Art|Basel|Miami Beach Art|Basel|Conversations Transcriptsdocshare04.docshare.tips/files/7033/70330071.pdf · 2017-02-02 · In conversation | Hans ulrich obrist john baldessari Hans

Art|Basel|Miami BeachArt|Basel|ConversationsTranscripts

Art|Basel|Miami BeachArt|Basel|ConversationsTranscripts

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sPeAkers | Hans ulricH obrist joHn baldessari

art basel conversations | Thursday, December 7, 2006 | Art Guest Lounge, Miami Beach Convention Center

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In conversation | Hans ulrich obrist john baldessari

Hans ulrich obrist: This is an ongoing series of conversations which has actually already been recorded in a series of books for several years. The idea is to create a lasting dialogue around a topic which unfolds and develops over three or four years. In this sense, the Conversations contribute the production of new knowledge. There are different strands; one is Public/Private which looks at the Future of the Museum in different parts of the world. We have recently looked at the future of the museum in China, last year here in Miami we will discuss the future of the American museum, in Basel of the Middle East, and now this year the future of the museum in Latin America. Also, our strand includes a very thorough ongoing investigation of the role of collecting and philan-thropy in the development and the support of the arts. We are also very pleased to be holding a Conversation on Memory and Collecting this year. On Saturday we will meet Artists Who Build, so we’ll have conversations about how artists are moving closer to architecture. This is the key to these ongoing Conversations programs. There will also be interviews with artists and architects who have had a legendary influence on younger generations. Eric Hobsbaum, the great English historian, remarked to me in an interview that in the context of studying amnesia he thinks it is very interesting to consider the idea of Conversations as a purpose against forgetting. I think that Hobsbaum’s astute remark perfectly illustrates the idea behind Conversations with Legends. You might remember that in December last year we actually honored Robert Rauschenberg, with a Conversation with novelist Alain Robbe Grillet and artist James Rosenquist. Last summer in Basel Tino Sehgal and Joseph Kosuth engaged in a live debate on the directions in which they are going, and further we were honored by the pres-ence of Ettore Sottsass and many other icons, sharing moments with us that take on a particular meaning when in the context of an art fair.

Welcome | samuel Keller

I would like to start by thanking the board of the Art Basel Conversations who have put together this year’s panel: Hans Ulrich Obrist, James Rondeau, Isabella Mora, and Maria Finders. We have been doing a book into which all the transcripts of the talks go.

This morning we are going to be meeting one of the great artists of our time. We are very pleased that John Baldessari is with us today. When I met John, we were in Miami a couple of years ago and I invited him to the show. He said that for artists going to art fairs is like children going into their parents’ bedroom whilst they are having sex.

So I hope its going to be a very sexy morning. I’m handing over to Hans Ulrich Obrist. Enjoy.

Hans ulrich obrist Co-director of Exhibitions and Programs, Director of International Projects, Serpentine Gallery, London, UKHans Ulrich Obrist was born in Zurich in May 1968. He joined the Serpentine Gallery as Co-director of Exhibitions and Programmes and Director of Interna-tional Projects in April 2006. Prior to this he was Curator of the Musée d’Art mod-erne de la Ville de Paris since 2000, as well as curator of museum in progress, Vien-na, from 1993 to 2000. He has curated over 150 exhibitions internationally since 1991, including do it, Take Me, I’m Yours (Serpentine Gallery), Cities on the Move, Live/Life, Nuit Blanche, 1st Berlin Bien-nale, Manifesta 1, and more recently Uncertain States of America, 1st and 2nd Moscow Biennial, and 2nd Guangzhou Triennial (Canton China). Among other projects for Fall 2007, Hans Ulrich Obrist will co-curate the Lyon Biennale. Hans Ulrich Obrist has also co-curated many monographic shows at Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris, such as Olafur Eliasson, Philippe Parreno, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Anri Sala, Steve McQueen, and Doug Aitken. He has been the founding Chairman of the Art Basel Conversations Board since 2002.

john baldessariArtist, San Diego – CA, USAJohn Baldessari was born in National City, California. He attended San Diego State University and did post-graduate work at Otis Art Institute and Chouinard Art Institute and UC Berkeley. He taught at the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia until 1990 and is currently teaching at UCLA. His art has been fea-tured in more than 120 solo exhibitions in the US and Europe and in over 300 group exhibitions. His projects include artist books, videos, films, billboards, and public works. His awards include the Governors Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Visual Arts in Cali-fornia and the Oscar Kokoschka Prize from Austria. Current projects include: solo shows in New York and Europe, books, films, and an upcoming com-mission from the Deutsche Guggenheim, Berlin.


So today it is a great pleasure and privilege to welcome John Baldessari here to our Conversa-tions that will add to our palimpsest of ideas.John Baldessari’s influence on artists of our generation is extraordinary; his permanent reinvention for many decades is on going. I was actually thinking that while we were here doing a retrospective interview that it would be interest-ing to start with your current projects. I was hoping you could tell us a little bit about these extraordinary ears-and-nose series which actu-ally have been ongoing for the last couple of months and the last two shows.

john baldessari: Certainly, I had a retrospective a few years back in Indiana. The works actually started in the mid sixties; one of them was a nose floating in the sky and this idea held up for me. At the time I had a friend who owned a billboard com-pany that would give me there surplus material and I would go through it with them and of course I was getting the chopped-up billboards, rather than the totality. I was only getting parts of old ones and it always surprised me to see what would show up on these panels, and luckily one of them was a nose and there was a beard too and so that is where I started. I used them as a basis for a series of paint-ings. Over the years I tend to block out certain features of an image which I feel would normally be important information like a face or something like that. So one would have the anxiety of not knowing what has been blocked or omitted.

OK, so let’s fast-forward. Let’s start with the new series of work in Lisbon. Thinking about that nose, I thought I would like to push it a little bit further, and after getting a reputation for blocking out faces I decided I should do that in a different way, and I would just show a little bit of the nose or an ear or an ear and a nose. Thinking about art his-tory it seems that lips and eyeballs were getting a lot of attention – there is some history about body parts. But I can’t find much about ears and noses in literature as you might know in Vogel and certain others. I tried to pick out why and I guess they just don’t separate too well, I mean floating

eyeballs and lips seems to work OK but not noses and ears, and the only person that detached a nose was with a nose that’s left the figure and it began to have a life of its own, so I guess that’s pretty much what I was doing; freeing up the nose and ear. Of course you can have all the sexual connota-tions of the nose and the ear and I thought that was interesting, so I decided to play with the nose-and-ear combination. The series’ title was Noses Ears and Etc, and Etc being things that it could include which could be a domestic scene or a scene with violence.

The works exist on more than what we call a single plane. I think I was getting a bit boring just having a single plane so I began to elevate elements of the work above the surface or below the surface so you would have three surface readings and then also I did prints that are neither photos nor paint-ings but that are located somewhere in between. There is, therefore, a different reflectivity; there is the reflectivity of the painting and then the reflec-tivity of the photograph, so it’s given me a nice playing field to have fun in. I don’t know when this series will be over, it may be over now, but I have two newer pieces in the Fair here now that are not in a rectangle or a square they are shaped and that’s where we are.

Hans ulrich obrist: You mentioned actually these shaped canvases, or you refer to them as shaped canvases or shaped fabrics, so that’s your newest work?

john baldessari: Yes, that’s where my head is right now but I’ll have to think about these new works and I’ll have to see if I want to go on with them.

Hans ulrich obrist: It would be very interesting to talk about the cursory exhibition which I saw at the Deutsches Guggenheim in Berlin which somehow precedes this talk. Perhaps you could talk about that?

john baldessari: Yes, OK. In Berlin they asked me to do a project and I pretty much followed the plan

of the museum completely architecturally includ-ing the columns and the windows. I had very tall works that went from floor to ceiling and that would somehow fill in for possibly missing col-umns and large rectangle works that would be surrogates for the windows; in those works ma-terial was blocked out or hidden and it was always orange that was painted, and then this began to play with going above the surface and going below the surface. This was not the first time I was play-ing around with this.

The first time was in Zurich where I started to use that device. With the saturated color and these forms that are above or below the surface it seems like I borrowed segments from past art like from Matisse.

Hans ulrich obrist: You were also saying that the whole series of Noses Ears and Etc, and Etc will con-tinue and there is an up-and-coming project about Adam and Eve and Eden; can you talk about that?

john baldessari: Yes, partly because it is not a se-lection of works but it is a project that deals with a space. It is entitled Adam and Eve (with Ear and Nose) Plus Serpent. On the far wall from floor to ceiling will be a black-and-white photograph of a missing head and shoulders and you see two hands holding a snake (the serpent) that would require a wall as it is a very tall space. The work will be paint-ed on the wall and that section of the painted pro-file would be the ear and the nose and would be elevated or sunk into the wall and the rest of the piece will be paint, describing hair, and faces, and so on. You have to look at it like the early King Kong where King Kong is looking up at the skyscraper’s window, at the people inside being terrorized by these huge fingers outside of the window. It’s not done yet but that’s the plan.

Hans ulrich obrist: Before we move on to any questions about your more recent work, I had one more question about another show in London which started with a lot of color, could you maybe talk about that?

john baldessari: Yes, OK. Well, the body of the series of work that we’ve seen about noses and ears started out with wanting to get back to language again. I said many times that I try to give equal weight to a word or image that are of equal impor-tance to me. So the first works were Duplex, on the one side you would read the word and on the other you would see the image. The image would be a close-up of a person’s face but a with a particular kind of expression of a face, and I have been trying to figure out what that person’s expression might be, angry, or happy, or sad, and I would put the corresponding word on the other side. The whole series was called Prima Facie which is the Latin term meaning “first evidence,” the idea being that you don’t know what anybody is thinking when they have an expression on their face; you could be looking at somebody in a restaurant who you think looks really upset, but it might just be bad pizza, who knows?

I like trying to match up a word with a facial expression. And then I have to consider what word would be appropriate and the acronyms and syn-onyms that would be matching, also with the color and this over the series of five exhibitions. In the last one in London I began to drop the expression completely and just use pure color, and the words I would choose that were used to name paints, so if I was to ask you what paint would be used for “hap-pily ever after” I don’t know what you would say, but there is a paint named “happily ever after” and again it would be a dipping format with the word on one side and the color on the other. In this case they would be actual paintings and on a portion of the canvas would be that color paint, so you would have the “happily ever after color.” I am not going to tell you what color it is so we shall leave it at that.

Hans ulrich obrist: Having talked a lot about this incredible new series, at the moment there is so much invention in your art, obviously you are com-pleting all types of exhibitions and a number of retrospectives. I was wondering about the notion of retrospective considering that your art has evolved and changed over the decades and always


remains committed to that 1971 performance where you said “I will not make any more boring art.” I was wondering, in terms of that permanent reinvention, what the notion of retrospective means, and if you can talk about the typology of this sort of exhibition. Obviously I am particu-larly curious about your forthcoming Bonn experiment where you are working with the notion of retrospect.

john baldessari: Yes, retrospectives are useful to an artist, or at least for me, in that you get to see the art of your life, the works that you have done. I remember reading years ago that the American artist (Robert) Motherwell rented a huge space and he lined up all of his work so he could work in the context and retrospective of work, and I remember thinking how fantastic that was. That’s a practical benefit of being an artist, you get to see what you’ve done and see how your work has evolved, and no matter, in my case I keep getting bored with what I do and keep trying to reinvent myself, and you realize that you can’t escape. I can always see a thread going through everything, but that’s useful, as it helps you to see what you should do next.

You mentioned an exhibition in Bonn; it will be presented in two parts in the museum, it won’t be retrospective but it will be chronological. And going through my work they realized I had done a lot of work about music, and decided to do some-thing involving the theme of music, so that will be retrospective in that respect. And then I am doing an edition of six sculptures – I find that such a scary word and prefer to call them objects. Further, since Beethoven was born in Bonn I decided to deal with that, as the exhibition is going to be about music. So the objects are going to be quite tall, and there will be a very realistic ear on the wall and coming out of the ear will be a replica of Beethoven’s ear trumpet; there will be six of these. It will be interactive and you can have a dialogue with Beethoven and ask him whatever you like. For the duration of your dialogue with Beethoven what would come back would be one of his late works; after his death.

Hans ulrich obrist: I was wondering if now, in 2006, you have any unrealized projects. Maybe projects which were too big to be realized?

john baldessari: Well yes, actually, there is a project I wanted to do and document, where I would have a wall and every day a painter would come in and paint the wall a different color, and so that turned out to be too costly at the time. And then on the wall there would be a little framed black-and-white photograph of the pyramids and this would be the idea of timelessness and then all of this business going on in the background. We’ll see ...

Hans ulrich obrist: Are there any kind of projects that are more architectural? In much of your recent work you have used 2D, 3D, or those things you call “objects.” I was wondering if you had any kind of projects that deal with this.

john baldessari: There was a competition in Los Angeles for a state building. And part of the com-mission was that the architect would have to be involved with an artist from the beginning as opposed to having the building built and then having the art plugged in. And the architect had chosen me to work with and I really enjoyed it. Calling this man an architect is just not enough, if you see all the things he is interested in, he is really fantastic, it was the first time I had worked with an architect on a project and I was really sorry that it didn’t happen in the end. He was very generous and wanted me to have equal credit, it’s a shame it didn’t happen. But I would like to do it again because certain things emerge that would not have happened when working on your own.

Hans ulrich obrist: But what about Frank Gehry?

john baldessari: I bought two houses, and he had agreed to do one of them, but this was before he became an architectural world star. Gehry said he would do my house and we had great conversa-tions about that and planning out the space, but

unfortunately it didn’t happen because it was in the early nineties when the art bubble burst and I just didn’t have enough money to do it so it just had to get shelved. But we had great talks and I always remember he was very direct, and he said “John, we are about the same age so we have to get up and pee at night so you want the bathroom real close” and he said “basically, John, you want a place where you can get laid.”

Hans ulrich obrist: One of the things I would like to ask you about is the shows you have been curat-ing and there are two exhibitions. One is the magnetic exhibition where you were involved in the display feature of the show with installations (Hirshorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Ways of Seeing: John Baldessari Explores the Collection). I was most curious to know how is the display feature for the Magritte show (Ni Por Esas/Not Even So)? Sign painting?

john baldessari: I was asked if I would design the exhibit and they have never had an artist do this before. So I said to myself I am never going to get a chance like this again. And so essentially I just collaborated with a dead artist, we could not com-municate so I had to guess. In a way I understood it in my mind, it is that metaphorically, we were walking a tightrope; not intruding too much, and that on the other side I have blank white walls and I was getting nervous thinking about what to do, and so I had to strike a balance. Essentially what I did was recycle an idea I was going to use in my last project and I realized that this entire exhibition space is carpeted with a carpet made of clouds and the sky so you are walking on the sky. And then you look up at the ceiling; it is covered with an aerial view of the L.A. freeway. So that’s the major feature, there is a big window, and they asked me if I want-ed to cover it up or use it. Most of the time I think it is covered up, it looks out over a boulevard in Los Angeles, and I said no, I want to use it but I don’t want to see Los Angeles, I want to see New York at night. So there is a huge transparency of New York at night, and what is so wonderful about it is that

it is like a double exposure, so you see very hazily New York-like – we do hear cars going by – and palm trees, so its like a composite of New York and L.A. and night and day. I can go on and on.

Hans ulrich obrist: One of the things I was curious about was how Magritte has been an inspiration to you (Los Angeles County Museum, Los Angeles, C.A. Exhibition Design: Magritte and Contempo-rary Art: The Treachery of Images).

john baldessari: One of the main things is the use of language and the use of signifier and signified. This theory by Saussure has attracted me for years too. One of the objectives of the exhibition was to make Magritte visible again as he had been hidden in present times and yet you find his influences in magazines, design, fashion ... I consider myself to be a Matisse-an rather than a Picasso-an, I am much more interested in color than I am in con-struction. I am very interested in Goya who is a hero of mine and they are part of my tool box.

I was interested in (Paul) Craig Roberts and he came to L.A. to see my work. One of his early purchases was a piece of mine. Over the years, we became friends and he has a huge collection of my work now. He has foundations too.

Hans ulrich obrist: I was wondering what effect an art fair has on an artist like yourself? Sam Keller already quoted your metaphor about children walking in on their parents having sex. But what is it really like?

john baldessari: For me it is a love-hate relation-ship, and I often lie to myself. I say to myself that I am not here for the art; I’m here for a foundation meeting, and as long as I am here I should look at the fair. I realize that I love looking at art, and I think the quality of art is getting better and better and that is fantastic, but I hate the social aspect of art fairs; it’s just too much for me.

Hans ulrich obrist: Maybe one last question about money: Damien Hurst said, “You don’t chase

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money with art; you’ve got to chase art with money” and I was wondering what your take is on that?

john baldessari: Well I was lucky, for my genera-tion of artists money wasn’t an issue. I suppose if someone waved a whole load of bank notes at me and said “here, sell out here,” I would have said I don’t know. I don’t think I’m any better than any other person. So basically money wasn’t an issue. If you were able to pursue what you were doing just because you were obsessed about doing it –and I think at one point you have to be obsessed because it is very easy to get bogged down in a standard life with a home, wife, and kids ... In this case the only hours you had for your art were at the end of the day when you were dying of fatigue. And then in about the late seventies or early eighties I noticed money came into the picture, and I remember speaking to a critic after a show who was really upset because she said she wanted to talk about all the art on show but what the readers wanted to know about were the prices. And that was really the beginning. It had started. So now you have collectors waiting to buy your artwork before you have even graduated. I think the fallacy is that you equate the art with the amount of money you pay for it and I think that is the completely wrong way to look at it.

Hans ulrich obrist: One last question; how do you see the future?

john baldessari: I just had a conversation with a friend of mine who is very astute and this person said that in the future art there will be a paradigm shift and will continue to be this way ... which is kind of depressing. But then, on the other hand, there is lots of money to fuel and support art. What is depressing is that art becomes just another com-modity.

Hans ulrich obrist: Many, many thanks to John Baldessari.

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TrAnsCripT | ART COLLECTIONS MEMOrY AnD COLLECTinGWhat are the challenges of a collection that spans a long period of time?How does collecting reflect personal history and build collective memory?How important is archiving and conservation for private collections?What are the checks and balances implicit in collecting cultural heritage?What do you hope will be the legacy you will leave to future generations?

spEAkErs | IRMA BRAMAN JORDI PUJOL SILVIO PEARLSTEIN

Hosts | RICHARD FLOOD JULIA PEYTON-JONES

Art Basel Conversations | Friday, December 8, 2006 | Art Guest Lounge, Miami Beach Convention Center

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Richard FloodChief Curator, New Museum of Contem-porary Art; New York City, NY, USARichard Flood joined the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York in September 2005. Previously he was, for many years, deputy director and chief curator of the Walker Art Center, Min-neapolis, Minnesota. In that capacity, he has curated Sigmar Polke: Illumina-tion, Brilliant! New Art from London, no place (like home), Robert Gober: Sculpture + Drawing, Matthew Barney, Crewmaster 2: The Drones’s Exposition, and, with Frances Morris of Tate Modern, London he has co-curated Zero to Infinity: Arte Povera 1962–1972. He is currently work-ing on America is Waiting: The Art of Cultural Inquiry, 1979–1989, scheduled for exhibition in summer 2006. He has written extensively on contemporary art and film for Artforum, Frieze, and Parkett. He has taught at the Rhode Island School of Design, the School of Visual Arts, New York City, and is currently a lecturer at the National College of Art and Design, Dublin, and the Royal College of Art, London. [www.newmuseum.org]

Julia Peyton-JonesOBE Director, Serpentine Gallery, London, UKJulia Peyton-Jones studied painting at the Royal College of Art, London, and worked as a practicing artist in London and a lecturer in fine art at Edinburgh College of Art. She moved to the Hayward Gallery in 1988 as curator of exhibitions. In 1991 she became Director of the Serpentine Gallery where she has been responsible for both commissioning and showcasing ground-breaking exhibi-tion, architecture, education, and public programs. Her tenure at the Serpentine could be divided broadly into four chap-ters beginning with the exhibitions she has curated, including Robert Gober, Agnes Martin, Man Ray, and Jean-Michel Basquiat (in consultation with Richard D. Marshall), and the Exhibition Program she conceived and developed, including Richard Serra: Drawings (1992); Gordon Matta-Clark (1993); Some Went Mad, Some Ran Away … (curated by Damien Hirst, 1994); Chris Ofili; and Louise Bourgeois: Recent Work (1998); Andreas Gursky: Pho-tographs 1994–1998; William Kentridge; Bridget Riley: Paintings from the 1960s and 70s (1999); Felix Gonzalez-Torres; Brice Marden (2000); Rachel Whiteread; Dan Flavin; Doug Aitken (2001); Gilbert & George: The Dirty Words Pictures (2002); Cindy Sherman, John Currin (2003); Cy Twombly, Gabriel Orozco (2004); Andreas Slominski; Oliver Payne & Nick Relph (2005); Ellsworth Kelly and Thomas Demand (2006). During the second chap-ter of her Directorship, under the patron-age of Diana, Princess of Wales, she over-saw the renovation of the Serpentine, from 1996 to 1998, which reopened with Piero Manzoni after a series of commis-sions in the Gallery’s grounds by Richard Deacon, Anya Gallaccio, and Tadashi Kawamata. In 2000, the third significant development in her tenure resulted in her concept for the annual architecture commission, unique worldwide, which represents an opportunity for an interna-tionally acclaimed architect to create a more experimental structure in the Unit-ed Kingdom, where none of those invited has ever built before. Those selected previously are Zaha Hadid (2000), Daniel Libeskind with Arup (2001), Toyo Ito with Arup (2002), Oscar Niemeyer (2003), MVRDV (2004, unrealized), Alvaro Siza

and Eduardo Souto de Moura with Cecil Balmond–Arup (2005), and Rem Kool-haas and Cecil Balmond, with Arup (2006). In the same year and the fourth term as Director, she invited Hans Ulrich Obrist to join the Serpentine Gallery as joint Co-Director of Exhibitions and Programs, and Director of International Projects, to realize their twelve-month research project for the Serpentine Gal-lery to devise programs globally over the next three years. China Power Station: Part 1, at Battersea Power Station, which she co-curated with Hans Ulrich Obrist and Gunnar Kvaran, Director, Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, Oslo, is the first to be realized in 2006. Visitor numbers have increased to 750,000 people per year. She serves on numerous committees and panels and was made an Honorary Fellow of the Royal College of Art (RCA) in 1997. In 2003 she was made both an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) and appointed an Officer of the British Empire (OBE). [www.serpentinegallery.org]

Welcome | Richard Flood

Welcome everybody; it’s great to have you all here. Some of you I know, some I’m meeting for the first time. The topic today is Memory and Collecting, as Maria stated, and I think we’re really lucky that we have three incredibly different and incredibly knowledgeable collectors and I think that each of them has a very special contribution to make to the panel. The one thing I want to emphasize is that we are not only talking about collections of contemporary art. We’re talking about collections that in the case of Mr. Pujol, date back to the six-teenth century and in the case of Mr. Pearlstein, include major works from Surrealism and Dada right up to this very moment in time with major and very ambitious installations among them. As Maria said, his collection is now being honored at an incredible exhibition at the Maison Rouge in Paris. Irma Braman and her husband Norman have put together an incredibly distinguished col-lection (can I mention a particular work?) which begins in 1901 with a painting that all of us have seen without really being able to see, which is Picasso’s Boy Leading a Horse, and goes right up to this very moment in time with work by artists such as Maurizio Catalan. So there is a great reservoir of knowledge here.

I want to kick off by trying to simply locate the conversation in a very human place and that is to just note that one of the greatest things about being a human being is that we are able to have memories. It’s something that really differentiates us from every other species. Animals remember, if remember is the word? They carry with them smells and physical responses but we can actually go back to the cradle and if we don’t have the memo-ry we have the luxury of creating the memory and once we create the memory then the memory grows with us and takes on significance. When you apply memory to art, something transformative begins to happen. I could quote a lyric from a horrible ballad by Barbara Streisand about memo-ries lighting a corner of our minds or I could quote a passage from Swann’s Way, a much more elo-

Welcome | Maria Finders

It is nice to see you all here so early in the morning, after having been out in Miami all night. Today we start the Conversations; yesterday we had Premiere with John Baldessari which was a very intimate conversation between John and Hans Ulrich Obrist. Today we are very excited to have a panel of collectors who are going to be talking about the topic of Memory and Collecting which is mostly the topic of collecting itself. We are lucky enough to have Julia Peyton-Jones, who is the director of the Serpentine Gallery in London; beside her is Jordi Pujol who is a Spanish collector with a very longtime history of family collecting. Irma Braman is on our Host Committee and has one of the most beautiful collections in Miami, and Silvio Pearl-stein who is a French collector of art from all over the world and has a magnificent collection which you can see at the Maison Rouge in Paris, if you are lucky enough to go there. Lastly, Richard Flood, Chief Curator of the New Museum of Contempo-rary Art in New York, who has been honoring us for the past years with his presence and his wit and his faith in our projects and great patience. Please take it away, thank you.


quent receptacle for the purpose and the pleasure of memory. But in this particular context, what I think is really important is when you think back about the family photos that you treasure, the ring that you inherit, the doll that you have kept from your childhood. This is a very eloquent demonstra-tion of what memory as possessions are and again how those memories are going to enable one’s lifetime and one’s relationship with the legacy that you build as you go through life. So, let me turn it over to Julia and we’ll proceed.

Introduction | Julia Peyton-Jones

Thank you very much, Richard, and thank you very much Art Basel for this very kind invitation. It’s a pleasure to be here on this platform with all of you.

There are many kinds of collections today and our guests this morning represent three immense-ly distinguished collections and of course, Miami is known throughout the world for the collections you have here. It is interesting what John Baldes-sari was talking about yesterday with Hans Ulrich Obrist, about the different kinds of artist collec-tions for example, those of Picasso and Matisse. Also the trade between artists that takes place, which results in collections being made; very dif-ferent collections, perhaps from the ones made by those participating in this panel and for very dif-ferent reasons. Also, artists have a way of support-ing their younger colleagues through collecting their work as a means of making their lives finan-cially easier. Collecting has also been very much a part of our thinking at the Serpentine Gallery; we are showing a collection by the artist Damien Hirst and his very interesting take on the subject ... If I may I’d just like to read a short passage from what he has said about memory and forming his own artistic memory in terms of collecting. He said that his taste is rooted in childhood, which mirrors what Richard was talking about, and, to quote him, “I think the earliest collecting were the nature tables we had at school and everybody used to bring things they had found and put them on the nature table, birds eggs, and pine cones, shells, and stuff like that, I used to love it.” He then goes on to talk about something that for him was a seminal moment. His next-door neighbor who was like a bagman and did “bring home objects every-day,” he eventually disappeared leaving Hirst free to go into his house where he found a bewildering array of objects that included a display of 200 tubes of toothpaste.” Hirst said that seeing Barns’s house (the man who owned it) affected him more than anything else in his artistic development and it seemed to underpin his collecting philosophy.

So that idea of how collectors come to be collectors and how collections are made is really something of incredible breadth. The artist as collector is only one example of what impels and drives a passion and an obsession for many people. Indeed it could be argued that the word “collector” is one of the most glamorous terms in the art world today; a term that is claimed, adopted, awarded, or earned. There is no limit to anybody who wants to be a collector, either of toothpaste tubes or indeed the very greatest artworks from any cen-tury including this moment in time. To bring it down to the context in hand, we are here today at an art fair, a place which provokes for artists a love-hate relationship. But for collectors, I imagine a love-love relationship. Collectors are now people of enormous influence, they create foundations which become important as lending institutions, and they become patrons to young artists of every generation, through the purchase of works of arts, and are very often significant founders of major public museums. Collectors are creating also their own museums and public institution, staging ex-hibitions, and publishing significant and impor-tant catalogues contributing to scholarship in the field. They provide a legacy through the support of academic programs and through the gifts of works of arts. The great collections of the world would be nothing without these gifts.

Artists themselves make their own collections and museums and indeed anyone can make their own exhibitions, exhibitions which have been staged in all sorts of places from the kitchen to a public space outside either an institution or a home. There is nothing to say that a living room can’t be made in to a museum and in that sense anyone can collect. However for today, we are talk-ing to people who have made very particular kinds of collections and it is a real privilege to hear about their experiences in front of an audience who are obviously fascinated by the subject and glad to be here so thank you very much indeed. Richard?

In Conversation | Irma Braman Jordi Pujol Silvio Perlstein

Hosts | Richard Flood Julia Peyton-Jones

Richard Flood: I would like to start by asking a very obvious question which has to do with the context we are in immediately. With you, what purpose does an art fair serve? Is it something that you look forward to? Is it something where you think, oh this is a wonderful opportunity to look for some-thing specific or this is a wonderful wild garden where I can go and find a new flower that I have never seen before and create a bouquet that I’ve never had at my home before?

Irma, can I start with you?

Irma Braman: Good morning everyone, Yes, I think I am the right one to start because when you ask me that question I can answer by saying this is wonderful for Miami Beach. We are happy you are all here, I sound like a Chamber of Commerce but we are simple collectors.

It has given us a sense of purpose and the mu-seums are thriving and the people are collecting and Miami Beach has a new face, all because of art. So that’s the civic part of it. Another part of collecting has to do with meeting new friends with so much in common, just seeing people through-out the years, going to art fairs, having dinners, seeing a few dealers that have always been very nice to us, and on special occasions who we work with constantly or we maybe only see twice a year. We as a couple stay in Miami very much, we don’t travel to any art fairs other than Art Basel in Basel. For us it’s a time to see what is on the market. An art fair, personally, is better when you are able to buy something; it’s always more fun, like going shopping and finding a special pair of shoes instead of coming home without the shoes, and in this case they can be Andy Warhol shoes. But it accomplices everything, it’s friendship, it’s education, it’s going to museums, and seeing old friends.


