VI.2.6 DIGITAL ARCHIVE 1065640
Peruvian curator, critic, and art historian Gustavo Buntinx delivered “El empoderamiento de lo local” at the symposium Circuitos latinoamericanos/Circuitos internacionales. Interacción, roles y perspectivas, organized by arteBA—Buenos Aires’s contemporary art fair—in May of 2005. Directed explicitly to his Latin American colleagues, Buntinx’s paper challenges them to refocus themselves on the most fundamental purpose of their work, namely on radically reinventing the art of their region. He explains that they will do this only by ceasing to seek the approval of North American “metropolises” and, instead, by developing their own local art scenes. These specific art milieus, he argues, must be committed to the democratic idea of art as integral to the construction of “local” meaning. It is worth noting the breadth of Buntinx’s lecture, which draws on themes such as cultural theory, art history, exhibitions, and linguistic theory. He also develops his argument by drawing on Nelly Richard’s criticism of Multiculturalism [SEE DOCUMENT VI.2.5]; his own research on the formation of the Museum of Modern Art’s (MoMA) collection of Latin American art in 1942 [SEE TEXTS BY ALFRED H. BARR, JR. IN THIS VOLUME, DOCUMENTS III.4.6 AND III.4.7, AS WELL AS WALDO RASMUSSEN’S ACCOUNT OF THE AMASSING OF MOMA’S COLLECTION, DOCUMENT V.1.10,]; Mari Carmen Ramírez’s and Héctor Olea’s exhibition Inverted Utopias at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (2004); and the work of French Post-Structuralist philosopher Jacques Derrida. This is the first English translation and publication of Buntinx’s text [Gustavo Buntinx, “El empoderamiento de lo local,” typescript, 2005].
LET’S NOT BE NAÏVE. AND LET’S NOT BUILD UP OUR HOPES. “Latin America” ended up being a French joke; “Ibero-America,” a [Francisco] Franco-period hyperbole; “Pan America,” a crass gringo term. And the intermittent efforts to establish North–South axes or momentum have often responded to U.S. interests more than to a legitimate need for symbolic exchanges between the United States and everything that stretches out below it (assuming that we accept the current cartographic conventions). I include here the acknowledgements that have come from the various politics of Multiculturalism. As Nelly Richard [SEE DOCUMENT VI.2.5] and others have already pointed out, the risk is that the difference itself be acknowledged, only to be articulated from the seat of power. Just as the periphery tends to be incorporated into the center only in order to be named and reconfigured from there. Just like the sad names they invent for us, which also have the sense of being terms in an inventory: Latin America, Ibero-America, Pan America. . . . These are ideological constructs imposed on the radical complexity of a region where political borders rarely coincide with cultural borders, and both are becoming increasingly fragile and porous.
A meaningful precedent took place in 1942, when only a few weeks after Pearl Harbor, the Museum of Modern Art in New York decided to contribute to the war effort by literally buying the goodwill of the contemporary art world of Latin America. In scarcely more than one single transcontinental trip, it acquired in one fell swoop scores of artworks that it would exhibit one year later as MoMA’s great Latin American collection. On other occasions,1 I have already analyzed some details of that pilgrimage of Lincoln Kirstein through southern lands [on behalf of MoMA], a trip that could be characterized as having enacted the repressed primal scene of the postmodern curatorial trip with which we are all too familiar with by now. The fact that the initial expedition, which was almost an initiation, would also be used for political and war-related espionage is perhaps too characteristic.
Undoubtedly so is the rapid oblivion into which it all fell—including the MoMA Latin American collection—once the exigencies of war were exhausted. It will be interesting to observe over time the whitewashed recovery of that experience sought by exhuming and showing those works in a temporary exhibition along with new Latin American works barely a year ago [2004] at the Museo del Barrio. The venue is revealing in itself and suggests an interesting postscript to the bitter polemic generated by that institution’s change of direction when it abandoned its original founding definition as a Nuyorican museum, [and adopted instead an identity as] a community museum, a museum of the barrio (precisely). It made this change in order to reorganize itself as a transnational Latin American museum in a paradoxical response to the globalizing demands of the metropolis. The subject is complex and requires a review impossible in the brief format of this paper: it suffices for now to point out the contrast between what an institution that is in the process of consolidating itself has already gained and the consequences of what detractors of that process consider “gentrification” (thus taking advantage of the Anglicism). These critics interpret the reorganization [of Museo del Barrio] as putting the local communities of Caribbean origins on hold in favor of more abstract and internationally prestigious notions of what is Latin American: the remote other used to camouflage and disadvantage the other that is too immediate.
