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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15 years later a leading Slovenian theorist of art from the former Eastern Europe, Igor Zabel, could already state in the past tense: “There was once a time when people knew exactly where the center of the art world was located and where the provinces where”. His words clearly reveal the pre-1989 geopolitical hierarchies that laid the foundation for the exoticizing representation of the region. Back in 2001, Zabel’s statement was still rather a desire for the final dissolution of these hierarchies than an actual assessment of the status quo. But his words can be repeated with full force today.

In 2014, when a group of curators and researchers from The Museum of Modern Art travels to Central and Eastern Europe, it is not to experience a mythically enchanted and bewildering art scene, but to revisit old colleagues, with whom the relationship dates back decades, to meet with the artists represented in MoMA’s collection, and to try to keep up with the rapid development of the local art scenes as well as the growing number of institutions and bottom-up initiatives.

Our 10-day research trip to Central Europe took us to multiple cities whose names start with “B”: Budapest, Bratislava, Prague, Brno and Wrocław (don’t be fooled by the last one – pre-1945 it used to be called Breslau). The visit was a brisk run through public museums and artists’ personal studios, through cozy apartments and vast storage spaces, contemporary art galleries and used books stores. We decided to focus our attention on the art of 1960s and 1970s, but were too often positively distracted by the appeal of early 20th century avant-garde architecture and design that is so prolific in these cities.

Traveling like this was not possible even 10 years ago: With all the world’s knowledge accessible online at our disposal, we were able to check New York libraries holdings when exposed to a rare book on sale or access MoMA archives when in need of answers to questions about the Museum’s past travelling shows. Needles to say, it was the smartphones that possessed the most magical powers available. However, these powers could be only used well with the local help. Our generous hosts took us to back streets and alleys not visible on google maps. Here, we share our experience of these places as well as impressions and observations from encounters with art and people of Hungary, Czech Republic, Slovakia and Poland, as well as individuals we met on the occasion of the opening of the biennial in Berlin.

Magdalena Moskalewicz

1. BUDAPEST

At the Ludwig Museum of Contemporary Art

Visiting Katalin Ladik

By Jon Hendricks

It’s hard to describe the shock and pleasure of first experiencing the work of a great artist one has never heard of. Katalin Ladik is one of those special artists who is all too hidden from public perception. On our C-MAP trip to Budapest, we had the chance to first see a group of her works at the Ludwig Museum: scores constructed of sewing patterns, seemingly random found bits of score, and other interventions. Then we visited her, and she showed us more works, works that we could look at closely, and we asked if we could hear what the scores sounded like. And then, she vocalized the scores, transfixing us. But this is not her only work. We saw more, and there is more to see: photographs of her powerful performances, poetry that mesmerized her contemporary, young generation of Hungarian artists, and a captivating soul. We were all so taken with Katalin Ladik.

Katalin Ladik’s spontaneous performance

Kassák Museum

By Juliet Kinchin

On the second day of our visit, we traveled under clear blue skies to the opposite end of the city from the Ludwig Museum, to the sleepy district of Obuda, an area of lowrise 17th- and18th-century buildings that is also the site of the Roman remains of the ancient city of Aquincum. Busy main roads and high-rise housing from the 1970s now encircle those historic structures. The Kassák Museum opened in Obuda in 1976 as a branch of the Petofi Literary Museum, an affiliation that positioned Lajos Kassák (1887–1967) first and foremost as a poet and critic rather than an artist-designer In recent years this emphasis has been inverted, with greater prominence given to his work as a visual artist in the newly refurbished displays. The current installation and programming feels fresh and accessible, serving to contextualize the long career of this seminal avant-garde figure both synchronically and diachronically and exploring his diverse international connections across Europe. The museum’s present and planned activities speak to a renewed interest in early modernist avant-gardes among the younger generation of curators, historians, artists and designers. The bold design of the new permanent displays effectively complements but does not overwhelm the art and documentary source material—a particular challenge, since the collection of works in various media is graphically so strong. The red and black display furniture and exclamatory texts screened directly on the walls blend with the more intimate scale of the printed ephemera on display.

János Szoboszlai and Katalin Szőke talked to us about the current thematic exhibition, Kassak and Kassak 2. The show addresses Kassák’s reworking in the 1960s of his 1920s output, a project undertaken after a successful exhibition in Paris. Questions of authenticity and originality have been a long-standing problem in considerations of Kassák’s early and later works. In tackling this question head-on and unraveling the complex history of Kassák’s 1960s reprints, the museum is offering fascinating perspectives on the trajectory of the artist’s practice and reputation on both sides of the Iron Curtain.

