El Museo de la Calle
Art, Economy and the Paradoxes of Bartering
In past decades, neoliberal policies have produced a strong impact in the art world, as artists and exhibitions worldwide have reflected on a shifting economic environment. This has been characterized by flexible post-Fordist management methods, the deregulation and decentralization of markets and labour, and the integration of financial markets. Exhibitions such as Services: The Conditions and Relations of Service Provision in Contemporary Project-Oriented Artistic Practice (1994), Exchange-Transform (2002) or Trade Show (2005) and books like What We Want is Free: Generosity and Exchange in Recent Art (Purves 2005) reveal how artists and curators tackle the new relationships between art and the economy by looking at cultural industries, art funding, intellectual property, service economies and fictional corporations.1 Either presenting a critique or proposing alternatives, these initiatives were mainly structured around the concepts of generosity, barter and gift.2 Within this framework, this chapter examines El Museo de la Calle (The Museum of the Street), a project that addressed these alternative modes of exchange by starting a process of bartering in 1998 that evolved in unexpected ways until its end in 2001. This project, as we will see, stands at a crossroads between art, anthropology and economy, if read through the concept of transvaluation, as developed by Arjun Appadurai.
El Museo de la Calle was an artistic project set up by Colectivo Cambalache [Barter Collective] that took place primarily in Bogotá, but also travelled to other cities around the world. The project consisted of a pushcart, which was steered by the artists through the streets and served as a site for bartering. The cart and the act of exchange constituted the basis for an ever-changing museum that mimicked, sabotaged and questioned both the circulation of commodities and the stability of the museum institution. Originally conceived of as an intervention in public space, the work represented the unstoppable circulation of goods that characterizes the streets of Bogotá, while its continuous movement contradicted and resisted any kind of conservative museological impulse. However, the artists’ original aims encountered significant criticism; charges ranged from the aestheticization of poverty to the instrumentalization of the Other and the neutralization of his/her potentialities in the exhibition space.
Colectivo Cambalache was part of the changing artistic scene that emerged in Colombia at the beginning of the 1990s. At this time, there was a generational takeover in which artists extended their practice, incorporating new issues, media and processes and thus going beyond established canons of modernist painting and sculpture (Fernández 2007; Arcos Palma 2007). According to Carlos Arturo Fernández and Ricardo Arcos Palma, these contemporary artistic languages were already present in the Colombian context, but this new generation of artists was the one which finally abandoned an exhausted modern vocabulary. The international reception of peripheral artists produced by globalization accelerated this diversification. Changes in medium included an expanded use of performance and installation while, in relation to the work’s content, Colombian artists began to look closely at the national socio-political and economic situation.3 There was a specific interest in investigating the country’s conflicted politics and the transformation of its urban environments. Common themes included violence, drugs, migration and displacement (Rojas-Sotelo 2010; Bernal et al. 2007). However, participative artistic practices invoking, examining and producing a sense of community did not develop fully until the end of the decade.
Colectivo Cambalache originated at the University of Los Andes (Bogotá) in 1998, under the impulse of Raimond Chaves and Federico Guzmán, together with a group of young artists, namely Carolina Caycedo, Luisa Clavijo and Adriana García Galán. Colombian-Spanish artist Raimond Chaves spent much of the 1990s in Barcelona, working on drawings, wall installations, posters, archival material, collective projects and workshops that re-interpreted traditional genres and concepts, such as cartography, landscape and portraiture.4 In 1998, he was lecturing at the University of Los Andes and already introducing young artists to collaborative practices (Roca 2003). In the course of that year, Chaves invited Spanish artist Federico Guzmán to give a seminar in Bogotá. Guzmán’s art practice has been based, since the late 1980s, in collective work, public space and pedagogy. Using art as a tool for knowledge, encounter and social transformation, his works construct ‘open’ monuments and copyright-free zones, critically investigating intellectual property through appropriation. Guzman’s seminar at the University of Los Andes was entitled Promote your Everyday Life and it sought to start a conversation that would take students beyond the university classroom (Iregui 2002).
