Andre Breton’s original 21-page manuscript of the Surrealist Manifesto (1924) will be auctioned tomorrow afternoon at Sotheby’s in Paris. This historical document is part of a larger auction including more than 200 lots, items drawn from the collection of Simone Collinet, Breton’s first wife. (Collinet died in 1980; the sale is arranged by her heirs.) The collection includes books, photographs and manuscripts, among them nine in Breton’s handwriting. There are other gems in the collection of documents, too, such as a manuscript of Les Soeurs Vatard by Huysmans, a series of written and typed and noted manuscripts, tapes and correspondence by Simone de Beauvoir, and a handwritten letter, Souvenirs de la Commune, by Nadar (Gaspard-Félix Tournachon). There is so much more. How crucial it is to see the handwriting, the strikethroughs and additions marked in the editing, the margins. This is the texture of the words and ideas of these texts.

These and other items of the collection were part of the five-day exhibition, Surrealism in Paris, at Sotheby’s Galerie Charpentier in Paris, which I went to see before their auction tomorrow afternoon. (An exhibition of these documents was also presented in Sotheby’s London in January-February 2008.) It would take time, I thought, for these original documents to be on view again. After their auction, these will most likely be shipped away and kept in the backroom of a national museum, the restoration lab of some institution located in a California hilltop or at a climate control storage in a suburb somewhere in the world.

Where will be the home of Breton’s manuscript and these other items? It’s unclear. And, why wouldn’t the family just donate them to a national museum here in Paris, where the manuscript was drafted and the movement conceived? I forget common sense is just a myth.

The idea of uncommon sense crossed my mind, and suddenly the GALA Committee auction at Christie’s a decade ago invaded my thoughts. Held at Christie’s in Beverly Hills on November 12, 1998, Primetime Contemporary Art. Art by the GALA Committee As Seen on Melrose Place brought together 49 lots for live auction and 51 more at silent auction. These 100 lots were GALA Committee artworks created for and appearing in different episodes of the popular television program of the time, Melrose Place. No need for me to summarize such a multi-layered art project and event. Instead, I here transcribe the catalog’s introduction, written by Brent Zerger (who, at the time, worked in LA MoCA’s now-defunct department of experimental programs headed by curator Julie Lazar):

In The Name of the Place is a complex collaborative project by the GALA Committee, initiated by artist Mel Chin for the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art (LA MoCA). Working with the Uncommon Sense theme of public interaction, the GALA Committee selected a prime TV program, Melrose Place, as the site for creative a massive “condition of collaboration” among an array of individuals, institutions and interests, organized initially around the activity of developing and placing site-specific art objects on the program’s sets. During the two-season interaction, the art-enhanced weekly broadcast reached millions internationally. Radically expansive in form, with diverse aesthetics and a wide range of audience/artist television production involvement, In The Name of the Place is an experiment that illuminates unexplored, creative territory at the intersection of museums, mass media and artistic action.

The culmination of the project is the public auction of the collectively-made art works. All proceeds from the auction will go to two non-profit educational organizations, the Fulfillment Fund and the Jeannette Rankin Foundation, to be used specifically to benefit women’s education.

The GALA Committee artworks were sometimes props—like, bed sheets with print design depicting condoms and promoting safe sex; Chinese Take Away paper-containers with inscriptions of human rights messages; a paperback book of Lyotard’s Libidinal Economy. At other times, the artworks were also just that, paintings hanging on walls and sculptures over pedestals. The closest meeting point between Melrose Place and GALA Committee’s collaboration was shown in a 1997 television episode with a scene happening at LA MoCA’s Geffen Contemporary. The actual set is the exhibition Uncommon Sense. For this, the program’s screenwriters wrote a scene in an art show and the producers commissioned GALA Committee a painting that would be discussed by two characters. (See image above for a video still, as reproduced in the auction’s catalog.) Not coincidently, the painting is titled Fireflies –The Bombing of Baghdad (acrylic on canvas; 72 x 96 inches) and shows a night scene apparently inspired in style by artists like Vija Celmins and Ross Bleckner, and in subject by the controversial televised US bombings of Iraq during the 1990s. (A month after the auction, the US conducted Operation Desert Fox.)

Aside from LA MoCA, and before this auction, the artworks created by GALA Committee for this project were exhibited at the Kwangju International Biennale in South Korea; Grand Arts in Kansas City, MO; and Lawing Gallery in Houston, TX. For the Grand Arts exhibition, curator and art critic Joshua Decter—who pointed me to this project in 2002, while we were planning a round table discussion about artists working in television—wrote a text detailing the collaborative process of GALA Committee with Melrose Place. More recently, Art:21 produced a documentary about Mel Chin, wherein the project is also discussed.

