A terrified woman is wading through her flooded, middle-class living room as fish jump at her from all sides. A train with a turtle head is charging at a well-dressed dame standing at the beach, holding up her hands in protection. If Hitchcock and Buñuel had ever collaborated to create surreal black and white photomontages, the result might have looked very similar. Yet, Grete Stern‘s collages from the ‘Sueños’ (Dreams) collection, on show at MALBA at the moment, do not merely aim at depicting the horror of unknown or unrationalised dreams. In fact, originally, they had a clear, rational, even scientific, aim.

From 1948-1951, German photographer and Bauhaus scholar Grete Stern, who moved to Buenos Aires in 1943, was commissioned to create photo-montages for a romance magazine called Idilio. On the basis of descriptions sent in by its female readership she visualised 143 dreams for the series “Psychoanalysis Will Help You“, working in close collaboration with the sociologist and psychoanalyst Gani Germani, who directly advised her on how to depict certain dreams in a Freudian way. Stern had less than a week for each collage, drawing on her archive of landscape photography and using relatives and friends as models. Germani would then refer directly to the collage when analysing the dreams in the magazine.

Through combining photographs of real, but both spatially and empirically distinct, objects in a unified, seamless manner, the photo-montages appear to be a suitable medium to represent dreams and their propensity to throw together seemingly unrelated emotions and impressions and somehow present them as a coherent whole. Yet Stern‘s series of visual interpretations of dreams raises questions: firstly, whether photo-montages are an effective medium to do so, and secondly, whether representing dreams was actually her intention in the first place.

The majority of the surviving 46 black and white “dreams“ on display at the Malba are nightmares telling the story of unhappy, middle-class women facing several domestic and social threats. There is the threat of maternity, for instance in Dream 83 (sarcastically called “Surprise“), where a woman covers her face in horror in a dead-end alley as a toddler is tumbling towards her, seemingly asking for her care.

Stern often presents family it as a deathly, alienating force completely inverting its traditional role. Men invariably appear menacing, be it as a direct physical threat in form of a monstrous macho with a tortoise head or as a commodifying force, transforming the female into a usable object, as in ‘Dream 61′ where the woman is the base of a lamp which is about to be switched on by a man. And then there are the obvious, and metaphorically heavy-handed, collages where the female protagonist is trapped in a literal cage, in a corked glass vessel, or beneath a net thrown at her by her husband.

Stern, however, not only confronts us with a clear feminist critique of the oppressive forces faced by the women of her time (which stood in contrast to the submissive women normally portrayed and targeted by Idilio), but also points to women‘s complicity in this subduing act. The elegant subjects of her work either do not attempt to break out of their prison, or, when doing so, give up and come back begging to be let back into the false security of the domestic.

So, next to this condemnation of the submissive female position, where is the Freudian analysis in Stern‘s monochrome puzzles? Where is the sexually transgressive, the penis envy, the oedipus complex? While there is undoubtedly much visual material begging for psychoanalytic interpretation, such as the implicit hysteria of the women or various phallic objects, clear Freudian references and analysis remain obscure in the ‘Dreams’ series.

It seems that while visualising, rather than analysing, the reader‘s dreams, Stern asserted her own creativity and opinion on the original psychoanalytical project. The fact that she, in later exhibitions, used her own titles instead of the ones that Germani gave her for the Idilio editions further demonstrates that she began to follow her own agenda. And then there are also the works that clearly fall out of both the feminist and Freudian pattern, such as a subtly composed montage in which, for a change, a smiling dame stands on a miniature earth floating above a vast extraterrestrial landscape.

This suspect psychoanalytical legitimacy does not limit the artistic merit of Stern‘s work and opens it up to the ambiguity inherent in conceptually independent bodies of art. The photomontages on display at the MALBA play with realistic perspectives and create an atmosphere which feels natural and surreal at the same time. Apart from the, often all-too obvious, social critique of her work, Grete Stern granted dreams a degree of irrationality, skilfully creating an aesthetic in the interstice between their randomness and their meaning.

The exhibition “Sueños“ runs until 1st July at MALBA.

Looking back through the annals of art history, Modernism is punctuated with collaboration and association. The succession of global pioneering artistic movements that constitute the mythical direction of modernist art is rooted in a perception of artists coming together to realise a project that can stand on its own in the contemporary world arena. The concept of artistic movements sporting a ‘co-operative’ label intimates an abandonment of respective oeuvres in an attempt to forge a revolutionary artistic breakthrough, the product of which is greater than anything that can be achieved independently.

Many short-term collaborations preserve individual identity such as Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquait’s brief partnership in the early 1980′s; a symbiotic marriage of two completely unique styles. Yet there are occasions when the seams on collaborative work never show, as is the case with Swiss duo Peter Fischli and David Weiss.

Coming together in 1979, their art has an eternal youthfulness to it, played out with the quiet magic of everyday objects showcasing the laws of science, demonstrating that no material is too banal to be left beyond the art framework – a clear pursuit of Marcel Duchamp’s austere modernist principle of the ‘readymade.’ Duchamp, perhaps the most important artist of the 20th century, utilised pre-existing mass-produced items, such as a bicycle wheel and most famously a urinal, and presented them within the white walls of a gallery space as ‘a work of art.’ While Duchamp’s objects remained untouched, Fischli and Weiss decomposed and de-contextualised their original pieces, opening up multiple interpretations and readings. On the similarities between the artists’, Fischli commented “Duchamp’s objects could revert back to everyday life at any point in time. Our objects can’t do that; they’re only there to be contemplated. They’re all objects from the world of utility and function, but they’ve become utterly useless.”