This is one in a series of research and exhibition projects on the historical avant-garde in Hungary undertaken by the staff at the Kassák Museum. Another currently in progress and outlined by curator Katalin Szőke during our visit is an international, interdisciplinary examination of Budapest’s dance and movement avant-garde of the 1920s, paying particular attention to the experimental pioneers Valeria Dienes and Alice Madzsar. Embracing numerous key figures in Central European art, music, drama and dance, this project whose development we will be watching closely over the next year or two.

Artpool

By Milan Hughston

The group’s focused visits in Budapest included a site visit to Artpool, one of the most active and comprehensive collections of experimental art practice in Europe. We were hosted by its founders, Júlia Klaniczay and György Galántai, at Artpool’s large archive located in the heart of Budapest.

Artpool was established in 1970 to produce, network, curate, and document avant-garde art practices in all formats. The resulting collection is astounding in scale and scope, covering contemporary art practice from the 1970s to the present.

In 2013, Artpool published a 535-page history of their efforts in a beautifully produced catalogue that is available in its entirety through the MoMA Library online catalogue.

In spite of their success, Artpool and its founders face serious financial and space issues in the contemporary climate of Hungary. It is vital that this unique centre of visual art action and documentation continue to tell its story.

Miklós Erdély Estate

Views of Budapest

At Budapest Art Galleries

Meeting with Tamas St.Auby

By Jon Hendricks

Tamas St. Auby is a legendary figure in the avant garde. He is one of them. He continues to be one of them. You kick over a stone, and there he is. You open a door and peek in— there he is. Hungary hid from him for twenty years. The art world has hidden from him even longer. What are we afraid of? His mind is a provocation; his mind is a revelation. He has so much to say, and our group was treated with an amazing and lucid presentation of his work.

Walk through modernist villas in the Napraforgó street, with Pal Ritook and Ardnas Ferkai

Villas in Napraforgó utca

By Juliet Kinchin

Given Budapest’s spectacular and rich architectural fabric, it has been disappointing to learn of the closure of the Museum of Architecture formerly situated near the Kassák Museum in Obuda. The entire staff has been dismissed (except for the current director Pal Ritook) and the collections have been removed to inaccessible, off-site storage pending possible inclusion in an expanded fine arts museum campus in the Varosliget. An equal if not greater loss is the closure of the museum’s display space in the Castle District and the program of excellent traveling exhibitions that the museum organized regularly for venues throughout Hungary and abroad.

Despite these problems, Ritook and Prof. Andras Ferkai of the Moholy-Nagy Művészeti Egyetem (Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design) prepared a collection of archival materials that they circulated during our architectural walking tour of modernist villas in Napraforgó utca (literally Sunflower Street) in residential Buda. Having started the day with a focus on Kassák and modernist graphics, a few of us ended the day with another journey back to the utopian future in this delightful enclave of early 1930s modernism, a legacy of Hungary’s influential participation in the Bauhaus. We began in Pasaréti tér, a square framed by a modernist bus station on one side and a Roman Catholic church and monastery on the other, all designed by the architect Gyula Rimanóczy in 1933. Alongside this is Napraforgó utca, an ensemble of twenty-two modest family houses built in 1930-31. This project was the culmination of several years of campaigning to encourage the authorities and the public at large to adopt modern principles in house design. It started in 1925, when Farkas Molnár, a star graduate of the Weimar Bauhaus and an assistant in Walter Gropius’s architectural office, returned to Budapest to spread the modernist gospel. Pointing to the success of the 1928 modernist housing exhibition at the Weissenhof estate in Stuttgart, Molnar and a group of up-and-coming architects petitioned the Budapest Public Works Council in 1930 to build a whole street of small houses. The group also included Jozsef Fischer and Lajos Kozma, the finest modern architects in Hungary. The names of all involved appear on a stone block at the center of a small square on one side of the street, where locals still gather to chat and play. This project, like the one in Stuttgart and others in Wrocław (then the German Breslau) and Prague, was to demonstrate that the main task of modern architecture was the construction of practical, affordable housing and rationally designed buildings. The neo-conservative social and political climate in Hungary between the Wars meant that, compared to Germany and the Netherlands, the country had very little public or collective architecture. Rather, new modernist ideas were applied mostly to the design of single-family homes and villas. Within a year of the initial proposal, the twenty-two houses had been built. With all of the architects working on plots of the same size, this little development shows what a small group of enthusiasts with a utopian vision could achieve in a year.

