Post-Surreal Art Tango in Buenos Aires
Valery Oisteanu
The inhabitants of Buenos Aires are called portenos and they refer to their city as the Big Apple. The similarities with the north-east Big Apple do not end there. Like New York, Buenos Aires is a checkerboard of neighborhoods. The city has 22 barrios. The biggest is Palermo, home to J.L. Borges, which is subdivided into colorful sections called Palermo Viejo, Palermo Hollywood and Palermo Soho. Another colorful area is known as San Telmo, Bronx. And Nuevo-Chicago is the site of the famous meat market whose matadors process the beef and other meat from and for the entire country.
The population of the city is roughly 11 million, with three million people located in one central area, similar to the demographic division in New York. And in an echo of recent New York art history, a stampede of acrylic cows has invaded the Puerto Madero neighborhood, color-spotting the streets. This "Cow Parade" has brought together works such as Liliana Rothschild’s Recuerdo de Argentina, with the animal sectioned into brightly colored and decorated butcher’s cuts of meat, Marisa Dominguez de Punto’s Fetuccine Cow, painted in gold, Gustavo Rodriguez’s Vaca de Vacaciones, a cow with wheels on its hooves and luggage on its back and Gloria Cesar’s Vaca Milonguera, whose subject is dressed in a red tutu with a glittering top.
The Americanization of the Big Apple-South is, of course, a result of cultural globalization and the pervasive influence of New York’s pop culture. Andy Warhol is taught in high schools in Buenos Aires but not the homegrown Vito Campanella, a surrealist influenced by Dali.
After a month of research following in the footsteps of Borges, the de facto poet laureate of Buenos Aires, I learned about the predecessors of the Argentinean avant-garde. The artists, whose contribution to the legacy of freedom and creativity here were remarkable, include futurist Emilio Pettoruti (1892- 1971), meta-physicist Alejandro Xul Solar (1887-1963), assemblagist-surrealist Antonio Berni (1905- 1981) and automatist Juan Batlle Planas (1911-1966). Living practitioners include Vito Campanella, Victor Chab, Leon Ferrari, Juan Carlo DiStefano, Eduardo Costa, Anibal Cedron and others, each with an original vision but also in touch with European avant-garde movements and American experimental arts.
The notorious J.L.Borges is being honored this year around the globe commemorating 20 years since his passing. In San Juan, Puerto Rico, he is being remembered with a conference on his poetry and Costa Rica is hosting a lecture by his wife, Maria Kodama. Lectures and poetry readings are planned in Madrid and Geneva, including an obligatory wreath ceremony on his grave. On June 7, a retrospective of the man’s life and work opens at MALBA, Museo of Arte Latino-Americano of Buenos Aires, in conjunction with the release of the new Martin Hadis book about the English branch of the Borges family.
Indeed, 2006 is turning into "The International Year of Borges," with cultural activities taking place around the world. But let’s start with the Borges Cultural Center, an impressive edifice in the center of Buenos Aires, where the poet’s more classically inspired lyrics are performed by famous opera singers standing alongside brilliant portraits of the man from different periods in his life. Here too is a Dali exhibit, interesting graphics by Chagall and paintings by Morandi. Next door, Vilma Villaverde’s hilarious show of half-baked sculptures, pardon the pun, with bathroom fixtures delight the senses.
Still at the Borges Center are hundreds of Robert Capa’s immortal photographs, in an unprecedented exhibit that recognizes the value of heroic war journalism. His unforgettable portraiture of Trotsky and Hemingway grace the walls as well. Another room features large, wall-sized, color-splashed paintings of twisting, kissing couples by nuevo-expressionist Andrea Gutierrez that overwhelms the uninitiated. To complete the tour, upstairs displays a grand Beatles memorabilia show from the Rodolfo Vasquez Collection.
Over at the Cultural Center Recoleta is "30 ANOS Esteticas De La Memoria" a courageous show of remembrance about and by the victims of Argentina’s military junta, is sponsored by the liberal government and curated by Liliana Pinero.
Several visits to artist’s studios and galleries revealed yet another aspect of the underground art scene here, imbued with liberal politics and fostered by the art magazine Magenta. For example, in a strange building located in San Telmo adorned with a life-sized metal sculpture of a man trying to enter through the wall, is a secret door leading to a maze of galleries, performance theaters and installation spaces united under the name TransArte Gallery. Inside, Jose Lois Luchessi is showing a series of nudes and neo-expressionistic paintings along with Nico Esses’s unique and unforgettable black and white prints of children and sadus from India.
Alejandro Aranda-Rickert is another talented young Argentine artist whose studio I visited at the recommendation of artist-friend. Aranda-Rickert studied in New Paltz, New York and his gracefully painted oils of mysterious exotic flowers were shown in New York City. Here, his portraits show a double vision of a person viewed from opposite angles. Rickert’s images of young shy models ads a touch of neo-surrealism, which makes his art similar to that of Balthus.
Yet another treasure is Leonardo Gotlieb, who does enormous woodcuts of the city and its instruments of construction and destruction. The local art critics consider his big engravings as the most important in the city’s art scene, comparing his work to the engravings of prison architecture by the Italian master Piranesi (1720-1778.)
At MALBA, the Constantini Collection of 20th Century Latin American Art retraces modernism, the avant-garde of the 20s, the surrealism of the 30s and 40s, the abstract and concrete art of the 50s, the New Figuration, pop art, minimalism and conceptual art of the 60s, 70s and beyond. Works by Argentines Antonio Berni, Jorge de la Vega, Nicolas Garcia Uriburu, Victor Grippo, Leon Ferrari and many others provide examples of some of the changes that began in those decades and continue till the present day. The works forge a new freedom connection between art and reality, between art and life.
In this globalized cosmopolitan world, one thing that is 100 percent Argentinean is the tango and so is the Buenos Aires VIII Festival of Tango that this year broke all records for participation and attendance by tangonistas from around the world. Groups of bandaneon musicians from Rotterdam, taught by an Argentinean, tango singers from Paris and Vienna and tangolieros from as far as Philippine and Bali all came to dance freely on the streets and at many milonga clubs alongside the locals.
A variety show, "The History of Tango," by Miguel Angel Zotto at the Theater Lola Membribes showed clips from past performances as a sort of anthropological study in social classes and their different tango interpretations. Indeed, tango lyrics, music and dance have evolved in different directions, creating the most unbelievable urban folklore, popular art and even fine art and music that is uniquely original and entertaining, but also a personal catharsis of emotions and feelings. And the Neo-tango composers at the Pablo Neruda Concert hall prove beyond a doubt that modern tango music can be combined with its classic antecedent, as well as with surreal orchestrations with the view toward the future of experimentation.
It’s nearly impossible to summarize all the creative happenings in Buenos Aires, but it is obvious that the city and its art is thriving and evolving faster than ever, due to a new freedom of expression and the return of many artists who fled during the repressive years of the military junta.
