Giampaolo Bianconi: Before we start this conversation, I just want to give a brief introduction to this exhibition, which is called Thinking Machines: Art and Design in the Computer Age, 1959–1989. This show is drawn almost exclusively from the Museum’s collection, and traces the relationship between art, computers, and computational thinking from the late 1950s to the late 1980s—before the Internet. One of the threads in the exhibition is how artists used computation to reconsider artistic production, and when my colleague Sean Anderson, Associate Curator in the Department of Architecture and Design, and I were putting together the exhibition, one of the first works we knew we wanted to include was this computer output drawing by Waldemar Cordeiro. That is, of course, in part because of Rachel’s scholarship around Cordeiro’s work, so it’s great that she’s here today to talk about this piece. Cordeiro is a really interesting figure because he approaches computation as an artist who really has no background in it, having a very different aesthetic origin. I’m wondering, Rachel, if maybe just to kick things off, you could tell us a little bit about where Cordeiro came from as an artist, and how he came to work with a computer in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Rachel Price: First of all, thanks for inviting me and thank you all for being here. Waldemar Cordeiro was born in Rome to an Italian mother and a Brazilian father. He studied in Rome in his early twenties, and he had a traditional art training. He moved to Brazil in 1946 and began doing quite typical figurative painting. Then, in the 1950s, he joined a group of avant-garde Brazilian artists called Grupo Ruptura. These artists cast aside their training and instead embraced geometric abstraction and concrete painting—or painting based on form, line, and color, rather than depictions of the natural world.

He moved through concretism and had a long and pretty distinguished career in Brazil as a concrete and then neo-concrete artist. It was only toward the end of his career—he died in 1973—that he started turning to proto-digital art as an extension of what he saw as concrete principles. Even though it was early computer art, he imagined it to be the natural progression from working with geometric forms.

GB: The relationship between his earlier work in concrete art and his later computational works, like this one, is really important. This drawing, which is called Gente Ampli*2 (Amplified People 2), is one of a large series of computer output drawings that Cordeiro made at this time. He made them all, as I understand it, based on images circulating in the media, in magazines and newspapers, which he translated into art. I’m wondering if you can talk a little bit about the process that he used to make these works.

RP: I think there are two important components to consider when thinking about these images. One is his choice of photography. The second is the process that he and Giorgio Moscati, a scientist at the University of São Paulo, used to produce the images.

In a way, photography was a surprising choice for Cordeiro because he was so opposed to representation. He wanted art to be its own thing. In the late ’60s, he became interested in the role of mass media, politically and aesthetically, to shape the way we see the world. He started appropriating photographs from advertisements and from the news in the moment after 1964, when Brazil was experiencing a military dictatorship and authoritarian regime, which made the manipulation of mass media even more important. At that point, Cordeiro began using newspaper images, and then manipulating them—not yet digitally, but rather using materials such as water or objects such as magnifying glasses to shape the images and distort them. But it was this interest in distorting images that Cordeiro brought to the first digital images that he made with Moscati. Rather than approach their collaboration as a scientist helping an artist to realize his vision, Cordeiro and Moscati were both determined to learn each other’s field. Cordeiro would have Moscati go to all the art openings that he was going to and help him to understand what was happening in visual arts, while he, in turn, was trying to learn the processes for digitizing.

It was an early period in computer science. They had to use a computer in the physics department at the University of São Paulo, which Moscati was using to process information for his own physics research, and they used punch cards to program it. In this exhibition, there’s another piece that you can look at that connects punch cards with textile production [Beryl Korot’s Text and Commentary (1976—77)]. Punch cards were used in the nineteenth century to operate industrial looms, and they were still used in the 20th century with large computers. It was a very laborious process because Cordeiro had to hand-input every dot making up the layers of figures in the final output. He had to decide how dark each spot would be, and then input that information by hand.

GB: Cordeiro used a numbering system of one to six to determine the lighter and darker areas on the image, correct? Then those were represented as characters. You’ve discussed this work as an early example of what today is called ASCII art, where images are represented by keyboard characters.

RP: Yes. If you come up closer to look at these, you can see the different letters he layered to create the image. As you can see, he used the letter H a lot. 

GB: From farther away, you can see that this image represents a crowd of people—according to the artist’s daughter—at a protest at the University of São Paulo in the early 1970s. Rachel, I want to ask you about the relationship, as it were, in this work between the pixel and the character.

Is there a relationship between the form that Cordeiro invented, for all intents and purposes, to create this work and his earlier understanding of concrete aesthetics, and especially of concrete poetry, where text is used in an abstracted manner?

RP: It’s interesting because he was very much a part of the world of the concrete poets in Brazil in the 1950s and ’60s. The concrete painters and sculptors were very much in collaboration with concrete poets. He was in contact with them. Cordeiro’s first computer piece with Moscati, called Beabá, is in fact a generation of plausible but not actual Portuguese words based on the frequency of certain syllables or sounds in Portuguese. It reminds me of Alison Knowles’s computerized poem The House of Dust, which is also in this exhibition. But Beabá is a kind of concrete poem or digital poem where the computer generated its own combination of phonemes or sounds.

Cordeiro’s interest in language, I think, came much more from an information-theory perspective. He read a lot of information theory, cybernetic theory that was being produced at MIT at the time. He came to play with language more from questions about information processing than from a history in lyric poetry, although the concrete poets were also interested in cybernetics and information theory.

GB: The relationship to information theory is quite interesting. Earlier you said that Cordeiro conceived of these works as interfering with the image, or adding noise to the image. He saw these as retinal games or exercises in a way, much like how he saw the concrete art that he had been engaged with before.

RP: He was really interested in what you could do to an image, what could be done to an image. It’s interesting that he uses the word algorithmic already in that period to describe the algorithmic logic of images. For example, he attempted to digitize—he mainly used photographs of crowds and people, but he also used images of famous art and historical icons, like a Goya, for example. He thought that if he processed the Goya, he would arrive at its algorithmic logic. There was some truth in the image that could be decoded and recoded. That was something that I think he tried to do with these. He tried to preserve something of the image, but also to push it to its limits in terms of legibility.

GB: At the same time, Cordeiro had a very advanced read on the information era in which he was living.

RP: One reason that Cordeiro has recently become of such interest is because he was so prescient about contemporary society. He died in 1973, but he was writing before he died about the world being in a post-Fordist era in which electronic transmission is more important than industrialism. This is surprising especially because he was looking at São Paulo, which was experiencing an industrial boom at that time. But he was already seeing beyond this. And he was interested in the way in which information was being processed collectively through distributed computers. Each individual computer was too small to handle the information, and so computers would be scattered throughout the world, and the information would be partially processed in each of the different locales. You can also see this as proto–Internet information sharing.

He was attentive to this phenomenon. He was trying to put his own work in conversation with it. Then he wrote some essays extending his idea to a vision of how we should understand society today. He also mentioned that the way in which the United States and Europe are structured has created a global society of consumption. This was the ’70s. There was an environmental consciousness beginning, one that the world couldn’t keep up with. That it was incumbent upon Latin America, Asia, and Africa to develop another form of production and consumption.

GB: His interest in networks was something that he enacted as part of his career as an artist. In part, he was related to the New Tendencies group, which, operating in Yugoslavia, was focused on the potential for the relationship between computation and art. What was the extent of his relationship with New Tendencies?

RP: Cordeiro’s relationship to New Tendencies was more minimal than that of his peer, the Brazilian artist Almir Mavignier, who moved to Germany, studied at the Ulm School of Design, and stayed there. Mavignier was also involved in the New Tendencies group. He was much more consistently involved. As far as I know, Cordeiro went to Germany and exhibited there, but I don’t think he had an ongoing conversation with the New Tendencies group. Though I could be wrong about that.

GB: One other question I wanted to ask you—you mentioned his relationship to environmentalism and ecological crisis. Cordeiro, before he made these works, had worked as a landscape architect. How do you see the relationship between not just his career as a concrete artist, but also his later interest in the information economy and computational forms of production, dovetailing with his work as a designer of urban space?

RP: His work as a landscape artist and architect was interesting, because in some ways it was a way of making a living, and in other ways, it was also very much a part of the conversation of concrete art in the period. The most famous landscape architect is, of course, Roberto Burle Marx. He had made landscape architecture part of the conversation of concrete poetry and neo-concrete aesthetics in general. It was not strange that an artist should be working in this field.

What was interesting about Cordeiro’s approach was that he was not interested in making his landscapes organic, as was another tendency at the time. Instead, he was really adamant about keeping it different than nature. He said landscape architecture should not imitate nature. It should do its own thing, which is very much what he wanted his concrete art to do. There’s another interesting flip side of that, which is that he was interested in nature as being a part of this question of the digital. For example, he was interested in the geometry of leaves. He was also interested, in terms of his digital art, in the ways in which the body transmits or processes electronic signals like computers do. He actually saw the body as being much more aligned with computation than divorced from it. Both are a rejection of one version of romantic nature, but an acceptance of the digital nature of nature.

GB: That embodied relationship to information is something that you see not just in his labor to produce these works—which is very physical and involved, and somehow contrary to the way in which we interface with the descendants of these machines today—but also in the reception or perception of these works by the viewer.

