Interview with Graciela Speranza "ARCOMadrid exhibits the natural display of a variety"

Various media have characterized the Argentine participation in the fair ARCOMadrid 2017 as a "landing". Is this a productive image?

I feel a certain discomfort with the idea of ​​"landing." It seems to me that it is the type of label that repeats itself without much attention to its meaning.It is an expression that limits the relationship that can be thought to exist between Argentine art and contemporary art And, in more general cultural terms, between Europe, Argentina and Latin America.It postulates a directionality that, at best, supposes, or augurs, an inversion of the classical route between the center and the periphery. At the cost of flattening out something that is now much more complex.In the global culture identities nationalities have a very convoluted operation.

In my opinion, ARCOMadrid exhibits the natural display of a variety, which is, in short, what is the scene of contemporary art in Argentina. On the one hand, a great effort has been made to present Argentine art at the fair following the more or less usual mechanisms at fairs, biennials, etc. On the other hand, there is a more encompassing presence with samples in different institutions and a great variety of artists.

Having discarded the idea of ​​landing, how can we think, then, the inscription of Argentine art within contemporary art?

I think that among the peculiarities more typical of Argentine art is that of being irreducible to the postulates of that supposed homogeneous international collective called "contemporary art" and its many stereotypes. This is a rather involuntary merit. We can evade these limits almost without our own idea because our own idea of ​​what is the Argentine art is not reduced to those labels.

It seems to me that when contemporary art is placed as that foreign place, distant and foreign to Argentine art, it continues to subscribe to that colonial imaginary which supposed that only in Europe were artists. In Latin America, it was thought, there were collectives or movements. In fact, if a Latin American artist or work entered the European context very hardly did it without the passport ahead. It seems to me that this is no longer the case. At present, the works of Argentine art enter into very different dialogues with the works of the rest of the world without needing to give greater explanations.

Within the globalized art scene the works are no longer defined from the Cleavage Center - Periphery. Instead, it is necessary to go to the meeting of works and artists to discover the plots and dialogues of which they participate. This is an idea that I have been working on for some time. In my last books the Argentine artists and authors enter and leave the Latin American or global series that sets my experience as a reader and spectator. I believe that this is also, indeed, the experience of art today.

In general terms, I believe that two traditions can be traced in Argentina through which this relationship with the global scene has been processed differently.

On the one hand, there are those who embrace the mandate of the synchrony imposed by Borges. It is a high and difficult quota but it seems to me that many artists and writers continue to produce in sync with the centers.

On the other hand, there are the artists who create resisting, but not ignoring, the international mandates. They continue, in this way, opting for a certain form of legitimate eccentricity, which is also a very Argentine tradition.

In this edition of ARCOMadrid you will be coordinating a day dedicated to explore the link between Art and Literature. What characteristics does this relationship have?

Let us say, in principle, that there is a tradition, very alive in our days, that has naturalized this dialogue in an illustrative and thematic way. There are novels where artists are mentioned, or they relate the lives of fictional artists or even invent works of art.

What is more relevant to me is not those cases in which the dialogue between art and literature redefines the artistic or literary practice itself; And especially when it allows the reinvention of a medium. For example, I think that dialogue is behind the way in which César Aira redefined, like no other contemporary author, how to make literature. The activity that I am going to coordinate aims to point out this double rich road, in which Borges appears as synthesis and light.

Without any nationalistic boasting, I believe that Borges was ahead of many practices of the second half of the XX century and of the XXI century, in a very similar but unknown relation with Duchamp. We do not call them that when we speak of Borges, but appropriation, falsification, copying and misattribution could also be called ready-made rectified or assisted ready-made, for example, if we translate them into the Duchampian categories. On the other hand, it is impressive to note how many artists Borges is the talisman: Joseph Kosuth, Sherrie Levine, Robert Smithson, Gabriel Orozco and, among us, Guillermo Kuitca or Jorge Macchi, for example.

How has this relationship developed in the Argentine case?

In the case of Argentina, although not necessarily from the Borgean matrix, literature has maintained a very fluid dialogue with art. There is a whole network of relationships, sometimes hidden, sometimes explicit: Cortázar and Duchamp, Puig and Pop Art, Piglia, which is the Brechtian-Marxist version of Borgean procedures, and finally Aira, in whom the link with Contemporary art is self-evident.

In the opposite direction, even before the collapse of specific media and even today, perhaps because of the always very literate condition of local artistic circles, the text appears as a very ingrained resource. There is a strange one that also forms a matrix: Alberto Greco, who finishes publishing a novel, "Besos brujos", that is a mix of texts, spots, graphisms, letters of Sylvie Vartan and Palito Ortega, etc. From there it is possible to reconstruct a plot of which they participate, each with its mark, Ferrari and his written pictures, the tables of Victor Grippo, Guillermo Kuitca and his pictorial diaries and Mirta Dermisache, among others; Until arriving at Fabio Kacero, in whom it seems to me that the artist of the writer is indescribable.

What is ARCOMadrid 2017 for contemporary Argentine art? What drifts are imaginable or desirable?

In general, I would say that ARCOMadrid is an occasion or a circumstance that forced to gather something that was very dispersed. In particular, it is an opportunity presented to a scene that, even in relation to other Latin American countries, has had very little institutional support and where each one has to do alone.

The opportunity for an artist such as Guillermo Kuitca, who had a retrospective at Reina Sofía, to share an exhibition inside the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum with others less known to the Spanish public, such as Alejandra Seeber and Juan Tessi, and with Lucio Fontana, from Who sometimes seems to have forgotten that he was from Rosario, enables new possibilities to present and narrate to Argentine art internationally. This type of exhibition can create some interesting paths that facilitate the approach of new spectators.

Given the platform of visibility offered by the fair and the events parallel to it, I am confident that some opportunity will open up. I trust the curators responsible for the selection - which was a very difficult task - and, fundamentally, I trust some Argentine artists and the experience that the viewer can have in front of his work. Artists like Diego Bianchi, Fabio Kacero, Eduardo Navarro or Lux Lindner, among others, whose works have nothing to envy to those that are exhibited in any international exhibition, can get, as already did Adrián Villar Rojas with his ephemeral beasts, that The viewer will be surprised with a new experience, out of program.

I do not dare to say how this can be translated materially because I do not know the operation of some plots; For example, if the collectors are going to be interested, if the museums are going to want to do retrospectives, if the artists are going to join European galleries, etc. Clearly, so that the artists can continue working is very good that all that happens. But I would already be satisfied that the spectators can find the works and feel, as David Viñas said to refer to certain writers, that there is an artist who "invented it".