miércoles, 30 de marzo de 2016

Argentine art abroad

Buenos Aires Herald      126th Anniversary  1876 – 2002      Sunday, September 15, 2002

By Alina Tortosa

For the Herald

For a broad and clumsy assessment of the acknowledgement Argentine art has received abroad in the last twenty years, a look at the large sums paid at auctions in New York at Sotheby’s and Christies for work by a few Argentine artists will do.   But this commercial approach is more of an anecdote than a thoughtful and relevant analysis.  It does not describe accurately the real place of these artists in the world. 

Artists like Greco, Julio Le Parc, Victor Grippo, Xul Solar and David Lamelas, who have slowly made inroads into international art history, were not necessarily top priorities in the world art market in the 1980s and in the 1990s.  It is useful to remember that the price of work by artists relates to promotion and fashion rather than to quality.

It was not in the politically manipulated exhibitions of Argentine and Latin American art in the 1960s in the US, nor in the official art galleries in embassies or Latin American organizations in Europe and the US that Argentine art gained true appreciation. These spaces do not merit valuable critical acknowledgement as, for the most part, they are in charge of non-professionals in the art world, who have a rather parochial and nepotistic attitude toward who and what they show.

It was in the day to day interchange between artists and curators at home and abroad, and due to the opportunities and to the resources provided by foreign and local grants, exhibitions in galleries abroad, international publications, and by word of mouth that some of the best Argentine artists now in their 30s and 40s have become known abroad in the last fifteen or twenty years. This wider acknowledgement has reached the point where I feel that the role of the genial artist who lacks recognition in his own lifetime is démodé, a blurry and romantic destiny that does not apply in the late twentieth and early twenty-one centuries.  Not even in Latin America, and certainly not in Argentina.

This phenomenon of interchange and communication is global.  It relates to changes in the way artists work worldwide and to the way art critics and art historians in the so called First World opened their eyes to what non European or non US artists were doing.  In the twentieth century, up to the 1980s, the work by artists could still be placed within certain movements.  Because of this, as Jorge López Anaya, the well known Argentine art historian, has said, everything that artists outside the first world did was automatically considered a copy of what was being done in the major art centers, as for the most part they were working on the same lines.

But it is also true that the more progressive artists here were mainly focused on what their colleagues in the first world were doing.  In some cases, to an unhealthy extreme.

In the late 1980s the question of movements and separate disciplines within the visual arts gave way to many possibilities that could not be neatly placed into who was working in what style, as the very notion of style fell through. Also people the world over were beginning to think in terms of genetic and geographic roots, and the sense of belonging to a definite historical and geographical area became more important.  In Argentina, with few exceptions, the best artists were looking around their own habitat and into themselves to figure out their own creative resources.  Most of them were children of European immigrants, but by then Europe was no longer the ultimate goal, but a reference among others. 

The period of the Military Government in Argentina broke the link between one generation and the next.  The then young artists had to look around them to learn what the world was about.  In their isolation, they found ways to work at home.   And because they felt strongly the loss of a missing generation and  lacked social communion with their native artistic elders, they looked up to them rather than to their foreign counter parts.

Jorge Glusberg, the director of the Museum of Fine Arts then, and a most controversial figure, should be also given his due, as as the founder and director of the CAYC –Centre for Arts and Communication- he held seminars, prizes, exhibitions to which he invited prominent foreign intellectuals who worked in different disciplines.  These encounters gave the visitors the chance to see what was happening here, and local artists the chance to talk to them.

When in the 1990s European and US curators took to travel around the globe, they slowly began to understand the import of what was then called multiculturalism.  This meant that art across the borders of the First World should no be understood as a cultural mirror of the more sophisticated West, but as different ways of working worthwhile watching. 

Philippe Cyroulnik, who first came to BA in 1989, as a member of the jury for the Gunther Prize, invited Jorge Macchi, Roberto Elía, Martín Reyna and Pablo Suárez to show in the CREDAC -Centre Regional d'art contemporain- in Ivry-sur-Seine, France.  This was the first of his many trips to Argentina, and the beginning of a long association with Macchi, who has since then shown extensively abroad, as have done the others.