The Carsey-Wolf Center for Film, Television, and New Media at UC San Barbara hosts the excellent web-archive of GALA Committee’s In the Name of a Place. The site, which states is still development but looks slightly dated, gives a sense of some artworks and their provenance—what “made it,” as they say, in the television show. The catalog of the Christie’s auction, which part of the cover illustrates this entry, remains more comprehensive in so far it illustrates the variety of artworks produced for the television show. It lists all the members of the GALA Committee, additional information of the auction, and images and provenance of the 100 artworks at auction, with captions describing the context that inspired the work or the scene in which it was placed. And then there is a funny inclusion: the catalog’s last page includes an unsigned text dated 2021 about GALA Committee’s so-called non-commercial product insertion manifestations (also included in the project’s web-archive).

Today, I wonder, where are the homes of these series of artworks by the GALA Committees? Where does the pool game item Africa is the Eight Ball sit or the landscape painting Rodney King hang? What kinds of collections are they part of? And, how are these artworks displayed to retell, or not, of their original context and presentation?

I took the photograph above last month in Beijing’s popular art district, Dashanzi (a.k.a. 798 for its main street address), with the intent to share it with artists Ayreen Anastas and Rene Gabri, whose art project Camp Campaign (2006) I had worked on some years back. The image shows three of dozens and dozens of camp tents lined in 798. These are the temporary shelters and homes for construction workers that are quickly working on beautifying the city for this summer Olympics in China. Construction apparently has to be completed and tents removed by June 1st; and workers sent back to their villages and homes soon after. With the devastating earthquake in China’s Sichuan Province, it is unclear how reconstruction of that area will affect the building developments and urban renovations in Beijing. What seems clear is that shelter tents and temporary homes of this kind will take a whole different meaning right now in Sichuan than in Beijing.

In early 2005, when Ayreen and Rene initially discussed and sketched the ideas for Camp Campaign, they had drawn a travel route across the USA with stops in campsites primarily used by and for the military for detention and training. The travel itinerary also included stops at national parks with camping sites and visits to cultural institutions with summer camp programs. The artists were doing an expansive research on the variety of existing campsites in the country, and along the way campaigning against the most opaque and unpopular of them all, the one in Guantanamo. During their planning, Hurricane Katrina struck in New Orleans that summer, and the course of their future trip changed. Ayreen and Rene re-sketched their more than forty-day cross-country road trip, drawing a route that would also take them to this affected region, and to the different areas where relief camps had been installed and to buildings, like Houston’s Astrodome and Reliant Arena, that had provided temporary shelter for evacuees who had lost homes or were affected by the hurricane’s flooding consequences in New Orleans.

All this came to mind when I saw photographs of other, more temporary forms of camping—or, well, of an area at Sangatte in France’s Pas-de-Calais, where a refugee camp once used to exist. The photos were part of a series made by Bruno Serralongue’s Calais, which I accessed yesterday in the archives of his gallery Air de Paris. Closed in 2002 by France’s Minister of Interior of the time, the camp at Calais opened in 1999 in a building once storing machinery used to create the English Channel. (Calais borders the North Sea, and is the French port city closest to England.) The camp was managed by the Red Cross, and housed up to 1,200 illegal immigrants at once, mostly from the Middle East, on their way to England. At the camp’s closing and with no formal housing solution for the migrants that arrive to Calais, makeshift shelters have been appearing in the city’s surrounding area. Bruno Serralongue’s photographic series, which he began in 2006, has been shot in these so-called wastelands over the course of two years; you can see a selection of these photographs here.

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To help support the relief efforts in China, or other regions in need, visit Global Giving or Doctors Without Borders.

Not only the dinner last night at Ananais—where we savored rabo de toro (bull’s tail)—had prepared me for this event. In fact, it seemed that every day this past weekend was grounding for tonight’s bullfight. It had been long since I last attended one of these events, and never had I been to one in Spain. To be specific, tonight’s bullfight was a novillada con picadores, including three matadors, plus the complete entourage and six novillos, the largest of them weighing 1175 lb (533 kg). This bullfight was part of the month-long Feria de San Isidro, which started in Madrid in 1947. This and the rest of the bullfights in the program take place at Las Ventas, the beautiful Plaza de Toros in that Spanish city. With a brick façade designed by the Spanish architect José Espeliú, the definitely Moorish-influenced bullring of Las Ventas opened in the early 1930s. However, the spectacle and culture of bullfighting, also known as tauromaquia, has a centuries-old history. Also far in history are the debates following criticism of whether or not this so-called blood sport ought to be permitted.

