Mapping the Republic of Contemporary Art (Notes from the Panamerican Highway)
Pablo Helguera
It was August 16th, 2006, and I was in Cúcuta, a town on the Colombian border with Venezuela. I had just arrived from Bogotá having driven more than 13,000 miles since setting out from Anchorage, midway to my goal of Tierra del Fuego. This journey was part of a public art project, The School of Panamerican Unrest, which consisted of driving through the continent with a large installation—a schoolhouse—and erecting it in various public plazas, universities, arts institutions and anywhere else possible along the way. A variety of events took place at each stop—panel discussions, civic events and ceremonies, screenings and other impromptu activities. At each gathering, various symbols such as flags and an anthem praised the fictional country of “Panamerica.” Local collaborators would write, sign and read public resolutions about their relationship with this fictional nation. A string of resultant debates was videotaped for a documentary intended to function as the reunion of transcontinental voices not normally pitted against each other.
This project emerged out of a word most of us are ambivalent about: Panamericanism—a 19th century idea that was never a reality, and yet, the term has taken a controversial turn due to neo-liberal economic policy, Chavista neo-socialism and cold-war era U.S. policies. These ambiguities, expressed in the fictitious utopian country the project promoted, —as well as the kind of institution it purported to be (a school)—became a traveling think-tank with the objective to push discussion toward defining the tangibility of what connects nationality and culture today. Somehow, however, the SPU ended up existing in flux, between being perceived as art or an unconventional school, a church, a political project or a missionary enterprise, depending on the places it appeared and audiences it engaged. Discussions often turned into giant group therapy sessions (someone in Argentina nicknamed me the “Panamerican Therapist”) in which people debated topics of their own choosing, usually about their relationship with their own country, local cultural and social conflicts.
Over the course of four months, The SPU was officially presented in 30 cities and included three dozen discussions, attended by a wide audience, functioning, in many cases, in non-art related contexts. Captured on video, the transcription of these dialogues runs several hundred pages long. Responses to the project were so wide-ranging and complex that—along with endless border crossing adventures and other experiences—one would never be able to describe them all in a single essay.[1] But I do think the engagements that took place amidst different art communities along my route are worth comparing and reflecting upon.
My presence in Colombia had been quite eventful. We had erected the schoolhouse at the Quinta de Bolívar, Simón Bolivar’s Colombian home, along with a panel discussion with local curators on issues of national patrimony and conservation, as well as a number of workshops. It was surrounded by plenty of adventures. Upon my arrival in Bogotá, a man posing as a hotel manager had stolen my laptop. The day I arrived on the border, I survived a collision with a passenger bus and the subsequent chaos that ensued, culminating at Cúcuta’s police station. Now I was on hiatus, waiting to be granted an elusive permit to enter Venezuela.
That night, I logged on at a shabby internet café and was notified about a post in a widely read Colombian arts blog, Esferapública. In Colombia, as in other places in Latin America, blogs are the most effective means of communication amongst those interested in contemporary art, reaching far beyond newspapers and magazines. Colombian artist Lucas Ospina had posted a piece on my recent passage through Bogotá. The text was a fable-like satire of my project, mixing fact and fiction. Making the points that I was an artist from New York who had worked in a large New York museum and received a U.S. foundation grant to do this project, Ospina’s text characterized SPU as a flawed attempt at institutional critique as I was an artist living in the “center,” endorsed by the center and operating with like mentality.
While Ospina had seen me discuss the project at an informal gathering he had not see the installation, nor had he been present during the performance and panel discussions in Bogotá. I wrote an emotional response. My reply led to a flurry of posts from other Colombian artists, most of whom, like Ospina, had not seen the project in person. Regardless, they began taking sides, dissecting the now public argument between Ospina and I, some of them saying my inability to accept his criticism corroborated the failure of the SPU as yet another intolerant institution. Others supported my intentions. This inevitably led to a debate on the age-old problem of center/periphery relations and the mechanisms of institutional critique. As I accused my blogger-critics of being paranoid and acting with a self-colonizing mentality, I was in turn accused of being naïve about the local art context and hopelessly trapped in an institutional mindset.
The debate went on for weeks, as did my journey. Every remote town I arrived at, I logged in and read the latest posting on Esferapública. In blogging culture, entries slowly start to feed each other, resulting in an ever-escalating series of misreadings. This debate provoked particular unrest in me, perhaps because it misrepresented the project to thousands of readers throughout Latin America where the smaller but most meaningful face-to-face SPU dialogues had taken place. It also seemed ironic that the most intense and public debate of the trip was occurring in cyberspace amongst people who, for the most part, had not even seen the project. I initiated the SPU with the goal of having the kind of exchange that simply cannot happen online. The Colombian blog experience made me think that, regardless of how much one may attempt to engage with others physically, in our information age, ultimately, the virtual—along with its unpredictable implications—supercedes all.
The Colombian debate typified some of the polarities that the SPU generated amongst art communities, although there were also patterns of reactions linked to the cultural climates I interacted with. In cities in which the art market is well established, for example, (Chicago, Los Angeles, Mexico City, New York, San José, Vancouver), response to the project was largely polite and uncontroversial, making a tiny ripple—if any—in the busy scenes of those places. Little critical attention was paid to the conceptual framework of the project. Instead, a lot of attention was given to the content of ensuing discussions, which included the crisis of liberalism, real estate, immigration, tourism, arts education, cultural policy and geography.