2. BRATISLAVA

Bratislava City Gallery

By Juliet Kinchin

It did not take long to travel from Budapest to another country and to Bratislava, the second of five cities on our itinerary beginning with B, if one counts Breslau, now Wroclaw. Traveling between these major cultural centers in a minibus was a reminder of how diverse and concentrated Central European culture is, with different peoples, languages, styles, and values often co-existing in cities just fifty or sixty miles apart. In Bratislava, we were met by Juraj Carny and taken directly to the City Gallery in the heart of the Old Town. In advance of the string of meetings scheduled with artists that afternoon, the gallery’s survey of Slovak conceptualism of the 1960s and ’70s (Koller, Bartoš, Filko, Sikora, Mlynárčik, Ďurček, etc.) gave us an excellent overview and preparation. Chief curator Zsófia Kiss-Szemán explained that there had been a great push in recent years to build up this part of the collection, which in its totality ranges from the Gothic to the art of the present. Some types of work fared better than others in the relatively intimate and historical atmosphere of spaces carved out of a former palace. One of the most successful was the vertiginous passageway created by Matej Krén between seemingly endless walls of books. Proceeding gingerly along the narrow path that Krén describes as a kind of symbolic “short cut across the world”, we felt the weight of the inaccessible knowledge locked within the tomes on either side. The books were those censored or discarded in Communist times.

Galéria Cypriána Majernika

By Juliet Kinchin

Despite a prevailing climate of censorship in the 1960s and the controversial closure of several of its exhibitions, the Galéria Cypriána Majernika clearly provided an important forum for young Czechoslovakian artists under the age of thirty-five. A state-run organization similar to Young Artists’ Centers in several other Soviet Bloc countries, the gallery had the prerogative to retain work by the artists it showed. The collection that has accumulated in this way is a fascinating time capsule of semi-official art from the 1960s to the 1980s, with limited additions of more recent work. I was particularly intrigued by a picture entitled Tesco Woman. Originally painted by Julián Filo, a politically engaged artist of the 1980s, it has been given a contemporary makeover by Veronika Rónaiová – the artist’s daughter. Due to the current restructuring of visual arts venues in Bratislava, this gallery’s function has been largely superseded. With the transfer of former director Richard Gregor to the City Gallery and a tightened budget, it remains to be seen whether the Galéria Cypriána Majernika can reinvent itself to perform a new role in the visual culture of post-Communist Slovakia.

Seminar with Slovak Artists and Curators at Kunsthalle Bratislava

Milan Adamčiak

By Jon Hendricks

Our trip to Bratislava was my first trip to Slovakia and my introduction to a number of marvelous artists and very generous and gracious curators and directors of cultural institutions. I was very taken by the work of Adamčiak, whose intriguing art takes several vigorous forms. He described an early piece where he went under a bridge and played his violin under water. It must have been so beautiful. He entranced us with descriptions of other sound explorations and innovations. We were shown scores that he has composed; it was so marvelous to be introduced again and again to artists who have been working with scores and sound art in the various cities that we visited.

Stano Masar

By Michelle Elligott

During a full afternoon conference organized by the Kunsthalle Bratislava, which was commenced by an excellent overview of Slovak art from the 1960s-on by Chief Curator Richard Gregor, we enjoyed presentations by a handful of artists.  Stano Masar presented an overview of his practice.  Notable are his two series of Global History of Art, 2004 and Contemporary Art, 2007.  In these series, Masar selects icons of art, from old masters to recent wonders, and translates them, if you will, into the language of infographics to create uniform pictographs.  The artist succeeds in distilling the image to its immediately recognizable, core form – its dna; utilizing the pervasive international language of graphic signage; and instilling a hint of humor to create a wonderful body of work.

Studio visit with Otis Laubert

By Milan Hughston

While visiting Bratislava, Jon Hendricks and I were taken by Juraj Carny to the studio of Otis Laubert, a Slovakian artist born in 1946. Upon arrival, it was apparent why a studio visit to Laubert’s home and workshop was necessary to understand the full breadth and scope of his work. The studio and home are located in a dense warren of buildings located in a suburb of Bratislava. It is a wonderland of found objects beautifully incorporated into all mediums—collage, paintings, and furniture, to name just a few genres.