Debates like this are also decisive for those of us who speak from the South–South perspective (there is also a South in the North, and vice versa). This is because they finally highlight the only lasting, legitimate galvanization of something we could call the Americas. It would have to rise up beyond the logic of the metropolitan purview whose sights represent a renewed form of Imperialism that has been given the misnomer of [or aptly mislabeled] post-colonial. And in that critical perspective, the decisive factor—in both the short and the long term—would be that it empowers the local. The empowerment I am talking about is not only of local artists, or even of the art itself, strictly speaking; it rather includes the complex net of personal and institutional relationships that constitute the actual experience of art. Artworks and their creators, certainly, but also museums, collections, discourses, publications, archives, markets. . . . Circuits. And above all, especially, necessarily, a critical project.
The development of the support necessary involves the simultaneous construction of at least three components: the consolidation and diversification of nascent markets for contemporary art; the creation of an artistic infrastructure that can be considered our own; and the coordination of artist communities with a critical project that is viable but profoundly committed to the democratic agenda, which is an urgent prospect for the entire continent today.
The democratic agenda is of vital importance. Many of those involved in discussions stirred up by this forum have—that is, we have—participated in different initiatives aimed at the cultural overthrow (sometimes also actual overthrow) of the dictatorships that for two or three decades tried to redefine—in the worst way—the very sense of what it means to be Latin American. Instead, these days almost all of us are involved in the cultural construction of democracy. And this entails the hard work of building a new set of institutions, including institutions in the republics of the arts. There are some very thorny problems. On the one hand, there is the formalization and consolidation of alternatives that originate with individual, utopian actions, such as [Virginia Pérez Ratton’s] TEOR/éTica in Costa Rica or [Ticio Escobar’s] El Museo del Barro in Paraguay, without naming projects in which I myself am involved. But beyond these, there is also the far more arduous and unavoidable mission of making new both state and public art institutions in order to penetrate and transform their ineffective museums and academies, their devastated archives, and their anachronistic schools. In this way, we may contribute to the radical, critical reform of administrations that are so often responsible for the inequities and underdevelopment of our societies today.
In each case, the decisive issue is empowering the local, building structures and relationships that respond to our own symbolic needs, while facilitating an exchange with the cosmopolitan circuits—an exchange not characterized by subordination. The still incipient experience in Buenos Aires is perhaps a useful example because of the almost systemic nature of the different initiatives, including some that work in opposite directions but are ultimately complementary. In recent years, these initiatives have revolutionized Argentina’s art institutions—although in general, they have been introduced through private channels. The simultaneous energies of proposals [in Argentina] such as arteBA, MALBA, the Fundación Espigas, the renewal of cultural centers, new publications, alternative spaces, and moody academic spaces have been implemented in the local art milieu—even at an international level—in ways that are extremely effective. Certainly they are more effective than some million-dollar donation to an institution such as New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, within which some Buenos Aires fortunes anxiously seek to create an isolated, individual space for themselves in the North–North social life.
At this point the subject of productivity arises, a matter that must be seriously tackled. Experiences as opposite as those of Chile under [Augusto] Pinochet and Cuba under Fidel [Castro] shine a bright light on the differentiating power of an investment in the shortest term. Whether from the perspective of the opposition or that of officialdom, it is the critical operations background of the best moments of the Avanzada de Santiago and the Havana Biennial that—at least— suggests the fantasy of the artists’ own power to destabilize the vertical orientation of the North–South axiologies. And while their results are tangible, at this point, they are insufficient.