RP: Because of the dictatorship, which has historically been associated with shrewd manipulation of the mass media, he was very interested in intervening with mass media, but he wanted to do something different than the authoritarian news was doing. He was appealing to people’s relationship to the image, and especially to the image of the human form. Although he had rejected human representation in his earlier career, he embraced it in his computer art. When I spoke with Moscati, he said computer art was so incipient in 1969, in 1970, that in a way Cordeiro had to embrace it, and this is Moscati’s interpretation. It may not have been Cordeiro’s. Moscati said that, in a way, it was necessary to bring something from the realm of human representation to the table so that it would be recognized as art.

GB: In a different direction, I’m wondering if there’s anything you can tell us about the reception of these works at the time. I know that you’ve written about the exhibitions of electronic art that Cordeiro organized in São Paulo while he was working on these. How were these works received? Did they influence artists who worked at the time or later on? I know that Eduardo Kac has written very appreciatively to you about this.

RP: I don’t know much about the reception in Brazil. I’ve read international reviews, which are appreciative of this play with legibility and illegibility. That was something that seemed to distinguish the work of Cordeiro and Moscati from that of other people. I think it was recognized that they were playing with the question of what the eye can perceive and process. This came out of interest that Moscati had as a physicist. In a way, it began with Cordeiro, and Eduardo Kac is probably the most famous person working today to recognize him as a forebear.

GB: Finally, I want to ask you a little bit more about this relationship between Cordeiro and Moscati. I think something you see in a number of the works in this exhibition—when artists are working with computers—is that there are a few different approaches to interfacing with the machine. One is that you yourself are a computer programmer who uses those skills to make art. Someone like Charles Csuri is an an example of that. Or another is that you are an artist who works with these machines through a human interface, meaning another person who knows how to work the machine and can help you to accomplish your art using it.

By all accounts, Cordeiro and Moscati had a very different relationship with intermediaries than a lot of other artists. I’m wondering if you can tell us a little bit more about that and how, if at all, it went on to influence Moscati’s own work?

RP: As I said before, they tried to think of their collaboration not as one of them assisting the other, but rather both of them creating the ideas together. For instance, the question of legibility and how much they were going to distort an image, or a derivative, as they called it, which refers to the process they used. They have a series called Derivatives of an Image. They would make their decisions together and then discuss the implications of them together. I spoke with Moscati a few years ago about some of the motivations—and you can speak to him today about them. He’s very conversant about what was going on in Brazil at the time and about what was going on in concrete poetry, about what was new in concrete art. He really came to understand Cordeiro’s motivations in a larger landscape of thought.

GB: Today when we think about the legibility of an image made by a machine, we might think about a machine that can itself read an image, such as facial recognition software, or the equipment employed by a surveillance state. These, too, were among the ideas that Cordeiro was grappling with at the time he made these.

RP: They were interested in how the brain processes an image and how long it takes to process an image. Some of that same thinking has been behind research on, for example, the human ability to detect something amiss in the field of vision. The brain bypasses conscious recognition and instead perceives something more subliminal. That notion of bypassing what we consciously perceive in order to get at some automatic reception is something they were interested in. Maybe they were interested in the technology that’s now being used for certain kinds of surveillance.

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These numbers were way too high, and we had such little time. Yet the trip offered a glimpse of a robust artistic history and a vibrant contemporary art scene in the cities of Colombia. It was also the beginning, our first steps toward planting a seed of curiosity at MoMA and building what we hope will be the long-lasting relationships. Since our return, that seed has not stopped growing.

Listed below are blog entries by the chosen members of the group, reflecting on their experiences.

In the following months, post will publish short interviews conducted with the scholars, artists, and curators who visited MoMA in 2016 to help us with our research. You can access them here.

Blog posts from the travelers

Lugar a Dudas

By Marta Dansie

Lugar a Dudas, which translates as “room for doubts,” is an artist-founded, artist-run, nonprofit, alternative art space in Cali, Colombia. It’s a gallery, which includes a street-facing public-art exhibition space; an artist residency program; and a cinema club that screens films almost daily to help promote many independent films made in Cali. It hosts talks and workshops as well as programs for school groups, produces publications, and publishes prints. In short, the organization runs an impressive range of programs to engage audiences locally and internationally.

Photographer Oscar Muñoz, whose work is in MoMA’s collection, founded Lugar a Dudas in 2005 and continues to direct it. He was also a founder, in the 1970s, of Colombia’s first independent art space, Ciudad Solar, which eventually disbanded as Cali was engulfed in violence in the 1980s. He explained that he started Lugar a Dudas to address an imbalance in Cali’s art network, which, he reports, currently has six art schools but only a few art galleries and therefore extremely limited opportunities for artists to work and exhibit. At the same time addressing a national imbalance, Muñoz was eager to help decentralize the Colombian art world, since most art institutions and organizations exist in Bogotá.

Everyone working at Lugar a Dudas is an artist. Muñoz’s partner, Sally Mizrachi, is a designer and coordinates the center’s programs. Víctor Albarracín is an art critic and founder of his own art collective, located in Bogotá, who has been in residence at Lugar a Dudas for almost a year. Iván Tovar, who is in charge of residency programs, works as a curator and artist (we saw Antiespacio, one of his hutlike sculptures made of rejected bricks from a local factory, at the 44th Salón Nacional de Artistas in Pereira). Breyner Huertas, the center’s website designer and communications manager, publishes miniature artist books under the pseudonym Hermes Acosta and received an honorable mention at the 2016 ArtBo fair for his photography.

The documentation center is at the heart of the organization and its largest gathering space. Juan Guillermo Tamayo, who is in charge of the center, hosts students and researchers in a library that is open-shelf and open to the public. He runs the genius Fotocopioteca, where essays from art theory, recommended by artists and others, are translated into Spanish, often for the first time, and made available as hard copies, downloads from a drive in the wall, and also on the organization’s website. I fell in love with the documentation center’s current exhibition of typeset posters (in the style of the much-lamented Carteles Horche), which use rebus-style clues to guide you to text contained in publications on the documentation center shelves, a colorful addition by Martin La Roche, a Chilean artist based in the Netherlands.

Residencies in a large house around the corner from the main space cost approximately 2,500,000 Colombian pesos or 850 US dollars for two months and offer artists and/or curators a private room with a work table as well as access to the common roof garden and even a small swimming pool.

A Multilayered and Rare Opportunity

By Yasmil Raymond

This report will never be complete nor does it pretend to be entirely accurate. But whatever is captured in the next sentences was written to give words to a multilayered and rare opportunity to visit Colombia during an exceptional historical moment of a potentially feasible peace agreement. There is no manual that tells curators the appropriate method of engagement on a research trip to a country that has recently experienced a civil war. It has been estimated that in Colombia, in the past fifty years, more than two hundred thousand people have died and five million people have been displaced from their homes. (It is hard to imagine what it must be like to visit artists in Afghanistan, Egypt, Iraq, or Syria but we can try.) In Colombia, the evidence of the past decades of warfare and devastation is not physically evident in its cities, but the overall silence and the empty sidewalks and squares are indicative of a trauma that is not easily “solved” with signatures. At the center of the normality we experienced during our visit was the stunning realization that artists are not speaking openly about the current political situation, or addressing the social indignation that has altered their culture. Once you realize what this omission might mean, you understand that the process of peace and reconciliation in Colombia has yet to begin.

The road from the airport to Medellín is a telling metaphor for the strong will of the city. The mountainous terrain is demanding and requires maneuvering, but eventually through patience and determination, we made our way along narrow and curvy roads into the valley. There is a palpable ambition in Medellín that is manifest in the recent urban renewal: the development of an efficient cable-car network and pristine subway systems. Our tour of Medellín was led by two visionary architects: Ricardo Vásquez and Emerson Marín. Among the many highlights was our visit to one of the UVA (Unidades de Vida Articulada) projects, a citywide endeavor that, in the spirit of Brazil’s phenomenal SESC (Serviço Social do Comércio) projects, takes water towers and turns them into community centers. The focus of this mission is socio-educational and recreational, and people seem to value it. We experienced another example of Medellín’s imaginative edge at Casa Tres Patios, a nonprofit organization where artists partner with educators to invent creative new methods for teaching children and young adults. Its founder is the American artist Tony Evanko. There is a heart beating in this space, a sense of urgency that was visible in the faces of the couple dozen of people we saw there rehearsing their lesson plans and teaching techniques. We also had the opportunity to meet the team at MAMM (Museo de Arte Moderno de Medellín), and to hear firsthand about the radical work of painter Débora Arango, which had been curated by Emiliano Valdés.

Not to be forgotten amid all the experiences in Medellín was Erika Diettes’s exhibition at the Museo de Antioquia, a solemn investigation into the trauma of the war. Her impeccable installation is unsettling and visceral, but equally courageous and necessary for those who have seen death and destruction. The rich history of the Museo of Antioquia precedes the tenure of its chief curator Nydia Gutiérrez. Opened in 1881, the museum is the second oldest in Colombia, and it houses an important collection of modern art as well as wonderful murals by Pedro Nel Gómez, who was inspired by the Mexican muralists. Gutiérrez was a gracious and generous host and guided us through the exhibitions. In one of the galleries, we came across an extraordinary series of watercolors by a self-taught artist by the name of Abel Rodriguez, a member of the Nonuya people, from the Caqueta River region. The selection was from his series Chagra, and it depicts both luscious rain forests and areas devastated by deforestation. The tour of the museum ended with an interesting display of some of the works included in the 1968, 1970, and 1972 Coltejer Art Biennials. It was gratifying to come across an exceptional painting by the Argentine artist Sarah Grilo (MoMA recently acquired a Grilo canvas from 1965) and a mesmerizing metal sculpture by Édgar Negret, in his signature red paint. We got to see more terrific examples of Negret’s floor works in Cali and Bogotá. MoMA owns an early sculpture from 1954 titled Sign for an Aquarium (Model) but nothing from the pinnacle of his career.