Meanwhile, in cities with limited financial or critical infrastructure for art production (Anchorage, Asunción, Mexicali, San Salvador, Tegucigalpa), a visitor such as myself was such a novelty that the local art community was entirely well disposed, fully engaged in all the activities and discussion topics that the SPU proposed. This context seemed to be where the SPU best contributed and where I felt a greater sense of accomplishment and even a small amount of success. For example, through their discussion, the arts community in Mérida, recognized the lack of criticism in their area and decided to organize an annual “criticism month,” which was first celebrated last October. In cases like this, discussion of whether the SPU was a good or bad art project—or if it was art at all—seemed irrelevant.[2]
It was interesting to me that art communities in places as different as New York and San Salvador generally responded to the project unambiguously. This was due, I think, to the fact that in those places, there are no great doubts as to the role of artmaking and in their place in an international context, of New York knowing that they form part of “the center” and San Salvador clearly knowing that they exist outside the mainstream. Somehow this allowed us to focus on other subjects. But the discussions became most animated, combative and aesthetically based in cities with strong art activity that are not powerhouses in the international art market. In such cities, (Bogotá, Buenos Aires, Caracas, Guatemala City, Santiago), I received the strongest criticism and skepticism regarding my project, typically, the accusation that I was replicating the institutional structures of the art world and I was often pressed to define my political and aesthetic positions. Debates in these cities may have been politicized because of their current political situation, and perhaps because of the intense self-questioning and that characterize certain arts communities. In Guatemala, certain suspicions about the project seemed connected to my being a Mexican national and similarities to NGOs— volunteer organizations with stated altruistic intentions but sometimes with hidden agendas. In Venezuela, some saw the SPU as a Chavista enterprise, being that “Panamericanismo” sounds a lot like “Bolivarianismo.” Perhaps due to the political climate there, my interlocutors in Caracas were extremely passionate—polarized in support of or against me—and, at times, hostile. This was striking in contrast to tempered but unfortunately predictable discussions in Los Angeles, Portland and San Francisco, which also revolved around politics and were highly informed, but characterized by a benign, politically-correct emotional detachment, critiquing neo-liberalism and globalization while at the same time sipping on Starbucks.
To anyone familiar with the general political apathy that exists in the U.S., the SPU didn’t uncover anything new about the extent to which those who rarely experience unrest in their own lives have difficulty of understanding the unrest of the others. With this in mind, there is something to be said for the intensity of discussions on Esferapública, which seem to maintain the tradition of never-ending café discussions—something that in places like New York has long been lost.
In Latin America, debates were not all belligerent in nature, nor did questions about the project’s intentions always stand in the way. In the end, discussions everywhere revealed common concerns, conflicts and agreements on all sorts of issues. There were similar discussions about landscape and creative isolation in Anchorage, Mexicali and Tierra del Fuego; Buenos Aires, Chicago and Mexico City seemed to mirror each other in their intense self-examination. Immigration is a common denominator in places like Guatemala and Phoenix: la Mara Salvatrucha (the MS-13 gang) impacts people’s lives from Los Angeles to Tegucigalpa. Real estate is a determining factor in the cultural landscape of Panama City and Vancouver. No real debate can take place in cities like Managua or San Salvador if one bypasses the history of their civil wars, or Chile and Paraguay if one ignores the historical impact of military dictatorship. In San José—as in Mérida—the impact of tourism in local artmaking was a common thread. Everywhere I went, there was intellectual uncertainty as to where to position oneself between Chávez and the U.S. The list goes on.
The topic that least interested me during these interactions was the SPU itself. And yet this became unavoidable when certain interlocutors, conditioned by their need to interact with me, centered discussions upon whether or not the SPU was conceptually sound. In Latin America, we are often more interested in hearing the theoretical defense of an art project than experiencing the project itself, which often results in judging works by their mission statements. The project became a case in point to argue about the institutional frameworks of this dialogue.
Amidst the sticky debate on Esferapública, Colombian artist François Bucher, who lives in London—and, like Ospina, did not see the project in person—compared my predicament to Jean-Luc Godard’s when he traveled to Mozambique, commissioned to create a TV channel that embodied the autonomous perspective of the local people. Godard’s experiment resulted in a self-acknowledged failure due to the fact that he could not prevent his personal artistic vision to filter through the process of helping Mozambicans come up with a media outlet that reflected their own image. Bucher wrote, “Pablo is like Godard, who cannot jump his own shadow upon arriving in Africa.”
While I happen to agree with the idea that the artist can never be invisible, I have never believed that this impossibility is necessarily a recipe for failure. Months before, I had written that the artist could never disappear in any public art interaction, but rather, the success of a public art project depended on place and the terms upon which public participation and input are established. In any case, I wasn’t a famous French film director trying to teach Africans about video technology, but a Latin American artist seeking to connect with other Latin American artists. It seemed to me that if we all were quoting Rosalind Krauss—as many were—and invoking Godard, weren’t we all coming from the same place anyway? I wrote in Esferapública, “we all are the others and we all are a self, but when it comes down to the art world, we all are New Yorkers.” François replied, “to me, to say that we all are New Yorkers is the same to say that we live in a classless society. Its like in architectural design: the more you use glass in corporate or government buildings to give the impression of transparency, the more intricate the labyrinth of codes security personnel control so that those who don’t know the protocol shall not pass.”