If the objects of their art were dysfunctional and mundane, then the artists’ approach to them was at once sophisticated and clever, culminating in perhaps their greatest expression and signature showpiece ‘Der Lauf Der Dinge’ (The Way Things Go) (1985 – 87). Constructing a 100-foot long Rube Goldberg style chain reaction in a Zurich warehouse out of commonplace household appliances such as bin bags, tyres, ladders, bottles and shoes, the artists then employed the natural elements of gravity, fire and water to produce a carefully choreographed 30 minute film exploring physical comedy and popular science.

The Sisyphean work and research that was undertaken to realise this project is remarkable. Bland domestic products, liquids, foam and fire erupt, explode, collide and collapse to produce a relentless, ostentatious kinetic display of cause and effect that celebrates the unspectacular aspects of daily life. This enduring triumph of engineering ecstasy exercises monotonous societal tropes as a springboard for larger questions, perceptions and assumptions. It has been interpreted as a metaphor for the French Revolution, reincarnation, the deist of God who set the world in motion and the transmigration of souls, as a student in China once suggested. Jorg Heiser, co-editor of Frieze magazine, once described Der Lauf Der Dinge as “a concatenation of fateful events” and asserts that it contains “the heroic theme of slapstick.”

So how then, can this pre-historic, apocalyptic, mechanistic view of our world display moments of humour? The absurdist amusement that inscribes this piece lies in the deliberate misapplication of these objects, inciting laughter that penetrates the perilous collisions and mesmerising brutality that underpins Der Lauf Der Dinge. In French philosopher Henri Bergson’s collection of essays ‘Laughter, an essay on the meaning of the comic’ he declares “A mechanical arrangement . . is a thing. What incited laughter was the momentary transformation of a person into a thing. . . . We laugh every time a person gives us the impression of being a thing.”

The same may also be said of a situation in reverse, where everyday items temporarily assume human characteristics – performing roles outside their conventional function. As the objects become spirited, living beings, we begin to relate to their fate, and in that fleeting juncture lies humour. The film showcases a plethora of classic comic techniques; anticipation, slapstick and terrific timing – just like all great comedians. Indeed, the work is reminiscent of the silent comedy films starring Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton, yet here, the stars of the show are bin bags, step ladders and bottles.

Just as painters of previous centuries found inspiration in the realities of everyday life, Peter Fischli and David Weiss, have too, over the last 30 years, constructed their subjects with the leftovers of our existence, activating the untouched extravagant qualities of our surroundings as they manipulate and juxtapose fragments of the world, proposing a modification of traditionalised ideas of how reality may look.

Having represented Switzerland at the 1995 Venice Biennale, a major retrospective of their work was organised by the Walker Art Centre in 1996 – an exhibition that eventually toured to museums in Boston, Philadelphia and San Francisco. ‘Der Lauf Der Dinge’ was first shown at the Documenta Art Fair, an international exhibition of contemporary art held in the German town of Kassel, to much critical acclaim. It quickly established a huge reputation and went on to win awards at the Berlin and Sydney film festivals with the New York Times labelling the work a “masterpiece.” One of the most revered films ever made in the name of art, ‘Der Lauf Der Dinge’ leaves audiences with a new awareness of the world – a true testament of great art.

You can watch the full 30-minute ‘Der Lauf der Dinge’ projection at MALBA until 3rd June.

The security guard sits absent-mindedly, bored, at the entrance to the exhibition, seemingly unphased by the strange combination of disco, piercing screams, and melancholy reggae emanating from the darkened rooms of the gallery space. Visitors move uncertainly into the exhibit, as if entering some seaside carnival funhouse, or a bad memory.

Small neon pink letters glow from the centre of a large black wall, reading, simply, “How It Feels”, the title of British artist Tracey Emin’s first exhibition in Latin America, hosted by the Latin American Art Museum of Buenos Aires (MALBA) with the collaboration of the British Council and curated by Philip Larratt-Smith. The show is the only one to date devoted exclusively to her video works, which loop repeatedly in their small rooms like archival footage from Emin’s subconscious.

Emin, born in 1963, is a leading figure of the Young British Artists, a group that includes Damien Hirst and Chris Ofili, whose works are characterised by their diverse mediums (formaldehyde and elephant dung among them), their controversial effrontery towards public sensibility, and, in Emin’s case, an extreme willingness to allow the viewer a glimpse into private, at times uncomfortable, moments. Emin has long delved into her own life as inspiration for her art, taking the most personal of experiences and laying them bare for a sometimes offended, yet helplessly curious, audience.

One of her most famous works, an installation piece titled “My Bed”, consists of her own unmade bed complete with yellowed sheets, empty vodka bottles, packs of cigarettes, stained drawers, and a used condom. Another piece, “Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963-1995”, featured a tent with various names sewn on, ranging from lovers, to family members, to her own aborted children. While critics accuse her of “conning” the public or exploiting her own private life, sympathetic viewers might find, in her work, a desire to connect at the most intimate level, even at the expense of privacy or propriety.

