – documented by Cedric in that old photograph mentioned at the start of this essay – is reproduced by the play of light set up within the current installation that alternately exposes and shrouds this interior passageway for viewers walking through it and for the camera that will eventually photograph it. It is the practical application of a formal (and potentially ideological) effect produced by a material that would have been discarded or transformed beyond recognition were it not for the tenacity of an artist intent upon sifting through the refuse of history.

[i] Deborah Ascher Barnstone, The Transparent State: Architecture and politics in postwar Germany, New York: Routledge, 2005, p. 233.

[ii] http://www.flachglas.de/eng/data/contentseite.php?menu_id=163; last accessed August 2, 2010

Memoirs of an ex-curator

2010-07-06T12:17:00.000-07:00

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.

José Luis Villablanca, Continuidad de Naturalezas Muertas, March 19-April 24, 2010

2010-03-15T22:52:00.000-07:00

“All art (after Duchamp) is conceptual (in nature) because art only exists conceptually.”

Joseph Kosuth

One of the most common misconceptions about painting is that it rejects the demands of contemporary art – theoretical discourse, social engagement, novelty – in favor of an archaic, naïve practice based on technical virtuosity and gestural expressionism. This is a myth partly based on its accessibility as a medium that is so well established historically as to be democratic in its sheer conventionality: painting fails to exclude those viewers not privy to the jargon of contemporary art discourse, in the way that other media (performance or installation, for example) often do. Like music, it aspires to independence from the constraints of narratives – the kind of external information that might make an otherwise boring visual art object seem more interesting than it actually is. Think of painting as the counterargument to a bad song with good lyrics.

Like most art professionals who came of age following the so-called ‘death of painting’ in the ‘80s, I’m suspicious of painting because despite its mass appeal, it’s a medium that can easily degenerate into a practice of solipsism veiled behind conventions of formal legibility. And yet, on certain occasions I find that there are paintings I really like, because they’re nice to look at or playful, or weird – like all those songs I can’t remember the lyrics to or never bothered paying attention to in the first place. Perhaps the greatest advantage of painting is that when it moves beyond its mere decorative qualities, it becomes extremely difficult to read; it may very well be this tension between material transparency and conceptual opacity that makes it such a complex, viable and still very contemporary medium.

As an artist who has moved from a formal training in printmaking – a medium initially conceived as a method to reproduce important paintings but also heavily linked to political protest – to video and installation, before finally settling upon painting, José Luis Villablanca has mapped out a reverse trajectory that ends with a brave, or maybe masochistic, decision to return to the medium that most artists are trained to forget. His paintings are reminiscent of Gerhard Richter with their mixture of abstraction and figuration – although his more pictorial than photographic – and the layers upon layers of paint slowly and meticulously built up only to be stripped back down again to reveal the process of construction and the drips and splotches that attest to their formal imperfection and which, in turn, comprise their unique beauty. Like any respectable painter (and like Richter himself of course), Villablanca claims indifference toward his subject matter, but to the attentive observer the assorted objects – a wine bottle, a teacup, tetrapak containers, a guitar – that float in pools of water or hover just below airy smudges of paint, comprise the detritus of both his life and previous work.

Painting is a slow process, one that demands a great deal of mental and physical energy but is stingy in its rewards – this last point, of course, was not always the case but quite the opposite back in the days before the visual arts were forced to compete with the velocity of digitally generated images. Painting is a practice that is habitual and requires a daily activity that is perhaps less goal oriented than those carried out in front of computers or in social networks (both virtual and real). In a sense it’s a daily ritual that better approximates something like a normal lifestyle – modest, and with a quiet dignity, or at least that’s the image that comes to mind when looking at these melancholic objects, abandoned and stripped of their material function and exiled to a space of formal experimentation that is arguably more vital in its poetic and therapeutic qualities.

Therapeutic is perhaps a good description of this work – despite the negative connotations associated with the idea of something that makes you feel good by forgetting the heaviness of those real problems that can never be resolved. Perhaps it’s time to deflate some of the claims of contemporary art obsessed with its historically unprecedented proximity to mass culture (i.e. the real world) that presumably makes it more relevant or useful. Just like that conventional idea of history that reduces it to a stage set with monumental events –say social unrest produced by an earthquake or an inexplicable return to a repressive political order – in denial of all those mundane little incidents that had been producing gradual shifts all along, the idea of that one great work produced for a specific public in a flash of informed genius is renounced in favor of a more intimate system of effecting subtle changes in the perception of the objects that inhabit what is usually a rather unremarkable world.

Artforum Diary, February 22, 2010

2010-02-22T12:50:00.000-08:00

http://www.artforum.com/diary/id=24963

Joaquin Luzoro, "Galería Alegría," Galería Metropolitana, Santiago de Chile, January 22, 2010

2010-01-22T00:39:00.000-08:00

NINETEEN EIGHTY NINE

In April 1989 I went to Santiago for the first time with my parents to visit my brother who was doing post-graduate research in political science after having worked with Paul Sigmund (a conservative scholar of Chilean political history) at Princeton. I don’t know what it was exactly that I liked so much about the city, especially given the nature of a family trip and the usual activities such a trip implies. Whatever it was, I wanted to go back and so my mother bought me a ticket as a graduation gift and I returned after graduating from high school that June.

My return had been welcomed by my brother who made grandiose promises of urban adventures and trips outside Santiago. But when I arrived he claimed to be too busy to entertain me and came up with the bizarre idea of sending me to a private school so that I could meet people my own age. Why I agreed to this is still a mystery to me – because who in their right mind would go back to school the summer after finally completing over a decade of torture? However, as I soon learned, school was quite different here from what I had been accustomed to in the U.S. Students walked in and out of classrooms and hung out in the yard for what seemed to be a disproportionate amount of time, so that the hours flew by and it felt more like leisure time than anything else. After a week I’d made enough friends to drop out. (I’d also developed a crush on the school principle, a recent college graduate from the U.S. who I thought about from time to time many years after).

Around that same week I’d met a classmate of my brother’s who scolded him for sending me to mix with cuicos and suggested that a better idea might be for me to go to La Chile with his brother who was studying history at a campus in a remote part of La Reina. So every morning I took the bus to meet with Julio and his friends and to engage in the same activities I’d participated in at my private school (hanging out in the yard, not attending classes) but, now, with students from a very different social stratum. I soon learned that my new friends were all members of the MIR and that they were generally suspicious of Americans but had made an exception in my case. I won’t even try to deny that for me it was quite exotic to temporarily abandon my sheltered middle class life in suburban Georgia and to suddenly find myself among peers who lived in poblaciones and who sometimes didn’t have money to take the bus to get to campus. And if, at the time, I was conscious that I was slumming in Chile, I was also aware that, despite their good intentions and generosity towards me, Julio and his friends also participated in the game in the way they perceived me as a sort of little sister, rich gringa convert connected to them only through a chance, precarious situation. There was the time, for instance, that they took me to a MIR party but blindfolded me on the bus to keep the location of the house where the party was being held secret. Of course I had spent enough time in Colombia by this point to understand the problem of class, especially coming from an ultra-cuica/politically conservative Colombian family (on my mother’s side) and seeing the sense of self-entitlement of family members that contradicted the middle-class values with which I had been raised. This is a complicated subject and of course in the 1970s class differences in the U.S. were still subtle (or at least hidden) enough for Americans to continue living out their deluded fantasy of living in a classless society, blind to the American foreign policy that made this delusion possible. I think that the development of my political orientation, then, was product of both a complicated family background and an education in (and subsequent rejection of) Cold War ideology.

The most vivid memory I have of that summer is one that I’ll never forget and that, in many ways, determines my still idealistic image of Chile (in contrast to my damaged relationship to Colombia). One evening I took the bus with a friend of my brother’s visiting him from Connecticut, to go to an event at the Universidad de Chile, Casa Central. Unaccustomed to the velocity of nighttime bus travel and lost in conversation, we ended up in San Bernardo. I realized we’d gone much too far and another passenger listening in on our conversation offered to show us to a payphone near to his stop but the bus driver, also eavesdropping, turned around and prohibited us from leaving the bus and then told the guy to stay away from us. And so we stayed on until he finished his route after which he drove us back into the city center to make sure we arrived home safely. When I offered to pay him for the extra gasoline he had used for the long trip back he refused and asked me only for one small favor. Instead of money he preferred that I send him a postcard from every city I traveled to and this I did for many years after. I still have his address and as I write this I realize that I am long overdue in sending him a postcard from Berlin.

“Pornomiseria Or How Not to Make a Documentary Film,” Afterall 21, London Spring 2009

2009-06-01T01:17:00.000-07:00

http://www.afterall.org/journal/issue.21/pornomiseria.or.how.not.make.documentary.film

Johanna Unzueta “Local People,” Queens Museum of Art, New York, 2009

2009-05-01T01:31:00.000-07:00

New York, Capital of the Third World

Perhaps one of the unintentional legacies of 20th century conceptual art has been a denigration of the labor process in favor of a privileging of ideas that distances the producer from the materiality of a given medium and reinforces a qualitative distinction between art and craft or between media like photography and video (thought to be intrinsically more conceptual) and more traditional media like painting, drawing and sculpture. While recent years have seen a revival of these traditional media, their vindication has probably more to do with an inflated and excessive art market eager for new products than a critical reinterpretation of art’s function in the early 21st century. One of the basic premises of Johanna Unzueta’s practice is precisely to valorize the labor intensive process through which she transforms felt - a semi-organic, sensuous, and ‘warm’ material that both alludes to the practice of dressmaking (typically gendered female and thus undervalued) and is also an obvious reference to Joseph Beuys - into a series of sculptural objects which make (sometimes explicit, sometimes oblique) reference to the cultural history of the industrialization and automation of labor signaling a shift from a productive society to a consumer one. Considering the rapid commodification of contemporary art, particularly during the last decade, and the increasingly blurry distinction between commodity aesthetics and art practice that might be considered ‘critical,’ the question of labor is particularly significant. With an insistence on the manual aspect of its production that is more conceptual than formal, Unzueta’s work may be read against a broad tradition of Western Marxist critique - with its discussions of both alienation and the emancipatory potential of art. But it must also be considered in relation to her own biography as an artist who came of age during the military dictatorship in Chile (which sought to suppress those very same ideals) and who now resides in New York City where she counts herself among the several million Spanish speaking immigrants who have gradually altered the topography of a city that is paradoxically so emblematic of the United States and yet so unrepresentative of its dominant culture.

In a conversation with the artist during the preparation of a previous solo exhibition entitled “Work Dignifies,”[i] Unzueta described how this phrase (in Spanish, el trabajo ennoblece) had been used often in the working class neighborhood in Santiago where she grew up. Its etymology is complex and varied: although in this context clearly associated with political resistance and revolutionary politics, this aphorism can be tied to the teachings of the Catholic Church (and in Chile its presence is strong and is generally associated with reactionary, right-wing agendas)[ii] and even to the Third Reich, with its Reichsarbeitsdienst (Reich Labor Service), the function of which was to combat unemployment in Nazi Germany under the motto “Arbeit ardelt.”[iii] There is even a Dutch proverb “Arbeid adelt, maar adel arbeidt niet,” which means “Work ennobles but the nobility does not work,” and points to the ideological, class struggles that are inherent to any discussion of human labor.

In his foreword to Critique of Everyday Life, Henri Lefebvre - a French philosopher who emphasized Marx’s early writings in a desire to reconcile Marxism and philosophy - wrote, “We may certainly affirm that work is the foundation of personal development…[but]…within the framework of…the capitalist regime…work is lived and undergone by the worker as an alien and oppressive power.”[iv] With these words he paraphrased Marx’s theory of alienated labor in which the division of labor produced by the Industrial Revolution dehumanized the modern worker by enforcing repetitive and excruciatingly boring activity creating a historically novel situation: “…in his work…he does not affirm himself but denies himself, does not feel content but unhappy, does not develop freely his physical and mental energy but mortifies his body and ruins his mind.”[v] Lefebvre lamented how 19th century literary modernism had initiated a critique of “an insufferable reality” by retreating from everyday, real life and taking flight in an invented world of fantasy and that this had continued up to the historical avant-garde with the Surrealists – a group with which he formally empathized but became increasingly disillusioned- and their preference for the “weird and the bizarre” which Lefebvre argued ultimately translated into a “transcendental contempt for the real, for work for example…”[vi] If a significant aspect of the modernist project (in literature and the visual arts) has been a critique of an existing socio-economic order in what is inherently a desire to make life better, this critique has had varied manifestations all of which might be loosely organized between two conflicting impulses: that of approximating the ‘real world’ on the one hand, and distancing itself from it on the other.

The problem with this denial of ‘real life’ is that it implies a resignation with the way things are, so that art and culture more generally take their place among many forms of escapism: at best an ideal of what one wishes life could be more like, and at worst, a dulling of the senses that temporarily alleviates this sense of discontent (or some sort of combination of the two). At one time or another, we have all justified watching bad television or renting a really mindless, feel-good Hollywood production with an explicit desire to not have to think too hard, in order to forget. (Drugs, alcohol, and religion may also be utilized for the same effect). But this merely treats the symptoms of the problem and not its underlying cause, reinforcing a relatively recent historical division between ‘work’ and ‘leisure,’ which has been treated by countless philosophers and cultural theorists throughout the 20th century. In Minima Moralia, Adorno describes the consequences of this separation in the following manner, “Work while you work, play while you play – this is a basic rule of repressive self-discipline…No fulfillment may be attached to work, which would otherwise lose its functional modesty in the totality of purposes, no spark of reflection is allowed to fall into leisure time, since it might otherwise leap across to the workday world and set it on fire.”[vii]

Writing in the mid 1940s, Adorno could still claim a certain degree of freedom for the intellectual (himself), from this contrived opposition between personal fulfillment (pleasure, creative stimulation, a sense of autonomy) and productive work. Today the term ‘intellectual’ sounds hopelessly elitist; now we might think about artists, writers, freelancers, and academics for example, all of whom may presumably still pursue their vocations independently of the corporate interests that have, during the last few decades, rapidly infringed upon every aspect of private and public life, further exaggerating the organization of every hour of every day toward the ultimate goals of productivity (so that we may all be productive members of society, as the saying goes) and consumption. However, in the absence of a strict temporal distinction between work (say, the hours spent in an office) and play (which is more and more about consumption), the two parts of what is essentially a complicated dialectic begin to interact ambiguously and to invade one another leading to inefficient work habits or not so restful leisure activities. This is further exaggerated in a highly competitive contemporary art world in which career success is often based to a great extent on self-promotion and ‘entrepreneurial extracurriculars’[viii] including obligatory public appearances at art fairs, cocktail parties, screenings, lectures and other similar events, all of which are very time-consuming so that it becomes necessary to out-source the labor involved in the making of the work behind those public personas.

This is entirely consistent with post-conceptual art’s foregrounding of ideas rather than technical skill or formal concerns, which falls within what Lefebvre more generally referred to as “…the separation of manual and intellectual work…”[ix] With a body of work that emphasizes the manual aspect of her own labor, which ultimately has a conceptual function in that it is less concerned with formal or existential issues and more concerned with the historical problem and political relevance of human labor, Unzueta refuses the terms of this separation while drawing attention to its elitist and ideological character. (One only need look at statistics regarding the average earnings of artists, curators, and critics to see that, despite the social prestige they may enjoy as members of an intellectual elite, in economic terms the vast majority are very much part of a working class.)

The exhibition “Iron Folklore” at the Queens Museum[x] takes place in the elevator, along a corridor, and against a large curved wall, all of which are intermediary spaces through which museum visitors would normally move in a distracted manner because there is usually nothing particularly interesting to see here. It is part of a program conceived by the museum for artists to engage with the building’s architecture (much of which will be out of use during the museum’s upcoming expansion) or to pursue projects off-site that engage with local communities and issues. Given the modesty of Unzueta’s work, more accustomed to drawing attention to the value of its production rather than that of the finished object, this format is highly appropriate for its subtle aspects. And so the massive elevator, used to both transport museum visitors and large, monumental works (or perhaps building supplies like dry wall and paint used to regularly alter or prep the exhibition spaces) is covered with what looks like the kind of corrugated metallic walls typical of garages and other industrial workspaces, except that they are made out of felt and soft to the touch (that is, for whoever dares to touch the art). Upon exiting the elevator onto the second floor, museum visitors may (or may not) notice a long colored plumping pipe - nothing out of the ordinary for anyone who has lived or spent time in New York City where exposed piping is common in commercial spaces, so many of which have undergone the transformation from artist studios to luxury lofts affordable only to young professionals like lawyers and bankers (or very successful artists). The remaining pieces – including a wheelbarrow, a shovel, and a couple of car doors severed from their rightful owner and emitting the sounds of the street of a neighborhood that is particularly significant to Queens- may be found at the end of this corridor resting against the wall as if waiting to be installed in a more appropriate manner.

