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The following text was originally produced for the apexart Conference 3: “Inside Out: Reassessing International Cultural Influence”, The Contemporary Museum, Honolulu, Hawaii. It has been published on: “On Cultural Influence”, edited by Steven Rand & Heather Kouris, published by apexart, New York; and on "The Fillip Review", Vancouver, BC
Marginally successful:
A brief account of two artist-run spaces
Michèle Faguet
There is a contradiction implicit in the idea of the alternative or artist-run
space as a phenomenon specific to developed countries or contexts, in which
a highly organized, sophisticated cultural infrastructure is clearly not lacking.
One might argue that the very modus operandi of this kind of space — rejection
or critique of both the institutional structure and the art market, with their
respective (often overlapping) processes of legitimation, a spontaneous manner
of operating based on immediate material conditions along with a desire to adapt
to (and make the most of) limited resources, and, perhaps most importantly,
the mapping out of a self-defined position or space of marginality (in the positive
sense of the term) — would find its natural habitat in a 'marginal' context
characterized by the presence of dysfunctional institutions and the absence
of a real art market. In other words, what is an alternative way of working
in one context might be a necessary manner of operating in another. And yet
the history of alternative spaces in Latin America is a very short one, and
difficult to research because it is a history that is fragmented, largely undocumented,
and too often forgotten, as many of these initiatives have fallen victim to
a selective amnesia, a product of territorial alliances and interests typical
of cultural contexts in which there are so few opportunities. This paper will
treat two specific cases from the nineties: La Panadería — an artist-run
space in Mexico that holds an originary aura and is often looked to as the model
for alternative spaces in Latin America — and Galería Chilena:
a lesser known artist-run nomadic, commercial gallery that moved around Santiago
over the course of several years, organizing exhibitions in borrowed spaces.
In order to have a discussion about alternative spaces in Latin America, it
is useful to situate them within a broader history of the formation of artist-run
initiatives on an international scale, and to point to congruencies existent
in other, sometimes radically different contexts. A. A. Bronson has written
a very telling history of the emergence of artist-run centers in Canada. Overshadowed
by the massive influence of U. S. media culture, Canadian artists found themselves
in a position subservient to the dominance of a centralized, New York-based
art circuit. This fact, coupled with the absence of venues in which to show
their work and thereby gain exposure even on a solely national level, necessitated
that they take matters into their own hands by forming small, overlapping circuits
of artists working around precariously funded publications, workshops, and spaces.
As Bronson points out, perhaps what was most significant about this phenomenon
was how it contributed to the self-projection of the artists themselves —
in other words, the extent to which these activities would be productive of
a space of visibility that would move their practice beyond the isolated spaces
of individual artist studios. Even to day, so much of how we think about art
is influenced by a romanticized image of the artist removed from his or her
context, engaged in an elite activity that is misunderstood or quite simply
ignored. If we can point to one unifying feature of contemporary art, it is
the desire to break with this myth, to reinsert artistic practices into our
everyday lives, to demonstrate that the making of art is a job like any other.
And to do this it is necessary that artists have access to media channels, because
media culture — television, radio, magazines — is perhaps the most
important and far-reaching element of contemporary life. As the author describes
it, 'We forgot that we ourselves were real artists, because we had not seen
ourselves in the media.*(1)
La Panadería has often been written about as something that burst upon
the local Mexican art scene in a highly spontaneous manner, created by artists
fed up with the lack of any space in which to show their work. Appropriating
a defunct bakery — rumor has it that the baker had been killed by a group
of punks after refusing to turn over a very ostentatious ring he sported on
a daily basis — Okon and Calderón along with a group of artists
with whom they shared artistic and social affinities, set about creating a self-sufficient
structure that would operate and show work based on their own criteria, which
to a great extent reacted to what they felt to be the limitations of more conventional
institutions. The location and design of the space — a converted street-level
storefront with large windows facing onto a busy pedestrian corner in the colonia
of Condesa, would allow La Panadería to maintain a close relationship
to the neighborhood itself, integrating its activities into the daily lives
of Condesa’s residents. To this end certain markers of the building’s
original function — the name itself, along with the oven — remained.
