El texto a continuación fue escrito por Linda Yablonsky para una de las publicaciones mas importantes del mundo en materia de arte contemporaneo. Antes que nada déjenme darles un poco de contexto y es que Artforum por lo general NO critica. En otras palabras, si Artforum dice que la casa de Oxenford es ‘modest’ es porque es una cagada. Todo esto se maneja con el poder de la ironía y el eufemismo y este texto es cruel. No voy a traducir todo sino las oraciones que son claves para entender la critica (a las que pondré en Italics). Veamos….
ON MAY 21, I arrived in Buenos Aires for the opening of arteBA, thinking it Argentina’s first contemporary art fair. I was wrong. It was number twenty-three.
El 21 de Mayo llegué a Buenos Aires para el opening de arteBA pensando que era la primera edicion de la feria de arte contemporaneo de Argentina. Estaba equivocada, era la vigésimo tercera. (Mi comentario: en otras palabras, ‘no existen’)
Where had I been? Certainly not in Palermo, the neighborhood of La Rural, the convention center housing the fair. Just by the by, BA also has a Palermo Hollywood, a Palermo Soho, and a seedy, riverfront district called La Boca that some call “the Bushwick of Buenos Aires.” So this is not the most Latin American of cities. It looks like Paris, for one thing, and nearly everyone I met over five days had a French, German, or Italian name, and spoke such Italian-sounding Spanish that roving Mousse editor Stefano Cernuschi could fake it and still be taken for a native.
He was there to appear on one of the panels organized for the fair by the curator Abaseh Mirvali. They were among the visiting VIPs from Brazil, Puerto Rico, Venezuela, Mexico, the UK, and the US transported through a soggy, afternoon chill to join their Argentine counterparts at a pre-opening mixer. No artists were present at the reception, held in the near ruin of a gorgeous, historic house called Casa Carlos. Champagne was served with empanadas and grilled organ meats on a stick, quickly immersing us in a social swim that floated pretty much the same faces every day.
Stefano Cernuschi participó de uno de los paneles organizados por la curadora Abaseh Mirvali y estaba entre los invitados VIP de Brasil, Puerto Rico, Venezuela, Mejico, UK y EEUU transportados en una tarde de frio húmedo (‘soggy’ significa que no le gustó, se traduciría como ‘humedad pesada’ o ‘densa’) al cocktail de pre-apertura de la feria. No había artistas presentes en una recepción. (Mi comentario: esto sorprende a cualquiera y es alarmante! SIN ARTISTAS EL OPENING DE UNA FERIA DE ARTE CONTEMPORANEO?) que tuvo lugar en lo que es casi la ruina de lo que hubo de ser una casa histórica llamada Casa Carlos (Mi comentario: el lugar del cocktail le pareció una RUINA). Siriveron champagne con empanadas y achuras servidas en ‘brochettes’ entre un grupo de gente que se repetiría (con las mismas caras) durante la semana. (Mi comentario: le pareció un BODRIO).
ArteBA president Alec Oxenford, collectors Guillermo Rozenblum and Raúl Naón, publisher Baroness Francesca (“Dudu”) von Thielmann, and arteBA past president Facundo Gómez Minujínsurfaced early as some of the bigger fish. Claques formed among the foreigners. Mexican collector Eduardo Prieto buddied up with Hôtel Americano co-owner Moises Micha, and New York dealer Bridget Donahue hung with Cernuschi and dealer Mari Spirito, who would represent her nonprofit Protocinema on Mirvali’s panel with Cernuschi.
“This is the greatest international presence we’ve had so far,” observed the raffish Julia Converti, arteBA’s current director.
‘Nunca antes hemos tenido tanta asistencia de extranjeros’, observó la ‘desprolija’ Julia Converti, quien es la actual directora de arteBA. (Mi comentario: el modo en el que esto está escrito da la pauta de que Julia Converti le cayó mal a la periodista. El adjetivo ‘raffish’ es segun el Oxford Dictionary equivalente a ‘poco convencional pero de baja reputación’. Para darles un ejemplo la hija de Cohen (Malamute) es ‘raffish’. En LANP traduciríanos ‘raffish’ como ‘con pelo con olor a cebola’. Ademas, sorprende el modo en el que la periodista dice ‘ArteBA’s current director’ ya que plantearlo en esos términos significa que el año que viene no lo va a ser o, al menos, no deberia).