This last piece – the car door and sound installation- is a reference to a very loaded political and social situation with which anyone who has been following the local news in New York City is well familiar, and from which the exhibition title “Iron Folklore” derives. The reference is Willets Point, also know as the “Iron Triangle,” a commercial area in Queens that is home to several hundred businesses (mostly small auto-repair establishments), which employ over 1,500 individuals (the vast majority of them immigrants). It is a thriving business community and an important destination for thousands of car-owners and drivers of taxi and limousine services as well as an important distribution center for products like flour and Indian spices due to the presence of two-longstanding family businesses (Fodera Foods and House of Spices). Despite this, the area has endured several decades of neglect from the city and has been deprived of even the most basic infrastructure, like sewers, sidewalks, and waste disposal so that it has come to resemble the sort of peripheral neighborhood one is accustomed to seeing in the third world but would never expect to find in the richest city in the most powerful country in the world. For years Willets Point (which enjoys easy access to Manhattan, Connecticut, the Bronx, Brooklyn and Long Island) has been coveted by real estate speculators and many attempts have been made to develop it, but all had gone unrealized until last November when, under increasing pressure from the Bloomberg administration which had declared the area “a euphemism for blight,”[xi] the City Council approved a plan to transform the 75 acre area with the construction of a convention center, a hotel, retail spaces and housing units.

There are still many factors that the city will have to navigate before any ground is broken, including a new lawsuit filed in March of this year by local business and land owners, as well as criticism from the Willets Point Defense Committee of a program set up by the city at LaGuardia Community College to retrain workers. Rather than train workers who are already highly skilled but the vast majority of whom are undocumented and would have little opportunity to acquire work anywhere else, the Committee argues that the city must invest funds in relocating these businesses together to a new site, where they may continue to work and to thrive cooperatively with one another - “as a family,” says Committee president Marco Neira, a Colombian business owner who compares the neighborhood’s current conditions to that of El Cartucho, a notoriously decrepit area of Bogotá that suffered a similar fate at the beginning of this decade.[xii]

One definition of blight is “a deteriorated condition,” but it can also mean “something that impairs growth, withers hopes and ambitions, or impedes progress and prosperity.” Beyond its broken and perpetually flooded streets scattered with debris and populated by ramshackle structures and even the occasional stray dog, Willets Point is a very visible reminder of the kind of labor and conditions that have been displaced by globalization onto populations living outside of the industrialized West but upon which these first world economies continue to depend but would like to deny or forget. In the case of the “Iron Triangle” the hopes and ambitions of those who struggle for the means with which to subsist inevitably impede the progress and prosperity of a consumer ethic that denies the value of the labor upon which that consumption is based. While policy-makers and developers complain that the area is an eyesore that mars what is potentially an otherwise picture perfect landscape featuring the recently constructed Citi Field stadium - home to the New York Mets - those who work there have endured its deplorable conditions (directly created by successive political administrations motivated by greed) for decades in exchange for a basic right that most of them would be denied outside of this first world informal economy: the right to work and to support themselves and their immediate and extended families. And that is a very basic form of human dignity.

[i] Or Gallery (Vancouver), January 11-February 23, 2008

[ii] There were, of course, certain segments of the Catholic Church in Chile that departed from this official position and were progressive and critical of the dictatorship and its human rights abuses.

[iii] A related phrase, “Arbeit macht frei” (Work Brings Freedom) was posted at the entrances to numerous concentration camps during WWII.

[iv] Henri Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life (trans. John Moore), London and New York: Verso, 1991, p.38.

[v] Karl Marx, “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844,” in Robert C. Tucker (ed.), The Marx-Engels Reader, New York and London: W.W. Norton & Company, p.74.

[vi] Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life, p. 119

[vii] Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia (trans. E.F.N. Jephcott), London and New York: Verso, 1999, p. 130.

[viii] Alison Gingeras uses this term to describe Andy Warhol’s “…careful construction of a public persona...” See Alison M. Gingeras, “Performing the Self: Martin Kippeberger," ArtForum, (Oct 2004), p. 22.

[ix] Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life, p. 30.

[x] May 10-September 22, 2009

[xi] Fernando Santos, “A Dilapidated Tract of Queens, and a Fight to Control its Future,” New York Times, September 9, 2008.

[xii] From a phone interview conducted by the author with Neira on Tuesday, March 25, 2009.

“Soy mi madre: Conversation between Phil Collins and Michèle Faguet,” El Tiempo Celeste, Mexico, Spring 2009

2009-04-01T01:26:00.000-07:00

MF: Let’s start with the most obvious question. This past Spring you were invited by the Aspen Art Museum to initiate its Jane and Marc Nathanson Distinguished Artist in Residence program, the mandate of which is to “further the museum’s goal of engaging the larger community with contemporary art.” How is it, then, that you ended up in Mexico City producing a film, soy mi madre, shot entirely in Spanish and based on the format of the telenovela?

PC: Hmm, yes, from Aspen to El DF in seventeen crazy steps…Where shall I begin?

It’s not the first time I’ve approached a place, or better still the idea of a place, by producing my work elsewhere, examining the links which bind us together. For example, for a show in Scandinavia in 2006 I went to the Sudanese border in Northern Kenya to find a fish factory built by the Norwegians and abandoned, after a litany of disasters, in 1992. How were they to know the nomadic tribe they were trying to help didn’t want to settle down, and hated fish? Or that the lake would dry up and there wouldn’t be enough clean water to re–frigerate the catch? These kinds of complications, I think, are more interesting than the often naïve and bafflingly limited idea of site–specificity formulated within an institutional framework where “site–specific” routinely functions as a byword for public relations or audience building exercise. Let’s just say I prefer out–of–site–specific.

In terms of this particular commission, a preconceived idea of Aspen seemed to me very present, even in the day–to–day dealings of Aspen people. It already seemed to me like a soap opera of the rich and famous. At the same time, I was interested to look at the machinery that keeps this glittering front in place on the most basic, practical level. For many in the States, Mexicans are thought of solely in relation to low–qualified, manual or domestic labour, and in Roaring Fork Valley rural Mexican and Latino immigrant communities would travel sometimes two hours in each direction to a job, mostly in the hospitality, building and property maintenance industries. Around the time I started researching the project, I saw a hideously unsympathetic report on NBC by Tom Brokaw about the issues facing undocumented workers in Colorado, and so the focus of the piece sharpened. I wanted to make something which would talk directly to this non–resident and, in Aspen itself, largely invisible community. So I decided to go to Mexico and make a telenovela.

In her essay “Live Through This,” Liz Kotz refers to what she describes as an “unabashed belief in the redemptive power of popular culture” in your work.[i] In other words, it’s not as simple as reducing Smiths fans in Bogotá, Istanbul, and Jakarta in the world won’t listen (2004–07), or, for that matter, Palestinian teenagers in they shoot horses (2004), to victims of a homogenizing globalization. And yet other works, most notably the return of the real (2006), explicitly address your deep mistrust in the corporate interests that determine the content of so much of the popular culture we consume today. Can you elaborate on this? I’m particularly interested in how your most recent work, soy mi madre, plays into this discussion given your use of the genre of the telenovela, which we know has been so culturally significant in places like Mexico and Brazil.

And in many more places besides. Soap opera, as the Anglo–American equivalent of telenovela, is often derided as a low cultural form that manipulates, in a shrewd and emotional fashion, the basest and most irrational passions of its viewers. I’d always quite liked soap for this. And its associated pleasures: the preposterousness of its narrative conventions, how the show must go on, and the potential to address, within such a highly predicated framework, some of the pains and dilemmas of the private sphere. I’m not saying that it necessarily does, nor that it’s a revolutionary form in itself, but it’s undeniably attractive and one which offers manifold possibilities for personal identification and projection. In soy mi madre I tried to retain the attendant delights but to create a hybrid form – something realer than real, I suppose – by overvaluing the visual register and calibrating the narrative arc by reflecting on class, race, power relations and the tensions of domestic labour. I adamantly didn’t want to make a satire or a pastiche of soap – with wobbly sets and bad camera work. In fact, I wanted to make something exquisite, purposefully cinematic, shot on 16mm, with beautifully dressed sets and leading telenovela actors.

Naturally the idea mutated in several ways before I decided on the format of a 28 minutes long, self–contained episode, which would recognisably have many of the key elements of the genre, and which could, more importantly play on television itself. As I said, I wanted to work with something that the Latino community of Colorado could relate to directly, but whilst I was aware of the popularity and cultural significance of telenovela in Central and South America, I didn’t quite understand its global reach. I’d gone to Mexico right off the back of shooting a film in Kosovo, which was about the construction of political identities through language, but even there, within the most bitterly ethnically-divided communities, telenovelas such as Esmeralda were still universally beloved. And only ten years out of date! Equally, Russia, China, Japan, Indonesia, France, and, of course, the States, are huge global markets for telenovelas. I heard, although never confirmed, that in the 1990s the telenovela was Mexico’s biggest export, bigger than oil, car parts or silver.

At the same time, making a telenovela was a chance for me to revisit one of my favourite childhood memories. Growing up as I did near Manchester in the 1970s, the broadcast schedule was dominated by soaps, such as Coronation Street (still running today after more than forty years – and still every bit as good!) and, later, Brookside. If you’ve never seen them, they are wonderful examples of the topics and the kind of dialogue we were aiming for in soy mi madre — rich in inflection, combative, camp, gritty. These shows, like all good soaps, focus on the interior lives and domestic intrigues of a predominantly matriarchal structure. But in Britain, as opposed to the States for example, the working classes are the focus of the writing. In that sense, I wanted to try and marry traditions of outrageous excess, characteristic of the Americas’ soaps, and social realism, characteristic of the British, and to look from an oblique angle, from another country even, at the United States where the immigration debate remains one of the acute political concerns, especially in the light of such recent benchmark developments like the 2006 immigration reform demonstrations.

A significant constant throughout your work has been the privileging of the production process, typically based on the convocation of individuals to perform a specific event determined by you, so that the resulting pictures and videos—although they are self-sufficient and do not necessarily require any additional information for them to have a significant (initially quite visceral) impact on the viewer—function as what Claire Bishop and Francesco Manacorda have called “residual traces of a larger aesthetic and conceptual scheme.[ii]” soy mi madre is the first time, I believe, that you’ve worked with actors and a formal script. Do you see this as a major departure from your previous working method in that the work no longer alludes to “a larger aesthetic and conceptual scheme,” but rather to a broader socio-political issue (to which these schemes, of course, are always intimately tied)?

It did feel like a departure for me. It was the first time that I worked specifically with actors and a script, but on the other hand, conceptually, I don’t think it constitutes such a major shift. After all, as with my previous work, soy mi madre is an attempt to talk about issues, which I find important, and others often label “political”, and how they tie in with private desires and fears. Whether you do it with professional actors or a group of passionate amateurs is not completely irrelevant, nor paramount either, but if you’re making a telenovela why not start at the top?

In this sense, the biggest departure in soy mi madre, for me personally, is in aesthetic terms. This film certainly looks least like anything I’ve done before. Which is interesting because many aspects of the production remained the same: a relatively small team, an insanely condensed production period, and a similar organisation of the shoot, albeit on a much larger scale.

Can you tell me a bit about your experience in Mexico and how you managed to make a telenovela with such high production quality in a short period of time, and in a country you’d never even visited before?

Quite typically, I arrived in Mexico City eight weeks before the show was going up, with one bag and one e–mail as a contact. I began working on the script with P. David Ebersole and Todd Hughes, two wonderful American screenwriters who’d made a number of telenovelas. Again it was all very much a labour of love for all concerned, but I had the good fortune to fall in quickly with a group of people whose amazing passion for and dedication to the idea meant that we could proceed with style in spite of our budget: from Javier Clavé and Tania Pérez Cordova who infallibly overlooked all aspects of the production, to Pablo García of Tigre Productions and Juan García who generously allowed us to shoot at 5 de Mayo studios, to Damian García, an exquisite director of photography, and his team who lit and shot the film in two days. I was also incredibly lucky to work with Salvador Parra on sets, who had been the production designer on Almodovar’s Volver and Schnabel’s Before Night Falls, and Malena de la Riva on costume design, both of which essentially contributed to the look of the film which was central for conveying its meanings. And of course, more than anything else, I still can’t believe how completely jammy I was to work with such wonderful actresses like Patricia Reyes Spíndola, Gina Morett, Verónica Langer and Zaide Silvia Gutiérrez who are all major stars in Mexico and thus have an international reach.

In the research stages, I started where all good students should, with melodrama. I re–read Bleak House by Charles Dickens and The Maids by Jean Genet, both of which sat below the script. I wanted the film to be about class conflict but also to have many of the classic tropes of soap opera: mistaken identity, babies swapped at birth, bitter sibling rivalry, social mobility, and a mother as the source of a revelation. Films such as Fassbinder’s The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant were really important in terms of the look and feel of soy mi madre, as were the films of Almodovar. But I also went back to things like Bunuel’s Diary of a Chambermaid or La Cérémonie by Chabrol. I wanted to make something which looked out of time – a reflection on a luxury home in the States, as imagined in Mexico in 1985. Once in Mexico, we went back and looked at Cadenas de Amargura, Rosa Salvaje and, of course, Cuna de Lobos to capture the precise look we wanted.

Stylistically, I wanted to focus on the artificiality of the genre, how actors replace each other but play the same character; on the heightened emotional pull of melodrama, which goes back to Victorian Theatre and beyond, and the sense of playing out to the audience. It’s a very particular style and difficult to carry off. So we tried to build the work around tracking shots which would occasionally reveal the sets and production conditions and then pan around to find us on a new set, with a new cast of actors playing the same characters. For a while I was toying with the idea of working with non–actors, and a testament to this is the guest appearance of Almadella and Montse, two friends and members of the local transsexual–prostitute community.

I’m going to indulge myself in a personal anecdote related to my own involvement in el mundo no escuchará- the first of the Smiths Karaoke trilogy the world won’t listen—filmed in Bogotá in 2004. After a frenetic two-month production period concluded on the eve of your scheduled exhibition in La Rebeca, we agreed upon a live karaoke session in lieu of a final product (which all of the hundreds of people who turned up for the opening were desperate to see of course). But then the lights went out in a massive black out that left the majority of Bogotá in complete darkness. I remember you expressing relief at my calmness, saying something about how in this kind of situation there’s usually a “curator off in some corner weeping.” But in assuming my role in that piece’s production (rather than that of the curator who would ultimately exhibit it) I fully understood that the significance that this work had for me, my little exhibition space, and all of those people who sang, had already occurred.

How do you (emotionally and conceptually) negotiate the potentially irreconcilable schism between the production and exhibition processes? You have often spoken about how lens-based media offer the potential for both exploitation and seduction. Is it uncomfortable for you to go back to these sites of production (as you have just done in Colombia for example) and show the completed work to those who participated in its production?

People sometimes say that my practice puts equal importance on the conditions of production, the relationship between myself and the “performers”, and the final exhibition that you encounter in the gallery. No matter how complimentary such remarks are, they seem to imply a distinction between these elements, which I don’t really see exists. For me, they’re all part of the same, of a general idea which we are working towards from the beginning, and of which the gallery presentation is just one manifestation. In it, the viewer should hopefully be able to perceive the intricacies and the energy of the production, or the details of its relations, if that’s of any interest to them..

Of course, for me it’s always exciting to show the work in its original context, as the work oftentimes elicits the most relevant responses in the place it was created. My love affair with Mexico City began instantaneously, from the very first day. It was overwhelming. This project without a doubt could not have been made anywhere else. I can’t wait to come back and show it.

You’ve traveled all over the world to make work, from, amongst others, Belfast, Belgrade and Baghdad, to Ramallah, Bogotá, and Jakarta. Part of what motivates you is to challenge the conventional journalistic approach that suppresses the representation of individuals in favor of a generalized, simplified political collective. In your work we see, for example, teenager hipster in Jakarta who know all The Smiths’ lyrics by heart (dunia tak akan mendengar, 2007) or young Serbian men and women lying in the grass in an unbearable close-up (young serbs 2001). One aspect of your work, then, addresses the uneven distribution of cultural knowledge in which Western Europeans and Americans know little about those who live in the rest of the world, whereas presumably they know a lot about us through the exportation of our pop culture (but your work, it seems to me, also hints at how complicated this other assumption can be). When did you first become interested in this issue and how did your work develop into a nomadic practice?

I suppose it comes very much from the experience of studying in Belfast in the late 1990s. I’d often found it difficult to reflect directly on a situation there, and whilst I was still at art-school, in 1999, I travelled to the Kosovan border to make a video called how to make a refugee in which I followed Western–media photographers and filmed them working. In many ways, this film was as much about the questions I was trying to articulate about Belfast and Northern Ireland at that time as it was about the conflict in Former Yugoslavia. In this sense, the methodology or motivation hasn’t changed much since. I go to places because I want to see for myself.

[i] From Phil Collins: the world won’t listen, edited by Suzanne Weaver and Siniša Mitrović, Dallas Museum of Art, 2007.

[ii] Claire Bishop and Francesco Manacorda, “The Producer as Artist,” Phil Collins: yeah…you, baby you, edited by Siniša Mitrović, Milton Keynes Gallery/Shady Lane Publications, 2005.

"Leaving on a High Note," Cuadernos del Encuentro Medellin 07, Museo de Antioquia, Medellin, 2009

2009-01-15T00:52:00.000-08:00

In 2001 I was living in Mexico City where I’d relocated from New York in order to direct La Panadería, 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 could take what I’d learned and do a little better elsewhere.