The five videos displayed in “How It Feels”, made between 1995 and 2000, are a bit more subtle yet no less personal than the rest of her body of work (which includes sculpture, painting, photography, fabric-work, literature, prints, and drawings). The first, upon entering the exhibit, “Love is a Strange Thing” (2000), is the most recent and least serious of the five. A humorous encounter with a drooling mastiff pokes fun at the promiscuity suggested by Emin’s earlier works.

“Homage to Edvard Munch and All My Dead Children” (1998) is decidedly darker. The two-minute video plays in the smallest, most cramped of the five rooms, and features the artist nude in the foetal position on a Norwegian dock. The peaceful lapping of waves is interrupted by prolonged, anguished screams. If “How It Feels” can be thought of as a cross-section of Emin’s memories or subconscious, then “Homage” is like an open psychological wound, the screams audible throughout the entire exhibit.

The centrepiece and namesake of the exhibit, “How It Feels” (1996) is the longest of the works on display and features Emin at her most candid. A lengthy and descriptive discussion with an unidentified interviewer on the abortion of her twins at age 18 touches on issues of religion, class, disease, guilt, parenthood, and artistic failure. The reasons for her controversial openness in art are made explicitly clear.

“Why I Never Became a Dancer” (1995), projected on a wall-sized screen at the rear of the exhibit, evokes the nostalgia of a home video with its grainy, washed out images of Emin’s childhood home of Margate. In a calm voice, she describes life in the small coastal town as well as her first sexual encounters with older men. Faded images of seagulls, the ocean, and boardwalk shops are depicted as Emin describes the anger, embarrassment, and disillusionment with small-town life that caused her to eventually flee. The conclusion is tinged with a self-justification that almost seems involuntary.

Finally, “Riding for a Fall” (1998) is the simplest yet most compelling of the videos. The title is taken from the reggae song that provides the soundtrack, in which the singer warns a love interest that her pride is bound to one day bring her low. Emin appears on horseback on a Margate beach, cowboy-hatted, her shirt unbuttoned to reveal a black bra. She looks defiantly, almost sadly at the camera, only occasionally smiling enigmatically beneath the cowboy hat. Her return to Margate as a successful artist is tainted by the underlying sense, suggested by the song’s melancholy lyrics, that hers is a sad story, and will continue to be despite artistic and commercial success.

Godless societies are on the rise but arguments over religion still rage in Léon Ferrari’s provocative collages. The most glaring idiosyncrasies of Christianity are nowhere more evident than around that heavily contested zone – the female body.

At the entrance to his latest exhibition in Buenos Aires’ Malba, an image of Michelangelo’s Christ, plucked from the Sistine chapel, is superimposed upon a Martin Schreiber nude of the pop icon, Madonna. Displaced from its original context, the marmoreally-contoured, imposing religious figure appears to rise, like a black-and-white surrealist still, from the pop icon’s reclining figure.

The blazing drama of late Italian religious paintings is insistently subjected to Ferrari’s potent re-imaginings. His provocative collages combine a distortionary, surrealist angle with a photomontage technique. Insistently foregrounding unlikely encounters between revered religious iconography, biblical quotations and oriental erotica, Ferrari’s ‘re-readings’ debunk any canonical interpretation, cutting religious and political hegemonies down to parodic size.

The exhibition opens with the mid-90s Braille series: this is Ferrari in a more sober, reticent vein. Scintillating dots overlay biblical images of scenes from the Last Judgment and the Expulsion from Eden, highlighting the seeds of cultural indoctrination. Unlike his bold, provocative collages that offer surface critiques of sexual morality, the transparent film of the braille series works by subtly drawing the viewers’ attention to dominant cultural narratives. Biblical translations are placed as side appendages, pointing to the sources of a 2,000 year history of deceit and repression.

From the laconically elegant typeface of his 1960s ‘Cuadros escritos’, Ferrari has insistently sought to foreground the materiality of language, exploring its associative potential. With the braille series, the viewer is silently engaged with the tactile surface bossing: the act of ‘touching’ the historic reproduction implicitly subverts the visual hegemony entrenched in Western iconography. In theory, bringing the viewer into physical contact with the work emancipates them from their role of passive spectatorship. In practice, visitors accustomed to viewing an objet d’art with revered critical distance, approach the work cautiously.

But Ferrari’s work is, nonetheless, compelling purely on the grounds of its wry directness, its wit and pizazz. In the vignettes of the Genesis landscape, ‘I created evil’, a blissfully insouciant Adam and Eve are lectured by a tufted-bearded priest and chased by a stick-wielding angel, casting the nude definitely out of Eden. Each religious figure is relentlessly perforated with Ferrari’s censoring crystals, placing such irrefutable dogmas in skeptical visual parentheses. In ‘The bread of life’, a coy-seeming Christ, his fingertips smeared with blood, heads a table on which plates display his beheaded disciples. Alongside the biblical text reads: “I am the bread of life: He that cometh to me shall never hunger; and he that believeth in me shall never thirst.”

The iridescent braille film over Andrea Mategna’s ‘The Lamentation over the Dead Christ’ points to the failure of Christianity to revere both body and soul, offering its own illusion of the spirit rising out of the recumbent body.

The series moves eastward with a series of erotic Japanese prints of couples in elaborate pornographic poses. The playful irreverence of the works depends on the combination of idea, image and biblical caption, of the like of ‘Flee fornication’ and ‘Who eateth my flesh’. While Man Ray’s black-and-white print ‘Eve’ is placed in dialogue with Jorge Luis Borges’ love poem.