Artist and theorist Jiří Valoch characterizes Laubert’s practice succinctly: “We could say Otis’s major summarizing work is his deposit—the collection of various objects, originating in about 1965 and containing thousands of things ordered according to certain rules.” Our visit with Laubert confirmed that.

Monogramista T.D.

By Jon Hendricks

Later that same afternoon that we met Milan Adamčiak, we visited the studio of Monogramista, an artist who also works with scores and installations. Unfortunately, we did not have the opportunity to hear his works, but visually they were very striking and beautiful. I look forward to seeing more work by Monogramista and Adamčiak and hope we will have the opportunity to meet both again soon.

Studio visit with Monogramista

Tranzit.sk

3. BRNO

Moravian Gallery – Jiří Valoch Archive

By Michelle Elligott

Moravian Gallery graphics

By Juliet Kinchin

In 1961, the same year that the Bratislava City Gallery was established, Brno’s Museum of Applied Arts morphed into its current form as the Moravian Gallery of Art. With rich historical collections, several branch museums and ambitious plans to accommodate the living archive of Jiří Valoch and other contemporary artists from the region, it remains the most significant cultural institution in Brno. Curator Marta Sylvestrova took time out from the final stages of preparation for Brno’s renowned International Biennial of Graphic Design to lead a few of us behind the scenes. I was particularly keen to explore the posters and graphic design collection and to catch up with her research for a forthcoming exhibition on Zdeněk Rossmann (1905–84), a former Bauhaus pupil and pioneer of the New Typography in interwar Czechoslovakia, whose work is represented at MoMA. I had just come across mention of Rossmann in Bratislava, where he and the photographer Jaromír Funke taught in the avant-garde School of Applied Arts, known as the Bauhaus of the East. This link was typical of the personal and cultural connections we encountered among many of the cities on our itinerary.

Moravian Gallery collections

Jiří Valoch

By Jon Hendricks

Dear Jiří Valoch—he so kindly came to greet us at the Moravian Gallery, where he has installed his archives. Jiří is an artist whose work has been in contact with many in the Fluxus group, and there is a good exchange of material in the Valoch archives and in the Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection Archives now at MoMA. I am certain that many scholars will be making good use of the material so that we can come to a fuller understanding of Valoch’s work.

Villa Tugendhat

By Paul Galloway

On May 24 the C-MAP Fluxus group visited the city of Brno in the Czech Republic. In addition to visiting local artists and curators, the team made a pilgrimage to one of the most important modernist houses of the 20th century: Mies van der Rohe’s Villa Tugendhat. Recently reopened after a long and thorough restoration, the Villa Tugendhat is a stunning example of Mies’s explorations in spatial and material design. After the harried first few days of the trip to Eastern Europe, the C-MAP group greatly enjoyed a lengthy tour of the Villa with the site’s director, Iveta Černá, followed by a leisurely exploration of the grounds.

As steward of the Mies van der Rohe Archive, the Museum of Modern Art has an important relationship with all things Mies in the world. MoMA’s Department of Architecture and Design played an important supporting role in the long and complex restoration to the Villa Tugendhat, which was undertaken by the city of Brno under the auspices of UNESCO’s World Heritage program. Teams of researchers from Brno spent hundreds of hours at MoMA’s Lily Auchincloss Study Center for Architecture and Design poring over the Museum’s holdings. By the end of the project, a partnership was formed between the Villa’s Study and Documentation Centre and MoMA’s Mies Archive. After the much celebrated reopening of the Villa to the public, curator Juliet Kinchin and I were, in particular, thrilled to visit and cement the lasting friendship with our brilliant colleagues in Brno.

Studio visit with J.H. Kocman

By Milan Hughston

The group visited the home and studio of J.H. Kocman, a prolific book artist and craftsman born in Brno in 1947. Especially after the Prague Spring of 1968, Kocman, like many artists of his generation, had to resort to alternative art practices in order to produce and distribute his works. Primarily, he turned to mail art and rubber stamps to disseminate his work, and in spite of the repressive political climate, he was very productive. The Artists’ Books collection of the MoMA Library contains eleven of his books dating from 1970 to 1995, illustrating a wide range of techniques from stamps to marbling.

Kocman’s studio is filled with evidence of his love and use of paper, particularly marbling. The group admired many of his later books—proof that he has continued to work steadily in the medium for many years.

