Dear Artist,
The night I had ahead of me when I wrote last Friday turned out to be the beginning of a fascinating week: a story about the very thing I have been trying to tell you about: the importance of reaching out and looking for the connections (“conexións” in Spanish).
Porchi, (Jorge Porcel de Peralta) an artist and art journalist living in Buenos Aires took me to a restaurant where this picture to the left happened to be hanging on the wall.
It is a famous piece titled ‘Hector-Martyr” by Marcos Lopez, an Argentinian pop artist. I recognized it immediately as something I had come across in pop art books before Argentina had been a twinkle in my calendar. (I would later find it hanging a block away from my apartment at the prestigious MALBA: Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires)
Porchi was speaking animately to the restaurant owner, a sweet-faced man in a white button down shirt. Porchi pointed to him and then to the picture and that was when I realized it: the owner of the restaurant was the same man in the picture.
Conexión numero uno.
We ate the best empanadas ever and using broken English, broken Spanish, and textbook French. We spoke in gestures and draw pictures and laughed at everything. I asked him about art in Buenos Aires and he gave me some of the important names from the last 30 years.
Names like Pablo Suarez, Raul Lozza, who just died this year, and Gyula Kosice. Porchi’s infectious joy and openness introduced me in one swoop to the heart of Buenos Aires. And later that evening he introduces me to no less than a dozen young contemporary artists.
The next day, when I met the young artist Ana Montecucco and she took me to the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes to see a brilliant show of South Korean artists called “Peppermint Candy.” It was some of the most interesting shows of contemporary work I had ever seen, on par with almost any of the any of the Whitney Biennenials. And I don’t know that I would have been able to see this show if I hadn’t come to Argentina.
Next was the Centro Culteral Recoleta. the retrospective happened to be of two artists: Liliana Maresca and Pablo Suarez (Suarez was one of the artists Porchi had mentioned offhand the night before). To the right is one of Suarez’s sculpture-installations.
Conexión numero dos.
Three days later I went to the Braga Menendez in Palermo Hollywood and saw some ethereal sculpture, very unfinished, very lovely forms of human bodies. Photo to the left.
A friend of mine, the Philadelphia illustrator Rachel Cox knew a French designer living in Buenos Aires and his roommate works for the Braga Menendez. Conexión numero tres.
There was a fascinating installation about sound, communication, and language at the Fundacion Telefonica, which I will write about soon.
There are so many thoughts and images buzzing through my mind. I keep thinking back over this past week and what it all means: the recurring ideas, themes…and how I can try to share it with you, artist.
When I was sitting in the empanada restaurant a week ago this time, Porchi was describing the intensity of the Buenos Aires art world and its hierarchies as mafias (small, powerful circles). Despite the derogatory terms, he was genuinely excited about social relationships that connected artists to each other and explained his philosophy to me, summing it up with this thought: “Art is social discipline. The work is the last consequence of the social construction of relations.”
This is the truth, whether we want to hear it or not. A part of being an artist means participating in culture and community, even if on the fringes…Your art becomes a part of a conversation about life, ideas, history, self, society, community, and of course, art itself.
Of course, dear artist, this is exactly what happens online. Only online, you can be present for people surfing the web, looking for conexións …even when you sleeping. You can imagine your online presence as an art in itself, a performance art, if you will.
Where can people find you? In a blog, twittering like a bird, with a stunning slideshow on flickr, or with subtle, understated statements on a website? And what will you tell them about yourself, what colors will your website use, and what language? What voice and what stories?
See? It is indeed performance. And you can have fun with it.
Besos y buenas noches,
Nina