In ‘Thou shalt not covert thy neighbour’s wife’, Gustave Courbet’s starkly realist, libertine ‘The Origin of the World’ is divested of its Musée d’Orsay gilded baroque frame and subjected to Ferrari’s braille censor.

Curator Florence Battiti presents a coherent, intelligent retrospective: the contemptuous works are allowed to seamlessly flow together, evoking the ubiquitous narrative of religious doctrine. The ever-so slight variations on the same theme do run the risk of sliding into gratuitous repetition, but Ferrari’s work is at its most probing when it subjects Christianity’s disdain for the flesh to absurdly comic proportions – quite literally in Utagawa Toyokuni’s gruesomely enlarged ‘love thyself’ prints.

In the second half of the exhibition, images from the mass media are starkly juxtaposed with religious iconography. A gaudy, technicolour pope presides over a Goya-like multi-layered etchings of hell; a cartoonish God looms over the Vatican; while angels bemusedly contemplate a phallic Roman sculpture.

The provocative temporal and cultural transplantation of these vignettes spin out of Ferrari’s central conviction that the “Bible is an anthology of cruelty”. The images point endlessly to the repressive, violent strains encoded in religious practice; and to the political manipulation of cultural signs. Nothing is self-contained in Ferrari’s world; his most successful pieces work on a theatrical principle of dramatic irony.

The apocalyptic scenes of Hiroshima are viewed through the curtains of Piero della Francesca’s ‘La Madonna Del Parto’; the angels of birth are now depicted as minions heralding the launch of weapons of mass destruction. As in Brueghel’s painting in which the major event is eclipsed by the diurnal round, a couple in Jan van Eyck’s ‘Virgin of Chancellor Rolin’ are absorbed in their ostentatious domestic setting, while in the distance a prospect of war and destruction rages on.

The explicit, intransigent works are testament to Ferrari’s relentlessly inventive, irreverent style. Curated in dialogue with Malba’s concurrent exhibition, Bye Bye American Pie, it offers a provocative, searing critique of the mechanics of political and religious imperialism.

“This exhibition contains artistic works with strong content that could offend the sensibility or beliefs of the visitors. If for whatever reason you think you might be affected please do not enter.”

So begins ‘Bye Bye American Pie’, the newest and long-awaited addition to the collection at MALBA. The exhibition, curated by Philip Larratt-Smith, brings together 110 works from seven of the most important North American artists of the last 40 years: Jean-Michel Basquiat, Larry Clark, Nan Goldin, Jenny Holzer, Barbara Kruger, Cady Noland and Paul McCarthy.

The exhibition’s name references the famous Don McLean song ‘American Pie’, which talks of the loss of innocence of the 60s generation, and this is essentially the exhibition’s point of departure.

Following on from the popular ‘Andy Warhol, Mr America’ exhibit by the same curator, the exhibition begins mainly in the 70s and explores each artist’s vision of their country.

Placed individually, the works offer specific, subjective and often shocking views of the United States. Pulled together, the exhibition explores and questions the changing cultural face of the country from the 70s to the present day.

“The work of these artists prophecises the gradual decadence of the United States, not only in its economic and political hegemony, but also its culture and ideals,” explains curator Larratt-Smith.

The exhibition includes several different mediums, including photography, drawings and installations. Choosing to step through the black curtain and into the exhibition places you directly in the middle of Larry Clark’s ‘Tulsa’, a set of 50 black and white photos taken between 1963 and 1971 in Clark’s hometown of Oklahoma.

The documental, cinematographic images focus on the drug abuse and subsequent addiction from which Clark suffered. The proximity between the artist and the subjects of his images brings the spectator extremely close to the characters; it’s a first hand account of a drug underworld.

Without labels, the photos stand alone with no narrative. They leave you to make up your own mind and to develop your own interpretations, which sometimes lends itself to uncomfortable truths; a dead baby in a coffin, a retrospectively pregnant woman shooting up; a bloody wound followed by a crazed man holding a gun in front of the US flag.

The images are beautiful but sordid, exposing a rarely portrayed reality of rural America in the 70s – an underground riddled with crime, death, sex and prostitution.

Although the space is open, each collection is separated by grey walls, which heightens the juxtaposition between the artists and intensifies the specificity of every collection. Following Clark’s violent images for example, comes a set of more sarcastically critical collages by the conceptual artist Barbara Kruger.

The trademark bright red borders and ironic use of hackneyed advertising phrases produce a humorous criticism of both consumerism and Manhattan’s advertising companies, nearly always with a feminist stance. One collage proclaims: “It’s a small world, unless you have to clean it.”

Cady Noland’s installations, on the other hand, attack the ‘American dream’ full frontally, subverting conventional versions of the United States. Next door, Nan Goldin’s intimate images of her friends, or people she names her ‘tribe’, are accompanied by understated captions in the style of Diane Arbus, such as ‘Heart-shaped bruise, NYC’. The captions are so basic and objective that they allow no judgement of the more seedy themes being exposed.

The final section is perhaps what made the warning plaque outside so necessary. Paul McCarthy’s giant, pink and textured installation is a shocker and an epic criticism of ex-US president George W. Bush. ‘Train’ depicts two men with oversized heads and the face of Bush mechanically having sex with bent over pigs. It’s a horribly uncomfortable image, but spectators are lured in by an almost compulsively morbid fascination.