While some of the criticism on bullfighting centers on animal rights (this argument being the least strongest, considering that hunting for survival, food industry or pleasure are stone age and modern day practices), the strongest critiques focus on elevating violence through sport. The counterarguments of the taurina community in Spain, as well as in other countries where bullfighting is practiced—mostly, found in Latin America—frame bullfighting as an artistic expression and cultural tradition. And this all sounds like rhetoric until you’re there, bearing witness to the dance and spectacle of the matador and the bull. Like every art form, bullfighting does indeed have a universe and language of its own. Yet, some things, perhaps the matador’s tactics of torture and distraction, now feel overtly familiar—and to the trepidation of all.

My experience of tonight’s bullfight was certainly influenced by a couple of artworks I had seen only days before here in Madrid. The first was the 2007 video by Antoni Muntadas, On Translation: Fear / Jauf, at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia. The second was La Tauromaquia, a series of drawings and prints created by Francisco Goya in 1815-1816, which formed part of the Museo Nacional Del Prado’s thoughtful and timely exhibition Goya in Times of War. The third was Pablo Picasso‘s Guernica (1937) in the permanent collection of the Reina Sofia.

Muntadas’ video is one of two works with the same title and addressing geopolitical borders and the cultural anxieties endemic to those overly monitored regions. The earlier work was developed in the framework of inSITE between 2003-2005, and dealt with the Mexico and US border region of Tijuana and San Diego. Inspired by that project, Muntadas looked at the geopolitical relation that his home country, Spain, has with Morocco. This new video is based on a series of interviews with citizens in both sides and political camps of the Strait of Gibraltar, a stretch of thirteen miles of sea that separate Western Europe from North Africa. The fifty-long minute video—originally created for television broadcast as the site of exhibition and distribution channel for the work—emphasizes the sense of fear that naturally emerges from experiencing a constant state of preventive security, particularly as it pertains to illegal immigration and an escalation of cultural intolerance.

No less intense was the visit to Goya in Times of War at El Prado. The exhibition covers a span of twenty-five years of the life and work of Goya, from 1794-95 to 1820. This is a period of intense political changes and war in Europe that affected Spain as every other country. During this time, Goya created what were then as today some of his most celebrated works, including the series of prints and drawings of Los Caprichos, Disasters of War and Tauromaquia. The introductory wall text to the gallery with the last of these aforementioned series states that Goya’s series of,

Tauromaquia has to be understood as more than a mere illustration of the history of bullfighting. The time at which this series was created and the resulting images suggest that beneath this apparent intention lies Goya’s need to express his criticism of man’s deep-rooted cruelty, which he himself had witnessed.

Brutality, which is explicit from the outset of the series, is an inherent characteristic of the bullfight, and we can interpret the artist’s characterization of the figures from this world as a veiled critique of human barbarity, already expressed shortly before in the Disasters of War. In its representation of the bullfight, the Tauromaquia emphasizes the idea of a combat between victory and torturers in which terror and madness prevail and in which death is the only outcome.

Intelligent but provocatively over-determined, the text misses to allude that it is not in the depiction where meaning is generated but in experiencing what is rendered. A sense of devastation awakens before the picture. I felt similarly the following day, when we went to see Picasso’s Guernica (1937) at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia. Like Goya’s Disasters of War, this is another work inspired by human violence and the atrocities of war. As it is when encountering Picasso’s work, my eyes were immediately activated at my encounter with Guernica. The painting’s monumentality and abstraction slowly began unfolding. It was a moving image, with all scenes happening at once to tell of an emotion that is as complex as the history that provoked it.

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Antoni Muntadas’ video screening was part of Rencontres Internationales, which was brought us to Madrid—Tom was participating in the same video and film festival, and he invited me along. On Translation: Fear / Jauf will next be broadcast on Al Jeezera TV.

The exhibition Goya in Times of War covers a span of twenty-five years of the life and work of Goya, from 1794-95 to 1820. It is organized and on view at the Museo Nacional del Prado in Madrid, Spain, from April 15-July 13, 2008.

Since 1992, Pablo Picasso’s Guernica (1937) is on permanent display in the collection galleries at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, after a long stay at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, who ceded the work back to Spain in 1981.

The shopping list included a variety of items, from a new notebook to some travel gifts to a variety of travel-size cosmetics to a lipstick, and I figured that at least one of these could be found at COMPANY, a gift, for example. Once there, it was difficult to contain myself. I ended up purchasing: a dried flower (this will be a gift, I explained myself); a grand opening banner (a portable artwork, I thought); and a red lipstick (I needed one anyway). The banner is an item from the first product line by Fawn Krieger, launched in November 2007 when the store opened; the other two items are part of her winter line introduced in January 2008. And still, I couldn’t stop. COMPANY was contagious. I decided to get a Performance Underwear Prototype (this will also be a gift, golden hanger included), one in a series of works that are part of a new product line commissioned by COMPANY to artist K8 Hardy.

