La historia reciente de la curaduría ha demostrado que las exposiciones más eficaces de arte latinoamericano en Estados Unidos deben tener como centro no sólo una estrategia curatorial, sino sobre todo, una estrategia política. Categorías como latino, hispano o latinoamericano son etiquetas que en el contexto estadounidense no pueden plantearse sin un posicionamiento político y menos si se quiere ofrecer una muestra de la inabarcable y heterogénea producción artística de las últimas décadas en la región.
Llama la atención que el discurso curatorial de “Bajo un mismo sol” copie el modelo constelar que hace una década propusieron Maricarmen Ramírez yHéctor Olea para la exposición “Inverted Utopias. Avant-garde in Latin America”, en el Museum of Fine Arts, de Houston, pero con resultados abismalmente distintos.
Inaugurada en 2014 en el Museo Guggenheim de Nueva York, la muestra itineró al Museo Jumex de la Ciudad de México, donde actualmente se exhibe. Como ha ocurrido con otras exposiciones en dicho recinto, la selección de artistas, salvo contadas excepciones, resulta más llamativa por los nombres que reúne, que por la fuerza de las piezas que exhibe.
Salvo las piezas históricas de creadores como Alfredo Jaar, Rafael Ferrer, Juan Downey o Marta Minujín, es difícil afirmar que el resto de los artistas está representado con alguna de sus obras emblemáticas. Trágicamente, lo que “Bajo un mismo sol” deja claro es que el Museo Guggenheim de Nueva York se tardó por lo menos dos décadas en poner atención al arte latinoamericano. Empezó a comprar cuando las obras ya tenían un mercado importante y precios tan elevados como el resto del arte internacional. Vale recordar que León de la Barra aceptó las limitaciones económicas que tuvo en una entrevista que concedió a la revista “La Tempestad”:
Y este retraso se acentúa ante la paradoja de que “Bajo un mismo sol” se muestra dentro del Museo Jumex, que sí cuenta con una de las colecciones más importantes de arte latinoamericano, ya que desde la década de los 90 Eugenio López empezó a comprar no sólo obra de mexicanos, sino de muchos artistas que dos décadas después empezó a comprar el museo neoyorquino.
Otro elemento que no se puede obviar, por lo poco funcional que resultó, fue la museografía tipo Casa Palacio que hizo la arquitecta mexicana Frida Escobedo, la cual gira en torno a un desnivel en el piso que en ciertos puntos se rompe para generar una suerte de bases donde se instalaron algunas obras. El problema de este “diseño dinámico” (así lo describe el museo) es que sólo funciona cuando el público lo recorre de la entrada al fondo de la sala, pues al regresar sobre sus pasos es común que el visitante termine sobre la base de la pieza. “Bajo un mismo sol. Arte de América Latina hoy” se exhiben en el Museo Jumex (Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra 303, Colonia Granada), del 19 de noviembre de 2015 al 7 de febrero de 2016. Crédito de fotos: Cortesía Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Nueva York, y Museo Jumex, Ciudad de México. Under the Same SunIn recent curatorial history the most successful shows on Latin American Art in the United States have had, at their center, not only a curatorial strategy, but a political one as well. Categories such as "Latino," "Hispanic," or "Latin American" have become labels in the United States art world that cannot be suggested without an accompanying political position, much less so if they are used in conjunction with the extremely diverse artistic production in the region in the last few decades. Under The Same Sun: Art from Latin America Today, organized by Mexican curator Pablo León de la Barra as part of the Guggenheim UBS MAP Global Art Initiative Program, disappoints precisely because the categories it proposes ("The tropical," "Conceptualism," "Political Activism," "Modernities," and "Participation/Emancipation") fail to offer political insight that furthers the preexisting rhetoric surrounding Latin America's artistic production. It would seem that after numerous visits by León de la Barra to the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Panama, Puerto Rico, Colombia, Mexico, Chile, Costa Rica and Guatemala (his itinerary is available onhttp://blogs.guggenheim.org/map/dispatches/), the curator was unable to determine any new categories from which to understand artistic production in the various countries. The show ends up being a partial tour through the region based on a criteria implemented more as a justification for the purchases made than as an attempt to diversify existing knowledge popular for describing Latin American Art. The show could have easily been titled "There is Nothing New Under the Sun". In the end, the curatorial discourse proposed by Under The Same Sun comes across as