Such elements reflected the desire to insert La Panadería into a broader
social context, drawing in a wide spectrum of individuals, specifically young
people who would not have otherwise attended art exhibitions.
This sort of space, unprecedented in its context, was then initially bound to
a rebellious, independent attitude which actively sought out confrontation with
an established system of exhibiting art that had turned a blind eye to the multiple,
eclectic subcultures specific to Mexico City. La Panadería became noted
for its willingness to embrace such marginalized practices by exhibiting the
works of extremely young artists, showing primarily video, photography, and
installation, organizing concerts and parties — reflecting and producing
more of a social dynamic and way of life than merely adhering to a static, rigid
set of paradigms dictating what art should be about. One might argue that already
inscribed into the formation of an artist-run space is a critique of the institutional
apparatus of art, which tends to flatten out even the most critical, polemical
sort of practices, domesticating them into mere objects of consumption. And
in its spontaneous manner of operating (often too precarious in economic terms),
La Panadería actively sought to offer a generation of young artists an
alternative to what its organizers believed to be the stagnant museum culture
of Mexico City.
And yet, as is often pointed out in Mexico — and not well known outside
of it — the Panadería group possessed a certain set of characteristics
that made it alternative, but at the same time more exclusionary in its behavior
than less critical accounts of this story would like to admit. For the most
part, the organizers of the space were men — upper-middle class, self-assured,
and bright, and whose transgressive, fuck-you attitude was effective in challenging
art-establishment values, but equally effective in alienating those individuals
who might have collaborated in the project but simply could not fit in with
the cool crowd. Perhaps most significant, and more problematic, was the fact
that this desire to break with a dominant value system associated with traditional
Catholic morality, present at every level of Mexican society, was translated
into a highly masculinist, even misogynistic, subject position whose visual
repertoire consisted of titty shots, guns, monster trucks and other bad-boy,
bad-taste instances of cultural slumming. In their obsession with and appropriation
of low culture, the Panadería group sought to break with accepted norms
of behavior appropriate to their social class by appropriating, and making visible,
an entire subculture of extreme machismo that obviously exists in Mexico but
that had never really been treated on the level of ‘high’ culture.
But while the satirical nature of this ‘making visible’ does indicate
the presence of at least some level of criticality, the end result in so many
cases was the reinforcement of the worst kind of traditional gender roles, which
proved to be damaging to a space that prided itself on being so inclusive —
but damaging perhaps only within its immediate context.
The image of La Panadería projected outside of Mexico in the art media,
primarily in the U.S. and Canada, presented an uncritical, heroic, and at times
overly enthusiastic image of it, and indeed, of the Mexican art scene in general.
Here A. A. Bronson's words ring so true: so many images of Mexican artists and
their work, published in mainstream magazines like Artforum, Art News, Paper,
and Poliester in the mid- to late '90s, legitimated and consolidated this scene
both inside the country and out. Here we can point to yet another instance of
cultural slumming — but one that is far more unsettling in its political
connotations. All throughout the '90s (and still today, to some extent), art
criticism about Mexico trafficked in a set of tired, narcissistic clichés
about the chaotic, overwhelming (i.e., exotic, glamorous, and exciting) experience
of living in an overpopulated and violent metropolis like Mexico City. Miguel
Calderón's gun-toting prehistoric to low-rider urban, gang-banger character
from his amazing photographic intervention piece Historia Artificial in many
ways embodied that romanticized image of our North American other: poor, dangerous,
different and yet ever so enticing. Mexico's geographic proximity to the U.
S., as well as its economic power in relation to the rest of Latin America,
and perhaps most importantly, its influence on the level of the mass media,
had always granted it a privileged position within the U. S. imaginary. There
are so many instances in which Mexico quite simply stands in for the entire
continent, so many instances of conflating Mexican and Latin American art. This,
however, is a whole other issue and the subject of a similar but different discussion.
Of concern here is the packaging and consumption of Mexico, which produced so
many 'booms' of Mexican art and culture throughout the ’90s and into the
early 21st century — the latter perhaps best illustrated by the reception
of Amores Perros, a film that perfectly exemplified everything the U.S. found
sexy about Mexico City. Such extensive interest in Mexico betrays, at best,
a sense of redundancy and exhaustion felt toward dominant cultural practices
and concomitantly the need to revitalize such practices with an outward gaze
— i. e., a continuation (albeit in veiled form) of the modernist 'desire
for a redemptive originality' *(2) — and, at worst,
an increasingly global, de-centered market that must constantly accommodate
itself according to the dictates of novelty, endlessly engaged in the cycle
of producing and satisfying new demands.