4. PRAGUE

Jan Ságl and Zorka Ságlová

By Michelle Elligott

Jiří Kovanda and Pavlina Morganova

By Jon Hendricks

In Prague, Pavlina Morganova very kindly arranged for Jiří Kovanda to show us his stunning exhibition at the City Gallery of Photography, where we had fun trying to identify artists’ work that he referenced in his own work.

We then walked to the center of Prague with Jiří Kovanda and Pavlina Morganova, and with Pavlina showing us photographs of Jiri’s gesture actions from the mid-1970s, Jiří showed us the exact spots where he had performed them, and we were able to envisage the power of the actions in the context of the surrounding cityscape during a period of restricted freedom in the country. We then all walked to the escalator, and in a way reenacted his 1977 Untitled action. He is a fascinating artist who I knew too little about and I think is someone who has continued to do very strong work up until today.

Pavlina Morganova

By Jon Hendricks

Pavlina is a brilliant scholar who has dug deeply into the history of Czech action art, and her new book Czech Action Art: Happenings, Actions, Events, Land Art, Body Art and Performance Art behind the Iron Curtain (Prague: Karolinum Press, 2014) is an invaluable reference for all of us who are so interested in Czech art. She was extremely generous with her time, and I know we’re all grateful to her for her kindness.

Meeting Jiří Kovanda

By Roxana Marcoci

One of the highlights of our C-MAP trip was the time we shared with artist Jiří Kovanda, a leading figure of Czech Actionism, in Prague. Our meeting point was the Prague House of Photography, where we viewed the exhibition Jiří Kovanda Against the Rest of the World, featuring his legendary actions of the 1970s within the context of the history of performance art. Then, we took a walking tour with him and Czech curator Pavlina Morganova around the city to revisit the sites of his public actions.

Kovanda began his career in the radicalized climate of the 1970s (following the 1968 Soviet reoccupation of Czechoslovakia), during a period of forced “normalization” of his country by the Soviet military. Working against the backdrop of political repression, Kovanda asserted his difference amid hardline social conformity by performing minimal yet disruptive gestures. Looking at art as a vehicle for change, Kovanda simply carried water from the river in his cupped hands, releasing it a few meters down the river; he gathered rubbish, and once he had made a pile of it he scattered it all over again; he invited friends to watch him try making friends with a girl; and he walked around Prague, casually touching, in a gentle brushing gesture, passersby—an action that was kindred to Vito Acconci’s “following” pieces of the same period. While walking with Kovanda around Prague, we arrived at one of the city’s subway entrances. Here, the artist allowed us to reenact with him one of his most influential works: Untitled (On an escalator . . . turning around, I look into the eyes of the person standing behind me . . . ), from September 3, 1977). This was a private moment with a generous artist, which left an indelible memory. Analyzing ideas about conformity and malleability, in works such as On an escalator, Kovanda encouraged critical reflection on the relationship between the individual and the ideological forces that shape social reality.

Walk Through Prague with Jiří Kovanda and Pavlina Morganova

Museum Kampa

Kveta Pacovska

By Milan Hughston

When visiting the Moravian Gallery in Brno, we were encouraged by Marta Sylvestrova to meet with the Prague-based artist and illustrator Kveta Pacovska, who is married to Milan Grygar. Pacovska has enjoyed a long career as one of former Czechoslavakia’s most recognized and published artists of children’s books. In fact, one of our hosts, Tomas Pospiszyl, said that all children of a certain age in Slovakia immediately recognize the whimsical yet instructional images that Pacovska has been producing for forty years.

When in Prague the next day after visiting Brno, I took a taxi to her studio in a residential suburb of Prague and found her to be an enchanting, modest, and hard-working artist, still going strong at the age of 86. Each of her many books takes an often unique approach in teaching children how to count, spell, and recognize shapes. She is too modest to note that her books continue to sell well internationally and that she was awarded the Hans Christian Andersen Award in 1992, the premier honor for writers and illustrators of children’s books.

The rest of the CMAP group had the privilege of meeting her when we visited Milan Grygar’s studio later that day.

