Margarita’s tea party

Margarita advised her friends

and Judy’s

to be available for tea

on May 17

it was she said

Judy’s birthday

and so it went

quite a few women

met in Pueblo Eden

for a dancing class

and tea at a long table

covered with delightful pastry

provided by the hostess

and by her guests

teapots with tea leaves

rather than tea bags

no small issue

the celebration went deeper

beyond the table

when asked what present

was appropriate for Judy

Margarita had suggested a towel

and so it went

Judy was asked to sit down

in the living room

to receive her presents

a towel from each woman

different colours

elegantly wrapped

after the fourth towel

Judy smiled roguishly

realizing the gifts

posed an enigma

they did

the towels were meant

for Judy to donate

to a home to be opened

in San Carlos

for women who suffer

domestic violence

Judy was delighted

so were we all

twenty and some guests

it was once more Margarita

planning ahead for others.

Liliana Porter: Wrinkle, wrinkle, little star

Buenos Aires Herald                                                              Sunday, November 23, 2003

On Sunday    

l                

By Alina Tortosa

For the Herald

Liliana Porter /Fotografía y Ficción, the show that opened last Tuesday at the Recoleta Cultural Centre in Cronopius, is a powerful statement on what an intelligent artist does with what is at hand.  Her highly poetical and understated work is a power station of contemporary multi disciplinarian aesthetics that works on several layers of perception: visual, literary, psychological, aesthetic and intellectual, far from your trodden conventional political correctness.

Porter (1941, Buenos Aires), a gifted draughtsman from childhood, attended the Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes from the age of 12 in Buenos Aires, and in 1958 traveled to Mexico to attend the Universidad Iberoamericana, where she became intensely involved with print techniques.  In 1964 she arrived in New York for what she had planned as a short stay, but quickly came to terms with how much the city could afford her in terms of material and aesthetic opportunities and stayed on.  Grasping the current contemporary mood, she realized that her expressionist and ultra elaborate technical background were excessive and cumbersome. So she went back to basics starting with what was closest at hand: a sheet of white paper.

If a rose by any other name smells the same, in Wrinkle/Arruga, 1968, a sheet of white paper treated as medium for a work of art is still to a point a sheet of white paper, and yet in the progressive treatment of a crease on it Porter created an elliptical and substantial essay on meaning and matter.  The original sheet of paper, support or medium became a rite of passage from elaborate technique and expression to intuition, and from description to suggestion, beyond anything the artist had done before.

A nail, the shadow of a nail, a piece of string in Nail, 1972, or a hand pointing to a line in The line, 1973, are minimal metaphors on content and technique, on an elusive representation of a pragmatic reality, backed by what runs all through the show, a highly developed sense of humour linked to a poetical vision of the world at large.

In The Square, the 1973 series, the artist has drawn in pencil a square on its own, or this same square over the finger or fingers, or on the palm of the hand. She is introducing us into a virtual reality in the same way a writer uses words to tell a story or write a poem. Porter “wrote” square for us to read it.  In Untitled, the 1973 series, a hand holds a geometrical volume in one hand, while the lines of this same object are outlined on the other hand.  These sensual representations illustrate the gap as well as the link between the physical perception of reality and the knowledge of this perception.  We know that we know how it feels though we are not touching it.

Porter works tongue in cheek, playing games with herself and with us, her audience.  Porter’s Picasso was prompted by her desire to put her finger under the master’s drawing.  So she drew her own Picasso to be able to put her finger under the drawing by running a line in pencil over it.  This intention of turning the world into her playground explains much of her work. 

She takes images from literature, popular culture, politics, the bric-a-brac of daily life, draws them or sticks them on a canvas or on a sheet of paper, stands them on a shelf, draws lines to and from them, stands them next to or against totally irrelevant figures to create rare and awkward meetings. We see how they look into each other’s eyes in a pensive mood establishing what we imagine are unusual dialogues.   What does Pinocchio say to the man in a dark suit and hat? Or the man in a suit and hat to the chicken? A rather dark skinned Che looks up into the sky from a canvas while a rabbit looks at him from outside the canvas.

Is it the spirit of Alice in Wonderland running amok that sets up these impossible meetings and describes a reality beyond the real world we know? Porter has chosen to translate illusion into a visual scenario, playing games of hide and seek, of exquisite vitality to illustrate her perception of culture and of contemporary life.

Two films by Porter: “For You” and “Drum Solo” are shown in the context of this retrospective in two small rooms off the main exhibition premises.   The “action” into which the endearing inanimate characters are drawn illustrates the dramatic content of much of Porter’s work. It is in these films that we grasp the anguish and despair that is not that obvious in her visual art. In a sort of staccato mood the defenseless small toy figures lose their heads, they are ludicrously overfed to the point of engorgement or jump into an abyss.

Inés Katzenstein, the curator of this exhibition, looked conscientiously into Porter’s archives and body of work to design the show. Her conclusion was that what underlined the whole of her production was the use of photography, a medium Porter first used to record her work in other media and then developed into a discipline per se.

A well-illustrated catalogue published by the Centro Cultural Recoleta together with Malba/Colección Constantini is an updated textual story that runs through the whole of Liliana Porter’s career.  Essays by Inés Katzenstein, Mercedes Mac Donnell, Gabriel Rangel, Ana Tiscornia, Shifra Goldman, Ricardo Martín-Crosa, Miguel Briante, Pedro Cuperman, Florencia Bazzano-Nelson, Mari Carmen Ramírez, Charles Merewhether, Gerardo Mosquera, Gabriel Peluffo and Alberto Martín discuss every aspect of her work.

 (Liliana Porter /Fotografía y Ficción, Centro Cultural Recoleta, Sala Cronopius, Junín 1930. Until February 29).

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.

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. 

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. 

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.