It is somewhat ironic, then, that a project so set against art-world conventions
so quickly became assimilated into its entire mechanism by ultimately fulfilling
a representative function in relation to the very art scene from which it sought
to differentiate itself. Does this mean that La Panadería should be written
off as another failed attempt to create a space of experimentation and critique?
Is it just further proof of the homogenizing and assimilating capacity of an
advanced stage of cultural industry? Not at all. Rather, the case of La Panadería
raises what is perhaps a rhetorical question in relation to the development
and fate of any self-described alternative space. It was due in great part to
attitudes and positions like those held by the organizers of La Panadería
that the landscape of Mexican art underwent such radical changes during the
'90s. From a stuffy, conservative environment dominated by Neo-Mexicanismo —
a school of commercial painting marked by a return to iconographic and vernacular
sources dressed up in the parodic garb of postmodernist jargon — Mexico
grew to become a thoroughly contemporary cultural terrain, filled with viable
exhibition venues which came to included traditionally modernist art museums
like the Museo Carrillo Gil and the Museo Rufino Tamayo, both of which underwent
enormous processes of transition during those years in order to accommodate
this new generation of artists. Also new to this period was the appearance of
state-sponsored funding possibilities for emerging, non-commercial artists,
no longer subject to the construction of nationalistic identities (which had
been the case previously), and the creation of the Jumex collection which began
buying works of very young Mexican artists alongside works by established international
figures like Dan Graham and Mike Kelley.
By 1999 La Panadería had become a permanent fixture on the Mexican art
scene and, some would say, an institution. Museums and galleries had begun to
use the space as a sort of screen to filter out the best and the brightest of
a new generation of artists. Gone were the days of funding exhibitions exclusively
through beer and tequila sales at openings. In its final years, La Panadería
could count on receiving support from virtually any foreign foundation or governmental
agency just by asking. Directors had come and gone, and many friendships had
broken up in the process, making for a space that people either loved or hated.
And so began the polemic among its founding members, close friends, and individuals
brought in from outside, myself included, regarding the space’s future.
In the midst of this very changed context, what should La Panaderia’s
new function be? Some argued that the natural evolution of such a space would
be its ultimate inclusion into the mainstream, while others, particularly those
nostalgic for those early years, argued that it was necessary to keep that original
spirit of rebelliousness alive. Between these two extreme positions there were
many others that tried to imagine a space at once spontaneous and historical,
intellectually challenging but that at the same time didn’t take itself
too seriously. Not surprisingly the question of ‘What do we do now?’
remained an open one, and was never quite resolved. In September 2002, La Panadería
shut its doors forever, but not without leaving an enormous legacy behind.
Galería Chilena was founded on December 13, 1997 on the occasion of a
24-hour exhibition of works by Cristóbal Lehyt held on the upper floor
of a nondescript house in the residential neighborhood of Providencia in Santiago.
Founded by three local artists between the ages of 24 and 27 — Diego Fernández,
Felipe Mujica and Joe Villablanca — Galería Chilena, like La Panadería
before it, arose in response to a local scene crippled by a lack of viable exhibition
spaces for emerging artists. One of the first significant acts of the group
was the printing of a low-budget, four-color flyer documenting this first exhibition,
but more importantly serving almost as a kind of heroic manifesto, albeit a
highly self-conscious one, which clearly stated the goals of the gallery while
critiquing the specific situation that had made its existence necessary. In
Chile there was a strong tradition of non-commercial, critical art practice,
most notably the so-called 'escena de avanzada' — a group of politicized
artists and writers who, during the ’80s, actively sought to work against
the military dictatorship and which was thus initially relinquished to a space
of relative marginality and invisibility. They were later to become part of
the academic establishment, thus influencing (sometimes too dogmatically) an
entire generation of young artists. The case of Galería Chilena, then,
is unique, in that its organizers did in fact recognize the existence of non-commercial,
non-profit spaces dedicated to artistic experimentation, but very rightly pointed
out the fact that such spaces were state-run institutions and would thus always
be subject to political interests and ideologies. In 1997 the political mood
was marked by the relatively recent model of neo-liberalism, along with what
has been termed the culture of consensus (still going strong today), the implementation
of progressive, liberal policies that have attempted to quickly develop the
country while simultaneously burying — without adequately dealing with
— its past. And although Chile is so often touted as the most developed,
stable, or even 'civilized' country in Latin America, there is a great deal
of internal discussion about the long-term effects of such radical change in
a country that has gone from oppressive dictatorship to 'nearly first world'
in a span of less than 15 years.