And so I began Espacio La Rebeca in Bogotá in August 2002, partially in response to this experience, as a critique of La Panadería’s deficiencies but also a recognition of what it 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 at that) has historically been, and continues to be, so dominant. Named for a public fountain in downtown Bogotá that had once been situated in an elegant park but was then banished to a dead, neglected space created by the construction of a major avenue (Calle 26) in one of the city’s many precarious attempts at modernization, La Rebeca was a project committed to intellectual and organizational rigor, sustainability and economic transparency, and in conceptual terms, the establishment of an international network of diverse, critically engaged artists and writers that ultimately sought to work against the idea of defining communities exclusively in geographical or nationalistic terms. Contrary to the conventional and uninteresting model of privileging the idea of the local, as a means not of preserving micro-histories but more as a strategy of achieving international visibility at the expense of complex readings (i.e. creating the next hot spot on the map), I preferred to adhere to the very common sense idea (derivative perhaps of my upbringing as the daughter of adamantly unassimilated French/Colombian parents in a small, provincial Southern American town in addition to an academic formation in postcolonial theory) 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 divided equally between 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 AVINA, in conjunction with 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 governmental, sources. Exhibitors who passed through the space’s doors 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. Artists ranged from not so visible figures working outside of major institutions or commercial networks to others who were beginning to be or were already quite established in Colombia and/or internationally. It is a myth that as an ‘alternative’ space, La Rebeca was necessarily interested in promoting so-called ‘emerging’ artists; this is just part of a huge cliché and expectation imposed on independent or non-institutional spaces to act as filters for institutions. It was never my mission to actively seek out ‘new talents’ (the very idea is so loaded in so many negative ways and the very term ‘emerging’ should immediately be banished from 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.

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. Enough years have gone by for me to unapologetically comment on a few of those exhibitions that were most memorable to me. First, Sharon Hayes’ SLA screeds, a performance/video work based on an important piece of the history of political resistance in the United States—the Patty Hearst kidnapping—which, not unproblematically for a complete, contextualized reading of the work, struck a local chord because of Ingrid Betancourt. Then there was 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. 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 or the magnitude of what it would eventually become, but because, quite simply, those two months of production were some of the happiest in recent memory.

In early 2005, my already growing desire to leave the space and to move on to something else (that implied leaving the country) was hastened by the arrival of the ‘reinsertion’ program to Teusaquillo, the neighborhood to which I had relocated La Rebeca the previous year, in a desire for a better space removed from the official art ghetto (La Macarena). An ill-conceived program to socially and economically reintegrate ex-guerilla and paramilitary soldiers who had voluntarily surrendered to the State, this short-lived initiative transformed a previously idyllic neighborhood into one that was tense and, at times, unbearable. It makes me uncomfortable to even write about this because it sounds like (and probably is) a scenario of betrayal (and the failure of some people to talk about why I chose that particular moment to close the space is testimony to this silent accusation): had I had a thicker skin or actually grown up in Colombia I would have been far more indifferent to this sort of situation. But the flip side is that then I never would have started the space to begin with. And in fact, I’m directing my conclusion of this story to my international readers (conscious of the fact that this publication is meant to reach an international audience) to show how frivolous art can somehow seem in certain contexts which, in turn, 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. 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 (as Víctor Albarracín has generously claimed in another text on this subject). Whether or not the space was successful in its ambitions is not my place to say. For me, at least, its memory is overwhelmingly positive.

Rodrigo Vergara, "El Mirador,"Galería Gabriela Mistral, Santiago de Chile, 22 mayo-4 julio 2008

2008-06-14T08:21:00.000-07:00

Every Artist is a Person

When I began to work on this text some time ago, I soon realized how frustratingly difficult it would be to extract any sort of conclusive statement from the artist about his work, which was surprising to me given Rodrigo Vergara’s parallel activity as co-founder of Hoffmann’s House[i], a role that requires a great deal of theoretical justification and verbal expertise (often approaching an almost messianic impulse). Numerous emails were sent back and forth and my demands that he tell me everything about his work -- motives, development, biographical and cultural specificities -- and that he satiate my requirement to compile as much information as possible before I could even think about writing a critical text, were met with a collection of low-res jpegs accompanied by frugal explanations and seemingly arbitrary anecdotes.

I will begin with one, (the most transparent perhaps). At age 20, Vergara began to go bald and took to camouflaging his baldness by wearing a baseball cap, everyday and all day long, regardless of the occasion. He soon became obsessed with the image of the baseball cap (taking into account, of course, its geopolitical connotations as it can be counted among the most insipid visual symbols of dominant U.S. culture) and began noticing just how prevalent was its use. The wearing of a baseball cap seemed to defy differences of age, class, race, ideology, etc., making it both a universal and democratic visual marker, the very prevalence of which simply empties it of any specific connotation or meaning. In the small, Southern town where I grew up, for instance, guys who wore baseball caps generally also played golf and made sure their Ralph Lauren shirts were tucked in at all times, whereas in Bogotá baseball caps virtually function as a uniform for juvenile delinquents. If you’re walking down the street late at night in Bogotá and you see someone in a baseball cap approaching you, your first impulse is to run in the opposite direction.

Looking at the masses of wearers, Vergara imagined that they were all hiding a secret, just like he was. He began scouring the newspaper for images of baseball cap wearers and the resulting selection of photographs (some interesting and others not so interesting) formed the basis of a series of some 100 drawings related to one another neither formally nor thematically, but rather, only through the banal and insignificant presence of the baseball cap. Cola less project, for example, shows two young girls sitting side by side with their backs toward the viewer in what we imagine might be a painful moment of ending an amorous (and perhaps forbidden) relationship, while El gato cosmico (Cosmic Cat) depicts a man dressed in a cat costume who has removed the head and angrily beats it against the ground in protest of the humiliation he is forced to endure on a daily basis at the supermarket where he probably works. Surrender to the night is based on a flood scene in which the cap wearer is literally up to his waist in water, seemingly resigned to impending death, a fate that is then echoed in La caída (The Fall), the pathetic image of a cap that has fallen off of its owner who we may presume to be dead (and who, in fact, really was dead). We are reminded of how Barthes saw death implicit in each photograph: “Ultimately, what I am seeking in the photograph taken of me is Death: Death is the eidos of that Photograph.”[ii]

And what, then, is the secret hidden behind all of these images? It is the lie of photography and its naïve promises of representational transparency, always burdened by an assumption of veracity, which we know to be utterly false. This lie is especially evident in today’s post documentary, reality-obsessed culture in which the blurred lines between fact and fiction become more and more explicitly revealed in the very construction of ‘reality’ as a genre. And so the artist’s exercise continues, now moving on to the medium of photography, which he employs in a manner that although casual and irrespective of the rules of composition or pictorial concerns that would motivate a more skilled practitioner, is clearly burdened by too much theory and the baggage of photoconceptualism. As Susan Sontag has written: “Those occasions when the taking of photographs is relatively undiscriminating, promiscuous, or self-effacing do not lessen the didacticism of the whole enterprise. This very passivity -- and ubiquity -- of the photographic record is photography's ‘message,’ its aggression.”[iii] The most compelling, perhaps, of Vergara’s photographic works is Italo, a portrait of a man who suffered a childhood illness that has left half of his face paralyzed and thus disfigured. Set alongside contrived images like Paranoia, a street scene whose constructed nature (betrayed by the ever ubiquitous baseball cap) mimics a ‘Vancouver school’[iv] aesthetic, and Diálogo con la juventud (Dialogue with Young People) in which Vergara himself emulates the photograph of Kippenberger upon which the latter’s Berlin bei Nacht (Berlin at Night), (1981-1982) was based, Italo might be erroneously perceived at first glance to be a photograph of someone in disguise, a fake portrait that seeks to draw attention to the conventions of photographic portraiture. This is more the case of Diálogo given that Kippenberger’s own practice of self-portraiture, according to writer Alison M. Gingeras, “[defied] the trite assumption that the genre should offer a glimpse of the artist's inner self, while also rejecting Warhol's empty yet glamorous concealment of the self behind a theatrical mask.”[v] In an inversion of Joseph Beuys’ claim that “everyone is an artist,” Kippenberger would counter with “every artist is a person”[vi] and his careful construction of a public persona based on rebellious behavior and drunken excesses, constantly wavered between self-promotion and self-effacement by revealing the more banal and vulnerable aspects of his personality, reflected in the degradation of his physical appearance as he succumbed to alcoholism and the cancer that would ultimately end his life at a relatively young age.

Just as Kippenberger’s performance of the self has proved to be the most influential aspect of his vast and diverse body of work on a younger generation of artists, it is Kurt Cobain’s suffered life and suicide that provides one of those iconic popular cultural references for anyone who went to art school in the 90s. Kurt Korner is a sculptural work that references Robert Gober while mimicking the only photograph that circulated of Cobain shortly after he was found dead by police. The original image shows only his right arm and leg splayed out from behind the door; the absence of any trace of blood fed rumors that he was actually murdered by someone (probably hired by Courtney as predictably misognystic accounts of events would claim) who administered a drug overdose to him and then shot him postmortem. In Vergara’s version, the very small pool of blood that was allegedly found just to the left of Cobain’s body spills out from a small can of paint, in a painterly and gesturely manner while on the wall behind is scrawled a verse from Nirvana’s hit Lithium: “I’m so happy cause today I’ve found my friends ...They’re in my head, I’m so ugly, but that’s okay, ‘cause so are you.” Perhaps a more fitting epitaph for the piece would have been a phrase from the Neil Young song he used in the suicide note addressed to the millions of fans he knew would mourn him: “…it’s better to burn out than to fade away…” And isn’t the desire for martyrdom one of the primary impulses behind suicide (and especially evident in Chile with its rather long list of iconic suicides)? In reaction to the media frenzy that obsessively depicted the details of Cobain’s life and career in search of an explanation for his premature death, years later Gus Van Sant would produce an eerily eventless, sensory film based on those mysterious last days, showing an isolated, unbalanced figure from a distanced and emotionless perspective, without any of the trite compassion of an industry that had effectively appropriated and marketed this palpable image of counterculture making alternative the new mainstream.

What Van Sant intended was a sort of anti-spectacle, a resistance to making entertainment, as he himself described it: a film whose insistence on the formal qualities of image and sound superceded any attempt at fixed interpretation. (“Deliberately pointless…Last Days is more art object than movie,” wrote one film critic accusingly.)[vii] Here I’m reminded of another phrase of Susan Sontag: “Ours is a culture based on excess, on overproduction; the result is a steady loss of sharpness in our sensory experience.”[viii] This was the premise for the title essay of her book Against Interpretation, a drawing of which oddly graces the cover of this catalogue. When asked why he’d chosen this book cover for the basis of an artwork and then selected the resulting drawing for the cover of his catalogue, Vergara recounted another anecdote about how a close friend had urged him to read the essay in preparation for this exhibition, and that he had done so but had quickly forgotten its content. In a later email, he confessed to having read the vast majority of Sontag’s writings and to knowing that her body of work has very clearly influenced his own. Written in the early 60s, Sontag’s call for attention to form over content -- “the modern style of interpretation” she wrote, “excavates, destroys”… “interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art”[ix] -- seems hopelessly outdated today; and it is, if we consider that she was reacting to a particular historical formation (as all cultural documents do and of which they form part), that is, the theoretical baggage associated with Conceptual Art and it reliance on text.

But as all historical documents do, this piece continues to have resonance beyond its particular context, particularly as the excesses of image production continue to spiral out of control and artistic production in the early 21st century must negotiate an obscenely bloated international art market that demands an increased professionalization of the artist whose own visibility (and resonance) depends upon inhabiting a sort of practical functionality amidst so much visual noise. (Among today’s global art stars I can think of at least a handful whose rise to fame is based solely on self-promotion, resembling Warhol’s “entrepreneurial extracurriculars”[x] but without any of the irony). Is there any doubt that the circulation of works through the numerous biennials and art fairs that have multiplied over the past few years, mimics the very structure of commodification and distances the contemporary producer from the emancipatory pretensions of previous generations? I return, then, to Vergara’s resistance to my own interpretation and to the manner in which he has gone about preparing this exhibition: refusing to edit the number of works in an overzealous and frenzied production, to develop or adhere to the rigors of medium specificity, and above all denying any sense of conceptual coherence -- an incoherence which might be perceived as a lack or refusal of political engagement but may offer a much needed space of critical resistance. In a recent discussion of the potentiality of contemporary art, Jacques Rancière has written “For me, the fundamental question is to explore the possibility of maintaining spaces of play…that thwart expectations. The main enemy of artistic creativity as well as of political creativity is consensus -- that is, inscription within given roles, possibilities, and competences.”[xi]

[i] Hoffmann’s House (H’sH) was a mobile exhibition space founded in 1999 by Rodrigo Vergara and Jose Pablo Díaz that operated out of a sort of emergency shelter (shanty) purchased from the Hogar de Cristo (Home of Christ), a local charitable organization. Over the course of several years, Vergara and Díaz installed the space in plazas across the city, exhibiting the work of their peers. In recent years H’sH has moved away from its physical exhibition space to produce international art events like, for example, EIEI (Encuentro Internacional de Espacios Independientes): an event that brought together independent spaces from Europe and the Americas in 2005 for a week long event that took place in Valparaíso and included seminars, public talks, and exhibitions.

[ii] Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, (trans. Richard Howard), New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Inc., 1981, p. 15.

[iii] Susan Sontag, On Photography, New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 2001, p, 7.

[iv] This term has been used to describe a group of artists from Vancouver whose work is based on photoconceptual practices. Artists typically associated with the term are Jeff Wall, Ian Wallace, Roy Arden, Stan Douglas, and Rodney Graham. In Vancouver the term is generally scorned, particularly by those artists said to be a part of the ‘School.’

[v] Alison M. Gingeras, “Performing the Self: Martin Kippeberger," ArtForum, (Oct 2004), p. 22.

[vi] Ibid., p. 23.

[vii] Jürgen Fauth, “It's Still Better to Burn Out Than to Fade Away,” About, Inc, 2008.

http://worldfilm.about.com/od/k/fr/lastdays.htm

[viii] Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation and Other Essays, New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 2001, p. 13.

[ix]Ibid., pp. 6-7.

[x] Gingeras, op. cit., p. 22.

[xi] Fulvia Carnevale and John Kelsey, “Art of the possible: An interview with Jacques Rancière,” trans. Jeanine Herman, Artforum (March 2007), p. 260.

“El sueño de la razón que produce monstrous: On the Work of Javier Téllez,” Afterall 18, Summer 2008

2008-06-05T01:09:00.000-07:00

http://www.afterall.org/journal/issue.18/el.sueno.de.la.razon.produce.monstruos.work.javier

Víctor Albarracín, La alegría de vivir, Bogotá, April 18, 2008

2008-04-18T01:21:00.000-07:00

The Personal is Conceptual
As a writer I’ve always been a little envious of the narcissistic potential of visual practice in its capacity to shroud what is essentially personal and autobiographical (i.e. banal) in a language based on a lack of transparency. Years ago a friend of mine claimed that one of his peers, a certain highly respected artist with whom he’s worked closely (and who will remain unnamed), had developed his entire body of work on the basis of the inadequacies he experienced with respect to his penis. (No details were offered). And I began to look around at all of those people who had achieved visibility in their careers and to wonder if that success was based on secretly exploiting a personal obsession or insecurity while learning how to carefully hide that autobiographical element within a seemingly objective and universally relevant conceptual narrative.

I also thought about myself and how my professional interests have been absolutely determined by a personal conflict I should been able to resolve years ago, but that I still carry around from one country to the next like a ridiculous weight, and that will continue to determine absolutely everything I do and has, in this way, become the source of my productivity. (Is it obvious I wonder?) It’s even difficult to think about writing critically in the first person after years of being taught in school that this is absolutely unacceptable.

Unheimlich is an exercise in making the self-indulgent visible by very explicitly and publicly exploiting the most intimate, pathetic, and humiliating self-doubts and frustrations that plague all of us at one point or another. It’s a celebration of failure (fracasar así es todo un lujo); an acknowledgement of mediocrity (la curva siempre va hacia abajo); an articulation of dissatisfaction (life is as miserable as this poor asshole); and above all a refusal to hide all of the bitterness and anger behind the good form of conceptual practice or the social diplomacy demanded by careerism (everything isn’t nice) in a cultural context (Bogotá) in which being nauseatingly nice all the time is, in and of itself, an art form and a means of survival amidst all of the aggression that these niceties seek to pacify.

However, Víctor’s claims to vulnerability and victimization (underdogged by myself), the feigned transparency with which he seems to openly bear his tortured and suffering self, is the means by which he disguises his own secret. And this is: that the rage so uniquely his own is product not of any real feelings of self-loathing but of a sense of intellectual superiority that makes it difficult to live out the farce of trying to be successful (whether that be through visibility or economic remuneration), or even just a productive member of society, when it’s so difficult to respect those who will ultimately determine that success or the very values required to attain a position of power (el sueño de mi ración que produce insomnia). If these drawings and writings diaristically reflect the inner musings of a pathetic loser, it is a loser who has chosen the difficult path of resisting to stake a claim in the ridiculous battle for social respectability—opting instead for cultural relevance which is far less prestigious—but who is obsessed with seeing how it will all end.

Dominique Rey, "Sisters of the Cross," TRUCK, Calgary, October 12-November 11, 2007

2007-10-12T04:52:00.000-07:00

At a time in which critical discussions of gender in relation to visual art production seem to have retreated into the background, the work of Dominique Rey is a compelling reminder that the question of gender is still as relevant as ever. Against the backdrop of third wave feminism—a term associated with the diverse strains of feminism that originated in the early 90s, informed by poststructuralist theory and critical of the essentialist and puritanical tendencies of a previous generation of feminists—Rey has developed a body of work that examines constructions of female subjectivity and sexuality, most recently in relation to specific female sub-cultures.

