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. 

Poetic alchemia

Buenos Aires Herald                                                                                              Sunday, July 4, 2004

Poetic alchimia

By Alina Tortosa

For the Herald

Energy as the key to life and creativeness, energy as the means to material and intellectual survival, is the backbone and the key to the work by Victor Grippo.  Grippo / Una retrospectiva. Obras 1971 – 2001, a partial retrospective of the work by this artist, that opened last week at the Malba – the Buenos Aires  Latin American Art Museum- illustrates for the visitor this criteria.

His work was exhibited and admired world wide as one of the valuable contributions to XX c. thinking and aesthetics.  A quiet, modest man, who was sure of himself, not to be deviated or deterred from what he thought best and from what he wanted to do, and who, at the same time, was surprised to draw to himself the attention and admiration he drew.  This combination of unworldliness and strength, nurtured by knowledge and erudition, places him among one of the most interesting minds we have come across in the art world

He studied painting and sculpture in Junín, province of Buenos Aires, where he was born in 1936 of Italian immigrant parents.  The atmosphere in his own home and of his native provincial town provided the feedback and support he needed to develop his intellectual and creative capacities. His father, a builder, introduced him as a child to moulding through plaster, an element he would use often in his work, and his mother and his sisters, who drew for pleasure, introduced him to drawing. 

 At the age of 17 he  moved to La Plata to study Chemistry and Design at the La Plata National University.  A deep understanding of the essential values of these two disciplines laid the foundations for his work as an artist:  a sense of purpose and a sense of economy, a feeling for the spare, run through the body of his work.

After an exhibition of his paintings at the Lirolay gallery in 1966, Grippo realized he wanted to go beyond paint on canvas to refer to basic human needs, such as work and survival. This took him to look for other materials and to a different way of showing his work.  His scientific experience led him to explore the link between science and art.  He thought of potatoes when looking for a medium easily found in daily life in large quantities  that would represent energy and the transmission of energy. He also found in simple, well used domestic tables, or in tables used for the different crafts, a medium and support for his aesthetic essays on labour. 

Potatoes and tables, the modest media that have become the clue to his work as we know it, again and again rightly described as conceptual, are also emotional choices that refer to his early home life.

Through his Analogies of the 1970s, beautifully installed in the current exhibition at the Malba,  Grippo proved that potatoes, if wired with zinc and copper electrodes, transmit electric energy.  

The tables in the show are the support and context for the tools and elements used in manual professions, they are sensual and poetic installation that suggest rather than illustrate a way of life.  Tables are also the surfaces on which words are written, words as the sustaining substance that burrows into our consciousness and irrigates our gestures  and our beliefs.

Life-Death-Resurrection  (1980) has been impeccably reproduced as the sense of this piece relates to a biological development that must take place during the show.  Beautiful geometric metal figures were again filled with wet beans.  The beans ferment and grow eventually into plants that will break through the neat metal structure. A wonderful metaphor: art, design, craftsmanship are means to an end, but life itself is the mediator. This work is an article of faith on the inevitability of evolution, on the beauty and the joy of creation through a process that goes from the whole to the decadent to growth.

Because of his knowledge of chemistry and because of his strong metaphysical and poetical leanings, Grippo chose to address the composition of his work and to address the equilibrium between basic needs and aesthetics, between the material and the spiritual, the ordinary and the extraordinary through  alchemy to transform the nature of matter.  Alchemy is the non scientific predecessor of chemistry.  It was held in great respect in the Middle Ages as one of the means to transform base metals into gold, to discover a life-prolonging elixir, a universal  cure for disease and a universal solvent.

This conception of alchemy implies that the material elements that go into the making of a work of art are transformed, through the mediation of the artist, into a presence imbued with sacramental value beyond its components.  This criteria of his gives us an inkling of the deep respect in which he held his own work.

A comprehensive catalogue has been published for the occasion with introductions by Eduardo F. Costantini, president of the Costantini Foundation and by Marcelo Pacheco, curator in chief, with texts by Ana Longoni and Adriana Lauría,  Argentine art historians, by Lilian Llanes, Cuban curator, who showed Grippo’s work in the Fifth La Havana Biennial in 1994, by Guy Brett, English art historian, on the artist’s visit to England in 1996, when he went with his wife, Nidia Olmos, to prepare for the show the following year at the St Ives Tate,by Angeline Scherf, French curator, Director of the Musée de Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, and by Justo Pastor Mellado, Chilean curator.  There is an extensive and well documented reproduction of works by the artist and photographs. The bibliography includes texts by the artist, texts by third parties and press articles.  The texts and information on the work are translated into English.

(Grippo / Una retrospectiva. Obras 1971 – 2001, Malba / Colección Constantini, Figueroa Alcorta Avenue 3415. Until September 6).

....

The material is all there is: Tony Cragg

Buenos Aires Herald, Sunday, July 27, 2003

On Sunday

The material is all there is

even love and intelligence are properties of materials in their extreme form, as far as I am concerned

By Alina Tortosa

For the Herald

A long conversation with Tony (Anthony) Cragg on the occasion of the opening of an exhibition of his latest work at Thomas Cohn gallery in Sao Paulo, Brazil, early this month, gave the Herald an insight into the feelings and creative process of this talented sculptor.

