Conference paper, Saturday, October 20th, 2007, 04:30 p.m.
Justo Pastor Mellado: Rethinking the Museum in Latin America
I ask your forgiveness for the pretension evident in the title “Rethinking the museum in Latin America.” My purpose is not to present a general theory of the museum in Latin America, but rather to offer two stories of two different experiences of museum production in institutionally hostile environments. The proposition of “rethinking” is merely a way of designating an action of resistance. In the context that I am going to describe to you, rethinking means creating a fiction that allows the carrying out of activities that have minimal institutional involvement. These activities must be converted into platforms capable of sustaining, over a fairly long period of time, procedures aimed at endowing certain types of practices with a general consistency of approach. Such practices would have a marked effect with respect to both the knowledge of the history of local art and the creation of archives.
The fiction follows a program of work activities designed to fill in the gaps of our experiences with regard to museology. This fiction operates as a factor working toward the restoration of a museum world that lies in ruins. Let’s put the matter as follows: there are areas of our globe where the idea and practice of museology is incomplete. I am not referring to the creation and operation of contemporary art museums alone, but rather to all art museums in general. In South America, we probably run museums of pre-Columbian art, colonial art, and nineteenth century art in a highly competent manner. However, it is less likely that we will find museums of contemporary art in the strict sense of the term. Most of the time, what is called contemporary art would fall under the rubric of modern art in other areas of the world. In other cases, what we see are museums of fine arts that in practice behave like national galleries of art. In other cases, especially in cities within the interior, we have museums of contemporary art that dedicate their efforts to establishing at least a critical mass of local works of art. All of this is to say that nothing is as it should be. There is no hint of a US-based model of a museum that would pose any threat to the status quo. Instead, what we have are hybrid institutions that, going under various names, carry out the work of recovery, cataloguing, and creating collections and archives, many times in spite of the efforts of state apparatuses, all of which means that the majority of the time, they go against state policies, which have been characterized in recent decades by the reduced state intervention in the work of museums.
In order to rethink the concept of the museum, it is not necessary to go back to square one. Instead, what is needed is the institutionalization of the available pool of archiving experience, and of the inclusion of artistic practices that are not in line with the rhetoric of the painted picture. To illustrate what I am trying to propose here, I will take two experiences from the 1970s as a point of departure. The first of these involves the activities of Gordon Matta-Clark and Jeffrey Lew at the National Museum of Fine Arts in Santiago de Chile in April, 1971. The second consists of the creation of the Solidarity Museum, in this same city, and in that same year. I must point out that these two events occurred completely independently of one another. Only the perspective afforded by a critical study that was recently written has allowed the articulation of these experiences as two aspects of a single problem.
Let’s take a brief look at the history. Roberto Matta traveled to Santiago in November 1970 to attend the ceremony in which Salvador Allende assumed the presidency of the republic, remaining in the country until the end of March 1971. At the beginning of his stay, in November, he did some paintings that, within the body of his work as a whole, have certain distinctive characteristics. They work with certain kinds of materials. Matta worked with clay, plaster and straw, receiving assistance from the bricklayers who were working on the renovation of the museum. Strictly speaking, these works reproduced in paint the texture of the whitewashed adobe walls of the home of a Chilean campesino. On this texture, he drew anthropomorphic signs that would afterward become associated with this period. In interviews with the press, he would say that those paintings/walls express the needs of the people, whose voices have historically been silenced.
Gordon Matta-Clark visited Chile in May, 1971 as part of a tour of South America, along with his friend Jeffrey Lew. He had already created the montage Foods prior to setting off on his trip. He had also written a letter/manifesto calling on American artists to boycott the biennial meeting in São Paulo. He had the idea of putting on a kind of “anti-biennial” in Santiago. It was an idea that did not catch on. He did, however, carry out work in the basement of the museum, while Jeffrey Lew did excavation in the central hall of the facility, in the same site where Roberto Matta had prepared his canvases in November, 1970.
It was at that moment that a parting of the ways occurred. While Matta represented the discourse of those who lacked their own voice, Matta-Clark adopted a situationalist stance of institutional criticism, triggering a crisis with respect to the foundations of the notion of cultural transmission itself, since he was working underneath an edifice that was a copy of a prototypical museum: the Petit Palais in Paris.
Okay then. These events occurred in 1971—this is to say, at a particular juncture in the history of Latin American art. Note that, if we are thinking in terms of divergences in space and time, the works created by Matta-Clark were not among those collected by the artists who met in Santiago at the Meeting of Southern Cone Artists in May 1973. These artists never knew that Matta-Clark had created those works. Their meeting was a kind of congress in which a document to be presented at the Second Cultural Congress of Havana—scheduled for September of the same year—was to be prepared. Imagine if you will a group of artists who need to set up a meeting to draft a document that, in turn, is to be presented at an iconic site. This gives us enough material to study what was literally a political subordination of artistic practices. What was created, then, was a kind of Zeitgeist.
It was, however, surprising that the reconstruction of the details of what took place has never been recorded in any history of Latin American art. There are some young researchers in Argentina that are trying to get to the bottom of what occurred. Matta-Clark’s visit to Santiago would remain invisible, not only in terms of local history but also for later critical historiography. It was only recently that Phaidon published a volume dedicated to Matta-Clark, and that was put together by Corinne Diserens, which included photographs of Matta-Clark’s work during his visit to Chile. In addition to this, we have the exhibition Transmission: The art of Roberto Matta and Gordon Matta-Clark, which Betti-Sue Hertz presented in August, 2006 at the San Diego Art Museum. By virtue of its very title, this last exhibition poses the problem that concerns us today: the transmission of knowledge and of artistic points of reference. What occurred in this filial episode between Matta and Matta-Clark, was emblematic: father and son appeared in the same place, only months apart, during the same year, and did not cross paths.
This failure to meet—this missing dialogue—is something that not only happened between father and son, but is a phenomenon that occurred on an institutional level as well. Both of these men worked in a museum that was constructed to celebrate the centenary of the republic. It is a museum that the oligarchy to which Matta belonged built for itself in order to celebrate its political achievements. Matta did something that violated the historical memory of his tribe, painting in the temple of aristocratic vanity a work making reference to a rural universe—a universe in which his class of origin had been the masters, and where their dominion constituted the foundation of their power within the larger Chilean society. In contrast, the fact that Matta Clark was working on the very foundations—creating work in the subterranean innards of the museum—seemed to threaten to undermine the act of protest that his father was undertaking.