Greco from Buenos Aires and from Barcelona, Victor Grippo from Buenos Aires, Julio Le Parc from Paris, Liliana Porter from New York, David Lamelas from London, Paris, Berlin and mostly from Los Angeles, Leandro Erlich from New York, Jorge Macchi from Buenos Aires, are some of the names of the Argentine artists that are internationally known and respected as the best in their field.  They have become the visual and information network that represent us abroad and which has opened the way to their peers and to the new comers.





illustration by Liliana Porter, Black thread, 2007.

lunes, 28 de marzo de 2016

On work by Jorge Macchi and Gabriel Valansi Art beyond media illustration

Buenos Aires Herald                                                          Published Sunday, April 13, 2003
Art On Sunday

By Alina Tortosa
For the Herald

Art as an expressionist experience will never recover from the world post the blowing up of the twin towers and from the contemporary experience of the war in Iraq lived through the media.  Art as a strong expressionist catharsis is over for the duration, as images that try to reproduce the violent conflicts we have lived through, that we have seen on a screen, read about, or imagined, will either fall short or be redundant. 

Live drama and melodrama are provided daily by the ironic and sinister appearances and speeches of international and national politicians who preach peace as they wage an unnecessary war, who speak of evil as if they themselves were good, of safety as if they were careful, of economic stability as if they were concerned with the community well being rather than with their own economic profit.

What images could translate  what happened in Irak and elsewhere without being redundant?  Would we react to art visual statements that repeat what we have already seen in the newsreel? What does an artist do to create work that is acknowledged as art and not sociology, journalistic information or propaganda? 

A good contemporary artist translates into lines and colour, into other media, into vaguely reminiscent iconic language to suggest and imply rather than to assess.  In good contemporary art assessment is out, as too obviously political, too explicit, too coarsely invasive and not efficient.

As I write I think of works by Jorge Macchi and by Gabriel Valansi that refer to tragic situations in elegant undertones. Macchi’s threaded or woven newspaper cuttings of articles that reported tragic situations into elliptic minimal wall pieces.  The writing is literally on the wall, but we have to look for it, the first impression is one of utter beauty, rather than of despair.

Valansi, a photographer, uses and intervenes the media he has chosen to work with to illustrate his concerns with war and violence.  In Cosmos, 2000, on the blowing up of the Amia,  “he developed his basic theme […] into an astrological metaphor.  A myriad of planets break away from a point in space, generating disruptive energy.  As we look at it, we cannot grasp the pain involved, only the beauty of the small round figures breaking away from the axis.  Small planets that look at us from dark pupils, eyes that witness the danger and the damage,  without luring us into obvious and active despair”. 


And this is the key to tragedy, as in the plays by Sofocles and by Shakespeare, beauty interwoven with pain to the point in which they interrelate so closely that we cannot separate them. 






jueves, 24 de marzo de 2016

Jorge Macchi: a talented trickster

Buenos Aires Herald                                                                               Sunday, May 5, 2002


By Alina Tortosa
For the Herald

If ever an artist exemplified The dematerialization of art, proclaimed by Lucy Lippard in the book that answers to this title, first published in 1973, that artists is Jorge Macchi.  From extremely concrete objects and paintings to the current show at Ruth Benzacar, his work has dematerialized in substance and perceptually into poetical renderings of musical and socio-anthropological interpretations.

I would say without doubt, Macchi is the Argentine contemporary artist par excellence, an artist at his best.  He has worked quietly and coherently from his beginnings, looking into things and around, to create objects and situations that may relate to hypothetical situations, as yet unknown to him, as in the early paintings of the domes of cathedrals, or that subtly hint at what he has seen and experienced.  He still seems unaffected by the respect and recognition he merits, under a deceptive simplicity that could pass for modesty.  I would not trespass this simplicity, in the notion that he does not really know the import of what he has done.  He does. 