Silvio Pearlstein: I should explain that I come to Miami, as I don’t live in Miami, and it’s very nice to be here. I go to a few fairs, not all of them, to meet people and sometimes you see new works of art, lately not so often, it’s more rare. But still, Miami and Basel are for me the most interesting fairs and I think it is where you get to know different people, connoisseurs and people who are starting, which is very nice.

Julia Peyton-Jones: Jordi, I think that one of the most interesting things about your collection is that it is both a historic collection as well as bring-ing the collection up right up to date. So when you come to a fair that is modern and contemporary art, from your perspective as a historical collector as well as a contemporary collector, how does it seem to you?

Jordi Pujol: When one observes the work of an Old Master, one has the advantage of the historical perspective and the filter of the time, so to recog-nize a good work turns out to be very easy. The opposite happens with contemporary art; it attracts and has to be understood within the context of the present, but it is difficult to really judge the full extent of its value. That is why it is interesting to visit fairs such as Basel, trying to discover artists that I don’t know, and to obtain information about them and their work, and if possible to obtain a good piece.

Julia Peyton-Jones: Do you find now that you buy more contemporary work or do you find that there is a balance between the historical and the con-temporary?

Jordi Pujol: It is difficult to obtain a great Old Mas-ter work, because of scarcity and price. In contem-porary art, this same difficulty is beginning to take root, and as I said before, it’s difficult to recognize who the best artist of the moment will be without any distance and also because sometimes artists are getting too much media attention and it is hard to sift through what is real and what is just media.

So, in my opinion, it is also important, in many cases, to stay away from fashionable names and not to acquire art as just one more consumer good. In my collection I try, in any case, to balance between classical and contemporary art

Richard Flood: Irma, I would be curious to find out about ... what we talked about early where the collection is really a collaboration between you and Norman and I see two lone wolves either side of you. Could you talk about how that collabora-tion works and what it means in the relationship because I think that this is a very big issue for a lot of people?

Irma Braman: I could start with a joke, but I won’t because you don’t know me well enough!

Richard Flood: Maybe you could finish with a joke!

Irma Braman: Maybe I’ll finish with the joke. It’s a little more difficult, I imagine. I have never done this alone. We started collecting together just after we were married, probably about eighteen years or twenty years ago. We decided that if either of us didn’t like a piece, we would not own it. There is enough art out there that everybody can enjoy together what they are buying. We do it together; but if Norman would be collecting alone, he would have a larger minimal collection (ours is very, very small). He would have a larger Minimal collection and I would have a larger Pop collection. But we have more Pop than Minimal if that means any-thing to you! We do have to agree, at some point we have to agree because we do not have a warehouse and we live with all our work on the premises and living with it everyday instead of just visiting it sometimes makes a difference.

Julia Peyton-Jones: It’s incredibly interesting, the thing about the amassing of works of art and this very different idea of living with art, which is of course so important to the private collector as opposed to the public institution. So I think, Jordi,

you have similar, very good arrangements with the works that you own: If you can’t hang them, you then lend them to friends.

Jordi Pujol: As I told you before, I do not feel like a collector, since I do not try to construct a coherent narrative in my collection. For me to buy art is more the fulfillment of a need to live, surrounded by art, and when I don’t find a suitable place for a certain piece I prefer to leave it to relatives and friends and to continue my relationship with the work when I visit them.

Richard Flood: I’d like to check in with you after this as to how I become your friend; I’m thinking of something around the sixteenth century!

Twelve years ago it was one of my great pleasures to be able to write invoices from a commercial gal-lery and during my ten years as an art dealer, one of my great pleasures was invoicing Silvio for some material. I never saw you come into the gallery with another human being and we would have very long conversations about the nature of the work that we were talking about and one of the great things about working with someone like Silvio is that the conversation is good enough and you are not itch-ing to get your invoice back. Would you go insane if you had somebody along with you whilst you were on the hunt? Would you ever go around with somebody else if you were looking around seri-ously for things?

Silvio Pearlstein: Once in a while ... but I go very fast. When I come to New York I see that there are so many galleries and if you are just by yourself, you will see only five galleries. I like to see every-thing in a few days because I don’t live in Manhat-tan and so it’s much better to have a guide and visit the galleries you like. Sometimes you stay longer, sometimes you go very fast. I think it’s better to be alone when visiting galleries. If you are visiting special works you can stay longer. Every-body wants to see something different and I think it’s better to be alone when looking at interesting exhibitions.

Julia Peyton-Jones: One of the things that is so topical now is the “model,” so to speak, the collect-ing model, which can involve curators and a tremendous amount of infrastructure. What we are hearing you describe is something which can be a joint or solo activity. But what really fascinates me is that to be a collector of great distinction, the knowledge that is required to be able to put together such a collection is simply extraordinary. So it would be interesting to hear, perhaps Silvio, about how you continue to absorb and amass that knowledge. How does that work?

Silvio Pearlstein: I like reading very much and I am full of knowledge. I have a lot of books and catalogues, magazines, and newspapers and I am always late because they arrive and you buy so much. I like to travel because when I travel I think I’ll have a rest and be able to finish half the things that I need to read. It is very different to obtain knowledge about everything. You follow your own instincts. I don’t think it is a question of taste, Richard, you asked me why I don’t go to galleries with somebody. It’s difficult as everybody has their own area of interest from photography to contem-porary art. After a few years you start to know what you want.

Richard Flood: I’m just trying to think about being a collector and when you’re a collector how many people are coming at you all the time? I guess there are dealers, artists themselves, there are always museums, auctioneers, advisors, and then other collectors and I have probably left a few categories out! Who do you find out of that grouping of people to be the most insistent in your life?

Irma Braman: Insistent, in what way?

Richard Flood: Out of that group that I just men-tioned, who is attempting to get to you the most?

Irma Braman: Well, lately, the people that are attempting to get to us are the people that we want to speak with. The museums do not try to “get to


us” as far as getting out work. They’ll call of course or write a letter and hope that we’ll put something in their exhibition. Once the collections are known, you get a call from a good dealer saying I have something that you might like, and if I’d like you to see it, can you fly in? Can I send you a transpar-ency? Sometimes we don’t want it and then some-times it becomes a great favor. I think I see Mary Boone here and she once called us with a piece that we now treasure and Friedman did it once and people get to know the collection and the quality of what we like. I really don’t think that they are “getting at us,” of course they are trying to sell the art but I really appreciate the phone calls.

Richard Flood: Good. You are saying everything right in this environment, it’s amazing!

Julia Peyton-Jones: One of the most fascinating questions for me is why do you collect? Here’s a question to all three of you. What pushes you? What really drives you? Not only to have collections but to keep collecting. It’s a general question. Irma maybe?

Irma Braman: Well, as a female, the hunt is not where I am. It’s about owning it. The hunt is not anything that turns me on or something that I want to do. The owning and living with the art and not trying to run after it is what I like. We try not to run after anything. If we see it, and it fits, and it’s rea-sonable and everything else that goes with it, then that’s fine, I mean we just don’t chase after a piece. With us it’s never the chase, it’s the owning.

Richard Flood: Silvio, when you go out and you are looking, are you looking with your current collec-tion with you in your head? Do you try to expand and fill in gaps because you see a thematic asso-ciation with something that you already own? As I said to you earlier, reading about the exhibition at the Maison Rouge, it goes down so many different avenues. There are so many possibilities for the curators working for the show. So are you always buying with the collection in mind?

Silvio Pearlstein: It is true that I am always trying to acquire something. When I started it was much easier because it was not really “collecting.” I am talking about the sixties and the seventies; it was not “collecting.” OK, it always existed but at that time the artists were friendlier and it was easier to get to know them. At that time, there were few fairs, few art magazines ... You could meet the artist and acquiring art was a lot easier than today. It was like a big family; you often met up in the galleries. In each city there were very few galleries and every-body who was starting at that time. There were no auctions like today where people are obsessed with prices. Because today you can find out every-thing about the price or who is going to buy a piece, and at that time, like I said, it was a big family and if you wanted to acquire art, you could. Things like Pop Art and Minimal Art were very new and differ-ent and so it was easier to acquire. Today however, money is very important it has become very diffi-cult to collect, especially for young collectors. I ask myself how young collectors can start a collection today. I think it’s almost impossible, even for my children. Even the work of young artists can be very expensive.

Julia Peyton-Jones: What do you think accounts for this incredible appetite for collecting, both to own work and to collect, which is now an epi-demic!

Silvio Pearlstein: Everything today is different, it is difficult to collect. Unfortunately, you have to be very rich if you want to start with a nice collection. Yes, you have a few nice galleries, like where I went yesterday, which is the Aqua Fair and which is affordable. But still, when I started, you didn’t know you were preparing a collection. You were curious, you met artists, and if you liked some-thing you could buy art simply.

Jordi Pujol: In my opinion, if one gets away from fashionable names one can construct an interest-ing contemporary collection investing a very rea-sonable amount of money. I said to Julia yesterday

that there is a high percentage of vanity in collect-ing, and I am not an exception here. I can feel just as proud of great work that I have acquired for under 3,000 dollars, as of another that I have spent much more on and might be worth a great deal more today.

When I buy a work, the first place it ends up is in my new apartment, but often then will be loaned out to a museum or a friend’s house, or is stored in a warehouse.

Richard Flood: This is interesting with your col-lection. Jordi has a lot of contemporary Spanish art, particularly young Spanish artists who reflect your time, your place, and your generation.

Jordi Pujol: When I began to collect, at seventeen and because of the proximity, I bought work of Spanish artists of my generation or those slightly older. Later on, because I began traveling and visiting galleries and international art fairs, I began to internationalize my collection, but never really stopped buying work from my country.

Richard Flood: I think 3,000 dollars is the new 1,200 dollars! Drawings used to start at less! Have any of you worked with an advisor of any sort? How did that work out?

Irma Braman: Yes, it was perfect. We don’t live in New York, we don’t live in Paris, and we don’t travel that much to either city and we want some eyes there for us. We want to get a call that says, “I was in Chelsea, SoHo etc. I saw something that you might like why don’t you fly up and see it.” Or, “I’m in London, you’re in Barcelona, you should come and see something here, you might like it.” Our advisor never chooses our art, he just helps find it, and helps us see if it is fairly priced. We are not looking to steal art but we do want something that is fair. Has it been damaged? Will you check it? We have a lot of sculpture that needs a lot of care. So he’ll make sure that people come who are going to help with the conservation. For a variety of reasons it works very, very well.

Julia Peyton-Jones: The question about conserva-tion is interesting particularly for collections of a significant size. How does it work to keep collec-tions in good shape but also how does it affect deal-ing with all the loans and requests. Do you have somebody working regularly with you to deal with the administrative side as well as to nurture the collection?

Irma Braman: We don’t have a curator.

Julia Peyton-Jones: I’m thinking in terms of con-servation.

Irma Braman: In terms of conservation we have someone that comes once a year and if he needs to twice a year but that’s for outdoor sculptures. Inside we don’t have any kind of conservational schedule.

Julia Peyton-Jones: I imagine that you must get many loan requests. Is it something that is a bur-den to you?

Irma Braman: Unfortunately, as long as we are talking about price, the more expensive the same art becomes, the less we as collectors want to send it out. We would like to send out things that people want, but we aren’t doing that anymore, so in fact the process has become much simpler!

Julia Peyton-Jones: For any non-collecting insti-tutions, like the one I work for, it’s a real issue which I am conscious of when we ask private col-lectors to lend work to us. The owner has to facili-tate these loans. It’s time-consuming and I imag-ine quite annoying, I imagine, also, that at some point you need to have help with this, is that true for you, Jordi?

Jordi Pujol: I cannot say very much about this be-cause I am not very orderly with my collection, to the point that I still have pictures in houses of my ex-wife. I never deny loaning to an exhibition and this probably helps me to review my collection.


Also my assistant helps me keep track of loans, but I should probably try to improve my systems.

Julia Peyton-Jones: So it is not just in your family?

Jordi Pujol: Not really.

Richard Flood: One of the things that are implicit in these collections is the success stories. It’s almost like you are starting out with a pool of actors where they are all at the same point in their career and then one suddenly goes to Broadway or to Hollywood and becomes a galactic superstar. In terms of collections this can happen to pieces of art where all of a sudden, not because of anything you’ve done as a collector but perhaps because of the way the world has respired around the work of a particular artist, everything changes, such as in-credible valuation of the work. Does this make the work change in your eyes? Do you say “whoa” I don’t even know what to think of this anymore? Or do you love it all the same?

Irma Braman: I love it more!

Richard Flood: Let’s ask the opposite question. How about the mistakes, do you feel that you have made any mistakes in your collecting?

Silvio Pearlstein: What do you mean by mis-takes? Julia Peyton-Jones: So the answer is NO!

Richard Flood: Do you ever walk through the house and think “yuck”?

Silvio Pearlstein: You buy things that you like. Contrary to Mrs. Braman, I have never had an ad-visor and I always travel from Europe to South America to the U.S. I am a very curious person and I like to find out everything myself. I have assis-tants for loans to museums. But otherwise I do everything myself. What is a mistake? When a piece of art is not featured in a big catalogue?

When a piece of art doesn’t become a huge star? I have artists that are not known which I like as much as artists which have become very expen-sive. I don’t think that a reason to give value to something you bought is to give only the market value. Sometimes, I notice, for example, what was less expensive say ten years ago is suddenly start-ing to increase in value. I do not follow the prices very much but I know that in Europe there are many artists that in this country you hadn’t heard about and now slowly you start to see them in shows.

Julia Peyton-Jones: The other side of the question about mistakes is about falling in and out of love with works of art. This is a reflection about how you look at things. I remember I used to feel pas-sionately about one artist and then about five years later I changed my mind and moved on; this is probably a reason why I don’t collect! Do you feel that there are some works that are passionately important to you at one moment and then maybe not really when they come back after being away on loan, or do you feel more or less the same about the collection and view it as a stable love affair with the work? Jordi?

Jordi Pujol: I think that some of the artists that I have been passionate about, I am still passionate about. Maybe some of them are not well known. I have made mistakes with certain artists and have decided to sell the work after a few years.

Richard Flood: In the museum world, when you are removing something from a collection for whatever reason it’s called “deaccessioning.” And is a rather polite word which means to remove something with a rather brutal cut, the art is all of a sudden ripped apart from it’s family and sent off to an orphanage where heaven knows what hap-pens to it. In real life it’s called selling the work. Have any of you sold work after you’ve bought it? Do you have transformations going on within the collection where at a certain point you say, “Let’s move this back in to the world.”

Irma Braman: We do not choose to store our art in warehouses at this point and we have x amount of walls. If we have for instance six big walls and seven pieces and if we know that the seventh piece is never going to be hung up there again, we would sell it.

It’s all about the wall space with us. If we find something we love and we like it much better than something we own, we would sell that piece so we could put up the piece that we care more about. This is not a mistake; we still like the piece but we don’t want to keep art in the closet.

Richard Flood: You could open the closet.

Irma Braman: And then come out of the closet!!

Julia Peyton-Jones: Silvio, what about you, how does that work? You live in many different coun-tries too.

Silvio Pearlstein: You cannot say that a collector never sells something as it wouldn’t be true; if a particular artist doesn’t sell well, you might want something better from the same artist.

Usually when I buy something, I keep it. I am very badly organized with insurance, I have a lot of damages. Should I give the work to museums on loan? Yes, often. Sometimes there are insurance problems. Let us consider the question of selling, I think it’s normal that sometimes you change you mind, or for reasons of space, or to improve the collection, you sell. But for me selling is not the most important thing, I like to keep things. If I have bought something it’s because I like it.

Richard Flood: When we were talking earlier, Julia was reminiscing about having been in Venice and being invited on to the Bramans’ yacht. One thing that caught her eye most particularly was a Magritte in front of a television screen. This leads me to ask you all, how important is the nature of installation in your environment? The way it’s arranged and placed? It’s relationship with one room to another wall.

Irma Braman: I pass; you said we could pass, right?

Richard Flood: OK. Silvio, same question about installation; is it something that you spend a lot of time with?

Silvio Pearlstein: In the beginning, yes, especial-ly when you move from one space to another. Like I said earlier, I do almost everything myself. I have people helping me, but I don’t like to hire curators, I like to do most things on my own. It is not a prob-lem for me. You are welcome to come and see where I live and what I have done.

Jordi Pujol: I do it myself as well. I try to find a good balance between masters and contemporary.

Irma Braman: My husband does it. He’s very good and I am not. I absolutely can’t place a piece and when he’s finished it looks fabulous.

Julia Peyton-Jones: In fact, one of the things about installing, as you all know, is that you need to be incredibly skilled. With art, it is an ability to make one thing look sublime and in other situations it doesn’t work at all. You were talking very much, Jordi, about this relationship. How do you place contemporary and historical pieces together?

Jordi Pujol: As I said before, I do it myself and I find immediately the right place for every piece. The balance between masters and contemporary allows me to create a better reading and a better dialogue, albeit subjective, among the works.

It is really interesting to see a work out of its con-text; for example the Old Masters out of a nine-teenth-century museum or a seventeenth-century palace. Recently I visited an exhibition that went from classical Spanish painting to contemporary works from the twentieth century at the Guggen-heim in New York. It was very interesting to see the dialogue between the works, and also the contrast between the classical pieces and the modern architecture of the Guggenheim, with its white


walls; it gave the work another dimension and allowed the visitor new way of viewing or reading the work.

Julia Peyton-Jones: In terms of legacy; in ten, twenty, thirty years or more?

Silvio Pearlstein: Thank you!

Julia Peyton-Jones: No when we’re all meeting back here!

What would be the ambition for your collection? Would you like it displayed in a museum or dis-played in your own house? How do you feel about it?

Silvio Pearlstein: I am going to Brazil now, to a little town by the sea with nobody about and I am going to be able to think. Maybe if I see you in a few months I’ll be able to tell you. For now I have no idea what I should do.

Julia Peyton-Jones: This idea of legacy is so com-pelling. These objects that you own become very dear to you and what you want to do with these objects is very important.

Richard Flood: Do you think about a publication one day? There is something very touching about seeing work come together on pages, in a book.

Irma Braman: We’ve discussed it but we still haven’t done it. I don’t know if we will. In terms of legacy, we have time to think about it and we still don’t know what we’re going to do. It is a difficult question.

Richard Flood: It sounds like the world is getting much closer to us over these walls. I think we have time for four questions. If there is any more time, we’ll take more. The one thing I ask is that people ask questions not make statements!

Audience: Have you thought about the opportu-nity to help a museum by giving the museum your

collection today instead of waiting until your death? That is the first part of my question, the second part of my question is: have you thought about the idea of auctioning off the collection after your death and splitting it up?

Irma Braman: We give art. I’ve chaired a museum in Miami for the last ten years We’ve given to many museums. We’ve given art to other museums in different countries and states.

Audience: One of the things that I’m concerned about is protecting my art. Do you have an emer-gency plans for any disasters for your art?

All the speakers: No.

Richard Flood: No emergency plans here!

Audience: What advice would you give to young collectors starting out?

Irma Braman: Make friends with your local mu-seum, they will help you enormously. That is what the curator is there for, not just to show the art but to help new collectors.

I also advise that you go to as many galleries as you can, you don’t need to buy, we used to haunt the galleries. I don’t think we bought anything for a year. Right now it’s a difficult moment in the art world because everybody is very busy, but when the art world slows down, the dealers have a lot more time and everyone will be there to help.

Jordi Pujol: A friend of mine wanted to start col-lecting and I said the same thing; Visit a lot of gal-leries, go to art fairs, go to museums, read a lot, and don’t buy anything for years!

Richard Flood: Something I can suggest are draw-ings because they tend to be much less expensive than other pieces of work, but also you can really feel the artist’s hand on the paper. It is like the artist has just left the room. Drawings are a great place to start because you can also be looking at

architects’ drawings, drawings by sculptors, con-ceptual artists as well as representational and abstract artists. It’s a good area to begin with; you can really find your taste and what you like.

Audience: How important is the relationship with the artist? I have the feeling that it is less and less important.

Irma Braman: I have very few relationships with artists, almost none.

Silvio Pearlstein: I think today it is very difficult to have a relation with an artist because its difficult to even meet them; if you go to the fairs or openings of galleries, most of the time you don’t see the artist. The artist stays home and has a crew of people working for him and sends them to speak with the collectors. When I started, however, I knew all the artists personally and that was a very nice relation-ship. This is also a good way to start collecting. The artist is a very good person because they always know more than you and can give you good advice.

Jordi Pujol: I have very few relations with artists, but I have good artists friends from my youth.

Audience: In terms of developing your tastes, who has been the most influential? Is it the galleries, museums, art fairs, collectors who are setting the trends in art or do you have your own tastes that aren’t being dictated by magazines, galleries, and fashion?

Jordi Pujol: Besides the Old Masters, at the begin-ning I was attracted by the artists who were reflect-ing experiences and personal emotions or were trying to reflect the values and the big questions of humanity. Today I find myself more interested in a generation of artists that are trying to com-municate with people about real problems and important issues in the world.

Audience: Could you address one of the questions about personal history and collective memory; I

thought that was a really interesting idea to address?

Richard Flood: I think we were there at the begin-ning. It is a big question and it’s where we began.

Audience: What do you do when wall space be-comes full?

Richard Flood: I think it’s obvious that Mr. Pujol and Mr. Pearlstein just keep on going!!

Audience: What influence do you try to have on an artist that you collect?

Irma Braman: None at all.

Audience: When did you start collecting? I would like to know how early in life you started loving art.

Silvio Pearlstein: I used to travel a lot when I was twenty or twenty-five; I acquired a lot through art-ists who were friends and were also my age. Many artists would come to Europe, at that time you would have a very few galleries, and artists came to Düsseldorf, Antwerp, Cologne, Holland, and France. It was a good opportunity to acquire art as they were at prices that every body could afford. But now I don’t have the same relationship with artists because I am not the same age. Maybe one day things can go back to how they were in my day? Photography remains cheaper than paintings and prices are more reasonable.

Julia Peyton-Jones: I think what is so intriguing about this conversation is that next to us is an array of art waiting to be collected, and this is why we are all here, to look and to enjoy. The dealers have cre-ated these extraordinary stands in order to sell art. So hearing from these three distinguished collec-tors about their own collecting history in this con-text is a real pleasure. Let me thank you on behalf of Richard and I for your generosity and for allow-ing us to hear about your collection, collecting skills, and your experiences. Thank you again.

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TRANSCRIPT | PUBLIC/PRIVATETHE FUTURE OF THE MUSEUM:FOCUS LATIN AMERICAWhat will be the role of the local museum in a global society?How do art institutions in Latin America handle issues of securityand conservation? How do they collaborate with artist, galleries, and other museums? How are institutions funded, and is this sustainable? What is the political, social, or educational role of a museum?

SPEAKERS | JENNIFER ALLORAMARCELO ARAUJOGUILLERMO CALZADILLACARLOS CRUZ-DIEZLIDIA LEÓNSEBASTIAN LOPEZNATALIA MAJLUFRAMIRO MARTINEZLUIS PÉREZ-ORAMASMARCELO PACHECOVIRGINIA PÉREZ-RATTONPEDRO REYESJOSÉ IGNACIO ROCA

Hosts | IVO COSTA MESQUITAHANS ULRICH OBRIST

Art Basel Conversations | | Saturday, December 9, 2006 | Art Guest Lounge, Miami Beach Convention Center

120 | ABC | ABMB06 | Public/Private ABC | ABMB06 | Public/Private | 121

Jennifer allora, Guillermo calzadillaArtists; Puerto RicoJennifer Allora (born 1974, USA) and Guillermo Calzadilla (born 1971, Cuba) have been working together since 1995. They live and work in Puerto Rico. Fre-quently mining the spaces between sculpture, performance, video, architec-ture, and social/public intervention, their inventive use of materials and strong sense of the aesthetic and social encom-pass art historical references and create a new artistic vocabulary within a psycho-logical, political, and social context. Allora & Calzadilla’s work has been re-cently included in group shows such as Day for Night: 2006 Whitney Biennial, New York (2006); 51st International Art Exhibition: Venice Biennale (2005); Com-mon Wealth, Tate Modern, London (2003); How Latitudes Become Forms: Art in a Global Age, the Walker Art Center, Min-neapolis (2003); and Ailleurs, ici, Musee D’Art Moderne de La Ville de Paris/Arc Au Couvent Des Cordeliers (2004). They have had recent solo shows at the Palais de Tokyo, Paris 2006); S.M.A.K. Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst, Ghent, Belgium (2006); Dallas Museum of Art (2006); ICA Boston (2004); and Walker Arts Center, Minneapolis (2004).

Marcelo Mattos araujo Director Pinacoteca do Estado;São Paulo, BrazilMarcelo Araujo is a Museum Curator and the Director of the Pinacoteca do Estado;. São Paulo since 2002. Before his he was the Director of Museu Lasar Segall, also in São Paulo. He as collabo-rated with a number of museums in Brazil and holes a PHD in Museum Stud-ies from the Faculty of Architecture and Urban Studies, at the University of Sao Paulo, and now lectures there in Urban Studies, and specializes in Museum Studies for Archeological and Ethno-graphic museums.

carlos cruz-DiezAritst; Paris, FranceBorn in Caracas in 1923, has been living in Paris since 1960. Studie fine arts in Caracas from 1940 to 1945. Professior of Applied History at the Fine Arts Academy in Caracas from 1953 to 1955. Lived in Barcelona and several times visited Paris in 1955/56. In 1957 returns to Venezuela and founds Estudio de Artes Visuales. From 1958 to 1960 co-director and pro-fessor of painting at the Fine Arts Acad-emy in Caracas. Professor of typography and graphic design at the School of Jour-nalism in the Central Venezuelan Uni-versity at Caracas. Teaches cinema tech-niques at the École Supérieure des Beaux Arts, Université d’Enseignement et de Recherches. Paris 1. Member of the jury for the diplomas at the same school from 1973 to 1980. Tenured pro-fessor at Institut International d’Études Avancées, IDEA, and director of the art department in Caracas from 1986 to 1993. In 1997 he becomes president for life and council member of the Museo de la Estampa y del Diseño Carlos Cruz-Diez in Caracas.Solo curator of the following expositions, among others: Museo de Bellas Artes. Caracas (1955); Museum am Ostwall. Dortmund (1968); Galerie Denise René, Paris (1969), XXXV Biennale di Venezia, Pavilion of Venezuela (1970).

lidia leónDirector Centro Cultural Eduardo León Jimenes; Santo Domingo, República DominicanaLidia León Cabral, holds a degree in ar-chitecture. In 1989 she worked at the Cerveceria Nacional Dominicana (National Dominican Brewery) as Supervisor in the Civil Works Department. She later worked at Editorial Padilla, Printing Company, in 1996 as Manager of Prepress Digital Tech-nology Area. Towards 1999, she became a member of the board of trustees of HENLA, developing an active role partici-pation with the second and third genera-tion of León family members. Since the very beginning of Eduardo León Jimenes Cultural Center (Centro León) she has acted as a consultant and coordinator in different areas, including the planning and construction of the building.Lidia was curator and coordinator of Centro León’s first temporary exhibition: Huella y Memoria, Un siglo en el Camino Nacional 1903-2003, which presented the León Jimenes family history and the evolution of the corporation as well. From her position, she also served as a link between Centro León, Grupo León Jimenes, the León Asensio family and the team responsible for the design, production and installation of exhibitions. Lidia has also served as Centro León’s Manager of Interinstitutional Relations and currently serves as General Director of Eduardo León Jimenes Foundation.Recently, she has been actively engaged in the coordination of musical events among which stands out her recent col-laboration with Francisco Casanova, internationally known Dominican tenor.

Sebastian lopezArtistic Director of Casa Daros; Rio de Janeiro, BrazilSebastian Lopez is an art historian. He is currently the Artistic Director of Casa Daros in Rio de Janeiro, a new space for contemporary art of Daros Latinamerica. He was the Director of the Gate Founda-tion, Amsterdam, and the Curator of the 2004 Shanghai Biennale. He has taught at the Art History Institutes of Amsterdam and Leiden University, starting in the former the first Dutch Seminars on Latin-American Art History and Theory of the Modern and Contemporary Times. He has extensible written on European, Asian, and Latin American contemporary art. He is the editor of On Post-Modernism, and Talking Back to the Media, among others. His most recent book is A Short History of Dutch Video Art. He is a con-tributor to Third Text, London; Lápiz, Madrid; art.es, Madrid; Kunstforum and Neue Bildende Kunst, Berlin, Revue Noire, Paris and Arte Iberica, Lisbon. He is a member of the Editorial Board of Yishu. Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art, Taipei. He has curated since the early eighties numerous exhibitions introducing the work of Latin America, African, and Asian artists. His lasted exhibition is The Hours. Visual Arts of Contemporary Latin America, that open at the Irish Museum of Mod-ern Art, Dublin, last year, and is traveling next year, among others, to the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, Australia.