Walking towards the installation prompts the ‘Bush twins’ to stare mechanically in your direction; their heads are equipped with motion sensors and their Terminator-like movements follow you around the room, involving reluctant spectators in the installation.

The piece has generated a certain negativity elsewhere. Critics claim that its blatant shock factor – its overt and unashamed bestiality- in fact lessens its impact. But in this setting, ‘Train’ acts as an almost natural conclusion.

After witnessing the cultural shifts of a nation, after looking at powerful images that bring into question the ideals of the United States, and after some harsh criticism of recent times, such a disgusting finale seems strangely fitting.

While the content, imagery and sounds of the piece may well be off putting, its presence doesn’t necessarily feel unjustified. It’s the dramatic and almost suitable end to a build up of images that point towards the downturn of a culture.

Together, the works making up ‘Bye Bye American Pie’ present a fascinating journey through the political and cultural shifts of the past 40 years in the United States. The exhibition may well be shocking, but it’s a risk worth taking.

The challenge facing curator Mari Carmen Ramírez could hardly have been more daunting — present the life’s work of a formally inventive and dramatically undervalued artist in a way that does justice to both his conceptual heft and his public-spirited drive to engage and transform his viewers. As tens of thousands of visitors to Malba’s new single-artist retrospective,  Carlos Cruz-Diez: El color en el espacio y en el tiempo (Color in Space in Time), have discovered, Ramírez was up to the task, delivering a show that is as instructive as it is accessible, and an awful lot of fun.

A household name in his native Venezuela, Cruz-Diez is far from unknown in the broader art world. His works form part of many of the most celebrated permanent collections on the planet. But as Ramírez notes in her essay, “Lo que está en juego es el color” (The Issue at Stake is Color), Cruz-Diez has never before received a solo exhibition in Latin America, the US, or Europe, and he’s been relegated to second-tier status in the critical literature. For an artist who has managed not only to pull color off the two-dimensional canvas but to bring it fully into the public sphere, Cruz-Diez has not received his due.

Perhaps this neglect can be attributed to Cruz-Diez’s insistence on swimming against the grain of contemporary art-critical expectations. Critics tend to call Cruz-Diez a “ kinetic artist,” a label which itself underscores the artist’s awkward relationship with the critical establishment. While it’s true that many of Cruz-Diez’s works rely on the viewer’s movement to produce their effects, the “kinetic” label suggests an artist who’s primarily interested in motion, when even five minutes with Cruz-Diez’s work makes it clear that interrogating movement is far from his top concern. At heart, Cruz-Diez is really a “color artist” — but for a generation of critics eager to move beyond the aesthetic-transcendence-through-color of abstract expressionists like  Mark Rothko and  Morris Louis, an exhaustive exploration of color isn’t conceptually interesting, and a preoccupation with the viewer’s aesthetic experience probably seems passé. So Cruz-Diez is called “kinetic” — and by that standard, he isn’t very interesting at all.

This wider conceptual turn in art criticism has yielded many insights and encouraged plenty of interesting work, but if it can’t make room for an artist as provocative and broadly engaging as Cruz-Diez, it’s gone too far. To center art on conceptual concerns while deriding interest in aesthetic elevation is to deny all but the best-read and most historically aware viewers a way into the artistic experience and a reason to engage it beyond a superficial glance. It’s a choice, in other words, that leaves a lot of potential viewers behind, reinforcing the (largely but not always) unspoken conviction that the contemporary best art does not and should not have mass appeal.

Cruz-Diez, Ramírez’s retrospective reveals, made a very different choice. As the artist himself explains in one of the show’s excellent wall texts, color isn’t just something that spices up our world; it’s elemental to the way we experience it. Color happens — it makes other things happen — and Cruz-Diez wants to use his art as a prompt to make us all think about it. If this tangible, aesthetically-centered, far-from-elite project explains why El color en el espacio y en el tiempo is Cruz-Diez’s first real retrospective, it also explains why more than 56,000 people have seen the show in its first month, why so many of them linger on Malba’s top floor, and — most remarkably of all — why such a high percentage of the chatter one overhears up there is actually about the art.

Of course, Ramírez deserves a hunk of the credit as well. Ramírez heads the Latin American art department at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, where the Cruz-Diez retrospective was on display for the first half of the year. Her accompanying text is a pleasure to read, but her curatorial skills are perhaps even more evident when she is at her most invisible. The top floor of the show features a largely chronological organization, beginning with Cruz-Diez’s early works before moving on to his fisicromías(“physichromies”), the reflective, additive, and subtractive works for which the artist is best known, and which command a large majority of the exhibition’s wall space. Smaller spaces at the far end of the top floor and downstairs highlight the artist’s public works and reproduce two of his immersive chromographic “environments.” And with the exception of an introductory note and a few isolated curatorial observations, the wall text accompanying the exhibition comes directly from the artist himself.