Fuegos de artificio, the name of the show, may be interpreted quite differently according to whether we translate it as “fire tricks” or as “fireworks”.  Fire tricks  -trick as ability, special skill, even as an act of magic- answers Macchi’s interpretation of the title.  It implies the creative resources that allow the artist to discuss a given subject in such a manner as to mask or play around with the original preoccupation or information, moving away from literal meanings into irony and/or poetical nuances.  It is a dematerialization –again- of literal meaning into sensitive perceptions that redefine a practical situation into a subtle rendering of it that the viewer may or may not grasp.  But even when he or she do not grasp it, the work is there in aesthetic splendour to intrigue, delight, or reject.   Fire works, of course, is the explosive instance in which a design is blown out into the air as a sort of celebration, to then disappear into a memory or into forgetfulness.  So it would be safe, perhaps, to keep to the first meaning.

Intimidad (Intimacy), the first piece to the right, as one goes in, is a small multiple structure that hints –ironically- at minimal art without conforming.  It is, rather, a quiet introspective icon that introduces us into the spirit of the exhibition.

If one should start on the left hand side, as one goes in, one may walk into the small video sitting room and look at Les feuilles mortes, the drawings in pencil on pages torn from a copy book.  Drawings on lose copybook pages at Ruth Benzacar’s are, of course, an instant reminder of the work by Liliana Porter, but in Macchi the content and the intentions are totally different.  The small punched out holes, the straight lines that look as if they had been dropped on the page and the white spaces create a rhythm, that go from lento to staccato.  

These drawings, Macchi says, were seminal to Ornamento, the wallpaper covered in tiny flowers, those flowers that finally fall in a dark heap at the end of the panel.  One wonders at the mental process that turned something quite complex into this deceptive simplicity.

In The speaker’s corner, he is weaving text and controversy, or the notions of text and controversy, into long strips of paper cuttings, stuck on the support with pins, on which inverted commas open and close on empty space.  The speaker’s corner, by the way, is the spot in Marble Arch, in Hyde Park, London, where people may go on Sunday to discuss or make speeches about anything, however outrageous.  This traditional weekly speaking out in public must have seemed originally hygienic to the Crown, a sort of vaccine against further evil.  Macchi adds new meanings to this basic intention.  This highly refined and elegant -adjectives that the author feels ill at ease with –contemporary and relatively precarious, if you will, tapestry is an essay on the intricate and subliminal paths of information and opinion.

Trained as an artist, Macchi eventually became involved with performance as well, both musical and theatrical.  He cherishes this interrelated intervention that drives each participant to take into account the work of others.  He does not feel this as a limitation, but as context and atmosphere that add to his own proposal. In La canción del final  (The last song), the blurry names of the cast and technicians of a given film reel in front of our eyes as they do traditionally at the end of a film.  The words that most people do not read, but that must be shown. More information that may not be duly processed by the reader or the viewer.

Music threads through the work, in the titles: Les feuilles mortes, Nocturne, Variations, in the video installation: La canción del final, in a score with music by Eric Satie on which the notes are written in pins, a wonderful piece.  This show exemplifies how Macchi has been able to achieve one of the aims he set out for himself years go: to translate musical language into visual work.

In Horizon, in a detached twilit room, the author has drawn, by sticking pins on the wall,
a straight line at eye level.  The title is descriptive, and yet, we may assume that the pins and the spaces in between, barely modified, may also have musical connotations: silence – sound – silence – sound.  Macchi has been working with pins as media for a very long time.  They design and redesign a specter of possibilities, visual and metaphysical, that have always been inherent in his work. And it is this mystic quality, impossibly to measure in terms of acknowledgement or success, that makes him a major artist.





I inhabit the landscape and the light


I inhabit the landscape and the light
in their  myriad subtle shades

I am spellbound by their beauty

irrevocably caught and enmeshed
                                                in their ancient charm






jueves, 17 de marzo de 2016

Grupo de la X - X for talent and integrity

Buenos Aires Herald                                              Published Sunday, January 28, 2001

By Alina Tortosa                                         

Once upon a time there was a group of young artists who worked at their art at home or in lonely precarious studios.  Some worked in pairs and/or had a few friends with whom they could talk about what they were doing, others were lonelier.  An older artist realized this and decided to bring them together.  It is easier to work and to show as a group than as individuals, he told them. After several meetings they became a group to share and discuss their preoccupations.   Each of them worked in a style of his or her own, but they found it reassuring to understand that there were other young artists in the same position as theirs, trying to develop a line of work  and to grasp things that at the time seemed beyond them.   They wanted to exhibit and to be able to make a living out of their work.  They belonged to a generation that had grown up during the military regime, when it was banned to meet in groups and when information on what happened before was perfunctory.  They were thirsty for information and for discussions,  they  were anxious to get together and to meet older artists, to learn about their experience of life. 