Guzmán’s first project with the students was to play Parchís, a popular board game in Latin America, in public spaces including street pavements, train platforms and shopping centres. Through the observation of people’s reactions, the experiment revealed a high degree of control, surveillance and economic stratification at work in public space. Indeed, on more than one occasion, the students were chased by the police and had their game confiscated (Guzmán 2007). This led the group to move into a less controlled part of the city, called El Cartucho. In those years, this barrio (neighbourhood), located near the city centre and the presidential palace, was one of Bogotá’s most dangerous places, due to drug use and trafficking. In the late nineteenth century, the neighbourhood had been a wealthy residential area, inhabited by Bogotá‘s middle classes. In the 1950s, however, the area started to change, first with the establishment of jewellery shops and the settlement of immigrants and then, from the 1970s onwards, with the progressive encroachment of drugs causing middle class residents to leave (Góngora and Suárez 2008, 107–138). The steep reduction in drug prices attracted a growing number of users, resulting in the degradation of the whole district. Ruined streets and houses were populated by petty thieves, sex workers, underage dealers and corrupt police, along with clerics of all religions trying to the help the impoverished population. An artist working in the area, Rolf Abderhalden Cortés, characterized El Cartucho through Giorgio Agamben’s concept of ‘state of exception’, a site with its own laws, existing outside of the juridical order and ‘under the blind gaze of the State’ (Cortés 2006).5 In 1998, Bogotá’s mayor decided to demolish the neighbourhood and turn it into the gigantic Third Millennium Park (Parque del Tercer Milenio). This programme of urban regeneration involved house demolition and the eviction of working class residents. It was this situation that convinced Colectivo Cambalache to start working in the neighbourhood (Caycedo, pers. comm. 2010).
The collective’s first project in El Cartucho was to set up a three-day free hairdressing salon called A toda mecha (Quick Cut) at the UASI (Unidad de Atención en Salud a Indigentes [Healthcare Service for the Destitute]), which they ironically called a ‘beauty salon’. The aim of the project was to introduce themselves to the neighbourhood, hear people’s stories through ‘hair salon conversations’ and learn how the barrio was organized.6 A few days later, at the suggestion of Luisa Clavijo and Adriana García Galán, El Museo de la Calle was established, seeking to organize a big barter and giveaway in the streets for the exchange of all kinds of artefacts. The idea was to reflect on the everyday social dynamics and economic practices of El Cartucho (see Figures 39 and 40). Due to the different kind of economic transactions, both legal and illegal, that took place in the barrio, the area was open to the existence of a talented and skilful alternative economy, especially of the type commonly called ‘economía del rebusque’ [economics of rummaging], whereby informal recyclers or waste pickers earn their living by collecting, sorting and selling materials such as cardboard, paper, glass or metal. Numerous and very active, these recyclers belong to the most marginalized sectors of the population.
The collective decided to mimic the recycler’s mode of action by building a pushcart named El Veloz [The Fast One], embellished with red felt and a set of drawers (see Figure 41).7 The artists then brought together various artefacts from friends and family, including clothing, toys and home appliances that were to be bartered in El Cartucho for other objects brought by anyone interested in an exchange. Since no money was involved in the interaction, a different, mainly functional or sentimental, system of value was set in motion.8 With the exchanged objects, the collective set up an ephemeral and portable museum called El Museo de la Calle [The Museum of the Street] whose collection was subject to constant change and reconstruction and hence echoed the way in which the neighbourhood was experienced daily by its inhabitants. As a collection of ‘material culture’, a sort of portrait of El Cartucho, the museum had a representative dimension, which was enriched by the use of exchange as a mechanism for inviting the ‘public’ to participate. Therefore, the museum could be understood as a paradoxical combination of indexical objects/documents (speaking indirectly from and for the barrio’s inhabitants while avoiding relaying a static or essentialized self-portrait) and a performative core (expressing the human, social and economic relations of a particular space, including its rules, languages and clothing) (Colectivo Cambalache 2007) (see Figures 42 and 43). For a year and a half, once a week, the collective brought El Museo de la Calle to El Cartucho. The project’s extended temporality allowed for a regular audience to build up and compensated for its ephemerality and continuous mobility. The artists also visited other neighbourhoods so that the items they had obtained in El Cartucho were spread around the city. Since ‘cartucho’ is the name of a flower growing in the area, this dissemination of local objects outside their place of origin could be read as a sort of pollination, a political gesture allowing artists to plant cartucho seeds throughout the city (Caycedo pers comm 2010).
The tension between the fixity of the making of a ‘collection’ and the circulation of its objects introduced an oscillation between the museum’s material practices and its symbolic value. El Museo de la Calle brought into the streets items that still had a modicum of usability while taking away or keeping apparently useless objects. In a street context, however, the latter gained meaning, becoming telling documents of how that space was inhabited. El Museo de la Calle tried to grasp both a material culture that could eventually represent not only El Cartucho but also Bogotá, and work practices that accompanied this material expressivity. In this way, the project and its homemade museography could be understood as a contemporary interpretation of an ethnographic museum whose very architecture embodies this intentionality. When the museum started to grow, the collective began to classify the objects according to categories: jewellery, toys, books, clothes, radios, pieces of wire and so on. According to Caycedo, a broad range of objects entered and left the circuit, including objects related to the specific subculture of the criminal and drug scene, such as handmade guns and crack pipes. Caycedo highlights the handcrafted creativity of some of these objects, which could be considered quasi-sculptures, customized as they were by the user’s personal taste.