COMPANY is an evolving and unpredictable art project by the curious and generous artist Fawn Krieger, a project that I curated while working at Art in General in New York, with Meghan DellaCrosse as curatorial assistant. It was certainly an interesting experience to re-visit COMPANY now as an audience member. Fawn’s project is sculpted as a store, and operates like one, too. It consists of an installation at Art in General’s storefront gallery that transforms a window-filled-little-white-cube into a three-leveled boutique-like space with a plethora of vitrines and cases displaying artworks of different sorts under the label of “product lines.” The artworks or so-called products are sculptures in every form, and all of them are unique and irreproducible just because Fawn’s mind is way speedier than her hands. At COMPANY, you can find anything from an oil barrel and a shoe, to a nervous system and some botox or a green card. There is also a TV (remote control sold separately), loose cigarettes, an airplane passenger, and a box of chocolates, gigantic dandruff flakes and dinosaur eggs. They are made in ceramic, wood, felt, paper, plaster, gold leaf, fabric, plastic and other materials. They range in sizes, structural make-up and surface textures. Some are realistic, others far from it. They are anything from funny, intense, absurd, disgusting and beautiful.

But Fawn’s COMPANY is not only an aesthetic endeavor. It also aims at being an economic project, proposing an alternative if slower kind of marketplace with and for artists, as well as unique forms of exchange and engagement with the public. The sales of the first product lines by Fawn were reinvested in COMPANY allowing for the commission of K8’s product line, which was launched in mid-March. And K8 has proposed herself another parameter involving the forms of sales for her work and impacting its actual form and distribution, too: the purchase of an edition of her Performance Underwear includes a performance by the artist at the buyer’s direction; the edition if of 10 including one garment, and is priced at $700 each.

The online art journal MUSEO published an interview that art critic Miriam Katz conducted to Fawn, and a radio interview with the artist was broadcast in San Francisco’s Pirate Cat Radio, available online. (Fast forward to the middle of the recording to skip the music and begin listening to the interview). COMPANY by Fawn Krieger continues until April 26 at Art in General, with current product lines by Fawn Krieger and K8 Hardy on display (and for sale).

During my visit to Brazil last October, I had the opportunity of attending the second of two international symposiums that were organized in conjunction to the 6a Bienal do Mercosul (6th Mercosur Biennale) in the city of Porto Alegre. Titled, “Art for Education, Education for Art,” the symposium brought together artists, critics and other types of cultural producers to discuss their (creative) practice in relationship to pedagogy. The conference key note speech was given by curator Bruce Ferguson, who is known, among many things, for co-editing the fantastic anthology Thinking About Exhibitions (1996) and for his tenure as dean of the school of arts at Columbia University in New York City from the late 1990s and until recently. Symposium participants included Roberta Scatolini, a researcher at the Paulo Freire institute in Brazil, artist Harrell Fletcher, who was a participating artist of the 6a Bienal do Mercosul, and Alfredo Oliveira co-founder of Radio La Colifata, among several others. The discussions were all interesting, yet there was one particularly moving. It was the one by Oliveira. He talked about the development of a radio program that is aired from Hospital Interdisciplinario Psicoasistencial Dr. José T. Borda, Buenos Aires. More commonly referred simply as “El Borda,” it is the largest psychiatric institution in Argentina and home of hundreds of people diagnosed with mental illnesses. With the assistance of Oliveira and a small staff and volunteers, the radio program is produced by and with El Borda’s patients. Recently, participants also include former patients who have been re-incorporated to “normal” lives outside of an institution.

Inspired in part by how Oliveira talked about his experience with La Colifata during the conference, I wrote a text about the 6a Bienal do Mercosul curatorial framework in general, and its pedagogical program in specific. The article is published in the current issue of Modern Painters (March 2008). It was with much curiosity and great pleasure that, a couple of weeks ago, while I was in Buenos Aires, I made my way to La Colifata. It was a Saturday afternoon when I went to Barrio Barracas to check out the colifatos’ live radio emission at El Borda. (In Argentina, “colifato/a” is colloquial for crazy or loony.) I wasn’t alone. The attendance was of about thirty people, two thirds of them El Borda patients who had “scheduled” (and prior to this, practiced) their live performance or who were there to listen; the rest were family members of patients and two or three visitors like me who were there to learn. Whether it was to give a recipe for a pescado a la mostaza, to sing the lyrics to a piece they had written (choir included) or to send a message, the Borda’s patients where pretty aware about what it meant to have a microphone on hand: they would be heard.