There is an irritating contrast between all this and the sterility of private, personalized initiatives, in which the intuitive strategies (note the deliberate paradox of this term) of other artists, curators, and collectors are exhausted. After the apparent inclusion that arose with globalization, there tended to be finer (or more perverse) forms of exclusion; as Gerardo Mosquera has rightly pointed out, in too many ways, the world is still divided between cultures that are curators and cultures that are curated—and that distorts everything. To get to the bottom of what this means, it will suffice to perform a no-holds-barred analysis of the difficulties and traps imposed on a “Sudaca” curatorial project such as that headed up by Mari Carmen Ramírez2 (actually including Mosquera3). This project committed the insolence of trying to rewrite certain modern art histories from within the [Museo] Reina Sofía—funded in part by the museum’s budget, which stirred up no end of resentment in certain Spanish circles.
Not long ago, this exhibition was presented again [with a new catalogue] at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston4—with all the necessary support and all the necessary appreciation for its essentially critical perspective. Perhaps this will help place these issues in a sharper (and more revealing) perspective. Here we have the interesting paradox of a battle for prestige among the apparent North and a supposed South turned into a competition of assessments between two so-called First World privileged art scenes (Madrid and Houston). But perhaps what we have to confront in situations like this is the growing erosion of such geopolitical categories and descriptors—actually part of the broader erosions of our time. A time in which whole states in the United States are progressively—and silently—being integrated into what they persist in calling “Latin America.” A time in which Spain has disintegrated into a Europe that is reorganizing based on autonomies and fragmentary identities.
Perhaps the new maps that take shape in this way will weaken geopolitical nomenclature itself [and] even the meaning of descriptors such as North–South. And [perhaps they will] help coordinate its radical inversion (South–South): the perpetual utopia of axiologies that are new, alternative, pathetic from the periphery [but] going though the periphery; that are sensitive to bringing back art and the art world’s potential imagery to renew communities of sense, communities of feeling; and that are capable of taking the crucial historical step from deconstruction to what is to be reconstructed.
[Jacques] Derrida, the acknowledged father of deconstruction, already said as much: “Today, emancipation has once more become an enormous question. I have no tolerance for those who are ironic with the great discourse of emancipation, whether they are deconstructionists or not.”5 Perhaps there is too much cynical irony in our godless, soulless times: too much irony or not enough commitment. May all deconstruction feed the reconstructive impulse! A challenge for the radical imagination, in both meanings of that overworked term “radical”: thinking about things from their roots means taking them to their extremes. (Or at least reviewing them from bottom to top.)
The wonders of dialectics: if my arguments started out in sync with the justified, melancholy skepticism of the [Brazilian art critic] Paulo Herkenhoff in yesterday’s conversations, today, I am reaching conclusions that seem to resonate better with the utopian thought defended by my colleague Llilian Llanes on the same occasion. To conclude this self-contradiction, even if it only seems that way, I would like to suggest that if Latin America did not exist, perhaps we would have to reinvent it.
1
See, for example, my unpublished book, “Another Goddamned Gringo Trick”: MoMA’s Curatorial Construction of “Latin American Art” (and Some Inverted Mirrors). Portions of that study were presented for the first time in 1999 at the University of Texas at Austin and later in several forums in Argentina and the United States, including one in November 2002 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. To go over the argument set forth there, point-by-point, see: Gustavo Buntinx, “El eslabón perdido: Avatares de Club Atlético Nueva Chicago,” Adriana Lauría, ed., Berni y sus contemporáneos. Correlatos (Buenos Aires: MALBA, 2005).
2
Héctor Olea and Mari Carmen Ramírez, Heterotopías: medio siglo sin-lugar 1918–1968, exh. cat. (Madrid: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, 2000).—Ed.
3
Gerardo Mosquera, No es sólo lo que ves: pervirtiendo el minimalismo, exh. cat. (Madrid: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, 2000).—Ed.
4
Héctor Olea and Mari Carmen Ramírez, Inverted Utopias, exh. cat. (London and Houston: Yale University Press/ The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 2004). See Holland Cotter, who called the exhibition one of the two most important of the decade, in “Depending on the Culture of Strangers,” New York Times, January 3, 2010, 23—Ed.
5
Quoted in: Simon Critchley, Richard Rorty, Jacques Derrida, et al.: Desconstrucción y pragmatismo (Buenos Aires: Paidós, 1998). A sentence articulated in the context of an earlier debate (1993) between Derrida and Rorty.