The cart’s drawers served to catalogue objects, as in a store, but also suggested the custody mission of a museum. In fact, El Museo contained a smaller museum within itself: a box holding objects that were not bartered. Some were notably dangerous, such as guns or pipes for smoking crack. In this case, the logic of removal was ethical as well as legal, highlighting the taboo position occupied by these objects. They spoke of social restrictions that contradicted the actual economic flows characteristic of the neighbourhood. By hiding them, the artists both represented the neighbourhood’s ‘ecosystem’ and offered an ethical point of view which endorsed the place’s potential for transformation. Interestingly, when El Museo was circulating in the streets, these dangerous objects were kept apart, whereas when, later on, the project was exhibited in art centres and museums, they were displayed in a glass vitrine. Other objects were kept because of their sentimental value, their representation of the affective bonds between people. Finally, some objects, such as poems, were reserved because they were gifts to the museum, a condition which invalidated the bartering rationale.9
From the Aesthetics of Hunger to the Aestheticization of Poverty
In 1999, El Museo de la Calle travelled to several cities, inscribing its practice into the art circuit. In that year, it was shown in the 3rd Bienal de Venecia, organized by Franklin Aguirre in the neighbourhood of Venecia in South Bogotá. In 2000, it travelled to the Modern Gallery of Ljubljana in Slovenia for the show Worthless (Invaluable): The Concept of Value in Contemporary Art and, in 2001, it participated in the exhibition Da adversidade vivemos [We Thrive on Adversity] at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, both organized by the Argentine curator Carlos Basualdo (2000b and 2002) (see Figure 44). In 2000, the show looked at the question of the value of artworks and presented work by some 40 artists and collectives from various periods of the twentieth century and from different parts of the world.10 The exhibition in 2001, which took its title from a work by Brazilian artist Hélio Oiticica, presented Latin American artists of different generations and dealt with the relationship between artistic practice and the South American social context (Arcos-Palma 2001).11 For Basualdo, these shows reflected a specifically leftist political consciousness in Latin American art, which he continued to explore in The Structure of Survival at the 2003 Venice Biennale.12 These shows indicate the dominant ways in which El Museo de la Calle has been read: firstly, in relation to a wider economic environment and, secondly, in relation to the idea that (all) Latin American art is politically loaded.
Following a long tradition in Latin American art and cinema, both discourses intersect with the debate about poverty, art and the spectacularization of deprivation. An exhibition at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (2001), which ran concurrently to Da adversidade vivemos and was curated by Carlos Basualdo and Octavio Zaya, rescued another related expression from the 1960s: a estética da fome [the aesthetics of hunger] as first discussed by Brazilian filmmaker Glauber Rocha in 1965.13 Rocha’s manifesto stated that ‘our originality is our hunger’, a political reworking of Oswald de Andrade’s concept of antropofagia, which played on the idea of a Western or Westernized ‘digestive cinema’ (Andrade 1928 and Rocha 1965). Rocha wanted to abandon a discourse of poverty based on denunciation and victimization, which he deemed too connected to ‘developmentalist’ politics searching to accelerate the pace of modernization at any cost, and instead imbue hunger and misery with an affirmative, political meaning.
Statements by other contemporaneous Brazilian artists, especially Hélio Oiticica and Artur Barrio, were no less politicized (Aznar and Iñigo 2006). Barrio’s 1969 text Estética del Tercer Mundo [Third World Aesthetics] advocated for a place of enunciation able to speak from/of the economic underdevelopment in Latin America, and proposed working with ephemeral, precarious and cheap materials in order to reflect upon the economic inscription of art production. Paulo Herkenhoff observes that Barrio radicalized the paradox between productive and non-productive labour in relation to artworks and the market, asking how artists could produce use value from an art made of waste (2001, 70). In this context the ‘povera’ of Arte Povera became radically politicized and the notion of ‘dematerialization’ designated lack instead of subtraction (Ramírez 1999, 53–73). For artists who during the 1960s and 1970s pursued economic independence and social justice with a shared spirit of Panamericanism, hunger provided a metaphor to give an active sense to suffering and even bestow upon it the feeling of desire (a desire also directed towards the advent of a social revolution). Influenced by Frantz Fanon, the aesthetics of hunger was intimately linked to an aesthetics of violence. The ‘anarchic unconscious’, as Ivana Bentes describes it, was a destabilizing force that could be reversed into a revolutionary one (2001, 47–64).