I flew direct from Buenos Aires to Mexico City on Friday, and spent a busy weekend attending family commitments and social events. Of course, there were other activities, too: on Saturday, visits to Museo Casa de Leon Trotsky and La Casa Azul of Frida Khalo, both house-museums in Coyoacan. On Sunday, the afternoon was devoted to exhibitions. At the Museo Rufino Tamayo, most of the museum was dedicated to a solo exhibition of Wolfgang Tilmans, guest-curated and organized by Domenic Molon and Douglas Fogle. There was also an exhibition of a new installation of Thomas Hirschhorn; one of the museum curators, Tatiana Cuevas, organized this project. I was also tempted to visit the formerly-sleepy Museum of Modern Art (MAM), across the street from the Tamayo, as it is now directed by Osvaldo Sanchez, former artistic director of inSITE. There were numerous exhibitions at the MAM, two particularly memorable. One of them was a small but beautiful exhibition of Spanish-born painter Remedios Varo (1908-1963). Varo emigrated to Mexico in 1941 as a political exile and lived there for most of her life. Her exhibition included a series of beautifully illustrated drawings and paintings, filled with ghosts, doubles and other fantasmagorical references of the otherworldly. The works were collected by Varo’s late husband, Walter Gruen, who donated them to MAM. The other excellent exhibition was of the MAM’s collection guest-curated by the art historian James Oles. His curatorial address privileged “realism,” and the selection of works emphasized the cultural concern and ultimately paradigm of shaping modern Mexico, with the protagonist many times representing a community, the worker, and the common man and woman. While it was a collection exhibition, it was complemented by artworks on loan from other collections.

In the evening, I attended Anselm Franke’s program for unitednationsplaza, “an exhibition as school” that originated in Berlin and is sited for a month at Casa Refugio in Mexico City. unitednationsplaza is created by Anton Vidokle, and this new, month-long iteration of the project in Mexico is organized by the Patronato de Arte Contemporáneo (PAC). (Concurrently, Night School, a year-long version of unitednationsplaza, is taking place at the New Museum in New York.) Franke’s seminar was titled From Animism to Animation: Moving Image in Modern Culture, and focused on the work of Sergie Eisenstein. The evening was briefly introduced by Franke, followed by a lecture by Oksana Bulgakowa. As part of her presentation, Bulgakowa screened excerpts of a biopic on Eisenstein that she co-directed with Dietmar Hochmuth. The documentary was informative and provided much biographical depth on Eisenstein, from his family background to his incursions in theatre and eventually cinema. Sadly, the DVD jammed during the run and little did we get to learn about the makings of Eisenstein’s unfinished film Qué Viva Mexico!

Esentstein’s Qué Viva Mexico! has been the subject of numerous research-based works in Mexico. So much that even at James Oles’ exhibition, La colección: el peso del realismo at MAM, for example, an excerpt of the Eisenstein’s footage was included in the exhibition. Mexico City-based curator Olivier Debroise wrote and directed Un banquete en Tetlapayac (2000). A kind of film reenactment to address historical aspects of the original, Olivier’s film was staged at Tetlapayac, the hacienda that served as location of Eisenstein’s film. (Art historian James Oles was an actor in Debrois’ film, as were curator Cuauhtémoc Medina, and artists Andrea Fraser and Silvia Gruner, among others active in the art field today.)

On my last night in Buenos Aires, I attended the inauguration of the group exhibition Fantasmas (Ghosts) at the Universidad Torcuato DiTella in Buenos Aires—a place most commonly associated to 1960s avant garde art in Argentina, through the most times controversial Centro de Artes Visuales directed by Jorge Romero Brest. Curated by Guillermo Faivovich and Javier Villa, Fanstasmas included artworks and projects created in a relatively abandoned part of the university. Each of the participating artists (made and) had a designated exhibition space, which ranged from a small free-standing building to large hanger-like rooms, all located in the perimeters of a wide outdoor plaza. Artist Daniel Hoglar’s installation included the rearrangement of found furniture in the storage-turned gallery space where he exhibited. The installation included a hill-like stack of a couple hundred unused school desks, along with a series of dimly lit, suspended ceiling lamps that were aligned forming a circle.

It was Thursday, March 6th, a damp evening, and a night with what seemed to be a new moon. This atmospheric condition emphasized that the lack of outdoor lighting was smartly dealt by dimmed illumination design (by Matías Sendón) of Fantasmas. With this atmosphere in the raw architectural context that was the venue, it was unavoidable to experience a playful sense of intrusion while walking in and out of the artist’s installations. Barely seeing, the public attending the opening walked cautiously and slowly throughout the space. A marvelous effect, it suggests a call for a playful, thoughtful, and certainly multi-sensory experience of what may well be associated to future of art practices in DiTella. See, Fantastmas is first in a series of projects celebrating DiTella’s fiftieth anniversary. More pertinently, the newly launched art department of the university organizes it.