In 2003, Rey traveled to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina where she gained access to the Crazy Horse strip club and began photographing and videotaping the women working there. Images of the womens’ reflections in the mirror as they transform themselves into objects of male consumption are set alongside polaroid snapshots initially taken to label the consent forms the artist asked them to sign. A documentary style video records the women carefully applying their make-up—that serves both to heighten their sexuality and create a protective barrier—and talking about aspects of their everyday lives that are repressed in the performativity of the dance, which is, significantly, never shown in this body of work. In images that are heavily and self-consciously mediated in an attempt to get at the real women behind the spectacle, Rey peels away at the layers of social conditioning only to arrive at a fragmented and slippery notion of subjectivity.

The current exhibition follows a two-year investigation that examines a very different group of women: the nuns from the Sisters of the Cross order in Winnipeg. This move from the sexually charged environment of the strip club to the austere and static space of the convent inevitably brings to mind the virgin/whore dichotomy that has historically reduced women to one extreme or the other and forms the very basis of Christianity. In this work however, although Rey again utilizes lens-based media to penetrate the intimate space of her subjects, she does not photograph the nuns themselves but the empty, silent spaces they inhabit—a sitting room, a dormitory, a chapel. Instead the artist has chosen to paint her subjects in a series of watercolor portraits in which the face of each sitter is depicted in detail against a stark white background into which the rest of her body fades and disappears. It is almost as if the photographic image would have been too invasive here. While Rey had inserted her own image alongside the women she had previously photographed in order to address the ethnographic impulse of such an operation, here the moment of identification lies on the plane of spirituality—the reflection and self awareness that the artist associates with her own practice of Vipassana meditation.

There is also an element of closure here as most of these women are elderly and approaching death. In a sense this work functions commemoratively in relation to their individual lives but also to a vocation that seems to belong to another historical moment. And while history has seemingly liberated us as women from the confines of an archaic notion of sexuality, today’s image obsessed culture seems equally repressive. Sometimes it even feels like a backlash making it as urgent as ever to talk about gender.

Wilson Díaz, Los Rebeldes del Sur, "Displaced: Contemporary Art from Colombia," Glynn Vivian Art Gallery, Swansea (Wales), Oct. 6, 2007-Jan. 6, 2008

2007-10-07T01:11:00.000-07:00

Los Rebeldes del Sur documents two musical performances by a Vallenato band made up of guerilla soldiers that took place while the artist was visiting San Vicente del Caguán, a town located in what used to be called the ‘Zona de Distensión’. This was an area the size of Switzerland in Southern Colombia that was temporarily demilitarized by the Pastrana administration in 1999 in order to carry out a series of peace talks between the government and the FARC. The negotiations came to an abrupt halt in 2002 following the hijacking of a plane by FARC members and the kidnapping of several passengers. Shortly after, Presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt attempted to visit this area and was quickly taken hostage and, to this day, remains missing.

Visual culture today in Colombia is saturated with images of the armed conflict that has dominated the country’s political stage for more than half a century. And although many Colombians speculate about what kind of paradise they might live in if it were not for the FARC, the structures of domination and economic repression have been a constant throughout the country’s history. It is only the protagonists of this conflict that change against a constantly shifting set of ideological positions that makes it difficult to articulate the struggle in moralizing terms.

In the works that resulted from his experience in San Vicente del Caguán, Wilson Díaz portrays an image far removed from media depictions of an opaque and yet absolute enemy. In Bañito en el cañito, young boys who are still children really, quietly bathe in a stream and carefully dress and groom themselves in the military uniforms that seem so at odds with the tranquility of their surroundings. Similarly, Los Rebeldes del Sur captures a few moments of festive time in which soldiers perform to an audience made up of visitors as well as local residents. It is a humane, empathetic image shot with an old video camera so that the poor quality of the video reflects the precariousness of its context and functions more like a simple document than an invasive artistic intervention. And while the image of uniformed, fully armed guerilla rebels appropriating a musical genre typically associated with love and heartbreak appears at first to be so perverse and contradictory, Vallenato has long been a genre that articulated the daily struggles of rural people and thus functioned as a subtle form of popular protest. It is also a genre that is intricately connected to the culture of drug trafficking but, perhaps most importantly, has become an important symbol of national pride and self-definition.

In Colombia the daily spectacle of social and economic conflict and ‘underdevelopment’ that is product of the country’s complex history often proves to be fierce competition for contemporary art: it is difficult to find work that is more compelling or complicated than the context that produces it and to which it attempts to respond critically. Throughout his work, Díaz has successfully negotiated a slippery terrain dominated by tendencies to over-aestheticize cultural formations or to simply represent them in order to make work that passively satisfies global and even local expectations about what Colombian art needs to look like to achieve widespread legibility. The strength and relevance of Díaz’s work derives from an economy of means and a refusal of epic representation in favor of simple documents that modestly and perceptively bring out all of those subtle details that are often relegated to the backdrop of history but are the only means with which we really have to understand it.

“On the Periphery of the Periphery: Chilean conceptual art 1975-2005,” TransPOSE: Shedding the capacity to fit in, International Symposium, Mackenzie Art Gallery, Regina, March 23-25, 2007

2007-03-23T01:32:00.000-07:00

A positive assessment of the dramatic shifts that have taken place over the last two decades due to the application of postcolonial theory to curatorial practice would suggest that art produced outside of a european/u.s. context has gained access to the major art circuits and has shed its subordinate position with respect to mechanisms of production, dissemination, and reception. If in the past such work was celebrated for its cultural specificity, which provided both respite from and reinforcement of eurocentric, universalist paradigms, more recent criteria may come to depend too heavily upon its illustrative value in relation to postcolonial theory. It is under the rubric of cultural globalization that a vast array of heterogeneous practices have been forced into a reductive category of subaltern art and then made to serve a representative function for so-called third world issues, thus perpetuating a form of neocolonialism. Such interest, at best, betrays a sense of redundancy and exhaustion felt toward dominant cultural practices and the need to revitalize such practices with an outward gaze, and at worst an increasingly global, de-centered market that must constantly accommodate itself according to the dictates of novelty, endlessly engaged in the cycle of producing and satisfying new demands. Gerardo Mosquera has repeatedly cautioned against allowing terms like multiculturalism or hybridization to stand in for “harmonious totalities, without analyzing the structures of relation and domination operating through them.” Similarly, Homi Bhabha writes: “However impeccably the content of an ‘other’ culture may be known, however anti-ethnocentrically it is represented, it is its location as the closure of grand theories, the demand that in analytical terms, it be always the good object of knowledge, the docile body of difference that reproduces a relation of domination that is the most serious indictment of the institutional powers of critical theory.”

In presenting a talk about the history of conceptual art in Chile it is my argument that this specific tradition is of interest precisely because it has never functioned as this sort of docile body of difference. Conceptual art in Chile arose in direct response to a repressive political apparatus and sought to complicate dominant visual and semantic codes by producing works resistant to manipulation, censure, or the imposition of a transparent meaning. Such practices are then historically bound to a specific tradition of political resistance and at the same time a localist paradigm which utilizes references not easily comprehensible to the outside, an element that has directly interfered with its ability to penetrate international art circuits. But perhaps more problematic is that formally such conceptual practices have been characterized by a minimalist, austere aesthetic that has little to do with the exotic images shamelessly but often ignorantly used to describe an entire continent in fetishizing and homogenizing terms. And so Chilean art produced over the course of the last three decades has eluded international circuits because it is the exact inversion of what international curators usually look for when traveling to peripheral contexts.

The 1973 military coup in Chile was not only an unprecedented shattering of the strongest democratic tradition in Latin America but brought about the breakdown of an entire system of social and cultural references. Cultural institutions and universities were dismantled and extreme censorship was imposed as part of the dictatorship's more generalized program of obliterating the past and any notion of collective memory. In this sense art came to comply with an important social function in the absence of any political activity—that of preserving a national identity and recuperating what at many times may have become an overly romanticized notion of the democratic past. But according to Nelly Richard, a Santiago based theoretician and principal historian of this period of Chilean art, such practices, bolstered by the Left were based on traditional forms like theater, folklore and music and failed to question the discursive capacity of art by remaining within a realist paradigm in which the image was always subservient to the ideological message. According to her narrative then, there arose a group of artists which she has termed the avanzada group, whose unprecedented experimentation in visual language and semantic codes represented one of the earliest attempts to call attention to the very conditions of artistic production and as such has acquired them an originary aura within the trajectory of late twentieth century Chilean art.

Carlos Leppe's performance, “Coat Hanger” from 1975 is the first photographic treatment of a transvestite nude in Chilean art. Up to this point the body had never been used as a support and it's important to note that the pervasiveness of body art during these years was less influenced by similar practices in Europe or the U.S. and more a direct response to a local political situation. On the most obvious level the use of the body as a critical medium was inevitable given the pervasiveness of torture and the disappearance of thousands of Chileans. There are several notable works that involve self-mutilation which metaphorically address the violence done to the collective body and attempt to approach the borderline between individual and collective experience. In Raul Zurita's first book of poetry entitled Purgatory published in 1979, the cover shows the author's mutilated face resulting from performances in which he had cut himself and sprayed acid into his eyes attempting to blind himself. Similarly writer Diamela Eltit cut and burnt her arms leaving them permanently disfigured.

Leppe utilizes his own body as a site for transgressing and deconstructing the constraints imposed by social and political formations on individual subjectivities. The body here is configured not in biological terms but as that which is always culturally and historically situated. In his 1980 multi-media work “Waiting Room” his body is entrapped within an orthopedic plaster and he desperately flails his arms about in a pathetic gesture while his mouth is held open by a metal dental contraption. A strong tradition of feminist critique emerged during these years in response to a patriarchal system that gendered anything and everything marginal to it, female. This is why representations of the feminine and the marginal become useful analytic tools to deconstruct the exclusionary mechanisms of the authoritarian apparatus—that is, what needs to be excluded and more generally what kind of function that which is marginal has in relation to the maintenance of a specific type of collective identity. But the notion of alterity possesses a double function in a country like Chile, which is already marginal in relation to the axes of international cultural, political and economic power.

Eugenio Dittborn's works are filled with photographic documentation of social outcasts, many of them women. His 1982 work entitled We were all going to be Princesses show mug shots of four female petty thieves taken in the 1920s. The text is from the Gabriela Mistral poem of the same name. Found images become the material with which Dittborn attempts to reconstruct a fragmentary past—a history that is not organically unified but that is already full of exclusions and discontinuities. But clearly the pervasiveness of mug shots throughout his work alludes to the contemporary situation of the disappeared. According to Richard: "Because the present is so restricted, the past becomes an eloquent metaphorical source...Dittborn's search for an entombed memory are only so many substitutions for the forbidden present..."

In perhaps the most seminal text on Dittborn's work entitled Of the Space of Here, Ronald Kay, a German critic and poet, transplanted in Chile, writes about the visual conquest of America implemented with the arrival of the photographic camera. Whereas in its place of origin, Paris, photography captured “objectivities consistent with the level of technological development of the process of intervention itself…” the material reality of the New World—representative of those vast, uncharted territories of the European imagination—was historically (temporally and spatially) estranged from the technical and discursive apparati that had preceded photography’s invention abroad. This produced, then, a moment of rupture or “temporal discontinuity”—physically present in the images themselves—which is always inscribed in the act of colonial domination. Photography interferes with the consolidation of a local tradition of landscape painting that would typically be organized around the representation of nature as a harmonious totality (a historical construct that itself is suspect), or what Adorno termed “second nature,” the use of nature to represent an ahistorical and idealized vision of social relations. According to Kay “In a world where that which establishes the possibility of painting now finds itself previously disempowered, visibility must necessarily organize itself around other coordinates.” So while Dittborn's found images attempt to preserve the memory of that which is suppressed by the official apparatus, the use of photography in Dittborn's work and in the works of the avanzada more generally bear testament to the mechanisms of power already inscribed in the act of framing and in that of being framed. In the series of archival ethnographic photographs used by the artist throughout his work, the photographic image functions as both the material trace of indigenous peoples who have left no trace in the official history of Chile and at the same time the indicator of their capture and subordination.

The last artist of this generation I'm going to discuss is Juan Davila who, although he has lived in Sydney, Australia since 1974 has had a strong presence on the development of Chilean conceptual practice. Like Leppe his work seeks to draw parallels between sexual repression and political repression and this accounts for the prevalence of highly sexualized pornographic imagery in most of his paintings. Davila draws from a heterogeneous set of visual and semantic codes ranging from academic painting to pop art to imported media culture to local iconography that very clearly demonstrates an interest in pastiche—an idea which Adorno defined in derogatory terms as style wrenched from historical function and which later Fredric Jameson would recuperate as a major tenet of postmodernist cultural practice. However it's more useful to describe Davila's practice in relation to antropofágia, which according to Haroldo de Campos "is the idea of the critical swallowing up of the universal cultural heritage, elaborated not from the submissive, complicit perspective of the ‘good savage’ but from the disillusioned viewpoint of the ‘bad savage’, the white-man eater, the cannibal. It involves, not submission...but transculturation...a critical view of History...as well suited to appropriation as to expropriation, di-hierchization, or deconstruction." One of the most interesting aspects of Davila's work is that his construction of the bad savage is one that is always sexualized and gendered. In this way he seeks to infiltrate postcolonial narratives by positing a destabilized postcolonial subject rather than a neutral one. The best example of this can be seen in a series of works from 1994 which depicted Simon Bolivar with the features of a Chilean working man class and breasts while sitting atop his horse in a caricatured Latin American landscape.

Richard's own history of the avanzada group, her book entitled Margins and Institutions, was written in 1984, at a moment in which the international model of transavantgardism and neoexpressionism began to have a powerful effect upon local artistic practices manifested by a return to painting and a commercial gallery system. In the concluding chapter of this book, Richard very pessimistically wrote: "The new painting widely copied by young Chilean artists after 1982 has changed the scene and the terms of the debate considerably. Questions concerning Latin America or marginality, which were so important during the avanzada period, are now put aside. The problem of cultural domination does not interest the new school, which is content to be part of the great urban centres and to exploit their markets. The fact that the subjective or symbolic categories of this new painting seem "universal," only further absolves the artists from making any analysis of the social and historical circumstances surrounding the production of their work."

However, beginning in the early 90s a young generation of art students began to look back to the avanzada group partly because after the return to democracy in 1989 many of the intellectuals previously banned from the state universities were returning to teach. To those who subscribe to this tradition it is at times a burden—overly dogmatic and politicized and I would even venture to say, highly suspicious of any move to venture away from what is often a claustrophobic notion of the local. Today, the Santiago art scene is characterized by the presence of several historical figures whose mentorship towards younger generations often result in rigid lines of influence and lineage that create political rivalries out of distinct sets of ideologies or formal tendencies. Although this makes for an intellectually rigorous environment in which to produce art, it is also quite stifling and the result is that a disturbingly large percentage of artists who finished art school in the mid 90s have left Santiago but many of them continue to make work that engages with this history but with the perspective that geographical and psychological distance affords.

The most notable example of self-exile is that of Cristián Silva who is perhaps the most internationally recognized Chilean artist of his generation but who has lived in Mexico since 2000. Silva is one of thousands of children who spent their early youth in exile and whose adolescence was profoundly marked by alienation from, and then rediscovery of and fascination with all of the iconography, customs, and habits that form part of the construction of recent Chilean cultural identity. His work, consisting of objects, murals, photographs and drawings, establishes complicated and often cryptic relationships between elements extracted from this autobiographical repertoire that are at once adamantly local but that also attempt to articulate what Silva has described as ‘the social condition of a third world emergent middle class and its collective aspirations.’ One recent work entitled Proteins, Minerals, and Vitamins is an anthology of seventeen Milo commercials that appeared on Chilean television between 1980, the year Silva and his family returned to Chile, and 1992 and functions as a very oblique marker of the ideological shifts that took place over the course of those years. Marketed as a nutritional supplement to even the poorest classes, Milo’s images of young children engaged in athletic training and sporting events in order to grow up into healthy, productive adults take on a disturbing set of connotations seen against the backdrop of a regime that exalted ideas of triumph, physical strength, and progress.

In 1993 Silva along with artists Monica Bengoa and Mario Navarro and art historian Justo Pastor Mellado formed a collective called Jemmy Button Inc. named for the Yagan native from Tierra de Fuego who was bought for a sack of buttons by Captain Robert FitzRoy during the 1830 expedition of the HMS Beagle and taken to England where he was educated as an Englishman and became a local celebrity. A little over a year later he was returned to his home on the expedition that first brought Darwin to the New World. However, to both the captain and Darwin’s dismay, Button quickly abandoned his European clothing and customs in order to return to his former way of life, only to find that his people no longer fully considered him one of their own. He was later accused and stood trial for hijacking a ship of British missionaries and killing every one of them. It is believed that he lived the rest of his life in abandonment and as a perpetual misfit. This historical anecdote functions metaphorically to situate the ruptures affected by the military dictatorship within a larger narrative of colonialism. It is also a story about exile. But the legend of Jemmy Button is of additional interest as it relates to the problem of Latin American art and its reception in the mid 90s. According to Mellado: “[Latin American] artists are returned to their home for being incompetent; unless they become collaborators of contemporary Darwinism and accept being decontextualized and interchangeable pieces in a symbolic market, homogenized by the desire for the primitive.”