Natalia MajlufDirector, Museo de Arte de Lima; PeruNatalia Majluf has been Director of the Museo de Arte de Lima, in Peru, since 2001. Prior to assuming this position, she was Head Curator of the same institution from 1995 until 2001. During her tenure at the museum she initiated the photo-graphy collection, and was responsible for expanding the collections of Peruvian twentieth-century and contemporary art. With Jorge Villacorta she curated the sur-vey exhibition Documentos: Tres décadas de fotografía en el Perú, 1960–1990. She has published extensively on Peruvian art of the nineteenth and twentieth centu-ries. She is the author of Escultura y espa-cio público. Lima, 1850–1879 (1994), Fran-cisco Laso. Aguinaldo para las señoras del Perú y otros escritos (1854–1869) (2003), and co-author with Luis Eduardo Wuf-farden of the exhibition catalogues Elena Izcue: El arte precolombino en la vida mod-erna (1999), La recuperación de la memoria. El primer siglo de la fotografía. Perú, 1842–1942 (2001), among others. In 1998 she received the Inter-American Develop-ment Bank and Andrew W. Mellon Foun-dation Visiting Senior Research Fellow-ship, Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts in Washington D.C. to under-take research on Latin American costum-brismo. In 2005 she edited Los Incas, reyes del Perú, published by the Banco de Crédi-to del Perú and in 2006 curated the exhibi-tion Reproducing Nations: Types and Cos-tumes in Asia and Latin America, ca. 1800 –1860 for the Americas Society in New York. The same year, she was awarded a Getty Curatorial Research Fellowship and in 2006 she was named Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Latin American Studies at Cambridge University. She forms part of the editorial committee of the project Documents of 20th-century Latin American and Latino Art: A Digital Archive and Publi-cations Project, which is being developed by the International Center for the Art of the Americas, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Majluf received her M.A. in art history from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University (1990) and a Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin (1995).


ramiro Martinez Director, Museo Tamayo Arte Contem-poráneo; Mexico City, MexicoBorn in San Antonio, Texas 1956, Ramiro Martínez is the Director since 2002 of the Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporáneo in México City. His studies include Business Administration at the Instituto Tecno-lógico de Monterrey and Saint Mary’s University in San Antonio, Texas and Wharton Applied Research Center.For ten years he worked at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Monterrey (MARCO) as registrar and head of exhibi-tions. His various projects there include El hechizo de Oaxaca; Julio Galán; Leonora Carrington; Louise Bourgeois, La elegancia de la ironía; Isamu Noguchi y la figura; Inside Out, New Chinese Art; Pierre Alechinsky; Jesús Rafael Soto; David Salle, 1990-2000; Manuel Álvarez Bravo and Henri Cartier-Bresson among others.At the Museo Tamayo he has been respon-sible for the presentation of exhibitions such as Douglas Gordon; Thomas Ruff. Identificaciones; Lawrence Weiner. Covered by Clouds; Luc Tuymans; Mira Schendel; Peter Fischli and David Weiss; and Lisa Yuskavage.

luis pérez-OramasAdjunct Curator, Department of Drawings, The Museum of Modern Art; New York, USALuis Pérez-Oramas was born in 1960 in Caracas, Venezuela, and currently lives and works in New York. A writer, a poet, and an art historian, Pérez-Oramas re-ceived his Ph.D. under the direction of Louis Marin and Huber Damisch at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris, France, in 1994. Pérez- Oramas was a Professor of Art History at the Université de Haute Bretagne-Rennes 2, Rennes, France (1987–91); at the École Régionale Superieure des Beaux Arts de Nantes, France (1992–94); and at the Instituto de Estudios Superiores de Artes Plásticas Armando Reverón, Caracas, Venezuela (1995–2002). He was a member of the Board of Directors of the National Gallery of Art of Venezuela (1995–2001) and Curator of the Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros, Caracas (1995–2002). Since 2002, he is Adjunct Curator in the Department of Drawings at The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Among the recent exhibitions he has curated or co-curated are Geometric Abstraction: Latin American Art from the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Collection, Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University Art Museum (2001); MoMA at El Museo: Latin American and Caribbean Art from the Collection of The Museum of Modern Art, El Museo del Barrio, New York (2004); Ven-ezuelan Contemporary Art from the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Collection, 1990–2004, Museo Soto, Ciudad Bolívar (2004); The Rhythm of Color: Alejandro Otero and Wyl-lis de Castro, Two Modern Masters in the Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros, The Aspen Institute, Colorado (2006); and Transforming Chronologies: An Atlas of Drawings, The Museum of Modern Art, New York (2006). Currently, Pérez-Oramas is collaborating with John Elderfield in the upcoming retrospective of Venezuelan artist Armando Reverón at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, scheduled for February 2007. Pérez-Oramas is the sole author of six books of art and political criticism and five books based on his poetry.

virginia pérez-rattonDirector, TEOR/éTica; San José, Costa RicaArtist, cultural agent, and independent curator since 1992. Directs TEOR/éTica since 1999, a non-profit project in Costa Rica for the research, exhibition, collect-ing, and promotion of contemporary art practices of the Central American/Carib-bean basin and for the establishment of links with the international arena. First Director of the Contemporary Art and Design Museum (MADC), San Jose (1994–1998). Created the National Board of Curators in 1994 in Costa Rica, and the Regional Center for Art Research at the MADC in 1995 under the auspices of HIVOS and directed by Luis Fernando Quirós. Responsible for the draft and approval in Congress of the law that con-solidated legally the museum as an offi-cial but de-centralized institution of the Culture Ministry of Costa Rica in 1998, and defined exhibition and collecting policies for the MADC.Main curatorial projects: Mesótica I, II and III (among them the first Central Ameri-can contemporary art exhibition, at the MADC in 1996 and itinerant in Europe 1997/98); Central America and the Carib-bean: a story in black and white, regional project for XXIV São Paulo Biennale (1998); Individual Regions, for Politics of Difference, itinerant Latin American show organized by the Generalitat Valenciana (2001); Between the Lines, with Santiago Olmo, at Casa Encendida, Madrid (2002); On the border of each other”: EV+A in Limerick, Ireland (2003); All Included: an approach to the urban experience in Central America, with Santiago Olmo at Conde Duque Cultural Center, Madrid (2004). Regional curator for VIII Cuenca Bien-nale, Ecuador (2004) with Tamara Díaz. Curator for Costa Rican participation in biennales: Santo Domingo (1996) Lima (1997, 1999, special guests 2002), São Paulo (1996) , Venice (1997), Cuenca, Ecuador (2001). Since 1999 has curated shows in TEOR/éTica by Carlos Garaicoa, Abigail Hadeed, Oscar Muñoz, Nadin Ospina, Luis Paredes, Patricia Belli, Lang-lands and Bell, Baltazar Torres, Carlos Capelán, among many others.

pedro reyesArtist; Mexico City, MexicoPedro Reyes (born 1972 lives and Works on Mexico City). Reyes’ work addresses the interplay of physical and social space, making tangible the invisible geometry of our interpersonal relationships. His ex-panded notion of sculpture examines the cognitive contradictions modern life, and the possibility to overcome our planetary crises by increasing the individual and collective degree of agency. Pedro Reyes founded La Torre de los Vientos, an alternative space active from 1996 to 2002 that was a crucial part of the contemporary art scene in Mexico City. Reyes has exhibited has been shown at institutions throughout the world, in-cluding the Carpenter Center for Visual Arts at Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts; the Aspen Art Museum, Colorado; the Reina Sofia, Madrid; the South London Gallery, UK; Yvon Lambert Gallery NY; the Jumex Collection, Mexico City; P.S.1, New York; and Witte de With; Rotterdam, Netherlands; the Shanghai Biennial; the Seattle Art Museum and the Venice Biennial.

José ignacio rocaCo-curator, São Paulo Bienal, Brazil, 2006, curator of the Biblioteca Luis Angel Arango; Bogotá, ColombiaJose Roca is a curator based in Bogotá, Colombia, where he has been in charge of temporary exhibitions at the Luis Angel Arango Library since 1994. He has written extensively on Colombian artists for local and international publications. Among his recent curatorial projects: Botánica política, Sala Montcada, Fun-dación La Caixa, Barcelona (2004); Traces of Friday, Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia (2003); TransHistorias: Survey of the work of José Alejandro Restrepo, Biblioteca Luis Ángel Arango, Bogotá (2001); Define “Context,” APEX Art Curatorial Program, New York (2000); Carlos garaicoa: La Ruina; la utopia, Biblioteca Luis Ángel Arango, Bogotá, Bronx Museum for the Arts, New York and Museo Alejandro Otero, Caracas (2000–2001). He edits Columna de arena, an online column on art and contemporary cul-ture. Roca co-curated the Trienal Poli/gráfica de San Juan, Puerto Rico (2004–2005), and currently is part of the cura-torial team for the 27th São Paulo Bienal (2006).

ivo costa MesquitaIndependent Curator; São Paulo, BrazilIvo Mesquita is an independent curator. Since 1996 he has been visiting Professor at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, and Curator for Projeto Octógo-no at Pinacoteca do Estado, in São Paulo after 2003. Mesquita was researcher and Assistant Curator (1980–88) and Director (1999–2000), São Paulo Bienal Founda-tion; Director, Museu de Arte Moderna, São Paulo (2001–02). Curator, Jorge Guinle, 20th São Paulo Bienal (1989); Desire in the Academy, 1847–1916, Pinacoteca do Es-tado, São Paulo (1991); Cartographies, Winnipeg Art Gallery (1993); Daniel Senise: The Enlightening Gaze, Museum of Contemporary Art, Monterrey, Mexico (1994); Body and Space, Museu de Arte de São Paulo (1995); Stills: works from the Marieluise Hessel Collection, CCS-Bard College, (1997); Alair Gomes, fotógrafo, Museu da Imagem e do Som, São Paulo (1999); and Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle: Climate, Fundación la Caixa, Madrid, 2003; Voyage to Dakar: Three artists from the Américas, VI Dakar Biennale – DakArt 2004. Co-curator, Roteiros …, 24th São Paulo Bienal (1998); inSITE97 and in-SITE2000, San Diego and Tijuana; and F[r]icciones, Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid (2000). Publications include Leonilson: use é lindo, eu garanto (1997), Daniel Senise: ela que não está (1998), F[r]icciones (with Adriano Pedrosa, 2001) and catalogue essays. Lives and works in São Paulo and Rhinebeck, NY.


Hans ulrich Obrist Co-director of Exhibitions and Programs, Director of International Projects, Serpentine Gallery, London, UKHans Ulrich Obrist was born in Zurich in May 1968. He joined the Serpentine Gallery as Co-director of Exhibitions and Programmes and Director of Interna-tional Projects in April 2006. Prior to this he was Curator of the Musée d’Art mod-erne de la Ville de Paris since 2000, as well as curator of museum in progress, Vien-na, from 1993 to 2000. He has curated over 150 exhibitions internationally since 1991, including do it, Take Me, I’m Yours (Serpentine Gallery), Cities on the Move, Live/Life, Nuit Blanche, 1st Berlin Bien-nale, Manifesta 1, and more recently Uncertain States of America, 1st and 2nd Moscow Biennial, and 2nd Guangzhou Triennial (Canton China). Among other projects for Fall 2007, Hans Ulrich Obrist will co-curate the Lyon Biennale. Hans Ulrich Obrist has also co-curated many monographic shows at Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris, such as Olafur Eliasson, Philippe Parreno, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Anri Sala, Steve McQueen, and Doug Aitken. He has been the founding Chairman of the Art Basel Conversations Board since 2002.

I will always remember the extraordinary con-versation Ivo Mesquita and I had about the role of curators and the role of the biennial in Latin America, so when we talk about the future now it might be important to look back to some of the important models of the past which still can serve us greatly.

Now I am very happy to hand over to Ivo for his introduction.

Welcome | Hans ulrich Obrist

Welcome to our Public / Private Series of Art Basel Conversations. This is part of an ongoing discus-sion we have had for many years on The Future of the Museum. Art 36 Basel focused on the Future of the Museum in China, and in Miami last year we talked about the Future of the Museum in the United States. Last summer again in Basel we brought together curators, artists, and architects from throughout the Middle East discussing this same topic in their region, and today we gather here in Miami to explore the future of the Latin American art institution.

I am very happy to welcome here today a group of thirteen distinguished panelists composed of prominent museum directors and curators also representatives of Biennials and Foundations, publications, and all types of new institutions and new endeavors. Of course we also have artists on this panel as they are always at the center of these discussion and key in what they bring to them.

From the multiplicity of backgrounds of the dif-ferent speakers we in fact form a kind of museum; as a museum is always based on a multiplicity of views. We organize this series and do so in such a thorough and long-term way because we believe that the museum today is nothing less than a space for the re-actualization and re-contextual-ization of art itself.

I am particularly happy today because it brings me together with Ivo Mesquita, with whom I have an ongoing collaboration, and that we can con-tinue what has already started in Dakar when we curated the Dakar Biennial and has continued over the years.

Maybe one thing is important when we talk about the future of the Museum: that we don’t forget the past, in a dynamic way, as a possible toolbox particularly in the context of museums that still seem to suffer from a form of amnesia, as the history of the museum always seems to be missing – in written form – all the pioneering ex-amples of how museums and curating have evolved.


Introduction | ivo Mesquita

Good morning and thank you Hans. I would like to thank Art Basel Miami Beach for putting to-gether this panel and it is a great occasion to be here, mostly because I think for the first time we have thirteen speakers together from Latin America to talk about museums. It is very interest-ing that we are doing this in Miami because there is a sort of irony in that Miami is a way a “capital” for Latin America, so it is good to discuss the future of the museum here. Also part of this will be in English or in English translations which is important as we address this issue in an interna-tional platform.

The panelist will be working around the follow-ing series of questions: What will be the role of the local museum in a global society? How do art in-stitutions in Latin America handle issues of secu-rity and conservation? How do they collaborate with artist, galleries, and other museums? How are institutions funded, and is this sustainable? What is the political, social, or educational role of a museum?

We have a big group of speakers so we are going to start this discussion off right away. Hans?

Introduction | Hans ulrich Obrist

We are going to be giving short biographical snap-shots for each of the speakers, so I am very happy to now introduce our first speakers, Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla who always collaborate. Jennifer, who was born in 1974 in the USA, and Guillermo, born in 1971 in Cuba, have been working together since 1995 and have participated in many international exhibitions from the Whitney Biennial to the Venice Biennial and of course are very present here in Miami this week with their extraordinary project at the Moore Space which I hope you all have time to visit.

In Conversation | Jennifer allora Marcelo araujo Guillermo calzadilla carlos cruz-Diez lidia león Sebatian lopez Natalia Majluf ramiro Martinez luis pérez-Oramas Marcelo pacheco virginia pérez-ratton pedro reyes José ignacio roca

Hosts | ivo costa Mesquita Hans ulrich Obrist

Jennifer allora: Well we decided this morning to just make a presentation briefly of a work that we made in 2002 for the Lima Biennial and what we will do just now is give an overview of that project and how it unfolded within the context of that exhibition. Our hope is that this project points to, in a way, the questions that are being proposed in this Conversation, as they relate to the role of the art institution and its limits in its relationship to the city and to a larger context.

To begin we are going to read through a sum-mary of events that took place on the day that we began this project. It’s called Chalk.

Basically Chalk was shown in the Pasaje Santa Rosa in Lima, Peru which is located in the admin-istrative center of the city, around which are located the most prominent buildings of the city, including the Governmental Palace which is the official residence of the president and the town hall or parliament.

So here is the description of the succession of the events that happened.

At twelve o’clock noon twenty-four pieces of chalk were positioned on the Pasaje Santa Rosa. Some of them where broken or written with as to suggest their function. Passers-by began writing with the chalk and drawing with the chalk, trans-forming the Pasaje into an enormous chalk board; as a surface of communication and dialogue.

At one o’clock pm daily demonstrators pressing various social and economic demands make their way from the Plaça de Armas to the Pasaje Santa Rosa, and begin using the chalk as a vehicle to write down their petitions. The scale of the writ-ings is largely due to the enormous size of the chalk. The demonstrators write a variety of state-ments about topics like government lay-offs implying months without pay or statements about governmental corruption.

At one thirty pm the crowd and the messages continue to grow in size and variety. The activity on the street begins to get noticed by government officials who show their dissatisfaction about what is being written. A heated debate inssues over who has access to the public space and who has the right to speak and to write and lay claims there and whose voice does and should be heard. This debate is registered through in chalk inscriptions on the Pasaje Santa Rosa. Phrases like “Toledo is for the people” begin to appear.

At two o’clock pm the national police along with some government officials go into the Biennial of-fice which is located on the Pasaje Santa Rosa. We are informed that the crowd was going to be removed and the chalk sculpture was put under arrest.

At two thirty pm the chalks were broken up and placed into a large truck and at three o’clock a cleaning squad arrives and begins to wash away the writing with buckets of water, brooms, and water hoses. The government officials direct the cleaning squad as to which writings to erase first, namely those who make direct accusations against the government.

And finally at seven o’clock pm, after the Pasaje Santa Rosa was cleaned of any writings that ques-tion the government policies publicly, these very same officials proceeded to make speeches right on the Pasaje Santa Rosa. These speeches were about the liberating effect of art as a form of free expression.

ivo Mesquita: The second speaker is Marcelo Araujo, the director of the Pinacoteca do Estado; São Paulo in Brazil. Prior to this he was the director


of the Museu Lasar Segall. He has a Ph.D. in archi-tecture and urban studies from the University in São Paolo and is also a lecturer for urban studies at the University of São Paolo.

Marcelo araujo: Good morning. I would like to thank Art Basel and Hans Ulrich and Ivo for this invitation. The panel this morning has a lot of important questions to answer about the Future of the Museum in Latin America and I decided to choose one topic that seems to be a fundamental one which is management of museums. As we all know, most museums, and Latin American ones are no exception, are state-run museums, under the auspices of the federal government or the state government or municipal government. Since the creation of most of these institutionsat the turn of the last century until today, structurally there have always been some problems which have led to the fact that most museums today are facing the issues of insufficient funding, a lack of agility, and precariousness of most of the technical staff. This has led to a situation of the very limited, even impossibility of action and the need to seek out a new structure and a new form of management for museums.

The first steps in Brazil were taken around 1998 when our parliament passed a new law creating a new kind of institutional structure which loosely translated from the Portuguese means a “social organization.” A “social organization” is in fact a non-profit organization which re-defines the legal structure of the museum. These organizations (institutions) are allowed to sign a contract with the state and this procedure allows the institution to have the power to manage itself in an autono-mous way. This legal framework has also been applied in the area of public health and education. The Pinacotech, the oldest art museum in São Paolo, is a state museum and was founded in 1905 and since January of 2006 it has been functioning in this new legal framework. Our Friends of the Museum association, created in 1992, became in 2005 a “social organization” and signed an agree-ment with the government.

This new structure has given us the legal frame-work to look for additional funds from private sources, and this has also allowed us to make more permanent contracts for our technical staff. I think that for museums in Latin America this is one of the basic issues, because without perma-nent staff, which allows us to be more distanced from the political changes, the museums cannot find the structure and the funds that they need to meet the challenges of the twenty-first century. These challenges for us are education, building a more consistent acquisition program, and also for joint activities with other museums in Latin America so that we are able to write art history in Latin America from our point of view. Thank you.

Hans ulrich Obrist: Now I have the honor and pleasure to present Carlos Cruz-Diez, born in Caracas in 1923 and living in Paris since 1960. His pioneering work makes him a hero for many artists today. His exhibition history is so vast that I can only pick out some of the key moments with important exhibitions in the sixties at the Muse-um am Ostwall, Dortmund, which he considers to be a key show. His strong presence in Paris was supported by the gallery of Denise Renée, in 1961 a key group show at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, Movement Movement; which predat-ed by four years the big New York exhibition of 1965 on Kinetic Art. What makes his presence here today very important on the topic of the museum is that Mr. Cruz-Diez has actually found-ed his own museum, Museo de la Estampa y del Diseño Carlos Cruz Diez, Caracas, and he has spoken a lot about the idea of the museum not only being a place of exhibition but also of inven-tion. Welcome, Carlos Cruz-Diez.

carlos cruz-Diez: Thank you very much. The Cruz-Diez Museum in Caracas was actually founded by the Governor’s Office in the City of Caracas, and it will indeed be a museum. I rejected the idea because I did not want anyone to make a living mausoleum for me.

The two factors that have made the museum influential in terms of education and communica-tion and the diffusion of our ideas are the “multi-plication” of the image and design. The whole museum, from its tip to its tail, is highly designed. When you think about it, a museum such as this one is a deposit of memory, that we have to save, and that we have to study and analyze, and this can only be achieved by merging the “multiplication” of image and design.

The museum, at this time, is in a comatose state because of the change in the political regime in Venezuela; therefore, we are reviewing the general policy of museums in the country. When the museum was founded, it was a foundation, as each museum has to look for its own funds. An association was created which operates the museum with a single budget which comes from the central government of Venezuela, so that means it comes directly from the central econo-my. Each project and each museum has to apply for these funds, and send its ideas to see if the central organization accepts them or not. If this central organization is in agreement with the ideas it is usually because they agree with the political doctrine that has been installed in the country.

The museum must also have, according to the new rules, a mission for social integration. It must properly audit everything that has been done by the people in the neighborhoods to prove that everyone can participate and that the mu-seum does not become an eclectic zone; it should be built on a popular basis. I hope that in the future things will take a logical turn and that they can straighten out and go back to what is essential, which is design and the multiplication of the image that has been so important for the develop-ment of humanity and the development of the people.

ivo Mesquita: Thank you, maestro. I have the pleasure to introduce Lidia León, Director of the Eduardo León Jimenes Foundation in Santo Do-mingo, Dominican Republic. Lidia has developed

a program for the Foundation with an interdisci-plinary scope, including social activities and music, as I understand.

lidia león: I would like to say a few words. First of all I want to apologize to those who don’t speak Spanish for doing my presentation in my native language, but the good news is that my presenta-tion has more images than text; the paintings speak for themselves. I would like to thank Sam Keller for his invitation to participate on this panel at Art Basel and I would like to say that I represent the youngest institution that participates in this interesting panel about the Future of the Museum focusing on Latin America.

We are located in the center of the Caribbean, in the heart of the Dominican Republic, in Santi-ago de los Caballeros, a city that is five centuries old, where we have cultural heritage from three different continents. The Eduardo León Jimenes Cultural Center was inaugurated on October 3, 2003, commemorating the centenary of La Aurora, the cigar factory where the León family began its business. In 1964, the first Eduardo León Jimenes Art Prize was awarded. In his inaugural speech, Eduardo León Asensio anticipated that, after a certain point, the collection would demand the creation of a space in order for it to be exhibited on a permanent basis. Here [slides] you can see the first few years, we have paintings and sculp-tures and drawings. I present here some of our most recent acquisitions; we also accept photo-graphs and ceramic arts, among other things. Once the collection grew, it became necessary to continue to develop through the investigation, exhibition, diffusion and conservation of artistic realizations from the Dominican Republic and above all, that it contribute to the creation of a society that is more sensitive to the intrinsic value of art; more proud of itself, and capable of partici-pating actively in the improvement of the quality of life of the nation within the Caribbean context. The Center León strives to become one of the most complex and complete cultural centers in the Caribbean and Latin America when it comes to


archiving and documentation and the way it deals with cultural products. The Center León connects the collective heritage of the nation with a terri-tory and the participation of the community, as it investigates dynamics regarding Dominican cul-ture from three different perspectives: activity, identity, and habitability.

Here [slides] we can see the architectural di-mension and how the space contributes to the sustainability of this project. Next, we can see the shop; we also have a cafeteria and an auditorium, with the possibility of having simultaneous trans-lation, where we conduct creative workshop. We also have training and activity rooms. Visitors can also see endemic plants from the Hispaniola Island; we have a Caribbean patio and La Aurora, there is a replica from 1903 in which cigars mak-ers make cigars for this company. In the video library, visitors can have contact with the multi-media collection, and have the possibility to do research using documentation on art, culture, and the environment.

The visual-art collection has its own permanent exhibition space. This exhibition is renewed every two years with the celebration of the Eduardo Jimenes Art Prize. The permanent collection reflects the evolution of Dominican arts starting at the beginning of the twentieth century. The anthropological collection covers two types of objects, ethnological and archeological. This is thanks to important donations from different private collections; here it is important to mention Gustavo Tavares Grieser and Bernardo Vega. As I said before,the La Aurora replica trace the memo-ries of the past one hundred years of the León Jimenes Group, the family and company’s values. It offers visitors a framework of the León Center and the commitment it has to society.

At present, we have two important projects; the 21st Eduardo León Jimenes Art Prize, and here I have some images of the prize that was granted and the image of the installation of Jorge Pineda. We also have the exhibition for Yoryi Morel, to celebrate the centennial of his birth. He is consid-ered the most important painter in the Dominican

Republic. We will present over two hundred works sourced from more than sixty collectors.

Merengue! Visual Rhythms / Ritmos Visuales was inaugurated this year in New York in The Barrio Museum and will be there until December – January 21 of next year. In February it will be presented in Washington at the Museum of the Americas. Some future projects that the León Center has for next year: in February will include the Second International Congress for Music, Identity, and Culture of the Caribbean, celebrated in April and at this moment, the subject will be Son and Salsa; with the Cisneros Foundation the Center will present sacred art of the colonial era from Venezuela and we will also present Baseball Culture and Dominican identity in November of 2007. Thank you.

Hans ulrich Obrist: Our next speaker, Sebastián López, is artistic director of Casa América Latina in Rio de Janeiro and for the contemporary art program of Daros-Latinamerica. He is an art historian and was the former director of the Gate Foundation in Amsterdam and curator of the 2004 Shanghai Biennial. Recently, he has been curator for an exhibition in IMMA, Dublin, The Hours, Visual Arts of Contemporary Latin American, which will now become a traveling show, soon to tour to Sidney. We welcome Sebastian López.

Sebastian lópez: Thank you very much to Art Basel Miami Beach for this invitation that is very important to us at Daros-Latinamerica, because we still don’t have a museum in Latin America, but we do have plans to inaugurate a space in 2008. Daros-Latinamerica is a private collection that started in 2000, and within a very short period of time we have collected very actively and gath-ered contemporary art pieces from Latin America from the beginning; extending the collection from the sixties to contemporary production today. In the past six years we have created a collection including more than one thousand works from over one hundred artists. And it is very interesting, the fact that they are artists from

nearly all Latin American countries which are seldom represented; that is outside of Latin Amer-ican collections. I am referring to art from Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil, Colombia, but also countries whose collections have not frequently been shown outside their regions like Panama, Costa Rica, and Guatemala, and the Caribbean countries as well.

From the very beginning, Daros-Latinamerica has been aware of its public responsibility to bring the collection to be housed in Latin America, be-cause, and I forgot to say this, the collection was constituted in Zurich, Switzerland. Now our proj-ect is to create a space for the exhibition of the collection and that would host other exhibitions. What everybody wonders now is why we selected Rio de Janeiro as the location? When a project like this is undertaken, we had to find a building where we could locate the administrative office and carry out the necessary work to establish the pro-gram. Through a combination of circumstances we bought a wonderful mid-nineteenth-century neoclassical building last year in Brazil. Others would call it “colonial,” but anyway, it is a wonder-ful structure with a 1,200-square-meter area and we are currently working on restoring it; we are working with Paolo Mendes de Rocha, an archi-tect who has always been based in São Paolo. We hope to have now the exhibition space ready for 2008; we are in God’s hands and in the hands of the construction workers, but we hope to open in March 2008. The house is located at Botafogo, for those of you who know Rio de Janeiro, and almost across the street from the Canecao Theater which has always been one of the major venues for Brazilian popular music.

In the new space we would like to house the Da-ros-Latinamerica collection, but will also feature works from the second collection we have whose name is simply Daros which is a private collection of masterpieces from the twentieth century, from Europe and the United States; with artists like Jackson Pollack, Andy Warhol, Eva Hess, Louise Bourgeois, Gerhard Richter and others, and we will make use of it in Latin America.

Both collections share the same eclectic vision, and shy away from the idea of “gathering or amass-ing” with a “biological approach” of the eight-eenth-century style, having “one of each.” Our goal for this new location is to literally follow the ideas of some artists we consider relevant today. That means we want to establish a more profound col-lection, where we can have up to twenty pieces from the same artist that exemplify all the aspects of his or her work.

Even though this practice, as I said before, is about a private collection, a good example of how we work our recent project with artist named Julio le Parc, who is both Argentinean and French. After several visits to le Parc’s studio, much to our surprise, we saw that some of the most relevant works he had produced in the early sixties had never been collected or shown in other places besides the shows in the sixties. Some of the piec-es were in poor condition, and for those who know Julio le Parc’s work, he does a bricolage (do-it-your-self) kind of work, with mechanical objects where he hides light and a wonderful effect is produced by projections on the walls of other surfaces; then we proceeded to restore the pieces, which took us about a year and a half, with different people and under the supervision of le Parc himself, and we have created an exhibition that will begin to travel today and throughout the coming year.

ivo Mesquita: Thank you very much, Sebastián. Now I have the pleasure to introduce Natalia Majluf, who is an art historian and Director of the Museo de Arte de Lima in Peru, and who was formerly curator in this same museum. She has been building a program and a collection devoted to contemporary art.

Natalia Majluf: Hello, and thank you for your invitation.

I want to start with an anecdote: a few years ago when I was speaking at the museum, an artist stood up and began to talk furiously about the oppressive authority of museums. I surmised that he had been reading something by Han Haack, or


something like that but in the context of our mu-seum that has no public visibility and no signifi-cant contemporary art collection and virtually no exhibition program, it seemed that he was a little out of touch with reality. The museum never had any influence on establishing a “canon” or at least I can say as much from a Peruvian perspective. This also true for museums in other countries in Latin America where museums don’t function as the proper authority, and, in fact, I think this is a weakness in their constitution. Now, how we explain this weakness is another matter.

It is largely perceived that this is due to a failure of the function of the central state in countries where we still have the idea of the state-run, owned and financed museum, and that model is a safe haven from private interests. But I think that in fact they have been so safe that they no longer exist as viable institutions with very few exceptions. I want to take up a proposition of Chilean art critic Justo Pastor Mellado who sees the role of the Latin American curator as a maker of infrastructures, and by infrastructures he is not referring to the construction of the building, but to the construc-tion of the other bases for artistic practice and curatorial work; the structures of feasibility of dis-course and of seeing criticism as a fundamental sort of infrastructure.

To me, this means collections and the writing of a history of art. There is nothing new in this notion; museums should collect and conduct research and yet very few Latin American coun-tries have graduate programs in art history and very few Latin American museums collect in any significant manner. We talk about criticism, but the first “subject” of criticism is always a corpus of works made visible through institutions. Latin American museums have not collected to the extent that they should have; how many important early Mattas are there in Chile?

If the Latin American museum is to have any kind of significant role in the future, these collec-tions are the basic infrastructure on which we must build so we can develop a discourse on art that is meaningful and that contributes to a public

debate. The viability of the Museo d’Arte de Lima where I work is largely dependent on the fact that it is clearly a public institution but one in which the state has no participation because it is run privately under the direction of a board of trustees. As such, we receive no public funding but we are nonetheless expected to fill the role of a national museum covering broadly Peruvian art from the Pre-Colombian period to the present. At the Museo d’Arte de Lima we have tried to develop strategies that allow us to turn the institution’s weaknesses into strengths; with no collecting funds, we turned our focus on photography; a medium which had functioned on the margins of a local art history and which basically had no market at all.