Directed by Argentine curator and art critic Inés Katzenstein, the main goal of this new department will be to create an art school at DiTella. In the meantime that Katzentein and her team develops the program, projects like Fantasmas will be organized to engage artists, curators and the pubic to explore and activate the university grounds. The program is planned to take the form of a curricula-based advanced art school for artists, as well as a training program for emerging curators and critics. While the program will most likely involve studio-based classes, it will also offer intensive art history courses (about local art and international production) as well as critical theory seminars. At first, the program will not grant academic degrees, but this is one of the goals of the university.

The new DiTella art program emerges at a time when clinicas—artist-initiated and led studio-based workshops—have proliferated and possibly reached its peek activity in Argentina. (The literal translation of a clinica in English is clinic.) Through clinicas, artists offer technique theme-based course to a group of younger artists. Clinicas vary from technical and practical courses to seminar-based discussions to the more common studio crit’ moderated or led entirely by the teaching artist. They are commonly held at the studio of the artist who has designed and leads it, but they are sometimes hosted at institutions, allowing for wider outreach. Operating pretty much like unregulated markets, clinicas emerged as a response to the need and lack of advanced or critical arts training and art schools in Argentina. Today, there seems to be a decrease in granting support of clinicas, e.g. becas (grants) awarding artists grants to partake in the clinicas. The most popular grant was awarded by Fundacion Antorchas, whose primary granting activity to artists was during the 1990s. (There was also the well-known Beca Kuitca run by artist Guillermo Kuitca; this offered a dozen or so artists a studio space for a year or so, during which time Kuitca did studio crits.) While professionalization of the artist may seem to be a question of values when formalizing a degree-granting arts program, it is clear that artist-initiated endeavors, such as clinicas, are the best indicator to measure the needs of artists and the communicative desires their work bears. A dedicated institution can certainly consolidate these efforts and create a new communities and thus cultures.

(Photo: Archivo de Prensa de DiTella)

The wake of artist-run spaces and independent cultural initiatives in Argentina is telling of the state of cultural policy of a country, as well as the institutional work, or lack thereof, of established venues. But it is also telling of something else—of a need and a desire to develop communities. To be in touch, exchange with others. While the Other has discursively been assigned to those in so-called disadvantaged geo-political and socio-economic margins of society, it seems that in Argentina the other is just the foreigner in oneself in conversation with someone from elsewhere. It is not peculiar then but rather symptomatic that the spaces and initiatives that have emerged in the last couple of years here are dedicated to hosting artist residency programs. I visited a couple and met with their founders: El Basilisco in Avellaneda, just in the outskirts of Buenos Aires; Residencia Internacional de Artistas en Argentina (RIAA), organized from Buenos Aires but taking place in a nearby beech town called Ostende; El Levante, a residency and art school of sorts in the city of Rosario, Argentina; and Residencia de Un Solo Artista (RUSA), which also takes place in Rosario, but this one at the home of its founding artist.

El Basilisco was initiated by artists Tamara Stuby and Esteban Alvarez, and is the most established residency program in town. Former and current artists in residence seem to praise the communication imperative at El Basilisco—participating artists, who stay for approximately eight weeks, are introduced to the art scene immediately, to a new public, and are also passed on invitations and tips by Tamara and Esteban to attend a number of events in town. Alejandro, an artist who lives full-time at the house (literally) of El Basilisco, also takes the artists around and keeps the house in order. Tamara and Esteban live very nearby. And the residency has turned the local bar into its residency lounge, adopting (or having been assigned) the name “Bar Silisco” with a neon artwork by Esteban hung from its window. But El Basilisco is not only a local affair. But El Basilisco’s presence locally, nationally and internationally is felt in other ways. The program offers three residencies happening at once, with an Argentine artist from the “interior” taking a spot, and, most times, with two others from abroad. Its attention to hosting artists from Latin America has made its program stronger and certainly more unique. It is assumed that artists from Latin America are one and the same, but the disparity between cultures and the experience of cultural exchange between countries of the Americas is relatively low. The current artists in residence are: Narda Fabiola Alvarado (La Paz, Bolivia), Luis Guerra (Santiago, Chile) and Jorge Tirner (Resistencia, Argentina). El Basilisco’s internationalism is possible thanks to their efforts in participating in the demanding and time consuming world of grant making, as well as in initiating and sustaining fruitful relations with others in the field. An example of this is their institutional residency exchange program with Helmut Batista’s CAPACETE in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, as well as at Hangar in Barcelona, Spain.