For decades, my imaginary of Colombia has been shaped by the lucid narratives penned by Gabriel García Márquez and Héctor Abad Faciolince, and this trip didn’t diminish the veracity of their accounts. As always, works of art have that unsettling ability to tip emotive charge into extreme discomfort. We began our stay in Cali with a visit to the studio and home of Rosemberg Sandoval. Sandoval is an internationally acclaimed performance artist and his work is included in MoMA’s collection. I can imagine that experiencing his actions would be infinitely more powerful than seeing black-and-white documentation of them—or related props and artifacts. However, the pictures of his 1985 action on the statue of Simón Bolívar across from the Palace of Justice (on the eve of the rebels’ attack) were charged with defiance and desperation. The hour-long visit to Sandoval’s home reeled with dignity, vigilance, and a peculiar inventiveness. His work is unapologetic, visceral, and consciously “badly” made, qualities that I admire and a position that seems to be undervalued by the younger generation of artists we encountered throughout our trip, who are so eagerly concerned with quality and craftsmanship. Later, in Bogotá, we saw some of Sandoval’s objects made from scraps of glass, and even his tabletop pieces, intended for domestic settings, have an edge and a certain monstrosity that rubs against notions of taste and civility.

In contrast to Medellín’s determination, Cali is a combination of warmth, sensibility, and modesty. The city might lack infrastructure, but it seems to enjoy a fearless sense of lucidity as the institutions and studios we visited reflect a particular self-awareness and extraordinary command of the basic conditions necessary to display art and generate forceful aesthetics. We learned about the hugely impressive synthesis of theory and practice happening at the artist-run space Lugar a Dudas (founded by the artist Oscar Muñoz and graphic designer Sally Mizrachi) and shared a relaxing lunch alongside the team of artists and writers running its ambitious residency, library, lecture, and film programs. Another interesting phenomenon seems to be germinating at the Museo la Tertulia under the leadership of its chief curator Alejandro Martín Maldonado. It was at this museum that we had the chance to see two exceptional exhibitions, one on the work of Beatriz González, and another on the year 1971, when Cali hosted the Pan American Games. All the works on view were from their collection, among them Antonio Caro’s important installation Aquí no cabe el arte (Art does not fit here) from 1972. (Later, in Bogotá, we had the opportunity to briefly meet Antonio Caro. His early work is difficult to find, but he is an artist that we should consider for MoMA’s collection.) The team at Museo la Tertulia allowed us to use their facilities to meet with the daughters of photographer Fernell Franco, and to organize a viewing of groups of works only available for museum collections. Seeing Fernell’s photographs was among the highlights of the trip for several of us. Fernell’s work recently entered the collection of the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía and the Tate, but it is still not represented in MoMA’s collection. Although Fernell was a self-taught artist, he is considered one of the leading figures in photography in Colombia; having had an extensive career as a photojournalist, he exhibited his large-scale series throughout the 1970s and 1980s.

From Cali, we headed to Pereira to see the 44th edition of the Salón Nacional de Artistas. The exhibition was not short on ambition or diversity. Though there are too many examples to mention here, artworks by Barış Doğrusöz (printmaking), Rabih Mroué (video), Ming Wong (video), Wilson Díaz (painting), Ethel Gilmour (sculpture), and Tatyana Zambrano y Roberto Ochoa (sculpture) were among the most memorable. It was unclear if the exhibition was well received by the artistic communities in the neighboring cities of Cali and Medellín, but we sure felt its effort to approach a wide range of forms and aesthetics without being pretentious. The director Rosa Ángel and guest curators staged an impressive synthesis of practices and nationalities. This exhibition was the only instance we experienced in which artworks by national and international artists had been brought together.

Bogotá was our last stop. The revival of the artistic scene there seems to be driven by the opening of a number of commercial galleries and the establishment of the art fair ARTBO in 2004, a program sponsored by the Chamber of Commerce of Bogotá. We were lucky enough to learn about a range of alternative spaces run by artists and architects throughout the city, and we listened to individual presentations by a handful of artists whom professor Lucas Ospina graciously gathered together for us at the Universidad de los Andes. It is indisputable that the work that José Roca and his team are doing at FLORA ars+natura has been pivotal to this rebirth, and we were fortunate to meet several of the artists participating in their residency program (and to experience the delicious food prepared by one of his daughters). However, the unforgettable moments still took place in the privacy of individual studios. A charming Nicolás Paris allowed us into his home-studio and shared insights into his investigations of geometry, nature, and pedagogy. His ongoing project centers on an emancipatory pedagogy that encourages students to self-initiate the “lessons” through games and other techniques that stimulate exploration. It was particularly interesting to see how Paris has integrated his studio practice into his life, expanding the team to include other artists and architects, teachers, and researchers; together, they seem to be reinventing the nature of collaboration and authorship.

Similarly, another inspiring conversation took place during our visit to the home-studio of architect Simón Hosie Samper. He spoke to us about his multidisciplinary practice and his experience building La casa del Pueblo (community library) in Guanacas Cauca. Samper’s research and collaboration with the indigenous people of Cauca brought a totally new dimension to social architecture. His project seems to have generated a critical discourse not only in the field of architecture but also among artists through his interrogation of the place of native cultures within Colombian society. And last but not least was the visit to the home-studio shared by Gabriel Sierra and Delcy Morelos. It took twelve years for Sierra and Morelos to build this sanctuary for their work and life, and it is definitely worth it. Due to the unexpectedness of our visit, the artists were not fully prepared but managed to show us fragments of their most recent projects. In February, Sierra will be mounting a solo exhibition at the Secession in Vienna, on the back of his acclaimed project at Kunsthaus Zürich and The Renaissance Society in Chicago.

Sierra’s work can come across as somber with a no-fuss formalism that seems to spring from a political exigency that favors the mundane over legibility. On Friday, our last day in the city, we did a rushed walk-through of the Museo de Arte del Banco de la República, which included a thrilling display of their Neo-Concrete collection with exceptional works by Ary Brizzi (Argentine, born 1930), Rogelio Polesello (Argentine, 1939–2014), Yutaka Toyota (Japanese, born 1931), Julio Le Parc (Argentine, born 1928), Carlos Cruz Diez (Venezuelan, born 1923), and an unforgettable juxtaposition of an Édgar Negret sculpture from 1967 titled Edificio (Building) and Louise Nevelson’s Rain Garden Zag II from 1977.

Ten days in Colombia, 29 studio visits, eight museums, nine galleries, ten independent spaces, six private collections, and two delayed flights, left us physically unable to carry on but also offered plenty to ponder. In retrospect, the overall impression of this first visit can be summarized by one of Nicolás Paris’s proposals for art: “A classroom for error: the incorrect, options how to fail, possible ways to make mistakes.”

Discovering Feliza

By Starr Figura

In Colombia, probably the biggest revelation (among many) for me was the work of Feliza Bursztyn (1933–1982). Our group had the opportunity to visit her home and estate in Bogotá. The property includes a modest front garden and the tiny apartment that was her first home and studio, as well as three adjacent buildings purchased by her second husband, Pablo Leyva: a small house, another building where her library and archives are currently stored, and a much larger, garage-like studio. Leyva’s son, the artist Camilo Leyva, now uses that large space for his own work, and he also manages Bursztyn’s estate. Examples of Camilo Leyva’s sculptures mingled comfortably with those of Bursztyn, whose art has always been a touchstone for his own. Bursztyn’s sculptures were resting unceremoniously here and there, the large ones occupying sections of the floor and the smaller ones placed on makeshift surfaces and tables, or inside crates or cardboard boxes.

What impressed me about Bursztyn’s work is its combination of visceral toughness, poetic sensitivity, and sly, irreverent humor. In 1961 she began using scrap metal, twisting, crushing, and welding it to create sculptures large and small. In 1967–68 she made her first kinetic artworks, a series of steel constructions that she called Las histéricas (The hysterics), by welding long, thin ribbons of metal into circular, springlike configurations; attached to motors, they vibrate noisily, even aggressively. There is a suggestion of playfulness in them, but also of confrontation, disruption, and violence.

In Colombia, Bursztyn is revered as a key artist of the postwar period, a pioneer whose sculpture broke new ground in the 1960s and helped pave the way for avant-garde practices in more recent decades. Her work is highlighted in the collections of museums such as the Museo Nacional de Colombia and the Museo de Arte del Banco de la República, and can be found in galleries such as Alonso Garcés, all of which we had the good fortune to visit during our trip (although, regrettably, her major works were temporarily not on view at the museums). Despite this renown in her own country, Bursztyn is all but unknown in the United States. Hopefully this will change, not only because her work represents a high point in the history of Colombian art, but also because it can be seen as part of an artistic current that crested internationally in the 1960s. Bursztyn’s work is often compared to that of César (with whom she studied in Paris) and Jean Tinguely, but it may resonate even more potently with the work of a number of women artists—Lee Bontecou, Louise Bourgeois, Eva Hesse, Alina Szapocznikow—who also found their own strong and slightly eccentric voices by creating disturbingly subversive and unorthodox sculptures during that same heady, transformative decade.