Based on research conducted on temporary exhibitions and mainly through the contribution of artists, the museum began to acquire what can be considered today as one of the most important regional collections of photography.

The collection influenced our building pro-gram, leading to the construction of a new gallery dedicated exclusively to photography. We could say in this case that the rewriting of art history has helped to create infrastructure. We have not thought of this gallery as a ghetto but a special space does not preclude that photography be included in other spaces in the museum, espe-cially in the contemporary gallery. The incorpo-ration of photography created an interesting friction with the prevailing history of Peruvian art. In the first place it “de-centered” painting which, until recently, was considered the only legitimate practice to be developed in a museum. Photography helped to provided Peruvian art his-tory of the nineteenth century with a new face, and created a counterpoint to early twentieth-century indigenous art, not only offering a new take on traditional subject matter but forging a new interpretation of early twentieth-century masters like Martin Chambi, or the Vargas broth-ers, outside the narratives of art history. Photog-raphy gave a new context to the violence of the nineteen-eighties, and allows us to perceive the photographic base of painting in the eighties.

The documentary, the artistic action and perfor-mance have further allowed for a new paradigm for the observation of a post-modern sensibility. It gave institutional support and visibility to a generation of artists whose work is largely based on photography or at least on a photographic paradigm. Now a small market for photography is beginning to emerge and young artists have a new “canon” to contend with, one which is per-haps closer to current issues. This is to me the kind of infrastructure: one that is built through collections, through the writing and re-writing of art history. This is how I understand Mellado’s useful advice about curatorial work creating infrastructure. For collections to exist in muse-ums there must be a public desire for the collec-tion and this is perhaps the most difficult thing to achieve in Latin America. In the United States museums “collect” collectors but in Latin Ameri-ca collectors make their own museums as private spaces. This is a sign of the failure of the public sphere which is a space that museums must recover for art. In Latin America trustees and collectors need to realize that if they don’t support their museums, help build their collec-tions and give them a basis of independence to resist commercial, political, and private inter-ests, their own role as collectors will be weak-ened. This may seem like an un-selfish pursuit but for a collector I am convinced it can also be a self-serving one.

Hans ulrich Obrist: Many thanks Natalia. I now take great pleasure to introduce the next speaker, Ramiro Martínez, director of the Museo Interna-cional de Arte Contemporáneo Rufino Tamayo, Mexico City. Born in San Antonio, Ramiro Martinez has been running the museum since 2002; before that he worked as Director of Exhibitions at the Monterrey Contemporary Arts Museum. At Tamayo Ramiro Martínez has been responsible for many exhibitions during the last couple of years, like Douglas Gordon, Lawrence Weiner, Luc Tuymans, and more recently Peter Fischli and David Weiss. Welcome, Ramiro.

ramiro Martinez: Thank you very much. There are two issues I would like to address. One of them is funding. I think that funding is crucial for our institutions and their continuation. Speaking from a Mexican perspective I can say that muse-ums, especially contemporary art museums, are not a priority when it comes to determining the allocation of public money. Historical museums usually receive a better treatment since they con-tribute to create a sense of nationalism and relate to the history of the country, which is necessary for the government. Consequently, there is the need to find alternative funding sources, usually through the creation of foundations or other informal associations and friends of museums. I believe that the Museo Internacional de Arte Con-temporáneo Rufino Tamayo is a good example of productive collaboration.

The museum opened in 1981 as a private institu-tion sponsored by two of the main corporations in Mexico. Some five years later, due to disagree-ments among its founder Rufino Tamayo and one of the sponsors, it was handed over to the govern-ment. Five years later Tamayo realized that public funding was inadequate, and that it would be inadequate in the future, and established the Fundación Olga and Rufino Tamayo with the purpose to support the operations of the museum. Such additional support has allowed the museum to develop long-term plans rather than depend on the government funding cycles. This has allowed us to develop a stronger plan for corporate spon-sorship. It is only through financial stability that museums may develop plans in advance and create projects, share costs, and establish realistic work networks.

Another topic I would like to address concerns the exhibition programs. In the last five years, we have been developing at the Museo Internacional de Arte Contemporáneo Rufino Tamayo an inter-national program of exhibitions, conferences, video-programs, and web-based exhibition pro-grams. Within the formal programs, we have focused on the presentation of solo and group exhibitions that present work from the fifties to


the present day and in the course of these five years we have come up with various lines of curatorial interest that have been developed through multi-ple exhibitions and respond to contemporary and historic events in the Mexican culture and its con-text.

One line of interest is the art of Latin America; geometric abstraction. To date we have presented five exhibitions of the sort: Arta Abstracta Río de la Plata, questioning the Questionada la Linia Rego; Concrete and Neo Concrete Art in Brazil; Vision in Motion with some of the exhibitions either visiting the museum or being produced by our museum’s curators. Two of the latter traveled; one within Mexico and Argentina and Italy. The interest in geometric abstraction from Latin America emerged from the recognition of a lack of specific investigation of its history within the Mexican context.

As a museum dedicated to art from the post-war to the contemporary period, we felt it was fundamental to acknowledge Latin America as part of the international interest and offset the historic lack of dialogue among Latin American countries. As we know, in Latin America we have historically focused on Europe and the United States, so historically contemporary themes are presented through North American and Euro-pean artists and exhibitions are programmed for those countries. This programmatic line has helped to foster links with other museums and cultural organizations in Latin America, in terms of working with collections and/or curators, which is part of a larger institutional interest. We have found that we have similar histories and often a common cultural context, budgetary limitations, and institutional conditions as our colleagues in Venezuela, Brazil, Argentina, and Costa Rica, and this has made us work together to produce and share exhibitions easily and beneficially for all of us, as all parties must sit together at the negotiation table to determine our needs, constraints, and ambitions.

We at the Tamayo are interested in furthering these relationships in a variety of institutional

contexts, so we seek to establish alternative circuits for exhibitions in the Latin American region. Thank you very much.

ivo Mesquita: Now I am pleased to introduce Luis Pérez-Oramas, Estrellita Brodsky Curator of Latin American Art at MoMA. Luis Pérez-Oramas holds a Ph.D. from L’École des hautes études in Paris, and he was also professor at several schools in Europe and Venezuela. He has also been curator with the Patricia Phelps Cisneros Foundation.

luis peréz-Oramas: In 1949 Alfred Barr, founding director of the Museum of Modern Art, spoke about research and documentation problems regarding Latin American contemporary arts. Among many interesting observations Barr made, and I quote: “I know that we, at the Modern Arts Museum, work in considerable haste. We begin to see that we made many errors both of policy and taste. We entered the field of Latin American art in the spirit of discovery. I hope that the results have laid the foundations of a more profound study that may come in the future. The political atmosphere created a great deal of skepticism about our intentions particularly among Latin American who are extremely capable to detect political motives in non-political actions where they don’t exist. Our projects were met with similar cynicism in this country (USA) where even exhibi-tions, publications, and acquisitions of superior-quality works were often discounted because they were from Latin America and it was believed that they were also motivated by political reasons.”

As you know, Alfred Barr was arguably the first curator in this country and worldwide concerned by the fact that modern arts should be fully represented in its entirety, including works from Latin America. As far back as 1931, he empha-sized the avant-garde role of Mexicans and Amer-icans alongside of each other as central to collec-tions of the museums. Since 1941 he extended this category to the whole Latin American conti-nent, and acquired works from all parts of Latin America. The MoMA owns over three thousand

Latin American and Caribbean works of art, hun-dreds of them are either definitive master works or critically important works that no other mu-seum or private collector in the world had the capacity to acquire. The MoMA has one of the earliest but also the world’s most comprehensive collections of Latin American and Caribbean art, in its magnitude and the number of masterpiec-es it includes. I have selected some of the most important works that I would like to show you today. The early collection includes David Alfaro Siqueiros, Diego Rivera, Matta, Armando Reverón and Lamb’s Jungle, as well as Joaquin Torres- Garcia with recent acquisitions of works by Alejandro Otero, De Soto, Ana Mendieta, Leon Ferrara, and Waltercio Caldas. It also includes Pop Art works from Latin America, Botero and Marisol, also works by Arturo Herrera, Doris Salcedo, and Cildo Meirelles.

This leads us to the role of Latin American and Caribbean art within the more visible aspect of the collections of the museum. The history of the museum is tied to the idea of modernism, to the experience of a contemporary culture, shared by the whole world. And we see here the reinstallation of the permanent collection with works from Joaquin Torres-Garcia, which for the first time are shown beside those of Mondrian.

The quote by Barr in 1949 depicts a situation that has hardly changed today for the majority of great museums in America. It depicts what we can call a “localist attitude.” This leads me to say that I find it confusing when I think about one of the first questions that announced this discussion “what is the role of the local museum in global so-ciety.” I have to ask myself, is there a global soci-ety? Or is there just the illusion of a global society? More importantly, is there anything other than local museums? What defines a local museum? Does anybody know a global museum? I would like to argue that the Museum of Modern Art in New York is a local museum, for it has been an institution successfully driven by the require-ments and imperatives of a “local scene.” It is also an international museum but this is different

from a global museum. It is based on the scope and strengths of a local ambition which builds up an international dimension. Setting an opposition between the local and the global can be mislead-ing because it opposes the reality of the local with the illusion of the global; or the fact of the local museum opposed to the ideology of a global mu-seum, and like every ideology, the ideology of the global is there to maintain the core and structure of power, to impeach the legitimate ambitions of the local or national as well as to avoid the clear understanding of local scenes by international institutions. Instead of following the misleading opposition between the local and the global I pre-fer to build a difference between the local and the international. It might sound less exciting but I don’t believe that museums in Latin America handle differently than other museums issues such as security, conservation, funding, relation-ships with artists, education, or social or political constraints. It is a fact that by setting the mirage of the global, a museum could loose its links with the local realties that make up its raison d’être.

Thinking about theater and commenting about Antonin Artaud, Jacques Derrida once talked about an “inflated” word, or a soufflé in French. This refers to a word uttered by someone who has lost the true word, thus becoming simply a “recording agent” or a slave to others’ utter-ances. The inflated word is a word that doesn’t come out of your body, or in French tombé du corps, as Derrida said; it is a word inspired by someone else, it is a stolen voice, a stolen word. I think museums must seek their own words, their own voice which is linked to their own bodies of work and programs. The local context makes them internationally significant.

Hans ulrich Obrist: Thank you very much. Now I have the pleasure to introduce the next speaker, Virginia Pérez Ratton, artist, curator, and cultural agent in Costa Rica, as well as director and found-er of Teorética, a non-profit organization in San José, Costa Rica dedicated to the research and dis-semination of artistic practices in the Caribbean


basin. Teorética has always been publishing and producing all kinds of different realities. Virginia has been a curator and participated on many bien-nial juries, and has also implemented in Costa Rica a law for the protection of the museum. Let’s welcome Virginia Pérez Ratton.

virginia pérez ratton: Good morning. I would like to thank this panel for inviting me and I am very happy to be here. When I was invited to par-ticipate in this panel, I decided to have someone do the homework for me, because I am no longer the director of the museum, and I was looking at the museums from the outside. I asked my col-leagues in San José, directors of museums, to answer the question posed by the panel. So I am here with four answers from seven individuals whom I contacted and I have selected two of them, but then I decided that the reason why I asked was because the panel’s question for me implied a certain threat to the existence of the museum. What is the future of the museum? It is at risk of dis-appearing? So I decided, after getting the answers with which I wasn’t satisfied, to briefly present the reality of the project we opened last week in eleven venues in San José, Costa Rica as a model of col-laborative work with museums and other institu-tions. The truth is that, rather than having many independent museums with limited authority and limited funding, we can have everybody working together and try and empower the whole concept by combining our forces, so I would like to briefly present this project now.

This project was curated by Tamara Díaz and I. I was the founder of Teorética and we created this show together. It was presented at the National Museum of Costa Rica and at Teorética, a retro-spective exhibition by Margarita Azurdia whom perhaps you don’t know. Margarita Azurdia is a Guatemalan artist born in 1931 who died in 1998; she was the precursor of Central American con-temporary art, but is not recognized as such, and was considered insane during her productive period in the sixties and seventies. So we have this retrospective that we wanted to have as an anchor;

we had the support of two large museums in San José. Then we curated four independent but con-nected shows called Intangible roots, limits, traf-fics, and the filibuster. And all these exhibitions are interconnected because they are related through intangible roots which includes artists like Soto, Marco Maggi, and other generations of Central American artists and to exhibitions that are more local. So we can review this, because these are two of the answers I got regarding the museum. Well, I hope you can see it. This is the Teorética façade; as you can see, it started a month ago with the photograph by Carla Solano covering the whole façade. There were works Sandra Cinto, also from São Paulo, did for this event. These are the institutions that collaborated with us. I don’t want to go into too much detail about this at this time, but invite you to consult the exhibition catalogue which is available online at www.estre-chodudoso.com that you can see on the screen.

I just wanted to show this because we got a lot of collaboration from all the museums though, as everyone has already commented, we are all burdened with heavy bureaucracy, and are some-times under-staffed, or over-staffed with many inappropriate people and of course under-fund-ed. This event has proved our capacities to put together a group of local institutions in order to create an event that will bring this further, to an international context. We also have the capacity to respond to an event like this by the fact that everything was ready for each opening; we had eleven openings in four days and everything worked well; our Teorética eight-people team was enhanced with staff from each one of the muse-ums and we got the help we needed, so we worked with almost two hundred people on the exhibi-tion with a minimum cost, because each institu-tion made a contribution from its own budget. We had to pay for the equipment, overtime, cata-logues, and everything, but at least we had the institutions with their basic funding and it created a very strong link among all public or state-managed museums and Teorética, which is independent and private.

I would like to add two more things: one is that even though the museums face numerous prob-lems in Central America, I consider that in reality the lack of a strong gallery system and a real art market actually makes the museum the only legitimate purveyor of contemporary art in the region, and of course, that is where the legitimacy takes place, and not in the market.

The last point I wanted to bring up is that I heard a comment the day before I came here; a local artist approached me to congratulate us on the exhibition; he commented unexpectedly “I really liked the exhibition, after being at the Con-temporary Art Museum, I felt like I had been on a long trip.” Thank you very much.

ivo Mesquita: Thank you Vicki. And now I would like to introduce the artist Pedro Reyes from Mexico City. He was director of Torres de los Vien-tos, an alternative space in Mexico City, from 1996 through to 2000; he currently works for the Cultural Agents Initiative which is a Harvard Uni-versity initiative. Pedro?

pedro reyes: Thank you very much. I am going to talk briefly about a project in which I was in-vited to participate when I was asked to talk about the Future of the Museum. When I was recently visiting Culiacan (Mexico), I discovered a project that could represent the future of the museum, or the museum of the future. And this impressed me because Culiacan is the most un-likely place where you would expect to find an art project. Culiacan is a city west of Mexico City, which literally has no artistic tradition of any sort. It was known as one of the cities with the highest crime rates in Mexico. The art project I would like to talk about took place at a botanical garden that turned out to be the garden with the biggest collection of tropical plants in Latin America. This is where a visionary collector, Agustín Coppel who lived in Culiacan, decided to devote whatever he had available to create a top-of-the line collection of world-class art that could be seen in his garden.

The project was curated by Patrick Charpenel and a very young architect, Tatiana Bilbao, who is cre-ating the buildings across the botanical garden. I think there are numerous reasons to believe that this is a miracle, that is, a model for a whole new environment for art, totally new.

First of all, it is a garden that arises from a very long process that took some forty years to materi-alize. It was done by an engineer named Carlos Murillo, and I would like to take this opportunity to say this, because he died just a few weeks ago, as a small tribute to his memory. It is worth men-tioning how this garden came to life. I asked Murillo how that wonderful collection of plants came to exist and he told me a beautiful story; he said that everything came in envelopes, rather than having a big budget to ship the plants from all over the world; he visited other regions and botanical gardens, and stood patiently under a tree until a seed dropped; he spent forty years traveling around the world, collecting seeds, going back to Culiacan, planting them, and making all this work; he said the most difficult places to get seeds were the botanical gardens in the United States, because there were always people cleaning up and he was unable to pick up the seeds, so this is a true miracle.

I think that most Latin American wonderful projects happen not by bringing the whole plant but because of seeds that travel, that are sort of containers or receptacles of information that sometimes travel across the space. And that im-pressive plant collection that Agustín Coppel and Patrick Charpenel created was an incredible col-lection of commissions; to mention just some of the ongoing projects by Dan Graham, James Turrel, Tino Sehgal, Francis Alÿs, Theresa Mar-golles, Franz West, and Santiago Sierra.

I believe there are numerous reasons why this is interesting. First, because we think of a museum as a building; many of the world’s institutions are contained within a building, but in the old times there were academies and other places where ideas were born and were shared, and they were peripatetic; that is, places where people could walk


across them, and they were like gardens; those were the best places for meditation and to be in contact with ideas. I also think that the fact that the garden is a place where people go for jogging and not to see artwork is another way to attract a new public. This is very interesting to me. And, in general, all projects taking place in this garden are not the usual kind of sculptures placed in a rotunda, but the kind of works adapted to and integrated into the environment.

My own project is linked to this, that is, the museum’s role as agent to transform the life of a city. When I was invited to participate in the gar-den, I told Agustín that it was great to have that bucolic garden which was sort of an oasis, but that there was every kind of problem regarding the garden in the city, and that how that conflict could be linked to my own ... so I asked him to cooperate with my project so we could start collecting; I asked him to launch a campaign to collect weap-ons, since we are dealing with a city with a high death rate due to firearms, and there are machine guns, pistols, handguns, and people were willing to donate them; those weapons were being col-lected; the idea is to melt them and make garden-ing tools that will be used in the garden; the idea is to use the museum institution to transform an agent of death into an agent of life and for the museum to transcend its own limitations and penetrate the context of the city.

Hans ulrich Obrist: Thank you very much. I take great pleasure to introduce our next speaker, José Ignacio Roca. José is a curator in Bogotá, Colom-bia, where he has been in charge of temporary exhibitions from the Luis Ángel Arango Library. Since 1994 he has done extensive publications on Colombian artists, and he has also been curator for many exhibitions, most recently the 27th São Paulo Biennial. Welcome.

Jose ignacio roca: Thank you very much for the invitation. This panel addresses several ways to predict the future of the museums in Latin Ameri-ca. Many of the topics proposed imply a tension

between traditional and contemporary art, between a rich cultural heritage and the neces-sity to be in line with what is currently taking place within the arts. I would like to reflect on this tension and deal with it in a creative way. I work at a very large cultural center financed by the Central Bank of Colombia whose job is to turn economic capital into symbolic capital, as Paulo Herkenhoff once observed.

In the last decade we have followed two axes of development of our institution. We renovated several buildings which were formerly the mint turning them into several museum and exhibition spaces. Now we are on two different city blocks, inside the historic center of Bogotá, and this is a project I have been spearheading little by little over a ten-year period.

On the other hand, we developed our collection by building on a solid foundation of mainly Co-lombian Art and Latin American masters, but this is what museums do, or should do, so I won’t bore you with our achievements. I will indeed give you some information about the history of our spaces; I will show you pictures, as every museum profes-sional knows, the key aspect of attracting visitors to a museum lies in the concept of temporality. Permanent collections often cease to interest the public because they don’t change. And they don’t change because they think their obligation is to be accountable for something, be it Western art, Co-lombian, or Latin American art for the education and enlightening of the public. But in most cases, this public is mainly constituted by the locals. Af-ter the mandatory school visit when you are a child, you don’t want to venture back into that collection because you feel you already know it. Foreign visi-tors do visit because they feel they have to do so. Temporality is associated with the collection. Museums soon understood this and the concept of temporary exhibitions came to be, or temporal-ity associated with the collections themselves.

Temporary exhibitions often come from the outside. The collection is often regarded as static, with the temporary exhibitions providing the dynamics within the museum.

Now the question is how to provide a vibrant pro-gram that activates the collection and at the same time maintains the narrative that is at the founda-tion of the social role of museums. I will refer briefly to two initiatives that have been implement-ed in the last years in the Biblioteca Luis Angel Arango which is really a museum, and a really interesting contemporary art institution. Both initiatives involve artists to activate the collections and for the first one, Transversal Gaze (Mirada Transversal), we invited artists to take the perma-nent collection as their work material in order to curate thematic shows based on their personal readings of the work. We tried to pair an artist with a theme, and then they are free to develop their idea any way they please. That strategy has worked in many ways; it allows us to show lesser-known works, among them drawings, prints, and objects of historical or ethnographic interest, that wouldn’t be seen otherwise because the master narratives almost always privileges the master-piece. It also shed a new light on the collection allowing artworks from different periods and prov-enances to co-exist creatively and provide a wider understanding of a more traditional reading. Landscape, still life, or abstraction were not just themes but also questions of interpretation of the cultural understanding of color and the represen-tation of urban space. So the artists came to us with an idea and take a look at our collection – it is not a very good collection, we have about four thou-sand objects, and then they propose a theme and develop it in different ways. There are also work-shops to activate the exhibition, because those thematic works are intended to be traveling exhibi-tions to twenty smaller cultural centers that the Bank has in different cities in Colombia. Transver-sal Gaze was very successful, and also provided a space for experimentation. For most artists this was their first curatorial endeavor, therefore help-ing to extend the field of curatorial practice where art history is not taught as a career.

I will talk briefly about another project we have been pursuing over the past three years called Guest Work. We invite an emerging artist and

encourage him/her to propose a work that can be an existing one, or something new, and establish a relation with a specific work or series of works within our collection. It is a very small space so they are free to change the space the way they deem necessary. This (slide) is a work reflecting on the work from the mid-seventies by the late Colom-bian artist Antonio Barrera and a video artist, Rosario López, created this beautiful video instal-lation with a performer moving in synchrony with waves depicted in that painting which is one of the most important works of the Colombian modern-ism. Another example is the work of Beatrix Gonzáles who is well represented in our collection and whose works deal with the violence in Colom-bia and some of her works were the basis for a beautiful exhibition with drawings done with push pins on paper by the artist Lina Espinosa. This has yielded very interesting projects and has been suc-cessful in bringing younger generations back to the collection; the new works functioning as a screen through which we can view the collections. Thank you very much.

ivo Mesquita: It’s already 11:35, so we will give the public the opportunity to ask one or two questions; and then we will allow time for the public. Well, I think someone wants to talk.

carlos cruz-Diez: It has been beautiful and very exciting to see all the projects undertaken by our friends working in different museums throughout Latin America; each of those projects could be called an odyssey because the ... well, the econom-ic difficulties are always a factor in all cultural activities in Latin America. There is a very impor-tant thing to say. Art is communication and we live in a society of the media and of communication. This is a new civilization, which is totally domi-nated by both information and the media. Also, common problems in all cities and countries cur-rently have to do with lack of security. Everybody is asking for peace, even if we have countries like the US and others that have found social solutions that have given people the possibility of existing


and living and becoming educated. Others have not been as lucky. I live in Europe, for example, and in France the main concern is security. Imagine France that has a privileged society, that has so-cially solved many problems but currently security is their main concern. Now, art is communication and art contributes to social peace. Art, culture, and sports are the tools of this new society we are starting to create and they are instruments for social peace; why, because work time, which was so long previously, has been reduced and there is more leisure time, and what happens is you can see from the press, outside of Paris there were a lot of problems with youth, what happens is that people live in those huge spaces with no sense of community, without a sense of art or sports, with-out any tools to nourish their spirit. What remains is violence, because human beings are evil, you know, you have to teach your child not to pull the cat’s tail, this is something that naturally occurs in human beings, and so, what does civilized men do and what helps them to live with others within a culture and, well, everything is geared towards enlarging and making space; more noble is what happens in society, what we have to do is convince the political spheres in every country that art, sports, and culture are the tools for social peace. It is not something of the elite because those who are able to collect art are more privileged. No; art is everywhere. Art is for everyone and it helps us to live together, to get to know each other and to become more complicated. He who paints wants to be seen; he who writes wants to be read; and he who writes music wants to be heard. And, as a means of communication I think it is the most powerful tool that has done away with all barriers invented by Napoleon throughout the world, and that is the world of art. I think that the work we undertake, what we have seen until now is just the tip of the iceberg and not the future. What do we see in the museum of the future? Well, we have to convince the political spheres that this is a tool to lead the country and to better direct the economy of the country. I undertook a project in Venezuela called The Root of Art, we were on it to develop a

specific area of the country of the Andes in Venezu-ela, and we wanted not the economic spheres to finance art, but the other way around; after living in France I have realized that France has nomi-nated three women for more than a century and has produced all the possible money to produce bombs, tanks, and everything that we see: the Mona Lisa, the Venus de Milo, and The Victory of Samothrace. The planet, the entire world goes to France to see these three icons and what do they do while they go to the beauty parlor, they hop on a cab, they go to a restaurant, and they also develop its economy. France is just one example, but let’s not forget about Spain that also has a naked wom-an and three women midgets have produced all the wealth we can speak of in the world. So art is able to move people, is able to mobilize people and is an agent of economic development and thus we have to create landmarks; as I mentioned, I was thinking of the Root of Art I was creating in a small town in the Andes to place works of contemporary art and have people get there to see them and develop the entire economics of the place in this world. Museums of the future have to undertake this task. They should motivate collectively so that people would go there and develop the economy of the region. I think the future of museums is linked to this, it has to be a place of communica-tion for furthering understanding between people and not just create and perpetuate the heritage that we already have; we need the cooperation of all the existing media to create awareness of the entire planet of different topics, they can go to Ecuador, they can go to Buenos Aires, specifically to see, as we have seen in Miami, the interest the media is able to create around an event for the entire planet. Why? Because it has become an event, an event that is able to attract people and to make them come together for the marvelous com-munication of art.

ivo Mesquita: Thank you maestro. A few points have come from the presentations and I think we should address them. One is the role of the Latin American museum and how it perceives itself

with respect to the global scene, but not only to look at models that have be adopted, but models that are forged in Latin America, and how these models contribute to writing a new art history. So can I say something about this? I am going to say it in Spanish. Many of the subjects that came out of this morning’s discussion had to do with the different models and the autonomy of the different museums in order to describe and write its own history. What is that relationship for the different museum people in relation to the pro-spectus of globalization and the different local models?

Marcelo araujo: Well I think that this is one of the greatest challenges that Latin American muse-ums face, because historically I think that Brazil-ian museums have more contact with European museums than with other Latin American muse-ums. That has happened perhaps since the late sixties and I believe they have been developed only recently in any consistent way. I think it would be very important that we could articulate a con-sistent relationship between Latin American museums, not only to think about Latin American history but to help promote exhibitions, so many of my colleagues have talked about traveling exhibitions in Latin America. We recently had a very successful experience with Malba, Colección Costantini / Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires created an exhibition of the work of Xul Solar (Oscar Agustín Alejandro Schulz Solari) that traveled to Mexico and later here to the United States, to Huston. Xul Solar until now was an almost unknown in Brazil, and in many other countries. So this is true for the historical produc-tion, beginning with the area of modernism when we think of the twenty-first century; I don’t recall any other exhibition exchange within the Latin American countries with similar histories regard-ing the creation of the nineteenth-century acad-emies, and so on. So, in my view, I would say that is a very important route for the future of Latin American museums to try and establish better contacts among themselves.

ivo Mesquita: Anyone wishes to answer or make any other comment? Then, can we go to some other question? Another issue was the financing and what you would like to propose on this topic, because we depend largely on political decisions concerning money, but there is also private sup-port. What are the existing legislations in terms of the support of museums?

ramiro Martinez: I am talking about the situation in Mexico and I believe the ideal situation is to es-tablish cooperation between the government and private institutions. There has also been a history of privately funded institutions that had to go out of business after fifteen years of operation because of changes in the corporations or changes in atti-tudes of the private individuals funding or having originated them. I believe that there needs to be a balance between government and private financ-ing to assure continuity and so that long-term projects may exist.

ivo Mesquita: And you José? What about your museum, since it belongs to the Central Bank? José ignacio roca: Yes, well, that is our case, we don’t have to raise funds, but we have to spend wisely what we get. My problem is not financing, but how to persuade a board with very conservative members to contribute to a contemporary pro-gram, both for acquisitions and the exhibition programs. So far and for a long time, I would say sixteen years, I have been able to do that; conse-quently we have established a contemporary art exhibition program with a lot of success, but we have been very shy in making acquisitions of works produced for exhibitions we do, for example the work of Carlos Garaicoa; his first exhibition was in 2000 and then it traveled to the Alejandro Otero Museum and the Bronx Museum, and we let 80 percent of those important works literally slip between our fingers because the board was not interested in acquiring them, and we worked hard to acquire some, but most of the work has landed in the hands of European institutions.


Yes, I believe it is very interesting to see what is happening in Colombia. Colombia had super-vised all this scenario or contemporary art, more-over, I would say that Miguel Ángel Rojas who is already sixty years old, has not collected because he did not have a “painting phase” and has moved directly into installations, early on in the seventies and more difficult, so he was not collected. And then Daros came and they were able to acquire a sizable amount of contemporary art in Colombia, which is wonderful and tragic, and we realized the incapacity of Colombian institutions to see what they had in front of their eyes; what has happened after Daros and other exemplary acquisitions from collectors is that the institutions suddenly turned back to these artists; sometimes it was too late because the works had already been purchased or gone somewhere else; but they have expressed an interest in those artist, by collecting videos.