an imitation of the constellar model proposed by Mari Carmen Ramírez and Héctor Olea a decade ago for the exhibit, Inverted Utopias: Avant Garde Art in Latin America, at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, but with drastically different results. While Inverted Utopias merits recognition as a watershed moment in contemporary exhibition-making–thanks to its ability to critique Eurocentric constructs within the field of art history, and successfully form alternative approaches for understanding Latin America Art and culture within the United States– Under The Same Sun is, at best, derivative of the earlier project, and of work by other contemporaneous curators, including Gerardo Mosquera. The danger of a show such as this one lies in the fact that it transforms the very categories that once served as platforms of emancipation into terms that produce generalized and exoticized understandings of Latin American cultures. Here I am specifically referring to the section entitled "The Tropical," a term which curator León de la Bara explains is in reference to revolutionary ideas put forth by Hélio Oticica's "Tropicalia," a project developed by the artist in response to a rationalism championed throughout Europe and the United States at the time. By trying to re-appropriate the term in the United States in the twenty-first century, the result is anachronistic, and León de la Barra fails to take into account the fact that the rationalism challenged by Oticica is that of twentieth-century modernism. Today "The Tropical" is understood as a term related to Latin American popular culture, and forms part of a tradition of interpreting the region's cultural production as "exotic" or "fantastic." After opening in 2014 at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, the show traveled to the Museo Jumex in Mexico City, where it reinforced the museum's unfortunate reputation for housing exhibitions in which the names of the artists selected are more compelling than the pieces exhibited. Alexander Apóstol, Carlos Amorales,Tania Bruguera, Mariana Castillo Deball, Eduardo Costa, Luis Camnitzer,Minerva Cuevas, Juan Downey, Rafael Ferrer, Mario García Torres, Tamar Guimarães, Regina José Galindo, Alfredo Jaar, David Lamelas, Marta Minujín,Carlos Motta, Rivane Neuenschwander, Gabriel Orozco, Damián Ortega,Amalia Pica, Wilfredo Prieto, Beatriz Santiago Muñoz, Gabriel Sierra, andJavier Téllez are some of the artists included in the show. Almost all of them are frequent fixtures in biennials and international exhibits, and the selection of works should be of far greater significance than the selection of the artists themselves. With the exception of a few historic works by Alfredo Jaar, Rafael Ferrer, Juan Downey, and Marta Minujín, the remainder of the artists are represented through lesser known pieces. Tragically, what Under The Same Sun makes clear is thatthe Guggenheim lingered for at least two decades before turning its attention to Latin American Art. The museum only began buying from the region once works from these artists had already achieved significant market value. León de la Barra recognized this limitation in an interview with the Mexican magazine "La Tempestad," in which he states: "One phrase returns to me when I speak of the show: there are more than are here. I would have liked to organize a bigger show, but there were limitations of all kinds, one of which was financial." These limitations are made more egregious when one considers that Under The Same Sun was exhibited in a museum that houses one of the most important collection of Latin American Art in the world, due, in large part, to the fact that the museum's collector, Eugenio López, began buying Art from through the region in the 1990's, almost two decades before the New York-based museum turned to the region. So, would it not have been better to do a show that incorporated works from the Museo Jumex's collection? The question is particularly suggestive given thatUnder The Same Sun highlights Museo Jumex's preference for importing foreign shows in lieu of producing their own. Under The Same Sun exemplifies the institution's continued acceptance of its place at the art world's periphery, housing and promoting exhibits (in the case of Under The Same Sun, with an unusually large publicity campaign) that hail from distant cultural centers, without questioning whether they could create more pertinent equivalents, particularly in the case of Latin American Art.
Under The Same Sun: Art from Latin America Today was up at the Museo Jumex(Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra 303, Mexico City), from November 19, 2015 to February 7 2016.
Translated by Nika Chilewich | For english scroll down |
Bajo un mismo sol
POR EDGAR ALEJANDRO HERNÁNDEZ