Begun in 2006 by Diana Aisenberg, Melina Berkenwald, Graciela (Gachi) Hasper, Roberto Jacoby, the Residencia Internacional de Artistas en Argentina is locally referred to simply as RIAA (in Spanish, pronounced: ree-ah). The residency brings together about ten artists from Argentina and ten others from abroad for a period of two weeks. The selection process is based on nominations. Artists all meet in Buenos Aires for a two-day period or so, where they each give a 30-minute artist’s talk to present their work. Afterwards, the artists head to Ostende, a beech town about 2 hours away from Buenos Aires. The group takes over the Viejo Hotel Ostende (in operations since 1913) settling there for the rest of the residency period. Curators and critics are invited to visit, and the site is open to the general public for an afternoon on the last weekend. RIAA takes place only once a year. I attended the last RIAA artists’ talks in Buenos Aires, which was a marathon-like public program held at the Centro Cultural de España in Buenos Aires. The quality of the work as well as the presentations varied significantly. Yet, having managed a residency program for more than four years, I can confidently attest that the “spirit,” necessary for a productive and creative residency, was certainly there. I’ve also heard from artists that have participated that they praise the program for that very reason, too. Most times, it is in that free and open and far away space that new ideas and communities surface. The RIAA website is complete with information of artist’s who have been in their in the last three versions (2006-2008), and with memories and statements in different prose by most of the participants.

In the city of Rosario, located about 200km northwest from Buenos Aires, is the art and cultural space called El Levante. Its name is drawn from a nineteenth century brothel that originally housed the building this arts organization now occupies. El Levante’s space is great—no, it’s majestic. A bar greets you (functions seldom, primarily during events); a mirrored wall room on the right with serves as a milonga dance room; a wide open plaza at the heart of the building covered with a glass-like rooftop drenches with light what becomes a multi-purpose room, flanked by a lounge area with seats, tables and chairs. This central area is what is constantly transformed for closed workshops and public presentations. Upstairs, three bedrooms and a common room with kitchen and bath hosts the artist residency program. The many spaces are telling for the diversity of things that happen there. El Levante was initiated, first, as a “taller de análisis y confrontación de obra” (workshop for the analysis and questioning of artwork and artistic practice) by the artist Mauro Machado and the artist Graciela Carnevale. (Graciela’s work was featured in Documenta 12 in 2007, and is commonly associated with her involvement and archive of the artist’s collective and activities denominated Tucuman Arde.) A couple of other artists have become involved since: Lorena Cardona, Luján Castellani and María Spinelli (in 2005). The space soon evolved into something different, including 2-year program of art workshops were artists could register, a kind of post-BA art program, and a 2- to 3-month residency program hosting artists from abroad who would participate, if only temporarily, in the workshops. El Levante also hosts a number of other programs, evening events and milongas, which are organized with the building owners, who share the building with them.

The Residencia de Un Solo Artista (RUSA) that Rosario-born artist Claudia del Rio initiated in her hometown (and at her home!) is not exactly institutional, but telling of the type of artistic endeavors spurring here and elsewhere. RUSA was begun this year, and is a genuine effort to offer a space and time for thought to someone else. This is a personal and self-funded endeavor, by an artist who makes a living at teaching art (in Argentina and most of Latin America, not exactly a lucrative career): she covers roundtrip bus fare to Rosario, room and board in hopes that the resident artist can use this brief period to think and work. I was surprised at meeting Claudia. Her generosity was in everything she did and said. Her thoughts moderated by intellectual humbleness, a sense of humor softened her directness. To select RUSA’s first artist, Claudia made an open call, and selected one person after reviewing a number of applications—this time, the first, was a poet who stayed for two weeks. In the website of Club del Dibujo, another artist-initiative that Claudia runs together with Mario Gemin and others, a statement by the first resident artist, Eloísa Oliva, is therein posted. This is an excerpt:

La generosidad de esta casa hace que sienta un desfasaje: ¡yo no lo merezco! Sin embargo fui elegida para estar acá, y entonces, trato de cumplir honestamente con mi parte, lo cual, por otro lado, es un privilegio: extraerme de mi rutina doméstica, urbana y laboral, para regalarme esta “pequeña vacación literaria”.

This house’s generosity make me feel a lag: I do not deserve this! But I was selected to be here, and thus, I will honestly try to fulfill my part, which is, on the other hand, a privilege itself: to remove myself of a domestic routine, an urban and work environment, to give myself this “small literary vacation.”*

* An excerpt of Eloísa Oliva’s statement, published online, followed by my translation of this from Spanish to English.

