Acha’s critical contributions run the gamut from his theorization, under the pseudonym Nahuaca, of Peruvian painting in the late 1950s (as contextualized by Miguel López is his forthcoming essay for this theme) to his analysis of the aesthetic culture of Latin America in the 1990s. A good example of his theoretically diverse deliberations is his interest in the art of Latin America as a geocultural dilemma. This interest gained momentum in 1973, when he published the essay “Por una nueva problemática artística en Latinoamérica” (For a new artistic problematic in Latin America) in which he contrasted the realities of “first” and “third” worlds. Acha was deeply concerned with providing a path for the development of Latin American art and culture through his work. As Rita Eder comments in her essay, “Acha looked to the future, worried by what he considered to be the blindness of subjectivism and nationalism, and warned of the unstoppable advent of the industrial age and mass culture, which interpenetrated borders, heedless of illiteracy and feudal remnants.” Acha’s preoccupation with the production, circulation, and consumption of art objects was a concern throughout his life, from his years as a chemical-engineering student in fascist Germany until after he left the position of assistant director of the Museo de Arte Moderno in Mexico City. Foreseeing the radical exchange of information through immaterial works, he called into question hierarchical artistic categories that demote design and the so-called popular arts, and criticized the supposedly natural contradiction between authentic avant-garde artistic attitudes and those of the economically “underdeveloped.”

After several years of theoretical investigation of the materiality of art, Acha instantiated, in 1981, his own term no-objetualismo, which he used as the main theme of a now-historic symposium and exhibition in Medellin, Colombia. The notion of no-objetualismo is perhaps Acha’s most lasting contribution, and one that has had a critical resurgence in recent years, with scholars pointing out that the more global terms “conceptualism” and “dematerialized art” have been posited at the expense of homegrown categories, among them Acha’s own. No-objetualismo encompassed not only conceptual and collectively created works, but also popular arts such as design and artesanía (handcrafts). Crucially, no-objectualismo did not signify a disdain for the object but rather resisted its fetishization, and this concern for materiality and aesthetics has made Acha’s theory particularly relevant to recent studies on ecology, new materialisms, and object-oriented ontologies.

Acha’s critical revisions of art history itself and his focus on materiality have coincided with recent shifts in art historical thought. In her essay for this theme, Eder reflects that in Acha’s “diatribe against art history, he tested new classification systems, concluding that it is possible to dispense with the long list of ‘isms’ and chronologies, and think in terms of four groups that define twentieth-century avant-gardes and movements: abstractions, objective realisms, non-objectualisms, and conceptualisms.” Acha’s theoretical framework, though increasingly disseminated in the field of Latin American art in recent years, has not yet been sufficiently explored in relation to artistic production in and beyond the region and provides a non-canonical (and non-Western) critical framework for artistic gestures that would otherwise be categorized as “conceptual” or “dematerialized.” The impact of Acha’s ideas on artists is surveyed here in forthcoming texts by Maris Bustamante and Sol Henaro, who trace the ways in which his ideas were absorbed into the radical artistic propositions of their time.

Some of the questions this theme hopes to engage are the following: What is the renewed and specific role of the material object in no-objectualismo? How do artistic practices, often understood as ephemeral, dematerialized, and conceptual, benefit from a re-reading as material? What can Acha’s thinking contribute to recent art historical discussions about materiality? What kinds of objects are those that we call “art objects” and how are these separated from the general world of “objects”? In what context were vanguard Latin American attitudes championed for the reintegration of art into the day-to-day sphere of human existence?

Juan Acha’s thought also provides a lens through which to reconsider MoMA’s collection, library special collection, and archive, casting a renewed light upon the Museum’s holdings.

Translation of the material published in this theme was provided by Nuria Rodriguez.

This theme was developed in 2016. The original content items are listed below.

Juan Acha: Vanguardismo y subdesarrollo / The Avant-garde and Underdevelopment

Juan Acha

“Impious Forms”: Unfinished Maps in the Work of Juan Acha

Maris Bustamante

“Formas Pías”: Cartografías incompletas en la obra de Juan Acha

Maris Bustamante

Teoría y práctica no-objetualistas en América Latina / Non-Objectualist Theory and Practice in Latin America

Juan Acha

Conceptualism, Dematerialization, Arte no-objetual? Historicizing the ’60s and ’70s in Latin America

Harper Montgomery

Una guerrilla cultural: Juan Acha y la vanguardia peruanade los años sesenta

Miguel López

Cultural Guerrilla: Juan Acha and the Peruvian Avant-Garde of the 1960s

Miguel López

Juan Acha: pensar el arte desde América Latina

Rita Eder

Juan Acha: A Latin American Perspective on Art

Rita Eder

Juan Acha: Por una nueva problemática artística en Latinoamérica / Toward a New Artistic Problematic in Latin America

Juan Acha

The post Conceiving a Theory for Latin America: Juan Acha’s Criticism. appeared first on post.

Architecture

Casa Cetto

By Barry Bergdoll

One of the highlights of the trip for me was the visit to the Casa Cetto in El Pedregal. Until recently, this was the house of the family of the German émigré architect Max Cetto, a figure who has only recently been the subject of significant scholarship in Mexican architectural history. Cetto worked with Barragán on the earliest houses in El Pedregal, a novel high-end residential development built on the lava fields to the south of Mexico City and developed during the same years as the nearby University. Here Barragán sought to create a landscape that could in part preserve and in part create a dialogue with the lava remains, by crafting houses that were integrated with courtyards and gardens. While the houses had a fair amount of insularity from the beginning, built behind high walls (some of which have been raised further in recent years for security concerns), there were also public parks and plazas that were integral parts of this picturesque suburb, a distinctly Mexican addition to the genre pioneered in England and the United States in the 19th century. Cetto came from the garden reform movement in the German housing practices of the 1910s and 1920s, so his house is a particularly interesting fusion. Here the lava meets a lush, semi-tropical garden laid out by Cetto’s wife, as his daughter Bettina explained to us. Her stories so charmed us as we lounged in oversized furniture in the architect’s former home office that Bettina became a part of our group for the next two days. The house is now the office of the INBA, the stage agency for protecting cultural treasures. Not usually accessible to visitors, it opened to us an astounding window on a key moment of creativity in post-war Mexican residential design.

Biblioteca Vasconcelos

By Milan Hughston

Following our visit to Galería Jumex, the group made a brief stop at the magnificent Biblioteca Vasconcelos, a massive public library which opened to wide architectural acclaim in 2006. Designed by the Mexican architect Alberto Kalach (b. 1960), the huge building is noted for its cantilevered book stacks that resemble a hanging garden of Babylon for books. It is also notable for its large sculpture by Gabriel Orozco, Ballena (Whale), which dominates the central portion of the building. Since its opening, the Vasconcelos Library has been a lively and vital destination for readers of all ages and benefits from its location next to a major transportation hub in the Buenavista neighborhood of Mexico City.

UNAM Campus

By Wendy Woon

The trip to visit UNAM’s Central University Campus was most interesting because of the importance of the campus in the development of the urban plan of modern Mexico City and the goal of centralizing the public university in one campus in the south of the city. The campus was laid out following the model of the ancient Aztec city Teotihuacan, with a large central plaza around which other buildings were located, most iconically, the library, a modern block covered with ornate mosaics by Juan O’Gorman that articulate aspects of Mexican mythology and history. A three-dimensional mural by Siqueiros was under restoration, and the Olympic stadium featured reliefs by Diego Rivera. The project was a collaboration between Mexico’s top artists and architects of the time. Unfortunately, student housing was not included in the plan, so students must commute to the campus. According to our guide, the aim of centralizing the university’s activities has not been fully successful, since other campuses continue to exist in other locations in the city. We also saw and experienced the Sculpture Space, a collaborative installation by several artists and architects led by Mathias Goeritz. This site-specific installation is reached by a tiled walkway, with individual tile designs by each of the artists and architects whose work is incorporated in the campus. It leads to a large circular sculpture around volcanic terrain. According to our guide, the site was chosen by flying above the site to get a bird’s-eye view. The installation had a ritualistic quality, allowing people to pass along the inside of the circle alongside the large geometric stones that formed the circular shape, while leaving the volcanic terrain free and untamed in the center. Overall, I found the underlying idea of the campus as a collective work that brought together modern sensibility and clear references to ancient times to be an interesting urban experiment. While it has succeeded in some respects, it has failed to achieve its functional goals of centralization and easy access for students.

Palacio Iturbide: Architecture in Mexico, 1900–2010

By Patricio del Real

Thanks to the generosity of the curator of the exhibition, architectural historian Fernando Canales, the landmark exhibition Architecture in Mexico, 1900–2010 at the Fomento Cultural Banamex was extended an extra day for our group. Staged in Banamex’s spectacular 18th-century Palacio Iturbide, one of the finest Mexican Baroque residential interiors surviving in the historic center of Mexico City, the exhibition brought together an exceptional trove of archival materials—drawings, models, and period photographs— representing the astounding diversity of buildings dating from the very end of the Porforio regime (1877¬–1880 and 1884¬–1911) to the tumultuous but highly experimental decade of the Mexican Revolution (1910–1920), and on through contemporary practice. Arranged on two floors in and around the great arcaded two-story courtyard, originally open to the sky but now under a glazed skylight (we were grateful for its protection against a typical mid-summer torrential downpour), the show was a veritable cornucopia of new discoveries even for me and Barry Bergdoll, who have been at work for several years preparing MoMA’s forthcoming show Latin America in Construction: Architecture 1955–1980 (March 29–July 12, 2015). For the rest of the group it was both a crash course in Mexican modern architecture and a superb introduction to some of the key sites we were to visit in the coming days: the main campus of UNAM, the studios of Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, and the most recent projects of figures like Alberto Kalach, whose Vasconcelos library the group had already visited and which Kalach had spoken about so engagingly last spring at MoMA in a symposium on library design.

Our attention was divided between the profusion of material on display and Canales’s engaging explanations of that material and of the months and months of sleuthing that yielded some of the documents chosen. Not the least of the show’s many accomplishments was the fact that it created a picture of Mexican architecture that took in the whole country, whereas so many publications to date have focused primarily on Mexico City. At the end of the exhibition we enjoyed refreshments and conversation with Candida Fernandez, director of the Banamex Foundation. She explained the functioning of the foundation and the astounding cultural program that they offer each year.