Cragg was born in Liverpool, Great Britain, in 1949. Three months later his parents moved away. “My father designed bits of aircraft, electrical parts and we moved around Great Britain, Scotland and Sussex, everywhere, while he designed the different projects”.  

Before going to art school the artist worked as a Lab Technician at the National Rubber Producers Research Association. Both his father’s profession and this first job may have been instrumental in developing his inquisitive approach to his work, looking for ways to do things beyond what had already been done before.

He attended the Gloucestershire College of Art in Cheltenham, the Wimbledon School of Art and the Royal College of Art.  In 1977 he moved to the town of Wuppertal in Germany, where his first wife was born and raised and has lived there ever since. 

From his first sculpture as an art student he has carried on an articulate dialogue with different materials to create forms that do not exist, to fill that void between utilitarian pieces and pieces created by his passionate and matter-of-fact approach to matter, letting the very substance of the materials dictate what the work will become.  “There are millions of forms and shapes between the table and the chair, between the table and the lamp, or the chair and the carpet which don’t exist because they are not useful but they can still be important and useful parts of our visual language. Dragons don’ t exist, but they are very important to us.”

Of his early work and of his installations with bottles and found bits and pieces, Cragg said “It was simply the Duchampest strategy of finding what was in the non art world and bringing it into the art world”. Later he realized he wanted to take responsibility for the form.

When the Herald remarked that his early work seemed to stem from the perception of his own body and its movement, he replied, “I am a fanatic materialist, that is what I really am, and because I can see it and I can move it, the body has a role.  That is, obviously, the sculptor is an agent of the body.  But what I am really interested in is in what the material looks like. I have a great belief in material. I believe the material is all there is.  That sounds perhaps difficult, I mean it in a very positive way.  Materials are the most beautiful and the most wonderful things; even love and intelligence are properties of materials in their extreme form, as far as I am concerned.  And so I look at them in all their shapes and forms”. 

“A hundred years ago there were very few materials for sculpture and after a hundred years of artists running through the world and nominating possibilities, we now have a fantastic range of materials that we can use to make sculpture with.  I always say the same thing.  And in the course of my own working line, as a young man I also looked for new materials, and tried to find meaning in them. That is part of a sculptor’s work”.

 Cragg believes that sculpture is still at the beginning of its evolution.  He reminds us that a hundred years ago sculpture was figurative and that it was a power symbol in Europe, just for the Church and for the monarchy. “Now it has a completely different function in our world and it has become a radical, cutting edge of our experience with material.”

When asked whether he had positive feelings about using any material, Cragg answered: “There are a lot of choices.  Unfortunately I am quite limited. It is very difficult to make anything. The constraints are not just technical and physical; there are an enormous number of intellectual, psychological constraints on one’s activity.  Things one doesn’t understand.  One doesn’t know how the material works; one can’t read what is happening to it. I work in the evening on a sculpture and I am happy about it and go to bed feeling very good.  In the morning it looks something entirely different.  It has a different meaning and I discard it.  It’s very much about my measuring whatever capabilities I have up against the materials. It is a genuinely non-conceptual investigation of matter”.

 The sculptor is also a good writer. “Why am I this shape?” the text in the catalogue of the current show is by him, written in 1998.

Cragg’s basic interests have not changed throughout the years. The differences are that he has learnt more about himself and about his work.  As he mentioned before, his creative process in not conceptual. He does not believe in “good ideas” previous to the physical work: “It is only in the making, as soon as I start to move the material, after the first one or two moves that I get into a calculable and more emotional territory, like in a chess game.   It is a dialogue, and if I am lucky, it will lead me somewhere I have never been before”.

The large, differently shaped, and differently coloured pieces of sculpture in the elegant exhibition rooms of the gallery exact immediate attention. They are epic in nature, strong and visually fluent.  Matter at its best.

An invitation from British Airways to Sao Paulo made covering this exhibition possible.

(Tony Cragg, Thomas Cohn, 642, Europa Avenue, Sao Paulo, Brazil. Until the end of November).

The Glusberg affair in focus (Jorge Glusberg)

Buenos Aires Herald. Sunday, December 14, 2003

On Sunday

The Glusberg affair in focus

By Alina Tortosa

For the Herald

 

That Jorge Glusberg, the outgoing director of the  MNBA National Fine Arts Museum has been devious in the management of this museum, as he was devious as long time president of the Asociación Argentina de Críticos de Arte, is no news to anybody concerned with the recent past and the current affairs of the visual art world.  His past supporters and comrades in political gains dwindle as headlines of his political demise reach the general public. And the very few who still support him do not seem to acknowledge basic responsibilities civil servants have towards the community, adhering to the philosophy that it is better to do things however haphazardly, than not to do them. This is a consideration that has proven to have distressful consequences in every field of public and national life.