In the aftermath of various Latin American armed conflicts in the 1960s and 1970s, however, the Reina Sofía Museum exhibition seemed to reflect on how the option of violence had vanished from artistic discourses. Instead, the pervasive violence generated by dictatorships, guerrilla warfare, counter-terrorism and drug cartels had been transformed from a means of action into a recurring artistic theme, identifying and stereotyping the Latin American imaginary. In this sense, the aesthetics of hunger, cleansed of its politically violent side and transformed into an aesthetics of poverty, became an unexpected signifier of resistance to neoliberal economic policies in the 1990s. Furthermore, the political aspect of an anarchic unconscious of deprivation had been turned into a romanticized expression of informal economies in the artistic realm, one that has been readily swallowed by Western art institutions, markets and discourses.
The relationship between these informal modes of economic production and distribution and El Museo de la Calle has been addressed by several critics, including Catalina Lozano and Michèle Faguet. In her text ‘Recycling Bogotá’, Lozano uses Félix Guattari’s notion of ecology to understand recycling as an itinerant, multiple and molecular economic process that is not opposed to capitalist society, but fully participates in it (Lozano 2005). In her view, recycling is not only an economic practice, but also a form of social organization that ‘allows for the emergence of new physical or/and subjective spaces of co-belonging which call into being a revolutionary potential’.14 Recycling is not only a way of living, but also an ‘expression of life’. Its ‘expressiveness’ can be marked out in the collection of objects that the recyclers deal with. For Lozano, creativity is related to Do It Yourself (DIY), the crafty and random transformation of matter and the city, and redefined as both the ‘production of a collective inter-subjectivity which constitutes the creative emergence of a community’ and a channel of empowerment (Lozano 2005). She understands creativity as the creation of difference and explores the political potential of this differentiation, affirming that these ‘tactics of survival, creative and precarious’ come about ‘without mediation’. A similar celebration of adversity as a creativity trigger – an aesthetization of precariousness – is present in Basualdo’s projects, as Anna Dezeuze argues (2006).15
Lozano (2005) states that, as curator and critic, she is not interested ‘in some kind of politically committed art’ and circumvents several questions that usually arise in relation to political art, such as effectiveness and the artists’ instrumentalization of others. Instead, she relies on the automatic potency of words, such as communality and co-belonging, which she connects uncritically to this artistic project. However, recyclers are determined by a logic of subsistence on a day-to-day basis, with no social rights, working in the open air, using physical strength and dealing with waste. It is a socially stigmatized activity that takes place in an already stigmatized neighbourhood. It is certainly a creative adaptation to an existent reality but it is precisely the reality that produces these modes of ‘making a living’ that must be questioned. With the increase of globalization, informality has tended to accelerate, to the extent of becoming a topos of its own (García Canclini 2006, 17–25). An informal economy not only produces but also reproduces outsider ways of considering labour and of determining subjectivities and social alliances. Parallel to the labour of recycling in Latin America cities, and counter to what Lozano states, El Museo de la Calle does not create any kind of communality and the discursive edulcoration of these practices does not produce social or political agency.
Michèle Faguet, by contrast, in ‘Je est un autre: la estetización de la miseria’ [Je est un autre: aestheticizing misery], questions this valorization of alterity as a subversive element (2008, 69). She references Hal Foster’s essay ‘The artist as ethnographer’ (1996) and Joshua Decter’s use of the concepts of ‘slumming’ and ‘schmoozing’ (1996) to question contemporary artists’ ‘ethnographic mapping’ of the Other.16 In this article, she argues that ‘slumming is highly problematic because it too is all about empowering oneself but through the dis-empowering of another while pretending to do the exact opposite’ (Faguet 2008, 69). She focuses on the consumption of images of marginality by First World audiences and connects this phenomenon to the notion of ‘pornomiseria’ [poverty porn], a concept that comes from the Colombian film industry in the 1970s (Faguet 2009).17 Furthermore, Faguet is highly critical of an ethnographic position that is not only complicit with the structures of domination, but which especially benefits artists. In her view, ‘slumming in Colombia is a useful method of schmoozing internationally’ (Faguet 2008, 69). Furthermore, she mentions that Colectivo Cambalache was invited to ‘quite high profile exhibitions in Europe, most notably Carlos Basualdo’s From Adversity We Live, a sort of who’s who of rising young Latin American art stars’ (Faguet 2010, emphasis in original).