Hotel Camino Real

By Patricio del Real

The Camino Real is one of the world’s great luxury hotels, and the place really holds up after nearly 50 years of use. Architect Ricardo Legorreta designed this veritable prototype of the Mexican hotel poised between traditional imagery and modernist innovation so that nearly every element of the design and every moment of the astounding spatial sequence in the generously proportioned public spaces of the hotel can be seen as both traditionalist and modern. All categories are defied. Unlike so many grand hotels today, which do everything to set themselves apart from the city, the Camino Real is woven into its neighborhood a short walk from Chapultepec park. Indeed, we perhaps unwisely walked out of the Tamayo Museum, with its newly refurbished restaurant (next time!), to walk a few minutes to the buffet in the Camino Real. Everyone was stopped in their tracks by the astounding fountain in the driveway—no conventional jet of water erupting towards the sky (perhaps not good in a city with volcanoes in the background), but rather a pool of vigorous waves crashing against the sides of its huge circular pool, a seaside landscape that sets up the journey into the hotel, where color, radical changes of scale, and broad staircases create a kind of architectural landscape. The buffet lunch room is a real trip in time too. We could almost imagine that we were visitors in Mexico for the 1968 Olympics, when the hotel had just recently opened.

Cultural spaces

Alumnos 47

By Milan Hughston

While the larger group was visiting a gallery, I went to Alumnos 47, a relatively new cultural space in the San Miguel Chapultepec neighborhood. Alumnos 47 was established by a local Mexico City collector and activist named Moises Cosio, who has established a dynamic program of art instruction, lectures, and exhibitions promoting contemporary art. I was shown the facility by the director, Adriana Maurer, and curator Jessica Berlanga. I arrived in the middle of a lively, week-long day camp for children, who were engaged in a wide range of art-making activities. This program, a new one, reflects the energy that Alumnos 47 is projecting throughout Mexico City. One of its first programs was an art bookmobile stocked with art books that travels to Mexico City’s underserved neighborhoods. Alumnos 47 has recently commissioned French architect Didier Faustino to design a new facility next door to their current building. The art community of Mexico City is eagerly awaiting the continued success of their programs in even more space.

Discussions

Roundtable at MUAC

By Wendy Woon

A round table discussion with Cuauhtémoc Medina, Patricia Sloane, Sol Henaro, Magali Arriola, Guillermo Santamarina, Graciela de la Torre and others was very animated. Medina challenged MoMA staff to think not just of coming to Mexico to learn from them and to go back and create our own exhibitions, but to think about developing exhibitions together or to consider proposals from Mexican curators and institutions for shows that could be presented at MoMA.

Events and discussions

Poema Colectivo 2014 Reception

By Wendy Woon

My last evening was rounded out with a reception for the artists who participated in Poema Colectivo 2014, a project for MoMA’s research platform post.at.moma.org. The original Poema Colectivo call from the 1980s was revived on post with invitations to a younger generation of Mexican artists to participate in a mail art call for responses to the theme of ‘revolution’, either digitally or by mail. It was tremendous to see how proud the 1980s artists, César Espinosa and Aracely Zuniga felt as they gave impassioned speeches after Pablo, Zanna and Mauricio Marcin thanked them. I was privileged to speak with Monica Mayer and to learn of her interest in art education. She recounted how important a touch tour at a museum had been for her.

Galleries

Leon Trotsky House Museum

By Starr Figura

After our tour of the monumental Defying Stability exhibition at the MUAC, my colleague Geannine and I broke away from the group to visit the Leon Trotsky Museum and the Frida Kahlo Museum (Casa Azul), two wonderfully preserved house-museums a short walk from each other in the quiet, residential neighborhood of Coyoacán. Both museums are cultural landmarks that neither one of us had seen before.

We visited the Trotsky Museum first. After perusing the dense and historically evocative display of books and documentary photographs in the modest galleries near the entrance, we arrived at an enclosed garden courtyard that led us to the core experience of the museum: a visit to the house where the Marxist revolutionary and his wife lived from 1939 to 1940, when he was murdered by a Stalinist assassin with an ice axe. The rooms are small and mostly arranged in railroad-style, with one leading to the next. Outside there is a large wall that conceals and protects the house and property from the street. Enclosed within this tranquil compound, there is the feeling of time warp. The rooms with their modest personal furnishings have not been changed or renovated, with Trotsky’s impressive library, the couple’s clothes in their closets, and even the toiletries in the bathroom apparently undisturbed since the time they were there. Despite the very humble and mundane character of the house and furnishings and the overall tranquility of the experience of walking through it, a sense of momentous history and life-and-death stakes is somehow still palpable there. Bullet holes from a first, failed attack on Trotsky’s life still line some of the walls inside the house.

The museum is fascinating for the political history that it embodies, but this history was also closely intertwined with Mexico’s cultural history. The Trotskys had close ties to Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, who helped Trotsky obtain asylum in Mexico. Trotsky and his wife stayed with Kahlo and Rivera at the Casa Azul after they first arrived in Mexico City in 1937, until they had a falling out in 1939 and moved to the Trotsky house. The visit to this house-museum underscored for me the deeply political and revolutionary nature of Mexican art during this tumultuous period in the 20th century.

Ministry of Public Education

By Geaninne Gutiérrez-Guimarães

Diego Rivera (1886–1957), a major figure of the Mexican Renaissance, left a lasting legacy in the history of modern art. In 1931, The Museum of Modern Art presented an exhibition of five portable murals that Rivera executed onsite at the Museum’s request, and between 1935 and 1941, the Museum acquired a series of works by Rivera, including May Day, Moscow (1928), Flower Festival: Feast of Santa Anita (1931), Agrarian Leader Zapata (1931), and Young Man in a Gray Sweater (Jacques Lipchitz) (1914), all through the generosity of Abby Aldrich Rockefeller. Most recently, in 2011, the MoMA organized Diego Rivera: Murals for The Museum of Modern Art, a show curated by Leah Dickerman that featured and critically re-examined several of the portable murals from the 1931 exhibition.

For all of these reasons, visiting the Ministry of Public Education in Mexico City was a unique experience: seeing Rivera’s frescoes from this period provided an in-depth understanding of his artistic practice. Rivera’s interest in murals stemmed from his studies of Italian Renaissance frescoes during a trip to Italy in 1920. By 1923, Rivera had begun a series of 124 frescoes for the courtyard of the Ministry of Public Education, a project that took five years to complete. According to scholars, Rivera’s frescoes in the Ministry are grouped in two sections: one represents Labor and the other, Celebration. The frescoes related to Labor illustrate the industrial and agricultural work of the Mexican people as well as their arts, dance, music, and poetry; those related to Celebration depict popular ceremonies and festivals. This extensive mural project not only marked Rivera as a significant international artist, but it also established the revival of mural painting in Mexico.

Frida Kahlo Museum

By Geaninne Gutiérrez-Guimarães

Casa Azul Museo Frida Kahlo occupies the lifetime home of the artist Frida Kahlo (1907–1954), which was turned into a museum in 1958, in accord with the instructions of her late husband, the artist Diego Rivera. Despite its many visitors, the museum preserves a sense of intimacy. It showcases Kahlo’s studio, complete with palette, brushes, and paints, as well as her books, her wide assortment of collectibles, colorful dresses, flamboyant jewelry, and several of her paintings. The first in the museum’s series of temporary exhibitions related to Kahlo’s art or lifestyle, Las apariencias engañan: Los vestidos de Frida Kahlo (Appearances Lie: The Dresses of Frida Kalho, November 2012–September 2014), curated by Circe Henestrosa Conoan, was based on new critical research into Kahlo’s vestments made possible by the discovery, in 2004, of a trove of archival materials within the house itself. The exhibition highlighted one facet of the archive’s contents and has paved the way for many more scholarly interpretations of Kahlo’s oeuvre and persona in the years to come.

Museo Experimental El Eco

By Starr Figura

The special character of Museo Experimental El Eco is apparent even before you enter. Its sleek black façade is punctuated on one side by a jutting vertical panel of canary yellow, a wall that projects upward from behind a wall that conceals the museum’s interior patio. El Eco is an alluring and provocative presence on Sullivan Street, where it sits across from a leafy square just off the Paseo de la Reforma in the center of Mexico City. Curator Maurico Marcin gave us a tour of the small museum, which includes two galleries, a bar area, and the patio where young architects are often commissioned to design site-specific interventions. The spaces were empty while we were there—the museum was between shows—but in the bar area a performance troupe was conducting an informal rehearsal. Their string puppets and papier-mâché costumes, including a horse head worn by one of the members, lent a charmingly surreal aspect to our visit.

El Eco’s program revolves around contemporary art exhibitions and projects commissioned from Mexican and international artists. These projects and exhibitions emphasize experimentation and cross-disciplinary creativity. Dance, theater, music, and poetry are all part of the mix. The commissions are often related in some way to the work of the museum’s creator, Mathias Goeritz (1915–1990), a German-born Mexican painter and sculptor, who was inspired by the radically experimental and interdisciplinary work of the Dada artists in the early 20th century. Goeritz designed the distinctive 1950s-era building—a paradigmatic example of Mexican modernist architecture—almost like a geometric sculpture, with an interlocking arrangement of small galleries, walls, platforms, and corridors. Though inaugurated as an art space in 1953, the building was subsequently turned into a bar and nightclub until it finally returned to its original function in 2005.

While there, we visited with artists-in-residence Felipe Mujica and Johanna Unzueta in a small studio adjacent to the gallery building. Felipe and Johanna are Chilean artists who now live and work in New York. Felipe was preparing for a solo show at El Eco that opened August 14, a couple of weeks after the end of our trip. It was easy to imagine that his work, which often takes the form of the screenprinted geometric abstractions or installations of monochromatic fabric panels that alter the perception of a public space, would feel right at home within the geometric sculpture-building that is El Eco.

Galería Jumex Ecatepec

By Sarah Meister

The original exhibition space for the Jumex Collection is located within the Jumex fruit juice plant on the outskirts of Mexico City. Admission to its handsome galleries and library—nestled within the bustling industrial compound—has been free to the public since the opening in 2013 of the David Chipperfield-designed Museo Jumex in the center of the city. We were fortunate to be guided through Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin’s exhibition, Dodo, by its curator Javier Rivero. (I was keen to see this, as Broomberg & Chanarin’s War Primer had been featured in New Photography 2013 at MoMA. The exhibition opened with a suite of five large black-and-white framed photographs showing, against a seamless backdrop, various views of the last remaining dodo egg from the East London Museum in South Africa. Projected in a cavernous nearby gallery were outtakes from the filming of Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 that had been retrieved from the vaults of Paramount Pictures. The only other object in the space was a giant B-25 propeller, slowly rotating, bearing witness to the film. The third space included hundreds of bits of detritus found in the Sonoran desert, where Catch-22 was filmed in 1969. Likening their search for the bomber plane abandoned on the set to the search for remains of the dodo, Broomberg and Chanarin found an apt title for their exhibition.