Cristóbal Lehyt was the first of a large group of artists from this generation who settled in New York City in the mid to late 90s. Lehyt’s work has clearly developed in relation to the avanzada tradition in addition to what he identifies as a very overdetermined situation of engaging with a marginal history from within a first world context. Since 2003, Lehyt has developed a series of drawings, paintings, photographs, and book works that deal with the idea of ‘el norte’ both as a geographical site in Chile that is highly charged in the political history of that country and the surrounding region, and a more generalized concept that makes reference to the hierarchical axis that divides global power relations between north and south. The north of Chile is a mythical place full of abandoned mining towns that once operated within an economic structure that exploited workers to the benefit of multinational conglomerates in an almost pure model of colonialism. In the 19^th century war of the Pacific, Chile invaded Bolivia and Peru for control over these mines. Chile's victory ceded it an enormous chunk of territory of both countries, notoriously land-locking Bolivia by cutting off its access to the Pacific and damaging diplomatic relations with this country from then on. Chile’s recent economic prosperity has generated the migration of significant numbers of Peruvians to Chile, especially in Santiago, and has created a new migrant underclass, and with it new strains of racism and discrimination unprecedented in this country's history. Lehyt utilizes images from archival sources like history books and newspapers, in addition to video and photographic footage shot by him during frequent trips to the region to piece together a complicated narrative about the power relations that determine current day constructions of nationality and cultural identity. His most recent exhibition “El Mar de Bolivia” (Bolivia’s Sea) engages with recent diplomatic efforts to end the moratorium Bolivia has maintained for decades on the sale of natural gas to Chile by imposing a ‘gas for sea’ policy.

If historically, conceptual art in Chile has been associated with the authoritarianism that took hold of the entire Southern Cone region during the 70s and 80s, neo-conceptual practices of the post-dictatorship era have responded to a radically changed political climate known as the “culture of consensus” involving the implementation of progressive, liberal policies that have attempted to quickly develop the country while simultaneously burying—and not adequately dealing with—its past. Although today Chile is often touted as the most developed, stable, or even “civilized” country in Latin America, there is a great deal of internal discussion about the long-term effects of the radical change that has taken place in a country that went from an extremely violent dictatorship to a neoliberal, democratic state in a span of less than fifteen years. Galería Chilena, a nomadic, commercial gallery founded by three local artists, Joe Villablanca, Diego Fernandez, and Felipe Mujica provides a very telling example of the political and cultural context within which the current generation of Chilean artists was formed. In 1997, on the occasion of the first of a series of exhibitions they organized in borrowed spaces around the city, the group printed a low-budget, four color flyer that served almost as a kind of heroic manifesto which clearly stated the goals of the gallery while critiquing the specific situation that had made its existence necessary: a local art scene which seemed to divide artists between two seemingly incompatible categories: commercial, conservative practices vs. conceptual, economically unviable ones. GCH seemed to consciously embody a whole set of contradictions that its organizers desired to productively put to use: a collective of recent graduates with no money, no physical space, and limited social contacts intent upon single-handedly creating a market for contemporary critical art in Chile. In an interview published in August 1998, Joe Villablanca stated hyperbolically that in just six months of operation, GCH had already changed the historical course of the visual arts in that country forever. In his own work, Villablanca exemplified his new public persona in a series of videos that depict the artist in various related situations. In one, Villablanca, clothed in a clerical robe, stands behind an impromptu podium delivering an impassioned discourse (in the style of political populism) about Galería Chilena to an empty room. Here, the speech is a word for word repetition of that very first text printed the previous year and sent to a select list of curators, artists, and critics in Chile and all over the world—it is the image of the artist repeating the party line to a silent, indifferent audience. In another piece, Gran Santiago, the artist places a call to a local talk show program that aired very early in the morning, at a time that presumably nobody watched. The show, like the video, is called Gran Santiago and is hosted by two middle aged AM radio personalities. Holding the camera in one hand, Villablanca talks to his absent public about the role of Galería Chilena in relation to the emergence of a new artistic scene in Chile. The hosts nod patiently, politely attempting, unsuccessfully, to end the call. It is perhaps this video, which most eloquently articulates the fate of a project that already had the knowledge and acceptance of (and perhaps desire for) its ultimate failure built into it from its inception: an artist alone and awake in his room at four o’clock in the morning, wasting his words on deaf ears, conscious of the indifference of those who only pretend to listen, and yet, is just a little bit hopeful.

A constant parody of itself, Galería Chilena simply stated the obvious: that the creation of an informed group of collectors of contemporary art in Chile that would presumably lead to the consolidation of a coherent emerging art scene was simply not possible at this stage of the country’s development. In making explicit this failure, Galería Chilena was effectively articulating a set of negative truths about its immediate context against the spastic, unwarranted optimism that had gripped Chile during the first phase of the post-dictatorship as well as the manner in which the art world must constantly compromise itself to publicists and buyers in order to have the necessary visibility to be socially relevant. Despite all the rhetoric of globalization and the circulation of information, knowledge is still restricted by such limited parameters. Anything outside of those parameters must be forced in as something else or quite simply dismissed. I am thinking about geography but not exclusively.

"Je est un autre," The Institutionalization of Outsider Art, Panel Discussion, Simon Fraser University Gallery, Burnaby, Saturday February 17, 2007

2007-02-27T01:49:00.000-08:00

According to NY Times critic Roberta Smith, “outsider art is often conveniently artist-free; it has been made by someone who is, as the term implies, on the margins — poor, uneducated, nonwhite, mentally ill, dead or otherwise inaccessible.” The actual term was invented in 1972 by Roger Cardinal as an English language equivalent for Jean Debuffet’s notion of art brut which he described as “...works created from ... pure and authentic creative impulses - where the worries of competition, acclaim and social promotion do not interfere ... in relation to these works, cultural art in its entirety appears to be the game of a futile society, a fallacious parade."

Although articulated from very different positions, common to both definitions is the idea of a more sincere or honest art practice uncontaminated by the dictates of the market or the ideological apparatus of the museum. In its most uncritical manifestations, outsiderism lays claim to Truth with a capital T and does so because of its very exclusion from dominant economic and social structures. This idea is not entirely unrelated to an entire tradition of Marxist cultural critique whose object of contestation is the bourgeois institution of autonomous art defined through these very same sorts of exclusions. In his 1996 text The Artist as Ethnographer, Hal Foster writes: “there is an assumption that the site of artistic transformation is the site of political transformation and that this site is always located elsewhere, in the field of the other...[and] that this other is always outside and that this alterity is always the primary point of subversion of dominant culture.”

I’d like to connect this valorization of alterity as a subversive element in culture to the practice of cultural slumming—an activity that can be traced as far back as Victorian London when the East End became a sort of tourist attraction for the wealthy classes. Although presumably those who engaged in slumming were primarily interested in establishing proximity with which to selflessly carry out philanthropic or charitable activities, according to one writer “the slums of London ironically functioned as sites of personal liberation and self-realization for several generations of educated men and women.”

Art critic Joshua Decter has written about current practices of slumming in a text entitled “Schmoozing and Slumming” which efficiently links together two practices that seem to be contradictory but are actually quite similar. Decter describes schmoozing as “a behavioral condition, often witnessed at parties, dinners, benefits and other collective events, (that responds) to the evolution of professional or technocratic cultures.” Simply stated, schmoozing is a necessary part of career advancement. Going back to Debuffet’s definition, schmoozing is precisely what seems to be absent from outsider art and what makes it morally superior to an art system that seems to be weary from so much schmoozing. However, Decter is an apologist for schmoozing and claims that because it is merely a technique of self-preservation it is not reproachable. Slumming, however, is highly problematic because it too is all about empowering oneself but through the dis-empowering of another while pretending to do the exact opposite.

And it is this similarity between schmoozing and slumming that brings me directly to the subject of my talk: cultural slumming in contemporary Colombian art, which has its own history and terminology and is often referred to in Colombia as “pornomiseria” which literally means, pornomisery. The term pornomiseria is derogatory and came into use during the 1970s to describe a type of local cinema verité that was accused of exploiting social issues to gain international recognition and prestige. Ciro Duran’s 1978 Gamin documented the lives of street children in Bogotá in a superficial, even staged manner and it was an entire genre of such films being made across Latin America that spawned Carlos Mayolo and Luis Ospina’s satirical documentary “Agarrando Pueblo,” a film that would ban its makers from all of the major international film festivals but that would eventually become one of the hallmarks of experimental film in Colombia. What’s interesting about this case, and common to so many others is that the issue is not just the perceived ethnographic position of the filmmaker within his/her own cultural context but how that position panders to or is complicit with the structures of domination that operate through the consumption of images of marginality by first world audiences. Hal Foster has pointed to an interesting shift that occurs in the late 20th century in which a model of political transformation previously identified with a universal idea of the proletariat becomes displaced onto a cultural other: the oppressed postcolonial, subaltern, or subcultural.

The term pornomiseria has enjoyed a recent surge of use in Colombian critical discourse, mostly in the context of debates that have unraveled in the digital media, like local listserves and blogs, which provide ideal venues for uninhibited ranting. To my recollection, the term started being thrown around in relation to a photographic series by Jaime Avila entitled “La Vida es una Pasarela” or “Life is a Catwalk.” This work consists of a series of diptychs, each showing an image of a young homeless man alongside a desolate image of urban decay lit up by tiny colored lights reminiscent of panoramic posters of cityscapes found in tourist shops. Shot in the style of fashion photography, these incredibly fetishized images are charged with homoeroticism and meant to document the personal style exhibited by each of the artist’s subjects. Shown alongside the works are texts that include biographical information about each of the models and anecdotes about making this work, along with a narrative written by the artist about a former close friend who ended up on the streets. This work has been shown countless time in Bogotá as part of the country’s completely anachronistic model of statesponsored art salons.

One of the most celebrated and most criticized bodies of work dealing with representations of marginality is the Museo de la Calle (Museum of the Street), an archive of objects accumulated by a group of art students who began to barter in El Cartucho, a previous wealthy neighborhood long ago abandoned to recyclers, drug dealers, pimps and prostitutes. This project began in 1999 with a routine visit to the neighborhood in search of cheap drugs, by Carolina Caycedo and Federico Guzman who were immediately captivated by its extraordinary seediness especially upon learning that the City had recently announced plans to completely level the neighborhood in order to gentrify the area. Guzman and Caycedo became obsessed with the neighborhood’s imminent destruction and began establishing proximity to its residents by offering free haircuts. They were eventually joined by several other students and formed a collective that began participating in the area’s informal economy by bartering objects, which they stored in a recycler’s cart purchased for their growing collection. In 2000 the collective received invitations to show its collection of objects in several quite high profile exhibitions in Europe, most notably Carlos Basualdo’s “From Adversity We Live,” a sort of who’s who of rising young Latin American art stars. Carolina Caycedo has defended the group’s participation in institutional art contexts claiming that the collection was never meant to be shown as merely a static set of objects but rather as items that were available for exchange so that these international invitations actually allowed these objects to continue circulating outside of their original context. The recycling cart was eventually returned to the neighborhood in a free raffle shortly before that part of the city was completely erased from the urban landscape.

Rosemberg Sandoval is another artist whose work has been associated with the genre of pornomiseria. Between 1999 and 2004 he enacted a series of performances in which he would find a homeless man willing to be carried into the gallery or museum where the artist would proceed to drag this individual across the wall and other white surfaces thus creating a series of drawings made entirely out of the dirt and debris that became dislodged from the person’s clothing and body. The title of the work is “Filth.” Despite the fact that this work has been purchased by the Daros Collection and that Sandoval can be counted among the country’s most successful and exportable commodities, he sees himself very much as an outsider to a local art scene not only because of the explicit and gruesome nature of his work but because of his own working class origins to which he remains adamantly tied and that conveniently allows him to assume a moral, if not slippery, position when making work that successfully negotiates social critique with commercial viability. In a recent interview he has stated: “I studied art for ethical, aesthetic, and moral reasons, and as a young man I had to decide: either I join the guerillas or I become a transgressive artist. In the end I decided to make art.”

So based on Decter’s argument, we might argue that cases like these prove that slumming in Colombia is a useful method of schmoozing internationally. After all Latin American art has historically been made to embody a romanticized image of our North American other: poor, dirty, dangerous and yet ever so enticing.

In 2006 a group of young artists enacted a highly satirical public performance in a busy downtown plaza in Cali under the name of “Colectivo Pornomiseria.” The piece was titled “Limpieza Social” or “Social Cleansing,” a direct reference to the well-known public policy in many Latin American countries of simply eradicating entire segments of the population considered dangerous or worthless. In Colombia homeless individuals are conventionally referred to as “desechables” which literally means “disposables.” In fact when questioned about the ethics of how he utilizes homeless individuals in his work, Rosemberg Sandoval himself has stated, “To me the indigent is an instrument. It’s about using them at a specific moment and then discarding them, which is what society does with them.” In this performance an MC dressed all in white offered a free bath and food to anyone in need. Scantily clad women, armed with soap and hoses proceeded to wash down participants who were then clothed and photographed in white t-shirts printed with the words “Social Work.” During the performance the MC read a manifesto in which he called attention to the moral ambiguity of recent examples of so-called socially engaged art in Colombia and went further to directly accuse artists like Ávila, Caycedo, and Sandoval of representing marginal segments of the population in an exploitative manner.

It’s also interesting to note that the term pornomiseria has been applied to the local media and its often biased or incomplete representations of the armed conflict that has gone on in Colombia for over half a century and that has invaded absolutely every aspect of daily life there. And while it is true that most artists in Colombia do come from privilege and have been educated in the same Western canon taught in art schools in Europe or North America, it is this unavoidable and undeniable proximity to economic deprivation and social injustice that makes the idea of a rarified realm of art making look ridiculously elitist. Given the virtual absence of a national art market and the precarious nature of the few institutions dedicated to promoting culture, it seems a bit difficult to even consider something like an ‘inside.’ Only in the presence of a technocratic or professionalized art system that responds to the demands of a society that claims universal access, can we really begin to conceive of absolute binarisms like inside and outside. In a context like Colombia, the terms of the argument become inevitably shifted to class conflict and to the question of how to address that conflict in art practice because it is generally accepted that to simply ignore it is not an option. But what is evident in critiques of “pornomiseria” is that not only does the fetishization and sensationalism of the cultural other replicate conventional structures of power, rather than just calling attention to them, it creates a false spectacle in which marginality becomes represented through extreme situations in a country in which social and economic marginality is, in fact, the status quo. Furthermore the commodification of this spectacle for a bloated global market eager for new products, does nothing to further develop the terms of political engagement.

I’d like to end my talk by pointing to the most recent discussions around issues of marginality and how these margins might come to be addressed, within an art or curatorial practice, in a more ethical and rigorous manner. In his curatorial proposal directed precisely towards a long term investigation of practices that exist outside of the established canon of contemporary art in Colombia (in which the three previously mentioned artists are strongly entrenched) Victor Albarracín has made the very interesting point that the vast majority of popular culture in Colombia is produced on the periphery so that it is through this popular cultural production understood as experience and not as spectacle, that we might finally begin to really think about political transformation. He is directly drawing upon the experience of an art exhibition organized in 2006 by art collective Helena Producciones that sought to expand the terrain of the visual arts to include a broader arena of cultural and social practices as well as instances of political resistance. One performance featured a live fencing match by a school of fencers from an isolated and poor area of Colombia who fence with machetes which are the tools they use in their daily lives as sugar cane workers. In another part of a room, a listening station had been set up to broadcast a community radio station situated in El Choco, one of the country’s most violent and isolated departments. One particular action that provoked confusion as to whether or not it was art, was a typical African-Colombian family sitting down to lunch just like any other day. As a critique of the established idea of Culture that is eurocentric, apolitical, and written with a capital C; this exhibition sought to contextualize all of the objects, performances, and actions on display within specific historical and social formations that have been systematically excluded not only from official critical discourse in Colombia but from media representations that, like hegemonic histories, focus exclusively on exceptional individuals or actions. Peter Schjeldahl has written that “art, to be recognized as such, requires grounding in both individual biography and common culture.” It seems to me that it might be more useful to think about where it is exactly that we begin to situate this idea of a common culture.

Madness is the Language of the Excluded,” An interview with Javier Téllez by Michèle Faguet and Cristóbal Lehyt, C Magazine 92, Toronto, Winter 2006

2006-12-08T01:18:00.000-08:00

The interview format is most fitting for a discussion of the recent work of Javier Téllez given that he is so articulate and forthcoming about the complicated set of references—historical, literary, cultural, personal—that have informed his practice. Téllez is earnest in his attempt to engage in an ethical, consequential manner with communities of individuals who live outside of the models of normative behavior that define the parameters of a ‘sane’ society but that are constantly shifting in relation to the ideological structures that determine this social order.

Téllez’s interest in articulating a position of alterity is partly autobiographical: both of his parents were practicing psychiatrists in the provincial city of Valencia, Venezuela. His father, a Spanish immigrant, was a pioneer in his field and the first to introduce certain psychotropic treatments in Venezuela. Perhaps his exposure from a very early age to those deemed mentally ill by the medical establishment produced a recognition of the process of alterity as a permanent cultural condition, inscribed within Western epistemological models of identity based on antagonistic binarisms of self and other.

The collaborative nature of his work means that the final product presented in an art context has been determined collectively and is not necessarily based on the aesthetic considerations we might come to expect. In this conversation Téllez has described his work as documentation of fictional scenarios constructed from within the psychiatric institution from the point of view of those who inhabit it. What the viewer sees is a work that has no claim to authority, no centered point of view; it is not easy work but vulnerable and ambivalent. It is work that demands the viewer’s active participation.

