Editorial
Essay
Onde a arte habita...
Julieta González
10 Feb 2022, 1:42 pm
oikonomia: the management of the home
Art, however, and its dwelling places, are today often coopted by the very system they are supposed to resist. The inherent unsustainability of IWC* and its logics of production, accumulation, profit and consumption, have immersed museums everywhere in a vicious cycle of measuring their success mostly through attendance numbers; mere statistics that do not assess the real impact that both art and the institution may have on society at large and that confine the museum institution to the framework of the culture/entertainment industries. Success itself is a measure that belongs to the logic of the unsustainable, and the results of such a valuation method are evident; exhibitions are increasingly costlier to produce as insurance, transportation and packing expenses increase; collecting works of art is nearly impossible, among many other issues.
Many museum institutions in Latin America have entered this vicious cycle, looking towards institutions in the United States or Europe without thinking of their local contexts, organizing blockbuster exhibitions of so-called blue-chip artists to bring in a public that is only interested in the selfie moment with an instagrammable artwork. If this model has not already proved itself unsustainable (especially in public institutions vulnerable to budget cuts), in time it will, and will only result in the depletion of institutions’ energies and resources, both human and material, to the point of exhaustion and even foreclosure.
Series "Irreversível" (2018), Renata Padovan, presidency project at LABVERDE (Photo: Renata Padovan | Courtesy LABVERDE)
"República" (2020), Luiz Roque (with Natasha Princess), at Pivô (Photo: Everton Ballardin)
It is thus urgent to break from the cycle and rethink the museum towards a more humane, place-based, dialogic configuration, that does not measure and quantify its “success,” that reconsiders its practices of accumulation, that resizes its operations by thinking small and local, and by deploying the many resources at its reach. A museum is just one element in a broader system, a larger ecology, in which all the elements are singular and specific to each place. Art’s dwelling places are responsive to that larger system where they are inscribed, and as such, they must design the solutions to their particular problems and face their challenges with a careful consideration of their contexts, as their sustainability hinges on this contextual interrelation.
This has been the hallmark of autonomous, independent, spaces and more grassroots oriented arts organizations that do not revolve around the accumulation of art objects, but rather on the experiential relation to artists and their practices. Independent and artist run spaces have indeed led the way in terms of self-organization, porosity, organicity, and in our region they have filled huge gaps that larger public or private institutions failed to address; mired sometimes in the stifling grip of bureaucracy, in the case of the former; and falling prey to art market-oriented agendas, in the case of the latter. The smaller, more organic spaces, have indeed not only preserved and cultivated the poetic but also provided a blueprint for an ecosystem where art can dwell and thrive.
These smaller spaces can mobilize the potential to become what Ivan Illich described as tools for conviviality. I use Illich’s analogy because the contemporary museum, in general, has also been affected by the institutionalization of specialized knowledge, becoming a sort of ivory tower, ever more disconnected from its audiences or resorting to the spectacularization of exhibitions which further contributes to the alienation of its audiences for whom the language of art is confusing and seems to be privy only to a rarefied elite. So, to open up the museum to the dynamics of the smaller spaces, to have them be a part of an ecosystem where there is an exchange with these other organizations, can also make of the museum a tool for conviviality and a site for experimentation of a better society.
“Invenção da cor”, Penetrável Magic Square #5, De Luxe (1977), Hélio Oiticica, at Inhotim. (Photo: Carol Lopes)
where art dwells in latin america: towards a renewed
criticality and the singularization of experience
In 1982, invited by Suely Rolnik, Félix Guattari visited Brazil and witnessed a singular moment that he described as a “molecular revolution” in the making. It was the moment in which the “ditadura branda” [soft dictatorship] was opening up to democracy. Guattari identified this process of transition as one enabled by micropolitics, that is: the organization of local, smaller constituencies, grassroots movements, that are able to have a larger impact and produce macropolitical transformations by operating in smaller and local spheres of action. Micropolítica: Cartografias do Desejo, [Micropolitics: Cartographies of Desire] narrates his witnessing a “micropolitical vitality, the force of what was taking place in the politics of desire, subjectivity, and the relation to the other… a dissolution of the politics of subjectivation built during the 500 years of the history of Brazil, in which regimes of exclusion and segmentation succeeded each other to form a powerfully established, perverse cartography. A colonial, slave-owning, dictatorial and capitalist cartography, marked by a social hierarchy so cruelly and passively accepted that the country positioned itself (and continues to do so) at the top of the world rank of social inequality”.