Centro de la Imagen

By Sarah Meister

We had the opportunity to tour the unfinished Centro de la Imagen with its director, Itala Schmelz, whose vision for the institution is as expansive as the physical space it will fill. Since the early 1990s, the Centro de la Imagen has played a key role in collecting, exhibiting, and publishing photography in Mexico. While planning to continue these activities, Itala is committed to embracing a broader range of image-based works. To this end, Regina Tattersfield, whom we also had the pleasure of meeting, is heading up a research platform that will bring together new perspectives from visual theory, art history, archival research, and curatorial practice, examining the use of technology in art since the Cold War. And our lovely alfresco lunch with the core team from CI, with mezcal for all? Let’s just say it seems like a great place to work.

Galería OMR

By Wendy Woon

Our visit to Galería OMR, which represents both Mexican and international artists, was interesting not only because of the thought-provoking work on view, but also because the owners were so generous in taking time to give a sense of the gallery’s history (it was established in the early 1980s), its architectural background, and its role, as they see it, in contributing to contemporary culture within the city. A powerful installation by David Moreno provided an interesting counterpoint to the sculptural work of British-Israeli artist Daniel Silver, who draws upon and remakes sculptural history in a wide range of traditional materials. I was particularly struck by a drawing by the Troika collective, which placed electrically charged water in contact with the paper support, creating finely patterned burns resembling rivulets. Mexican artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s work, a digital “1984” seeming clock, also stood out among many interesting works.

Arróniz Arte Contemporáneo

By Wendy Woon

We visited the Arróniz gallery and met with the owners, who are mother and son. The idea of a family-run contemporary art gallery has a particular charm. Works that resonated with me were Ishmael Randall-Weeks’s piece Pillars, 2014, which spoke to the elemental social and material structures that define urban development in Peru in a very poetic way, through the marking of space with concrete pillars. Other highlights were Mauro Giaconi’s wall drawings from an earlier solo exhibition at Arróniz that the artist was able to uncover by removing the layers of paint that had been applied over them since his show in 2013. Marcela Armas’s Zenith, a piece that included transparent plastic catheter tubing laid out in the shape of a cityscape, changed during the course of our visit as a hydraulic pump pushed used motor oil through the tube, creating a dark line drawing. When the tube was completely filled, oil dripped onto the floor.

The work of Moris was at once engaging and disturbing. It documented violent struggles—cock fights, dog fights, and even social interactions at a party attended by gang members, whose movements were marked on a canvas on the floor, creating barriers that others, including the artist, could not cross.

Seeing with Other Eyes: Visit to Kurimanzutto Gallery

By Sarah Lookofsky

At Kurimanzutto gallery, we met with the artist Abraham Cruzvillegas and the curator Clara Kim, who organized a major exhibition of Cruzvillegas’s work at the Walker Arts Center in 2013. In addition to admiring the gallery’s architecture, a beautiful succession of interior and exterior spaces designed by Alberto Kalach, we saw the exhibition Vista de Ojos by the Berlin-based Mexican artist Mariana Castillo Deball.

For Deball’s show, the floor of the large gallery space was covered with wood panels laser-cut with inscriptions from a mid-16th-century painted map of Mexico City (then called Tenochtitlan), commonly known as the “Uppsala Map” owing to its present location in that Swedish city. It is thought that the map was made some thirty years after the conquest by Aztec cartographers trained in the European topographical tradition. The map shows the city threaded with canals and surrounded by water, and is annotated with the names of native plants and peoples. For Deball’s installation, the woodcuts served as the basis for a series of black-and-white prints that were compiled in a big, atlas-like tome, as well as for a framed selection of prints in a smaller gallery upstairs.

Also on view in the main gallery, in larger-than-life-size prints leaning against the wall, was a series of photographs of masks set within the abstracted space of colored backgrounds. This series, titled UMRISS (2014), was based on an international advertising campaign promoting the antipsychotic drug Stelazine during the 1980s. That campaign featured masks from a variety of indigenous peoples, set on similarly hued backdrops and accompanied by taglines such as “Stelazine. Remove the mask of schizophrenic symptoms.” In contrast to the Mexican iteration of the original ad campaign, which featured a variety of striking Mexican masks, Deball’s photographs capture instead only oblique angles of a mask housed in the Ethnographic Museum in Berlin.

I couldn’t help thinking about this show in relation to C-MAP, MoMA’s research initiative devoted to a global perspective on modern and contemporary art. The exhibition seemed to reflect on different kinds of intercultural vision and the potential pitfalls they present. In the first instance, the map drawn by native inhabitants for foreign viewers captures the aspiration to an omniscient perspective, an impossible feat for the eyes of a single person. In the second, the mask captured in the photographs, in a riff on the pharmaceutical advertisement, might be interpreted as a commentary on the failed assumption of being able to “to see through another’s eyes.” When approaching a different cultural context, the tendencies to create totalizing narratives (like the cartographer) or, at the opposite end of the spectrum, assuming the narcissistic ability to see with other eyes (donning an ethnographic mask, as it were), are temptations that must be acknowledged and avoided.

Museums

Arkheia, Museo Universitario Arte Contemporaneo (MUAC)

By Milan Hughston

As part of our day at UNAM, the group received an orientation to Arkheia, an innovative program at MUAC that fosters dialogue and engagement with documentary sources of modern and contemporary art, with an emphasis on Mexico. This program is of particular interest to MoMA and C-MAP, since we have seen an increase in the use of documentary materials in curatorial and art research practice.
Pilar García, the curator in charge of Arkheia, gave us a virtual tour through the collections, illustrating various methodologies that she and her small staff have used in promoting the collections not only to scholars but to the general public. Arkheia is known for its creative exhibition installations, designed to provide viewers with access to archival documents in non-traditional ways.
A particular highlight of Arkheia is its collection formed by the late art historian, critic, and curator Olivier Debroise (1952–2008), whose archive illustrates the goal of Arkheia to be a “laboratory for experimentation and a space for generating knowledge.”

Studio Visits

Iñaki Bonillas

By Luis Pérez-Oramas

The group visited the artist Iñaki Bonillas (b. 1981) in his house/studio. Bonillas has devoted his oeuvre to answering the challenges of a “post-photographic” form of art. He was eloquent in his overall presentation, providing thorough descriptions of each work he’s made since at least 2003. Addressing the question of how to pursue photography without shooting pictures, Bonillas has mixed post-Conceptual strategies and appropriationist tactics to produce an impressive core of works based on the found-photography archive left by his grandfather, the late J. R. Plaza. A work on the very construction of memory and history (as micro-history), as well as a reflection on the nature of photographic images in a post-photographic age, the works based on the J. R. Plaza archive combine the decisive presence of an author (Bonillas) with that of a fictitious “creative” persona. This visit generated interest on the part of Sarah Meister in pursuing an acquisition for MoMA.

Fernando Ortega

By Luis Pérez-Oramas

The group visited artist Fernando Ortega (b. 1971) in his studio/house. Ortega is one of the most significant artists working in Mexico post–Gabriel Orozco and belongs to the same internationally recognized constellation of Mexican artists as Damián Ortega, Abraham Cruzvillegas, Mariana Castillo Deball, Gabriel Kuri, and Carlos Amorales. Ortega has devoted his investigation to chance-based situations, extending the fields of readymades and the poetics of minimal performance settings. The artist had set out on tables recent works in progress, including the “tracings” left by animals (such as a snail) that had “wandered” around his studio. In a different space, he presented early works, including photographic documentation of unexpected interventions that derail conventional settings (for instance, a laser light cast on a partition while an orchestra director conducts) as well as some recent sound works based on chance circumstances (for instance, a composition for his neighbor’s car alarm, which replaces the constant disturbance of the original sound). MoMA recently acquired a work by Ortega through the LACF, and this visit allowed us to get a deeper sense of the breadth, humor, and poetry of his oeuvre—an art of minimal action.

Exhibitions

Technology at Art’s Service: Visit to SAPS (Sala de Arte Público Siqueiros)

By Sarah Lookofsky

At SAPS, we were given a tour of the impressive exhibition Mechanization: Art and Technology in Siqueiros’s Production by Daniel Garza Usabiaga, the show’s curator. Focusing on the impact of technology on the important Mexican muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros (one of the “big three” muralists along with Diego Rivera and José Clemente Orozco) to which this space is devoted, the exhibition was replete with fascinating documentation, all of it drawn from the museum’s archives, of the rigorous research that informed the artist’s work.

Taking as a point of departure a dialectic often invoked in relation to new technologies—their inherent capacity to become tools of instrumentalization and repression, but also their potential to serve the project of human liberation—the exhibition argued that Siqueiros always insisted on the positive promise locked within new capitalist technologies.

Illustrating this point, the archives gave substance to the idea that Siqueiros was interested in techniques of consumer advertising, evidenced, for instance, in his photographs of contemporary billboards. (One of these shots shows a fabulous tobacco ad emitting real smoke rings.) This indication that the revolutionarily-inclined muralist was intrigued by the latest fashions in spectacular image production provided new insights into the history of Mexican muralism.

The idea of the modern, technologically-impacted spectator was given further dimension by a series of motion studies made for Siqueiros by the photomontagist José Renau, a Spaniard exiled in Mexico. Commissioned by Siqueiros during the preparation of his mural Portrait of the Bourgeoisie for the stairwell of the Sindicato Mexicano de Electricistas, the series of images begins with a photograph showing an architectural diagram of the staircase. Successive shots show people descending and ascending as well as their lines of sight as they move through the space. The final photographs in the sequence reveal how the mural’s composition were created in accord with the pseudo-scientific diagramming of eyes in motion.

Rounding out this impressive scholarly endeavor was a section devoted to the Polyforum (1971), Siqueiros’s panoramic pavilion financed by the asbestos magnate Manuel Suarez as part of an ambitious real estate project that included the Hotel de México. This section not only summarized the double-edged sword of technological innovation thematized by the exhibition, but also bracketed the contradictions of Siqueiros’s career, which was fueled by revolutionary fervor and, in the later years, supported by corporate commissions. The interior mural of the Polyforum, titled The March of Humanity, was accessorized with the latest technological innovations of the time (a rotating floor, a soundscape, and artificial illumination), while the building’s roof was designed to feature the asbestos company’s logo, “Eureka,” rendered so large that the people in planes passing above could see it.