Allowing Cruz-Diez to speak for himself works well because his pieces are so engaging on their own terms. His first fisicromías are simple assemblages of horizontal wooden slats painted red, green, black, and white, some protruding from father than others to form shapes. Visitors following the exhibition watch the materials, shapes, colors, and effects slowly change, as wood is replaced by PVC, mirrors, and silkscreened aluminum. The immersive environments — one with three sub-rooms, each filled with a different color of filtered light, the other with overlapping, moving bands of color projected onto white walls — are testaments to the power of color to shape our perceptions of space and place. And the public art projects presented downstairs, shown only after the viewer has seen color projected, reflected, and transformed up close in dozens of ways, point to the vastness of Cruz-Diez’s ambition: to revalue color as a central dimension not only of the artistic experience, but of human perception, writ large.

Cruz-Diez’s works aren’t themselves ideal candidates for lengthy prose description. They’re better experienced than recounted; the top floor of Malba awaits. Sure, Cruz-Diez’s vision may not be as philosophically intricate as some of his contemporaries’, but what it lacks in esoteric complexity it more than makes up for in breadth and interactivity. Oh, and — did I mention? — in color.

This review was originally published on Juanele AR

 

 

Contextualising Marta Minujín proves difficult, and would possibly do a disservice to the celebrated artist: her work constantly re-imagines artistic characteristics and looks beyond any confines and rigid barriers. Sprawling across specific categories, Minujín works not only outside the box but seemingly against it.

As one of Argentina’s most prominent contemporary artists she has the city bowing before her as she takes over the top floor of Malba in her latest exhibition. With over 30 years in the making, the long anticipated retrospective promises to be Malba’s biggest show of the year, encapsulating the grand status of Minujín and her diverse variety of work. Crossing boundaries in each and every direction, her work incorporates eccentric ideas, elaborate sculptures, and humorous undertones to her often political motivations.

Meandering through the immaculately organised space, visitors are guided chronologically across three decades of Minujíns’ work. The exhibition’s guest curator, Victoria Noorthoorn, revisited the depths of the archives, carefully scouring Minujíns’ monumental collection to select an array that epitomises the artists’ range of styles. Discussing the most important elements of the work exhibited, Noorthoorn comments that the exhibition showcases not only the elaborate and extravagant work that Minujín creates but the critical thought and realisation of political themes, having used her work to denounce political realities.

Political undercurrents

Attaining the Guggenheim scholarship in 1966 Minujín relocated to New York. This fortunate opportunity inadvertantly enabled her to leave Argentina before the coup d’etat of that year, the newly installed government frequently banning and censoring elaborate performances such as hers.

From such geographical distance Minujíns’ works became further politicised and following Argentina’s return to democracy in 1983 she celebrated with an installation on the grand boulevard of Nueve de Julio. Drawing attention to the censorship imposed during the series of dictatorships, Minujín built ‘The Parthenon of Books’, a collection of previously banned books that were then redistributed to the public. In collaboration with Andy Warhol ‘The Debt’ put the Latin American debt crisis on a stage. Minujín symbolically handed Warhol a shipment of maize in a performance celebrated for its continued political analyses.

Destruction and Participation

At first sight the exhibition appears surprisingly reserved: a series of low reliefs line the walls of the first gallery, appearing like cross sections of industrial machinery sculpted from old iron and steel. Quickly the energy of her work picks up pace and the visitor gains a sense of Minujíns’ transition. Moving from piece to piece photographs show how she physically put herself within her work. Her series of sculptures ’The Destruction’ indirectly maintain this idea as the unoccupied bed in disarray presents the trace of a person. Mattresses seemingly tugged apart and up-ended as though a victim of a quarrel, the works also reflect the recurrent theme of destruction evident in Minujíns’ work, a theme Noorthoorn claims to be one of the most important within the exhibition. Recurrent also in her sculptures exhibited on the Terrace, her works often more literally capture the moment in which they tumble to the ground.

Preoccupied with dismantling her art the theme of destruction cemented itself within her work during the 1960′s and underscores many of her grand interactive installations. One example documented in the exhibition is ‘The James Joyce Tower in Bread’, a public installation that took place in Ireland. “In this way you will participate in one action of instantaneous culture” reads the photograph of her participatory project. Building an enormous frame structure packed with loaves of bread, Minujín lowered the sculpture onto its side, creating a participatory project in which she invited the public to destroy her work by each taking one of the 5,000 loaves. Following the re-evaluation of art in the years that preceded this era, the notion of publicly ‘unmaking’ art was a preoccupation typical of this modernist period. Other performances of the same time paralleled these ideas, the 1966 performance by Raphael Montañez Ortíz reminiscent of this when he encouraged audience members to each burst a paper bag in a concert in London.

In this way Minujín collects together and subsequently pulls apart her work, not precious about her art and it’s significance, refreshingly light hearted in her attitude. This adds an interesting dimension to the exhibition: the show is pulled together from the archives, documenting and reconstructing work while simultaneously engaged with the works inability to exist. Her pieces occupy an ephemeral platform, their original performances retold.

‘The Mattress House’ is emblematic of the importance of participation to her work. As opposed to a work of art, the space is described as a “soft gallery”, constructed from 200 mattresses tied together with ropes, encouraging the audience to bounce within the space and becoming living exhibits.

In comparison a reconstructed performance piece encourages more self-conscious analysis. The audience become voyeurs, witnessing a couple in a stifling bedroom scene as the pair lie in bed the sound of their bickering drowned out by the incessant noise of the television.

Transforming Malba into a space of interaction and participation, the gallery has brought together each of the themes which Minujín herself embeds within her work. Combining the concepts of construction and fragmentation, the exhibition demonstrates the undercurrents of cohesion and dissemination in Minujíns’ work. Any notion of art synonymous with elitism or boredom is destroyed, the show effectively celebrating the elevation and continuation of the last three decades.