MF& CL: When speaking about your work you have often made reference to the phonetic similarity between museum and mausoleum written about by Adorno. Your own proximity to and interest in psychiatric practice has resulted in a series of works that extracts, in an almost archaeological manner, objects from the sterile, white hospital wards that make up the visual landscape of the mentally ill, and inserts these objects into the pristine white cube of the museum. Can you elaborate on what you see to be the processes of selection and exclusion common to both psychiatric and curatorial practices?

JT: The museum and the psychiatric hospital are products of the enlightenment project. It is not a coincidence that ‘la convention’ of the first republic opened the Louvre to the public in 1793 at the same time that Philippe Pinel was named chief physician of Bicêtre. It is as if the same impulse that created the museum liberated the patients from their chains, marking both the birth of the modern asylum and the public museum.

Growing up as the son of two psychiatrists, I often visited the psychiatric hospital where my father worked. At that time I also began to go to museums and I remember that even back then I already found a lot of similarities between both types of institutions: hygienic spaces, long corridors, enforced silence and the weight of the architecture…Both institutions are symbolic representations of authority, founded on taxonomies based on the ‘normal’ and the ‘pathological,’ inclusion and exclusion.

I have always been very interested in these ‘other’ museums of the pathological: the wunderkamern, freak shows, collections of art of the mentally ill, exhibitions like “Entartete kunst” or “l’art brut,” because in their morbidity they reveal to us the ‘pathology of the museum,’ showing precisely that what is excluded from the museum is what constitutes its very foundation: "El sueño de la razón que produce monstruos." (The sleep of reason that produces monsters)

La Extraccion de la piedra de la locura (The Cure of Folly), 1996, is my first project that deals with a specific psychiatric hospital. The installation filled an entire floor of the Museum of Fine Arts in Caracas, and was intended as an archeology of the psychiatric institution Barbula, the state hospital where my father worked all of his life. But it was also a critical reflection on the museum—the installation was presented as a museum within the museum and included archival material like a collection of photographs documenting the life of the institution since its foundation in the late 50s, psychological tests, medications, electro-shock machines, etc. The installation also contained a selection of artworks made by the patients. This piece represented my first collaboration with mental patients and included, for example, a series of piñatas that patients made especially for the installation shaped after pharmaceutical pills like Prozac or Valium. The idea was to create a panorama of the psychiatric institution presenting as many different visions as possible. Visitors would see an institutional history of treatments represented in display cases, but would also be given the opportunity to hear the ‘voice’ of the patients represented in their artworks and the piñatas. Since then, I have become more interested in this collaboration with patients. If there is a critique of the mental institution it make more sense that it be articulated by them.

MF& CL: Your work has been described as giving visibility to peripheral or neglected communities or situations. Your collaboration with mental patients necessarily treads a thin line between representation and exploitation. How do you negotiate your own position when working with patients?

JT: The question of ethics is always at the core of representation. Mental illness only exists within the realm of representation: it is a language and our task is to challenge it. Most “objective” representations of the mentally ill have been made by the psychiatric institution, in which the discourses of the patients are always categorized as mere illustrations of their diagnoses, not to mention stigmatic media constructions. The experience of madness can be situated historically in between the prohibitions against action and against language; these prohibitions also involve the representation of the body of the mentally ill, observed and catalogued only as a representation of the illness. Fortunately there are also counter discourses articulated by the patients themselves that can be use as models to understand the problem of language. Artists and writers like Hölderlin, Artaud, Richard Dadd, Adolf Wölfli, Artur Bispo do Rosario, Louis Wolfson and others have created a language of rupture that not only questions the conception of madness but also the fundaments of language itself. These discourses can be used, above all, as tools for a definition of the ethics of representation of those with mental illness. The question is: How might we define a system of ethics capable of moving beyond the dichotomy of the normal and the pathological?

In my practice I try to create a flexible space where those represented can intervene in their own representation. According to Levinas, ethics is a devotion to the other: “I have to forget myself to acces the other.” Ethics has to be understood as a responsibility to difference. For me this responsibility is manifest in the inclusion of the other as an active participant of the work. This participation is capital in the process of production of the work: the patients are the main actors, work on the scripts of the pieces, choose the props, review the footage and comment on it…

This inclusion obviously takes place within a framework that includes the conditions of distribution and reception of the art system. In the end it is about working in collaboration with other people and I never pretend not to be visible in the discouse, but the work is articulated in the dialogue between my subjectivity and their subjectivities.

Our interaction with the other is inevitably framed in a certain way, but this frame can offer the possibility for change. Cinematic history illustrates this big ‘jump-cut’ from Lumieres’ fixed camera on the workers exiting the factory to the sequence shots of Rossellini’s Roma, città aperta.

The making of each piece is different because each situation is different: over time we learn from previous experiences. There are also specific factors that shape the encounters with the patients: the length of time spent with them, their input, the willingness of the staff to allow me to work within the facilities, the architecture of the institution, etc. I always attempt to propose an idea that will trigger some sort of dialogue. This idea or ‘imago’ is sometimes related to the specificity of the site: for example the idea of a human cannonball crossing the Mexico-US border in Tijuana. In this case the idea was developed in conversations with psychiatric patients from the Baja California Mental Health Center in Mexicali; we organized a workshop with those interested in the project and ideas were exchanged. I try my best to create structures that include a variety of different approaches to the original idea. Sometimes certain ideas have to be edited out for practical reasons or because they interfere with other ideas.

In Tijuana the point of departure was to create a public event with the patients culminating in the crossing of the border by a human cannonball. The patients saw the geopolitical border between the US and Mexico as a metaphor for another frontier: that which confined them to the mental institution. Through the presence of the human cannonball, they embraced the idea of the circus and created an animal parade, in which the patients wore animal masks and carried signs with phrases like: ‘patients are human beings too,’ and ‘to live with drugs is no way to live.’ The parade was more like a political demonstration that ended with a circus act in which the patients read speeches and performed a lion tamer act. Given the opportunity to choose which flag would be hung on the ‘barda’ [border fence] as a backdrop for this spectacle, they decided to create a new flag made from cut outs of the Mexican and American flag, that was14 meters in length.

MF& CL: Last December you exhibited La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc (Rozelle Hospital) 2004 at the Power Plant in your first solo exhibition in Canada. Can you tell me about this project?

JT: La Passion de Jeanne d’arc (Rozelle Hospital) was a video installation made in collaboration with female patients of a psychiatric hospital in Sydney. We used Dreyer’s 1928 film of the same title as a point of departure. Twelve female patients watched this silent film during a workshop that we organized and then created a new set of intertitles for it. Then we filmed the patients writing the intertitles on a blackboard and edited it into the film, to be shown without any other cuts. There is also another projection of a 16mm color film consisting of individual monologues of the women’s particular experiences within the mental health system.

The intertitles made by the patients altered the original narrative of the film: the protagonist J.D.A is a newly admitted patient of Rozelle Hospital diagnosed as a schizophrenic suffering from ‘’delusions of grandeur’’ because she believes that she is Joan of Arc. Here, the trial of the French saint that constitutes three quarters of Dreyer’s original film is presented as a process of institutionalization in the hospital and makes references to psychiatric interviews, form releases, medication, isolation rooms, and punitive electroshock therapy.

The piece operates on several different levels of translation. First, we have a film that represents a particular period of history and a specific time and place that becomes displaced as events in the new version of the film are re-situated within the Rozelle hospital from the very first frame, showing the symbolic similarities between intolerance toward difference during the inquisition and the stigmatization of the mentally ill. We are also dealing with an originally avant-garde film that has become a classic, used as a ‘blackboard’ that can always be rewritten—a palimpsest that refers to obsolescence and memory.

Dreyer’s La Passion de Jean d’arc also has several connections to mental illness beginning with the fact that Joan of Arc was played by Maria Falconneti, an actress who later became mentally ill and committed suicide in Argentina. Also, Antonin Artaud is cast in the film as one of the principal actors, while the use of close-ups and physiognomy make reference to one of the foundational tools of psychiatry. The particular history of the film director’s cut is significant as well: the film was censored in France and accidentally burned in Germany and disappeared for more than half a century until it finally reappeared in the closet of a mental institution outside Oslo!

Mental illness is fundamentally a question of language, and is also a question placed onto language itself, since we build language on the basis of exclusion. Madness is the language of the excluded.

One of the things that interested me the most about the patients’ intervention in the film was their ability to ‘do the voices’ of the psychiatrists and other institutional staff. This ability is seldom present on the other side— the language of the institution can never mimic those subjected to its dominant discourse. When patients’ statements are cited in clinical discourses they always appear as manifestations of the diagnosis. In other words, language represents a set of symptoms. The same applies to the reading of so called ‘Art of the mentally ill.’

MF: I’m particularly interested in the fact that this is the first work of yours that explicitly deals with gender and how gender has influenced historical constructions of mental illness.

JT: The question of gender is very important to the piece. This is obvious in that the collaborators are all women; in fact this was the first time that I had selected my collaborators according to gender. Because I had chosen to work with the feminist icon, Joan of Arc, it would not have made much sense to work with male patients who perhaps would have directed the piece to a less specific interpretation of the story. Because Joan of Arc barely speaks during the trial depicted in the film, working with the women gave the character a voice to confront the dominant male discourses. This piece obviously acknowledges the way in which mental illness has historically been constructed around gender. These ‘epistemes’ have, without doubt, changed considerably but are nonetheless still present today.

MF& CL: Your most recent project Oedipus Marshal pushes the idea of collaboration with mental patients one step further: this piece is a feature length narrative film featuring actors from the Oasis Clubhouse, a psychiatric facility near Aspen. Co-writer Aaron Sheley is also a resident of this facility.

JT: Oedipus Marshal is a film we made this year in Aspen, and was commissioned and produced by the Aspen Art Museum. When Heidi Zuckerman Jacobson, director of the museum and the curator of this project, visited my studio last year to offer me a residency, I spoke to her about my long time desire to create a western film in collaboration with people living with mental illness. Since the exhibition was in Colorado it presented itself as the ideal scenario for the film. When I visited Aspen it became obvious that I would not find a mental hospital there. I had to go to Grand Junction to find the right place: a facility called Oasis Clubhouse where outpatients of the Colorado Mental Health System meet on a daily basis. The Clubhouse provided an ideal environment in which to pursue this project since the Clubhouse is a rather autonomous institution and a perfect arena for open dialogue. During initial meetings with members I spoke about Sophoclean tragedy and the idea of reenacting Oedipus Rex in a ghost town in Aspen. Since most of the people were familiar with the history of the area and with myths of the West, the idea generated a great deal of enthusiasm from the very beginning. Aaron Sheley, a young filmmaker and cinephile from L.A and a member of the Oasis Clubhouse living with mental illness, became the co-writer of the script. Aaron’s knowledge of film history and culture was instrumental for this project. He became an interlocutor for the other members in the process of building the narrative structure that supported the project. The decision to choose him as co-script writer as well as the process of casting actors was based, as in any other film, on the particular roles certain individuals could take on in the work. Many ideas developed while

reviewing my collection of over 50 westerns films on DVD, starting with the founding father John Ford, then Budd Boetticher, Nicholas Ray’s Johnny Guitar, Zinnemann’s High Noon, Anthony Mann, Sam Peckinpah, Sergio Leone and others. I was really surprise to see how many of these films were familiar to the member of the Oasis Clubhouse. As a foreign living in New York I often forget to what extent the myth of the West is present in that part of the country. We also watched Passolini’s Edipo Rei together.

The making of the film was very interesting because the members of the cast had to move from Grand Junction to Aspen for one week; they basically spent every day in Ashcroft, which is a mining ghost town from the late 19th century. The natural landscape and the confrontation between the human subject and that landscape are fundamental themes of the Western. Filming in a deserted town lost in a Valley outside Aspen was a truly unique experience. Cell phones did not work there, it was almost impossible to keep the coffee warm, and there was no electricity or running water. This environment imposed a particular psychological mood upon the members of the Clubhouse that ultimately helped them to reconstruct the Oedipus myth. The actors spent the entire day in costumes, there were horses on location, and we would meet with the actors at the town’s original bar that had been refurbished for the film. There were moments when reality and fiction collided and we felt like ghosts of the town perpetually reenacting our past lives.

MF& CL: What specific set of ideas do you want to foreground when you set up this basic formal friction between Noh Theatre and Westerns?

JT: When I first traveled to Japan in 2001, I became very interested in the tradition of Noh theatre, one of the oldest forms of theatre in the world that is still performed today with only minor adaptations. I have been researching the genre since then, particularly the treatises of Zeami that are among the best texts on aesthetics I’ve ever read.

The fact that the stories in Noh plays are about ghosts is an ideal ‘connector’ to talk about memory, and obviously the mask is the fundamental element in Noh representation. The presence of masks in my own work is not new. We used them in La Batalla de Mexico, a video that documents a fictitious militia of patients in a psychiatric hospital in Mexico City who take over the hospital armed with machine guns and wearing camouflage uniforms and Zapatista style ski masks. One flew over the void in Tijuana also involved the use of animal masks. The mask is, of course, one of the most important elements of the carnival. But in the particular case of Oedipus Marshal it also referenced Greek tragedy. Since the point of departure was to re-enact the Oedipus play, the mask became an important component of the work.

The mask ties together various references: Greek myth, the myth of the American West and mental illness. Also, we should not forget that persona means mask. I recently presented the film in Mexico and someone in the audience asked why, in this piece, mental illness is not “faced” (repeating the old equation: physiognomy equals diagnosis). Pablo Sigg responded brilliantly: “Madness is masked!” There is a sense of catharsis at the very end of the film at the moment in which the actors finally reveal their faces.

MF& CL: Can you talk about the transition from documentary video to fictional filmmaking? Your work obviously problematizes such clear cut distinctions and I’m curious to know to what extent Oedipus Marshal seems to be the logical development of a long term-investigation of psychiatric practice and identity formation.

JT: I never believed in a clear distinction between documentary and fiction; perhaps the best answer to the question of genre is provided by Borges, who argued that literary genres do not exist and that it is the responsibility of the reader to decide whether to read Don Quixote as a detective novel or as an essay.

Film and video are always documentary in the sense that they constitute evidence of the real; at the same time the fictional element in any visual representation must be recognized. It is very important for me to work with non-professional actors—or ‘models’ as Bresson called them—because their lack of skills make the evidence of the real more present in the work. My previous work might be described as documentation of fictional re-enactments that take place within the mental institution.

The theatrical elements we use as props—costumes and masks—are related to the Carnival which is an important axis of my work. The use of the carnivalesque is related to its potential to create a collective experience that confuses the roles of actors and spectators, giving political agency to a community that is fragmented within the psychiatric institution. I have always been interested in the subversive element of transgression inherent to the festive celebration, even prior to reading Bakhtin, a writer who has been very influential in my thinking. My relationship to the carnival comes from my childhood: while growing up in Venezuela my father often took us to visit the mental hospital were he worked as a psychiatrist. Every year the staff and patients there organized a carnival with a parade, costumes, decorations, and a beauty contest. Almost everybody in the institution participated in the event. I have one very vivid memory of seeing patients and psychiatrists exchanging their respective uniforms. This experience is very significant to me, because it allowed me to see, from a very young age, this sort of symbolic interchange and role-playing as a model to transgress the notions of ‘normal’ and ‘pathological’ behavior and the power relations inherent to the psychiatric institution.

"A Brief Account of Two Artist-Run Spaces," The Fillip Review: volume one, number three (spring/summer 2006), Vancouver (previous version published in: On Cultural Influence: Collected Papers from Apex Art International Conferences 1999-2004, New York: 2006)

2006-05-08T01:05:00.000-07:00

There is a contradiction implicit in the idea of the alternative or artist-run space as a phenomenon specific to developed countries or contexts in which a highly organized, sophisticated cultural infrastructure is clearly not lacking. One might argue that the very modus operandi of this kind of space—rejection or critique of both the institutional structure and the art market with their respective (often overlapping) processes of legitimation, a spontaneous manner of operating based on immediate material conditions along with a desire to adapt to (and make the most of) limited resources, and perhaps most importantly the mapping out of a self-defined position or space of marginality (in the positive sense of the term)—would find its natural habitat in a “marginal” context characterized by the presence of dysfunctional institutions and the absence of a real art market. In other words, what is an alternative way of working in one context might be a necessary manner of operating in another. Yet, the history of alternative spaces in Latin America is a very short one and difficult to research because it is a history that is fragmented, largely undocumented, and too often forgotten as many of these initiatives have fallen victim to a selective amnesia resulting from territorial alliances and interests typical to cultural contexts in which there are so few opportunities. This text treats two specific cases from the 1990s: La Panadería, an artist-run space in Mexico that is often looked to as the model for alternative spaces in Latin America, and Galería Chilena, a lesser known artist-run, nomadic, commercial gallery that moved around Santiago over the course of several years, organizing exhibitions in borrowed spaces.