Defying Stable Understandings: Visit MUAC (Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo)

By Sarah Lookofsky

Mexican art of the 1950s is frequently ignored in the art historical record, since precedence is given to the nation’s famous muralist period before it and the subsequent, notorious events of 1968, most notably the student massacre and the politically fraught Summer Olympic Games, both in Mexico City. According to most stories, the Fifties were defined by a turn against muralism rather than by what would supplant it.

Arguing that in fact this period is of great interest, a team of Mexican curators led by the art historian Rita Eder (her collaborators were Angélica García, Pilar García, Cristóbal Andrés Jácome, Israel Rodríguez, and Álvaro Vázquez Mantecón) put together an impressive exhibition, Defying Stability, that covered the years 1952 to 1967. The starting date of the title coincides with the opening of the Ciudad Universitaria, the main campus of UNAM, the National Autonomous University of Mexico, where MUAC is located. According to the curators, the development of the university’s site was a central project within the country’s urban expansion boom, and the university provided a generative context for artistic production during the first 15 years of the exhibition’s scope.

The show beautifully captured a dynamic period of prolific artistic experimentation and collaboration that upended prior conceptions of the body, politics, and religion. Defying art historical conventions such as the celebration of individual artists and the treatment of each medium as separate and distinct, the exhibition focused on collaboration among artists’ groups and the cross-pollination of ideas across mediums. Painting, sculpture, film, books, design, and urban planning, etc., were assembled in thematic arrays that effectively brought out the tensions that existed in cultural production at the time: consumer conformity versus counter-cultural currents; modernization versus tradition; consumer optimism versus repressive or destructive impulses, etc. Although these themes all focused on the specific cultural, economic, and political context of Mexico, they might also very fruitfully be brought to bear on other geographical regions at mid-century, where it is often similarly assumed that all was peace and conformity before the upheavals of 1968.

Defying Stability visit

By Wendy Woon

Curators in Mexico are starting to piece together contemporary histories of chapters in Mexican art that have long been neglected, including ephemeral and marginal conceptual practices that have never before been integrated into the “official” Mexican art historical narratives. The Age of Discrepancies: Art and Visual Culture in Mexico 1968–-1997, curated by Cuauhtémoc Medina and the late Olivier Debroise in 2007, and which traveled to São Paulo and Buenos Aires, provided the first major, in-depth examination of this critical, yet little examined period. Museums in Mexico are now acquiring archives of important artists, collectives, and galleries that are critical to the construction of those narratives. We were fortunate to be able to see an excellent exhibition at MUAC, Defying Stability: Artistic Processes in Mexico, 1952–1967, curated by Rita Eder (who gave us a tour), Cristobal Andrés Jácome, and Pilar Garcia. This period, which is often referred to as “the rupture,” marks a repositioning of the relationships between national identity and international influences with a generation of creators who emerged and revolutionized Mexican visual arts, film, theater, literature, and architecture in ways that blurred the boundaries between the media, often through collaboration. For example, the impact of revolutionary, daring approaches to theater indicated influence on other disciplines including public sculpture, film and architecture. The social commingling of the creative intelligentsia of Mexico City was documented in black-and-white films of social gatherings where important literary figures and artists from many other disciplines met. That aspect of creative exchange is not often included in survey exhibitions, and it added a distinctly human quality to the notion of the culture out of which these developments arose.

El Museo Expuesto Sala de Colecciones Universitarias, Centro Cultural Universitario Tlatelolco

By Lilian Tone

Our visit to the renovated Sala de Colecciones Universitarias was preceded by an early morning stroll through the Plaza de las Tres Culturas and its adjacent sites. Beyond the three moments in Mexican history for which the square is named —it connects the expansive archeological site of Tlatelolco, the 17th-century church Templo de Santiago, and the 1960s modernist apartment complex designed by Mario Pani— Plaza de las Tres Culturas was also the site where students were massacred by government security forces in 1968, an event memorialized at the Centro Cultural Universitario Tlatelolco.

The Sala de Colecciones Universitarias reopened in 2013 as a curatorial laboratory with a two-year project titled “El Museo Expuesto” (The Exposed Museum). We were greeted by James Oles, who directed the project with the assistance of Julio García Murillo, and were guided through by both of them. The project phased in with in-depth research into art dating from 1950 to 1990 in UNAM’s collection. Following this, seven exhibitions drawn from UNAM’s holdings were organized by students in the university’s curatorial studies program. “El Museo Expuesto” cleverly takes the modus operandi of museums as its subject and structure, addressing behind-the-scenes processes and principal goals: exhibition, preservation, research and education. Stressing the exhibition’s educational scope, the introductory text defines the project as “a space to investigate museum culture, a laboratory in which to better understand the functions, strategies, codes and symbols of the art museum.” The exhibition highlights some of UNAM’s lesser-known holdings while skillfully exposing gaps in the collection—gaps filled by astutely selected loans.

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In presenting a pre-1990s regionally defined globalism, Global Conceptualism did not attempt to blur the geographical boundaries despite the fact that a nascent transnationalism was evident in networked art, even in the 1950s. In the last fifteen years, much has changed in the ways that globality is thought about in museums, not least because of rapid changes in communication. As contemporary art traces similar paths to those of transnational financial flows, the emphasis on the global is rendered suspicious because of its deep entanglement with capital. Although neoliberal forces are certainly at play, the impetus for researching art from outside the traditional purview of US institutions must be understood as much more complex, in that it is also an attempt to understand the history of art scenes and movements that are growing ever more connected. Not only an impetus then, but also an imperative.

The term conceptualism has also been contested in recent years. If using the label makes available widely disparate works that respond to very different contexts, it is also guilty of flattening out the unique nature of propositions made by artists around the world. What can be learned today from an exhibition such as Global Conceptualism? How can the incommensurability of artworks created in different places be considered productively? Is the “global” exhibition defunct or do new curatorial practices that cast aside curatorial values such as coherence or chronological linearity (as Weiss suggests in her text) need to be developed? What alternatives might be sought to this model of exhibition?

This Theme, Global Conceptualism Reconsidered, offers an opportunity to think about these questions. It also offers the chance to reposition some of the materials published by post over the last few years. In addition to the two texts by Jane Farver and Rachel Weiss and an interview with Luis Camnitzer, the project directors, we asked the curators of different sections to reflect on their involvement in the exhibition, and republished here some of the reviews and installation shots of the exhibition.

“We Painted the Crystal, We Thought About the Crystal”—The Crystalist Manifesto (Khartoum, 1976) in Context

Anneka Lenssen

Thinking Back on Global Conceptualism

Rachel Weiss

Global Conceptualism: Reflections

Jane Farver

Conceptualism, Dematerialization, Arte no-objetual? Historicizing the ’60s and ’70s in Latin America

Harper Montgomery

Modern Art in the Arab World: Primary Documents – Art and Arab Life, a Questionnaire

Anneka Lenssen, Sarah Lookofsky, Sarah Rogers and Nada Shabout

Margarita Tupitsyn Looks Back: Thoughts on Global Conceptualism

Margarita Tupitsyn

A Conversation with Adriana Valdés (Part 1)

Adriana Valdés

A Conversation with Adriana Valdés (Part 2)

Adriana Valdés

László Beke Looks Back: Thoughts on Global Conceptualism

László Beke

“Pop Art Is Poison.” Cildo Meireles on Ideological Circuits

Cildo Meireles

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“Let’s convert all the systems into poetry and visions.” Felipe Ehrenberg, Telegraphic Work, 1970.

In this text, Zanna Gilbert explores the Work Secretly titled Upwards and Onwards…whether you like it or not by the Mexican artist Felipe Ehrenberg, considering how mail art works continue to provoke even years after their inception.

“Let’s convert all systems into poetry” was the ludic proposition stated in Felipe Ehrenberg’s 1970 Telegraphic Work.¹ At the end of that same year, this strategy of exploiting an official system for artistic purposes found expression in one of Mexico’s first major mail art works: Obra Secretamente titulada Arriba y Adelante . . . y si no pues tambien (Work Secretly titled Upwards and Onwards . . . whether you like it or not). The work signaled an appropriation of media and communication systems for artistic purposes and a commitment to collective production that would be developed in the mail art network in the next decade, reaching its zenith in the Poema Colectivo: Revolución more than a decade later. Like the Poema Colectivo, the work’s resuscitation today raises questions about the relationship between these early forms of collective networked artistic activity and our contemporary hyper-networked condition, about the reproduction and reconstruction of these works for exhibitions or for sale, about ways of resisting surveillance culture and censorship, and about how artists and thinkers might be “polled” for their ideas on societal transformations.

Arriba y Adelante, as it has come to be known, was an ambitious work whose chosen system for conversion into poetry was the postal service. Conceived as a conceptual puzzle, it was made up of two hundred prestamped postcards, on each of which Ehrenberg painted an unrecognizable shape. When later assembled in a given order, the postcards formed a painting depicting a larger-than-life topless woman proffering one of her breasts with one hand and holding a soccer ball branded “Mexico ’70” in the other. The image was copied from one of a collection of nude photo shots published in England on the occasion of Mexico’s hosting of the World Cup. Ehrenberg converted this celebratory soft porn photograph into a Pop-influenced, black-and-white, stylized art piece. However, unlike a Pop work, Arriba y Adelante traveled through the media and communications circuits that it commented upon: On November 15, 1970, Ehrenberg sent the two hundred postcards from three different post offices in London. Each was addressed to the Mexican Independent Salon, which was about to hold its third exhibition at Mexico City’s University Museum of Science and Art (MUCA).

1970 was also a year of presidential elections in Mexico. Ehrenberg took as the title of his work Luis Echeverría’s campaign slogan, a maxim denoting a politics of desarrolismo (“developmentalism”) closely tied to Mexico’s role as host of the 1968 Olympic Games and the 1970 World Cup, events that offered up a commodified image of a country ripe for international investment. Interior Minister since 1964, Echeverria was widely considered responsible for the Tlatelolco massacre of October 2, 1968, in which government forces opened fire on a peaceful student protest just days before the opening of the Olympics. Hundreds are thought to have been killed.² Ehrenberg and his family decided to leave Mexico for England in the wake of that state-perpetrated violence.

Why did Ehrenberg choose to construct his entry to the Independent Salon in such a way? On one level, his strategy solved the practical problem of his dislocation: he was far from Mexico, and his participation in the exhibition necessarily required a journey of some sort. The disembodied journey he devised was part and parcel of the work’s meaning. Moreover, the Mexican postal system refused to carry pornographic material of any sort, and, as Ehrenberg pointed out, criticism of the government was a risky business.³ Not only could the multipartite piece, illegible in its fragmented state, evade moral and political censorship, but also the critique of government systems was redoubled by the postcards’ passage through the mail service, a branch of the very thing the work criticized.