In my institution we have been holding video shows for a long time, but just two or three years ago we acquired the first installation, the first video by Miguel Ángel Rojas or by José Alejandro Restrepo, and it is very interesting due to the influ-ence or the impact Daros has had; thanks to these acquisition, Oscar Muñoz, an artist from Cali, a city that had big depression after the drug-traffick-ing period, with the money he got from those acquisitions, he was able to buy a house and trans-form it into a cultural center that has been greatly efficient in activating the whole local artistic scenario, and this is another way in which private capital helps strengthen institutional practices within a city or country.

ivo Mesquita: Thank you very much. Virginia, do you want to say something? And then I wanted to ask Marcelo and Natalia to make some com-ments.

virginia perez: Now, in Costa Rica, the two main museums, the Arts Museum and the Design Mu-seum of Costa Rica, have two completely different structures. The Costa Rica Arts Museum has a Society of Friends of the Museum; the problem is

that the Friends of the Museum are confused about the idea of fundraising for the museum’s projects and designing the projects. The result is sometimes a disaster. As for the Contemporary Arts museum, when I was its director there was no legal structure; there simply was a decree to con-stitute the museum; so the Congress had to pass a law to actually create the museum because before there was nothing. Anyone could have writ-ten off the decree and the museum would have disappeared. So we had to pass a law, and that is the only institution in Costa Rica where we were able to create the museum as a state-run institu-tion, depending on the Ministry of Culture, but it is also a state foundation with a private function. At this point, the funding for the contemporary art museum does not even cover the salaries; so the Foundation may raise private funds to pay the rest of the salaries and other projects. Also, some-thing that is very interesting in Central America is that the institution that is both private and pub-lic has a foundation or an association, and has been receiving since 1995/96 considerable funds from NGOs that have been established in the post-war era and much of the cultural support and de-velopment is owed to people of for inistance the Prince Claus Fund etc. ... and other NGOs that have really been instrumental in changing the whole scenario in our Central American region.

Hans ulrich Obrist: Perhaps there is someone who would like to react to that before we move on?

Natalia Majluf: I do want to say something on this because it seems to me that state funding which seems to be all very well and fine is tragic some-times because you have persistent political inter-vention in the museum. You have a similar prob-lem with the private funding, where you have sponsors who think they can design policy and it all seems to me that the major problem is institu-tional weakness; we don’t understand how insti-tutions should be set up and basically it all boils down to a question of education. I think what trustees and politicians have to realize is that they

have to be a little selfless and think beyond their own immediate concerns. There must be a set of checks and balances that must be more formally agreed upon if we want the institution to function. Then it doesn’t matter where the money comes from. There will always be pressure and tension no matter what the source is.

Hans ulrich Obrist: Now, one of the things that has came up in our previous Conversations is the whole idea of the museum as a brand, capable of creating cultural capital. In a recent conversation I had with Ann d’Harnoncourt, director of the Philadelphia Museum, she remarked that we should make a very strong difference between the brand on the one hand and reputation on the other hand, as these are not the same things. I was wondering if anyone could comment on this? Also what kind of pressure that you feel with respect to the branding of your institutions?

Marcelo araujo: I think, and this has to do with what Natalia was saying, that you have to be very clear as to what your mission is and how to work to achieve it. It ought to be very clear to us, even within public instructions, within the system; what we can allow or not. The same thing holds true for private funds; it is important to ask for the money, and we say, we need money for this and not for something else. We cannot play those games where one gives up too much to get money, and within the government, this is an experience which I can personally talk about. When I joined the museum there were all these projects that came from the National Institute, which is basi-cally our boss, and this is something very interest-ing; we must do this or that because he/she is friends with someone or a very important artist. I think that the establishment of a plan; a five-year, ten-year, twenty-year plan, will give a very clear idea to your bosses and sponsors. Having a plan also provides a clear image of the institution and what it intends to do even when your support-ing partners change their intentions or staff members.

Hans ulrich Obrist: Someone else has any other comment?

luis peréz Oramas: I think that brands or brand-ing is a less creative version of significance. And obviously you can choose branding or to build the museum as a brand but I think the challenge is to build the significance of the museum as a local institution vis-à-vis the local context and vis-à-vis similar institutions in other countries in Latin America or abroad. Personally, I don’t work for a brand, nor for a branding process. I did not work in that sense when I worked for local museums in Venezuela. I do not work for the branding process now that I work for MoMA ... but this is the first time in the history of Latin American museums in which we see an exchange among museum directors from all Latin American countries. This didn’t happen in the thirties, the forties, or the fifties; so it’s a process that is probably starting and will help evolve the way we conceive our museums; I believe every country has a role with respect to this process. The academic institution, university museums. and major institutions in America have a role – or had a role at the beginning of that process, and I believe that it is a spectrum one has to face. What I ... what are the challenges of this process in Latin America with respect to what the American institutions are doing.

Hans ulrich Obrist: Does someone else have any other comment? Please make your comments before we move along to another topic, or next question.

lidia león: After listening to my colleagues, I just wanted to say something very quickly about how I see museums, and not only in Latin America. Any museum to be able to survive these days must actively participate in the community where it operates; perhaps the museums were more dedi-cated to exhibit art works, but now art and culture go hand in hand; a change has taken place and change occurs more and more quickly. In order to keep the institutions strong, that tendency will


come from the community itself. The community itself needs for the institution to speak the lan-guage or be the tool so they can express them-selves. Artists need to participate within the heart of the community; and good artwork can expose and raise the issues that arise in the culture within the context they are in. In Latin America there is plenty of artwork whose theme is, for example, the issue of immigration or identity. Now, at this historic time, when we talk about globalization, we must strengthen our institutions, and the only way to do it is by truly knowing where our roots are, where we come from so we can express it through arts within the global community. And I believe – I hope – financing will be easier. Actually, I don’t believe it when I say it, but according to our experi-ence in how cooperation works in Latin America, the private sector will be the path to follow. I hate to say this, but in reality the government keeps changing, and as I said before, we are currently working closely with the secretary of culture, but when the next government takes over we don’t know what will happen. What we can see is that corporations and even private foundations or private collectors have managed to keep the collection as a living organism. In our case, the Jimenes Foundation, which started in 1964, was for ten years unable to do too much because of internal changes. I think that funding will work in the end because corporations supporting the arts will watch you closely. If you have an impact on the community or if you are exercising some influ-ence, or the community has any effect on the institution, then this is a way, a two-way street. We must continue encouraging this, the effect of the institution on the community that cannot be a one-way street. The community must also interact with the institution, and they understand the pub-lic that goes there to see the change that is taking place; then when the corporations see that interac-tion, they will realize that the programs can expose, not only works of art, but also they can express what the community really is, and they want to invest their money there; they want their corpora-tion brand, from which our funds come, because

the corporation has a minimum structure to stay alive, but the community programs and the rest come from the corporation, and they really want to encourage the dialogue between the institution and the context of the community.

Hans ulrich Obrist: Maybe it’s time before we open for questions to the floor that we ask one final question: the question that Ivo and I always refer to as the Zanini Question, which is the question about curatorial and museum pioneers. What has always fascinated me about Latin American museums is the great inspiration of the radical experimental models from the sixties and seven-ties. I remember a long discussion with Pedro Reyes and many others about all these visionary experiments of institutional models. My question is – perhaps it is a small contribution from this panel to what Eric Hobsbaum calls a necessary and urgent protest against forgetting, it would be great to see if there are any other models around, besides the ones I already mentioned ... are there any important tool boxes of the past with the tools used in the past that have inspired any of you with regard to Latin American museums?

pedro reyes: Well, perhaps what is interesting about the botanical garden in Culiacán is that the tradition of a garden as that of a museum is not something new; there was a very interesting proj-ect developed during the forties by Carlos Pegisera which they have called the Poem Museum, and this Poem Museum was a very subjective approach to walking through the botanical garden. The garden was designed in a very complex way; there were plants with paragraphs that explained briefly why there were all those Olmec sculptures, huge stones, heads made of huge stones made by the Olmec people and Pegisera was commissioned as an artist to curate this garden and organize this exhibition that was beautiful. He would use sen-tences from his own poems, and you can still visit of this garden and it is very liberating – it is an incredible experience to walk through a mu-seum with no pedagogical agenda whatsoever,

something totally subjective; it was like a poem, and rather than having labels with explanations, we find poems as explanations. So theoretically there is a space where artists could design muse-ums or be incorporated within museums with the concept of different perspectives.

Hans ulrich Obrist: We shoud open the discussion. I see a question here. We don’t have much time; maybe we have time for two or three questions.

audience: I am a collector and writer. I think about this topic because of what you have expressed here today, and also the role of politics, what is allowed; I have heard a lot about censure, and I know there is censure also in some regimes; it may be that they don’t move toward the left, and the limitations you are facing are that we don’t know; we want to hear about them, about the future. One of the issues we are trying to understand and bring to the public in general is that you talked about pedagogy, the major part besides the pedagogical issue, looking at contemporary arts may be difficult; in this coun-try we have some good programming about the arts on public television, also, art fairs like this one have become universities in our times. I think we are behind in the expression of bringing it here, and then the people can assimilate them. I love the idea when you say walking through a park. I think that ordinary people have to talk about what they see and what they don’t see and what they don’t understand. Thank you very much.

pedro reyes: Yes, in fact it is not ... when we talk about pedagogy it is because I think pedagogy is something incredible, I think it is a concept that must be revisited, because it is often associated with very stiff ideas. But I think that it is indeed something we should approach with a very high degree of creativity; many artists, going back to old museums, for example experimental museums, and that radical experiments carried out by muse-ums that happened during the fifties, the forties, and the sixties in Latin America, that were initi-ated by artists and run by artists, and this also

meant being involved in the design of programs for universities or for art schools, etc.; therefore I believe that the future of the museums is not only to expose, but also to create a space where peda-gogy is not a way to explain art, but a space where art may be used for education, and where artists can be directly involved in that way of communica-tion; as Carlos just said, I think it is very important to create a new public or new audiences for those museums; this is something crucial.

audience: I have a question. Now, when some museums are closing their doors in countries like Venezuela, and the national patrimony is threat-ened, art works are destroyed; what is your role as international museum directors to protect that heritage, that patrimony? Do you think you have a role, and which is the way to preserve that past, those museums? And also the example of maestro Cruz-Diez’s work. Your work that has been destroyed in Caracas and the works of Deso-to, who ... what is our responsibility within the Latin America community to speak out against this?

carlos cruz-Diez: We see several problems there like the destruction of works of arts on the street, and the destruction of our heritage. There are those who don’t understand the idea heritage, they don’t even understand their own heritage within their own families. These are very complex prob-lems that are not easy to solve. If we live within a society of communications we need to keep people informed; when we set down a work of art without any explanation, they are not concerned. I remem-ber I made a test where people were called upon to participate and they asked, called upon the popu-lation including one of the walls that was just destroyed in my work in the La Guaira Port. The population participated and once they had demol-ished it, there were manifestations of more than two thousand people protesting because they had destroyed the wall that was their heritage. So, if people become involved, then they know what it is about; they can defend it and then they can be

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aware of what is happening to them, it’s like when you provided public service that the population does not have.

If you launch a huge campaign, people get involved; it’s about propaganda. People read the press and see movies, and so on, but when a museum is erected – something that is related to the spirit – there is usually no promotion and people do not find out, and of course this is alien to them. In the government, when they destroy those works of art, they rationalize it by saying that it was not art, that was something that poor people had made in order to be able to eat, to sell the aluminum and the steel and they did away with them. Of course the state made no action to stop the destruction. In these cases there is, let’s say a complacency, and complicity on the part of the state to allow the work of art to be taken down. But when something like this happens, it is im-portant that it is communicated correctly, and the people are informed about what really hap-pened. Thank you.

audience: I am organizing an exhibition called The Jewish Presence in Twentieth-Century Latin American Arts, in New York, and I would like to know if there has been a similar exhibition in Latin America before or if not, if any of you would be interested in considering your museum as a location when we take this exhibition to other places.

audience: I just wanted to say that there was a project in Venezuela about a portfolio of Jewish artists in Latin America and I wanted to give you that information, because there has already been some research on that topic, Jewish contemporary artists.

Maria Finders: Well, this is the end, I can’t believe it. This is a historic event. We should go and have some coffee. Thank you very much to all.

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CONVERSACIÓN | PÚBLICO/PRIVADO EL FUTURO DEL MUSEO: AMÉRICA LATINA¿Cuál será el papel del museo local en una sociedad global? ¿Cómo podrían las instituciones del arte en América Latina manejar cuestiones de seguridad y conservation? ¿Cómo colaboran con artistas, galerías y otros museos? ¿Cómo se financian estas instituciones y es esto sostenible? ¿Cuál es el papel político, social o pedagógico de un museo?

PONENTES | JENNIFER ALLORA MARCELO ARAUJO GUILLERMO CALZADILLA CARLOS CRUZ-DIEZ LIDIA LEON SEBASTIAN LOPEZ NATALIA MAJLUF RAMIRO MARTINEZ LUIS PÉREZ-ORAMAS MARCELO PACHECO VIRGINIA PÉREZ-RATTON PEDRO REYES JOSÉ IGNACIO ROCA

Co-presentadores | IVO COSTA MESQUITA HANS ULRICH OBRIST

Art Basel Conversations | Sábado, 9 Diciembre, 2006 | Art Guest Lounge, Miami Beach Convention Center

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Siempre recordaré la extraordinaria conversación que Ivo Mesquita y yo mantuvimos sobre el rol del comisario y el rol de la bienal en América Latina, así que cuando hablemos del futuro puede que sea importante recordar algunos modelos impor-tantes del pasado que aun nos pueden servir muy bien.

Me complace dar la palabra a Ivo para su pre-sentación.

Bienvenido | Hans Ulrich Obrist

Bienvenidos a nuestra serie de Art Basel Conversa-tions sobre Público/Privado. Esto es parte de una conversación más amplia que llevamos años te-niendo sobre el Futuro del Museo. Art 36 Basel se centró en el Futuro del Museo en China, y el año pasado en Miami hablamos del Futuro del Museo en Estados Unidos. El verano pasado en Basel juntamos a comisarios artistas y arquitectos de Oriente Medio para conversar sobre este mismo tema en esa región, y hoy nos reunimos en Miami para explorar el Futuro de las instituciones artísti-cas en América Latina.

Me complace dar la bienvenida hoy a un grupo de trece participantes que se compone de directo-res de importantes museos y comisarios además de representantes de Bienales y Fundaciones, pub-licaciones y todo tipo de nuevas instituciones e iniciativas. Por supuesto también tenemos artistas en esta mesa redonda ya que ellos siempre son el centro de estas discusiones y son clave en lo que les aportan a éstas. Con las múltiples procedencias de los diferentes participantes formamos una es-pecie de museo y como un museo, siempre se basa en multiplicidad de perspectivas. Organizamos estas series y lo hacemos de un modo minucioso y con tiempo porque creemos que el museo de hoy es nada menos que un espacio para la re-actual-ización y re-contextualización del arte mismo.

Estoy particularmente contento hoy porque me reúno con Ivo Mesquita, con quien mantengo una colaboración continua y podemos seguir lo que ya empezó en la Bienal de Dakar cuando fuimos sus comisarios.

Hay otra cosa que puede ser importante: cuando hablamos del Futuro del Museo no podemos olvidarnos del pasado, de un modo dinámico, como una posible herramienta, en particular en el contexto de los museos que todavía parecen sufrir de una especie de amnesia, ya que la historia de los museos siempre parece faltar –en forma escrita-, la historia de todos los ejemplos pioneros que muestran cómo los museos y la actividad del comisario ha ido evolucionando.

Introducción | Ivo Mesquita

Buenos días y gracias Hans. Me gustaría agradecer a Art Basel Miami Beach el organizar esta conver-sación, es una gran ocasión estar aquí, principal-mente porque creo que por primera vez tenemos trece participantes latinoamericanos juntos para hablar de Museos. Es muy interesante que lo hagamos en Miami porque es un poco irónico al ser Miami una especie de “capital” de América Latina, de modo que está bien discutir el Futuro del Museo aquí. También es importante que parte de ella será en inglés o con traducciones, cosa que es importante ya que dirigimos este asunto a una plataforma internacional.

Los participantes trabajarán acerca de esta serie de preguntas: ¿Cuál será el rol de Museo local en una sociedad global? ¿Cómo pueden las institu-ciones artísticas en América Latina manejar cuestiones de seguridad y conservation? ¿Cómo colaboran con artistas, galerías y otros museos?

Cómo se financian estas instituciones y es esto sostenible?

Cuál es el papel político, social o pedagógico de un museo?

Tenemos un gran número de ponentes así que vamos a empezar ya. ¿Hans?

Introducción | Hans Ulrich Obrist

Vamos a dar unas pinceladas biográficas sobre cada ponente así que me tengo el placer de pre-sentar ahora a los primeros, Jennifer Allora y Guillermo Calzadilla que siempre trabajan en colaboración. Jennifer nació en 1974, en EEUU, y Guillermo, nació en 1971, en Cuba. Trabajan juntos desde 1995 y han participado en muchas exposiciones internacionales, de la Bienal del Whitney a la Bienal de Venecia y , por supuesto, están aquí en Miami con su extraordinario proyecto en el Moore Space que espero que todos tengan tiempo de visitar.


Conversación | Jennifer Allora Marcelo Araujo Guillermo Calzadilla Carlos Cruz-Diez Lidia Leon Sebatian Lopez Natalia Majluf Ramiro Martinez Luis Pérez-Oramas Marcelo Pacheco Virginia Pérez-Ratton Pedro Reyes José Ignacio Roca

Co-presentadores | Ivo Costa Mesquita Hans Ulrich Obrist

Jennifer Allora: Bien, esta mañana decidimos simplemente hacer una presentación breve de un trabajo que hicimos en 2002 para la Bienal de Lima y lo que haremos será dar una repaso a ese proyecto y cómo se desarrolló en el contexto de esa exhibición. Esperamos que este proyecto señale, de algún modo, las preguntas que se han propues-to, ya que son relativas al papel de las instituciones del mundo del arte y sus límites en su relación con la ciudad y en un contexto mayor.

Para empezar vamos a leer un resumen de even-tos que tuvieron lugar el día que empezamos este proyecto. Se llama Chalk. Básicamente Chalk se mostró en el Pasaje Santa Rosa en Lima (Perú) que se encuentra en el centro administrativo de la ciudad, alrededor del que están los edificios administrativos más significativos de la ciudad, incluyendo el Palacio del Gobierno que es la resi-dencia oficial del presidente y el ayuntamiento o parlamento. Esta es la descripción de los eventos que ocurrieron. A las 12’00 del mediodía 24 trozos de tiza se colocaron en el Pasaje Santa Rosa. Algunos estaban rotos o usados para escribir, como para sugerir su función. Los que pasaban empezaron a escribir y a dibujar con la tiza, trans-formando el pasaje en una gran pizarra, en una superficie de comunicación y diálogo.

A la 1’00 pm había manifestaciones a diario desde la plaza de Armas al Pasaje de Santa Rosa

con quejas sociales y económicas, y comenzaron a usar la tiza como vehículo para escribir sus peti-ciones. La escala de los escritos es grande debido al gran tamaño de la tiza. Los manifestantes escribían una variedad de declaraciones sobre temas como cuestiones del gobierno que implica-ban meses sin paga o declaraciones sobre la cor-rupción gubernamental. A la una y media pm la gente y los mensajes crecían en tamaño y variedad. La actividad en la calle empieza a percibirse por funcionarios del gobierno que muestran su insat-isfacción sobre lo que se está escribiendo. Se da un acalorado debate sobre quién tiene acceso al espacio público y quién tiene el derecho a hablar, escribir y presentar quejas ahí y cuya voz debe ser oída. Este debate se registró en inscripciones en tiza en el Pasaje Santa Rosa. Empezaron a apa-recer frases como: “Toledo es para el pueblo”.

A las dos pm la policía nacional junto a algunos funcionarios del gobierno van a la oficina del a Bienal que está en el Pasaje Santa Rosa. Se nos informa de que la masa va a ser disuelta y que la escultura de tiza estaba bajo arresto. A las 2’30 pm rompieron las tizas y las subieron a un camión y a las 3’00 una brigada de limpieza llegó y comenzó a lavar lo escrito con cubos de agua, cepillos y mangueras. Los funcionarios del gobierno dirigi-eron la operación con instrucciones sobre qué frases borrar primero, aquéllas que hacían acusa-ciones directas contra ellos.

Finalmente a las 7 pm después de que el Pasaje Santa Rosa se limpiara de escritos relativos a la actuación del gobierno, públicamente los mismos funcionarios procedieron a hacer sus discursos allí mismo. Los discursos eran acerca de la influ-encia liberadora del arte como un forma libre de expresión.

Ivo Mesquita: El Segundo ponente es Marcelo Araujo, director de la Pinacoteca do Estado, São Paulo en Brasil. Anteriormente fue director del Museu Lasar Segall. Es licenciado en Arquitectura y Estudios Urbanos por la Universidad de Sao Paolo y también es conferenciante de estudios urbanos en la universidad de Sao Paolo.

Marcelo Araujo: Buenos días, me gustaría dar la gracias a Art Basel y Hans Ulrich e Ivo por esta in-vitación. La mesa redonda de esta mañana tiene muchas preguntas importantes para contestar sobre el futuro del museo en América Latina y he decidido elegir un tema que parece ser fundamen-tal y que es la dirección de los museos. Como sa-bemos, la mayoría de los museos, y América Latina no es una excepción, son museos dirigidos por el gobierno, ya sea bajo los auspicios del gobierno municipal, provincial o estatal. Desde la creación de la mayoría de estas instituciones alrededor del final del siglo pasado hasta hoy, estructuralmente siempre ha habido problemas que han desembo-cado en el hecho de que muchos museos hoy se tienen que enfrentar a problemas de insuficientes fondos, falta de agilidad, y precariedad de la may-or parte del personal técnico. Esto ha llevado a una situación de una muy limitada, casi imposible, capacidad de acción, y a la necesidad de buscar una nueva estructura, una nueva forma de dirigir los museos.

Los primeros pasos se dieron en Brasil alrede-dor de 1998 cuando nuestro parlamento aprobó una ley nueva que creaba una nueva estructura institucional que de forma aproximada traducía del portugués una “organización social”. Una “or-ganización social” es de hecho una organización sin ánimo de lucro, lo cual re-define la estructura legal del museo. Estas organizaciones (institucio-nes) tienen permiso para firmar un contrato con el estado, y este procedimiento permite a la insti-tución tener el poder de administrarse de modo autónomo. Este marco legal también se ha apli-cado al área de la salud pública y la educación. La Pinacoteca es el museo de arte más antiguo de Sao Paolo, es un museo estatal y se fundó en 1905. A partir de enero de 2006 funciona desde su nuevo marco legal. Nuestra asociación de “Amigos del museo”, creada en 1992, se convirtió en 2005 en una “organización social” y firmó un acuerdo con el gobierno.

Esta nueva estructura nos ha permitido el mar-co legal para buscar fondos adicionales de fuentes privadas y esto también nos ha permitido tener

contratos más permanentes para nuestro person-al técnico. Creo que para los museos en América Latina este es un asunto básico, porque el per-sonal permanente nos permite tomar distancia de los cambios políticos, los museos pueden encon-trar la estructura y los fondos que necesitan para dar respuesta a los retos del siglo XXI. Estos retos para nosotros son: la educación y la construcción de un programa más consistente de adquisiciones y de actividades conjuntas con otros museos de América Latina, de modo que podamos escribir la historia del arte latinoamericano desde nuestro punto de vista. Gracias.

Hans Ulrich Obrist: Ahora tengo el honor y el placer de presentar a Carlos Cruz-Diez, nacido en Caracas en 1923 y residente en París desde 1960. Su trabajo pionero le ha convertido en un héroe para muchos artistas de hoy. Su trayectoria de exposiciones es tan amplia que sólo puedo señalar algunos momentos clave con exposiciones impor-tantes de los sesenta como la del Museum am Ostwall, Dortmund, que él considera clave. Su fuerte presencia en París fue apoyada por la galería Denise Renée; en 1961, otra exposición clave en el Stedelich Museum en Amsterdam, Movement Movement, que se anticipó en cuatro años a la gran exhibición en Nueva York de arte Cinético. Lo que hace que su presencia aquí hoy, en el asunto de los museos, sea muy importante es que el Sr. Cruz-Diez ha fundado su propio museo: Museo de la Estampa y del Diseño Carlos Cruz DÍez, Caracas. Él hablado mucho acerca de la idea del museo no sólo como lugar de exhibición sino también de invención. Bienvenido Carlos Cruz-Diez.

Carlos Cruz-Diez: Muchas gracias. En realidad, el Museo Cruz-Diez de Caracas fue fundado por la Oficina del Gobernador de la Ciudad de Caracas para ser un museo. Yo rechacé la idea porque no quería que me hicieran un mausoleo en vida. Las dos disciplinas que han hecho que el museo sea influyente en términos de educación y comuni-cación y difusión nuestras ideas son la “multipli-cación” de la imagen y el Diseño. Todo el museo


de punta a cabo está muy bien diseñado. Cuando piensas en ello, un museo como este es un depósi-to de memoria, que tenemos que salvar, que ten-emos que estudiar y analizar, y que se produce en la fusión de la multiplicación de la imagen y el diseño.

El museo en este momento está en estado co-matoso debido a que ha cambiado el régimen político del país. Por lo tanto, estamos revisando la política general de los diferentes museos. Cuando se fundó el museo, era una fundación y, como tal, debía buscar sus propios fondos. Ahora hay un fondo general debido a que se creó una asociación que tiene un sólo presupuesto que sale del gobierno central. En este momento, para cada proyecto, los museos tienen que enviar documen-tación y planificación para ver si la organización central los acepta o no. Y si están en consonancia con la doctrina política que se ha instalado en el país. El museo también debe tener, según las nue-vas reglas, una integración social que utilice todo lo que ha hecho el pueblo en los barrios, de mane-ra que todos puedan participar y no se convierta en algo elitista o discriminatorio, debe tener una base popular. Espero que en el futuro las cosas tomen un rumbo lógico y se dirijan hacia lo que realmente es lo esencial que, como he dicho ante-riormente, es el diseño y la multiplicación de la imagen, que ha sido tan importante para el desar-rollo de la humanidad y de las personas.

Ivo Mesquita: Gracias, maestro. Tengo el honor de presentar a Lidia León, Directora de la Fun-dación Eduardo León Jimenes en Santo Domingo, República Dominicana. Ella ha desarrollado un programa para la Fundación que, según creo, tiene un amplio espectro interdisciplinario que creo que incluye actividades sociales y música.

Lidia León: Ante todo quiero pedirles disculpas por hablar en español, voy a hacer mi ponencia en mi idioma nativo, pero lo bueno es que la ponencia tiene más imagen que texto, los cuadros hablan ... Deseo agradecer a Sam Keller su invitación para participar en este acto en Art Basel y quisiera decir

que represento a la institución más joven que par-ticipa en esta mesa redonda (una mesa muy inte-resante sobre el futuro de los museos). Nuestro museo está en el centro del Caribe y en el corazón de la República Dominicana, en Santiago de los Caballeros, una ciudad que se fundó hace cinco siglos, donde tenemos una herencia cultural de tres continentes diferentes. El Centro Cultural Eduardo León Jimenes fue inaugurado el 3 de oc-tubre de 2003, en conmemoración del centenario de La Aurora, fábrica de habanos donde la familia León comenzó su negocio. En 1964 llevamos a cabo el primer concurso de arte Eduardo León Ji-ménez. En el discurso de inauguración, Eduardo León Asensio expresó que al cabo de los años esta colección requeriría la creación de un espacio para exponerla de manera permanente. Aquí (dia-positivas) podemos ver los primeros años, ten-emos pinturas, esculturas y dibujos. Aquí tienen algunas de las más recientes adquisiciones, tam-bién aceptamos fotografías y objetos de cerámica, entre otras cosas. Una vez que se amplió la colec-ción, se hizo necesario desarrollar la creatividad mediante la investigación, protección, exhibición y difusión de obras de arte de la República Domin-icana. Sobre todo, la contribución que hizo a la formación de una sociedad más sensible al valor trascendental, más orgullosa de sí misma y capaz de participar activamente en la mejora de la cali-dad de vida en el contexto del Caribe. El Centro León trabaja para convertirse en uno de los centros culturales más complejos y completos del Caribe y de América Latina en cuanto a documentación y realización de productos culturales. El Centro León conecta el patrimonio colectivo de la nación con un territorio y la comunidad participativa a medida que investiga la dinámica de la cultura dominicana comenzando con tres temas diferen-tes: actividad, identidad y habitabilidad.

Aquí podemos ver la dimensión arquitectónica, quiero mostrarles esto para que vean al espacio que se aportó a la continuidad de este proyecto. Luego podemos ver la tienda. Tiene una tienda, una cafetería, un auditorio (donde también es po-sible realizar traducciones simultáneas), talleres

creativos y de actividades para escuelas. Los visi-tantes también pueden ver planes endémicos de la Isla de La Española, tenemos un patio caribeño, La Aurora, hay una réplica de 1903 en la cual los productores de habanos hacen habanos para esta compañía. A través del video los visitantes pueden tener contacto con la colección gráfica de video y multimedia y tienen la posibilidad de hacer inves-tigaciones y obtener documentación sobre arte, cultura y medio ambiente.

La colección de arte visual tiene un espacio, una exposición permanente. Esta exposición se renue-va cada dos años con la celebración del concurso de arte Eduardo Jiménez y ofrece la evolución de las artes dominicanas comenzando a principios del siglo XX. La colección antropológica cubre dos tipos de objetos en exposición permanente: dos objetos etnológicos y dos arqueológicos. Ello se debe al resultado de donaciones muy importantes de colecciones privadas diferentes. Es importante mencionar a Gustavo Tavares Grieser y Bernardo Vega. Como dije anteriormente, en la réplica de La Aurora tenemos huellas de 100 años del Grupo León Jiménez, de los valores familiares y de la com-pañía. Se ofrece al visitante un esquema del Centro León y del compromiso que tiene con la socie-dad.

Actualmente tenemos dos proyectos, el vigési-mo primer concurso de arte del premio Eduardo León Jimenez que vemos aquí. Esta la imagen del premio que se otorgó y la imagen del premio de instalación para Jorge Pineda. También tenemos la exposición de Yoryi Morel con motivo de los cien años de su nacimiento, un pintor que está consid-erado como el más importante de la República Dominicana. Tenemos doscientas obras de más de sesenta coleccionistas.