So why the public eruption of discomfort and disgust now and not before?  And why have suddenly many of those artists who exhibited at the MNBA under Glusberg rally against him, as if they had not supported and abetted his whims and uncalled for demands to serve their own purposes?

And who is Glusberg anyway? What do we know about his long and diverse career as an artist, curator, art operator, businessman and a sort of petty power broker?  Why has he made a name for himself in matters related to architecture and his title as an architect is not mentioned in his very detailed curriculum?

The story goes that his father was an intelligent and poor intellectual accepted as an equal by Borges and other acknowledged figures of his time.  The son did not come that easily to peer acknowledgement, and had ambitions beyond intellectual intercourse.  So he first went into business to make money to avoid material need before starting his career in the art world. He succeeded widely in this commercial endeavour, which allowed him to found in 1968 the CAYC (Centro de Arte y Comunicaciones de Buenos Aires), a cultural foundation that was central in bringing over to Buenos Aires leading thinkers and visual art operators, giving the local intelligentsia and art communities, as well as the general public, the chance to attend lectures and seminars in which these foreign figures took part, at a time when little else was going on.  These beginnings as the director of the CAYC were instrumental to a career that soon became international, as an artist, an art operator and as a writer, as well as in architecture.

In 1971, under the sponsorship of the CAYC, the Grupo de los Trece came together, created under the influence of the thinking and acting methods of the Polish theater director, Jerzy Grotowski. The thirteen artists that first took part were Jacques Bedel, Luis Fernándo Benedit, Gregorio Dujovny, Carlos Ginsburg, Jorge Glusberg, Victor Grippo, Jorge González Mir, Vicente Lucas Marotta, Luis Pazos, Alfredo Portillos, Juan Carlos Romero, Julio Teich and Horacio Zabala. Guided and sponsored by Glusberg, they have come down in art history as the conceptual artists who made headway internationally, filling the void left by the Instituto Di Tella.  Eventually, the group dwindled to Bedel, Benedit, Grippo, Glusberg and Portillos, who were later joined by Leopoldo Maler and Clorindo Testa.  In 1975 they became known as the CAYC group.  Glusberg was instrumental in promoting the work of these artists abroad as a group, organizing complex and large experimental installations under the premises that it was Arte de Sistemas  or Systemic Art.

This flair for international action and exchange has been constant in Glusberg’s artist cum curator cum art critic cum art historian career, who obviously wanted to make sure he had most fields in the visual art world covered. From businessman to sponsor, from sponsor to artist, form artist to art critic and to art historian he has operated dillying and dallying, allegedly exchanging and demanding invitations and favours the world round, promoting Argentine Art or purportedly promoting himself through organizing exhibitions of Argentine and foreign art at home, in the premises of the CAYC and elsewhere, and of Argentine art abroad the world round.  Though the staging of these exhibitions according to his critics was hectic, untidy and manipulative, many artists accepted his methods so as to have their work exhibited. It was a perverse relationship in which authoritarian and non ethical proceedings were accepted and taken for granted under the belief that it was best to be part of this Glusbergian universe than to be left out, illustrating the above mentioned shallow notion that it is best to do things, no matter how badly, than not to do them.

It is interesting now to see how many of these artists whose work he has exhibited, both as head of the CAYC and as director of the MNBA, now turn their back on him, as he slipped from official government approval.

Glusberg was president of the Argentine chapter of the Art Critics Association from 1978 to 1986 and from 1989 to 1992.  As president he was accused of using the association as his own private enterprise, paying for whatever costs it entailed out of his own pocket, to use it basically to serve his own purposes.  Again, we have to admit that he was allowed a certain leeway by those art critics he engaged in juries and because he did not demand their dues as members.  He allegedly paid the dues to the International Art Critics Association and trips abroad of several art critics in a foiled bid to head the international association. He run three times for international president and lost every time, once to Bélgica Rodriguez and twice to Jack Leenhardt.  As an elderly academically well established Belgian woman art historian put it on one of these occasion: Il n’a pas la carrure.  It is true that Glusberg did not have the right standing or profile to be international president, but the sad truth is, Kim Levin, the American New York based art critic who won the following elections, did not have the standing, the know-how or the personality needed either.

It is an accepted fact by people in the art field that Glusberg is supposed to work with ghost writers, who are responsible for his many books and articles, published the world over.

As director of the MNBA from 1994 to today he appears as the author of most of the leading essays in the catalogues of the exhibitions held, as well as the curator to most of them. Quite apart from the unethical approach, as directors of national museums should open the way to curators who specialize in different fields of Argentine and foreign art, rather than take credit for everything themselves, there is the practical data that it is impossible for anybody to have the actual time to cover all these activities as well as run Modulor, his factory, plus the museum, plus travels abroad on business and on art matters.

But the question keeps cropping up, why are artists and others staging demonstrations now and not before?

