Conference paper, Saturday, October 20th, 2007, 04:30 p.m.
Justo Pastor Mellado: Rethinking the Museum in Latin America
We have the case here of an active group of artistic agents who mounted an initiative that took a decade to reach fruition, and that has now been in place for three decades, always in a state of financial instability, looking for national and international resources to sustain it, but continuing to put on exhibitions and maintaining interconnections with contemporary art—activities that have made it a place of undeniable importance, not only in the world of Latin American art but with respect to the continental history of rescue of endangered handicrafts, and in relation to social projects connected with the Commission of Solidarity with Indigenous Peoples.
At the 2007 Biennial in Valencia, Spain, Escobar and I formulated a curatorial proposal called “The Museo del Barro Complex: An Institutional Work.” We sought to demonstrate the existence of a platform of ethical, formal, and political resistance within a minority space of curatorial practice.
In order to respond to the question on behalf of our contemporaries, it seemed advisable to take the Valencia Biennial and to juxtapose it with the effect of the São Paulo Biennial that had led to the aforementioned episodes. And not merely any of its versions but, in particular, the 27th Biennial which, in the manner in which it was conceived, gave voice to the discontinuities in artistic conceptualizations.
What the appearance of a paper like “The Museo del Barro Complex” wrought was nothing less than an expanded adaptability—a non-traumatic process of negotiation. From this point of view, artistic resistance in countries in which peripheralism and centrality are brutally combined came to study the model of social production of a cultural industry that operated across vast areas of popular culture. In this way, the conceptualization strategy of this paper was the ambiguous function of popular art and its productive conflictual character, which runs the risk of losing coherence and of obscuring its comprehension, leading to the configuration of a residual world lacking all boundaries whatsoever, and where subjective productions of the people are imitated and protect themselves, assuming hybrid forms that grow beyond the control of any cultural watchdog institutions.
Seen in this perspective, the question is not one of conserving or protecting, or even of integrating popular art or indigenous art, but rather of converting these branches of art into a platform upon which their existence is repositioned as factors indicating their formal production, and that casts doubt on the very conditions of production of the collective imagination of the locales where artistic works are produced.
Contemporary art on the Paraguayan stage is a pocket paradigm that allows the expression of structural mistrust that we are able to project, in the rest of the subcontinent, regarding institutional productions of societies that experience the fictions of their own completeness.
In the face of the threatening specter of museum completeness—a European and North American notion—experiences on the ground within Paraguay allow the creation and maintenance of the experience of survival like very few others. It is there that the experience of anthropologists—who must depend on the power of narration of their informants—takes root. These informants, who generally have an uneven command of various languages, tell the researchers what they want to hear, because they know nothing new beyond what the investigators need to confirm.
I will now tell the story of an indigenous ceremony called debylyby, described by Ticio Escobar in his book The Curse of Nemur. What I mean is that I will set forth my theory of institutional flexibility on the basis of this indigenous story. The debylyby is an impressive ceremony in which conditions of social agreements are renewed. But it also has to do with mourning. It is as if a myth of the Paraguayan jungle had anticipated the theory that would validate the museum as a key institution in the construction of the republic. This is to say that, in the debylyby, social agreements and mourning are linked together in a highly complex ceremony of conjuration, in which males wear female clothing in order to deceive them, occupying the place of the gods that these men have themselves murdered. However, when these articles of clothing and domestic utensils enter into the space of the harra, the ceremonial scene, they are no longer handbags and mats, but rather striking instances of ritual dress. This means that parts of this dress are filled with woso, that strange and potent energy that may be either adverse or beneficent, and that lift people from their banal immersion in the world of mundane facts.
The work that I’ve mentioned relates the scene of Ashnuwerta, the goddess of red splendor, wife of anábsoro, pronunciation of whose name should be avoided if at all possible, and who is the incarnation of mediation, division and identification. It is the case that desire arises as a result of restriction, and with desire, art and culture make their appearance. It is here that we see the emergence of the role of Nemur, which signifies the complementary aspect and counterpart of Ashnuwerta. If the latter represents the role of the benefactor who has given the gift of language and proclaimed the Law, with an emphasis on mediation, Nemur symbolizes the moment in which one is punished for having violated the rules. Nemur is the great administrator of punishment, the transmitter of sadness, the one who watches over the tobich, which is the ceremonial space, the center of initiation which constitutes the sacred site of this myth—the house of the Word.
In the hypothesis that I’ve presented here, one must think of the museum as the house of the contemporary myth—as a place in which word and image are articulated in order to rethink the conditions of the writing of history. The museum, for us, should be like that ceremonial space established by tobich.
Imagine that, in the Southern Cone region of South America, these two instances of anomalous museums continue to survive thanks to the will of self-production initiatives. However, it is this very fact that constitutes their great institutional fragility. It is the state that contributes in a precarious way to these conditions of existence. Or, it may be said that, as often happens, it is obliged to participate in initiatives that supersede it. And the institutions that sustain these two museums must resort to foreign assistance to carry out the minimal tasks that their administrative teams have imposed on them. This reproduces conditions of international assistance that should be providing models of development that do not mean the mechanical transfer of experiences of museum management that were created for institutions in the developed world. In the entire process of transfer and cooperation, there is an attrition that takes place that affects the receptive entities and spaces, and which gives rise to new forms of management and promotion of projects that involve significant sectors of citizens. In this context, these kinds of museum can become true catalysts of a micro political life that takes as its central concern the erasing of boundaries between contemporary art and the social production of subjectivity anchored in these popular and indigenous forms of manufacture, and whose circulation traverses directly and without distinction a large number of symbolic spaces.
I do not want to end this presentation without making reference to the 1971 appearance of Matta-Clark in the Museum of Fine Arts in Santiago. This event occurred at more or less the same time as the formation of the social dynamic that led to the creation of the Museo del Barro and the Allende Museum. This even consisted in making excavation a mode of recovery of the remains of history. In this respect, I would like to mention that, upon entering the building of the Allende Museum, I noticed that a space was set aside for his Memorial. Upon entering the building, one must walk across this area to visit the museum collection. In this area, a wall of transparent glass has been installed, with small holes in which radio speakers have been placed, and from which the voices of the past can be heard. It is the voice of Allende, in declarations and speeches, along with the voices of various other people, recorded in the carrying out of various activities, and rescued from records that were originally created between the years of 1970 and 1973. The recorded voice is amplified, like a murmur that replaces the “absent” bodies. This means appealing to what Benjamin called the underground history of those who for now are defeated, an appeal that, as Eduardo Gruner maintains in The Place of the Gaze, is not an appeal to abstract memory, “but to the active construction of the anticipated memory of future redemption.”