I never replied to that statement partially because at that point I was bogged down amidst the difficulties of crossing the Paraguayan border. Once I emerged from that ordeal, the discussion in had already taken a different direction and I felt it was too late to reply, but François’ words stayed with me for the rest of the trip.
***
Despite its unwieldy political and natural borders, Latin America is no longer defined in terms of national territories as much as by zones of commerce. While Internet cafés are present everywhere (thanks in no small part to online gaming), some towns reminded me of the Mexico of my childhood—the years before NAFTA—while some appear to have barely reached the 1950s. Some neighborhoods in Panama City, parts of San Salvador, Santiago and Tijuana are at the economic forefront of the 21st century, while neighboring communities are still in the 19th. But everywhere, it was clear that the forces of globalization are undeniably at play, and things are changing rapidly. Perhaps more than ever, in the past two decades, tension between the left- and right-wing is dividing the region between a pro-US, neo-liberal climate—in most of Central America, Colombia, Chile and Mexico—and a left-leaning, pro-Chávez bloc in Bolivia, Nicaragua, Venezuela and the Mercosur. I was doubtful as to whether local art production has managed to keep up with these rapid changes. To do so would mean to make art that truly departs from old-fashioned political art of the 70s—as well as art that conforms to a straightforward market-pleasing aesthetic—but also revising mythologies that remain from old center/periphery debates. While contemporary art practice in Latin America has largely evolved from such debates so commonplace in the 90s, the idea of a north-south polarity was still implicit in local discussions. While this is not always expressed by directly regarding New York as symbolizing the dominant power center, dialogue dynamics revolve around themes like “the mainstream art world” vs. “the local artist community” and “the individual artist” vs. “the large and evil institution,” as the SPU was regarded in Esferapública.
But while artists see artmaking as a way to contest every sort of dominating power in their lives—be it the New York art world, the local bureaucracy, their own governments or a conservative local cultural scene—their intellectual tools, strategies and visual languages are basically taken from the “center,” and expressed as contemporary strategies only intelligible to someone with access to and an understanding of the general referents of contemporary art. This in turn creates semi-isolated art spheres that are equally ambivalent about their place of operation—their city, their country—with a reduced immediate audience who understands their views and a virtual or distant interlocutor (the mainstream), which is hard to locate and access. This begs the question: who is the real audience for artwork?
“A system of representations is a system of exclusions.” This phrase in the collectively written “Panamerican Address of Mexico City” was part of the emphatic central resolution by local artists and curators to renounce the notion that artists are representatives of their country’s feelings or concerns. Given the history of Mexican art post Gabriel Orozco—and the way in which the art market of urban Mexico has been nourished—the need to overcome a pattern of national representation felt urgent amidst this community. As Mexican art from the nineties became a sort of mélange of arte povera, conceptualism and social commentary on the urban environment via the ethnic or cultural specificity imbedded in subject matter, materials or place, artmaking managed to position itself in a perfect place from which it was dialoguing with the international art world while solidly referencing an indigenous and tangible reality.
One of the most common misconceptions that we hold while discussing nationalism, hegemony and resistance from the standpoint of the visual arts is that artists, curators and art historians that work on the margins are often assumed to be adequate spokespersons for the feelings and thoughts of their fellow countrymen or ethnic group. Aside from the fact that many members of the art world do try to assume this role—be this due to legitimate interest or a sense of opportunity—the likelihood is that their relationship with their own localities is much more complex and often much more conflictive than that of the average national. This is, I believe, because the Western tradition of the intellectual from which the contemporary art world emerges moved from the affirmation of national identities in the post-war era to the condemnation of aesthetic regionalism, making us highly suspicious of those who place national pride before art. But at the same time, there has always been the unspoken expectation of the international art world that artists of the periphery defend aspects locality by becoming a representative voice.
Contemporary artists thus exist in open contradiction to the notions of hegemony and nationalism, alternatively embracing it and rejecting it depending on the circumstance. We seem to be at the end of the bridge of a multi-generational gap, from the time when writers and artists in mid-20th century Latin America took the on the role of political actors and the philosophical voices of their countries, to today, where we are part of a profitable international art scene that is interested in hearing from us, but only through the rarified codes of the art object. More than a decade after the proliferation of the internet and nearly thirty years after the publication of Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978), the art world has negotiated a formula in which apparently irreconcilable opposites—local color and aesthetic worldliness—can come hand in hand with what was once termed “global conceptualism.” In regions with no hegemonic influence, artists with the ambition to show internationally may have to face the question of how their work will be regarded in connection to their national context and consciously decide whether to avoid or incorporate local referents of this reality.