Ehrenberg’s written instructions for installing Arriba y Adelante were as follows: “During the opening night of the Third Annual Exhibition of the Independent Salon, and after a respectable amount of citizens are gathered, my duly appointed representative shall begin by tacking up each card in order. . . . Members of the public are happily invited to help.”⁴

Just as Echeverria’s sloganeering concealed a pernicious, violent approach to politics, Ehrenberg’s lighthearted directions for assembling the work overlay a deadly serious point. Arriba y Adelante was to be mounted on a red backing, so that any failure of the postal system to deliver a postcard would be represented by a crimson gap, effecting a visual correlation between the inefficiency of the postal bureaucracy, specifically identified by Ehrenberg as “a government institution,”⁵and the violent means pursued by the government to control the student movement. At the same time, the work playfully mocks the British postal system’s reputation for impersonal efficiency as well as its figurehead, Queen Elizabeth.⁶ The monarch’s profile on each of the stamps is overwhelmed and rendered ridiculous by Ehrenberg’s outsized, overtly sexualized figure.

More than forty years later, in 2011, Arriba y Adelante was included in the exhibition Intimate Bureaucracies: Art and the Mail, at the University of Essex (U.K.). Since the whereabouts of the original work is unknown (the piece was presumably destroyed after being exhibited at the Independent Salon), it was decided that the work would be re-created for the show with Ehrenberg’s help. Some twenty-first-century issues were provoked by the work’s ephemerality. The Royal Mail no longer produced prestamped postcards, and so a facsimile produced by Mauricio Marcin for his 2010 exhibition Arte Correo en Mexico (Mail Art in Mexico) at the Museo de la Ciudad in Mexico City would be used. The file was sent by email and printed by the university’s printer. When we came to assemble the work, the logic of its reconstitution was unclear; somehow the order of the postcards had been lost in the translation from digital file to printer. A long afternoon was spent puzzling out how to assemble the pieces, showing just how effectively the work must have concealed its meaning in its original transit. We constructed the copy with the original work’s ephemerality in mind, paying attention only to the immediate challenge of mounting the exhibition.

After many mail-related adventures, the exhibition closed, and we had to decide what to do with this version of Arriba y Adelante. Doubts over the status and value of the work began to emerge: Was it a facsimile, an exhibition copy, or a replica? Should it enter the Essex Collection of Latin American Art (ESCALA), or be stored in the archive? Should it be destroyed in order to assure the integrity of the edition then being produced by Ehrenberg’s gallery in São Paulo?

I had a fascinating exchange with Ehrenberg over these matters, and he kindly offered to produce a new iteration of the work as a gift to ESCALA. We decided to destroy the version that had been made for the exhibition and to accept Ehrenberg’s offer of a new one, which would be sent by post from São Paulo. While all of these questions were being considered, and long after the other works in the show had been safely shipped back to their owners, Arriba y Adelante languished in the gallery.

The following week, the porters charged with clearing out the gallery space removed the work and disposed of it in the bowels of the university. A few days later, one of the gallery staff members came across it, weather-beaten and vandalized, resting unobtrusively against a skip. There, the logic of its insistent ephemerality, of its belonging to a space other than the gallery, was more apparent than ever, even so many years after its original inception. Just as the Poema Colectivo is redeployed here on post with a renewed significance, Ehrenberg’s work also spoke once again to a new moment. Mail art and its archives continue to provoke, to make us consider and reconsider the politics of art and the potential for collective action. This performative aspect of mail art confers a continually evolving meaning, hinting at a journey that is as much temporal as it is geographic.

This is a revised version of a text published in Spanish in the magazine Blanco sobre Blanco.⁷

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Meireles also reflects on his Inserções em circuitos antropológicos (Insertions into Anthropological Circuits, 1971–73), works that put new objects into circulation, thereby creating circuits that didn’t previously exist. These included clay tokens, which were fabricated in order to avoid having to pay for the subway and telephone calls; banknotes without values; and Afro hair combs.

While the circulation of these objects has been read in relation to Pop art, Meireles rejects this reading because, of course, “Pop art is poison.”

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We visited the cities of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro and passed through Belo Horizonte on our way to the Inhotim Institute. The group spent time in botanical gardens, museums, galleries, art spaces, studios, architectural landmarks, and cultural foundations to see the work of important figures in Brazilian art and architecture. Another purpose of the visit was to attend the 30th edition of the São Paulo Bienal, which was curated by Luis Pérez-Oramas, MoMA’s curator of Latin American art. For some members of the group, this was a first trip to Brazil. We were lucky to have as part of the group our Brazilian colleague Lilian Tone, assistant curator in MoMA’s Department of Painting and Sculpture, especially when facing such important challenges as locating the best pão de queijo (cheese bread) in São Paulo.

This preliminary visit was aimed at acquiring firsthand knowledge and experiences, establishing face-to-face professional relationships, and laying the groundwork for a more profound engagement with Brazilian art and artists in the future. Ten days were of course not enough to take in all that we wished in Brazil’s two major cities, not to mention in the culturally rich regions lying further afield. We would love to hear what we missed out on and know more about what’s going on now, para matar as saudades (to stop missing it so much)!

1. São Paulo

Lygia Clark: A Retrospective at Itaú Cultural

By Zanna Gilbert

On our first morning in São Paulo, our plans to walk to the Itaú Cultural gallery were disrupted by a heavy rainfall that had the effect of causing an epic traffic jam. When we finally arrived at our destination, it was a relief to be met by Sofia Fan, the institution’s manager of visual arts, who led us through the Lygia Clark (1920–1988) retrospective. Presenting Clark’s work is an enormous challenge for any museum, since its participatory nature is key to its experience. The curatorial team engaged in these questions laudably, displaying the original 1960s Bichos (Creatures)—manipulable works made of steel—on a raised platform alongside replicas of these works that could be handled and freely manipulated by visitors. The reconstructed 1968 installation A Casa é o Corpo: Labirinto (The House Is the Body: Labyrinth) evokes a process of rebirth as visitors walk through various chambers containing sensory stimuli such as balloons, colored string and balls, and an inflatable chamber created from clear plastic. On the lower level were films, other works inviting direct participation, and a video installation in which the visitor is required to enter the space of the film. Clark conceived of but never realized this work, which had not been displayed before. It exemplifies the problematic nature of revivifying Clark’s work and the challenge that lies ahead for the curators of the Lygia Clark exhibition that will open at MoMA in 2014.

Museu do Arte de São Paulo (MASP)

By Zanna Gilbert

Museu do Arte de São Paulo (MASP) is housed in Lina Bo Bardi’s landmark building on Avenida Paulista, one of São Paulo’s main commercial axes. We arrived to a very warm welcome from Paulo Portella, education director and artist, who seemed to hold the memory of the institution’s recent years. Paulo showed us around the building, constructed by Bo Bardi in 1968, nearly twenty years after the museum was founded. We toured the impressive permanent collection, the library, education workshops, and conference facilities. The group discussed Bo Bardi’s original design for the display of paintings, which were mounted on glass panels not only so that both the fronts and backs could be seen, but also so that Renaissance and Impressionist works might seem to bob and float, defying the weight of their concrete-block pedestals. Bo Bardi’s vision of a light-filled museum was only partially apparent, since the museum has long since blacked out the glass windows.

Instituto Moreira Salles

By Sarah Meister

The Instituto Moreira Salles is based in Rio but has modest galleries and offices in São Paulo as well. These will expand significantly in 2015 when they open their new space on Avenida Paulista. IMS holds the preeminent historical photography collection in Brazil (rivaled only by the Biblioteca Nacional, where the collection of the former Emperor of Brazil, Dom Pedro II, who was a passionate photography enthusiast, now resides). On view was one slice of the IMS collection: a focused exhibition of Horacio Coppola’s photographs of the sculptures of Aleijadinho (made during Coppola’s trip to Minas Gerais in July and August, 1945), curated by Luciano Migliaccio. All of the prints were modern but had been reviewed and signed by Coppola. The exhibition also presented in vitrines a first edition of the luxurious book Coppola published of this work as well as an extraordinary travel diary in which Coppola carefully noted the technical and aesthetic details of his approach (see snapshot). I met with the IMS photography curator, Sergio Burgi, and Thyago Nogueira, editor of the journal ZUM and contemporary photography curator at IMS, after which all three of us joined the group for lunch at Bar da Dona Onça, on the ground level of the enormous, undulating Niemeyer Copan building.

Pivô Art Center for the Investigation of Artistic Processes

By Lilian Tone

Our first full day in São Paulo started with a downpour that caused the city’s second-worst traffic jam of the year. As our taxi inched forward, we heard on the radio that 152 miles of the city’s streets were snarled with congestion.

After lunch with photography curators Sergio Burgi and Thyago Nogueira from Instituto Moreira Salles, the rest of the group made their way to Estação Pinacoteca while I visited Pivô (Portuguese for “pivot”), the brainchild of artist Fernanda Brenner, who works in collaboration with art historian Martha Ramos-Yzquierdo Esteban and the producer Thyaga Sá Brito. Only a few months old, Pivô is an open platform for numerous noncommercial artistic uses, including studios and residencies, an exhibition space, a laboratory, collaborative projects, and, they hope, other experimental models yet to be explored. It is located on the street and mezzanine levels of Oscar Niemeyer’s iconic Copan building, perhaps the most striking visual symbol of the city of São Paulo, with residential floors on top and commercial space at the bottom. Covering a seemingly endless labyrinthine area of over 37,000 square feet, Pivô’s space is very raw and versatile in the scale and character of its rooms. On the occasion of my visit, the artist Paulo Nimer Pjota (born São José do Rio Preto, 1987) occupied a temporary studio space with a gorgeous veranda and was preparing large-scale works for his upcoming show at Galeria Mendes Wood.

Edifício Copan and Pivô

Estação Pinacoteca

By Zanna Gilbert

It seems that a generalized amnesia and “look forward rather than backwards” attitude in Brazilian politics have pushed aside memories of the 1964–1985 dictatorship. However, the Resistance Memorial at Estação Pinacoteca is one of the first institutionalized efforts to deal with the history of the military regime. In fact, its broad mission is to preserve the memory of Brazilian resistance and political repression since the founding of the republic in 1889. The exhibition we saw relied upon audio testimony of former prisoners and reconstructions of the cells of those imprisoned and abused by the regime. Estação Pinacoteca’s location is particularly apt, since it is situated in the prison section of the erstwhile headquarters of DEOPS, São Paulo’s former political police faction, infamous for having tortured those deemed threats to the military regime. In addition to creating exhibitions, the Resistance Memorial is tasked with researching, documenting, conserving, and communicating the history of repression and resistance.