The Art of the Book

By Milan Hughston

Our group’s visits to museums and artists’ studios confirmed how important artist’s books are to Colombia’s flourishing art-publishing history, both modern and contemporary. The rich tradition of drawing and the profusion of beautifully rendered sketchbooks quite naturally find their way into the production of artist’s books and editions.

Our C-MAP group was fortunate to be able to see work by three Colombian artists participating in the forthcoming project being published by MoMA’s Library Council. The Library Council is a group whose annual membership supports activities of the Library and Museum Archives. A special benefit is the semiannual publication of a limited-edition artist’s book that often brings together the work of an artist and a writer.

In early 2017, the Library Council will publish The Valise, which includes work by seven Latin American artists inspired by the text of Argentinian writer César Aira. Aira’s text follows the dramatic journey of a nineteenth-century German artist through the mountains and pampas of Chile and Argentina. Three of the artists included in this collective project are from Colombia; and we made studio visits to two of them, Johanna Calle and Nicolás Paris, as well as saw an exhibition by Mateo López at Casas Riegner gallery.

We were lucky to be accompanied on these visits by the editor of the Library Council publications, May Castleberry, who was in Bogotá working with the artists on final details for the publication. Our studio visits with Calle and Paris allowed us to enter their worlds in an intimate and personal way, to closely observe their past work, and to see how their more recent work for The Valise has taken them on new journeys—in terms of traditional production and also new media and formats, all contained inside a Duchamp-inspired “valise” that reflects the themes of journey and travel.

Both Calle and Paris are known for their meticulous and detailed work, particularly in drawing, and each of them is well documented and represented in MoMA’s collection.

Calle’s contributions include a series called Morphine Landscapes, which incorporate intricately typed letters that frame the images, functioning as a kind of typed poem imagining the drug-addled German artist on his journey. Her second piece uses a series of anonymous photographs taken by a photographer in the 1940s that depict the Colombian Andes, again echoing the themes of travel and adventure.

Paris’s work incorporates architecture, objects (including a glass bulb with a local seed floating within it), and drawings. The body of work as a whole reflects the themes of travel, exploration, time, and teaching, all of which find their ways into most aspects of Paris’s art practice.

At Casas Riegner gallery in Bogotá, the group visited Mateo López’s latest solo exhibition, Ciudad Fantasma (Ghost City). This exhibition included examples of the intricate folded and printed pieces that López has created for his participation in The Valise. These comprise twenty-four letter press and woodcut prints that reflect the “geometry of the object” and interpret the artist’s recent trip through the Darién Gap, a wild area straddling the borders of Panama and Colombia that remains one of the least-traveled areas in the Western Hemisphere. In conclusion, it’s very appropriate that our CMAP “journey” through Colombia mirrored the focus of the forthcoming Library Council publication, incorporating discovery, collecting, and learning. All of these traditions are timeless.

Colombia Coca-Cola

By Sarah Meister

Early in the evening of our last night in Colombia we had the opportunity to meet with Antonio Caro, who for more than four decades has been a key protagonist in Colombian art circles. We met at La Oficina del Doctor, an intimate book-space nestled within Caro’s gallery, Casas Riegner, in Bogotá. This struck me as fitting, given that one of Caro’s most iconic works Colombia, painted in Coca-Cola’s distinct looping script, had become a leitmotif during our travels throughout Colombia. We first encountered a version in Medellín at the Museo de Antioquia (executed in 2007; Caro’s first version is dated 1977) and saw several others in public and private collections. My favorite was an embroidered apron hanging in Nicolás Paris’s studio—not only because we all so enjoyed that studio visit!

This work succinctly points to the complex network of relations between Caro’s native country and my own through this symbol of American capitalist enterprise, produced in a variety of formats and editions that irreverently mimic a marketing strategy. But no matter the scale or material, Caro imbues each version with subtle imperfections (a missing dot over the i or irregularity in the lettering), nodding to broader political and human conditions, perhaps, but certainly to the hand of an artist whom Luis Camnitzer has described admiringly as a “visual guerilla.”

As a photography curator, I can’t resist mentioning a select few of the most meaningful photographic encounters, wishing I had the time to write about each and every one of them. There were several artists working with photography whom we knew we wanted to see the minute our C-MAP group decided we would be visiting Colombia. We had acquired a few works from Miguel Ángel Rojas’s series Faenza in 2015 (see the acquisitions here), but it was a rare treat to be welcomed by the artist at his home in Bogotá and to have a leisurely opportunity to trace the broader trajectory of his career through the work installed there.

Fernell Franco (1942–2006) was another artist whose work we have been following actively for years, and we enjoyed an afternoon in Cali with his two daughters, who have thoughtfully tended to his legacy.

Perhaps slightly less well-known, but equally significant is Jorge Ortiz, who had a few works included in Pablo Gómez Uribe’s unassumingly revolutionary exhibition This House Isn’t Worth Anything: What Is Really Worthless Is the Lot at Galería de La Oficina in Medellín. We were fortunate, on our last day, to have been in Bogotá for the opening of “Bernal, Ortiz y Cano: un cuerpo para el arte” at the Fundación Gilberto Alzate Avendaño (thanks to Alexa Halaby for the tip, and for so much else). This was a great opportunity to develop a sense of Ortiz’s broader career, with work dating from 1978 to 2016 whose material presence is remarkably difficult to capture through reproduction.

Back in Medellín, also at La Oficina, we had a chance to speak with Jesús Abad Colorado about his work, also lesser known outside of Colombia, which compellingly presents activism and art in equal measure.

Though I can’t pick favorites, it is always a thrill to learn about work that one simply wouldn’t encounter in midtown Manhattan. The first of these discoveries was tucked into a small gallery at the Museo de Antioquia (not far from Caro’s Colombia): an impressive panorama by Jorge Obando (1894–1982) of thousands of people gathered for the inauguration of the Atanasio Girardot stadium in Medellín (1953).

And on our final day, at the Museo de Arte del Banco de la República in Bogotá, we came across the work of Luis B. Ramos (1899–1955), whose series El hombre y la tierra from the 1930s was represented with an assortment of modestly scaled vintage prints.

These were contemporaneous with many of the oil paintings hanging in the same gallery and spoke to a distinctly local, quotidian experience. It’s no surprise that the least familiar achievements are those that flourish outside the international art scene, but it does underscore the importance of traveling to see beyond established narratives.

A Thought About La Tertulia

By Thomas J. Lax

Located on the Cali River, directly in front of what feels like the city’s center of skateboarding and cruising culture, Museo La Tertulia presented a set of thoughtful and original exhibitions organized by their relatively new chief curator Alejandro Martín. Cali/71 looked introspectively—but refreshingly without navel-gazing—at the city’s critical history of activism, cultural and otherwise, that not only led to the formation of its important art collectives, but also to massive changes at the museum itself. The combination of agitprop and formal approaches to political engagement by a range of artists including Barbara Jones, Luis Caballero, Jesús Rafael Soto, and many others, seen on the heels of the stunning upset in the United States of the Democratic Party candidate by a fascist, white supremacist, was a stunning reminder of the potential of art and culture to interfere with the work of hegemonic consolidation.

Singing for the Absent

By Luis Pérez-Oramas

The very first scene of the video Centro Espacial Satelital de Colombia, by the art collective La Decanatura, depicts a mother cow slowly, even lovingly, stroking with her tongue a newborn calf, presumably her own. The landscape is pastoral and magnificent in its Arcadian calm, but for two uncanny architectural presences: two monumental satellite towers dating from the 1970s.

The place is known as the Centro Espacial Satelital de Colombia (Satellite Space Center of Colombia) and, like many similar sites throughout Latin America, it was opened in the 1970s, specifically on March 25, 1970.

The video, introduced by two black-and-white photographs of the towers, was authored by a collective of young Colombian artists, La Decanatura (Elkin Calderón and Diego Piñeros), and presented among many works in the National Salon of Artists in Pereira.

I still have this video in mind. It is one of the strongest, most moving art pieces I have seen in recent months. It obliquely touches upon some of the issues that I have been personally interested in, both as a curator and as a poet. The experience of seeing it actually drew me to the writing of some verses, maybe a poem, as well as to the memory of some old, haunting readings, and to general thinking about the purpose (or purposelessness) of an initiative such as a trip by MoMA curators to Colombia within the frame of our Contemporary and Modern Art Perspectives initiative, C-MAP.

Were we bound there with the expectation of discovering some (hidden) masterpieces? Do we really care about the history of a country such as Colombia—or for that matter about any other (relatively small) country in the Americas, or in the world? What is our position, as employees of a dominant, mainstream art institution, vis-à-vis the struggles and celebrations of national communities that are not planned to be part of the fairy tales embodied by our geniuses and artistic heroes? Could an institution such as MoMA be generous? Could an American, or for that matter international, curator working in the very axis of art power produce a critical perspective outside of a logic of power-will? What is a powerless art? A powerless Modernity: does it exist?

After the cow has caressed her newborn calf with her tongue, the video proceeds to show the rainy surrounding landscape of the very old Leal y Noble Villa de Santiago de Chocontá, in Cundinamarca.

Suddenly, sparingly, a group of children, all bearing musical instruments and wearing white costumes, which we presume were the uniforms of the technicians who worked at the Satellite Space Center, come out from those monster towers into the open field. They start playing a moving song, a lullaby. They caringly play that music while it slowly rains. In another shot, they play inside the abandoned towers, uncannily, against the silence of a failed Modernity.