While national adherence in the general population are expressed in straightforward ways—waving a flag, celebrating holidays, going to soccer games—nationalism in art, along with all that accompanies it, generates great aesthetic and existential conflicts to an artist. Perhaps as a result of this, contemporary artists since the 1970s have slowly become post-national. And while many of their works may still function against a background of references that includes national origin, it is clear that most of their work is less understandable through local referents than in the language of conceptualism. Additionally, adding to the myth of being “the voice of the people,” Latin American artists’ case of being underdogs of the art system weakens when one knows that the hierarchies in the art world do not necessarily obey national borders. For instance, an unspoken truth about Latin American art is that significant numbers of those who make and write about art professionally in cities like Asunción, Caracas, Mexico or Panama City generally belong to the upper-middle or upper class. And those artists in Latin America recognized by the international mainstream often do not differ much in terms of their formal education from their American or European counterparts: many of them were educated or lived abroad, and have a substantial set of international experiences.
Certainly, there are many people who make art in Latin America who are entirely disenfranchised from mainstream contemporary art. But they are not too different from endless artists from developed countries, including the U.S., who also make art in critical darkness. A struggling artist living in Brooklyn has closer proximity to the power centers of the art world, but local hierarchies—as well as the sheer cost of living, assistant labor and materials—does not necessarily make it easier for them than for an artist that makes art elsewhere. François Bucher protested when I called all artists New Yorkers, but perhaps he had forgotten that the South Bronx and East Brooklyn are far scarier places than Chapinero Alto in Bogotá.
Like any other social system, the art world is definitely a hierarchy, but more than being composed by nationalist interests, this results from a complex and transnational conglomerate of criticism, fashion, private collecting and scholarship in which consensus makes some players rise above others. In this intricate system, a Cuban artist living in Havana may make significantly more money than the average American artist, and a contemporary artist working in Mexico City today will likely have a better chance to be noticed by the art world than one living in Calgary or Phoenix.
The elitism to which Boucher referred to and his metaphor of the corporate glass building is justifiable when one thinks of, say, MoMA. But as I went through my journey, I felt that by thinking that way, not only do we continue to propagate the imprecise notion of the periphery, we also fail to understand the extent to which the power structures of our world have already changed, noted more than a decade ago by sociologists like Néstor García Canclini and Arjun Appadurai. It is as if artists all over the world want to see themselves as separate from a system that clearly involves almost every aspect of their lives. The attempt by anyone with an arts background to contest that aspects of the establishment fall into a familiar cul-de-sac—including artists accepted by the mainstream—is a paradox. In trying to play the underdog, we face the uncomfortable prospect of critical indifference (which is equal to invisibility) or acceptance (which neutralizes critique). Our greatest contradiction is that the more we attempt to renounce the art world, the more we become entangled its matrices. There is a famous saying: there is nothing more Latin American than pretending not to be one. Similarly, nothing may make you more part of a system than portraying yourself as its underdog. The corporate glass building is not only New York: the contemporary art world mentality in itself is a giant, provincial, virtual glass head case that lives in constant delusion, ignorant of difference and change while seeming to homogenize ideas, aesthetics and identities wherever it goes. The traveling schoolhouse clearly became a symbol of this to certain artists because they saw it replicating the structures of institutionalism, but also, in my view, because it further reminded them of the ways in which they are active participants of its trappings.
***
My trip came to an end when I reached Ushuaia in Tierra del Fuego. A small town that only recently became touristy, Ushuaia has begun to attract visitors through cultural initiatives. At the time, the city was hosting events in preparation of their first international biennial, La bienal del fin del mundo and it looks, so far, like all featured artists and curators hail from elsewhere. I visited a gallery where Buenos Aires conceptual artist Alicia Herrero was giving an introductory course on contemporary art to the small art community of Ushuaia, many of whom were sold on the pleasures of conceptualism. I guess it should come as no surprise that even at the tip of the hemisphere, global notions are being exported—or that local artists were being indoctrinated and versed in the language of conceptualism to better integrate them into the international festival mentality that will soon descend upon their quiet little town.
As I spoke to the group, a familiar discussion along the lines of “why should I admire something that has no labor invested in it” began. I quickly found myself once again in the inevitable and paradoxical role of the conceptual art missionary. Should I say what I think or shut up and simply allow local perceptions of art to prevail? In my many interactions, I was dispirited by the way in which I had seen contemporary art practice prescribed to communities for all the wrong reasons, turning less of a liberating practice than an obliquely understood, alienating force—something that we have to do in order to be “in touch” with what we think the rest of the world is thinking.
The problem with contemporary art is that it is usually taught to speak only about itself. And, as the Ushuaia Biennial seemed to attest, artmaking today operates by creating islands wherever it goes, building embassies of local interpretation of realities that may well contribute to the places where they arrive but are, generally, inaccessible to the audiences that go about their lives fairly unconcerned about what art says or may be about.