At the time, a large rambling house in La Boca, that had belonged to the paternal grandparents of Jorge Macchi, one of the young artists,  was uninhabited.  A beautiful house, literally gone to seed, since plants had started to grow in the walls of the large patios and of the terrace, as plants do, thriving in cracks and in the ground under the old chipped tiles.   The young artists, who called themselves el Grupo de la X, moved their studios to the old house.   There they worked, looked into the work of their colleagues, discussed and argued,  pondered and matured.  

Enio Iommi, the artist who had introduced them, and Jorge López Anaya, the art critic and art historian who first took and interest in their work,  followed their creative process attentively.  And one day, I myself was taken by Jorge López Anaya to the old Macchi house in La Boca.    There I met young Carolina Antoniadis,  
Ernesto Ballesteros, María Causa, Gustavo Figueroa, Ana Gallardo, Enrique Jezik,
Jorge Macchi, Gladys Nistor, Juan Paparella, Martín Pels, Andrea Racciati and Pablo Siquier.

The group, as such, lasted only two years.  Since then, each one of them has done  well, developing a project of his or her own.  By well, I mean each one has achieved a body of work that is respected for talent and integrity.  Some of them are living abroad:  Gustavo Figueroa lives in Berlin, Enrique Jezik in Mexico,  Gladys Nistor in Paris  and Juan Papparella  in Brussels.   When they come back on visits they tell the others what they have been doing, how they live, what they miss, what they want to do next.    Gustavo Figueroa, Gladys Nistor and Martín Pels are the ones about which I know the least.


Some of them are no longer close friends and hardly see each other.  Ernesto Ballesteros and Pablo Siquier are always best friends.   Ana Gallardo and Jorge Macchi keep in  touch, discussing each other's work.  Ana Gallardo's daughter Rocío, María Causa's son Camilo and Andrea Racciati's daughter Marina are good friends, and play around while their mothers discuss this and that.  Ana works as assistant in the same gallery that shows María's work.   Carolina Antoniadis is close to the three of them.  Enrique Jezik and Juan Paparella would not dream of coming to Buenos Aires and not meeting those members of the group who live here.   Some of them still need each other, as aesthetic references and as dear friends.   Ernesto Ballesteros and Pablo Siquier are the most aloof to the rest of the group, and certainly to the women in the group.

The end of last year ended in celebration for those members who live here.  In November 2000 at the exhibition held by the Banco Nación  Jorge Macchi won the first prize and Ernesto Ballesteros and Ana Gallardo won menciones.  María Causa won the second prize in a contest sponsored by the Fondo Nacional de las Artes.  Most of them have shown abroad in prestigious exhibitions and institutions.  No show in which they take part goes unnoticed.  And as far as I know,  all of the original  members are still working as artists, which is unusual.  





martes, 15 de marzo de 2016

On Jorge Macchi - From objects to theatrical installations

Buenos Aires Herald                                              Published Sunday, January 28, 2001


Jorge Macchi's art has evolved from primitive forms to conceptual work

By Alina Tortosa
For the Herald                                                               

The time has come to assess and trace the development of the work by Jorge Macchi (Buenos Aires, 1963), who won the First Prize of the Premio Banco de la Nación Argentina a las artesvisuales in November 2000.    As he basks in the respect and admiration of most of his colleagues and of contemporary art critics,  hailed as  the ultra neoconceptual figure by Eva Grinstein in La Nación, who baptised the present as the Macchi era,   I remembered when Pablo Suárez (Buenos Aires, 1937), an artist who was influential in shaping the criteria of several generations of young artists,  used to say of him that he was a happy maker of objects.  By which Suárez meant he was a craftsman rather than an artist (an appreciation that was not shared by Jorge López Anaya or Damian Bayon at the time).  What happened to the young boy who quietly worked away in wood and paint objects and canvas to become one of the more interesting conceptual artists of his generation? 