While Faguet concentrates her critique on the representation of poverty in art, she pays no attention to informal creativity, which I believe is at the core of the First World’s current fascination with art from impoverished regions. It must be said that El Museo de la Calle was not trying to speak on behalf of the recyclers or attempting to empower them. The collective’s intention was not to represent a situation, but rather to create one. Their main tactic was the mimicry and appropriation of a practice that was itself already ‘appropriative’ of leftovers. El Museo de la Calle’s strategy of bartering can best be seen as a counter-appropriative technique. Instead of subtracting objects to reframe them in the art world, Colectivo Cambalache inserted new objects into the economic scene. This new factor altered the usual nature of recycling (dealing with waste) and introduced fairly usable middle class objects whose price was not to be measured in money but by the buyer’s personal choice. It also subverted the nature of bartering as the value commensurability was distorted. The original providers of the exchanged commodities (family, friends) were not given anything in return: ‘We collected from our family and friends and a lot of things were brought in. Clothing, toys and home appliances were given away for anything useful or useless that people wanted to give in exchange’ (Basualdo 2000a, 88–91). The process was in fact a hybrid of bartering and recycling.
Barter can be defined as an exchange without money, which is also characterized by a reduction of transaction costs. Moreover, by being relatively impersonal in relation to the gift, the gesture implies a larger degree of reciprocity and sociability. Even if barter functions without actual money, it, as any other commodity exchange, involves a calculative dimension, since the value of the exchanged goods is less an inherent property of the objects than a judgement made about them by subjects. Therefore, following Arjun Appadurai’s study on commodities and the politics of value, we can say that it is economic exchange that creates value. That is to say, value does not precede economic exchange (Appadurai 1986, 3–64). For that reason, Appadurai understands the exchange of commodities as a situation where exchange takes place in a framework conditioned by standards of set criteria (symbolic, classificatory and moral) that define the exchangeability of things in particular social and historical contexts. It is this exchangeability which ensures that objects can eventually move in and out of their commodity status. In El Museo de la Calle, bartering did not pursue monetary equivalence but involved respect, consent and legitimacy, so that the collective could stay in the community without problems. From the Colectivo’s point of view, it was sociability that was at stake in the process of exchange. In this sense, the museum could be considered also as an exchange of gifts, since not only pure economic exchange, but also social protocols necessarily inhered therein.18
Collecting, Representing: Paths and Diversions
Colectivo Cambalache played two different roles in El Museo de la Calle: it acted as an intermediary and it produced a ‘museum’. Its first task was related to the provision of the conditions of exchange, to gather commodities and make them accessible. Moreover, as a commodity exchange situation, El Museo conflated two different regimes of value, the lucrative and the artistic, proper to the same object in relation to its location in the market or in the museum respectively. Arjun Appadurai asserts that in order to fully understand the exchange of commodities, we need to rethink the relationship between the paths and diversions that characterize the circulation of objects. For him, following the anthropologist Nancy Munn, paths are defined by the laws of supply and demand, which organize socially regulated paths for the flow of commodities. In parallel, objects can be diverted from culturally conventionalized paths and these diversions can also become institutionalized. Diversions serve different purposes. They can be used, for instance, to open new paths of exchange. They also operate to remove or protect objects and place them beyond a demarcated zone of commodification. This process of decommodification is known as transvaluation. Appadurai points out that this type of transvaluation is typical of aesthetic objects and ‘sacra’ (1986, 3–64). For transvalued objects, the commodity phase is ideally brief and its movement restricted as these objects are not ‘priced’ in the way other things might be.
El Museo thus played two contrasting roles: the path (opening the flux) and the diversion (collecting the objects), an economic model and an aesthetic one, revealing their interdependency while, at the same time, disrupting or sabotaging both. Value was not only linked to the supply and demand logic operating on the streets, it also underwent a transformation, a transvaluation during which objects were ‘museified’ and removed from this logic. Being at the same time a museum, a storefront, and an exhibition, its condition was basically situational and unstable. Placed in a double bind (between co-optation and romanticization), El Museo was burdened with its own contradictions, reaching a final step of self-sabotage. Back in Colombia, it was presented for the last time at the Museo de la Universidad Nacional (October 2000) before fading in the economic flux. Empty of its goods, the recycling cart was returned to the neighbourhood in a free raffle, shortly before El Cartucho disappeared to make space for the Third Millennium Park.
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