It didn’t really matter how many borders I crossed. The true test at hand were the intellectual labyrinths of Latin America and the many extensions of art thinking, including my own. During the journey, the few redeeming times when small windows of clarity appeared occurred when we stopped talking about art. Art has an enormous potential to be relevant outside the art world, but for that to happen, we need to use the tools of art to create understanding instead of simply promoting the understanding of art. And in order to accomplish this, we may have to learn to disengage from the old, discursive structures that define artmaking and cultural dynamics. This is a tall order given that there is nothing more artistic than thinking that we are detaching from art thinking. But it may only be when we stop worrying about making something that looks like art, when we may be able to transcend the borders of this hermetic, virtual and odd nation of ours, the Republic of Contemporary Art.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
La República del Arte Contemporáneo
Y el romance de la periferia
Pablo Helguera
El día era agosto 16, 2006, y me encontraba en Cúcuta, la tumultuosa y extraña ciudad en la frontera con Venezuela. Estaba físicamente exhausto, justo habiendo llegado desde Bogotá después de haber recorrido 16,000 kilómetros desde Anchorage, y estando a la mitad de mi meta de llegar hasta Tierra del Fuego.
El viaje fue parte de un proyecto de arte público denominado La escuela panamericana del desasosiego, que consistía en acarrear una estructura colapsable en forma de escuela,
Donde se presentaban mesas redondas, eventos cívicos y ceremonias, videos y otras actividades. Varios objetos patrios como banderas y un himno conmemoraban la nación ficticia de Panamérica. Uno de los objetivos principales del proyecto fue instigar in debate sobre las contradicciones del nacionalismo así como facilitar un foro de opiniones desde diferentes partes del continente que normalmente no eran contrastadas en un mismo proyecto. Las conversaciones giraban alrededor de los ideales decimonónicos de integración continental y el papel actual del arte en la formacion de agendas sociales y políticas. A lo largo del viaje mantuve un diario de las discusiones e incidentes que se iban dando (www.panamericanismo.org). El proyecto, entre otras cosas, se convirtió a ratos en una terapia de grupo gigantesca (alguien en Argentina me nombró el “terapista panamericano”) en donde los participantes debatían temas escogidos por ellos pero que solían derivar en debates acerca de los conflictos sociales y culturales locales. En lo que viajaba con mi nación utópica e investigaba lo que la gente opinaba del panamericanismo, también aprendí mucho acerca de nuestra conflictive relación con los legados y principios del arte hoy en día.
Esa noche, al sentarme a trabajar en un ceniciento café internet, me llegó noticia de un posting que el artista colombiano Lucas Ospina había hecho en Esferapública, el conocido blog en las artes de latinoamérica. Su texto se titulaba “El cazador cazado” y, en forma de fábula, comentaba mi paso por Bogotá. El texto satirizaba mis afiliaciones institucionales ( siendo que soy un artista que vive en Nueva York, que ha trabajado en museos y cuyo proyecto recibía el apoyo de una fundación neoyorkina). El texto indirectamente descartaba el proyecto como una iniciativa fallida, sugiriendo que su misma naturaleza iba en contra de lo que trataba de conseguir ( es decir, que no podia funcionar como modelo de diálogo alternativo dado que provenía aprovado por el centro, y operando con sus herramientas).
Ospina también satirizó mis intentos de involucrarme en Bogotá, diciendo que el cansancio del viaje me había hecho funcionar en autopiloto, ofreciendo formulas e ideas vacías. Me molestó el hecho que Ospina, que no había visto la instalación o participado en las discusiones (que de hecho fueron sustanciales en Bogotá), precipitara ese juicio. De manera que decidí responder a su crítica a través de otro texto similarmente literario y con el calor emocional del momento.
Mi replica resultó en toda una serie de respuestas de otros artistas colombianos, muchos de los cuales que, como Ospina, no habían visto el proyecto en persona, pero aún así comenzaron a dar sus posturas, analizando las partes del debate, algunos defendiendo la crítica de Lucas (diciendo que mi inabilidad para aceptar críticas corroboraba el fracaso del proyecto) mientras que otros como Jorge Peñuela (que sí había participado en los debates) defendieron la intención del proyecto y su habilidad de generar diálogo. Esto inevitablemente derivó en un debate sobre el eterno tema de la centro-periferia y los mecanismos de la crítica institucional.
El debate en el blog duró meses, al igual que mi viaje. Al llegar a cualquier pueblo o ciudad, me conectaba para leer los últimos comentarios. En retrospectiva, las muchas cosas que se dijeron en ese debate fueron representatives de las actitudes generales que encontré entre artistas latinoamericanos e intelectuales en lo relacionado a sus percepciones de nación, el resto del mundo, y la difícil pregunta del lugar que ocupa el arte entre esas dicotomías. Pero hubo otros aspectos muy particulares del blog que no dejaron de llamarme la atención, comenzando con el hecho irónico que la discusión más intensa que tuve en todo el viaje no ocurrió en tierra sino en la blogósfera y entre personas que en su mayoría nunca vió el proyecto en persona. Me hizo pensar que la comunidad artística no busca tanto la oportunidad de involucrarse, sino de distanciarse.
En el transcurso de cuatro meses, el proyecto de la EPD visitó 27 ciudades, organizando tres docenas de discusiones sobre temas locales con una gran variedad de públicos, muchas veces funcionando fuera de ámbitos artísticos. Las respuestas hacia el proyecto fueron muy variadas y complejas, y no podría describirlas todas aquí. Me referiré tan solo aquí acerca de la respuesta de artistas, curadores, y otras personas conectadas con el arte.