They may be playing their music in search of a voice that they have lost, or the voice that they are losing as they become adults, and they look for the place of infancy, where they come from, that place that we all have abandoned: that site of absence projected into the future, uncertainly.

The Satellite Space Center is no longer useful, no longer “modern.” Beside its ruins of modernity, the landscape continues, beyond itself, following the same secular, ever-evolving pace of cows, trees, tempests, veals, harvests, lightning storms. A verse by Alberto Caeiro, one of Fernando Pessoa’s heteronyms, reads, “Os pastores de Virgílio, coitados, são Virgilío, / E a Natureza é bela e antiga (Virgil’s shepherds, poor guys, are Virgil, / And Nature is beautiful and ancient).”

The Banda Sinfónica Infantil de Chocontá (Children’s Symphonic Band of Chocotá) ends its lullaby outside the satellite towers as the rain recedes. Each child turns away, one at a time, and goes inside. The day is ending. From above, from a hill maybe, we see the landscape of Chocontá entering the darkness of the night, gray mirrors of water slipping toward the horizon.

Few days, too many places: Medellín, Cali, Pereira, Armenia, Bogotá. A country emerging from a century of wars, from innumerable lost. A community rethinking itself, projecting for the first time, as a possible achievement, a future of peace. Artists getting together, making art there, where it was not possible to make art before. Is there a more exciting encounter? Do we need to expect there, as good old colons, the illusory greatness of art, the fiction of genius, the phantom of masterworks to feed our insatiable, Saturnine capitalization of the modern . . . instead of—Agamben’s dixit—just the upcoming, ordinary community?

I will keep with myself, for years, this brief encounter with La Decanatura’s view of Chocontá, the lullaby addressed to the absent, the dove’s coo intended for those who have not yet come as a testimony of something that, for the most, I think contemporary art has unfortunately lost.

We have lost an ambition. An ambition that consists of addressing those who are no longer with us, or those who have not yet (be)come. This deep ambition of temporal projection, of resilience against the precariousness of the present time; this will against the preterition of the absent; this illusion of making connection with that which we were, or with those who were, or with that which is the place from whence we come, and never were, was the driving ambition of art, at least since its intellectual regime was theoretically established in the Western world. It has been one of the most recurring figures of transcendence, that human impulse. That is what seems to have been lost in a world of art that only satisfies itself with the present; that aims only to be contemporary; that surges in cowardly silence against all forms of anachronism; that satisfies itself with a contempt of politics consisting in neutralizing it in its very mediocre scenes of representation; that feeds itself with its own commercial fetishizing, with its own, imperturbable economy. That conforms itself with its own present being, as if the darkness of the present or the uncertainty of the future were nonexistent; that satiates itself with its own fashions, happy to not be anything more than what it is, as all fashions, ceaseless, expiring from the anodyne exhaustion of its consumers. It is against that world that the kids of Chocontá are singing.

Listen to Colombia

By Giampaolo Bianconi

One of the most striking threads through our recent visit to Colombia was that of sound and its deployment as a tool to produce and question both standards of scientific investigation and understandings of nature and culture. Institutions of varying scales across Colombia are united by the strength of their spaces dedicated to sound art created toward these ends—works that ultimately reflect one of the strongest themes in contemporary Colombian art: an all-encompassing focus on territory as an umbrella under which both art and politics are articulated.

In Medellín, the newly expanded Museum of Modern Art (MAMM) contains a gallery called Lab 3, a space designed to showcase sound installations. On view during our visit was a biologically driven piece by Leslie García and Paloma López, titled Micro-ritmos. Powered by soil samples collected from different parts of the city, Micro-ritmos transforms organic bacteria into a constantly shifting light and soundscape. García and López are Mexican artists who have worked extensively in alternative spaces, radio, and experimental sound rooted in organic systems. Throughout our time in Colombia, we came to realize that the pattern of working with organic material is part of a broader focus on the issue of territory in Colombian art and politics. As a watchword, territory encompasses concerns with landscape, real estate, extraction of natural resources, organic animal and plant material, and more.

At the National Salon in Pereira, one of the standouts was Carlos Bonil’s Fonoarqueologia y otras conexiones con el Amazonas (2016). In this sound work comprised of a listening station on blonde wood, visitors were invited to hear sounds like those derived from field recordings of the Amazon. These “recordings” were, however, in fact reproductions, produced in a studio using special instruments and techniques. By implicating the construction of human-made sound with the scientific endeavor of field recording, Bonil allows his listeners to question the supposed distinction between nature’s purity and industry’s artificiality. This theme was repeated at FLORA ars+natura, a space in Bogotá dedicated to exhibiting nature-related artworks and cultivating artists demonstrating a keen awareness of nature. Alberto Baraya and Sylvia Jaimes’s worked with an archive of birdsongs from Cornell University, collaborating with a team of singers and musicians to re-create these natural sounds from scratch for a piece entitled Gallada Lab (2015–16). Gallada Lab was presented in a dedicated sound gallery at FLORA, a room used throughout the year to host a rotating series of sound installations.

While artists use sound to question the authenticity of nature itself, other institutions in Colombia use immersive sound toward more didactic ends. At the Museo del Oro, a dramatic sliding door lead to a gallery that houses glass walls behind which illuminated golden relics were presented. Sound recordings of rituals that once incorporated these artifacts were presented with musical punctuations of light that animate the objects. At the National University of Colombia, an exhibition tracing the history and contemporary manifestations of shamanistic rituals in indigenous communities in Colombia featured a completely dark space in which a sound bath of recordings of ceremonies played on a loop. In both exhibition venues, theatrical presentations of recorded sound were being used to convey experiences of anthropological knowledge.

In each of these institutional and extra-institutional contexts, sound is presented as an aesthetic experience contiguous with other mediums. From my perspective as part of MoMA’s Department of Media and Performance Art, this was an inspiring constellation of spaces fostering sonic experiments with thoughtful depth.

3 days in Bogotá

By May Castleberry

For the last two years, I’ve had the pleasure of working with three artists from Bogotá—Mateo López, Johanna Calle, and Nicolás Paris—on a collective project called The Valise.¹ Joining the C-MAP group in Bogotá for three days in November certainly expanded my outlook on Colombian art. I was particularly interested to see works that helped me understand the context for the Colombian contributions to The Valise—works that reflect an affinity for travel, history, and bookmaking, and that draw upon Latin America’s rich tradition of graphic design, typography, and illustration.

When I first visited Bogotá in 2014, I went to the Luis Ángel Arango Library with López and Paris. While there, we looked at nineteenth-century atlases, entomological drawings, and expeditionary volumes, and it was clear that some of these objects, which López and Paris have been looking at for years, influenced their works for The Valise. In any case, all three artists appreciated the suggestion that their contributions might evoke earlier journeys or explorations of South America.

The C-MAP trip introduced me to some of the institutions and collections of older works that have inspired the Colombian artists participating in The Valise, as well as to some of their contemporaries, colleagues as well as rivals, who also employ graphic techniques, albeit in different ways. For example, after hearing of my project, the kind curator of art at the Museo Nacional de Colombia showed me a gallery filled with heroic paintings of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century conquest. Then he took me to an adjacent gallery and showed me a satirical reproduction, by José Alejandro Restrepo, of a nineteenth-century print of a supposedly paradisiacal tropical scene. This work, an interesting contrast to that of Calle, Paris, and López, sends up the colonial idea of the “picturesque.” The next day, I saw some of Restrepo’s incisive videos at Espacio El Dorado; despite the shift in medium, these pieces still incorporate text and photographic illustration in a layered way, recalling the artist’s harshly powerful work as a printmaker.

I saw echoes of the artwork we’ve commissioned in multiple places. Knowing of López’s love of the informational poster, I was struck by a large, early twentieth-century color chart in Beatriz Gonzáles’s studio—one of the only pieces of décor/art/information hanging there (other than her own work). I saw collaged, collapsed, altered, and/or blurred typography, and texts as images in almost every collection we visited. This only added to my impression that Calle, a master of such mediums, is a singular innovator rooted in a long Latin American lineage. In fact, typography appeared where I least expected it! At the studio of Miguel Ángel Rojas, we saw miniaturized photographs of illicit acts, bunched together to form letters and words. Conversely, Doris Salcedo, an artist clearly on the “maximalist” end of the typographic imagination, showed us her studio filled with dozens of massive concrete plinths, cut with water-filled alphabetical letters that form the names of would-be immigrants to Europe who had drowned in the Mediterranean en route.

More practically, I saw López’s gallery, Casas Riegner, and they proposed that we might show our project in La Oficina del Doctor at the time of the Bogotá Book Fair. I’ve begun to think about libraries in which we might place The Valise, or to whom we might give the extra, offset-printed pamphlets we’ve made in conjunction with it. For example, we will have 150 extra copies of a small pamphlet, designed and created by Nicolás Paris (and including a poem of his authorship), about Colombian leaves that have been marked by leaf-mining insects—perhaps of interest for the Flora library?

A Big, Healthy Nose

By Jerónimo Duarte Riascos

Perception, when it becomes habitual, also becomes automatic. Take, for instance, your nose: you know it is there and yet you don’t really see it anymore. Unless, of course, you change your habitual perspective: close one of your eyes and your nose (or at least part of it) “appears.”