In 1980 the person in charge of the art department in La Prensa newspaper asked this art critic to interview Rafael Squirru, Basilio Uribe and Jorge Glusberg, as the first of a series of articles on art critics. The ensuing articles on Squirru and Uribe were duly published in the Sunday cultural supplement, but when the time came to publish the article on Glusberg I was told it had been vetoed by the then upper echelons, as he was not considered genuine. It is true that the editorial management of La Prensa then was quite imperial, the proud “We do not approve” attitude they had on different matters had quite a regal ring to it, but their misgivings seemed to have been based on fertile ground.  So if Glusberg was already academically suspect in 1980, how come it has taken government authorities, the art world and the public so long to come to terms with it?

Previous governments were happy not to have to worry about devoting funds to the MNBA, as Glusberg raised funds for projects by –according to accusations now made public- making artists pay through their nose for exhibiting in the museum by overcharging them costs,  as well as milking dry those companies and embassies who wanted to stage shows. National political and cultural authorities before the new administration chose to look the other way to avoid having to go into the matter, not really caring what it was all about.

This choosing artists for how much they could pay rather than for the quality of their work meant that many of the exhibitions held were definitely beneath the standards the MNBA should abide by.

When Americo Castilla was appointed director of national director of patrimony and museums in May, one of his first chores was to read carefully with experts the regulations that national museums must abide by. He studied every point conscientiously and rewrote those rules and requirements that needed updating.  The next step was to apply the new regulations to the museums, so he started by the MNBA, which is Argentina’s leading museum.  As Castilla studied  the details of the spurious administrative misdemeanors supposedly committed by Glusberg as director of the museum, it made it impossible for the once all powerful director to stay on. Jorge Glusberg has finally resigned as director of the MNBA.

This resignation is the result of a formal official auspicious development in Argentine cultural matters that has nothing to do with some of the rather noisy, confusing and self promoting events in which a few artists took active part.

Great Expectations: Marcelo Pacheco

Buenos Aires Herald. Sunday, June 30, 2002

Great Expectations

By Alina Tortosa

For the Herald

Marcelo Pacheco (1959), the very recently appointed Chief Curator to the Malba, the Museum of Latin American Art that houses the Eduardo Costantini Collection,  a well known art historian and curator, brings with him to his new position a solid background of museum and curatorial practice experience.  A fantastic asset in a country where museum directors appointments have often been political choices rather than professional ones.   He worked at the Museum of Fine Arts of Buenos Aires from 1986 to 1993 in the Archives department and as curator, he has taught at the Colegio Nacional de Buenos Aires, the most prestigious state run secondary school, at the University of Buenos Aires,  and at the Universidad del Cine (B.A).  In 2000 he taught a post graduate seminar on curatorial practices as  guest professor of the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Santiago de Chile.  He has acted as curator and curatorial advisor in shows in Brasil, Spain and the US.  As from 1989 he has taken part in national and international congresses and seminars on art history, art theory and on curatorial practices. As a curator he has staged exhibitions of contemporary and historical art, as an art historian he has written on historical and contemporary artists, as an investigator his specific chosen field is Argentine art of the 1920s.  From 1993 to last week he was director of the Espigas Foundation a private comprehensive archive of the history of Argentine visual arts.  

It is impossible to day for the artistic director of a museum to cope with the day to day administration and manage the curatorial department.  Pacheco explained that the internal management of the Malba is being reshuffled, following contemporary concepts of museum administration.  Ana Goldman is in charge of management,  Tomás Vengerow is at the head of  human resources, and Carlos Galtieri will start next week as head of the funding department.  Gualtieri, who arrives from “Vida Silvestre” is an NGO specialist.  Victoria Noorthorn, who was head hunted by the Malba while working in New York,  is the vice curator, under Pacheco. 

Pacheco and his team are currently working on the exhibitions to be held in the second half of 2002 and in the whole of 2003.  On July 4  will open an exhibition of work by the Brazilian artist Lasar Segal, and the several times postponed retrospective of work by Guillermo Kuica is on for next year.  The rest of the calendar will be announced shortly.

A tall, thin, self contained private man, Pacheco is not often seen in public social visual art to dos but is a key figure in any serious cultural art related project.  He has a low-key, aristocratic attitude towards public exposure per se, and was in no hurry to accept positions that did not suit his professional choices.   His name was mentioned on and off in the past as a possible director for the Museum of Fine Arts and for the Museum of Modern Art, but he would not accept job commitments that were not backed by coherent political and administrative policies. As a professional connoisseur of Argentine art he has influenced the buying choices of important collectors.  He is highly political in a quiet manner and at times one has sensed his influence behind certain scenes as a sort of eminence gris.

Pacheco, who is backed, as it reads above, by a solid academic background and a long analytical exposure to the issues that make up the chore of Argentine and Latin American art curatorial concerns, is very well suited for his new position.  He is an articulate and powerful speaker, who can analyse and debate fluently the subjects presented to him, and who speaks out his mind clearly on controversial subjects.  In a long interview with the Herald he discussed his decision to accept this job, the Argentine and Latin American art exposure possibilities under current economic and art political circumstances, and his commitments as Chief Curator of the Malba.