Once restricted to Argentine galleries, the fair has purposefully expanded its reach in the past three years, hoping to attract dealers from abroad while also creating a new collecting class among younger patrons at home. “It’s difficult in a country going down to have a fair that goes up,” said Minujín. He is the son of artist Marta Minujín, a local folk hero worshipped by many. With her platinum hair and the paparazzi around her, she was hard to miss at the fair’s evening preview, where visitors lined up to snuggle into her large, earthen “bird’s nest” of a sculpture at Henrique Faria’s booth in the forty-five-gallery main section.
Si bien en el pasado, la feria habia estado restringida solo a galerías argentinas, la misma ha expandido su rango (pero no su tamaño) tratando de atraer mas galerias del exterior mientras se trata de crear una nueva clase de coleccionistas jóvenes nativos. Sin embargo, Facundo Minujin (ex Presidente de ArteBA) dijo: ‘ES DIFICIL EN UN PAIS QUE SE VA AL CARAJO, TENER UNA FERIA QUE CREZCA!’. El es el hijo de la artista Marta Minujin, una suerte de héroe folklórico local adorado por muchos. Con su pelo platinado y los paparazzi rodeándola, era dificil no verla en la recepción del opening, en la que los visitantes hacían cola para entrar a su ‘hornero’ en la galería numero 45 de la sección principal. (Mi comentario: Facundo Minujin debe disculparse por hacer ese comentario. El tiene una responsabilidad como ex Presidente de la Feria. Se ha vuelto totalmente loco? Respecto de que la gente ‘hizo cola’ para entrar el hornero, debe quedar claro que la periodista se está cagando de risa).
Unlike most fairs, this one is operated as a nonprofit directed by a board of trustees. Foreign dealers were given booths, gratis, after guest curators Agustín Pérez Rubio, Octavio Zaya, and the Tate’s José Roca selected their artists for presentation in one of three, stand-alone sections, each underwritten by a different corporate sponsor. Rubio had the international section, named “U-Turn Project Rooms by Mercedes-Benz,” which pretty much puts the art-is-money and money-is-art state of things today in plain language.
A diferencia del resto de las ferias internacionales, esta feria esta operada como una fundación sin fines de lucro con un consejo directivo. A las galerias internacionales se les dieron stands GRATIS y los curadores Agustin Perez Rubio, Octavio Zaya y Jose Roca (de la Tate) seleccionaron a los artistas de tres espacios, cada uno de los cuales estaba sponsoreado por una empresa diferente. Rubio tuvo a su cargo la seccion internacional llamada ‘U-Turn Project Rooms by Mercedes Benz’ en donde, palabras mas palabras menos, el mensaje de que ‘el arte es dinero y el dinero es arte’. (MI COMENTARIO: ES INJUSTO PARA LOS GALERISTAS ARGENTINOS QUE TENGAN QUE COMPETIR CON GALERIAS EXTRANJERAS EN IGUALDAD DE CONDICIONES. PARA PEOR ESTO TIENE SUBSIDIOS ESTATALES Y DEL GOBIERNO DE LA CIUDAD? ESTAMOS TODOS LOCOS????)
However, the works on hand—from Gavin Brown, Simon Preston and Michele Maccarone (New York); Micky Schubert and Johann König (Berlin); Proyectos Monclova and Labor (Mexico City)—carried more conceptual heft than flash and, Pérez Rubio said, was meant to inform serious collection-building. In the same spirit, Roca organized a six-gallery section of “expanded field” solo outings by Latin American artists, and Zaya, on short notice, put together another six for Photobooth. “That’s new this year,” he said. “Up to now, there hasn’t been much interest in collecting photography.”