Russian formalism, notably Viktor Shklovsky, proposed that this process of fighting the habitual, of seeing anew, is called defamiliarization—and he identified it as one of art’s core effects. But art is not by any means the sole defamiliarizer. So, I think, are time and space, something that became apparent to me during (and after) our recent C-MAP trip to Colombia.

C-MAP Latin America’s recent focus on Colombian modern and contemporary artistic practices—which included around twenty study sessions on the country’s art, history, and culture and was the reason for MoMA’s recent trip to Bogotá, Cali, Medellín and Pereira—was, for me, a defamiliarizing moment. In a way, I saw my nose again and realized how much it had grown.

Born and raised there, I moved to the United States (space) a good number of years ago (time). I return to Colombia a lot, usually in a rush, always trying to do and see too many things in too short a time. In November 2016 I went back, again in a rush. But this time I was joined by a group of colleagues, most of whom were traveling to Colombia for the first time and whose objective was, after having spent more than a year researching its art, history, architecture, key figures, and particularities, to gain a better understanding of the artistic scene of the country.

We experienced a very intense ten days, complying with the stereotypical Protestant ethic: early mornings, late nights, and few (too few!) breaks in between. We visited artists, museums, independent spaces, galleries, collectors, schools, exhibitions, universities. I felt like a proud local, though a defamiliarized one, showing them things that were also new to me. Because despite the cliché, things are changing in Colombia—quite radically. Not only politically, of course, with the much-discussed and recently signed peace treaty with FARC, but also behaviorally.

There is optimism and brains and creativity. And a very encouraging desire to work together. This was clear to me throughout the whole time in Colombia and during most of our visits. But I want to underscore two events, in particular: a brunch with representatives from some of the most interesting and exciting independent spaces in Bogotá, and a class (of sorts) that we took at Universidad de los Andes.

Brunch was held at Espacio Odeón, where we met not only with Odeón’s team but also with teams from La Agencia, C a m p o, and Miami. The spaces these groups are creating are, it seems to me, the basis for a community of experimentation and thus the impetus for a self-critical and fertile scene. I felt a bit jealous seeing this scene from afar—I know that some of my colleagues, who have no particular connection to Colombia, felt the same way, and so I think it is safe to conclude that it was not (only) a case of homesickness. Odeón, La Agencia, C a m p o, Miami, and the more than sixty flourishing independent spaces existing in Bogotá alone, invite you to belong and that is perhaps one of the reasons why they have successfully lured new publics into their spaces, projects, and experiments.

After brunch we left for class. The whole MoMA group sat quietly and in orderly fashion to hear a group of artists, who had graduated from Universidad de los Andes or were otherwise affiliated it in some way, discuss a diversity of paths enabled by artistic education. The group was so diverse and the conversation was so engaging that we ended up staying for a couple hours more than initially anticipated. You know it’s a good class when students refuse to leave and instead linger in the classroom trying to get a bit more of what has been given.

After class, as we continued on with our full schedule, my feeling of defamiliarization intensified with every new conversation. My conclusion: a pleasure, and an unparalleled opportunity to (re)discover my big, healthy, full-grown nose.

Photos from the trip

Medellín (Nov 10-12)

Cali (Nov 13)

Pereira (Nov 14)

Bogotá (Nov 15-18)

The post Growing Seeds of Thought: 10 Days in Colombia appeared first on post.

Blog posts from the travelers

Art Aspiring to the Condition of Literature

By Jerónimo Duarte Riascos

In 2007 Argentine thinker Reinaldo Laddaga published Espectáculos de realidad, an excursion into some of the particularities of contemporary Latin American literature. There he states that often literature aspires to the condition of contemporary art, which is a solid statement (albeit a general one) when one looks at the examples discussed in the book (Mario Bellatin, João Gilberto Noll, César Aira, Washington Cucurto . . .).

Looking at Chilean artistic production of the last fifty-plus years (in the way that MoMA’s C-MAP Latin America research group did over most of 2015) demands an addendum to Laddaga’s statement. Though a large part of Latin American literature indeed aspires to the condition of contemporary art, I want to say that this is not the case in Chile. “Chile, país de poetas” (Chile, a country of poets) is not only a catchy, sometimes overused slogan, it is also a characteristic that permeates the artistic production of the country in drastic and wonderful ways.

One could start with figures as solid and complex as the artist/writer Juan Luis Martínez and think about the innovative engagement with writing and images he proposes in La nueva novela and that is present in his visual works, some of which are (happily) part of MoMA’s collection. Nicanor Parra also comes to mind—not only for his Quebrantahuesos (1952), a public-intervention-collage-poem hybrid, but also with his Antipoesía.

C-MAP’s Chilean focus allowed us to better understand Parra and Martínez, and to appreciate the slippery boundaries between Chilean poetry and visual arts—a phenomenon that survived (and was perhaps accentuated by) the years of dictatorship as illustrated by some of the Colectivo de Acciones de Arte’s – CADA interventions, and one that still remains prominent in contemporary art practices. Three cases come to mind from the preparation for and trip to Chile:

1) Pedro Lemebel’s last performance Abecedario.

Better known as a writer, Lemebel was also a performer, visual artist, and member of the collective Las Yeguas del Apocalipsis. His last piece was a performance conducted across the street from a cemetery in Santiago, where he “wrote” the alphabet in explosive powder and then proceeded to light it.

2) Francisca Benítez’s video-poem Décimas Telúricas.

Based in New York City but with a strong relationship to Chile, Benítez has been working with sign language over the past year. Her works merge the performativity of the deaf-mute language with video and poetry, which is often, like in Décimas Telúricas, written by her.

3) Catalina Bauer’s Primeras Palabras.

A collaboration with dancer Amelia Ibanez, this work explores the acquisition of language while simultaneously creating a new alphabet made out of movement and poses.

Maybe these three examples are not exactly cases of art aspiring to literature, but in all of them (as in many of the works we studied and witnessed during our trip) “Chile, país de poetas” resounds. Perhaps by flirting with literature and poetry, these pieces stress the arbitrariness of a language that still communicates even when the arbitrary linguistic codes are not always shared—which, I think, is not a minor statement in a “país de poetas,” scarred by the divisions of a twenty-plus-year dictatorship.

Architecture as a Living Act

By Luis Pérez-Oramas

Since 2011, when I was invited to visit Ciudad Abierta (Open City), near Valparaíso, traveling to Chile has meant a return to Ritoque. I was in charge of the curatorial direction of the 2012 São Paulo Biennial when I first visited, my intention being to invite the cultural community living and working there to build a pavilion within Oscar Niemeyer’s biennial pavilion. I have to say that this project was beautifully accomplished, and its realization remains one of the most moving and compelling moments in my career and a life-changing experience.

When we planned our C-MAP trip to Chile, I insisted upon visiting Ritoque with my colleagues from MoMA. I am glad that we had the privilege to enter Open City, where our generous friends from the Corporación Cultural Amereida hosted us.

This was more than a conventional “art visit” as Open City requires a different sort of understanding. A project that began in the early 1950s and was the life’s work of the sculptor Claudio Girola, the poet Godofredo Iommi, and the architect and theoretician Alberto Cruz, among others—with origins in the phalènes and other poetic gatherings of the Santa Hermandad de la Orquídea (The Holy Brotherhood of the Orchid), a poetry collective made up of Iommi and a handful of Brazilian poets (Gerardo Mello Mourão and Abdias do Nascimento, among others) in the late 1940s—Open City embraces, through the constant exercise of freedom, “the act of living.”

Linked since the late 1960s with the Architecture School of the Catholic University in Valparaíso, Open City has also been a laboratory for architecture as a poetic act, that is, for life as architecture (of bodies, deserts, dunes, words, journeys). The most daring and advanced new Chilean architecture has roots in its intellectual grounds—and some time on its material, earthy ground.

As is true of all major foundations, Open City was subject to a double act of inception and therefore, to a double temporality in its establishment. By 1967 Iommi, Cruz, Girola, Vial Armstrong, and others were engaged in the university reform that led to a scission within the architecture faculty in Santiago, providing the momentum and opportunity to establish a new approach to teaching and form of thinking at the Pontificial Catholic University in Valparaíso.

Rather than a science, a technique, or a discipline, architecture was seen as a living act by the founders of what came to be known as Amereida—an act that is related to two fundamental constituents: the human voice as poetry (as Alberto Cruz writes: “The art of architecture, in order to become such art, must listen to the poetic word”) and human transhumance, that is, the experience of passage, travel, journey as drift, as dérive, as travesía. It took a second generation of young interlocutors to come up with a radical response to these thoughts and teachings, which was to start building Open City on a piece of land rejected by the agrarian reform.

Among the various foundational voices (and texts) for Open City, the central one is a long poem that Iommi began to write in the 1960s, titled “Amereida.” This title, which today is seen to embody the philosophy of Open City, is a conflation of “America” and “Eneida” (Aeneid), the title of Virgil’s famous epic poem. It signals the will to understand South America as a continental body that has to literally be “gone through,” journeyed through, stressing its absence of cities as well as its massive interior—a desertic body, or an ocean of lands.

Since then, Open City has been an endless laboratory of hope and of alternate forms of living, where a community of men and women live with their families, acknowledging the possibility of transcending the cultural constraints of “property,” accepting the rules of a communal life in which decisions are made by consensus, and engaging in a lively linking of life and art, thought and life, experience and contemplation. Giorgio Agamben has stressed modernity as a period in which a spiritual schism has condemned us to “perform” experiences without owning them, leading to various forms of alienation—some “perform” experiences without possessing them, whereas others “possess” experiences without performing them.