Pacheco sees the Malba as the perfect place to achieve stature and exposure as regional exponent of Argentine and Latin American art exhibitions.   “The concept of a packaged exhibition that has become prevalent during the last 15 years within world wide circuits relates to the power management of the cultural industries”, said Pacheco.  He believes that what Malba has to bear in mind is that this global circuit sets us at the ultimate receiving end of these “first world” tinned proposals that do not enhance our performance.  “I think one has to be intelligent enough to look around and realize how things work, what is the map like, and this is what I think is so exciting about an institution like Malba.  One ought to take into account how Brazil has worked for the last 15 years, how Mexican and Venezuelan institutions function,  how other institutions are beginning to work out, such as the new MAAC in Ecuador, the anthropological and contemporary art museum that will open next October.  Cuba  has construed  an alternative model and format of the traditional biennial that is still one of the more interesting cases to study.” Pacheco suggested that the Cuba Biennial may have influenced the set up of the new Lima Biennial, which opened this year for the second time, with a clear vision of their regional identity.

It is this knowing who we are and working from where we come from that Pacheco sees as the distinctive role of the Malba and of himself as curator.  “The Lima Biennial, as  well as the Cuban Biennial, bring out the way  a good product may compete internationally when it is thought out from its regional potential, from its own strength and not from the totally erroneous and deceitful concept that one may compete in the international (first world) circuit”.

This wanting to belong to a Western world outside Latin America  “has been one of the cultural syndromes that Argentina has dragged since the May Revolution,” adds Pacheco  “I remember when I worked on modernism and the avant-garde of the 1920s, one of the mystifying aspects in Argentine historiography was that it had been designed after imported European models. It was not a question of expansion by the Europeans models, it was an Argentine choice. (..)  It is fabulous how we cannot relate to our real context, but neither can we relate to the other one”.

Later in the conversation Pacheco said that Argentina is afraid to look at herself, so she plays at being somebody else, which is well illustrated in the recurrent looking glasses in the stories by Borges  and in the work by Liliana Porter, an Argentine artist who has lived in New York for 40 years but still illustrates in her work this cultural misunderstanding.   

Pacheco feels that Malba may construe a discourse and start a debate to establish a regional and international identity  through exhibitions, publications and its education department, if it keeps in mind the reality of geographical and historical matters. 

Pacheco´s appointment is a welcome sign that the Malba, and the Argentine visual art museum scene may be coming of age.

Man Ray: An influential modernist

Buenos Aires Herald. Published October 15, 2000.

An influential modernist  

Photographs, litographs and objects by Man Ray at the Centro Cultural Borges.

By Alina Tortosa

Man Ray was well trained in design and the economical use of the material at hand since childhood, as his father, a taylor, worked at home. The bits and pieces, samples and left overs of cloth, where used by the mother, with the aid of the artist and his brother and two sisters to make carriage blankets and kilts. Economy, texture and design were inbred, not appropiated. His first known piece, true enough, was a tapestry made of different samples of cloth. 

As a young adolescent he was exposed to the art shown by Alfred Stieglitz (1864-1946) in his 291 Fifth Avenue gallery. Stieglitz was instrumental in introducing the latest work by talented and avant guard European artists to an attentive and cautious American audience, including photography, as Stieglitz was a talented photographer himself. This experience did not prepare him, however, for the reverberating shock suffered by himself and others on the opening of the famous and notorious Armory Show in 1913. This major exhibition -more than one thousand and six hundred pieces by European and American avant guard artists-,  was a commotion that unsettled the understanding and perception of artists and lay persons to a point of no return.  Man Ray confessed that after the show he did nothing for six months: I took me that time to digest what I had seen.

The Stieglitz influence, the Armory Show, and his reading of Rimbaud and Lautréamont prepared our artist to understand Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968) when he met him in 1915. Their friendship and collaboration lasted for fifty years.  

Man Ray, who had evolved from abstraction to a vaguely cubist style,  became disenchanted with painting. He needed to go beyond the brush and the easel. The airbrush, an instrument used by illustrators to produce a light, even spray of ink or paint, provided the alternative he was looking for.  He enjoyed painting without touching the canvas. It gave him enough physical distance from the support he was working on to make him feel he was engaged in a cerebral activity. The first work, an aerograph, as work done with an airbrush is called, Suicide, 1917, is now in the Menil Collection in Houston. 

Influenced by Marcel Duchamp and Francis Picabia (1879-1953), Man Ray  investigated mechanical devices and the construction of objects. He was also involved with photography and the process of printing it. His photographic portraits of women and of men, of surrealist scenes and motifs and his self portraits have influenced the visual conscience of succeeding generations. He was also involved in film making, engraving, sculpture, illustration, philosophy and in the writing of essays and poetry. 

In 1921 Man Ray went to Paris, where Marcel Duchamp, who had left before him, was awaiting him. He was happy to leave New York, as he felt constrained by an unappreciative audience who did not understand his innovative spirit. He became acquainted with artists and intellectuals and made a living as a photographer, while he pursued his own investigations. Sylvia Beach, owner of Shakespeare and Company, the bookstore and expatriate literary gathering place, referred many of the prestigious British and American novelists to him for photographs. 