En las ciudades donde el mercado del arte está bien establecido (Vancouver, Nueva York, Chicago, Los Angeles, México DF, y San José), la respuesta hacia el proyecto fue generalmente amable y positiva, en la medida en que el proyecto logró generar impacto alguno en la saturada escena artística de esos lugares. Aunque la primera discusión del proyecto, que incluyó una crítica del filósofo Stephen Wright acerca de la imposibilidad de un proyecto artístico de tener impacto alguno fuera del territorio artístico, en general pocos cuestionaron al proyecto en sí en terminos de formato o concepción. En cambio se le presto suma atención a los debates que se organizaron, que incluyeron temas como la crisis del liberalismo, el “real state”, imigración, turismo, educación, agenda cultural y geografía.
Por otro lado, en ciudades que tienen una infrastructura limitada o ausente en cuanto a instituciones artísticas (San Salvador, Asunción, Tegucigalpa, Anchorage, Mexicali) se generó un gran entusiasmo, pero por razones diferentes: el simple hecho que un visitante llegaba era tal novedad que la comunidad artística local se encontraba muy dispuesta e interesada en participar en todas las actividades y temas de discusión propuestos por la EPD. ( Esto generó algunos pequeños éxitos: como resultado de los debates propuestos por la EPD, la comunidad artística de Mérida Yucatán reconoció la carencia de crítica en la ciudad e instauró el “mes de la crítica”, un proyecto annual que se celebró por primera vez en Octubre.) En estos casos, la discusión de si la EPD era un proyecto bueno o malo, o de si era arte del todo, nunca se hizo relevante.
Pero en los lugares donde las discusiones se volvieron más beligerantes y reveladoras, así como aquellas donde el territorio de batalla de de índole estética, fue en aquellas ciudades con una actividad artística sustancial que sin embargo aún no se han desplazado para ocupar un centro de influencia tangible en el mapa del mundo del arte. En estas ciudades como Bogotá, Caracas, Buenos Aires, Santiago y Ciudad Guatemala, recibí las críticas más fuertes así como el mayor escepticismo en lo relacionado al formato mismo del proyecto. En estos casos fui acusado de replicar las estructuras institucionales del mundo del arte y se me exigió que definiera mis posturas políticas y estéticas.
Los debates en estas ciudades posiblemente fueron más politizados debido a las actuales situaciones en estos países, y quizá también por la constante auto-indagación que suele caracterizar a los medios artísticos en ciudades como Buenos Aires o Bogotá. Mis interlocutores en Caracas resultaron ser en extremo apasionados – ya fuera a favor o en contra— y en ciertos momentos hostiles. (Esto contrastó marcadamente con las discusiones calmadas –aunque desafortunadamente un tanto predecibles—que tuvimos en la costa oeste, como en Portland, San Francisco y Los Angeles, las cuales giraron en torno a la política pero siempre bajo un marco de cordialidad, correccionismo politico y distanciamiento emocional, criticando al neo-liberalismo y al libre comercio entre sorbo y sorbo de Starbucks).
Las respuestas ambivalentes que generó la escuela tuvieron muchas razones, desde la similitud del nombre “Panamericana” con el Chavista “Bolivariana” en el caso de Venezuela hasta el hecho de mi nacionalidad mexicana (en Guatemala). Pero sin lugar a dudas, fue mi conexión con Nueva York y su mundo institucional que motivó las críticas como la de Ospina, que señalaban que yo no podia escapar mi condición de “insider”, o como de Mery Boom, quien veía en la EPD un caso clásico de incapacidad de diálogo crítico—aunque mis objeciones a las críticas, mas que un acto de intolerancia, tenían que ver con que ni Boom ni Ospina estaban realmente al tanto de lo que el proyecto realmente se trataba, y que habían fabricado fantasias alrededor de su rebeldía a todo lo institucional.
En el intercambio de Esferapública, el artista colombiano François Bucher, quien vive en Londres y quien, como Ospina, no vio el proyecto en persona, entró en la discusión y comparó mi situación con la de Jean-Luc Goddard cuando viajó a Mozambique para ayudarle a los locales a crear un canal de television que tuviera una visión enteramente autónoma y no adulterada por el mundo exterior. El experimento de Goddard resultó en un fracaso que el mismo admitió, dado que no pudo prevenir que su visión artística se infiltrara en el proceso de ayudarles a los africanos a armar la suya. Bucher escribió: “Pablo es como Goddard, que por ser europeo no puede saltar sobre su sombra al llegar a Africa”.
Al igual que François Bucher, estoy de acuerdo en que el artista nunca puede ser invisible, pero nunca he pensado que esta imposibilidad sea necesariamente una receta para el fracaso. A lo largo de los años, mi actitud hacia la crítica institucional ha sido que en vez de denunciar estructuras de poder a la manera antigua de Fred Wilson o Andrea Fraser, es necesario aceptar nuestro papel dentro de estas estructuras y asimilarlas en lo que creamos las nuestras propias— con la esperanza que lograremos ejercer un juicio más sabio, flexible y productivo que el que ejercen las grandes instituciones (esto me llevó a iniciar otro proyecto similar en 2002 titulado Instituto de la Telenovela, una organización de alfabetización mediatica que viajaba por Europa del Este estudiando el fenómeno del consumo desenfrenado de las telenovelas latinoamericanas ahí). Antes de salir en el viaje, había publicado un texto titulado “Casa Abierta/Casa Cerrada” donde escribí que el artista no puede desaparecer en ninguna intervención o colaboración de arte público, pero que el éxito del proyecto radica en el lugar y las condiciones en que el artista estipula la participación de este. En general, la manera en que los debates se fueron dando parecieron mostrar que sí se puede dar un intercambio beneficioso tanto para la obra como para sus participantes.