Also problematic for Galería Chilena's organizers was the very idea that
all artistic practice must be grouped into two opposing categories: commercial
(i. e., uninteresting, uncritical and ethically questionable) or experimental
(interesting, critical, but economically unviable). Drawing upon the example
of Christian Nagel Gallery (where Felipe and Diego had recently exhibited),
Galería Chilena wanted to make it known to all young artists that it
might be possible to think about art-making in professional terms — as
an actual career — without having to sell out to bourgeois, money-laundering
galleries. And thus seminal to its self-presentation was Galería Chilena's
insistence upon its business, for-profit character, articulated over and over
again in texts, interviews, and catalogues from those years and which is quite
different from the conventional attitude held by alternative spaces, that tends
to shun all commercial activity. However, it should be pointed out that empresarial,
the Spanish term used by the group, has a double meaning that becomes very telling
in this story. While empresa typically refers to a business enterprise, it can
also mean 'an arduous and difficult action that requires a great deal of initiative
and energy.' As part of its carefully constructed public image (directed toward
the media and, as was hoped by the gallery’s founders, future generations
of Chilean artists), Galería Chilena had come up with a clever logo:
the initials GCH, pronounced "Galchi," inscribed into a heart. To
a Latin-American or anyone else who has spent time in Spanish-speaking countries,
the reference is clear: el Chapulín Colorado — a popular TV character
from the Mexican sitcom of the same name that aired all over the Spanish-speaking
world from 1970–79, and can still be seen today in syndication. Invented
by Roberto Gomez Bolaños, who also played him, el Chapulín Colorado
was conceived as the Latin-American antithesis of Superman — clumsy, dumb,
and cowardly. El Capulín did not possess the characteristics typical
of superheroes. However, as was pointed out in the final episode of the series,
el Chapulín's heroism consisted precisely in the fact that he was able
to overcome his cowardice and confront all the obstacles and enemies that came
his way.
And so GCH seemed to consciously embody a whole set of contradictions that its
organizers desired to productively put to use — a collective of recent
graduates with no money, no physical space, and limited social contacts, intent
upon single-handedly creating a market for contemporary art in Chile. Perhaps
the least of their problems was recruiting interesting young artists to participate
in the project — Chile was, at that time at least, home to a relatively
cohesive art scene which had been theorized by a prior generation of critics
schooled in post-structuralist methodologies. Most notable was Galería
Chilena’s decision in 1998 to visit local art schools in order to ‘discover’
new talents. The resulting exhibition presented the work of Juan Céspedes,
an artist who went on to show his work in several prestigious venues outside
of Chile, and who today can be counted among the limited success stories of
this narrative: his work is exceptional and sells. Joe Villablanca, perhaps
the most over-the-top member of the group, in an interview published in August
1998, stated that in just six months of operation, GCH had already changed the
historical course of the visual arts in that country forever. During those years,
Villablanca’s dedication to his new role of entrepreneur came to occupy
a central place in his artwork. In 1998, Galería Chilena was invited
to exhibit, as a gallery, in Galería Posada del Corregidor, one of those
municipal, non-profit art spaces GCH so explicitly sought to set itself apart
from. The very invitation was unprecedented in that Posada del Corregidor was
not inviting the gallery to curate a show of its artists but rather was inviting
Galería Chilena as a group of artists and entrepreneurs. The invitation
could have been interpreted in many different ways. Fernández, Mujica
and Villablanca accepted the invitation, describing it in the catalogue produced
for the exhibition as an opportunity to present 'a commercial gallery…as
an art object, in order to show the legitimating role of publicity and the art
market within a local context.' At the same time, they claimed, and rightly
so, that as individual artists they never would have been invited to show in
this particular space. The very legitimating mechanism that they had thoroughly
exploited and thus made explicit successfully gained them entry into a space
that would otherwise have been closed to them at the time. And like everything
GCH has ever said about itself, the tone of the catalogue text was at the same
time both extremely cynical and euphorically heroic. In it they stated: 'We
are utilizing the official status of Galería Posada del Corregidor to
publicly celebrate our business activities.'