He was welcomed by the European Dada movement, together with Duchamp and Picabia, as a member of the small New York Dada group. Later, as Dada fell through and Bréton proclaimed the Surrealist Manifest, he became an independent member of the Surrealist movement as well. Though he would not bind himself to one circle or group, and liked to be able to move from one to the other freely.

When the nazis invaded France he returned to the US via Spain and Portugal. He lived in Hollywood for ten years. Then he returned to Paris, where he felt at home. He died in Paris in 1976.  

Clever, ingenious, mysterious, sadistic, ironic, Man Ray  rebelled in the energy and enthusiasm generated by the creative process, rather than by the action or the object accomplished. His portrait as a modernist artist is untarnished by the critical contemporary appreciation of avant guard totalitarian movements. His was a world without bounderies, open intellectual spaces unfettered by aesthetic limitations or dogmatic dialogues. 

Man Ray, was born in Philadelphia on 27 August 1890, the eldest child of an immigrant Russian Jewish family. It is possible that his iconoclasticism and anarchist leanings stemmed from his Jewish background. Christians were -and mostly are- expected to believe rather than to discuss the Churches teaching, while being Jewish implies generations (of men) discussing the Torah and its interpretation by diverse religious scholars, to a point in which even non religious Jews inherit this passion for dissent and reinterpretation. 

(Man Ray, Centro Cultural Borges, at the Galerias Pacífico.  The work shown in this exhibition belongs to Giorgo Marconi, an Italian collector and a friend of Man Ray. A hundred and forty photographs, fifty litographies and ten objects.) 

Antonio Seguí: A man who knows what he wants

Buenos Aires Herald. Published Sunday, March 25, 2001

A man who knows what he wants

An exhibit of graphic work donated by the artist himself illustrates his deep talent

By Alina Tortosa

Antonio Seguí seems to have had a deep understanding of what he wanted to do as an artist, from the very start of his career. He was born in Córdoba in 1934, were he grasped the essentials of conservative provincial life and the strong family ethos and psychological implications that go with it.  We can read in his work this language of manipulative interrelations, possessiveness and underhand eroticism that is at the root of claustrophobic, close family ties, little given to outside interests. He grasped this, and knew better than to stay put, so that after going to a local art school, he went away in 1951 to study in Madrid and in Paris, to return to Córdoba in 1954.

His first work shown in Buenos Aires in 1961 and 1962 were abstract compositions in thick sensual paint on canvas. In 1962 Seguí exhibited at the Galería Lirolay a series of ironic pieces called La familia de Felicitas Naón, manipulated photographs of an elegant bourgeois lady and her relationship with a lover who eventually murdered her.  That was the time when young enterprising artists in Buenos Aires were arguing the merits of the “new” figurative painting against the older and, by then, conventional abstract art. Seguí did not take an active part in the discussions, nor did he join the group Otra figuración, whose members were the vociferous exponents of the new art. Though he developed a distinct figurative style, he kept apart because he preferred to work on his own, and because he did not partake for the taste for scandal and limelight that the artists of this group enjoyed so much. 

The exhibition of Antonio Seguí’s graphic work held currently at the MAMba –the Museum of Modern Art of the city of Buenos Aires-, his generous donation to this museum, brings out clearly his strong psychological perception of character and environment. This body of work is a reassuring statement on his talent and sense of commitment to a profession and a way of life. From early pieces in 1953- 1954 to 2000, his articulate ability to draw, design, paint and print people and scenes, illustrate his capacity to work in a manner relevant to the time he lives in, spacing, constructing and deconstructing images, creating situations that draw from art history, from political history and from political and cultural contemporary realities.  The result, which may be funny, ironic or sarcastic, is always vital.

The artist moved to France in 1964, keeping in touch with Argentina, always, keeping in mind the essence of ways of being which he discusses again and again in his work. In his best known pieces, paint on canvas of small men of sizes irrelevant to the urban scene about them, who walk up and down and across the scene, he brings out the characteristics of those city male dwellers he knew in his youth, who act and live according to old fashioned structured codes and habits which are the quintessential of the native porteño, arrogant in his indiscriminate knowledge of who he is and of what the world is about, in the wilful belief that life is what he thinks it ought to be. The way Seguí describes body movement and gestures speak of his own psychoanalytical perception, quite unlike the somewhat stubborn character he depicts: the native urban dweller, who cannot see much beyond his own neighbourhood. He has understood and taken in different cultural and artistic influences that have enriched his knowledge of men and of life. He has redefined popular iconography in art, drawing on the vernacular, beyond the American POP. He also plays with international popular cultural icons, such as the film and song, Tea for two, in a series of prints, 1982, in which the polite and stereotyped elements and manners of the original subject have been turned by the artist into rather violent and absurd situations.

In a series of prints for a book by Silvia Barón Supervielle, in which he reproduces scenes from the argentine countryside from a window, there is a strong reminiscence of the feelings stirred by La jalousie, the novel by Alain Robbe-Grillet.

A hard workingman, one feels the energy and the sound academic background that have gone into his work.  Food, love, sex, violent politics, they are all there.  Life has not gone by without this artist taking notice. No ivory tower for him. Unless we believe that intelligence and talent are an ivory tower in themselves.