Pero de cualquier manera, yo no era un famoso director de cine francés que venía a enseñarle a los africanos a manejar cámaras, sino un artista latinoamericano que buscaba intercambiar impresiones con otros artistas latinoamericanos. Y me parecía que si todos estábamos citando a Rosalind Krauss (como era el caso) e invocando a Goddard, qué no veníamos del mismo lugar? Escribí entonces en el blog: “todos somos los otros y todos somos nosotros mismos, pero en el mundo del arte todos somos neoyorkinos”.
François respondió: “Sin guardar proporción alguna yo diría que ese mito de que todo el mundo es neoyorkino en el arte contemporáneo es idéntico al de una sociedad sin clases. Es como en el diseño arquitectónico: entre más se hace uso del vidrio en los edificios corporativos o gubernamentales para dar la ilusión de transparencia, más intrincado se vuelve el laberinto de códigos que maneja el personal de seguridad para que no pase el que no conoce el protocolo.”
Nunca respondí a ese último comentario— parcialmente porque a esas alturas estaba atorado en líos fronterizos en Paraguay. Cuando emergí de ellos, la discusión del blog había finalmente virado a otros asuntos, y pareció ser tarde para responder. Pero las palabras de François se quedaron conmigo por el resto del viaje.
***
Una de las presunciones más comunes que mantenemos cuando hablamos de nacionalismo, hegemonía o resistencia desde el punto de las artes visuales es que los artistas, curadores o historiadores que trabajan en la periferia son los portavoces adecuados de sus compatriotas o su etnia. Fuera del hecho que muchos de ellos tratan efectivamente de asumir este puesto ya sea por interés legítimo o por sentido de la oportunidad, lo más probable es que la relación con sus localidades respectivas es mucho más compleja y mucho más conflictiva que la de alguien fuera del ámbito artístico.
Esto es, creo yo, porque la tradición occidental del intellectual de donde proviene el mundo del arte contemporáneo, se ha desplazado de la afirmación de identidades nacionales de la posguerra a condenar la estética regionalista, haciédonos sospechosos de todo aquel que ponga su orgullo nacional por encima de su arte. Pero a la vez, ha habido siempre una espectativa tácita del mundo internacional del arte de que el artista de la periferia venga a restaurar aquello que aparentemente se ha perdido en la traducción.
Los artistas contemporaneos por ende tienen que existir en una contradicción entre las nociones de hegemonía y nacionalismo, a ratos aceptando y rechazando ambas (y a veces cuando parece ser más conveniente). Parecemos estar al final del puente de una brecha multi-generacional del tiempo en que los artistas y escritores latinoamericanos tomaban el papel de actores politicos y voces filosóficas de sus países
(Siqueiros, Neruda, Rivera, Vargas Llosa, Paz) al día de hoy, en el que formamos parte de una escena artística que está interesada en saber de nosotros pero solo a través de los herméticos códigos del objeto artístico.
Estando a más de una década de la aparición del internet y a casi treinta años de la publicación de Orientalism de Edward Said, el mundo del arte ha creado una formula en la que dos opuestos aparentemente irreconciliables—el color local y la sofisticación internacional— vienen mano a mano en lo que se vino a denominar “conceptualismo global”. En regiones que no ejercen poder hegemónico, los artistas que tengan la ambición de exponer en el extranjero deben de encarar la pregunta de cómo su obra será interpretada, y cómo asimilará o evadirá los referentes a su realidad local.
El ejemplo más inmediato es el arte mexicano contemporáneo, post-Gabriel Orozco. Cuando el arte mexicano adoptó el rumbo de convertirse en un mélange de arte povera, conceptualismo y comentario social de un ámbito urbano que capturaba la esencia de especificidad cultural a través de tema o materials, el quehacer artístico logró posicionarse en un lugar perfecto desde donde dialogaba con el mundo del arte internacional meintras que referenciaba sólidamente esa realidad semi-exótica y tangible. El hartazgo generado por esta tendencia fue expresada por los artistas y curadores que escribieron colectivamente “el discurso panamericano de la ciudad de México”, donde decían que era urgente superar la noción del artista como representante de un país: “un sistema de representaciones es un sistema de exclusiones”.
Mientras que el nacionalismo en la población general se expresa de maneras sencilas y directas (enarbolando la bandera, celebrando fiestas patrias, yendo al partido de futbol), en cambio entre los artistas contemporaneous la idea de afiliación nacional genera toda clase de conflictos estéticos. Quizá a raiz de esto, desde los años 60 los artistas han seguido un proceso de des-nacionalización, y mientras que sus obras (y sus carreras) funcionan en mayor o menor medida ante la serie de referencias de su historia y cultura, lo que verdaderamente le otorga coherencia a su creación es la meta-cultura del lenguaje contemporáneo del arte.