Less than a week after its opening, the group exhibition Autopsia de lo invisible (Autopsy of the Invisible) at MALBA has received critical acclaim in Argentina: art critic Fabián Lebenglik writes an extensive article for the newspaper Página 12; so does Mariana Rolandi for the newspaper Clarín; Ana Martínez Quijano for Ambito Financiero, and; Mercedes Urquiza for Perfíl, who makes fun of me by referring to the exhibition as a “show” (a colloquial and telling word in itself). A video walkthrough of the exhibition was produced by the website of the newspaper La Nación, and another one was produced by Cultura al Dia, which was aired on television on Sunday, March 2, 2008. (It aired by METRO in Argentina on Channel 13 of Multicanal and Channel 13 of Cablevisión.) The independents Beatriz Montenegro de Antico and Alejandro Zuy, who are interested in researching contemporary curatorial practices, interviewed me for their arts and culture website, Leerlo.com.

Addendum. Two more reviews were published: Judith Savloff writes one for Diario Crítica and Alicia de Arteaga for La Nación. Also, Carmen Boullosa includes a note on the exhibition for a column on Art of the Americas published in El País of Madrid, Spain. (March 17, 2008)

After lunch, we took a walk at a busy street in Barrio Palermo. It took us about five blocks to get to New York. The year was circa 1966, and Eduardo Costa had taken me to me moment he proposed the editor of Vogue to incorporate his newest conceptual artwork in that magazine. Soon after, Fashion Fictions was published there and in a couple other magazines. I had met Eduardo in New York about six years ago, while he was still living there. But shortly after he had moved back to his hometown Buenos Aires and I hadn’t seen him since. Eduardo had been an integral part of the 1960s avant garde art scene in Argentina, and a conceptualist at heart. Now, forty years later and with much longer and shinier silver hair, his attention to detail and the sophistication of his thought process were even sharper. We discussed his move back to Buenos Aires and life thereafter, his recent body of work, a series of volumetric paintings, and the revival he had experienced in I Am Not a Flopper or… (2007) by artist Mario Garcia Torres.

During the 1960s, Eduardo was part of “Arte de los Medios,” doing collaborative works with artists Raúl Escari and Roberto Jacoby that emphasized tactical communication in conceptualism. Earlier that week, I had also met with Roberto. Unlike Costa, Roberto had stayed in Argentina. His conceptualism turned more political in its motivations and forms as the 1960s ended and the decade of the 1970s arrived. But later, during the eighties, he distanced himself from art making, yet his work remained creative: from creating the identity of an Argentine rock band and writing its musical lyrics to consulting on identity and promotional strategies of various industries. Roberto never left the idea of communication as a means and end in his work, and this in addition to organizing and mobilizing artists have been at the heart of his practice. Roberto is the mastermind or instigator or supporter or something along those lines in almost every artistic venture that emerges in Buenos Aires. Among these ventures are: Fundacion Start, a platform from where a number of events happen and projects emerge; Proyecto Venus, a working currency and social network that he launched at the turn of the twenty-first century and that peeked during Argentina’s crisis in 2002 (the project concluded last year); Bola de Nieve (Snowball), an online archive of portfolios by local artists; Ramona, a magazine he co-founded in 2000 with the art collector Gustavo Bruzzone. With almost 80 issues published to date, Ramona has become a key source for contemporary art there and elsewhere, many times including the first and only Spanish translations of key theoretical and art historical texts originally published abroad, as well as new art historical and theoretical essays about Latin American art.

Gustavo Bruzzone is also a key figure in Argentina’s art scene. Aside from his connection to Ramona, he is more commonly associated with the art scene of the “Rojas” generation or “Arte Light.” I visited his apartment on a Friday evening. What I thought would be a simple guided visit to his art collection turned out to be an intense art history seminar. Gustavo began collecting art during the early 1990s, most times as support gesture or money advances to a group of then-emerging artists that he had become acquainted through a painting class. But Gustavo is not an artist; he is a lawyer and a respected judge in Argentina. He is a great storyteller, too. His memory of the 1990s art scene is as fresh as his narrative. He told me of the times when artist Jorge Gumier Maier was curator of the art gallery of the Centro Cultural Ricardo Rojas in Buenos Aires. His exhibition program was said to be representative of an aesthetic pursuit giving precedence to the search for beauty that was far from the over intellectualization of neoconceptual art and instrumentalization of high art. Critics condemned this, called the works exhibited there arte light, gay and so on. Today, however, many revere that moment. Gustavo’s collection has early works of every artist of that art scene, including works by Gumier Maier, Marcelo Pombo, Sebastian Gordini, among many others. The works are installed in salon style throughout the house—hanging from every wall space from floor to ceiling, and sitting on any type of flat surface available. The collection is also complemented with a series of documents and ephemera of the time—newspaper clippings, exhibition invitations, posters, even early gallery checklists with price lists. It’s an admirable collection, and it’s formed wholeheartedly by a unique eye and empiricist soul.