To have a discussion about alternative spaces in Latin America, it is useful to situate them within a broader history of the formation of artist-run initiatives on an international scope and to point to congruencies in other, sometimes radically different contexts. AA Bronson has written a very telling history of the emergence of artist-run centres in Canada during the late 1960s and early 1970s. Overshadowed by the massive influence of American media culture, Canadian artists found themselves in a position subservient to the dominance of a centralized, New York-based art circuit. Coupled with the absence of venues in which to show their work and thereby gain exposure even on a solely national level, this situation often forced artists to take matters into their own hands, forming small, overlapping circuits working around precariously funded publications, workshops, and spaces. As Bronson points out, perhaps most significant to this phenomena was how it contributed to the self-projection of the artists themselves—in other words, to what extent these activities would be productive of a visible space that would move their practices beyond the isolation of individual artist studios. To the present day, so much of how we think about art is influenced by a romanticized image of the artist removed from his/her context, engaged in an elite activity that is misunderstood or simply ignored. If we can point to one unifying feature of contemporary art, it is the desire to break with this myth, to reinsert artistic practices into our everyday lives, to demonstrate that the making of art is a job like any other. To do this it is necessary that artists have access to media channels because media culture—TV, radio, magazines, etc.—is perhaps the most important and far-reaching element of contemporary life. As Bronson describes it, “we forgot that we ourselves were real artists, because we had not seen ourselves in the media.”[i]

La Panadería has often been written about as something that burst upon the Mexican art scene in a highly spontaneous manner, created by artists frustrated by the lack of any space in which to show their work. In 1993, local artists Yoshua Okon and Miguel Calderón appropriated a defunct bakery and, along with a group of friends, set about creating a self-sufficient structure that would support work based on their own criteria, which, to a great extent, responded to the limitations of more conventional institutions. This sort of space, unprecedented in its context, was then initially bound to a rebellious, independent attitude that actively sought confrontation with an established system of exhibiting art that had turned a blind eye to the multiple and eclectic subcultures specific to Mexico City. La Panadería became noted for its willingness to embrace such marginalized practices by exhibiting the works of extremely young artists showing primarily video, photography, and installation, organizing concerts and parties—reflecting and producing more of a social dynamic than merely adhering to a static, rigid set of paradigms dictating what art should be. One might argue that already inscribed into the formation of an artist-run space is a critique of the institutional apparatus of art, which tends to flatten out even the most critical, polemical sort of practices, domesticating them into objects of consumption. In its spontaneous manner of operating (often too precarious in economic terms), La Panadería actively sought to offer a generation of young artists an alternative to what its organizers believed to be the stagnant museum culture of Mexico City.

Yet, as is often pointed out in Mexico (and not well known outside of it) is that the Panadería group possessed a certain set of characteristics that made it alternative but at the same time more exclusionary than some accounts of this story would admit. This particular account is based on my own experience as director of the space from 2000 to 2001. For the most part, the organizers of the space were men—upper middle class, self-assured, and bright, whose transgressive, fuck-you attitude was effective in challenging art establishment values but equally effective in alienating those individuals who might have collaborated in the project but simply could not fit in with the “cool” crowd. Perhaps most significant, and more problematic, was the fact that this desire to break with a dominant value system associated with traditional Catholic morality, present at every level of Mexican society, became translated into a highly masculinist, even misogynistic subject position whose visual repertoire consisted of titty shots, guns, monster trucks, and other “bad boy” and “bad taste” instances of cultural slumming. In their obsession with and appropriation of low culture, the Panadería group sought to break with accepted norms of behavior associated with their social class by appropriating and making visible an entire subculture of extreme machismo that evidently exists in Mexico but had never really been treated on the level of “high” culture. While the satirical nature of this “making visible” does indicate the presence of at least some level of criticality, the end result in so many cases was the reinforcement of the worst kind of traditional gender roles that proved to be damaging to a space that prided itself on being so inclusive—but damaging perhaps only within its immediate context.

The image of La Panadería projected outside of Mexico in the art media, primarily in the US and Canada, presented an uncritical, heroic, and at times overly enthusiastic image of it, and, indeed, of the Mexican art scene in general. Here, Bronson’s words ring true: so many images of Mexican artists and their work published in mainstream magazines like Artforum, Art News, Paper, and Poliester in the mid to late 1990s legitimated and consolidated this scene both inside the country and out. We can point to yet another instance of cultural slumming—but one that is far more unsettling in its political connotations. All throughout the 1990s (and still today to some extent), art criticism about Mexico trafficked in a set of tired, narcissistic clichés about the chaotic, overwhelming (i.e. exotic, glamorous, and exciting) experience of living in an overpopulated and violent metropolis like Mexico City. Miguel Calderón’s gun-toting, lowrider, urban gang banger from his amazing photographic intervention piece Historia Artificial (1995) in many ways embodied that romanticized image of our North American other: poor, dangerous, different, and yet ever so enticing. Mexico’s geographic proximity to the US and Canada, as well as its economic power in relation to the rest of Latin America, and perhaps most importantly, its influence on the level of the mass media, had always granted it a privileged position within the North American imaginary. (In fact, during those years I lived in Mexico I never felt that I had altogether left New York.) There so many instances in which Mexico quite simply stands in for the entire continent, so many instances of conflating Mexican and Latin American art. It is this packaging and consumption of Mexico that has produced so many “booms” of Mexican art and culture throughout the 1990s and into the early twenty-first century.

It is somewhat ironic, then, that a project set against art world conventions so quickly became assimilated into that world’s entire mechanism by ultimately fulfilling a representative function in relation to the very art scene from which it sought to differentiate itself. Does this mean that La Panadería should be written off as another failed attempt to create a space of experimentation and critique? Is it just further proof of the homogenizing and assimilating capacity of an advanced stage of culture industry? Not at all. Rather, the case of La Panadería raises issues in relation to the development and fate of any self-described alternative space. It was due, in great part, to attitudes and positions like those held by the organizers of La Panadería, that the landscape of Mexican art experienced such radical changes during the 1990s. From a stuffy, conservative environment dominated by Neo-Mexicanist painting, Mexico City grew to become a thoroughly contemporary cultural terrain, filled with viable exhibition venues, even including traditionally modernist art museums like the Museo Carrillo Gil and the Museo Rufino Tamayo, both of which underwent enormous change during those years in order to accommodate this new generation of artists. Also new to this period was the appearance of state-sponsored funding possibilities for emerging, non-commercial artists (monies no longer subject to the construction of nationalistic identities) and the creation of the Jumex Collection, which began buying works of very young Mexican artists alongside works by established international figures such as Dan Graham and Mike Kelley.

By 1999, La Panadería had become a permanent fixture in the Mexican art scene and, as some would say, an institution. Museums and galleries had begun to use the space as a sort of screen to filter out the best and brightest of a new generation of artists. As a “professional curator,” I was implicitly hired to guarantee a smooth transition toward a more economically viable, self-sufficient space by procuring stable funding among other things. Although the days of funding exhibitions exclusively on beer and tequila sales at openings were long gone, fundraising activities were still very limited and needed to be diversified. My own experience during those years proved that given its stature, La Panadería could virtually count on receiving support from any foreign foundation or governmental agency just by asking. However, the space’s eight-year history brought with it a tremendous amount of baggage and other, more complicated problems. Directors had come and gone and many friendships had broken up in the process, making for a space that people either loved or hated. And so began the polemic among its founding members, close friends, and other participants, myself included, regarding the space’s future. 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. Between these two extreme positions there were others who tried to imagine a space at once spontaneous and historical, intellectually challenging, but that, at the same time, didn’t take itself too seriously. Not surprisingly, the question of what to do remained unresolved. In September 2002, La Panadería shut its doors forever, but not without leaving an enormous legacy behind.

Galería Chilena was founded on December 13, 1997 on the occasion of a twenty-four-hour exhibition of works by Cristóbal Lehyt, held on the upper floor of a nondescript house in the residential neighborhood of Providencia. Founded by three local artists between the ages of twenty-four and twenty-seven—Diego Fernández, Felipe Mujica, and Joe Villablanca—Galería Chilena, like La Panadería before it, arose in response to a local scene crippled by a lack of viable exhibition spaces for emerging artists. One of the first significant acts of the group was the printing of a low-budget, four-colour flyer documenting this first exhibition that served almost as a kind of heroic manifesto (albeit a highly self-conscious one), which clearly stated the goals of the gallery while critiquing the specific situation that had made its existence necessary. In Chile, there was a strong tradition of non-commercial, critical art practice, most notably the so-called “escena de avanzada”—a group of politicized artists and writers who, during the 1980s, actively sought to work against the military dictatorship and was thus initially relinquished to a space of relative marginality and invisibility. Later, they became part of the academic establishment, influencing (sometimes too dogmatically) an entire generation of young artists. The case of Galería Chilena, then, is unique in that its organizers did, in fact, recognize the existence of non-commercial, non-profit spaces dedicated to artistic experimentation, but very rightly pointed out the fact that such spaces were state-run institutions and would thus always be subject to political interests and ideologies. In 1997, the political mood was marked by the relatively recent ascendance of neo-liberalism along with what has been termed, the “culture of consensus”: the implementation of progressive, liberal policies that have attempted to quickly develop the country while simultaneously burying—and not adequately dealing with—its past. Although Chile is often touted as the most developed, stable, or even “civilized” country in Latin America, there is a great deal of internal discussion about the long-term effects of the radical change that has taken place in a country that went from an oppressive dictatorship to a neoliberal, democratic state in a span of less than fifteen years.

Problematic to Galería Chilena’s organizers was the very idea that all artistic practice must be grouped into two opposing categories: commercial (i.e. uninteresting, uncritical, and ethically questionable) or experimental (interesting, critical, but economically unviable). Galería Chilena wanted to make it known to young artists that it could be possible to think about art-making in professional terms—as an actual career—without having to sell out to elitist galleries. Articulated consistently in texts, interviews, and catalogues, Galería Chilena’s for-profit strategy set it apart from other alternative spaces that tended to shun all commercial activity. However, it should be pointed out that the term utilized by the group in Spanish, empresarial, has a double meaning that becomes very telling in this story. While empresa typically refers to a business enterprise, it can also mean “an arduous and difficult action that requires a great deal of initiative and energy.” As part of its carefully constructed public image (directed toward the media and, as was intended by the gallery’s founders, future generations of Chilean artists), Galería Chilena had come up with a clever logo: the initials GCH, pronounced “Galchi,” inscribed into a heart. To anyone who has spent some time in a Spanish speaking country, the reference is clear: el Chapulín Colorado, a popular television character from the Mexican sitcom of the same name that aired all over the Spanish speaking world from 1970 to 1979 and can still be seen today in syndication. Invented by Roberto Gomez Bolaños, who also played him, el Chapulín Colorado was the Latin American antithesis of Superman. He was clumsy, dumb, and cowardly, and did not possess the characteristics typical of super heroes. However, as it was pointed out in the final episode of the series, el Chapulín’s heroism consisted precisely in the fact that he was able to overcome his cowardice and confront all of the obstacles and enemies that came his way.

GCH seemed to consciously embody a whole set of contradictions that its organizers desired to productively put to use: a collective of recent graduates with no money, no physical space, and limited social contacts intent upon single-handedly creating a market for contemporary art in Chile. Perhaps the least of their problems was recruiting interesting young artists to participate in the project—Chile was, at the time, home to a relatively cohesive art scene which had been theorized by a prior generation of critics schooled in post-structuralist methodologies. Most notable was Galería Chilena’s decision in 1998 to scout out local art schools—resulting in the “discovery” of Juan Céspedes. In an interview published in August 1998, Joe Villablanca stated hyperbolically that in just six months of operation, GCH had already changed the historical course of the visual arts in that country forever. During those years, Villablanca’s dedication to his new role as entrepreneur came to occupy a central place in his artwork. In 1998, Galería Chilena was invited to exhibit as a gallery in Galería Posada del Corregidor, one of those municipal, non-profit art spaces against which GCH so explicitly sought to set itself apart. The very invitation was unprecedented in that Posada del Corregidor was not inviting the gallery to curate a show of its artists but rather was inviting Galería Chilena as a group of artists and entrepreneurs. The invitation could have been interpreted in many different ways. Fernández, Mujica, and Villablanca accepted the invitation, describing it in the catalogue produced for the exhibition as an opportunity to present “a commercial gallery […] as an art object, in order to show the legitimating role of publicity and the art market within a local context.”[ii] At the same time, they claimed that as individual artists they never would have been invited to show in this particular space. The very legitimating mechanism that they had thoroughly exploited and thus made explicit successfully gained them entry into a space that would otherwise have been closed to them. Like everything GCH has ever said about itself, the tone of the catalogue text was both extremely cynical and at the same time euphorically heroic. In it they stated,“we are utilizing the official status of Galería Posada del Corregidor to publicly celebrate our business activities.”[iii]

In his own work, Villablanca exemplified his new public persona in a series of videos that depict the artist in various related situations. In one, Villablanca, clothed in a clerical robe, stands behind an impromptu podium delivering an impassioned discourse (in the style of political populism) about Galería Chilena to an empty room. Here, the speech is a word for word repetition of that very first text printed the previous year and sent to a select list of curators, artists, and critics in Chile and all over the world—it is the image of the artist repeating the party line to a silent, indifferent audience. In another piece, Gran Santiago, the artist places a call to a local talk show program that aired very early in the morning, at a time that presumably nobody watched. The show, like the video, is called Gran Santiago and is hosted by two middle aged AM radio personalities. Holding the camera in one hand, Villablanca talks to his absent public about the role of Galería Chilena in relation to the emergence of a new artistic scene in Chile. The hosts nod patiently, politely attempting, unsuccessfully, to end the call. It is perhaps this video, which most eloquently articulates the fate of a project that already had the knowledge and acceptance of (and perhaps desire for) its ultimate failure built into it from its inception: an artist alone and awake in his room at four o’clock in the morning, wasting his words on deaf ears, conscious of the indifference of those who only pretend to listen, and yet, is just a little bit hopeful. All of this ambiguity had been incorporated into the project from the very beginning.

A constant parody of itself, Galería Chilena simply stated the obvious: that the creation of an informed group of collectors of contemporary art in Chile was simply not possible at this stage of the country’s development. In making explicit this failure, Galería Chilena was effectively articulating a set of negative truths about its immediate context against the spastic, unwarranted optimism that had gripped Chile during the first phase of the post-dictatorship as well as the manner in which the art world must constantly prostitute itself to publicists and buyers in order to have the necessary visibility to be socially relevant. Even their notably effective milking of the local media machine was not enough to gain international recognition and this is due to the fact that contemporary Chilean art is strongly tied to a localist paradigm that is quite hermetic. Unlike Mexico, Chile has never profited from any sort of international “boom” and possibility never will. This, it might be argued, is a blessing in disguise.

In 2000, Galería Chilena was temporarily suspended when two of its founding members relocated to New York. It appeared again briefly in 2003 producing work for the group show To be political it has to look nice, at Apexart in New York, vis-a-vis a series of e-mail discussions between Mujica and Fernández in New York and Villablanca in Santiago. These discussions were later published in a low-budget photocopy catalogue made for the show. In April 2004 the group reunited again to participate in an international conference of independent spaces organized by another Chilean collective, Hoffmann’s House, in Valparaiso, Chile.

There are many conclusions that might be drawn from this account. Alternative spaces in contexts like the ones I have just described are too precarious, sporadic, and ephemeral, to constitute anything like the more stable, state sponsored artist-run culture that exists in Canada. Although not necessarily a bad thing, it makes it difficult to measure the long-term effects of such initiatives. It seems that the kind of heroic or sacrificial tropes that continue to inhabit discourses surrounding artist-run culture in Canada might be anachronistic and need to be revisited in the context of a much changed cultural landscape. And yet, the reality of under-funded but also highly bureaucratized entities allows us to indulge in such tropes because this middle ground position sometimes feels like the worst of both extremes.

Perhaps more significant to this text is an attempt to articulate the legitimating role of official narratives that make everything that goes on outside of them invisible. As critics of the institution, presumably those of us who seek to work in an independent (or irreverent) manner are always still subject to those mechanisms (commercial, institutional, ideological, social) that determine our own roles within the entire structure. Sometimes those instances that elude recognition or legitimation are the most interesting, misinterpreted, and quickly forgotten. Despite all the rhetoric of globalization and the circulation of information, knowledge is still so restricted by the limited parameters to which we are expected to adhere and willingly do so. Anything outside of those parameters must be forced in as something else or quite simply excluded and dismissed. I am thinking about geography but not exclusively.

[i] AA Bronson, “The Humiliation of the Bureaucrat: Artist-Run Centres as Museums by Artists,” Museums by Artists, eds. AA Bronson and Peggy Gale (Toronto: Art Metropole,1983), 30.

[ii] “Galería Chilena en Galería Posada del Corregidor” (exhibition brochure), trans. Michèle Faguet (August 1998).

[iii] Ibid

“Abriendo Espacios,” Interview by José Ignacio Roca, Arteria, Bogotá, Año 1 #4, December 2005- February 2006

2005-12-01T01:02:00.000-08:00

Michele Faguet llegó a Colombia en 2001 con la intención de crear un espacio artístico en Bogota. Historiadora de arte y con experiencia en el campo de la gestión de espacios artísticos (fue curadora del Swiss Institute en Nueva York y directora de La Panadería en México D.F), su llegada al ámbito incipiente y relativamente cerrado de la escena contemporánea en Bogotá fue recibida con especial interés.

El primer espacio que fundó, en compañía de dos artistas colombianos, tenía el sugestivo nombre de El Parche, una palabra típica del slang colombiano que se refiere a un espacio mental o físico que se comparte con amigos. El Parche, situado en el Bosque Izquierdo (un barrio de intelectuales y con tradición de galerías) duró mas bien poco, y por diversas razones cerró a menos de un año de su fundación.