Open City was created in order to respond to this modern alienation. As such, it might be the last living utopia in the Western Hemisphere: a utopia that is neither imposed nor promoted through messianism. Maybe the only analogue contemporary experience is Fernand Deligny’s Radeau, a community of autistic people in which a revolutionary concept of images and actions was developed through silent, minimal acts. One can say that Open City is a utopia accomplished: a place, a new topos, whose effects resonate alongside silence and modesty, through community and hospitality, a utopia of small gestures, endlessly realized as habitation, cohabitation, and poetry. At a time when architecture as social commitment is being recognized as a mainstream practice, as shown by the recent nomination of the London-based collective Assemble for the Turner Prize, Open City/Amereida is also, maybe, a true model—a model for the endless, and always failing, pursuit of truth.

A Case of Experimental Pedagogy

By Wendy Woon

The recent C-MAP trip to Chile underscored the complexities at the intersections of art, politics, pedagogy, and public life. Nowhere can the debate about broader democracy, the arts, and free expression be more apparent than in this country, with its recent political history of repression, torture, death, and exile under the dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet. The trip provided a unique opportunity to visit museums dedicated to making this history visible, including the Museum of Memory and Human Rights and the Museo de la Solidaridad Salvador Allende. Under Pinochet, many artists, writers, and poets lived in exile yet continued to raise protest from their positions outside of Chile. However, there were others who remained, and I was interested in the different ways this group survived and continued their creative art practices under such repression.

As an art educator, I am interested in experimental pedagogy and how it can be fostered by constructed environments. What I was most looking forward to was the visit to La Ciudad Abierta (Open City) in Ritoque, located along the coast near Valparaiso. The city and its structures were built on a piece of land, divided by a highway, with beaches, dunes, and wetlands; a diversity of flora and fauna; and grassy meadows, pines, and eucalyptus trees, which grow on the high ground above the highway. La Ciudad Abierta was founded in 1970 as a utopian community of architects, sculptors, poets, painters, philosophers, and designers. It survived the Pinochet dictatorship and continues to exist today, still home to some of its original “citizens.” Those who live in the Open City are members of the Amereida Corporation; there are no individual owners and all constructions and contributions are considered donations to the corporation. Today the city offers the School of Architecture of the Catholic University of Valparaiso, the initial source of Open City’s origins, a partnership arrangement wherein students have opportunities to actively participate in the city’s life, work, and studies, sharing in the construction of new structures and experimentation with materials.

Remote and isolated, the city is comprised of a range of structures—some are spare and spread-out buildings for community events such as concerts, meeting/studio rooms, and “entry quarters,” and others are uniquely designed homes, outdoor gathering “agora” spaces, outdoor sports spaces, sculpture gardens, and even a cemetery. Experimentation with materials, in particular concrete, is evident throughout the city and its structures, as is the use of recycled or natural materials. Modern forms are combined in a unique and often quirky aesthetic that integrates into the natural environment.

Rooted in European utopianism transported to Chile, in combination with political concerns of Chileans in the 1950s and ’60s (who were focused on small communities living in nature), the Open City also reflects the Jesuit communitarianism of the Latin American Catholic left. When architect Alberto Cruz Covarrubias joined the School of Architecture of the Catholic University of Valparaiso, his goal was to reimagine the pedagogical model. Rather than maintain a hierarchy, he “opened up” his professorship and invited practitioners and researchers to share in it—including in its salary. Argentine poet Godofredo Iommi was one of those who participated in this innovative teaching model. Iommi took his students on a journey from southern Chile to Bolivia to understand not only the landscape but also how people lived within it. Although the group was stopped from completing this immersive learning trip, Iommi was inspired to write Amereida (1967), a long and philosophical poem that became the foundation of the utopian community’s underlying principles. An opportunity arose, when President Eduardo Frei Montalva passed reform that allowed larger farms to be used for public interest in Chile, and those who followed Amereida collectively bought the land for the Open City.

An experiment in radical communal living, architecture, and education, the city was initially an extension of the curriculum of the School of Architecture of the Catholic University of Valparaiso, breaking down hierarchies between faculty and students. Designs were and continue to be collectively authored. Experimentation with materials and use of recycled and local materials are integrated into a process that includes both planning and improvisation. This pedagogical model continues today and is realized in the more than twenty unconventional structures integrated across the natural landscape.

The community is somewhat secluded, and not accessible to many visitors, but we were fortunate to have Jaime Reyes, an Open City community member, poet, and professor give us an extended tour of the buildings and constructions. Jaime generously provided insights into how the city and citizens function collectively. Even the tribe of dogs that runs freely on the property belongs to everyone—and not to one particular family.

I was intrigued by the range of public and private spaces, which seem to evolve out of the landscape. Experimentation with form and materials, especially concrete, is demonstrated throughout the property. We were informed that though a family might inhabit a home, they are not its property owners. As needs change, for example, as children grow up and move away, a citizen may be moved to a smaller home so that an expanding family may move in. The ethos is that citizens pool their resources and own everything collectively. Of course, this system presents challenges when someone chooses to permanently leave the city.

The city includes design classrooms and studios, and some housing and outdoor athletic fields for students as they continue to work with faculty to build structures and experiment with materials. Spaces for group meetings include a concert hall where a weekly communal meal is served.

During our visit, the citizens and some of the founding members arranged a communal lunch outdoors. A daughter of one of the founders shared with me some of her experience of growing up in the Open City. She continues to reside there, but her brother opted to move out. Her story left an impression on me, and I wondered how her experiences differ from those who were part of the first and second generations living there. It is difficult to gather whether the idealism has worked in practice.

When we arrived at the Open City cemetery, we were reminded that a city needs to meet the needs of its citizens from birth until death. The cemetery was constructed in the early decades, after two of the children in the community died, one by drowning and the other in a fire. Since then, it has been expanded to include plots for many of the founders and their family members.

It is interesting to consider how, as a social and pedagogical experiment, the design of structures in the landscape supports the community’s collective values, according to which they live their lives together.

Throughout the city, the importance of poetry is apparent. Exploring language through poetry is a means by which citizens develop the creative research that informs the design process of the city’s structures. Phalènes, essentially poetic acts, games, celebratory garments, readings, or performances continue to be enacted by community members as a way to link architecture and poetry, generate ideas, and add unexpected qualities to the spaces. After initially acquiring the land, community members enacted a phalène in 1971. More interested in “changing life,” rather than in a heroic role for modern architecture to “change the world,” the first citizens and students of the Open City used poetry as a foundation in their aim to realize a built environment not motivated by adding to an historical and aesthetic canon, and this practice continues today.

There is no master plan for La Ciudad Abierta; it is a city that continues to evolve. Experimentation with form and materials, and a connectedness and transparency in relationship to the landscape are central to this evolution. It is clearly not a “commune,” but rather, a professional and pedagogical, socially engaged, participatory learning environment. Given that the city as an experiment in pedagogy has survived a repressive dictatorship, most likely because of the nonpolitical agenda and Catholic University association, it demonstrates one of the modes of resistance and creative survival that we investigated while in Chile. I admire the creativity, and persistent commitment to a collective vision. I think that for students this must be a wonderful and memorable method of embodied learning about design, innovative approach to architecture, and living.

An Overall Impression of the Art World

By David Frankel

The highlight of the Chile trip for me was less any single experience than an overall impression of the art world there: I was struck by how often our conversations turned to issues of social engagement and conscience, informed, I think, by both the relatively recent past and a long-term sense of art’s public accountability. Whether at the Taller Bloc, a Santiago studio-cum-school run as an artists’ cooperative, or at the Ciudad Abierta (Open city) outside Valparaíso, we saw artists operating collectively and either implicitly or explicitly concerned not only with producing individual artworks but with developing ways in which artists could live. A subtext of this kind of ambition, it seemed to me, was the country’s experience of dictatorship under General Augusto Pinochet, from 1973 to 1990. During that brutal period the usual codes of civil society were suspended; many artists left the country, while others who stayed carried out their subversive pursuit with extreme caution.

The Pinochet regime ended twenty-five years ago but it came up again and again in our encounters in Chile, whether in glancing ways—through conversations about earlier work with artists such as Paz Errázuriz or Eugenio Dittborn, for example, survivors of the dictatorship—or in direct confrontations with that history. The most manifest case of the second kind was Santiago’s Museo de la Memoria y los Derechos Humanos (Museum of memory and human rights), set in a large, purpose-designed building on a site a city block wide. The entrance to this austere, even-sided geometric mass is in a sunken plaza, asking the visitor to descend well below ground level to reach the door, in a metaphor of death reminding me of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C. A more modest symbol, but in its way as powerful, was the Parque Cultural in Valparaíso, an old hillside fort that during the Pinochet years became a prison and worse but today has been converted into a cultural center and park where people play on the grass in the sun. What was surely our most ravishingly beautiful day was spent at the Ciudad Abierta, a large expanse of open countryside on the sea north of Valparaíso that a group of architect poets have developed as an experiment in both education and communal living, teaching students through the building of innovative houses and gathering places scattered through the parkland. But beauty comes in many forms, and I was just as impressed by the spirit of endurance we saw in grittier circumstances in Santiago and by Chilean artists’ sense of responsibility in dealing with the legacy of history.