Forty years later, after the auspicious beginnings of a molecular revolution in the making witnessed by Guattari, it seems that Brazil today is back to square one, and the rest of the continent is in a similar state of socio-political and ecological, not to speak of economic, disrepair. The only place where the seeds of this molecular revolution seem to be sprouting is in the cultural ecosystem, in the network of smaller and larger institutions (places where art dwells) which, in response to this state of disrepair, are today generating situated knowledge and forms of embodied experience. In their capacity to self-organize at a small local level, these cultural ecosystems can sow the seeds that may one day bring about structural and macropolitical changes. The dwelling places of art will of course not solve all of these problems but, by thinking micropolitically, in terms of the agency they have in their particular field of action, opening up to and collaborating with other micro-political assemblages, they may be better equipped for confronting their challenges.
"Caracol" (2020), Ana Navas. Exhibition view at Sagrada Mercancía
“Estamos Más Unidos a lo Invisible Que a lo Visible” (2018), Felipe Mujica. Exhibition view at Museo de Arte Moderno de Medellín (MAMM) (Photo: Courtesy MAMM)
"El Capital te Culea" (2019), Teresa Margolles, at Museo de la Solidaridad Salvador Allende (MSSA)
There is a visible turn today, among the places where art dwells in Latin America, towards generating processes of singularization, described by Guattari as “ways of rejecting all the preestablished modes of codification, all the modes of manipulation and remote control in order to build… modes of sensibility, modes of relation with the other, modes of production, modes of creativity that produce a singular subjectivity. An existential singularization that coincides with desire, joie de vivre, and a will to construct the world in which we live, with the instauration of dispositifs that allow for social transformation.” This turn is also epistemolological as artists, curators, and art institutions and spaces look towards and learn from other forms of knowledge, indigenous, afro-descendant, and what was formerly considered folk and outsider art. Not surprisingly, this turn places ecology at the forefront, a holistic conception of ecology (of mind and nature, to go back to Bateson) that is also shared by forms of knowledge such as indigenous ones that have a symbiotic relation to nature. However, not all art and cultural institutions, however, are participating in this turn towards singularization; there are still institutions in Latin America — mostly larger ones, a few of them private — that remain faithful to the mausoleum metaphor, spending millions to further alienate and depersonalize their audiences on exhibitions of white male artists whose work commands astronomical prices; there, art does not dwell but lies dormant, accumulated as a commodity, displayed as a fetish or a trophy, spending millions to further alienate and depersonalize their audiences.
“Tecelãs” (2003), Rosana Paulino, at the Pinacoteca de São Paulo (Photo: Pinacoteca de São Paulo | Isabella Matheus)
It is the task of the places where art dwells, to engage in dialogic practices based on exchange rather than the unilateral transfer of knowledge, in order to counteract the mechanisms of exclusion and marginalization set in place by a normative system that imposes its codes, beliefs and values on the rest of society. Through inclusion and participation, the places where art dwells can become sites for shared collaboration, testing grounds for other ways of being, thinking and doing, in order to collectively imagine more favorable conditions for human and nonhuman coexistence.
*: Integrated World Capitalism (IWC), concept developed by Félix Guattari and mentioned in the initial part of the text, regarding the homogenization of experience, numbness of the senses and mind, and disarticulation of singularity.
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