Este año se inauguró Merengue! Visual Rhythms/Ritmos Visuales en Nueva York, en el Museo del Barrio y estará allí hasta el 21 de enero del próximo año. En Febrero se presentará en Washington, en el Museo de las Américas. Algunos proyectos futuros que tiene el Centro León para el próximo año son el Segundo Congreso Internacional de la Música, Identidad y Cultura del Caribe, cuyo tema

será el son y la salsa, y junto a la Fundación Cisneros presentará Arte Sacro del Arte Colonial de Venezu-ela y Cultura del Baseball e Identidad Dominicana en noviembre de 2007. Para terminar, les voy a mostrar un video muy breve con imágenes de al-gunas actividades del Centro León para motivarlos a visitarnos.

Hans Ulrich Obrist: Sebastián López, Director Artístico de “Causa América Latina” en Río de Ja-neiro, es historiador de arte y, de hecho, es quien dirige el nuevo espacio de arte contemporáneo de “Daros América Latina”. Era Director de la Gate Foundation en Amsterdam y Comisario de la Bi-enal de Shanghay de 2004. Recientemente ha sido Comisario de una exposición en IMMA Dublín, “The Hours. Artes Visuales de América Latina con-temporánea”, que va a viajar a Sydney. Le damos la bienvenida a Sebastián López.

Sebastián López: Muchísimas gracias a Art Basel Miami Beach por esta invitación que para nosotros, “Daros América Latina”, es muy importante ya que no tenemos un museo en América Latina aún, aunque esperamos tenerlo en el año 2008. De hecho, “Daros América Latina” es una colección privada que se inició en el año 2000, y en un perío-do de tiempo muy corto hemos coleccionado muy activamente arte contemporáneo de América La-tina desde el principio, ampliando la colección desde los años sesenta hasta el presente. En este corto período de seis años hemos creado una col-ección de más de 1,000 obras de más de cien artis-tas. Es muy interesante el hecho de que estén rep-resentados artistas de todos los países de América Latina muy poco frecuentes en una colección de arte Latinoamericana. Es decir, arte de Chile, Ar-gentina, Uruguay, Brasil o Colombia, pero tam-bién de países que con frecuencia no han sido objeto de colección fuera de su propia zona como Panamá, Costa Rica y Guatemala o los países del Caribe. Desde el principio, “Daros América Lati-na” ha tenido una responsabilidad pública. Siem-pre pensamos que cualquier cosa que pudiéramos coleccionar nos mantendría alejados de América


Latina porque, se me olvidaba decirles, esto es una colección que se fundó en Zurich (Suiza). Pero queríamos que la colección se trajera para que pudiera ser vista en América Latina. Nuestro proyecto es crear un espacio para la colección y otras exposiciones que se lleven a cabo. La pre-gunta que todo el mundo se hace en la actualidad es: ¿Por qué al final elegir Río de Janeiro como sede? Cuando se inicia un proyecto como éste, una de las cosas que siempre se quiere hacer, es encontrar un edificio donde se puedan ubicar las oficinas administrativas y hacer el trabajo necesa-rio para poder establecer el programa. Esta mez-cla de circunstancias se ha dado en América Latina, donde el año pasado compramos un edi-ficio maravilloso de mediados de siglo XIX que tiene la tradición de la arquitectura del Brasil lla-mada Neoclásica. Hay quien lo llamaría Colonial, pero bueno..., es una estructura maravillosa, con una superficie de 1,200 metros cuadrados, y en este momento estamos en proceso de restaurarla. Para emprender el proyecto arquitectónico, esta-mos trabajando con Pablo Mendes da Rocha, uno de los arquitectos contemporáneos más rele-vantes, que siempre ha vivido en Sao Paulo y espe-ramos que el espacio de exhibición esté listo para el año 2008. Estamos en manos de Dios y de la compañía constructora. Esperamos poder inau-gurarlo en marzo del 2008. La casa está en Bota-fogo, para los que conozcan Río de Janeiro, casi enfrente del teatro Canicao que ha sido desde siempre uno de los teatros principales para la música popular brasileña. La política que quere-mos establecer en el nuevo espacio estará basada en la colección latinoamericana Daros América Latina, pero también tenemos una segunda colec-ción que se llama simplemente Daros y es una gran colección de piezas de arte del s. XX de Eu-ropa y Estados Unidos, con artistas como Jackson Pollock, Andy Warhol, Eva Hess, Louise Bour-geois, Gerhard Richter y otros. Ambas colecciones tienen la política de no representar a todo el mun-do. En la práctica esto significa que queremos alejarnos de la idea del s. XVIII de que las colec-ciones debían tener un ejemplar de cada especie.

Esa no es nuestra meta, no queremos hacer una especie de biología de la obra de arte. La colección tiene su sede y quiere tener como objetivo seguir literalmente las ideas de algunos artistas que con-sideramos como relevantes contemporánea-mente, hacer una colección profunda. Es decir, que de algunos de los artistas a veces tenemos quince o veinte piezas, mediante las cuales se pu-ede rastrear una idea, aquélla con la que ellos tra-bajaron. Esta práctica, aunque como dije al prin-cipio, se trata de una colección privada, se puede mostrar en un proyecto muy reciente que hemos emprendido con el trabajo de un artista llamado Julio Le Parc, argentino y francés. Después de var-ias visitas al estudio de Le Parc, para nuestra pro-pia sorpresa, vimos que algunas de las piezas más relevantes que había hecho él a principios de los sesenta nunca se habían coleccionado ni mostra-do en otros lugares más allá de sus propias exposi-ciones de la época. Algunas de las piezas estaban en muy malas condiciones, y para los que conoz-can el trabajo de Julio Le Parc, él trabaja con bri-colaje de objetos mecánicos en los que esconde una luz y se produce un maravilloso efecto por las proyecciones en las paredes. Así que no nos libra-mos de la labor de restaurar las piezas, una labor que emprendimos durante un año y medio con distintas personas y con la supervisión de Le Parc mismo. Después creamos una exposición que, gracias a Dios, va a ser itinerante, y probablemente el año entrante, para aquellos de ustedes que vivan en Miami, podrán verla en el Museo Arts Central. Podríamos seguir hablando sobre el tema más adelante si alguien tuviera otra pregunta, gracias.

Ivo Mesquita: Muchísimas gracias Sebastián. Es un placer presentarles ahora a Natalia Majluf, Directora del Museo de Arte de Lima, Perú. Antes de asumir esa posición ella fue Comisaria Princi-pal de dicha institución de 1995 al 2001. Es im-portante hacer notar que Natalia está desarrol-lando un programa muy interesante, una colec-ción de arte contemporáneo, que es su programa principal.

Natalia Majluf: Hola, y muchas gracias por su in-vitación. Quiero empezar con una anécdota. Hace unos pocos años, durante una charla en el museo, un artista se puso de pie y empezó a hablar furio-samente acerca de la autoridad opresiva de los museos. Supuse que estaba leyendo algo de Han Haack o algo así, pero en el contexto de un museo que casi no tiene ninguna visibilidad pública, no tenía colecciones contemporáneas ni ningún pro-grama de exposiciones, estaba un poco como fuera de contacto con la realidad. El museo nunca tuvo un papel en establecer un canon, o al menos no desde una perspectiva peruana. Eso es también es cierto para muchos otros países de América Lati-na, donde los museos no tienen un peso específi-co en particular, no funcionan como la autoridad apropiada y, de hecho, creo que esto es un punto débil en su constitución. Ahora, ¿Cómo se explica esta debilidad? Esa es otra cuestión. Pero creo que es un fallo del estado central en esos países donde se tiene la idea de que el estado se encarga y finan-cia todos los medios y que este modelo es seguro, independiente de los intereses privados. Creo que eso ya no es un modelo de institución viable, con muy pocas excepciones. Quiero ahora hablar de una propuesta presentada por el crítico chileno Justo Pastor Mellado: ¿Cuál es el papel del comis-ario? Es crear una infraestructura, y por infrae-structura él no quiere decir la construcción del edificio, sino precisamente la constitución de esas otras bases con las que trabaja el comisario, la es-tructura de la viabilidad del discurso y la de ver la crítica como una especie de base fundamental. Esto significa colecciones y también escribir una historia del arte. No hay nada nuevo en esta no-ción, los museos deberían coleccionar e investigar y, aun así, muy pocos países latinoamericanos tienen programas de posgrado en historia del arte y muy pocos museos coleccionan de manera sig-nificativa. Hablamos de crítica, pero el primer lugar de la crítica es siempre un “corpus” de tra-bajo que se hace visible a través de una institución. En Latinoamérica, los museos no han coleccio-nado como lo debían de haber hecho, ¿Cuántos Matta del principio están en Chile? Así que si los

museos de Latinoamérica tienen que tener un pa-pel significativo en el futuro cercano, estas colec-ciones son la infraestructura básica que debemos de construir para poder desarrollar un discurso de arte que tenga sentido y que contribuya a un de-bate público. La viabilidad del museo de Lima donde yo trabajo depende enormemente de que es básicamente una institución pública, en la cual el Estado no tiene participación y tiene una junta de directores que se ocupa de él privadamente. No hay fondos públicos, sin embargo se supone que debemos cumplir el papel de un museo Nacional desde la época de la colonia hasta el presente. En el museo de Lima tratamos de desarrollar estrate-gias que nos permitan reforzar los puntos débiles de la institución. Estamos coleccionando sin fon-dos para hacerlo, así que nos hemos pasado a la fotografía, un medio que ha funcionado en los márgenes de una historia del arte local y que no tiene apenas mercado. Basándonos en una búsqueda llevada a cabo en exposiciones de arte contemporáneo y en la contribución de los artis-tas, el museo está adquiriendo lo que es una de las colecciones regionales más importante de foto-grafía. Eso ha tenido varias consecuencias para nuestro museo, y nos ha llevado a la construcción de una nueva galería dedicada exclusivamente a la fotografía. Se podría decir en este caso que el re-escribir la historia del arte ha ayudado a crear infraestructura. Nosotros no hemos pensado en esa galería como un ghetto, sino como un espacio especializado que no impide que la fotografía sea incluida en otros espacios, especialmente en la galería de arte contemporáneo. La incorporación de la fotografía creó una interesante fricción con el arte peruano dominante y sobre todo con el apoyo que recibe la pintura, que hasta hace poco era el único medio legítimo para los museos. La fotografía ha ayudado a dar una nueva cara a la historia del arte peruano del Siglo XIX, y ha creado una contrapartida al arte indígena de principios del siglo XX, no sólo ofreciendo una nueva cara a los temas tradicionales sino también forjando la nueva interpretación de los maestros del Siglo XX como Martín Chambi, o los hermanos Vargas y


otros, que han estado marginados de la narrativa del arte. La fotografía da un contexto distinto a la violencia de los años ochenta y nos permite perci-bir la base fotográfica de las pinturas de esos años. El documental, la acción artística y las perfor-mances, han creado nuevos paradigmas de obser-vación de una sensibilidad posmoderna. Dieron el apoyo necesario y visibilidad a una generación de artistas como Eduardo de la Torre, Pablo Géne-sis y Bumberg y Fernando Grais, para mencionar solamente unos pocos, cuyos trabajos se han ba-sado en la fotografía, en el paradigma fotográfico, así que ahora en el mercado las galerías están em-pezando a incluir las fotografía.

Para mí este es el tipo de infraestructura que necesitamos, una que se forje a través de las colec-ciones y mediante la redacción y re-redacción de la historia. Así es como yo entiendo el consejo de Mellado sobre el trabajo del comisario creando infraestructura. Para que existan colecciones en un museo debe haber un deseo público de que exista la colección y quizá eso sea lo más difícil de conseguir en América Latina. En Estados Unidos los museos “coleccionan” coleccionistas, en América Latina no es así, los coleccionistas hacen sus propios museos como espacios privados. Este es un signo del fracaso de la esfera de lo público, un espacio que los museos deben recuperar para el arte. Los coleccionistas deben entender que si no apoyan a sus museos, ayudan a fomentar sus colecciones y a darles una base de independencia y poder para negociar y rechazar cualquier interés político o privado, su propia actividad como colec-cionistas se va a debilitar. Eso parecería una em-presa un poco egoísta pero para un coleccionista puede ser una que vele muy bien por sus intereses. Muchísimas gracias.

Hans Ulrich Obrist: Con gran placer les presento ahora al próximo ponente, Ramiro Martínez, que es Director del Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporá-neo en México DF. Nacido en San Antonio, él está a cargo del museo desde 2002. Antes trabajó como Director de exposiciones del Museo de Arte Con-temporáneo de Monterrey. El Museo Tamayo ha

sido responsable de muchas exposiciones en los últimos años, como por ejemplo la de Douglas Gordon, Lawrence Weiner, Luc Tuymans, y más recientemente la de Peter Fischli y David Weiss. Bienvenido Ramiro.

Ramiro Martínez: Muchas gracias. Hay dos temas de los que yo quisiera hablar en este momento, uno de ellos es el de los fondos. Algo fundamental para nuestras instituciones, para su sostenibili-dad. Hablando desde México puedo decir que los museos, especialmente los museos de arte con-temporáneo, no son una prioridad cuando se va a determinar la distribución de los fondos públicos del presupuesto. A los museos históricos, usual-mente, les va un poco mejor ya que contribuyen a crear un sentido de nacionalismo en la historia del país que es necesario para el gobierno. Por lo tan-to, es importante la idea de recurrir a fuentes alternativas de fondos, usualmente a través de creación de fundaciones u otras asociaciones informales y amigos de los museos. Tamayo es un buen ejemplo de esa colaboración. El museo se abrió en 1981 como una institución privada patro-cinada por dos de las empresas principales de México. Unos cinco años después, por desacuer-dos dentro de sus fundadores, Rufino Tamayo y uno de los patrocinadores, fue entregado al gobi-erno. Cinco años después, Tamayo se dio cuenta de que los fondos públicos eran inadecuados y serían inadecuados en el futuro. Se estableció en-tonces la Fundación Olga y Rufino Tamayo con el propósito de apoyar las operaciones del museo. Ese apoyo adicional le ha permitido al museo desarrollar planes a largo plazo que no dependen del ciclo de fondos del gobierno y que nos ha per-mitido desarrollar un plan más fuerte en cuanto a patrocinio corporativo. Sólo es mediante estabili-dad financiera, que los museos pueden planear por anticipado y crear proyectos, compartir los costos y establecer unas redes de trabajo realistas. Otro tema del que yo quisiera hablar es el de los programas de exposiciones. En los últimos cinco años hemos estado desarrollando en el Museo Tamayo de Arte Contemporáneo, un programa

internacional de conferencias, video-programas y exposiciones en la web. Dentro de los programas formales nos hemos centrado en la presentación de exposiciones individuales y colectivas, trabaja-ndo desde los años cincuenta hasta el presente. En el curso de esos cinco años, hemos establecido varias líneas de interés que han sido desarrolladas en las múltiples exposiciones y que responden a puntos contemporáneos e históricos de la cultura mexicana y su contexto. Todos estos programas han estado en relación con América Latina. Hasta la fecha hemos presentando cinco exposiciones en esta dirección: Arta Abstracta Río de la Plata, cuestionando Questionada la Linia Rego; Arte Concreto y Neo Concreto en Brasil; Vision in Motion. Varias de esas exposiciones eran itineran-tes que vinieron de fuera, mientras que otras fueron producidas por el Comisario del museo. De las últimas exposiciones una fue a México y la otra a Argentina e Italia. El interés en la abstracción geométrica de América Latina surgió del recono-cimiento de una carencia de investigación especí-fica de su historia en el contexto mexicano. Adicio-nalmente, a medida que el museo se dedicó a la presentación del período de posguerra hasta el presente, pensamos que era importante reconocer a América Latina como parte del interés interna-cional y contrarrestar la falta histórica de diálogo entre los países en Latinoamérica. Como sabe-mos, históricamente dentro de Latinoamérica estamos más centrados hacia Europa y los Estados Unidos, en presentar temas contemporáneos históricos a través de artistas norteamericanos y europeos, y en presentar exposiciones para esos países.

Este programa ha fomentado conexiones con otros museos y organizaciones culturales dentro de Latinoamérica en términos de trabajar con colecciones y/o los comisarios, que es parte de un interés institucional más grande. Hemos encon-trado que tenemos historias parecidas, de con-texto cultural, de limitaciones en el presupuesto y en cuanto a la relación que existe entre nuestros museos, con nuestros colegas de Venezuela, Bra-sil, Argentina y Costa Rica, lo que ha nos ha hecho

trabajar juntos para producir y compartir exposi-ciones, ha sido más fácil y beneficioso para nosotros. Todos deberíamos sentarnos y negociar y determinar cuales son nuestras ambiciones y necesidades. En el Tamayo estamos interesados en continuar estas relaciones de modo que poda-mos establecer circuitos alternativos, que no sean los de Europa o Estados Unidos, para la región de Latinoamérica. Muchas gracias.

Ivo Mesquita: Me complace ahora presentarles a Luis Pérez Oramas, Comisario de Arte Latinoamer-icano. El señor Pérez Oramas tiene un doctorado de L’Ecole des hautes études en París y también ha sido profesor en varias escuelas en Europa y Ven-ezuela. Además ha sido comisario de la Fundación Patricia Phelps Cisneros.

Luis Perez Oramas: En 1949 Alfred Barr, director-fundador del Museo de Arte Moderno, habló sobre los problemas de investigación y documentación del arte contemporáneo de Latinoamérica. Él dijo, y cito: “Sé que aquí en el Museo de Arte Moderno trabajamos en una constante precipitación. Ya empezamos a ver que hemos cometido muchos errores de política y de gusto. Iniciamos esta colec-ción en el espíritu del descubrimiento. Espero que los resultados hayan sentado las bases para que en el futuro se estudie de una manera más pro-funda. La atmósfera política creó mucho escepti-cismo sobre nuestras intenciones, sobre todo entre los latinoamericanos, que pueden detectar inmediatamente motivos políticos en acciones no-políticas aún cuando no existan. Sin embargo, ese cinismo lo hemos visto también en este país (EEUU) donde incluso exposiciones, publicacio-nes y adquisiciones de primera categoría se des-preciaban con frecuencia por ser latinoamerica-nos y, por lo tanto, supuestamente se debían haber emprendido por motivos políticos”. Alfred Barr fue el primer comisario de este país y del mundo a quien le preocupaba el hecho de que el arte moderno tenía que ser representado comple-tamente, incluyendo artes de América Latina. Ya en 1931, él recalcaba el papel que desempeñaba


la vanguardia en la obra de los mexicanos, junto con toda la colección americana de los museos. Desde el año 41 amplió esta categoría a todo el continente latinoamericano adquiriendo obras de toda América Latina. El MOMA es propietario de más de 3,000 obras de artistas latinoamericanos y del Caribe. Cientos de ellas fueron obras de arte críticamente importantes que ningún otro museo ni coleccionista privado en el mundo estaba en situación de poder adquirir en su momento. El MOMA fue uno de los primeros coleccionistas de arte latinoamericano y del Caribe, tiene la pos-esión más amplia de este tipo de arte si considera-mos la amplitud de la colección y la cantidad de obras maestras que tiene. He traído una selección de algunas de las más importantes y quiero mostrarles algunas imágenes.

Esta colección comienza con David Alfaro Siqueiros, Matta, Diego Rivera, Armando Reverón y la Jungla de Lamb, tan famosa, además de Joaquín Torres García de 1938. Adquisiciones más recientes son las obras de Alejandro Otero, De Soto, Ana Mendieta, León Ferrara y Waltercio Cal-das. También incluye arte Pop de América Latina: Botero, Marisol, Arturo Herrera, Doris Salcedo, Cildo Meireles. Esto nos lleva al papel del arte de América Latina y del Caribe en cuanto al aspecto más visible de las colecciones del museo. La his-toria del museo está vinculada a la idea de lo mod-erno. A la experiencia de una cultura contem-poránea y compartida mundialmente. Y aquí vemos la reinstalación de la colección permanente con las obras de Torres García que por primera vez se muestran al lado de Mondrian. Muestra la lógi-ca de la integración y no la práctica de la separa-ción, que tiene que prevalecer en la forma en que nos dirigimos en la actualidad en el arte latino-americano no contemporáneo, que exige el es-fuerzo de crear nuevos y significativos diálogos entre nuestras obras y las nuevas adquisiciones, y que implica la lógica del comisariado, que es una mezcla entre las formas canónicas y no-canónicas de arte. Aquí vemos a Armando Reverón al lado de una escultura de Pablo Picasso muy conocida, el Culto de los Bares. La cita de Barr de 1949 describe

una situación que no ha cambiado mucho en la mayoría de los museos americanos. Describe lo que se podría llamar una “actitud localista”. En relación al papel que desempeña el museo local en un entorno global, en una sociedad global, me pregunto: ¿Existe una sociedad global o se trata de la ilusión que existe de una sociedad global?, y más importante: ¿Hay algo que no sean museos locales en el mundo?, ¿Qué ponemos por oposición a un museo local?, ¿Alguien conoce al-gún museo global? Yo diría que el Museo de Arte Moderno de Nueva York es un museo local, ya que ha sido una institución propulsada por los requi-sitos y expectativas de un entorno local, y también es un museo internacional, que es algo distinto de un museo global. Su amplitud, su fortaleza y la convicción de esas ambiciones locales es lo que ha creado esa dimensión internacional y creo que hacer una distinción entre lo local y lo global apun-ta en la dirección equivocada, porque lo que está es proponiendo una confrontación entre lo local y la ilusión de algo global, que es algo que no existe. En toda ideología, el tema de lo global parece crearse para mantener la estructura actual de poder, que impide las ambiciones legítimas de lo local para manifestarse y evitar una comprensión clara de lo local por parte de las instituciones in-ternacionales. En vez de seguir esa posición que se presta a error entre lo local y lo global, prefiero fomentar la diferencia entre lo local y lo interna-cional. Sé que suena menos emocionante pero me parece que los museos en América Latina no se manejan de manera distinta a otros museos del mundo en temas como la seguridad, la finan-ciación, las relaciones con los artistas, los vínculos artísticos y las limitaciones sociopolíticas. Recal-caría el hecho de que buscando la imagen ilusoria de lo global se pierden los vínculos con la comu-nidad local que es lo que verdaderamente es su razón de ser. Y pensando sobre teatro y en referen-cia a Antonin Artaud, el filósofo Jacques Derrida habló sobre la palabra “inflada”, o un “souflé” en francés. Es decir, una palabra que alguien dice, que ha perdido la palabra verdadera, convirtién-dose así en una simple “grabadora” o un esclavo

de las palabras de otros. La palabra inflada es una palabra que no sale del cuerpo, o en francés tombé du corps, como decía Derrida. Es una palabra in-spirada por alguien ajeno, es una voz robada. Creo que los museos deben buscar su propia palabra, su propia voz que está vinculada a sus propios cu-erpos de trabajo y sus programas.

Hans Ulrich Obrist: Muchas gracias. Ahora tengo el placer de presentar al próximo ponente, Vir-ginia Pérez Ratón, artista, comisaria y agente cul-taural de Costa Rica, así como directora y funda-dora de Teorética, una organización no lucrativa en San José de Costa Rica, dedicada a la investig-ación y difusión de las prácticas artísticas en la Cuenca del Caribe. Teorética también publica y produce todo tipo de realidades diferentes. Vir-ginia ha sido la comisaria de muchas colecciones y también ha colaborado en le desarrollo en Costa Rica de una Ley para la protección del museo. Bienvenida a Virginia Pérez Ratón.

Virginia Pérez Ratón: Buenos días. Quisiera dar las gracias por la invitación a esta discusión y estoy muy contenta de estar aquí. Cuando fui invitada a participar en esta mesa, decidí que alguien hic-iera la labor de búsqueda de información por mí, porque yo no soy ya directora de museo y los ob-servaba desde fuera. Así que le pedí a mis colegas en San José, directores de museo, que contestaran las preguntas que esta mesa ha hecho. Tengo cu-atro respuestas de siete personas que contacté y me quedé con dos de ellas. Pero después decidí preguntarles, porque la pregunta de esta mesa para mí implica cierta amenaza a la existencia del museo, ¿Cuál es el futuro del museo? ¿Está en peligro de desaparecer? Después de tener respu-estas insatisfactorias, decidí presentar el proyec-to que abrimos la semana pasada en once sitios diferentes en San José, Costa Rica, como modelo de trabajo colaborativo entre instituciones, de forma que en vez de tener muchos museos inde-pendientes trabajando con poco poder y pocos fondos, reuniera a todo el mundo y tratar de dar el poder a todo el conjunto. Este proyecto fue

comisariado por Tamara Díaz y yo misma y fue presentado en el Museo Nacional de Costa Rica y en Teorética. Se trata de una retrospectiva de Mar-garita Azurdia que quizás ustedes no conozcan. Margarita Azurdia es una artista guatemalteca que nació en 1931 y murió en 1998. Fue la precur-sora del arte contemporáneo de Centro América, pero no es reconocida como tal y estaba consid-erada como una loca durante su período produc-tivo, en los años sesenta y setenta. Así que tenemos estas dos retrospectivas que queríamos hacer como anclas para la exposición. Obtuvimos el apoyo de dos museos que considero grandes de San José. Después pensamos cuatro exposiciones independientes pero con una conexión llamadas Raíces Intangibles, Límites, Tráficos y El Filibus-tero, todas ellas relacionadas a través de artistas como Soto, Marco Maggi de Siocalda, y Fred San-dac. Así que podemos repasar esto porque estas son dos de las respuestas que yo recibí en relación con el museo. Espero que puedan verlo. Esa es la fachada de Teorética, como pueden ver empezó hace un mes con la fotografía de Carla Solano cu-briendo toda la fachada. El trabajo de Sandra Cinto, también de Sao Paulo, para este evento. Estas son las instituciones que colaboraron con nosotros y estas son las exposiciones que hemos organizado. No voy a entrar en detalle porque este no es el momento para hacerlo, pero el catálogo está disponible y tenemos una página web que es www.estrechodudoso.com y aparece ahí en pan-talla. Quisiera mostrarles esto porque tuvimos la colaboración de otros museos aunque como todo el mundo ha comentado estamos ahogados en burocracia, tenemos poco personal o tenemos quizás demasiado personal pero con la gente equivocada y tampoco la mayoría tenemos los fondos suficientes. Esta experiencia ha probado que es posible reunir un grupo de instituciones locales para poder crear un evento que se pondrá en un contexto internacional y la capacidad de responder a un evento como este la probó el hecho de que todo estaba listo el día de su apertura. Tu-vimos once inauguraciones en cuatro días y todo funcionó bien. Nuestro personal de Teorética, de


ocho personas, se multiplicó con el personal de cada uno de los museos y trabajamos casi con doscientas personas en la exposición a un costo mínimo, porque esto se hizo dentro del presu-puesto de cada una de las instituciones. Tuvimos que pagar por el equipo, horas extras, catálogos y todo eso, pero por lo menos tuvimos las institucio-nes con sus fondos básicos, lo que creó un vínculo muy fuerte entre todos los museos que son públi-cos o financiados por el estado, y Teorética que es independiente y privado. Quisiera añadir dos co-sas. En primer lugar, que aún cuando los museos tienen muchos problemas en nuestra región de Centro América, considero que la falta de un siste-ma de galerías fuertes en la región todavía hace que los museos sean una institución legítima y es ahí donde ocurre la legitimidad y no en el merca-do. Creo que esto es un detalle muy importante que todo el mundo debe de saber, porque están ocurriendo cosas muy interesantes. Y en segundo lugar, el día antes de llegar aquí un artista local se acercó a mi para felicitarme por la exposición y me hizo un comentario que no esperaba: “esa ex-posición realmente me gustó. Después de estar en el Museo de Arte Contemporáneo, pensé que yo había estado en un viaje muy largo”. Muchísimas gracias.

Ivo Mesquita: Gracias Vicki. Y ahora quisiera pre-sentarles al artista Pedro Reyes de México DF. Fue director de Torres de los Vientos, un espacio alter-nativo en México DF desde 1996 a 2002 y en la ac-tualidad trabaja en el proyecto Agentes Culturales, iniciativa de la Universidad de Harvard. Pedro.

Pedro Reyes: Muchísimas gracias, voy a hablarles brevemente sobre un proyecto en el cual me invi-taron a participar a la misma vez que me invitaron a hablar sobre el futuro del museo. Visitando Cu-liacán pensé, éste es el futuro del museo o éste es el museo del futuro. Es un proyecto impresionante ya que es el lugar menos probable donde encon-trar un proyecto de arte. Culiacán es una ciudad al oeste de México que literalmente no tiene ningún tipo de tradición artística, que se conocía

como una de las ciudades con la tasa de crimi-nalidad más elevada de México. Es un proyecto que ocurrió en un jardín botánico que terminó siendo el jardín con la colección más grande de plantas tropicales de América Latina y de la mano de un coleccionista visionario, Agustín Coppel. Él vivió en Culiacán y decidió dedicar lo que tenía para crear un mundo, una colección de arte de primera, a nivel mundial, para que pudiera verse en su jardín. El proyecto fue comisariado por Pat-rick Charpenel y una arquitecta muy joven, Tatia-na Bilbao, que está realizando los edificios frente al jardín botánico. Creo que hay muchos motivos para pensar que se trata de un milagro, es decir, un modelo completamente nuevo de un nuevo entorno para el arte. Primero, es un jardín que surge a partir de un proceso larguísimo que tardó unos cuarenta años en gestarse. Fue hecho por un ingeniero llamado Carlos Murillo, aprovecho la oportunidad para mencionarlo porque murió hace apenas unas semanas, como un pequeño homenaje. Es curioso cómo surgió el jardín. Al ingeniero Carlos Murillo le pregunté cómo se creó esa colección maravillosa de plantas y me contó una anécdota bellísima. Me dijo que todo llegó allí en sobres, ya que no tenía un gran presupues-to para embarcar las plantas desde todas partes del mundo. Él se fue a otras regiones y jardines botánicos, y pacientemente se quedaba debajo de un árbol hasta que caía la semilla, así que le tomó cuarenta años viajar por todas partes del mundo, coleccionando las semillas, volver a Culiacán, sembrarlas, y hacer que todo esto funcionara. Dijo que el lugar más difícil de conseguir las semi-llas eran los jardines botánicos de Estados Uni-dos, porque siempre estaban limpiando y no podía recogerlas. Así que se trata de un verdadero milagro.