Carlos Leppe: Singing in Plaster

By Giampaolo Bianconi

Performance can be read in any text, glimpsed in any movement, and heard in any voice or caesura. This ubiquity can serve as camouflage: performance can hide in the most public spaces, where actions of grandiose inflection are lost among the rituals of daily life and the largesse of social patterns. An action, like an image, fades—though more quickly. Today, in the dispersive heyday of the digital age, performance might be charged with injecting presence into institutional spaces. Yet some works remind us of a time when the fugitiveness and marginality of performance formed an essential part of its realization—without constraining its ambitions.

The actions of Carlos Leppe most often occurred in galleries, for audiences made up of friends and colleagues. Whatever charge of secrecy his actions might have had, they can never be said to have faded into the rhythm of daily life. Deftly using his own body as a medium, Leppe produced one of the most radical bodies of work in the Chilean Escena de Avanzada. The abject grandiosity of his actions was unique in the Chilean scene from which he emerged. His artworks are little discussed in the United States, and his unfortunate recent death is an undeniable loss in and beyond Chile. Below, I’ll attempt to offer a brief introduction to his practice, as gleaned from recent travel in Chile.

In 1982 Leppe was invited to take part in the Paris Bienniale. The performance he presented there—“Mambo numero ocho” de Perez Prado (“Mambo Number Eight” by Perez Prado)—was staged in a bathroom of the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. It presents a matrix of the concerns that run through all of Leppe’s work. Dressed in a tuxedo, Leppe recited—in French—a text about his journey across the Andes. He then undressed, revealing the bra and panties he wore beneath his tuxedo. After shaving his body, he donned a headdress displaying the Chilean national colors (blue, white, and red). He danced to “Mambo Number Eight” until he fell to the floor of the bathroom, where he devoured a cake while singing the Chilean national anthem until he vomited. Then, on his hands and knees, he left the bathroom, calling for his mother until he reached a tape recorder, from which her voice sang the famous tango “El día que me quieras” (The day that you love me).

This performance belied Leppe’s own ambivalence about being a “Latin American artist” invited to perform in a world-capital biennial. His makeup, described as reminiscent of Carlos Gardel (an Argentine), his reference to the Cuban Perez Prado, and his singing of the Chilean national anthem created a pastiche of Latin American-ness for a European audience. How silly, even, to describe red, white, and blue as Chilean national colors given that their allegiance spreads across countless national imaginaries. His bra and panties indicate his position as a feminized object of a male, European, colonial spectator—all within a museum space from which art is excluded (the bathroom).

“Mambo numero ocho” de Perez Prado catalogues the themes that run throughout Leppe’s work: an ambivalent and antagonistic relationship with Chile, the flexibility of his own desire and gender, an affinity for the grotesque and marginal, an engagement with various media (here, the recorded voice of his mother, and elsewhere, photography and video), and the violent presence of his mother’s own needs and desires.

An earlier performance by Leppe, “Prueba de artista” (Artist’s Proof, 1978), took place in Santiago with the artist Marcelo Mellado, and crystallizes even more specifically the importance of desire in the artist’s work. With the word activo (active) stamped on his chest, Leppe embraced Mellado, leaving an imprint on Mellado’s chest. Formally, Leppe and Mellado reenacted the process of the work’s title, but their embrace and its resulting imprint impart a language of desire to the imperfect process of replication on display. A male body actively “reproducing” onto another, with flesh, ink, hair, and sweat—Leppe’s “artist’s proof” is the evidence of active desire as much as a translation of a traditional printing technique onto a bodily support.

“Prueba de artista” survives in a few black-and-white photographs, as do many of Leppe’s actions. But Leppe also performed for the camera, like in his well-known 1980 “Sala de espera” (Waiting Room), and arranged these performances into carefully arranged video installations. Consisting of numerous video monitors, long fluorescent light bulbs, a hospital bed, and sculpture of a monitor made of organic materials and containing a statue of the Virgin Mary, Sala de espera evokes the cold tension of a medical institution.

In this work three monitors display the artist wearing different forms of plaster on his body. Each video has either a blue, white, or red background. Harnessed in plaster, his lips painted bright red, and, in one video, his mouth held painfully open by a metal claws, Leppe sings from different operas. As he sings, saliva runs out of his mouth. An adjacent monitor shows Leppe’s mother recounting the pain that the artist’s birth and childhood caused her. Her evident bitterness about memories of her son, looped on video as a steady nightmare, contrasts with the excess of his own manicured singing. Trapped in plaster, Leppe’s voice rings out over his mother’s lament. Frozen in blue, white, and red, Leppe’s singing, claimed critic Nelly Richard, is an allegory of a repressive culture that, despite its best efforts, could not contain the artist. His mother’s psychic hold—at least as powerful as a political regime—emanates throughout the installation. In 1980 “Sala de espera” would have been as powerful in New York City, which was on the cusp of the AIDS epidemic, as it was in Santiago.

Always questioning his body and its political, sexual, and familial inheritance, Leppe’s actions are as compelling as they are complex. Their unraveling leads viewers in countless directions, and their shadowy accessibility—black-and-white photographs, grainy videos, secondhand accounts—reminds us that the impermanence of these works must be respected as an artistic strategy and not merely a historical accident. Somehow the mixture of documentation, gossip, and criticism with which we receive Leppe’s actions today reveals the complications of their origins.

More Than 150 Chilean titles added to MoMA’s Library Collection!

By Milan Hughston

The MoMA Library continues to aggressively collect printed material documenting modern and contemporary global art, either through gift or purchase. However, there is no substitute for being “on the ground” in a foreign country to ensure that relevant material is added to our 300,000-plus-volume library.

My participation in the recent C-MAP trip to Chile yielded great results. With the help of my colleagues, I was able to return with 150 or so titles that tell the story of modern and contemporary art in Chile. Although Chile enjoys a robust art publishing enterprise, of both historic and contemporary materials, distribution beyond its borders has been a challenge.

Virtually every stop on our week-long itinerary resulted in additions to the Library’s collection: catalogues from museums such as CeDoc Artes Visuales, leading galleries such as Patricia Ready and Die Ecke, artists’ collectives such as Galería Metropolitana, and artists, including Eugenio Dittborn and Paz Errázuriz. We also acquired rare historical works from writers such as Justo Pastor Mellado and the generous collectors Pedro Montes and Juan Yarur.

Most of the material generously given to the Library is not easily found in North American libraries. By adding these titles to our online catalogue, which is accessible throughout the world [http://arcade.nyarc.org/search~S8], MoMA is doing its best to promote modern and contemporary Chilean art.

Highlights and Surprises

By Sarah Meister

There are certain places you know you want to go when you visit Santiago: the Museo de la Memoria y los Derechos Humanos was one of these for me (don’t miss Alfredo Jaar’s subterranean memorial). And there are certain artists you know you want to meet: Paz Errázuriz was at the top of my list, and we spent an incredible afternoon in her company. But the surprises are what you feel you ought to share, and here are a few of mine.

If you weren’t able to see the installation of Errázuriz’s work at the 2015 Venice Biennale (where Nelly Richard presented Errázuriz’s work alongside Lotty Rosenfeld’s), D21 Proyectos de Arte has organized an exhibition of her photographs, which will be on view through November 26, 2015. The gallery’s program is filled with under-known achievements; we saw a Francisco Smythe exhibition there that was a knockout. Other galleries I’d recommend? Die Ecke Arte Contemporáneo and Galería Patricia Ready are as different as two galleries can be, but each represents great artists and both of their programs are focused and ambitious.

Samuel Salgado is the Director of the National Center of Historical Photography (CENFOTO) in Chile. He and his team care for, study, and promote public awareness of their extraordinary collection of more than a million (!) photographs made in Chile, from daguerreotypes to contemporary work (www.patrimoniofotografico.cl), and they serve as advisors to estates and collections looking to preserve their own holdings. As Salgado said when we met, one goal is to “convey the idea that photography comes from photographers,” and to “explore their individual visions.” John Szarkowski articulated a remarkably similar ambition when he began his career at MoMA in 1962.

Monserrat Rojas is similarly tireless in her efforts to discover and promote the achievements of contemporary artists who work with photography. Instead of simply describing what they do, she brought me to see exhibitions she had organized of work by Claudio Pérez at Centro Experimental Perrera Arte and Cristóbal Olivares at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo (MAC), introducing me not only to the art but also to the artists.

Visiting Taller Bloc was like entering an urban artistic utopia, a Ciudad Abierta of sorts, within the confines of a former bakery. Catalina Bauer, Rodrigo Canala, Rodrigo Galecio, Gerardo Pulido, and Tomás Rivas welcomed us warmly into their gallery/workshop/studio (www.tallerbloc.cl), and shared with us not only their own art, but also their unique pedagogical model, which has been designed to encourage experimentation, conversation, and practical training in the visual arts.

So many people were generous with their time, their perspectives, and their art, and I regret not being able to name them all, but I would like to mention Malu Edwards, Benjamin Lira, Pedro Montes, Francisca Sutil, Adriana Valdés, and Juan Yarur for going out of their way to make us feel welcome and facilitate connections between MoMA and the art scene in Santiago.

Finally, in that most literary of cities, it seems fitting to end with a bookstore. Metales Pesados Libros is a stone’s throw from MAC and Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes and well worth the walk. Then, once you’ve picked up a new book, you can wander over to Emporio la Rosa and enjoy it with a scoop of the best sorbet I’ve ever tasted . . .

MoMA visits Chile

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