Cambiando su nombre a La Rebeca (una escultura decimonónica muy tradicional del centro de Bogota) pero manteniendo el mismo esquema de funcionamiento, Michele abrió un nuevo espacio en la planta baja de la Galería Valenzuela y Klenner en agosto de 2002. La Rebeca funcionó en este espacio poco más de un año, cuando Michele tomo la decisión de trasladarse a un espacio más grande, una casa de estilo inglés en el tradicional barrio de Teusaquillo.

Aunque sin duda muchas de las decisiones de cambio (de país, de sitio, de espacio, de nombre) fueron motivadas por contingencias y circunstancias, parecería que la transitoriedad es una condición para el desarrollo del trabajo de Michele Faguet. En los últimos años se ha mitificado la figura del curador como una especie de nómada global que viaja de un evento a otro y de país en país en función de sus proyectos expositivos, pero el concepto de espacio alternativo como una praxis que cambia a menudo de contexto no es tan común. Los espacios fundados y/o manejados por Michele en México y Colombia fueron claramente alternativos, si entendemos “alternativo” como un modelo crítico a las prácticas dominantes, una resistencia pasiva que opera desde plataformas más dúctiles y maleables.

Los espacios propuestos por Michele fueron claramente diferentes en su accionar a los que existían hasta entonces en los contextos en los que se insertó (aunque no se deben desconocer las experiencias anteriores de artistas como Germán Martínez, Rafaél Ortiz, Carlos Blanco, Carlos Salas o Jaime Iregui en Bogotá). Estos espacios, a pesar de su corta duración, fueron muy importantes para los artistas locales -especialmente los emergentes- y se constituyeron en sitios de reunión y de referencia para los jóvenes, con un programa que privilegiaba lo “relacional” sobre lo puramente expositivo. Fueron también un contrapunto para quienes trabajamos en instituciones, pues su maleabilidad y vitalidad resaltaba la rigidez y relativa lentitud de toda estructura institucional.

Consistente con su propia historia profesional, Michele decidió una vez más cambiar de país y de lugar de trabajo y viajo este año a Canadá para dirigir la OR Gallery, en Vancouver, un espacio que anteriormente era manejado por artistas. Esta entrevista, realizada por correo electrónico para el Periódico ARTERIA, está compuesta de fragmentos de textos de Michele Faguet o respuestas a entrevistas anteriores, haciendo referencia a la tensión existente entre la permanencia de las convicciones y la transitoriedad y temporalidad de un contexto en cambio permanente.

Jose Roca: ¿Qué entiende por “espacio alternativo”? ¿No es una denominación ya un poco gastada? ¿No ha devenido lo alternativo la regla, inclusive en contextos como el colombiano?

Michele Faguet: Hay una contradicción implícita en la idea de los espacios alternativos, o manejados por artistas, entendidos como fenómenos propios de países o contextos en los que la compleja organización de sofisticadas infraestructuras culturales no se echa de menos. Se podría argumentar que el modus operandi de esta clase de espacios, que rechazan o critican la estructura institucional y del mercado de arte con sus respectivos (y a menudo traslapados) procesos de legitimación, requiere formas de acción espontánea, basadas en las condiciones materiales inmediatas y en un deseo de (sacando buen partido) adaptarse a la escasez de recursos y, aun más importante, la libre elección de una posición o espacio marginal (en el buen sentido del término). Por otro lado, podríamos afirmar que estos espacios encontrarían su hábitat natural en contextos “marginales” caracterizados por la presencia de instituciones disfuncionales y la ausencia de un mercado de arte real. En otras palabras, lo que resulta una alternativa de acción en un contexto particular, puede ser condición ineludible en otro.

JR: ¿Es la experiencia de fundar un espacio alternativo en un país como Colombia sustancialmente diferente a realizarlo en contextos con una escena artística más fuerte?

MF: Para abordar la discusión sobre espacios alternativos es útil situarla en una historia más general: la de las iniciativas de artistas en el ámbito internacional, para señalar las coincidencias que se dan en contextos separados y, algunas veces, radicalmente diferentes. En ese sentido, la historia de A.A. Bronson, acerca de la formación de Art Metropole en Toronto, resulta muy esclarecedora. Los artistas canadienses, que estaban a la sombra de la influencia masiva de la cultura mediática estadounidense, se encontraban en una posición subordinada al dominio de un circuito artístico centralizado en Nueva York. Esto, sumado a la ausencia de espacios para mostrar y difundir su trabajo, aunque fuera a nivel nacional, hizo necesario que ellos mismos tomaran las riendas y formaran pequeños circuitos de artistas relacionados entre sí que trabajaban en publicaciones, talleres y espacios sostenidos precariamente.

Como lo señala Bronson, quizá lo más significativo de este fenómeno fue la manera en que contribuyó a la proyección de los mismos artistas; en otras palabras, el espacio de visibilidad generado por estas actividades, que sacaría sus productos del aislamiento de los talleres individuales. A la fecha, gran parte de lo que pensamos acerca del arte sigue estando bajo la influencia de la idea romántica del artista separado de su contexto, dedicado a una actividad elitista e incomprendida, o simplemente ignorada. Si pudiéramos señalar una característica general del arte contemporáneo, ésta sería el deseo de romper con ese mito, de volver a insertar las prácticas artísticas en la vida diaria, de demostrar que hacer arte es un trabajo como cualquier otro. Para hacer esto, es necesario que los artistas tengan acceso a canales de difusión, pues es quizás la cultura de los medios (la televisión, la radio, las revistas), el elemento más importante y con mayor alcance en la vida contemporánea. Según lo describe el autor: "se nos olvidó que éramos artistas reales porque no nos veíamos en los medios”.

JR: Harald Szeemann decía que había que escapar a la institución cuando esta constriñe el desarrollo del deseo; usted ha estado en instituciones (Swiss Institute) y fuera de ellas (como curadora independiente), y puede hablar de ambas experiencias con propiedad. ¿Fundar un espacio de auto-gestión se constituiría en un híbrido que tiene las ventajas de ambos mundos? O cualquier espacio cae en la institucionalización (en el sentido de las restricciones ideológicas y prácticas que implica funcionar en un sitio físico, con un presupuesto, unos patrocinadores, un programa pre-definido, etc)?

MF: El contexto colombiano está caracterizado por la presencia de instituciones, aunque disfuncionales, fuertes políticamente; así como por la proliferación de espacios comerciales evidentemente mediocres. Esto, como consecuencia de la atomización y de la fragmentación del medio cultural, en el cual los artistas trabajan en relativo aislamiento los unos de los otros. La ausencia de espacios (no institucionales o no comerciales) interesados en prácticas críticas genera una atmósfera de desesperación y de indiferencia, en la cual es visible una carencia total de posiciones ideológicas o políticas.

No menos significativa es la existencia de un tipo de estructura arribista -específica de Colombia- que le exige aún a los artistas (individuos que presumiblemente asumen posiciones críticas en relación con las estructuras convencionales), la inversión de una energía considerable en procurarse un cierto status o grado de respetabilidad social, aún cuando esto contradiga o interfiera con sus propias prácticas artísticas.

JR: ¿Podria referirse a La Panadería en México, espacio que dirigió en su última etapa, cuando ya tenía un perfil consolidado?

MF: Se ha escrito con frecuencia que La Panadería irrumpió en la escena local del arte mejicano de manera muy espontánea y que fue creada por artistas hartos ante la falta de espacios en los cuales mostrar su trabajo. Apropiándose de un local en el que antes funcionaba una panadería, Yoshua Okón, Miguel Calderón y un grupo de artistas con los que compartía afinidades artísticas y sociales, se dedicaron a crear una estructura autosuficiente que funcionara y produjera exposiciones basándose en sus propios criterios, que en gran medida eran una reacción frente a las limitaciones que encontraban en instituciones más convencionales.

En un principio, este tipo de espacio, sin precedentes en su contexto, estuvo ligado a una actitud rebelde e independiente que buscaba confrontar activamente a un sistema establecido de exposiciones de arte que se había cegado ante las subculturas, diversas y eclécticas, de la ciudad de México. La Panadería se destacó por su disposición a integrar estas prácticas marginales, exponiendo obras de artistas muy jóvenes que trabajaban sobre todo en video, fotografía e instalación, y por organizar fiestas y conciertos, que ponían en juego más dinámicas sociales y modos de vida, que paradigmas estáticos dictando lo que el arte debía ser. Uno podría argumentar que la crítica al aparato institucional del arte, por su tendencia a aplanar incluso las prácticas más polémicas y complejas, domesticándolas hasta convertirlas en meros objetos de consumo, está inscrita de antemano en la formación de un espacio manejado por artistas. Con su manera espontánea de funcionar (a menudo en condiciones muy precarias), La Panadería buscaba ofrecerle alternativas a una generación de artistas jóvenes ante lo que sus organizadores veían como una estancada cultura de museos en Ciudad de México.

Hacia 1999, La Panadería se había convertido en una referencia permanente de la escena artística mejicana y, como algunos decían, en una institución. Museos y galerías empezaron a usar el espacio como una suerte de cedazo para filtrar lo mejor y más brillante de la nueva generación de artistas. Estaban muy lejos los días en que la financiación de las exposiciones provenía únicamente de la venta de cerveza y tequila en las inauguraciones. En sus últimos años, La Panadería habría podido contar, simplemente pidiéndolo, con el apoyo de cualquier fundación extranjera o agencia gubernamental. Los directores iban y venían, y muchas amistades se rompieron en los procesos internos de un espacio que la gente debía amar u odiar. Entonces comenzó la polémica entre sus miembros fundadores, amigos cercanos y personas llegadas de otros lugares, entre las cuales me cuento, sobre el futuro del espacio. En medio de un contexto completamente distinto al que le dio origen, ¿cuál debía ser la nueva función de La Panadería? Algunos argumentaban que la evolución natural de estos espacios contaba de antemano con su inclusión en el circuito comercial, mientras otros, particularmente nostálgicos por lo que habían significado los primeros años, consideraban que era necesario mantener vivo el espíritu de rebeldía que en principio caracterizó al grupo. Entre estas posiciones extremas había quienes imaginaban un espacio a la vez espontáneo e histórico, intelectualmente desafiante y capaz de no tomarse demasiado en serio.

No es de extrañar que la pregunta inicial sobre lo que debía hacerse permaneciera abierta hasta septiembre de 2002, cuando La Panadería cerró definitivamente sus puertas, no sin dejar tras de sí un enorme legado.

JR: En su opinión ¿cuál fue el principal aporte de La Rebeca al campo artístico colombiano?

La misión de La Rebeca fue la de proporcionar un espacio en el cual los artistas locales y sus obras pudieran dialogar, cruzando las diversas fronteras sociales, fragmentadas y dispersas, que existen en Bogota. Por otro lado, se pretendió invitar a artistas extranjeros a que permanecieran en la ciudad por una breve temporada de producción artística, procurando establecer la interacción entre artistas que, aun cuando tuvieran antecedentes diversos, podían compartir intereses conceptuales similares.

La parte internacional de su programación fue particularmente significante para una comunidad artística aislada por tantos problemas políticos y sociales, responsables de haber limitado el tráfico de artistas entrando o saliendo de Colombia. El miedo hace que mucha gente evite visitar Colombia y la paranoia internacional impide que los colombianos salgan (son pocos los países que fácilmente dan visas turísticas a ciudadanos colombianos).

Me pregunto todo el tiempo si La Rebeca realmente aportó algo al contexto colombiano. Lo único que puedo asegurar es que a mí me sirvió para muchas cosas, y la mayoría de los artistas que expusieron en La Rebeca tuvo una buena experiencia. Lo pasamos bien. Fue una experiencia agradable. Pero todos sabemos que lo que uno hace en un contexto determinado siempre será apreciado más por fuera de ese contexto. Es la regla más que la excepción.

JR: Ahora está en Canadá. ¿Qué tipo de trabajo realiza allá?

En Canadá los espacios “alternativos” o “sin ánimo de lucro” son conocidos como “artist-run centres” (espacios manejados por artistas). Estos espacios reciben financiamiento del gobierno canadiense y son en gran medida parte del sistema artístico, así que ya no es muy claro con respecto a qué son alternativos, o cuál debe ser su función. Hace poco asistí a una conferencia de Reid Schier, antiguo director de la galería OR y ahora curador de The Power Plant en Toronto, quien utilizó la decisión de OR de contratar un curador profesional en vez de un artista, como un ejemplo para discutir la cada vez mayor profesionalización de los espacios manejados por artistas (artist-run centres) en Canadá. También cuestionó la función misma de este tipo de espacios en medio de galerías comerciales y museos, interesados y capaces de exhibir arte joven y experimental. Estoy de acuerdo con Schier en que la idea de un espacio que pretende representar prácticas artísticas marginales ya no es muy relevante. Quienes apoyan la idea de los espacios manejados por artistas tienden todavía a hablar en términos heroicos, pero hoy simplemente suena un poco ridículo hablar de esa manera.

Sin embargo, no me interesaría intercambiar de lugar con alguien como Reid, porque para mí dirigir un artist-run centre en Canadá significa aun que hago exactamente lo que quiero. Tengo que tratar un poco con la burocracia, con el fin de conseguir el dinero para hacer mi programación, pero sigue siendo mucho menos que lo que uno tendría en una galería pública o en una institución. Menos burocracia, un poco menos de dinero, un salario más bajo, pero más libertad y autonomía.

Llegar de afuera es emocionante, pues Vancouver, a pesar de su prestigio internacional (Jeff Wall, Stan Douglas, Rodney Graham y Ken Lum, son todos de Vancouver) sigue siendo pequeña y en muchos sentidos provinciana en su forma de pensar. Tantos espacios y tanta financiación pública significan que uno termina viendo los mismos nombres una y otra vez –igual que en Bogotá-, y mientras que la calidad del trabajo que se produce aquí es absolutamente excepcional comparado con probablemente cualquier ciudad de tamaño similar, a Vancouver le haría falta un poco de diversidad. Yo soy solo una de varios curadores de afuera recientemente contratados en Vancouver para remediar esta situación. Tengo la intención de hacer una programación en gran medida internacional en la Or Gallery y afortunadamente tengo el apoyo de la comunidad artística para llevar esto a cabo.

Ana María Millán, Tour 2004, Alliance Française, Bogotá, 15 noviembre-15 diciembre, 2005

2005-11-15T00:54:00.000-08:00

A falta de instituciones culturales visibles (como las que funcionan en Bogotá), la reciente producción artística en Cali se ha desarrollado en condiciones precarias, resultando en una reafirmación de su marginalidad y en una estética del low-fi, que termina siendo conceptualmente elegante a pesar de sus limitaciones materiales. Cali ha sido descrita, en varias ocasiones, como la “periferia de la periferia”, un lugar donde el aislamiento geográfico, la disparidad económica y el malestar cultural conviven en un entorno relajado y semi-tropical en el que, al parecer, no pasa mucho.

Ana María Millán es cofundadora de Helena Producciones, un colectivo artístico que organiza el festival de performance en Cali. También es productora, junto a Wilson Díaz, de Loop, un programa de televisión que utiliza el formato del magazín de variedades para difundir las actividades de artistas y músicos caleños. Ambos proyectos se involucran con un cierto modelo de contracultura y con un intento de dar visibilidad a prácticas consideradas irrelevantes por las instituciones, logrando, desde afuera, expandir de forma admirable el número de personas a tener en cuenta cuando se habla de “cultura colombiana contemporánea.”

Esta exposición es el resultado de una residencia realizada por la artista en Londres en 2004, y está basada en el mito que postula a la capital inglesa como la cuna del punk y la contracultura. Animada por los encargos de amigos en Cali, ansiosos de souvenirs relacionados con esta imagen, Millán logró entrevistar a dos figuras fundamentales para la idiosincrasia del punk caleño: Jamie Reid, el artista responsable del diseño de la imagen anti-corporativa de los Sex Pistols (representada en distintos volantes, afiches y carátulas), y Paco, miembro de Eskorbuto, una banda ochentera de punk español. Junto a los videos se exhibe también una serie de doce pinturas, en las que se copian afiches de conciertos de los ochenta y se hace referencia a películas baratas de ciencia ficción, fundamentales dentro del trabajo que Millán viene desarrollando.

La década de los 80 ejerció una influencia ineludible sobre quienes crecimos en ella, cercados por lamentables fenómenos culturales, desde el conservadurismo político de la alianza Reagan- Thatcher, hasta el surgimiento de la cultura corporativa y, a nivel local, la consolidación de los carteles de la droga y sus primeros coqueteos públicos con el poder político. Sin embargo, muchos de nosotros miramos atrás con una enorme sensación de nostalgia hacia una década que, a pesar del mal gusto, la cultura trash y una sensación generalizada de decadencia económica, política, y cultural, parece haber sostenido los últimos vestigios de cualquier posibilidad real de contracultura, antes de que el humanismo de la industria cultural políticamente correcta de los 90 llegara para arrasar con lo poco que quedaba.

Estos afiches “líchigos” y mal hechos que hoy nos parecen ingenuos, terminan aludiendo al supuesto retraso cultural de toda práctica marginal en tanto mala copia o producto chiviado. En el trabajo de Ana María Millán, como en el de tantos otros jóvenes artistas colombianos, un repertorio visual conformado por elementos de la baja cultura busca redimir la empobrecida estética de la precariedad frente a La Cultura seudo-intelectual y afrancesada de la clase dirigente.