Even more striking was the frequent appearance of art from the 1960s and early ’70s—the period of Argentina’s repressive dictatorship—which gave not only context but meaning to the contemporary work on display. Meaning at an art fair? How many can boast of that? In the Dixit section, a sweeping, politically engaged, multidisciplinary exhibition titled, “Where does contemporary art begin?” drove home the point. Built around the idea of “simultaneous avant-gardes” by the Argentine-born, Austin-based art historian Andrea Giunta, it contained artworks generally unfamiliar outside of Latin America and suppressed within. (VER PASTELA ARTEBA 2014 PARA MI OPINION SOBRE ESTO).
“It’s rare to have such canonical works at an art fair,” said Roca, as he passed through. Thirty percent were loans; the artists still had the rest in their studios, either because they had no market at the time or because subject matter like AIDS and the Disappeared made it dangerous for anyone to show or acquire them. Giunta was the perfect choice to resuscitate this buried history. In 2004, she curated a León Ferrari retrospective that Pope Francis, then the Archbishop of Buenos Aires, condemned as blasphemous. “I’m very proud of that show,” she said.
Time collapses here. Galleries in business for less than a year, like Baró, could command prime positions in the main section of the fair with established enterprises like Ruth Benzacar (now run by Orly Benzacar and her daughter Mora Bacal), Gachi Prieto, and Ignacio Liprandi. Quality fluctuated at nearly every step. Generally, older works—like those in U-Turn or Photobooth—had more import, though I found collectors like Abel Guaglianone and Joaquín Rodríguez, supporters of emerging artists, shopping only in the Barrio Joven Chandon section for the youngest galleries. Among the brightest of these was Peña, a two-year-old nonprofit cofounded by Rosario Güiraldes, who is heading to Bard CCS in the fall and is definitely a talent to watch.
That night, the Brazilian embassy held a cocktail party for weary dealers and VIP fairgoers in very French colonial salons where murals painted on their ceilings by José María Sert turned heads and elicited gasps from the visitors. “Did you see the cloud room?” collector Richard Massey asked LACMA curator Jarrett Gregory, a new arrival. “Astonishing.” It was now going on 10 PM, time for the open studios at a building Guillermo Rozenblum owns and leases to artists but it was also past dinnertime. “There’s food upstairs!” Rozenblum promised, but a ravenous group, led by Mirvali and Massey repaired to Mirasol, a meat-eater’s paradise serving thick steaks and delicacies like testicles. “A bit spongy,” Massey remarked. “But tasty.” And that was day one. After that, things got interesting.
The following day began with a sweet visit to Guillermo Kuitca’s home and studio for a preview of the deft wall paintings he’s making for this summer’s opening of Hauser & Wirth Somerset. The next stop on the VIP tour—to the National Museum of Immigration—required an abrupt change of emotional gears. The Ellis Island of Buenos Aires, it was once a hospital and intake center for Europeans fleeing the world wars. It tells that story but also now has a year-old contemporary art space. Director Diana Wechsler guided me through “Losing the Human Form,” an exhibition of truly radical Latin American art from the ’70s and ’80s imported from the Reina Sofía. In this eerie asylum for the quarantined, the show’s political posters, performance photographs, books, videos, and punk music took on considerable power beyond its already provocative content. The whole building felt haunted by erasure.
Another surreal leap across cultural borders landed a small group of us at the Benzacar gallery, where sculptor Luciana Lamothe had constructed a vertigo-inducing bridge of wood and steel as a destabilizing path through life. “It’s all about trusting the materials,” she said, adding that vertigo was like music to her. Next door was a complete surprise: the Federico Jorge Klemm Foundation. Klemm, who looks in his many self-portraits here like an understudy for Siegfried and Roy, built a surpassing contemporary collection of work from the ’60s through the ’80s with artists like Warhol and dealers like Robert Fraser.
Otro momento surreal fue la visita a la galería de Ruth Benzacar en donde la escultora Luciana Lamothe (escultora??????) habia construido un puente (generador de vertigo?) de madera y andamios alegorizando el desestabilizante camino de la vida (?????). Lamothe dijo: ‘Tiene que ver con el confiar en los materiales’ a lo que agregó que ‘el vertigo es como musica para ella’ (????). Al lado de la galeria Benzacar, me encontre con una agradable sorpresa: la Fundacion Federico Klemm (!!!), quien en muchos de sus autorretratos se parece a un boceto para Siegfried and Roy. Klemm formo una colección de arte contemporáneo abarcativa con obras de la dedada del 60 hasta el 80.