As usual in this museum, the curartorship by Laura Buccellato, the director, and by Celia Taricco is clear and didactic. There is a well illustrated catalogue with a bland text by Damian Bayon, the late argentine art historian and poet who lived in Paris for many years, written for Puerto Rico in 1993. It is a pity that a better analytical text was not written to go with this very interesting show.

I recommend the guided visits by Jorge Zerda from Tuesday to Sunday at 5 p.m., except on Thursdays, when Zerda is to be found in the mornings. 

(Antonio Seguí, MAMba – Museo de Arte Moderno de la Ciudad de Buenos Aires-, on San Juan 350. The closing date is in May; there is no definite date yet).

Luis Seone: Artistic and political vocations hand in hand

Artistic and political vocations hand in hand

A man who used every medium he could to further the causes he believed in

By Alina Tortosa

For the Herald

Luis Seoane was born in Buenos Aires in 1910, the son of Galician immigrants.  In 1919 the family went back to Spain, where he went to school and graduated as a lawyer in Santiago de Compostela. He took an active part in the Federación Universitaria Escolar in leading roles, while he worked at his art and exhibited drawings and paintings. His artistic and his political vocations went hand in hand, aiding and abetting each other, in a rich personal and professional life, in which he took advantage of every means and media available to support and further the causes he believed in. The question of identity, always at the heart of issues related to people who are born astride different cultures, was not a deterrent, on the contrary, it seems to have given extra strength to his endeavours as a man with social and political preoccupations and as an artist. He returned to Buenos Aires in 1936 to avoid the Spanish Civil War -I imagine he felt that neither side represented the basic needs of his beloved Galicia.   So far, I have not found a comment on the subject-. In 1971 he returned to Spain, where he lived till he died in La Coruña on April 5, 1979.

His first known pieces are drawings described as some illustrative, others satirical, critical and political, by Valeriano Bozal, the curator of the exhibition of Seoane’s work currently on show at the MAMba -Museo de Arte Moderno de la Ciudad de Buenos Aires-. These drawings do not foretell what was to come, neither do his first paintings, obviously the work of somebody in the process of learning how to. 

The lines in his drawings developed into lyrical and playful representations, social in essence -Bozal, again- but free from the restraining influence of propaganda art. Later on his drawings would describe with affection the women and men of his native Galicia as immigrants aboard a ship, or sitting in pensive or restful attitudes, or lounging naked. The nudes and some portraits have a strong influence of Picasso, and, at least one of the portraits, of Soutine.

His first paintings were figurative in earthy, brownish hues, far away  from the bold and colourful planes, drawn within black lines or cernes, as the French call them, which represent his achievement as an artist.    These later paintings are the axis in which the Romanesque experience of his native Galicia, his Celtic inheritance, his stalwart peasant background, his knowledge and appreciation of modernist developments join to celebrate with robust energy a meaningful past and an auspicious present. His human figures acquired serenity, a being there quietly and gracefully that denotes strength. Women as stable, worthy representatives of the community are the subject of many of his figure portraits.  

Luis Seone’s work includes ceramics, printing, scenography and murals as well. An impressive collection of his prints is owned by the MAMba, and on show in “Perpectivas”, the room on the first floor. As a printer he worked on wood, linoleum, metal and stone, he also engaged in serigraphy and stencil. He did not think that the technique chosen defined the work of an artist; he believed the artist ought to redefine techniques, if necessary, to suit his purpose. An old dilemma with traditional print makers, who tend to become too engrossed in the technical aspects of their work, leaving little or no margin for creativity. 

His mural work can be seen at the Teatro San Martín, at the Galería Larreta on Florida Street, Esmeralda 561 and at the Galería Santa Fé, on Santa Fé Av. 1600. To illustrate the scenes he wanted to depict on a wall, which he treated as a huge canvass, he used stone, marble, iron, bronze, ceramics, glass, mosaic and chemical paint.  He enjoyed this representation in public places as it gave him a feeling of sharing his art with the passer by who would not normally have access to his painted work.  

Publishing, graphic work and writing were also an important part of his agenda. 

A very well curated show that should not be missed. An enjoyable outing that will whet the appetite for more knowledge on this community conscious and versatile artist.  

Two very interested catalogues were published for the occasion. One, by the MAMba, with careful reproductions of paintings, prints, murals and ceramics in argentine collections. A larger and more comprehensive catalogue  was printed by the Xunta de Galicia for this show that started out at the Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea de Santiago de Compostela last December, is on now in Buenos Aires till August 20, and will move on to the Museo Provincial de Bellas Artes Emilio Caraffa de la Ciudad de Córdoba -October and November 2000.

Buenos Aires Herald. Published Sunday, April 6, 2003

Art On Sunday

Jorge Gumier Maier is back at the Rojas

By Alina Tortosa

For the Herald

On April 2 the art gallery of the Centro Cultural Rojas de la Universidad de Buenos opened its season with work by Alfredo Battistelli, once more under Jorge Gumier Maier.  