His first pieces were rough and primitive looking altarpieces in dark  wood, retablos,mystical in nature and anthropological in substance.  He painted on paper compositions that represented the cupola of European cathedrals that he longed to visit.  His work related to a geographical and historical past he felt he belonged to biologically.  When I met him in 1986 he was determined in a quiet way.   One could sense the strength and a certain assurance under his unassuming manner of who he was and of what he wanted.   

In 1989, a French curator, Philippe Cyroulnik, who had come as a member of the jury for the Gunther Prize, given out by Edgar Gunther, a German art collector who then lived in Paris, chose four artists to show in the CREDAC -Centre Regional d'art contemporain-  in Ivry-sur-Seine, France.  And Macchi, whose work had not been admitted to the Gunther Prize, was one of the four artists Cyroulnik chose to exhibit.  It was when he travelled to France in 1991 for the exhibition, together with Roberto Elía, Martín Reyna and Pablo Suárez, that he and Suárez met for the first time.  And it was also then, on this first trip and in conversations with Suárez, that he became aware of further possibilities in the making of art beyond the object itself.   It was an exhibition by the Israeli artist, Haïm Steinbach, in which Steinbach had chosen manufactured grocery goods and set them on shelves that showed him that some artists had taken Duchamp's attitude towards art further and had adopted the repetition and juxtaposition of seemingly worthless items to explore social and psychological structures.

On that first trip, as he lived in Paris for two years in la Cité des Arts (Beca Braque1993-1994),  and later, in other trips, he felt that the work of art as a physical object was dissolving into space, it was losing weight,  that it was irrelevant in a wider context unless the architectural parameters in which it would be shown were taken into account.  So he worked on pieces that related to the space in which they would be displayed.  

In  April 1994 he exhibited at the Galerie Jorge Alyskewycz 32 morceaux d'eaux,  the decomposition of the River Seine in gouache into 32 fractions, that represented as many bridges, under a long glass that drew a  line the length of the gallery.  He wanted to transform the liquidity of the river into an illusion of liquidity.    The texture of the paint and of the paper were solid, and yet, the illusion was there.  We see how he had lightened his work.

In an exhibition shown first at the Casal de Catalunya in Buenos Aires and then in London in 1995, searching south,  one of his pieces,  a pillow behind lines of tense wire illustrates a pentagram.   This reference to music, and later, the need for music,  will come up again and again in his work.

His subsequent trips to Europe to exhibit in different cities: Extremely recent works,Rotterdam, 1996,  The wondering golfer,  Antwerp,  The killing tear (in collaboration with Miguel Rothschild), Paris, Incidental music, Essex, in 1998, and others, reinforced his first European impression that work had lost consistency, that it ought to be staged into existence in situ, and  was, therefore, ephemerous by nature.

His current work is profoundly influenced by an in depth relationship with the theatre.  In 1998 he took part in a Taller de Experimentación Escénica, organised by Fundación Antorchas, together with other other visual artists, writers, musicians, actors and theatre directors.  This workshop helped him to understand the fictional character of a work of art.  It sparked the energy that caused his work to radiate into different disciplines.   What impressed him most about the theatre was that to depend on other  people is inevitable.  And this  working out of everybody's input into a general pattern to achieve a final collaboration suits him well, as it exacts a dynamic attitude from those who participate.   Macchi feels that he has found a positive creative energy in the theatre that is not available in the visual arts.

As he strolls about the city he will notice things on which he will work in his studio.   He starts by painting them, for he still needs this media to grasp  why he was drawn by a certain visual image.  This painting of a motif, or photographing it, works as an  appropriation that serves him as first base.  It is never  enough,  so he will brood on it until he can work it into a structure that he feels represents the way in which he wants to tell the story.  The original motif will develop into an installation or a theatrical setting in which the gaze of the viewer and his sense of apprehension are taken into account.   This is how he worked on Publicidad,the theatrical installation that won him the First Prize of the Premio Banco Nación.

Going back full circle, there was more to the happy object maker in the very beginning than mere craftsmanship, for his objects were tainted with a mysterious depth that went far beyond a conventional approach to matter and content.  The use of nails imbedded in the wood to draw landscapes or patterns, feathers covering a panel, or the imprint of hen claws imbedded in the support  were ominous signs of portents to come.