In a multi-media collective installation entitled I want more galleries not
more calories, Villablanca exemplified his new public persona in a series of
videos that depicted the artist in various related situations. In the first,
a scruffy serious 'art-boy' sits alone in his room smoking and staring off into
space while a voice off-camera speaks the artist’s thoughts aloud —
thoughts identical to those in the catalogue text and repeated verbatim. In
the next Villablanca, now clothed in a clerical robe, stands behind an impromptu
podium delivering an impassioned discourse (in tele-evangelist style) about
Galería Chilena to an empty room. Here the speech is a word-for-word
repetition of that very first text, printed out the previous year and sent to
a select list of curators, artists, and critics in Chile and all over the world
— the image of the artist repeating the party line to a silent, indifferent
audience. The final video, not included in this particular work but presented
the following year in a very different context, is entitled Gran Santiago. In
it the artist places a call to a local talk-show program which aired in the
early morning hours and which presumably nobody watched. That show, like the
video, is called Gran Santiago and is hosted by two middle-aged AM-radio personalities.
Holding the camera in one hand (the video-tape image shows the face of one of
the hosts looking out from the television into the eyes of his caller), Villablanca
talks to his silent public about the role of Galería Chilena in relation
to the emergence in Chile of a new artistic scene. The hosts nod patiently,
attempting to politely but unsuccessfully end the call, as the caller is both
wide-awake and insistent. It is perhaps this video that most eloquently articulates
the fate of a project which already had knowledge and acceptance of (and perhaps
desire for) its ultimate failure built into it from its very inception: an artist
alone and awake in his room at 4 o'clock in the morning, his words falling on
deaf ears, conscious of the indifference of those who only pretend to listen,
and yet always just a little bit hopeful. All this ambiguity had been incorporated
into the project from the very beginning. A constant parody of itself, Galería
Chilena simply stated the obvious: that the creation of an informed group of
collectors of contemporary art in Chile was simply not possible at this stage
of the country’s development. But in making explicit this failure, Galería
Chilena was effectively articulating a set of negative truths about its immediate
context against the spastic, unwarranted optimism that had gripped Chile during
the first phase of the post-dictatorship, as well as about the way in which
the art world must constantly prostitute itself to publicists and buyers in
order to achieve the visibility necessary to be socially relevant. Even their
notably effective milking of the local media machine was not enough to gain
them international recognition; this is because contemporary Chilean art is
strongly tied to a localist paradigm which utilizes references not easily comprehensible
to the outside world, directly interfering with its ability to penetrate international
art circuits. Unlike Mexico, Chile has never profited from any sort of international
‘boom’ and possibly never will. This, it might be argued, is a blessing
in disguise.
In 2000, the activity of Galería Chilena was temporally suspended when
two of its founding members relocated to New York. It re-appeared briefly in
2003, producing work for the group show To be political it has to look nice,
via a series of e-mail discussions between Mujica and Fernández in New
York and Villablanca in Santiago. These e-mails were later published in a low-budget
photocopy catalogue made for the show. At the time of the writing of this text,
Galería Chilena’s members had just been temporally reunited in
Santiago, where they are planning a conference and group show to take place
later on this year.
1. A. A. Bronson, "The Humiliation of the Bureaucrat: Artist-Run
Centres as Museums by Artists," in A. A. Bronson and Peggy Gale (eds.),
Museums by Artists (Toronto: Art Metropole,1983).
2. Mircea Eliade, paraphrased in Ian McLean, 'The Circumference is Everywhere
& the Centre Nowhere: Modernity and the Diasporic Discovery of Columbus
as Told by Tzvetan Todorov,' Third Text, no. 21 (Winter 1992–3), p. 9.