Milan Grygar’s Acoustic Drawings

Walk through Prague Art Galleries

Views of Prague

5. WROCŁAW

Muzeum Współczesne-Ludwiński Archive

By Michelle Elligott

Muzeum Współczesne

Meeting Natalia LL

Olympic Stadium

By Milan Hughston

It is often a good idea to listen to your taxi driver when visiting a city you are not familiar with, especially if you are interested in modern architecture. As we were departing Wroclaw for Berlin, our driver, knowing of our interest in the Centennial Hall, suggested that we visit the Olympic Stadium in Wroclaw. The stadium was built in 1926–1928 by German architect Richard Konwiarz (1883–1960) as Schleisierkampfbahn (Silesian Arena) when Wroclaw, then called Breslau, was part of Germany. Like many other visitors, we were confounded by its name, since no official Olympics took place in Breslau. However, it is acknowledged that it could have been planned as a venue for the Summer 1936 Olympic Games held in Berlin.

Konwiarz’s design was awarded a bronze medal in the art competitions held during the Summer 1932 Olympic Games in Los Angeles. Although it has seen constant use as a motor speedway and soccer stadium, it still retains its essential character and modernist feel.

Architecture in Wrocław/Breslau

By Juliet Kinchin

Less well known than the Weissenhofsiedlung in Stuttgart is the Deutsche Werkbund’s comparable initiative known as Wohnungs- und Werkraumausstellung (Workplace and House Exhibition, WUWA), carried out in 1929, when Wrocław (then Breslau) was still part of Germany. The posters and graphic identity created by Johannes Mohlzahn for this event are among of the highlights of MoMA’s New Typography collection. The exhibition took the form of a housing development made up of functional “type” houses by a group of modernist architects. One of the most interesting buildings in the complex was Hans Scharoun’s house for singles and young couples, which now serves as a hotel. Noting our interest in modernist architecture, our driver took us on a short detour to the somewhat derelict “Olympic” Stadium built in 1926–28, then extended from 1935–39 as the Hermann Goring Stadion. Before leaving Wroclaw, we also paid homage to a pioneering work of modern engineering and architecture, Max Berg’s Centennial Hall of 1911–13 (now known as the Hala Ludowa, or People’s Hall). The importance of the hall has been recognized and it is now a UNESCO site. This massive recreational and performance space was constructed of reinforced concrete, providing a powerful example of the potential of this material to enclose and span huge spaces without the need for supporting columns. It survived the devastation of World War Two, becoming the setting in 1945 for the International Congress of Intellectuals in Defense of Peace, which was attended by György Lukacs, Pablo Picasso, Louis Aragon, Paul Eluard and Julian Huxley, among others. Perhaps MoMA’s founding director Alfred Barr was there also, since he acquired a printed textile square designed by Picasso to commemorate this event. Barr later donated the piece to the Museum.

Centennial Hall

6. BERLIN

Fahrbereitschaft, Haubrok Collection

By Michelle Elligott

Dorothy Iannone

By Jon Hendricks

I had the opportunity to see Dorothy Iannone’s major retrospective at the Berlinische Gallery days before it closed, and also to visit her in her studio. She is a dynamic and bold artist whose work I’ve admired for many years, and her retrospective gave a chance for many to become more familiar with her work over a long career. She is a political artist in the best sense of the word who spares no one. She is bitingly honest and direct. Her retrospective will be traveling to Zurich later this summer (Migrosmuseum für Gegenwartskunst, Zurich, August 30–November 19, 2014), so many more will have a chance to see it there. It was strange to be in her home with the usual cacophony of work momentarily stilled by the retrospective, but she was there and made up for any lack of the work’s presence, as she was present, and her voice and ideas are like her work.

Bazon Brock

By Jon Hendricks

Bazon Brock is an artist who I am familiar with only by name, by association, and by traces of his work. He was part of 24 Stunden at the Galerie Parnass (Wuppertal, 1965) and was also part of the legendary Aachen, July 20, 1964 events titled Actions, Agit-Pop, De-Coll/age, Happenings, Events, L’Autrisme, Art Total, Re-Fluxus, which included works by Eric Andersen, Joseph Beuys, Stanley Brouwn, Henning Christiansen, Robert Filliou, Ludwig Gosewitz, Arthur Koepcke, Tomas Schmit, Ben Vautier, Wolf Vostell, and Emmett Williams, which is most famous in our consciousness for a photograph of Joseph Beuys with a bloody nose, holding his arm up, and with the other hand holding an assemblage with a crucifix. Brock was fascinating to talk with and had very different points of view about Fluxus and the period than I have, and I hope that we will have an opportunity to have him visit the Museum in New York to discuss his thoughts further.

Seen at Berlin Biennale

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