As the man at the epicentre of the 60s Pop movement, Andy Warhol shaped how we think about art now. Elevating the everyday into art, he blurred the lines between high and low culture. He created the model of the artist as media persona, mass producer and businessperson, a concept taken forward by contemporary art giants such as Damian Hirst, one of the most successful artists working today.

Yet despite his epoch changing career, Warhol’s real identity and motives remain in question. Was his work simply a celebration of surface and the cult of celebrity or was there something more underneath? A series of portraits of Warhol in drag that greet you at the start of MALBA’s exhibition, ‘Mr America’ seem significant in this respect. Dressed in coarse blonde, brunette and red wigs with shocking crimson lipstick and strangely white skin, his stark stare provokes us to consider what motives might be beyond this crude manipulation of his own identity.

“The Polaroid portraits of Warhol wearing makeup and in drag were deliberately contrived to recall Man Ray’s well-known portraits of Marcel Duchamp dressed as his famous alter ego, Rrose Sélavy, and to position Warhol as his most spectacularly successful descendent,” says the show’s curator Philip Larrat-Smith. Duchamp, like Warhol, was a famous user of ruse, irony and sensationalism in his work.

The show moves on to the screen-prints of Campbells Soup cans which helped launch Warhol’s career at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles in 1962, and finishes up at the voyeuristic filmic portraits taken at The Factory, his centre of artistic production and microcosm of 60s alternative culture, where “rich and poor, famous and marginal, gay and straight met and mingled”.

The aim of the exhibition, according to Larrat-Smith, is to present the works that show: “…the political and popular culture of the United States through Warhol’s eyes.” It abounds with icons of the American dream, from Uncle Sam to the Empire State Building, seductive graphic portraits of Marilyn Monroe using his signature silkscreen process, to celebrations of the mass-produced superabundance that has come to represent the US myth.

Larratt-Smith is keen not to brand Warhol’s work as a straightforward avowal of American ideals, however. “For all that his Pop canvases may appear to uncritically reflect affirmative American values, his work is never without an awareness of the tragedy and entropy that accompanies stardom and self-exposure,” he says. In particular, he considers Warhol’s silkscreen series of disaster victims, criminals and Hollywood stars to represent the dark side, and therefore a critique of, the American dream.

This compelling ‘Death and Disaster’ series features four screen-prints of electric chairs on pink, violet, yellow and grey backgrounds, pictures of most wanted criminals taken from CIA files, as well as grainy images of car crashes and race riots blown up from newspapers. But Warhol’s refusal to acknowledge any meaning beyond the surface denies us any overtly moral reading of these works. Famously deadpan, he adopted an emotionless speaking voice in interviews and once declared: “If you want to know all about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface of my paintings and films and me, and there I am. There’s nothing behind it.”

Warhol’s cultivated facade prompted rumours of a double identity, and debate remains as to whether the cool, unaffected persona hid a deeply sensitive, even religious man. Critics however felt that his exploitation of the strange and troubled characters who came into The Factory, for his work, proved him to be as cool and heartless as his public persona. This cast of eccentrics, drag queens and drug addicts became the subjects of hundreds of works including his ‘screen tests’, shown in the exhibition. In these filmic portraits, taken between 1964-66, he fixed the camera upon his subjects for a period of minutes.

Behind their images of dramatically lit glamour and mystique, were tales of personal tragedy as many inhabitants of the Factory slid into irreversible decline. In particular, Warhol famously looked on as Edie Sedgwick, a beautiful and deeply troubled heiress took a path of drug abuse and self destruction in front of his eyes, dying at the age of 28.

Despite accusations of heartlessness, others see Warhol as representing a martyr like figure who used his work to highlight a symbolic and universal plight, and put up a troubling mirror upon American culture. A show in Paris’s Grand Palais in 2009, inspired by Warhol’s Catholic-Orthodox upbringing, even likens his portraits to religious icons, and puts them in terms of parable-telling and religious ideas. In his later years, the curators point out, Warhol moved beyond the film stars and political icons and turned to religious imagery, including works such as 112 screen-prints of Christ and a series of screen-printed images of the last-supper.

With his religious references, dramatic disasters and portraits in drag Warhol seemed to demand that the viewer look beyond the visual seduction of the image, and yet his insistence on remaining passive and superficial forces us to do the work of interpretation. In terms of Warhol’s attitude to the American Dream, Larrat-Smith sees the drag images as a pointer towards his true intentions: “From Hollywood to TV footage of the man on the moon, America has constructed an idealised image of its own hegemony,” he says, asking: “Is the American dream which Warhol embodied in his life and expressed in his art really just a series of images of an empire in drag?”

The exhibition runs until 22nd February at Malba, Av. Figueroa Alcorta 3415. Open Wednesday-Monday, 12-8pm. For more information, visit www.malba.org.ar

A man sits on an ordinary chair, eyes closed, levitating a potato chip between his hands.

This is the latest large-scale work by Cecilia Skalkowicz, and the fifth project from Malba’s ‘Intervention’ programme, which features specially designed works by local artists. Blown up to fill a wall, this absurd, giant snapshot hits you as you ascend the escalator of the gallery.