Gumier Maier, artist and curator, is definitely one of the best-known personalities in the local visual art scene. His decorative abstract figures and his own perception of art were central in the 1990s to open a mental and physical space to work that had never reached exhibition venues, other artists, the public, or the press, specialized or otherwise. 

In 1989, following Daniel Molina’s suggestion, the Centro Cultural Rojas de la Universidad de Buenos agreed to devote exhibition space to the visual arts.  Molina went further and said that he knew of an artist who could fill the role of curator. So it came about that Gumier Maier, who had never thought of himself as a curator, organized from scratch visual art shows that made history in what was then a corridor. How did he do this? Did he set out with definite ideas of what he wanted to achieve? No, he said he had no plans, no theories. He looked around to see what interested him that was not been shown elsewhere. He saw young artists working in isolation in ways that were not taken into account by anybody else.

He chose work that was mostly decorative, which then was a bad word in the local art world. Not to him. Gumier Maier reminded the Herald that decoration is at the very origin of man’s creative impulses, since art history begins with paintings in prehistoric caves and with the design of basic containers for domestic use.  He was concerned with work that celebrated domestic rituals as well as the identity of those artists involved. Soon people in the contemporary art world, particularly young people, spoke of “el Rojas” as an exhibition venue to take into account.

There was not much else going on then for the very young crowd except the gallery at the ICI, then Instituto de Cultura Iberoamericano – now the Centro Cultural de España - that had opened a year before under Laura Buccellato, currently the director of the Museum of Modern Art.   She was the contemporary curator by excellence then, the one and only, with a very clear-cut vision of the use of space.  Gumier Maier says that though they had different aims conceptually, he went to her shows to study her style, neat and perfunctory. By 1996, when his curatorship ended, he had helped to establish new parameters, created a convivial atmosphere that brought together young artists who had worked in isolation before, and he himself had become a legend.  A controversial legend, since much of the work he showed was considered too decorative by some curators and art critics.  Discussions issued on “light art”, and on the fact that a few of the artists he launched were gay. In practice, less than ten per cent -which is the given average in current society- of the artists shown were gay, but the fact that gay work had not been acknowledged openly before put the Rojas into the lime light and their acknowledgement was understood as a powerful statement.

In 2003 things have changed in the local art world. Quite a few art spaces, opened in the last three years, show very young work. Young artists are therefore well taken care of, some of them are even represented by prestigious galleries.  The schedule for this season is to work with artists from other provinces that have not shown in Buenos Aires.

The grand news is the University bought the house next door, so by late Spring the Rojas visual art premises will be three times larger and specifically designed as an art exhibition space. “It won’t be the Malba”, Gumier Maier says guardedly, but one can sense the pride in his tone.

As an artist Gumier Maier has exhibited extensively in Argentina and abroad. Though his work has changed throughout time –indented and meandering wooden structures that work as wall pieces, mostly in pastel shades-, it is always easily recognizable as his.  He has never shown his own work at the Rojas under his own curartorship, careful to keep his two activities apart to comply with his ethical principles. He has taught in the Buenos Aires, Tucumán, Rosario, del Sur (Bahía Blanca), and Cuyo Universities. He has been awarded the Konex Prize in 2002, the Fondo Nacional de las Artes Prize to career performance in 2001, and the Otium Ecology Prize in 1993.

The visual art community at large is focusing on this new period at the Rojas and looking forward to what our artist cum curator cum professor will propose.

Federico Klemm

Buenos Aires Herald. Sunday, December 1, 2002   

Federico Klemm

By Alina Tortosa

For the Herald

Federico Klemm, (1942, Checoslovakia), died last Wednesday, November 27, at 2 pm after a long bout of pneumonia.  Well known as an artist, who was not about promoting himself shamelessly,  he was also known as the director of his art gallery, the Federico Jorge Klemm Foundation, as a generous art collector, who shared his cherished acquisitions with the public that went to his art gallery, through the yearly Klemm Prize, and through his extraordinary cable art program: El banquete telemático.  Mr. Klemm’s  profile veered from the lovable to the ridiculous. He was an ultra extravagant, media character, larger than life itself, as well as a quiet and discreet benefactor of artists in need. 

His work as a figurative artist was strongly influenced by his profound love for his mother. Imbued with mystical feelings for her and of himself, and with an overwhelming sense of the theatrical, he painted several large compositions, esoteric representations of both of them, himself as Christ and the small blonde woman as the mother of God, reigning supreme. These paintings proclaimed gorgeously and proudly his Freudian attachment to her. He was influenced as well by his rampant homosexuality, his love for the human body, for physical pleasure and for the lyrical aesthetics that drove him to redesign his own image in several guises.

His sumptuous birthday party dinners at the Alvear Hotel were legendary glamorous evenings on which Klemm let his imagination lose, as much of a performance as any art event. 

The Federico Jorge Klemm Foundation hosts several art shows a year, promoting the work by young and not so young artists,  publishes books, and organizes lectures and seminars.  The Foundation will carry on the work started by its founder.