After the sobering visit to the memorial, the group went with Natasha Barzaghi Geenen, international relations advisior, Valéria Piccoli, chief curator, and Regina Teixeira de Barros, curator, to visit the rest of the building. The Estação Pinacoteca focuses on the history of Brazilian art and the display of the permanent collections. The exhibition Art in Brazil: A History in the Pinacoteca São Paulo comprised highlights of the collection. The opportunity to see canonical works of Brazilian art was a real treat, especially Tarsila do Amaral’s masterpiece of 1929 Antropofágia . We also saw solo shows: one exhibition of prints by the expressionist printmaker Oswald Goeldi, who had a singular impact on printmaking practices in Brazil; the other of paintings by the Venezuelan abstractionist Alejandro Otero, called The Resonant Space: The Coloritmos (Colorhythms) of Alejandro Otero. After our visit to the Estação Pinacoteca we went to its nearby sister museum, the Pinacoteca do Estado (State Pinacoteca).

Pinacoteca do Estado

By David Frankel

The Pinacoteca do Estado is housed in a Neoclassical brick building on the edge of a shady park in what today seems like a funky part of São Paulo. The museum opened in 1905 in its present building, which had served earlier as an art school. The architecture prompts visitors to imagine the students who once worked there, painting in the large central courtyard (today roofed over) or sitting in the classrooms, now galleries, upstairs. I experienced a certain sense of dislocation in seeing Neoclassicism in Brazil—in finding a statue of the Greek god Pan, for instance, under towering New World palm trees in a São Paulo park. But it’s really no odder than coming upon Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello in the mountains of Virginia.

Of the museums we visited in Brazil, the Pinacoteca was the one most directed toward telling the story of Brazilian art, of tracing it historically. Here, then, were not only galleries of nineteenth-century painting but of canonical Brazilian modern art. We also saw a great show organized by the British curator and writer Guy Brett, widely respected as a scholar of the contemporary art of Brazil and elsewhere. Aberto fechado. Caixa e livro na arte brasileira (The Enclosed Openness: Box and Book in Brazilian art) traced these two forms, the box and the book, from works made in the 1950s by artists born in the 1920s to a work dated 2012, the year of the exhibition, made by Ricardo Basbaum, who was born in 1961. There were works as small as matchboxes and works big enough to step into, and besides posing the question of why these two particular devices—box and book—should have proved so enduringly interesting to Brazilian artists over more than half a century, the show asked its visitors to recognize boxes and books in objects they might not have identifed as such. For me, too, the idea of the hidden interior—of the inner world you don’t see from the outside, always there in boxes and books—became a kind of metaphor for the trip, and for all experience of visiting a foreign land.

Interview with Anna Maria Maiolino

By Zanna Gilbert

We met Anna Maria Maiolino in the Pinacoteca, where one of her works was displayed in the exhibition Enclosed openness. Box and book in Brazilian art. Our conversation focused on her experience of migration and displacement. Joking about her “disgraceful Brazilian accent,” she told us that she moved from Italy to Venezuela as a teenager and then from Venezuela to Brazil. She reflected that it was the disruption caused by this series of relocations, perhaps, that led her to develop a kind of primordial abstract aesthetic language using earthy, organic materials.

Um Olhar Sobre o Brasil (A View of Brazil) at Instituto Tomie Ohtake

By Sarah Meister

With far too little time to enjoy all the treasures on view at the Instituto Tomie Ohtake, we previewed the exhibition Um Olhar Sobre Brazil, an ambitious review of Brazilian photography since 1833 curated by Boris Kossoy and Lilia Moritz Schwarz. The Instituto Moreira Salles was a significant lender to the exhibition, sending, among other works, a facsimile of photographically reproduced pharmaceutical labels made by Hercules Florence in a remote interior village of Brazil. According to Florence’s notebooks, the labels were made six years before Daguerre and Talbot published accounts of their inventions of photographic processes. In an ideal world, the exhibition would have relied on fewer modern enlargements, but their presence underscores two important realities: First, that vintage prints frequently don’t exist, even for key figures, so to insist on prints made by the photographer at the time the negative was exposed would senselessly distort and interrupt the development of any narrative; and second, that when vintage prints do exist the need to preserve them must be weighed against the importance of including the purest expression of a photographer’s intent. The catalogue is handsomely illustrated.

Tour of Adriana Varejão Exhibition at Museu de Arte Moderna (MAM)

By Milan Hughston

Upon arrival at Ibirapuera Park, the group toured a major retrospective of the contemporary Brazilian artist Adriana Varejão titled Histories at the Margins, on view at the Museu de Arte Moderna (MAM). The tour was led by Director Felipe Chaimovich. The artist is known for her large-scale installations and wall pieces, and this exhibition featured forty works from the last twenty years of her often politically charged artistic practice. The tour was followed by lunch at MAM with Felipe, and with the noted Brazilian art historian Aracy Amaral. Amaral has long been one of the most prominent curators and critics in Latin America. As director of the Pinacoteca in the late 1970s, she was responsible for inaugurating a more intensive program of contemporary art. She generously gave us a number of her publications, which will be added to MoMA’s library.

Museu Afro Brasil

By David Frankel

The Museu Afro Brasil is one of the several museums and cultural institutions scattered through the Ibirapuera Park in São Paulo. This is a place I particularly wanted to visit. In the years I’ve spent as an editor, I’ve worked on a number of books on both African art and African art in the Americas, the art made by people brought to the West as slaves and by their descendants. This art has seemed to me both fascinating and inspiring, for the slaves came to the Americas literally with nothing, leaving everything behind, yet through memory and invention were able to both preserve and expand on their traditions. It’s as if something were forced through the eye of a needle and came out on the other side just as large.

I walked through the Museu on a quiet weekday morning, when most of its visitors were groups of schoolchildren. The collection is varied and grand, and unusual in that it combines African statuary—original objects from the cultures imported to the New World—with works made in the Americas, allowing for a search for continuities. (Many museums or curatorial departments within museums concentrate on one field or the other.) Among the highlights for me were Afro-Brazilian shrines, which often put humble materials—fabrics, artificial flowers—to spectacular use, their contrasts of colors and layering of textures producing the effect as well as the actuality of enormous richness. In the face of this kind of flowering was the memory of the past, most notably, in one darkened room, shackles, chains, and the entire hulk of a slave ship. (Or that was my understanding, as I tried to figure out wall labels with my extremely limited Portuguese.) A temporary exhibition on Our Lady of Aparecida traced a celebrated icon of Brazilian Catholicism through its many syncretic interpretations in Afro-Brazilian culture up to and including the work of contemporary artists. All in all, the Museu testified to the extreme range and diversity of black culture in Brazil and left me with many questions about the role of that culture in Brazilian society today.

30th São Paulo Bienal: The Imminence of Poetics

By David Frankel

With an exhibition space of over 300,000 square feet, the São Paulo Bienal is among the heftiest single shows I’ve ever attended. The Giardini of the Venice Biennale, the older institution on which it is modeled, is larger overall, but that show is divided among multiple, individually curated halls and national pavilions, whereas São Paulo’s is to be imagined as one coherent show in one big building, one of the group of buildings designed by Oscar Niemeyer and others as cultural resources set in the Ibirapuera Park. It is a huge curatorial challenge, and to walk through the show with Luis Pérez-Oramas, who led the team of curators for the 2012 Bienal, was for me among the highlights of the trip, despite the fact that I’d already spent time in the show, having come, independently of MoMA, to the opening.

When he’s not organizing biennials, Luis is a curator here at MoMA, making him welcome as a friend as well as a guide. In conceiving the exhibition, he and his colleagues Tobi Maier, André Severo, and Isabella Villanueva had been guided by the idea of the constellation, a formation that might be disparate and far-flung but is held together by some kind of gravitational pull. And that was how the show felt: of a piece, with links in sensibility among artists sometimes self-evident, such as the shared Neoclassical interests of Ian Hamilton Finlay and Elaine Reichek, who occupied neighboring sections, and sometimes sensed among installations shown far apart from one another. Impressively, every artist had enough room to make a full statement, and some parts of the Bienal could, in other contexts, have been full-scale, freestanding exhibitions: the Brazilian outsider artist Arthur Bispo do Rosário, for example, was represented in depth, as was the Ivorian Frédéric Bruly Bouabré—not to mention August Sander, whose People of the Twentieth Century series, made over the course of forty years, was shown in its entirety for the first time in Brazil. (Whereas biennial exhibitions tend to focus on living artists, Luis and his team went back in time to make their points.) Both Sander and Bouabré appeared in a particularly intense part of the Bienal, on the top floor—the show’s “brain,” as Luis described it—which gathered together artists working in series, producing many images that rang changes on their chosen formats. We all remain grateful to Luis for leading us through this poetic labyrinth.

Dinner at the Home of Felipe Ehrenberg

By Zanna Gilbert

After visiting the São Paulo Bienal, we headed to the home of Mexican artist Felipe Ehrenberg and chef Lourdes Hernández Fuentes. The house doubles as a pop-up restaurant run by the couple, who have created an enclave of Mexican cuisine and culture in the Brooklin area of the city. David Frankel and I traveled there slightly earlier than the rest of the group so that we could talk to Felipe about his early career, including the establishment of an artists’ publishing and printing venture—the Beau Geste Press—and his time living in London. Still actively involved in the practice of bookmaking, Felipe kindly gave us a copy of his new book work Tercera Caída (Third Fall). The book references the 2011 Monterrey casino fire, which killed fifty-two people. The fire is representative of the ongoing crisis in Mexico and the government’s ineffective, U.S.-backed drug war that has led to escalating levels of violence, costing around 40,000 lives in recent years. Appropriating imagery from lucha libre (Mexican wrestling) as well as Mexican cultural icons and media imagery, Tercera Caída is an urgent lament for the artist’s homeland. The title refers to a rule in Mexican wrestling that says the fight is lost the third time you fall; through it, Ehrenberg makes an oblique allusion to the three parties that share power in Mexican electoral politics.

Lina Bo Bardi’s Glass House

Visits with Augusto de Campos and Sylvio Nery

By Milan Hughston

I began the day by visiting the home of Augusto de Campos, the noted concrete poet and artist who had recently visited MoMA to present his multimedia performance Poetry Is Risk with his son Cid Campos. De Campos continued his generosity toward the MoMA library by donating a number of poetic interventions he designed for Folhetim, a cultural newspaper published in São Paulo in the early 1980s. I then met with Sylvio Nery, one of Brazil’s pioneering dealers of abstract and Neo-Concrete Latin American art. Nery shared highlights of his gallery’s archives and library, including many ephemeral items documenting Lygia Clark’s early career. We joined the rest of the group for lunch at Capim Santo and enjoyed a traditional feijoada menu.