Additionally to the myth of being “the voice of the people”, Latin American artists’ case of being underdogs of the art system also weakens when one knows that class structures are much more marked in the Latin American art scene than they are in the United States or Canada. An unspoken truth about Latin American art is that significant number of those who make and write about art professionally in cities like Mexico City, Caracas, Asunción or Panama City generally belong to the upper middle classes or upper classes. And those artists in Latin America who become recognized by the international mainstream often do not differ too much in their education from their European or American counterparts: many of them were educated or live abroad and have a substantial set of international experiences. Certainly there also are many people who make art in Latin America who are entirely disenfranchised from the mainstream, contemporary art world. But they also are not too different from endless artists from developed countries, including the U.S., who also make art in the critical darkness (many of which are also from Latin America). A struggling artist living in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, will definitely have closer access to the power centers of the art world, but in many of these cases the sheer cost of rent, assistant labor and materials, does not make it necessarily easier for them than for an artist that makes art elsewhere in Latin America.
Like any other social system, the Art World definitely holds a hierarchy, but more than being composed by nationalist interests, it rather results out of a complex and trans-national conglomerate of criticism, fashion, private investment, and scholarship whose consensus make some players rise over the others. In this intricate system of international collecting, a successful Cuban artist living in Havana may make significantly more money than an average American artist, and a professional contemporary artist working in Mexico City today will likely have a better chance to be noticed by the international art world than one living in Phoenix or Calgary.
The elitism to which Boucher referred to, and his metaphor of the corporate glass building, is certainly justified when one thinks of New York’s MoMA. But as I went through my journey, I felt that by thinking that way not only do we continue to propagate the old, profitable romance of the periphery, but we fail to understand the way in which artists all over the world want to see themselves separate from a system that clearly involves them in almost every aspect of their lives. There is a famous saying that there is nothing more Latin American than pretending not to be one. Similarly, nothing makes you more of an artist than downplaying your own links with the art market.
The corporate glass building is not only in New York: the contemporary art world in itself is a giant, provincial, virtual, glass case. The traveling schoolhouse evidently became a troublesome symbol to certain artists, because they saw it replicating the structures of institutionality, and in my view, because it further reminded them of the ways in which they were also active participants of its trappings. The attempts by anyone with an arts background to contest any of the aspects of the art establishment fall into the familiar cul-de-sac paradox of the artists of the institutional critique: by trying to be the underdog, we confirm our role in the “tradition of rupture” of art, and thus be endorsed and accepted within it. But our contradiction is that while we make a point of renouncing the art world, the more we become entangled within it.
*
My trip came to an end when I reached Ushuaia, at the Southern tip of the continent, in Tierra del Fuego. A small town recently turned touristic, Ushuaia has started to attract more visitors through cultural initiatives. I met with the local culture officials of the city, who were hosting events in preparation to the upcoming international Biennial, La bienal del fin del mundo (of which it looks so far that all of the featured artists and curators will come from outside). I also visited a gallery where Buenos Aires conceptual artist Alicia Herrero was giving an introduction to contemporary art course to the local artists, may of which were still being sold on the pleasures of conceptualism. I guess it should come as no surprise that even at the tip of the hemisphere, the global notions of art are being exported, or that local artists were quickly being indoctrinated and putting up-to-date in the language of conceptualism to better integrate into the international festival that soon will fall upon their quiet little town.
But the problem with contemporary art language is that often it is only taught to speak about itself. I couldn’t help to see that the Ushuaia biennial was promising to become yet another exotic background for the usual group of international curators and artists to show their inner-referential, theoretical and visual wares. Art making today operates by creating small islands wherever it goes, building embassies of local interpretation of those realities that generally are inaccessible to the general audiences that go about their lives fairly unconcerned about what art says or may be about.
*
While we may be tired in the art world of speaking about center-periphery paradigms, it is not because technology or commerce have rendered these subjects moot, or because, as Néstor García Canclini has been saying for a while, “globalization is ending”. On the very contrary: never have these contrasts been greater now, only that they have now migrated and metastasized, in the same way in which contemporary art biennials have proliferated. In my journey, I saw the dynamics of center and marginality infinitely replicated in the structure of countries, cities, and neighborhoods, as polarities caused by global economy, where the third and first world coexist face-to-face in places like Panama City, San José, Caracas or Vancouver.
The problem may be that we all, as reluctant or unconscious members of an international art community, have not admitted our own delusional romance with the exterior world that we continue to think belongs to us as subject matter. We see ourselves as the center, and the non-art reality as the outside, when actually art has passively remained in the margins of the world’s events, in it of itself a peripheral activity of which the vast majority of people I saw in my journeys had no idea it even existed. We think we understand the world, and that we contribute significantly to it by pretending to detach from art thinking. Alexis De Tocqueville, had he lived to see this phenomenon, may have described it as the perplexing, and defining idiosyncratic feature of this great, virtual, and odd nation of ours, the Republic of Contemporary Art.
[1] Comprehensive documentation and descriptions of what happened during my journey and the general exchanges that took place are being reunited in a longer text for future publication. Accounts of some of these events can be read at www.panamericanismo.org.
[2] In fact, the question on whether the project was art or not ironically became an issue.
only when an art informed audience was present, and not otherwise.