Back at the fair we got a closer look at U-Turn, where Argentine artists like Amalia Pica and Irene Kopelman were getting their first exposure in their native country, and at Photobooth, where Zaya hit home runs with Annemarie Heinrich at Vasari, Milagros de la Torre at Rolf, and Miki Kratsman at Tel Aviv’s Chelouche.
A photojournalist by trade, this was Kratsman’s first trip to Buenos Aires since his Argentine family emigrated to Israel in the’60s. On the walls were unframed prints downloaded from his Facebook project, “People I Met,” an arresting archive of portraits of noncombatant Palestinians he encountered while working in Israeli-occupied territories. “At first I thought I had nothing to say to people here,” Kratsman confessed. “But the truth is that six members of my family were among the Disappeared, and we don’t speak of it. This project made it important for me to be here.” (?????)
That evening, Pérez Rubio was named the new director of MALBA, BA’s museum of contemporary Latin American art, at an exclusive dinner hosted by Eduardo Costantini, donor of the works forming its (major) permanent collection. A proud, self-made real-estate developer who started out collecting stamps and then birds before turning to art, Costantini showed me the brochure—actually a hardbound catalogue designed by Jeff Koons—of the luxury high-rise he’s building on the “most expensive piece of land” in Miami. It will have two Koons sculptures—of a Degas dancer (still in production)—on permanent display outside. “I bought them from Gagosian,” Costantini said.
Esa noche, Perez Rubio era nombrado nuevo director del MALBA en una cena exclusiva organizada por Eduardo Costantini. Un orgulloso (puede traducirse como ‘soberbio’ tambien), empresario inmobiliario quien comenzó coleccionando estampillas, luego pájaros y luego se decidió por coleccionar arte. En la ocasión Costantini me mostró el brochure diseñado por Jeff Koons de un rascacielos de lugo que esta construyendo en la parte ‘mas cara’ de Miami. Va a tener dos esculturas de Jeff Koons afuera del edificio. ‘Se los compré a Gagosian’, dijo Costantini. (Mi comentario: la periodista se le está cagando de risa).
AHORA VIENE LO MEJOR….
That Saturday, Oxenford hosted a daylong barbecue at his modest, Richard Meier–like home in a gated suburb. Everyone I’d seen all week was there, chowing down on the usual grilled meats and hanging out on the lawn. Back at the fair, Mirvali was moderating a collecting panel with Pedro Barbosa, Aimée Labarrere de Servitje, and Massey, which was not about collecting but supporting artist projects by three people with a deep commitment to art beyond vanity.
El sabado, Oxenford organizo un asado (que duro un dia entero) en su modesta casa de estilo Richard Meier-iano en un barrio privado. La misma gente que habia venido viendo durante toda la semana estaba allí, masticando las mismas carnes asadas y dando vueltas por el cesped. De vuelta en la feria, Mirvali moderó un panel de coleccionista de artistas con la participacion de tres personas que tiene un compromiso profundo con el arte (y que no lo hacen por vanidad). (MI COMENTARIO: ESTO PUESO EN EL MISMO PARRAFO DE LA MODESTA CASA DE ALEC OXENFORD DA LA PAUTA DE QUE LO ESTA PONIENDO EN SU LUGAR).
The week ended, perhaps appropriately, at a flea market, where a couple of aging street dancers doing a slow, beautiful tango spoke to the undying power of romance. That was the image in my mind when I reached the airport, where a monitor at the security line was scrolling a list of people who had gone missing.
La semana terminó apropiadamente en un mercado de las pulgas en el que un par de bailarines de tango entrados en año bailaban un lento y romantico tango. Esa fue la imagen con la que me fui al aeropuerto en donde un monitor mostraba una lista de nombres de desaparecidos.
WOW!