Visit to Leda Catunda’s Studio

By Lilian Tone

After our visit to Lina Bo Bardi’s breathtaking glass house in the Morumbi neighborhood, I left the group to take a peek at Leda Catunda’s studio near the soccer stadium. Catunda (born São Paulo, 1961) is widely considered one of Brazil’s most influential artists of the 1980s. In the studio were examples of her most recent body of work, which ventures into the world of sports. Catunda uses motifs from team uniforms, flags, and sponsors’ logos to construct shaped and stuffed canvases and collages that play with highly recognizable yet abstracted symbols of one of the country’s most cherished obsessions: soccer. A bit like a cultural archeologist or social anthropologist, Catunda selects emblematic images from our visual culture, defacing and reconfiguring them while continuously reinventing painting.

Interview with Paulo Bruscky

By Zanna Gilbert

The group took advantage of Recife artist Paulo Bruscky’s fleeting presence in São Paulo to meet with him and see some of his works at Nara Roesler gallery. After a brief discussion, the rest of the group went to the Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil (CCBB) to see the exhibition Plans for Escape while Milan Hughston and I interviewed Bruscky about his involvement in the mail art network and his interventions in Recife.

I have been particularly fascinated by Bruscky’s EEG drawings, part of a significant body of work in which the artist employs the methods of medical science (EEG, X-ray, and cardiogram) to produce drawings, poems, and mail art works. Bruscky worked as an administrator at the Hospital Agamenon Magalhães, where he made these pieces using the equipment that was available to him. They respond to the context of the dictatorship of the 1970s and 1980s and specifically to its impact on Recife, in Brazil’s northeast. In this respect, the inscription of the word “THOUGHT” on the surface of one of his works pertains to the restrictions on freedom of expression as well as to the damaging psychological effects of self-censorship. The works call to attention the processes of rationalization and objectification of the body that are inherent in the methods of biological science. At the time they were made, torture was often carried out in Brazil with the help of physicians.

Bruscky was at the forefront of an important group of artists working in northeastern Brazil, and his work demonstrates the international uptake of conceptual methods in varied contexts. We found some related works in MoMA Library’s Special Collections, such as Bruscky’s Performance Poema Linguístico (Linguistic performance poem, 2005) and several Xerox artworks that focus on the artist’s body.

Planos de Fuga: uma exposição em obras (Plans for escape: an exhibition under construction) at Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil

By Lilian Tone

Since our arrival in São Paulo, we had been hearing rave reviews from friends and colleagues about the current show at CCBB, so we decided to defy traffic and swing by old downtown São Paulo on our way to Galpão Fortes Vilaça. Planos de Fuga: uma exposição em obras proved worth the detour. Curated by Rodrigo Moura and Jochen Volz (current and former Inhotim curators, respectively), the exhibition was expressly conceived to be in dialogue with the tower-like building designed by Hippolyto Gustavo Pujol Junior and completed in 1901. Five in-situ installations, in addition to existing works by Cildo Meireles, Rivane Neuenschwander, Gabriel Sierra, Marcius Galan, Carla Zaccagnini, and Renata Lucas, radically reshaped our experience of the architecture as we awkwardly traversed its multiple floors and roamed around its imposing circular structure.

Planos de Fuga: Plans for escape

Rivane Neuenschwander: Fora de Alcance (Out of Reach) Solo Exhibition at Galpão Fortes Vilaça

By Lilian Tone

Galpão Fortes Vilaça, the gallery’s outpost in Barra Funda, a neighborhood originally spawned by industrial development, functions as a hybrid of exhibition space, offices, and storage. Rivane Neuenschwander (born Belo Horizonte, 1967) occupied the front area of the ample, open warehouse space, with an installation delimited by a sinuous fence (A uma certa distância—Barreiras públicas, São Paulo) that constituted a work in itself, while at the same time mediating our access to other works. We also encountered a wonderful series of Neuenschwander’s photographs (Mancha de óleo) and groups of drawings (Progressões de fogo) that allude to the artist’s environmental concerns, evoking oil spills in the ocean and forest fires.

Regina Silveira Studio Visit

By Starr Figura

At the end of the day, we visited with Regina Silveira in her lovely home/studio. Her small house and garden, hidden from the street behind a large gate, are a tranquil oasis tucked into this pocket of the city. Covering the walls were her own artworks as well as many by her friends and students. We conducted the interview in her studio, adjacent to her home. She responded thoughtfully to questions about her background, her involvement with mail art in the 1970s, the place of printmaking in her oeuvre, the distorted geometries in her Anamorfas series, and much else. For more than four decades, she has worked across media—from sculpture, printmaking, and photography to installation art and digital practices—to explore issues of space, light, and perspective and their relationship to perception. As a longtime teacher, she has had a profound influence on several generations of Brazilian artists. After the interview, we were delighted that she could join us and several other new friends for a lively dinner at La Frontera restaurant.

SESC Pompéia

By Pedro Gadanho

SESC Pompéia is a major project by the late Italian-Brazilian architect Lina Bo Bardi (1914-1922). A mix of new and converted structures, the complex was commissioned by the Serviço Social do Comércio, a nonprofit institution that provides community and cultural services across Brazil, and was built in 1977 in São Paulo’s Pompéia neighborhood. An existing factory was transformed to house a library, theater, restaurant, and spaces for exhibitions and workshops; two new buildings were designed for sports facilities. Connected by pedestrian bridges, these structures have become iconic and expressive of Bo Bardi’s flight from her earlier modernist work. At the time of our visit, the center was holding a major exhibition of work by Isaac Julien, organized for the São Paulo Biennial.

Lina Bo Bardi’s SESC Pompéia

Iran do Espirito Santo Studio Visit

By Starr Figura

After leaving SESC Pompéia, we drove a short way to visit Iran do Espirito Santo at his quietly stunning home/studio. In its subtle and precise interplay of minimalist forms and materials, Iran’s efficiently designed but sensual and dramatic home is a perfect reflection and extension of his artistic practice. The setting is equally affecting, with panoramic views of the city of São Paulo from the patio, windows, and rooftop terrace. We started with a visit to the studio, on the lower level of the house. Iran showed us some recent drawings of delicate, uniformly spaced rows of wavy pencil lines on paper, made using a plastic template. Also on view were wall drawings based on subtly modulated gray squares or stripes and a gorgeous set of small, white, solid marble sculptures that seemed to reference vernacular, domestic design objects. Next we moved upstairs to the living area for a delicious lunch. It was a pleasure to spend this brief time in Iran’s beautifully serene, pristine, inspiring world.

2. Inhotim

Instituto Cultural Inhotim

By Zanna Gilbert

In the evening, we flew from São Paulo to Belo Horizonte, in the state of Minas Gerais, to visit one of Brazil’s most talked-about contemporary art destinations: Instituto Cultural Inhotim. We spent the night in Belo Horizonte and woke early to travel roughly forty miles to Brumadinho, the town where Inhotim is located, in the beautiful mountainous landscape of the Paraopeba River valley. Opened in 2006, Inhotim has become a landmark center for site-specific works and for its stunning, 240-acre botanical garden. The art collection is comprised of over five hunded pieces by celebrated artists such as Adriana Varejão, Helio Oiticica, Cildo Meireles, Chris Burden, Matthew Barney, Doug Aitken, and Janet Cardiff, among others.

One of the highlights of the visit for me was Doris Salcedo’s Neither (2004), a meditation on imprisonment and an allusion to abuses of power in concentration camps. The piece unites interior and exterior space by embedding a mesh fence into the walls of an empty of a white space. Salcedo’s wry nod towards the genealogy of Minimalism also seemed, through its emptiness, to hint at an absence of memory.

The chance to experience Helio Oiticica and Neville D’Almeida’s Cosmococas 1-5 was enjoyable, but I wondered if the effect was what the notoriously radical and exacting artist really had in mind, since, like Lygia Clark’s films at Itaú Cultural, they had never been installed in the artist’s lifetime. I also enjoyed seeing Marila Dardot’s Heideggerian A Origem da Obra de Arte (The Origin of the Work of Art, 2002), consisting of 150 ceramic vases in the shapes of the letters of the Roman alphabet. Visitors can plant seeds and spell out words of their choosing. There weren’t any seeds left, but we managed to make a few concrete poems inspired by our meetings with Augusto de Campos earlier in 2012.

The group met for lunch with Rodrigo Moura, one of Inhotim’s curators, who explained more about the vast operation at hand. Inhotim employs over a thousand people, many of whom tend the botanical gardens and work in environmental research labs devoted to species native to Brazil. The landscaping was originally inspired by famed architect and landscape artist Roberto Burle Marx (1909–1994), whose house we would later visit in Rio.

3. Rio de Janeiro

Visit to Sitio Roberto Burle Marx

By Milan Hughston

The group drove out of Rio to the remarkable home/museum/botanical collection of noted Brazilian landscape architect and artist Roberto Burle Marx. Burle Marx acquired the property, located about ninety minutes outside Rio, in 1949 and immediately transformed it into a site for experimentation, where he could demonstrate his world-renowned skills in landscape planning and design using Brazilian native plant life, as well as species from other parts of the world. He spent the next forty-five-or-so years, until his death in 1994, perfecting the site, which is now open to the public. It’s a splendid showcase for the work of one of Brazil’s greatest artists.

Visit to Beatriz Milhazes’s Studio

By Lilian Tone

We met Beatriz Milhazes (born Rio de Janeiro, 1960) at her painting studio, which is located right behind the luscious greenery of Jardim Botânico, the vast and extraordinary repository of tropical plants established by Portuguese Prince Regent Dom João in 1808. The splendid garden makes for a fitting background and contextual reference for her work. Four doors further up the street, another house functions as her office and paper studio. Since Milhazes moved here in 1987, a gallery, a private collection, and other artists have relocated to this same quaint set of row houses, transforming the laid-back cul-de-sac into a hive of artistic activity.

Milhazes spoke to us about her distinct painting process, which invokes collage, printmaking, and stenciling techniques. Using acrylic paint, she creates motifs on pieces of transparent plastic and, after carefully considering different placements, glues them to the canvas. Subsequently, she peels off the plastic. Milhazes talked to us about major references in her work, such as Brazilian modernist painter Tarsila do Amaral and Henri Matisse. Observing Milhazes’s colorfully painted pieces of plastic arrayed on the floor, one can’t help but think of Matisse’s cutouts. She draws her motifs from a vast visual archive that knows no temporal demarcations, geographical borders, or high-low distinctions. Together, these elements conjure a medley of lacework, tropical flora, carnival decoration, jewelry design, and Baroque architecture.