Creo que gran parte de los proyectos maravil-losos de América Latina ocurren no trayendo la planta sino a través de semillas, que son como contenedores o receptáculos de información que a veces viajan en el espacio. Y esa colección impre-sionante de plantas que Agustín Coppel y Patrick Charpenel crearon, fue una colección increíble

de encargos, y para mencionar algunos de los proyectos que se están haciendo: Dan Graham, James Turrel, Tino Sehgal, Francis Alys, Theresa Margolles, Franz West y Santiago Sierra. Creo que hay muchos motivos por los que esto resulta in-teresante. Primero, porque pensamos en un museo como un edificio. Casi todas las institu-ciones de la humanidad están contenidas dentro de un edificio, pero antes existía la Academia y otros lugares donde surgían las ideas y se com-partían. Eran peripatéticos, es decir, lugares por donde se caminaba y que eran como jardines. El mejor lugar para meditar y estar en contacto con las ideas. Creo también que el hecho de que el jardín sea un lugar donde la mitad de la gente no va por el arte sino a correr y a hacer deporte es una manera de atraer nuevos públicos. Esto es algo muy interesante para mí. En general, todos los proyectos que están suscitándose en estos jar-dines no son del tipo de escultura normal que se pone en una rotonda, sino del tipo de obra ambi-entada e integrada en el entorno. Mi propio proyecto está vinculado a esto, es decir, al papel que desempeña el museo como agente para transformar la vida de una ciudad. Cuando me invitaron a participar en el jardín, le dije a Agustín que era maravilloso que existiera ese jardín tan bucólico y como una especie de oasis, pero que había todo tipo de problemas en torno al jardín en la ciudad y que cómo se podría vincular ese conflicto y mi propia ... . Así que le pedí que con-tribuyera a mi proyecto para poder empezar a coleccionar. Se inició una campaña para colec-cionar armas, ya que se trata de una ciudad con alta tasa de mortandad por armas de fuego y hay ametralladoras, pistolas, revólveres ... La gente estuvo dispuesta a donarlas. Son armas que se están coleccionando y la idea es fundirlas y hacer herramientas de jardinería para emplearlas en el jardín. La idea es también utilizar la institución del museo para convertir a un agente de la muerte en un agente de nueva vida y hacer que el museo pueda ampliar su impacto trascendiendo sus propias limitaciones y entrando en el contexto de la ciudad.

Hans Ulrich Obrist: Muchísimas gracias. Tengo el gran placer de presentar a nuestro próximo ponente, José Ignacio Roca. José es curador en Bogotá, Colombia, donde ha estado a cargo de exposiciones locales desde la biblioteca Luis Ángel Arango. Desde 1994 ha publicado extensamente acerca de artistas colombianos y también ha sido comisario de muchas de las exposiciones de la bienal de Sao Paulo. Bienvenido.

José Ignacio Roca: Muchas gracias por la invit-ación. Buenos días a todos. Esta mesa redonda tiene muchas maneras posibles de predecir el futuro de los museos en Latinoamérica. Muchos de los temas propuestos oscilan entre lo tradicio-nal y lo contemporáneo, entre la herencia y la nece-sidad de estar en línea con lo que en este momen-to está ocurriendo en el arte. Voy a reflejar esta tensión demostrando maneras de cómo lidiar con esto de un modo creativo. Trabajo en un centro cultural muy grande financiado por el Banco Cen-tral de Colombia, cuyo trabajo es el transformar capital económico en capital simbólico, como dijo Paulo Herkenhoff una vez.

Creo que tenemos dos maneras de desarrollar nuestra institución. Por un lado hemos renovado los distintos edificios, lo que era formalmente la Casa de la Moneda creando varios museos y espa-cios de exhibición. Ahora estamos en dos manza-nas distintas de la ciudad en el centro histórico de Bogotá y hemos estado renovando eso poco a poco durante un período de diez años en que he estado al cargo. Por otra parte, desarrollamos nuestra colección creando una fundación princi-palmente de arte colombiano y de Latinoamérica, pero esto es básicamente lo que los museos de-ben hacer, así es que yo no voy a aburrirles con nuestros logros. Sí voy a dar un poco de infor-mación sobre la historia de nuestros espacios, les voy a enseñar unas fotos, como todo profesional de los museos, el aspecto clave para atraer a los visitantes de un museo tiene que ver con la tem-poralidad. Los museos no le interesan al público porque no cambian, no cambian porque piensan que es su obligación ser responsables de algo, ya


sea arte occidental, colombiano o latinoameri-cano, para la educación y la mejora del público. Pero en la mayor parte de los casos, el público está compuesto por gente local y después de la visita de la escuela cuando uno es un niño para ver la colección, no van más porque piensan que ya lo han visto. Así que nosotros tenemos un tiempo limitado para hacerlo, la temporalidad está aso-ciada a la colección. Las exposiciones temporales fueron asociadas con las distintas colecciones en sí, pero las exposiciones temporales vienen de fuera, las colecciones no son consideradas como estáticas, las exposiciones temporales dan la dinámica a un museo. Para pagar un programa vibrante para estas colecciones y que al mismo tiempo podamos mantener la función del papel social de los museos, quisiera referirme a dos iniciativas que hemos puesto en marcha en los últimos años, como la biblioteca de Luis Ángel Arango, que por cierto tiene el nombre más feo del mundo, pero es realmente un museo y es interesante con respecto al arte contemporáneo. Ambos involucran a artistas como modo de activar la colección. Así, en la primera, llamada Mirada Transversal invitamos a artistas a que tomasen la colección como material de trabajo para poder hacer exposiciones basadas en sus lecturas personales. Tratamos de emparejar a un artista con un tema, les propusimos un tema y ellos pud-ieron desarrollar libremente sus ideas del modo que deseen. Esta estrategia ha funcionado en muchos sentidos, nos permite mostrar artistas menos conocidos con dibujos, grabados y objetos de interés histórico o etnográfico, que si no, no se verían, porque muchas veces el museo presenta sólo las obras maestras. Eso permite también que obras de arte de distintos períodos y lugares com-partan espacio de un modo creativo con un enten-dimiento más amplio de lo que son los canales tradicionales. Paisaje, naturaleza muerta o ab-stracción pasan a ser no simplemente temas sino también cuestiones de interpretación del enten-dimiento cultural del color y de representación de los espacios urbanos. Así que los artistas vini-eron a nosotros con una idea y a mirar nuestra

colección. No es una colección muy buena, ten-emos unos cuatro mil objetos, ellos proponen un tema y lo desarrollan de muchos modos diferen-tes. También hay talleres junto a la exposición porque tienen el propósito de ser muestras que viajan a veinte centros culturales más pequeños que el Banco tiene en las distintas ciudades de Colombia. La Mirada Transversal tuvo mucho éxito y nos permitió experimentar. Para la mayor parte de los artistas este fue su primer trabajo como comisario y ello contribuyó a ampliar las prácticas de comisarios en donde el arte no se estudia como carrera.

Voy a referirme brevemente a otro proyecto que hemos estado haciendo en los últimos tres años. Es lo que se llama Obra Invitada. Invitamos a un artista emergente y lo alentamos proponiéndole una obra, que puede ser ya existente o algo nuevo, y establecer una relación con esa obra para nues-tra colección. Es un espacio muy pequeño así es que pueden cambiar las cosas como ellos quieran. Este (diapositiva) es un trabajo que reflexiona sobre la obra de mitad de los setenta del artista colombiano Antonio Barrera, y la video artista, Rosario López, creó esta bella visualización con el personaje que se mueve en sincronización en relación con las olas de ese cuadro que fue uno de los cuadros más importantes del modernismo colombiano. Y aquí tenemos algunos de los ejem-plos de la obra de González, que está bien repre-sentado en nuestra colección, cuyo trabajo ha lidiado con la violencia dentro de Colombia. Algunas de sus obras fueron la base para una breve exposición con dibujos hechos con alfileres en papel por la artista Lina Espinosa. Este ha sido un proyecto muy interesante que ha tenido mucho éxito al unir a los más jóvenes con las colecciones mismas. Los nuevos trabajos trabajan como un filtro mediante el cual ver las colecciones. Muchísimas gracias.

Ivo Mesquita: Son las 11:35, así es que vamos a dejar un espacio para que el público pueda hacer una o dos preguntas. Bueno, creo que hay alguien que quiere hablar.

Carlos Cruz-Diez: Ha sido muy bonito y emocio-nante ver todos los proyectos emprendidos por nuestros amigos que trabajan en diferentes museos de América Latina. Cada uno de esos proyectos podría denominarse una odisea, ya que ... bien, las dificultades económicas siempre son un factor en todas las actividades culturales de América Latina. Hay algo muy importante que decir. El arte es comunicación y vivimos en una sociedad de medios de comunicación. Esta es una nueva civilización que está totalmente dominada por la información y los medios. También los problemas comunes a todas las ciudades y países se relacionan con la falta de seguridad. Todo el mundo pide paz, incluso países como los Estados Unidos y algunos otros, que han encontrado so-luciones sociales que dan a la gente la posibilidad de vivir y de tener una educación. Otros no han tenido tanta suerte. Yo vivo en Europa, por ejem-plo, y en Francia, la mayor preocupación ahora es la seguridad, imaginen, Francia, que tiene una sociedad privilegiada y que ha resuelto muchos problemas sociales. El arte es comunicación y contribuye a la paz social. El arte, la cultura y los deportes son las herramientas de esta nueva so-ciedad que estamos comenzando a crear y son el instrumento de la paz social. ¿Por qué? Porque el horario de trabajo, que antes era tan largo, se ha reducido y hay más tiempo para el esparcimiento. Lo que ocurre puede verse en la prensa. Fuera de París había muchos problemas con la juventud, pero la gente vive en espacios muy amplios con el sentido de comunidad, sin un sentido de arte o deporte, sin herramientas para alimentar el es-píritu. Por tanto, lo que queda es violencia, porque el ser humano es malo, lo sabemos, hay que ense-ñarle a los niños a no tirar de la cola al gato, eso es algo que ocurre de forma natural en los seres humanos y, por lo tanto, lo que hace al hombre civilizado y lo que le ayuda a vivir con otros dentro de una cultura. Todo se orienta hacia agrandar y hacer que el espacio sea más noble. Eso es lo que sucede en la sociedad. Lo que debemos hacer es convencer a las esferas políticas de cada país de que las artes, el deporte y la cultura son herra-

mientas para la paz social. No es algo para las élites porque los que pueden coleccionar arte son privilegiados. No, el arte está en todas partes. El arte es para todos y nos ayuda a vivir juntos, a con-ocernos y a ser más sofisticados. El que pinta qui-ere que lo vean, el que escribe quiere que lo lean y el que escribe música quiere que lo escuchen. Como medio de comunicación pienso que el arte es la herramienta más poderosa, la que ha elimi-nado todas las barreras inventadas por Napoleón en el mundo. Creo que el trabajo que emprende-mos, lo que hemos visto hasta ahora, es sólo la punta del iceberg y no el futuro. ¿Qué vemos en el museo del futuro? Bien, debemos convencer a las esferas políticas de que ésta es una herramien-ta para conducir al país y para dirigir mejor su economía. Yo emprendí un proyecto en Venezu-ela denominado La Raíz del Arte para desarrollar un área específica del país, los Andes, y no quería-mos que las esferas económicas financiaran el proyecto, sino lo opuesto. Después de vivir en Francia, me he percatado de que Francia ha nom-inado a tres mujeres durante más de un siglos y también ha producido todo el dinero posible para producir bombas, tanques y todo lo que vemos: la Monalisa, la Venus De Milo y la Victoria de Samotracia. El planeta, el mundo entero, va a Francia para ver esos tres iconos y ¿Qué hacen cuando van? Van al salón de belleza, toman un taxi, van al restaurante, y también desarrollan la economía. Y Francia es sólo un ejemplo, no hablemos de España que tiene una mujer des-nuda y tres mujeres enanas que han producido toda la riqueza inimaginable del mundo: Las Me-ninas y la Maja. El arte mueve a las personas, las moviliza, es un agente de desarrollo económico y por lo tanto debemos crear monumentos históricos. Como dije antes, creé La Raíz del Arte en una pequeña población de los Andes para co-locar allí obras de arte contemporáneo y hacer que las personas fueran a verlas y desarrollar así la economía de ese lugar en el mundo. Los museos del futuro deben emprender esta tarea. Deben motivar a la colectividad para que la gente vaya a ese lugar y desarrolle la economía de la región.


Creo que el futuro de los museos está relacionado con esto. Debe ser un lugar de comunicación para que haya más entendimiento entre las personas y no sólo crear y perpetuar la herencia cultural que ya tenemos. Necesitamos la cooperación de todos los medios existentes para crear conciencia en todo el planeta sobre temas diferentes. Pueden ir a Ecuador, a Buenos Aires, específicamente para ver algo, como hemos visto en Miami, el interés que los medios pueden crear alrededor de un evento para todo el planeta. ¿Por qué? Porque se ha convertido en un evento, un “evenement” que es capaz de atraer a las personas y unirlas medi-ante esa comunicación maravillosa que es el arte.

Ivo Mesquita: Gracias, maestro. Hay dos puntos que surgieron durante las ponencias y que creo que debemos de mencionar. Uno es el papel del museo en Latinoamérica en relación con el tema global, pero no solo mirando los modelos que se han adoptado sino modelos que se ha forjado en América Latina y cómo esos modelos contribuyen a escribir una nueva historia del arte. ¿Puede usted decir algo? Lo voy a decir en español. Muchos de los temas que surgieron esta mañana estaban relacionados con los diferentes modelos y la autonomía de los diferentes museos para de-scribir y escribir su propia historia. ¿Cuál es la relación de las personas de los diferentes museos con respecto al prospecto de globalización y los diferentes modelos locales?

Marcelo Araujo: Creo que eso es uno de los grandes desafíos con que se enfrenta Latinoa-mérica porque históricamente pienso que los museos brasileños tienen más contacto con los museos europeos que con otros museos de Lati-noamérica. Estos contactos han sido muy recien-tes, quizá empezando a finales de los sesenta y creo que se han desarrollado sólo recientemente en un modo consistente. Creo que sería impor-tante que pudiésemos articular una relación con-sistente entre los museos latioamericanos y no solo pensar en la historia latinoamericana sino

ayudar a promover exposiciones. Muchos de mis colegas ha hablado de exposiciones itinerantes en Latinoamérica. Recientemente tuvimos una expe-riencia con mucho éxito con Malba, Colección Costantini / Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires que crearon una exposición de la obra de Xul Solar (Oscar Agustín Alejandro Schulz Solari) que viajó a México y después a Estados Uni-dos, a Huston. Hasta entonces Xul Solar era un artista casi desconocido en Brasil y creo que no mucho en otros países. Así que esto es cierto para la producción histórica empezando con el área de lo moderno. Cuando pensamos en el Siglo XIX, no recuerdo ninguna otra exposición dentro de los países americanos que tengan historiales muy similares acerca de la creación de las academias del Siglo XIX y así sucesivamente. Ese es mi punto de vista, diría que ese es un camino muy impor-tante para el futuro de los museos de Latinoaméri-ca, el tratar de establecer un mayor contacto entre ellos.

Ivo Mesquita: ¿Alguien desea contestar o hacer otro comentario? Entonces podemos pasar a otra pregunta. Otro tema era el de la financiación y el de cómo o qué propuestas pueden ustedes tener para financiación, porque dependemos muchísi-mo de las decisiones políticas en las cuestiones de dinero, aunque hay dinero privado. ¿Qué leyes existen para apoyar a los museos?

Ramiro Martinez: Yo hablo de la situación en México y creo que la situación ideal es que haya una colaboración entre el gobierno y las institu-ciones privadas. También ha habido una historia de instituciones privadas que han tenido que cerrar después de quince años de operaciones porque ha habido cambios en las empresas o en las personas que las fundaron. Creo que debe haber equilibrio entre la financiación del gobierno y la pública, para una mayor continuidad y para que se puedan dar proyectos a largo plazo.

Ivo Mesquita: ¿Y tú José?, porque tu estás en un museo del Banco Central.

José Ignacio Roca: Sí, bueno, en nuestro caso es así porque no tenemos que recaudar fondos. Sim-plemente tenemos que administrar muy sabia-mente lo que tenemos. Pero mi problema no es la financiación sino cómo persuadir a una junta de miembros para que contribuya a un programa contemporáneo tanto con respecto a las adquisi-ciones como al programa de exposiciones. Hasta ahora y durante mucho tiempo, dieciséis años diría yo, he podido hacerlo así, por lo tanto hemos establecido un programa de exposiciones de arte contemporáneo con mucho éxito pero hemos tenido muchas dudas o vacilado mucho al adquirir obras para las exposiciones. Carlos Garaicoa es un buen ejemplo, su primera exposición tuvo lugar en el año 2000 y luego viajó al Museo Alejandro Otero y al Museo del Bronx, y el 80% de esas piezas importantes permitimos que se nos escaparan de las manos. Eso ocurrió porque a la junta no le interesaba y fue un gran esfuerzo lograr que adqui-rieran algunas obras, así que fueron a caer en manos de instituciones europeas. Creo que es muy interesante ver lo que está ocurriendo en Colom-bia. Colombia había supervisado todo este panorama de arte contemporáneo, yo diría más, Miguel Ángel Rojas que ya tiene sesenta años no había sido coleccionado porque el tipo de obras que se hacía no eran pintura. Se trataba de insta-laciones, sobre todo al principio, piezas difíciles y por lo tanto no se coleccionaba. Luego, con Daros, pudimos adquirir una gran cantidad de la produc-ción de arte contemporáneo en Colombia, que es maravillosa y trágica, y nos dimos cuenta de la incapacidad de las instituciones colombianas de ver lo que tenían delante de los ojos. Lo que ha ocurrido después de Daros y otras adquisiciones ejemplares de coleccionistas, es que las institucio-nes de repente volvieron a echar una mirada a esos artistas. A veces era demasiado tarde porque ya las obras se habían comprado o ido a otra parte, pero han manifestado un interés por esos artistas colec-cionando videos. En mi institución hemos estado haciendo muestras de videos desde hace mucho tiempo, pero solamente hace dos o tres años adquirimos el primer video de Miguel Ángel Rojas

o de José Alejandro Restrepo. Esto es muy intere-sante por la influencia o el impacto que ha tenido Daros, ya que gracias a esta adquisición, Oscar Muñoz, un artista de Cali (ciudad que había sufrido una gran depresión después del período del nar-cotráfico) pudo con el dinero que obtuvo de estas adquisiciones comprar una casa y convertirla en un centro cultural que ha sido enormemente efi-caz para activar todo el panorama artístico local. Este es otro ejemplo de que el capital, de hecho, ayuda a fortalecer las prácticas institucionales en una ciudad o en un país.

Ivo Mesquita: Muchas gracias. ¿Quiere usted decir algo, Virginia? Y después quiero que Mar-cela comente.

Virgina Pérez: Ahora, en Costa Rica, los dos museos principales, el Museo de Arte y Museo de Diseño de Costa Rica, tienen dos estructuras completamente distintas. El Museo de Arte de Costa Rica tiene Amigos del Museo con el prob-lema de que éstos están confusos acerca de la dife-rencia entre financiar los proyectos del museo y diseñar los proyectos, así es que el resultado a veces es un desastre. Y el Museo de Arte Contem-poráneo, cuando yo era directora del mismo no tenía ninguna estructura legal, simplemente había un decreto para crear el museo, así es que tuvimos que pasar por el Congreso una Ley para crear el museo ya que no existía. Cualquiera podría haber anulado el decreto y el museo habría desaparecido. Así es que tuvimos que pasar una Ley y esta es la única institución en Costa Rica que estaba a cargo del estado como parte del Ministerio de Cultura, pero también es una fundación estatal con una función privada. La financiación del Museo de Arte Contemporáneo ni siquiera paga los sueldos. Así que la Fundación puede recoger fondos privados para pagar los sueldos y el resto de los proyectos. Algo muy interesante en Centro América es que la institución, tanto privada como pública, tiene una Fundación o una Asociación, desde 1995-96 re-ciben muchos fondos de ONG que han venido y se han establecido en el área. Mucho del desarrollo


cultural es gracias a personas como Ivo y personas como la Prince Claus Fund y otros fondos ONG que han sido realmente los que han cambiado el pan-orama en nuestra región de Centro América.

Hans Ulrich Obrist: Quizás una pregunta al re-specto antes de que sigamos adelante...

Natalia Majluf: Me gustaría decir algo aI respecto ya que me parece que la financiación del Estado que parece a todos muy bien es a veces trágica ya que tienes una constante intervención política en el museo. Tienes un problema similar con la finan-ciación privada en la que existen sponsors que creen que pueden diseñar la política y me da la impresión de que el mayor problema es la debili-dad institucional. No entendemos cómo hay que organizar una institución y básicamente todo se reduce a una cuestión de educación. Creo que lo que los miembros del patronato y los politicos de-ben darse cuenta es que tiene que ser un poco desinteresados y pensar más allá de sus preocupa-ciones inmediatas. Tiene que haber cheques y cuentas que se tienen que acordar formalmente si queremos que la institución funcione. No im-porta de dónde venga el dinero, siempre habrá presiones y siempre habrá tensiones.

Hans Ulrich Obrist: Uno de los temas que surgió en las últimas conversaciones, es la idea de que el museo es como una marca, una marca que es ca-paz de crear capital cultural. El Museo de Filadelfia ha comentado que debemos hacer una diferencia muy grande dentro de la marca por una parte y la reputación por la otra, que no es la misma cosa, así es que me pregunto si alguien podría comentar algo al respecto, y también qué tipo de presiones con respeto a la marca ven sus museos en estos momentos.

Marcelo Araujo: Creo que esto tiene que ver con lo que Natalia estaba diciendo, tiene que quedar muy claro cual es su misión y cómo uno quiere trabajar con la misma. Incluso dentro de las instrucciones públicas, dentro del sistema, tiene

que estar muy claro lo que usted permite o no per-mite. Con fondos privados ocurre lo mismo, es importante que usted vaya a pedir dinero y les diga: necesitamos dinero para esto y no para lo otro. No puede jugar esos juegos en que uno cede demasiado para obtener dinero. Esto es una expe-riencia de la que personalmente puedo hablar. Cuando yo llegué al museo había todos estos proyectos que surgían del Instituto Nacional, que es básicamente nuestro jefe. Esto es algo muy interesante, se decía: debemos hacer esto o lo otro porque él/ella es amigo de alguien o es un artista muy importante o lo que sea. Hay que decir clara-mente que hay que establece un plan. Un plan a 5 años, 10 años, 20 años, o sea, tenerlo muy claro, tenerlo claro también con sus jefes y patrocina-dores. Eso también da una imagen muy clara de la institución acerca de qué es lo que va a hacer, in-cluso si las persona que están ahí desaparecen.

Hans Ulrich Obrist: ¿Alguien más tiene algún otro comentario al respecto?

Luis Peréz Oramas: Creo que en cuanto a la idea de marca, creo que es una versión menos creativa en cuanto al significado. Obviamente uno puede escoger crear el museo como una marca, pero creo que el desafío es a dar un significado al museo como institución local, dentro del contexto local y comparado con las otras instituciones similares en otros países de Latinoamérica o fuera de ella. Personalmente yo no trabajo para una marca. No entiendo de proceso de marca. No trabajé en ese sentido cuando estaba con los museos locales en Venezuela. Ni trabajo para una marca ahora que trabajo en el MOMA ... pero esta es la primera vez en la historia de los museos de Latinoamérica que vemos un intercambio entre los directores de museos de todos sus países. Eso no había ocurrido en los años cuarenta o los treinta o los cincuenta, así que es un proceso que probablemente está em-pezando y que dará una mutación en la manera en que concebimos nuestros museos. Creo que cada país tiene un papel con respecto a este proceso. Las instituciones académicas, los museos univer-

sitarios y las grandes instituciones americanas tienen un papel – o tuvieron un papel en el prin-cipio del proceso. Creo que eso también es un es-pectro con el que uno tiene que enfrentarse. Lo que yo ... ¿Cuáles son los retos de ese proceso en Latinoamérica con respecto a lo que las institucio-nes americanas están haciendo?.

Hans Ulrich Obrist: ¿Alguien más tiene algún otro comentario, cualquier comentario sobre esto an-tes de pasar a otro tema o la próxima pregunta?

Lidia León: Después de escuchar a mis colegas, quería solamente decir algo muy rápidamente sobre la forma en que veo los museos, no sólo en América Latina sino cualquier museo, para poder sobrevivir hoy tiene que crear una participación activa dentro de la comunidad en que se inserte. Quizá antes los museos se dedicaban más a exhi-bir obras de arte, pero hoy el arte y la cultura van mano a mano. Se ha efectuado un cambio y ese cambio ocurre cada vez más rápidamente. Para mantener las instituciones sólidas, esa tendencia surgirá de la comunidad misma. La comunidad misma es la que necesita que la institución hable el lenguaje o sea la herramienta para que ellos puedan expresarse. Los artistas necesitan par-ticipar en el seno de la comunidad y las buenas obras de arte, lo que logran, es exponer, exhibir, los problemas que surgen en la cultura del con-texto en que están. En América Latina hay muchas obras de arte, por ejemplo, que tratan sobre el tema de la inmigración o la identidad. En este momento, en esta coyuntura en que vivimos, al hablar de globalización tenemos que fortalecer nuestras instituciones y la única manera de hac-erlo es conociendo verdaderamente nuestras raíces, de dónde venimos, para expresarlo a través del arte dentro de la comunidad global. Creo que la financiación será así más fácil. Ni yo misma me lo creo al decirlo, pero en nuestra experiencia, la cooperación en América Latina con el sector privado va a ser el camino a seguir. Odio decirlo pero en realidad el gobierno no deja de cambiar. Ahora estamos trabajando muchísimo con la Sec-

retaría de Cultura pero para el próximo gobierno no sabemos qué va a ocurrir y lo que se puede ver es que las empresas, incluso las fundaciones o los coleccionistas privados, han conseguido man-tener la colección como un ente vivo. En nuestro caso, la Fundación Jimenes que se inició en el año 1964, durante diez años no pudo hacer mucho por los cambios internos ... Creo que esta va a ser una de las formas de colaboración. Las empresas van a observar muy de cerca la labor de uno. Si uno tiene un efecto sobre la comunidad o si está ejer-ciendo una influencia, o si la comunidad tiene algún efecto sobre la institución, entonces se trata de un camino de doble vía. Hay que seguir fomentando esto, el efecto de la institución sobre la comunidad que no puede ser de una sola vía. La comunidad también tiene que interactuar o inter-participar con la institución y hay que ad-herirse a ese público que acude allí para ver el cambio que se efectúa. Las empresas cuando ven esa interacción, verán que los programas logran no solo exhibir obras de arte, sino manifestar lo que es la comunidad realmente, y ahí querrán invertir su dinero. Querrán su marca como em-presa, de donde provienen nuestros fondos porque la empresa tiene una mínima estructura para mantenerse con vida pero los programas de la comunidad y el resto viene de la empresa y ella verdaderamente quiere seguir fomentando el diálogo entre la institución y el contexto de la co-munidad.

Hans Ulrich Obrist: Es el momento de abrir la última pregunta al público, la pregunta a la que Ivo y yo siempre nos referimos como la Zanini Question acerca de los pioneros de museo y de los comisarios. Lo que me ha fascinado a mí acerca de los museos latinoamericanos es la gran inspi-ración para los modelos experimentales de los sesenta y setenta. Recuerdo una conversación con Pedro Reyes acerca del museo, de los experimen-tos visionarios de modelos de instituciones. Mi pregunta es – quizás sea una contribución peque-ña de esta mesa redonda, lo que Eric Hobsbaum llama una necesaria y urgente protesta contra el


olvido. Estaría muy bien ver si hay otros modelos por ahí aparte de los modelos mencionados. La pregunta es: ¿hay alguna herramienta que les haya inspirado a alguno de ustedes en relación a los museos latinoamericanos?

Pedro Reyes: Bueno, quizá tiene que ver con lo que estaba diciendo acerca del jardín botánico en Culiacán ya que lo curioso es que esa tradición del jardín como museo no es algo nuevo. Hubo un proyecto muy interesante que hizo en los años cuarenta Carlos Pegisera que han llamado el Poema Museo. Era un abordaje muy subjetivo al hecho de caminar por un jardín botánico. Un jardín orquestado de una forma muy complicada que tenía plantas con párrafos que explicaban por qué había todas estas esculturas Olmeca, cabezas de piedra gigantescas. Pegisera fue en-cargado como artista para hacer de comisario de este jardín y hacer esta exposición que era muy bella. Ponía frases de sus propios poemas. Se puede visitar este jardín, es algo realmente increíble como experiencia estar en un museo que no tiene ningún tipo de agenda pedagógica, que es totalmente subjetivo. Es como un poema y en vez de tener etiquetas de explicaciones se encuentran los poemas como explicación, así que en teoría hay espacio donde los artistas podrían diseñar los museos o estar incorporados dentro de los museos en el concepto de ese museo desde distintas perspectivas.

Hans Ulrich Obrist: ¿Alguien más quiere decir algo al respecto?

Público: Yo no sé nada, quizá porque yo no estoy en esa área, pero creo que el desafío de los museos en cuanto a financiación es casi una imposibili-dad. Cómo se puede tener dinero para finan-ciación de la infraestructura, de los programas y tener la libertad de tomar la forma que uno quiere, la dirección que uno quiere. Es casi una imposi-bilidad tener ese dinero, esos fondos, para desar-rollar algo sin tener algún tipo de límite, siempre hay muchos tipos de límites.

Hans Ulrich Obrist: Podemos abrir la sala. Veo una pregunta aquí. No tenemos mucho tiempo, quizás hay tiempo para dos o tres preguntas.