Cecilia brings a new playful energy to Malba. Her past work includes ‘Sarita’, a gigantic print in which a girl, caught off guard, buries her head in a pillow. In similar humour ‘Los Dos Vincents’, exhibited in the ArteBA art fair, shows Cecilia’s friend Vincent posing by a Vincent Van Gogh painting. Moments spent messing about with your friends are made giant and monumental.

The Argentina Independent went to meet Cecilia.

What materials do you like working with?

Images, magazines, prints, designs, everything! In my work I am moving away from traditional art forms and disciplines to try something new…to extend the limits of art. I see it as a world of endless possibility, a world without limits.

I often work with my boyfriend, Gaston Perisca, and others. I like working with others, it’s how ideas grow. You might start with something and then chat it through with someone and then they have an idea and it gets taken to a new place, it becomes something different.

How did you come up with the concept for ‘Todo es Posible’?

The curator at Malba, Inés Katzenstein, invited me to do a photo installation. She had seen my other work, and that’s where the process began. Then we worked out the space I would use – Malba doesn’t have much open wall space you see. Then I worked at images and sent in various proposals.

The idea with the two pictures is that you are presented with two snapshots, (dos golpes), that you can then view in sequence.

I wanted to work with time, with the idea of moving images, changing scenes, life moving on in a very everyday, ordinary way. A little like the posters you see on walls on the streets, that change everyday. Most people don’t notice, but all the time these things are changing as life moves on. I like working with layers – exploring the different facets to every moment in life, every little snapshot. One moment, one picture, can mean a hundred different things to different people.

What do you want people to feel when they look at the installation?

(Long pause.) I want it to be different for every person. There isn’t one message that I am trying to get across. I want people to feel that, like the title ‘anything is possible’ for each person, anything can happen. I want each person to respond in their own way. But I guess the idea, demonstrated in quite a humorous way, is that, if you try hard enough, anything can happen – if you concentrate hard enough you can make a potato chip levitate!

Is this what Mariano Mayer (who writes the blurb for Cecilia’s installation) means when he mentions the scattered memory?

Yes. I like the idea of layers of meaning…hundreds of different opinions at the same time. It’s like a test, an experiment to see what is there, asking questions, and seeing how many questions can be asked. My art isn’t really about giving an answer to anything – it is just allowing people to open their minds, to question. I too am questioning.

Space is also clearly important to you with this piece

Yes, I like working with different but generally large spaces. I wanted to use this wall in Malba because you don’t see it when you first walk in. You have to walk round and look up. It’s a little bit awkward and uncomfortable.

And size too? I notice that your photos are usually of something quite ordinary, and yet it is extremely large in scale.

I like to work on these exaggerated scales. Making something that is a tiny insignificant moment, huge, important and oversized. It’s a bit of a game really. I like to create a tension between the casual nature of the photo, the low resolution of it, and the then huge size of the picture. It’s the incongruity of it all that I like.

I like to make intimate things into something huge: to change the scale and show people that ordinary daily life is important, it matters.

I was once asked to exhibit at an exhibition that was called ‘Diamonds’, that focused on precious objects. I focused instead on pebbles, and had pieces of paper with pebbles on them that people could take away. I wanted to make these ordinary stones precious, and contradict the idea of the priceless diamond.

You use a very low resolution for this photograph. Is this part of wanting your art to appear easy?

Yes, exactly. I want people to see that it’s something that anyone could do – for example, you don’t need a great camera or a studio to do what I have done. With basic items you can create art…and then question whether or not it is art! I work with images and abstract ideas, and the low resolution gives the picture that feel – like it’s not quite so clearly defined. I think that it gives it more potency.

What does your work bring to Malba?

A freshness, I think. I don’t know.

Of course, those who love art and contemporary art are the ones who will understand it the most. But I want this to be accessible to everyone. Everyone should be able to get something from seeing this.

I see you are involved in music (she is in a band) and writing (she hands me two copies of ‘The Script’, a short independent publication that she and Gaston have written about art and literature). How do you feel your photography works without the presence of these two disciplines?

Music and words are still present, because everyone looking at the photo will be thinking about something they have read or have a song going round their head. Their thoughts and images affect and join in with their experience of looking at the installation.

So, the individual becomes part of the installation?

Yes, they make it change and become something else. That’s the sort of idea that I am testing out.

What is most important to you in terms of your art?

That my friends like it. I always have them check it, see if they like it.

There’s a quote by Robert Nickas on your My Space page which says ‘art is there to change what we hope to gain from art’. What do think about that in terms of your work?

I want to create art that doesn’t look like art…art that breaks boundaries, goes out of the norms that we are used to.

There are two quotations by Andy Warhol, one in which he famously said ‘making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art’. The other simply says ‘the world fascinates me’. How do you find the balance between doing what you want to do and making it sell?

(Giggling a little) Well, clearly my work is not commercial, at the moment. No, I don’t tend to think about the money when I am creating something. That limits things.

How do you see things developing in the future? Do you have plans for your art?

No, not in that sense. There’s no big goal I am heading towards. It is a process – art – and that’s the part I enjoy the most; the process of creating.

Why?

Because of the possibilities. I’m asking questions, not providing answers.

 

‘Todo es Posible’ (Anything is Possible) consists of two images which will be shown one after the other. The first is currently installed and can be viewed until 26th November 2007. The second photograph will be presented on 28th November 2007. For more information, visit www.malba.org.ar