Gallery: A Gentil Carioca

By Zanna Gilbert

Sarah Meister, Pedro Gadanho, and I joined Pedro Rivera of Studio X at the opening of a new show at the gallery A Gentil Carioca. The gallery is located in the historic center of the city, an area known as Saara, which is dominated by a huge open-air market. Its inviting name seemed apt, as it was immediately evident that the atmosphere was very friendly. A carioca is the name for a person who lives in Rio de Janeiro, so a gentil carioca would perhaps be a kindly resident of Rio. Founded by the artists Laura Lima, Márcio Botner, and Ernesto Neto, the gallery aims to promote Brazilian art both at home and abroad and to “think, make, document and transform history.”

The exhibition we attended was titled Colapso (Collapse) and was curated by Felipe Scovino, who had invited Alexandre Vogler, Andre Komatsu, Guga Ferraz, and Marcelo Cidade to create works especially for the show. The central concept of collapse resonated with the hyper-development and rapid urban transformation of Brazil’s cities. For the ongoing project of temporary commissioned works on one of the gallery’s external walls, Alexandre Vogler gave the historic building a second skin of reflective glass, referring to a new development nearby.

Antonio Dias Studio Visit

By Zanna Gilbert

In the late afternoon, we paid a visit to the home and studio of the artist Antonio Dias in Copacabana. Now in his late 60s, he showed us his working space and studio, as well as the extraordinary sight of a Rio morro (hill) almost pressing up against a window. On the other side of the house, the artist’s balcony was populated by various plants and trees.

We enjoyed a drink with Antonio, his wife, Paola, and daughter Nina and chatted about his long and multifaceted career. He generously shared stories about his early career, his surprise at the lack of women in Milan’s art scene, and his participation in the Guggenheim Museum’s 6th International Exhibition in New York in 1971. He also shared his early concern about the commodification of his work and talked about his experiences in Brazil during the period of dictatorship. In particular, Dias discussed the series The Illustration of Art and the work The Invented Country, recently acquired by MoMA. With a healthy dose of humor, Dias explored the challenges and absurdities of his artistic career and commented poetically on his life’s work.

Studio X Rio

By Pedro Gadanho

Studio X Rio, led by architect Pedro Rivera, is one of a number of international branches of a project run by Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation. These studios investigate urban conditions in contemporary megacities in situ. We visited Studio X Rio’s headquarters and heard about their current activities, which include organizing exhibitions, symposia, and design workshops with urban planners and local populations. Their work’s relevance hinges upon an interdisciplinary approach to urban intervention that involves contemporary artists in projects about the city.

Visit to Cildo Meireles’s Studio

By Lilian Tone

The area in the neighborhood of Botafogo where Cildo Meireles (born Rio de Janeiro, 1948) has his studio feels far removed from postcard views of Rio. Walking up hilly Travessa Dona Marciana, a quiet residential street that seems to have stopped in time, I could barely contain my groupie excitement at this opportunity to visit Meireles’s studio once again. Meireles had just returned from a long trip abroad and was exceedingly generous with his time, receiving us on an early Sunday morning. He spoke at length about MoMA’s recently acquired Virtual Spaces: Corner 1 (1967–68), the first in a series of works that marked a breakthrough in his practice when he was only nineteen years old. In fact, the only visible work of art in the studio was another piece from that same series. It stood nonchalantly at the entrance, as if on its way out the door. Dominated by a big conference table at the center, the studio felt like a vast archive of paper, ideas, and materials. A natural storyteller, Meireles reminisced about his evolution as an artist and spoke about the multisensory nature of Brazilian art. He related stories about his time spent in Brasilia, Rio, and New York, his participation in the Information show at MoMA in 1970, and about his lesser-known sound works that are included in MoMA’s Library holdings. See the video interview we made in which he discusses his series Insertions into Ideological Circuits and Insertions into Anthropological Circuits.

Santa Marta Visit

By Pedro Gadanho

Visiting one of the few favelas in Rio that has recently become accessible to outsiders by an ongoing process of “pacification” provided a rare opportunity to better understand the urban history and social complexity of contemporary Rio de Janeiro. Santa Marta, like many of Rio’s five hundred favelas, lies right in the urban city center, in the area of Botafogo. Given the legal impossibility of displacing Santa Marta’s eight thousand inhabitants, the Brazilian government is sponsoring efforts to regenerate it. The Santa Marta favela was subject to this process and purged of drug trafficking in 2008. Now residents are exploring forms of self-empowerment and cultural expression, notably through music and graffiti culture.

Museu do Arte do Rio (MAR): Breakfast with Paulo Herkenhoff

By Zanna Gilbert

On our last morning in Rio, we met with the curator and critic Paulo Herkenhoff, formerly curator of Latin American Art at MoMA, to find out more about the new museum we had being hearing about since our arrival in town. The Museu do Arte do Rio (MAR) was under construction at that time but has recently opened to the public in the Porto Maravilha area of the city. As director of MAR, Paulo explained his vision of the museum as a space for the city and for its residents, and as a place to think through some of the major contemporary issues facing the metropolis. A key idea is to create temporary exhibitions drawn from private collections in the city, thus making artworks previously hidden from view accessible to a wider public. One of the first subjects to be tackled under the curatorship of Clarissa Diniz is the issue of land rights in Rio. The resulting exhibition will be held against the backdrop of increasing conflict over the city’s intervention in favela communities in the run-up to the World Cup (2014) and the Olympic Games (2016).

Casa Daros

By Zanna Gilbert

On our final day in Rio, Pedro Gadanho, David Frankel, and I visited Casa Daros, a restored Neoclassical building in Botafogo that is the new home of the Daros Latinamerica collection. Eugenio Valdés, director of art and education there, led us on a tour of the building (a former orphanage designed in 1866 by Francisco Joaquim Bethencourt da Silva), which has a huge amount of space for education and exhibitions as well as facilities for conferences and a nascent library under the care of Ranieli Piccinini Machado. At the time of our visit, the recently opened space was still undergoing final preparations before opening to the public. A testament to the booming interest in Brazil as a center for the arts, partly due to upcoming megaevents in Rio, the building will provide a second home for the Daros Latinamerica collection, currently headquartered in Zurich.

Instituto Moreira Salles

By Sarah Meister

Rio’s Instituto Moreira Salles is located in what was once the Moreira Salles family home, which has been adapted for exhibitions. During our visit, a show of William Kentridge’s work was on view. There are two new buildings on the property in which the collection is studied, conserved, digitized, and stored. Gilberto Ferrez (grandson of Marc Ferrez, regarded as the Atget of Brazil) was Brazil’s first photography historian, and the collection he gathered of mostly nineteenth-century work was the first major acquisition of IMS. Other strengths of the IMS collection are concentrations of works by Marcel Gauthereau, Hans Gunther Flieg, José Medeiros, Thomas Farkas, Henrique Klumb, August Stahl, and Magdalena Schwartz.

Galeria da Gávea

By Sarah Meister

Tucked away from the street, within walking distance of Instituto Moreira Salles, is the Galeria da Gávea. I met with the director, Gabriela Toledo, and two of the artists/partners in the gallery, Ana Stewart and Bruno Veiga. The gallery shares space with other small businesses, whose employees were sitting down to lunch around a communal table while we looked at the works on the walls. Among them was a series of paired photographic portraits of women by Stewart. The portraits in each pair were made ten years apart, and they were usually accompanied by a soundtrack of the subjects discussing the ways in which their lives had changed over the decade. Stewart was also showing a multifaceted work depicting aspects of “her daughter’s universe.” Viega began exploring a distilled “suburban aesthetic” after receiving a grant to photograph the old guard of Samba. A recent grant will allow him to publish this work. Viega also showed us some photographs of what he describes as the “very generous” sidewalk designs by Burle Marx in Copacabana (right by our hotel!)—generous in the sense that there are so many ways for artists to respond to the undulating black-and-white forms beneath everyone’s feet.

Gustavo Capanema Palace

By Pedro Gadanho

This building by Lucio Costa and a team of young architects that included Affonso Eduardo Reidy and Oscar Niemeyer, who went on to gain international prominence, is considered Rio’s (and South America’s) first large-scale modernist building. Based on ideas by Le Corbusier, who visited Rio de Janeiro at the invitation of the project’s initiator, Gustavo Capanema, the building was designed to house the Ministry of Health and Education and was completed in 1943. It includes important artistic contributions such as a suspended garden by the landscape architect Roberto Burle Marx and murals by one of Brazil’s most famous painters of the period, Cândido Portinari. The building currently serves as the local headquarters in Rio of the National Ministry of Culture.

Capacete Residency Program

By Pedro Gadanho

Founded in Rio de Janeiro in 1998 and with a branch in São Paulo since 2009, Capacete is one of Brazil’s and South America’s most important artist residency programs. It offers two-stage residencies of three to six months to artists, architects, and curators and has welcomed artists such as Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Falke Pisano, Andrea Fraser, and Pierre Huyghe. Helmut Batista, Capacete’s founder and director until 2012, introduced us to the artists currently in residence and showed us the growing archive of works and documents that have been produced by artists working there. He also described the open philosophy of the program as a form of contemporary salon and explained how its activities are managed and funded.

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As Hurricane Sandy struck in October 2012, legendary Brazilian poet and founder of the Concrete Poetry movement Augusto de Campos and his son, the musician Cid Campos, were holed up in a Manhattan hotel. As part of the MoMA series Modern Poets, the pair were due to present an intermedia performance integrating word, music, and image, what they call a “verbivocovisual” presentation aiming to be “free of the strictures of logical discourse.” The allusion to danger in the title of the performance, Poetry Is Risk, seemed apt given the circumstances, but it has an alternative meaning in Portuguese: risco can also mean “score” or “scratch out”—in other words, to make a mark.

The performance was postponed until the following day, and as New York reeled from the devastating effects of the storm, an impressive crowd gathered for a magical and restorative night of visual poetry spanning the career of one of the genre’s greatest innovators. Throughout Campos’s long career working within the expanded territory of poetry, he has used sound and image to activate associative thinking and explore the possibilities of language.

The poet dealt sensitively with the issue of translation, a process he refers to as re-criação (re-creation), by carefully overlaying his spoken English performance with gentle melodies provided by Cid Campos in the original Portuguese and projections of his poems. Aged 83, he also stunned the audience with a one-breath reading of his poem “cidade/city/cité” and a bossa nova rendition of “Our Share of the Night to Bear,” a “lyrical jewel” by Emily Dickinson.

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