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Abstracts
Artists and their media
Escaping stereotypes
Esteban Alvarez
- ¡Tucumán, Argentina!-
Carlota Beltrame
León Ferrari: la arquitectura de la locura
Maria Clara Bernal
Guest insert:
Principio y fin de la Ecología
León Ferrari
Literature focus:
Néstor Perlongher and Surrealism: Opposites and the Individual Self.
Ben Bollig
Artists and their media
Escaping stereotypes
Esteban Alvarez
Esteban Alvarez is an artist based in Buenos Aires.
This past October, I attended, with some curiosity, a round table discussion organized by the National Museum of Fine Arts in Buenos Aires. It came as no surprise that, while the theme was “Visual Arts Today”, the topic of discussion inevitably steered toward the more pressing topic of the state of the visual arts following the events of September 11.
Among other participants, Lilian Llanes (Founder of the Biennial of Havana) was present, having been invited by the Museum to be a juror for the “Banco de la Ciudad de Buenos Aires” prize. Llanes commented on the impromptu altars created to transmit information in the search for the disappeared, by many victims´ friends and relatives in the affected zone after the attack on the twin towers.
She felt that the visual aspect of these altars was reminiscent of some Latin American artists’ work, who invoke similar forms in response to similar events: massacres, the search for the disappeared and other abhorrent events that have produced personal losses and deep suffering in innumerable Latin American cities.
Where these types of expression have often suffered a certain disqualification, characterized as “sociology” rather than art when in the hands of Latin American artists, she suggested the ironic possibility that this aesthetic might now become globalized, implying not only that the entire world would have a chance to better understand, albeit in retrospect, many Latin American works that have this type of visual vocabulary, but also that the simultaneous world-wide distribution of these images might result in other artists’ adopting and incorporating this visual vocabulary, leading to its eventual legitimization.
The effect of globalization on aspects of visual language employed by Latin American artists, and the continuing formation and persistence of stereotypes are issues I will explore in detail, looking at the special relationship between an artist and their place of origin, their surroundings, and the subsequent repercussions these have in the role they are expected to play in global culture and markets.
- ¡Tucumán, Argentina!-
Carlota Beltrame
Carlota Beltrame is an artist and lecturer at the Universidad Nacional de Tucumán
Despite the low resources in Tucumán for art making, a generation of artists appeared in the nineties who have since struggled to overcome the self-referentiality present in art since the dictatorship. Instead, this group of young artists have as a common main feature a lack of desire for redemption. The concept of authorship has been banished and this has given free way to freedom to do whatever it feels must be done; to connectivity understood as the possibility of drawing multiple relations between all sorts of objects and non-objects, artistic and non-artistic; and finally, to a sense of the provisional that has allowed the artists to propose ephemeral readings not pretending to propose any permanent truth.
León Ferrari: la arquitectura de la locura
Maria Clara Bernal
Maria Clara Bernal is a PhD student at the Department of Art History & Theory,University of Essex.
In his little-known series of heliographies León Ferrari explores the absurdity of everyday life. He appropriates the language of the architect (by using Letraset) and gives this language a narrative, thus endowing the medium with a sensibility foreign to it. The artist defies the notion of order, and the rules that structure the everyday life of people in the city: questioning whether or not they have any logic.
Principio y fin de la Ecología
León Ferrari
León Ferrari is a conceptual artist based in Buenos Aires
In his characteristically polemic tone, Leon Ferrari presents the reader with a text-sculpture. The text itself was hung on the gallery wall as a work of art.
Ferrari juxtaposes sacred history and ecology to produce a parody of the idea of Paradise lost: suggesting that it was God who started the end of the ecological balance by punishing Eve with mortality.
With this he says God not only brought death to the people but also started the decay of all that he had created in seven days.
Néstor Perlongher and Surrealism: Opposites and the Individual Self.
Ben Bollig
Ben Bollig completed his MA in Spanish American Studies at King’s College, London. He is currently studying towards a PhD on the poetry of Néstor Perlongher
This paper aims to assess the importance of Surrealism as an influence on the poetry of Néstor Perlongher, the poet, essayist, sociologist and key member of the so-called neobarroco movement that emerged in the late 1970’s and 1980’s in the River Plate region.
It attempts also to demonstrate a number of the tensions and contradictions within both Argentine and European variations of Surrealist poetry, as revealed in Perlongher’s appropriation of some its techniques. Close readings of various poems by the Argentine are performed , as well as Surrealist manifesto extracts and poems and a number of texts considered to be precursors of Surrealism in Argentina. The relationship between Surrealism and the romantic individual poet is considered, as are the implications of certain Surrealists’ claims to be working beyond politics.
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