Público: Mi nombre es Ron Williams, soy colec-cionista y escritor. Pienso acerca de este tema que usted ha expuesto aquí hoy y también sobre el papel de la política, de lo que está permitido. He oído mucho acerca de censura y sé que existe censura también en algunos regímenes que no se mueven hacia la izquierda y las limitaciones con las que ustedes se enfrentan que nosotros no sabemos, queremos oír acerca de ellas, del futuro. Una de las cosas que estamos tratando de entender es que usted habló de pedagogía. La mayor parte de lo pedagógico, en lo que se refiere al arte con-temporáneo, puede ser difícil. En este país ten-emos algunos buenos programas sobre arte en la televisión pública, también ferias de arte como esta, que se han vuelto las universidades de nuestro tiempo. Creo que estamos atrasados en la expre-sión de traerlo aquí y que las personas puedan asimilarlo. Me encanta la idea de caminar a través de un parque. Creo que la gente común y corri-ente tiene que comentar lo que ve, lo que no ve y lo que no entiende. Muchísimas gracias.

Pedro Reyes: Sí, de hecho, no es ... cuando habla-mos de pedagogía es porque a menudo la peda-gogía es algo increíble, creo que es un concepto que debe ser retomado, que está asociado muy a menudo con una idea muy rígida. Pero creo que sí, que tenemos que abordarla de un modo cre-ativo y muchos artistas, volviendo a los museos experimentales de los años cuarenta, cincuenta y sesenta en Latinoamérica fueron los que iniciaron y mantuvieron estos proyectos, lo que también les llevó a estar involucrados en construir programas para universidades o iniciar escuelas de arte, etc., Así que creo que el futuro de los museos es no solamente exponer sino también crear ese tipo de espacio donde la pedagogía no sea una manera de explicar el arte sino un espacio donde el arte pueda ser usado para la educación y donde los artistas puedan estar directamente involucrados

en ese modo de comunicación, tal como Carlos acaba de mencionar que creo que es muy impor-tante crear nuevos públicos para esos museos, esto es algo crucial.

Público: Tengo una pregunta. Hay museos que están cerrando en países como Venezuela y el pat-rimonio nacional se ve amenazado, se destruyen obras de arte ¿Cuál es el papel que desempeñan ustedes, directores de museos internacionales, para poder proteger ese legado, ese patrimonio? ¿Creen ustedes que desempeñan un papel y cuál es la forma de preservar ese pasado, esos museos? Y, también, el ejemplo del trabajo del maestro Cruz-Diez. Su obra que ha sido destruida en Cara-cas y las obras de Desoto, quien … ¿Cuál es nuestra responsabilidad dentro de la comunidad latino-americana para denunciar esto?

Carlos Cruz-Diez: Vemos varios problemas allí como la destrucción de obras de arte en la calle, y la destrucción de nuestra herencia cultural. Hay personas que no comprenden su herencia, ni siquiera entienden su propia herencia dentro de sus familias, y estos son problemas muy comple-jos que no son fáciles de resolver, pero volviendo a lo que dije anteriormente, si vivimos en una sociedad de comunicaciones, debemos informar a la gente. Cuando exponemos una obra de arte sin ninguna explicación, la gente no se siente im-plicada. Recuerdo que hice una prueba en la cual se llamaba a la gente a participar y preguntaban a la población por uno de los muros que acababa de ser destruido en mi obra del puerto de La Guaira. La población participó, y una vez que lo demo-lieron, hubo manifestaciones de más de 2,000 personas que protestaban porque habían destru-ido el muro que era su herencia. Así, si la gente se involucra, sabe de qué se trata, puede defenderlo y tomar conciencia de lo que está ocurriendo. Es igual que cuando se ofrece un servicio público que la población no tiene. Si se lanza una gran cam-paña, lo publican en la prensa, tienen películas, etc., la gente se involucra. Pero cuando se erige un museo o algo que se relaciona con el espíritu, no

hay promoción, la gente no se entera, y por su-puesto, no lo entienden. En el gobierno cuando destruyen obras de arte, lo racionalizan diciendo que no era arte, sino algo que los pobres tuvieron que hacer para comer, para vender el aluminio y el acero, y lo hacen con impunidad. Por supuesto, el estado no tomó acción alguna para detener la destrucción, y esto es lo que ocurre siempre, cier-ta complacencia y complicidad por parte del estado en permitir que destruyan una obra de arte. Cuando ocurre algo como esto, se debe denunciar, se debe informar a la gente, se debe difundir esa información. Gracias.

Público: Estoy organizando en Nueva York una exposición que se llama La Presencia Judía en el Arte Latinoamericano del Siglo XX. Quisiera saber si en América Latina ha habido alguna exposición similar anteriormente, o si no, si a alguno le inte-resaría considerar a su museo como un punto cuando llevemos esta exposición a viajar.

Público: Simplemente quería decir que hubo un proyecto en Venezuela acerca de una cartera de artistas judíos de Latinoamérica y quería darle esa información porque ya hubo una investigación con respecto a este tema, artistas contemporáneos judíos.

Maria Finders: Bueno, sí, este es el fin, no lo puedo creer, esto es un evento histórico. Pasemos a tomar café. Muchísimas gracias a todos.

ABC | ABMB06 | Architecture for Art | 179

TRANSCRIPT | ARCHITECTURE FOR ARTARTISTS WHO BUILDWhat role does the practice of building play in the artists’ oeuvre? Can art be created on commission and when does an artist become an architect? How do you balance building regulations and artistic priorities? How do form and function influence your architectural projects? What are your unrealized projects and who would you like to build for?

SPEAKERS | RYAN GANDERDAN GRAHAMAI WEIWEI

Host | JOSEPH GRIMA

Art Basel Conversations | Sunday, December 10, 2006 | Art Guest Lounge,Miami Beach Convention Center

180 | ABC | ABMB06 | Architecture for Art ABC | ABMB06 | Architecture for Art | 181

ryan ganderArtist; London, UKRyan Gander, born in Chester, UK in 1976, studied Interactive art at MMU in the city of Manchester. After having completed a research residency at the Jan van Eyck Akademie in Maastricht, he participated in the artists’ residency program of the Rijksakademie in Am-sterdam. His first solo exhibition was held in March 2002 at the International 3 Gallery in Manchester, accompanied by a monograph entitled In a language you don’t understand. In 2003, Gander published the artist’s book Appendix, produced a solo exhibition for the Ste-delijk Museum Bureau Amsterdam and won the Prix de Rome for sculpture (the national Dutch art prize). In 2004 a children’s storybook The Boy Who Al-ways Looked Up written by the artist was published to accompany a solo exhibi-tion at the Cornerhouse in Manchester. In 2005 Gander was shortlisted for the British art Prize Becks Futures at the ICA in London, in 2005 won the Baloise Art Statement Prize at Art Basel, and in 2006 won the ABN AMRO prize of the Nether-lands. His recent exhibitions include T1 at Castello di Rivoli, Turin and Les Labo-ratoires d’Aubervilliers, Paris with Aure-lien Froment, and the Tate Triennial at Tate Britain in 2006. This year he will exhibit at GAM, Bologna; Massimo De Carlo, Milan; MUMOK, Vienna; Marc Foxx, LA; and the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam.Alongside his artistic production, he is also a visiting lecturer at a selection of art and design schools within Europe and writes regularly for art and design periodicals. Gander now lives and works in London and is represented by Store Gallery, London and Annet Gelink Gal-lery, Amsterdam.

dan grahamArtist; New York City, NY, USADan Graham (born 1942) is a New York based U.S. artist. He is an influential figure in the field of contemporary art, both a practitioner of conceptual art and a well-versed art critic and theorist. He was born in Urbana, Illinois, but moved to Winfield Park, New Jersey at age three, and then to Westfield, NJ at age thirteen Dan’s early childhood experience of New Jersey informed some of his early Mini-mal Art pieces. Dan and Robert Smithson photographed New Jersey together dur-ing the mid to late sixties. Dan was ro-mantically linked to artist Lee Lozano, rock artist Laurie Anderson, and artist Judith Barry among others. Dan has served as a visiting teacher internation-ally, and was especially influential in Halifax (at NSCAD) and Vancouver.Dan Graham has been identified as a Minimal artist, conceptual artist, performance art-ist, rock music writer, art critic, architec-ture critic and writer, pop culture critic, educator, sculptor, and collaborator with architects and other artists. While widely appreciated in Europe and Japan, Dan has received less recognition in the Unit-ed States than his contemporaries and friends, who include Robert Smithson, Gordon Matta-Clark, Vito Acconci, Sol Lewitt, Carl Andre, Dan Flavin, and many others. Graham’s work can be seen in public collections in at least seventeen countries. Some commissions in the U.S. are Yin/Yang at MIT, the labyrinth at the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden, and at Middlebury College, and in Madison Square Park.

ai weiweiArtist; Curator, and Architect; Beijing, ChinaAi Weiwei is, as an artist, architect, and designer, perhaps the most influential figure of his generation. The trajectory of his career in many ways mirrors the trajectory of Chinese art. He grew up with his father, the poet Ai Qing, in exile in Xinjiang before coming to Beijing to study. He played a role in 1979’s Stars, the first avant-garde movement in China, before moving to New York in 1981. He spent thirteen years there, soaking up the city’s intellectual and bohemian atmos-phere with friends as diverse as the poet Allen Ginsberg and Chinese expatriates Xu Bing and Chen Kaige. Returning to Beijing in 1994, he produced a series of collaborative books – Black Book, White Book, Grey Book – which gave a sense of momentum and community to an art scene that as yet lacked a market or even space for exhibitions. In 1999, he de-signed his own house, and the grand, severe design – part Bauhaus, part Cister-cian abbey – became a benchmark for contemporary domestic architecture in China, leading to important architectural commissions, including (in collaboration with Basel-based architects Herzog & de Meuron) the National Stadium being con-structed for the 2008 Beijing Olympics. In 2000, the Fuck Off exhibition he curated (with Feng Boyi) alongside the Shanghai Biennale launched a new generation of Chinese artists. He has also exhibited at the Kunsthalle Bern, Switzerland (2005); Caermerklooster, Ghent, Belgium; the 15th Biennale of Sydney (2006); and Between Past and Future, International Center of Photography & Asia Society, New York and Museum of Contemporary Art & Smart Museum, Chicago, IL, USA (2005).

Joseph grima Director, The Storefront; New York City, NY, USAJoseph Grima is a New York-based archi-tect and researcher. After graduating from the Architectural Association in London, he worked as an editor and adviser at Domus magazine, Milan. He is at present Director of the Storefront for Art and Architecture (www.storefront-news.org), a nonprofit exhibition and events space in New York City commit-ted to the advancement of innovative positions in architecture, art and design. He is a PhD candidate at the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths College in London, and a regular con-tributor to a wide range of international publications. Current projects include a collaborative research into outsourc-ing as a form of spatial practice, and a survey (provisionally entitled Instant Asia) of emergent Asian architects to be published by Skira in Fall 2007.


Introduction | Joseph grima

Thank you very much; it is a great pleasure to be with this amazing panel. The great thing is we have three artists who operate on very different interpretations on both a conceptual level and an engaged level. I think we will start with presenta-tions of the artists’ work, then we will move on to discuss the role of each artist in the world of archi-tecture, and then we will discuss how each artist has formulated their own identity within the world of architecture. I think we will start with Ryan Gander.

Welcome | maria finders

Good morning, this is the third conversation of this week. The topic is going to end the series of topics that we have done already about Architec-ture for Art, and the final panel of this series is about Artists who Build. We are delighted to have with us Dan Graham, one of the most important and prolific artists of our time; Ai Weiwei, an architect, curator, and builder from Beijing, China and Ryan Gander, an artist from London, who is working on many projects with performance, video, and building. With us today moderating the panel, replacing Stefano Boer, who could not be with us today, is Joseph Girma who has been involved with a great number of art and architec-ture projects and has been working with Stefano at Domus Magazine. So, I’m going to let you take it away Joseph, thank you.

In Conversation | ryan gander dan graham ai weiwei

Host | Joseph grima

ryan gander: So this conversation is called Artists Who Build and I build in an imaginative sense. I’m going to show two things very quickly. Firstly, this is a sculpture I made. The shelf and the number of books represent the number of floors in a social housing tower block in London in Notting Hill. This block is one of the last tower blocks, over ten stories made in Britain. One of the books you can see on the shelf is a children’s book I wrote called The Boy Who Always Looks Up.

The story is about a little boy called Tom who lives in a Victorian terrace house in Notting Hill. He meets an architect and talks to him about the new property that is being built next door to his house. Slowly, as the tower gets higher, the shadow from the block makes his bedroom darker and darker. In response, he and the architect play with one of the doors in the architectural model, a place that the boy visualizes as a place to hide. The door becomes the gateway between the concept and the reality of the modernist utopian building. This is a beautiful idea on paper but it developed into a very sad story. A man tried to propose marriage to his wife by jumping off the top of the building with a parachute but dies. Murders and rapes took place in the building. One Christmas someone flooded the lift shafts by setting off the fire hoses so there was no electricity. In the second year that it was opened, there are nicknames given to the building by the British press such as “Tower of Terror” and “Colditz in the Sky.” It is a disastrous story; on paper the building is ideal, but the real-ity of everyday living reveals its tragedies.

This relates a lot to my work because the spaces I make are paper architecture. It is architecture and I have to trust the spectator and they are required to use their imagination more than being given or told something. In a simplistic way of looking at it you can split the work into categories: “eye-candy,” “body-candy,” and “mind-candy.”

There is more “mind-candy” than “body-candy” in my work because you communicate and trans-late yourself into the work.

This is a slide of the little boy Tom drawn by a professional illustrator called Sara de Bondt. I can’t draw. It’s of Tom exploring the architect’s office. This is of them both making the model. This is a picture of the lift’s “Out of Order.” It is defi-nitely an adults’ book and not for children. This is a work I did last week in Los Angeles at Mark Foxx gallery, it is a bi-product of an idea I have been sitting on for two years. It is a notice board in a lockable case; all of the notices have been taken from the USC (University of Southern California). I went to USC and took down the notice board and photocopied all of the papers and replaced their notices with the black-and-white copies.

This is an architectural plan for a building called the New School of Art and Design. A school and a museum based on Jeremy Bentham’s vision of the panoptic prison. There are three rooms to it. The center houses the administration offices, which is very similar to the panoptic prison; the informa-tion is disseminated from the center. The outer ring is the institution and museum, with the galleries, book-shops, cinemas, and the restau-rant. The central ring is the art school which includes workshops and studios. The ring in between is the library that has one-way glass but, rather than playing on reflection in a way that Dan uses it because, it relies more on it’s visibility and it’s lack of visibility. It plays on Jeremy Bentham’s idea of the all-seeing eye. I believe that students work better when they are in the public eye and they are allowed to make mistakes that they are responsible for, so this room means that the students are aware that the public exists but the public around them are not necessarily aware of their presence.

Joseph grima: OK, we shall move on to Ai Weiwei who has carried out a considerable amount of work very close to the world of architecture and also collaborations with curators, publications, and dealing with art and architecture.


ai weiwei: I’m happy to be here; I have lived in the US for almost twelve years but still feel more com-fortable speaking in Chinese and have decided to use a translator (Philip Tinari). I’m an artist and over the last couple of years people have started calling me an architect. The first thing I built was my home and studio, and I think that is a very natural place for an artist to start; I started that because it felt as if I had lived with my mother for too long. The sex reasons are interesting as well as the metaphysical question about what it means when two people live together. After I built the house, people started coming to me asking if I could work on architectural projects. If they did not come looking for me, I would not have started this on my own because it’s kind of a pain.

In the past six years I have worked on forty proj-ects of which 90 percent have been realized, they range in size from an outhouse I designed for a friend to an Olympic Stadium. So I would not really like to think theoretically about what I am doing, I would prefer to have others do it for me. In China I live in Beijing now; I have a lot of opportunities to work with foreign architects, because as you may know they are all lining up at the door. Fun-damentally speaking, I find that wherever archi-tects come from, I am always amazed that they are interested in architecture as it is not the freest of professions and one has to remain interested for such a long time. In Zhejiang which is my home province in mid-pacific China, I am working to build an Architectural Cultural Park. The Cultural Park that I have created consists of small areas that bring together seventeen artists and architects who each contribute a small building. We had people from Germany, Switzerland, the Nether-lands, the US, and Mexico working with us. When we were at the point of signing the contract I was surprised that all these foreign architects were willing to come to a small city in southern China.

The most frequently asked question was about the conditions of the contract to which the Chi-nese government responded, whatever Ai Weiwei said they are! When I had to tell the Swiss and Ger-man architects that there was no clear program

but that we were going to proceed, they were sur-prised. It seemed they were not used to this idea of working and achieving something without a project in mind. Somehow the Mexican and Dutch architects were more used to this type of work.

We began this process of eating together all the time and getting drunk and some great ideas started coming out. After a year the entire project was completed, even though there were some problems with the Chinese government. The fact that it was completed was exceptional and it was widely covered in the global architectural press and so on. An interview was also published with Hans Ulrich Obrist which is funny because I have no recollection doing that interview, because it was quite long and I probably lost interest. But the lesson I learned from that interview was that the important thing is to construct space for possi-bilities and the result of these possibilities are a lot more fun than you would have expected.

I think that the important things about cul-tural activities are the possibilities for interper-sonal relations that they create. I think the distin-guishing thing about China right now is that you have the possibilities for these strange intersec-tions of people and ideas to give rise to new reali-ties. Another thing that people always ask me to talk on which I have sort of forgotten about because it was a long time ago is the Olympic Stadium, a design which is now structurally com-plete. The Olympic Stadium reflects a number of funny dynamics in China right now; it ties togeth-er a personal ambition as well as a larger set of social issues. I am someone who never goes to stadiums and have no interest in them; I actually think it would be more fun to build a wheel-chair center than a stadium. I think regardless of what the project is, an attitude of non-cooperation has to find itself in the context of broader participa-tion, otherwise protest is meaningless. We should always keep in mind the possibilities that may arise without expectation. Thank you.

Joseph grima: Let’s introduce Dan Graham who has been very influential on a whole generation of

architects through the production of artworks which are extremely architectural, but contextual-ized within artistic production, and the observa-tion of the relationship between human social interaction and spaces in which it occurs.

dan graham: These slides I brought have nothing to do with my first steps as an architect. Homes for America was about the city plan outside of New York, in other words a suburban city block, and it was very influenced by Michel Butor, a French novelist who talked about being watched in a northern city in England called Manchester. I was very interested in the suburban city plan, particu-larly in Kansas and New Jersey. I am interested in architectural plans being ideas of art and I was always interested in clichés and stereotypes. I like to deconstruct the idea of office buildings being owned by corporate banks and the difference between the suburban areas as well as the idea of landscapes.

Let me show the first slide, this is a piece I did near a lake for a sculpture park in Sweden. The shape of the sculpture is actually the shape of a lake. Here [slide] you can see the reflection of the water, as the sun changes.

When I was fourteen I was influenced by Jean Paul Sartre. My work is very much the subjectivity of material used in the city and the conceptual process of architecture, such as shopping arcades and the relationship between people. I think most architecture is the basis of modernism. The next slide is a project which took me about ten years to realize, it is late nineties. I was very offended by the work of some artists and I wanted to deal with the nineties’ clichés. This is a yin-yang design which represents the relationship between the body and architecture. Depending on how you look at the piece, your body shape changes.

This is the final piece. I’m sorry as I don’t have the video for this. It is interesting because I was very happy to work on this project. It is a dormi-tory of MIT and about 50 percent of the students are either Chinese or Chinese American. When

people are young, they don’t see themselves as being part of social clichés. I was in São Paulo in Brazil and I went to a school there and met an architect who was very big in the nineteen-sixties and seventies; here I noticed that 50 percent were Chinese, female students. They are everywhere at the moment. Recently, I spoke to a Korean girl who told me about her three sisters who are all artists. Luckily, her father worked in software designing and funded the studies. Many students, in fact, contributed to the Stephen Hawke project. The Hayward project was interesting too because we worked as a team and one of the great things about being an architect is that you can work in a team and work with many people, being an artist can be so lonely.

Joseph grima: I’d like to open up the discussion to the participants, I think we will start with Ryan, maybe with a comment that you have said, you said architecture was a lot more fun than you expected it to be; often architects tend to be exhausted and the process has been compared to giving birth – a very long and painful process. I think my question is: at what point does an artist become an architect?

ryan gander: Let’s take a school for example, the idea that school can remain as an idea and that it doesn’t have to conflict with the restrictions of being built, the concept is not undermined and the integrity is not threatened by being built. I was thinking about the idea of trust. I think artists that build buildings require a lot of trust. It’s the tradi-tional chain relationship between architecture, architect, and an end-user; however, art isn’t an end product because art isn’t useful. So, for an artist who builds buildings, the chain becomes something like an artist acting as architect, unless they have trained as an architect, they are only acting as an architect. Then it is not about the client but about the person who is funding the building. That is a different relationship alto-gether. For an artwork you have a spectator or audience so it is a completely different equation.


Joseph grima: I was just thinking of a lecturer and the question “What constitutes an architect?” came up and his definition was that anyone who has worked in construction of an architectural artifact is in fact an architect.

ryan gander: I make exhibitions that are archi-tectural installations. There are pre-fabricated walls, and doors, and hallways, and rooms that you can look into through windows without being able to access the space so, in fact, you are looking into a set. That is a construction, not architecture. It is an architectural sculpture because it becomes part of the installation. There is a time element associated with saying we are making something architectural.

Joseph grima: I would like to ask Ai Weiwei; you were saying the most interesting thing about the experience in Jinhua was in fact this participatory process in which you put all these people together and it was a long discussion which materialized in this architectural artifact. So through the way you were speaking about it, the architecture became art in the sense that it was giving life to an experi-ence and which became an artifact. Do you think architecture can be a performance?

ai weiwei: I think of course architecture requires more activity in the social and political spheres, but that is something that is taken up by Chinese artists in their works. If you say that a building cannot be entered or touched then maybe its art but if you can rub up against it, and throw it on the ground and break it then maybe it becomes architecture.

Joseph grima: So what do you think about this, when does an artist become an architect?

dan graham: The biggest influence on me was Flavin, and I think he came from Russian Con-structivism. What I like about Russian Construc-tivism was that the artist designer and architect reported to one person and also what I like about

Russian Constructivism was the social context. Melnikov did workers’ gloves, but what I really like are pieces that are both or neither art or archi-tecture without comments on them so they can comment on themselves.

Everything for me is a hobby and this is what I love doing. I had a wonderful student who was an architect in the Wright Academy and she is now an artist, and she told me that architecture was about the interior and not about the outside shell and also it is about program, so when I did my DIA Foundation project the idea was to turn the DIA into an “after-ICA” because it was an meditative genius artist space. And I wanted to have a seven-ties alternative space and atrium. And I think the thing about separating art and architecture is pro-gram, so maybe we can talk a bit about program as well as function.

Joseph grima: Do you have anything to say on program of your school example, because you’re introducing two specific programs and transpos-ing them onto an architectural form that was imagined for a third program? How did you choose? Tell me about the choice of program.

ryan gander: I thought they would bash against each other clumsily. The idea of challenging traditional ideas of education and turning its processes upside down, when a school has no teaching staff and it simply has administration at the core is more of a conceptual collage. The fact that they don’t fit is very interesting.

Joseph grima: The idea of art and its relationship with education is something you were talking a lot about this morning. You were saying a lot of your work has been analyzed from the educational view point.

dan graham: Actually my parents were upper middle class and the main collectors I have are doctors, professional upper middle class, but I am actually reacting against the simplification that Daniel Siedell wrote about the museum as a

historical establishment that we should go against. Actually what I love about museums are the public spaces, in other words the lobby. So I did the Heart Pavilion as a romantic meeting space in an empty modernist building lobby.

I think in the eighties and nineties the education program for children becomes the basis for the museum becoming a community center, so for the Hayward Gallery I brought in a computer which was originally for the Münster (Sculpture) Show. I wanted to have in the center and lobby of the museum a children’s day care center with comput-ers, CD-ROM, and a cartoon library to educate people and entertain them, and I did this for the Hayward Gallery also. It’s a place where people from the street without paying can come, old peo-ple and also people with children can come and entertain themselves. But I think again this is the program of the museum as it becomes more of a community center; it’s always shifting. I think also for the client and the demands they make are very important and very site-specific and very social specific. And also because I never went to art school or college I am educating myself and I’m very in-volved in the whole education process now, that’s also why I go to China now, to educate myself. The great thing about art is you can get air tickets and go to museums and meet with famous artists. And famous architects, and get paid a little bit.

ryan gander: Can I ask you a question? In terms of architecture projects, have you ever funded any projects yourself, or do you always use a financial backer, or is a client involved?

dan graham: I actually fund most things myself.

ryan gander: Have you ever made restrictions or compromises due to institutions or museums to produce something that is specific to what they are looking for?

dan graham: What I like is going to big shows in Germany. In Germany every show has a theme, a kind of didactic theme, a sort of Encyclopedia

Britannica idea and you can go against that theme. What I really like is world-fair type exhibitions for example at the Venice Biennale in 1976 there was a show called Environment, Participation, Cul-tural Structures about the environment. So I did a piece that was like a showcase window because I think in the Venice Biennale every pavilion has a showcase for the main artist of that country. But I wanted to have the spectator in the place of the object and they would be in the showcase. So I think the theme of big exhibitions rather than the funding becomes very important to me. Restric-tions happen when I get a curator who, instead of giving the initial idea, wants to be the artist him or herself. Funding is great if it is public because that means I don’t have to put my own money into it. When I do things with galleries, nothing sells so I have to pay for 50 percent. So, I really like the public situation when the money comes from you, the taxpayer.

Joseph grima: I wanted to ask, one of the interest-ing things about your work that defines the meet-ing point between architecture and art is the degree to which ideology is a driving force and I think in your work there is a very strong ideological content that runs through, from the Conceptual Art that runs straight through to the architecture. Especially to the way you were talking about it this morning. I wanted to ask Ai Weiwei a little bit more about what you think about ideology and its relationship to architecture. A large part of archi-tecture is somehow a leeway to ideological content art, in a way one of its defining feature is its close link with ideology. What do you think about this meeting point?

ai weiwei: Architecture, be it public or individual, is necessarily associated to sets of social ideals and that is a difficult thing to separate.

Joseph grima: So basically what you are saying is that architecture can be interpreted as an artistic medium almost like any other but has a particu-larly profound impact on a social context.


ai weiwei: I think the meaning of overall archi-tecture is always the product of an individual artist for political culture and self expression, interpretation of culture and political conditions. Of course it can be in various forms and different concerns; it can be in more intimate or obvious form but I think it’s always together – it can never be separated.

dan graham: I think that the role of the artist is to introduce playfulness, play into the situation, in other words, as Foucault said, “architects believe in utopia,” which I think is a bad and dangerous idea. Tafuri said that most modern architects build blueprints to build a new utopia and a better city and then they compete with each other, which then becomes a capitalist competition. I think what the artists do is to bring everything down to a playful situation. And as Marcus has said, we want to reduce everything to the polymorphous perverse sexuality of children. And I think in art projects you rediscover a playful mood. I think artists can do this better than architects because they are often trying to impose their own struc-tural utopia. I think art uses parody and architec-ture doesn’t offer parody.

ryan gander: Isn’t it just artists who choose to design architecture? If an artist designs some jew-elry it doesn’t make them a jewelry designer. My parents could design their own house but it doesn’t make them architects because they decide where the cooker should go.

dan graham: Yes, there is a disease out there I think artists want to become architects and archi-tects want to become artists. And it is a disease, so maybe I’m becoming a hygienist about the disease but in fact this is the situation we have now, and I think that it is because architecture has become a corporate forum, in other words a symbol. But this is where I go to an artist who had an enormous influence on me and architects, Claes Oldenburg, in other words, he was doing mock-minded men-tality, so I think we have to have a sense of humor

as you have (pointing to Ai Weiwei) about the situ-ation. I think that some great architects have an enormous sense of humor, like (Eero) Saarinen, and I think humor rather than superficial wit is really important.

Joseph grima: How would you draw the line between humor and superficial wit, do you mean seriously engaged humor in architecture looking to the Venturi example. Do you consider this work to be humorous?

dan graham: Yes deeply humorous, but I think it is because he took a lot from pop art and of course his work is about signs and signs in the environ-ment. Let me mention something about one of my favorite Saarinen buildings. This is because I am an architecture tourist and I like to talk about the buildings I have seen. There is a dormitory in the university of Pennsylvania, it was built as a wom-en’s dormitory, and the outside is brick with ivy so it’s very fake medieval gothic and there is like a drawbridge cutting across a kind of a moat situa-tion because the women’s dormitory inside has an atrium. Everything is white and then on the first floor there are French doors like in a bordello, with girls half dressed. Yes it is true.

Joseph grima: The other defining tendencies at the moment in architecture are the increasing nostalgia towards the past, so I was thinking may-be you could say something about this.

dan graham: Well I think that I go very far back in to the period of the Rolling Stones, they had a song called Yesterday’s Papers, “who reads yesterdays papers?” I think some fashion magazines were very interested in getting away from the “just passed” like the awful nineties into nostalgia from the six-ties or seventies. I think that we should look at the “just passed” so we have a sense of history because otherwise it cuts us off from history; like people who do new sixties artist sketches from books with-out the social context, or the complexity of that period, and also all the ambiguities. So of course I

am against this kind of neo “just passed” fashion stuff, but I guess because fashion magazines, and the fashion industry, and the architects are so much part of that ballgame right now, I guess I am just an old-fashioned sixties kind of guy.

maria finders: Joseph, we have time for a few questions. Are there any questions from the audi-ence to these speakers?

audience: How do you balance building regula-tions and artistic practices? It seems to me that as soon as you get near to building regulations, you all go off. I am curious what the effect of building regulations has on the ideology of the building.

dan graham: I found when I was working on the Hayward project, we had to deal with building regulations, and basically we had to make com-promises and then we came up with solutions. This was not a rare situation, just a process. This is what architecture is about – it’s why the people who work for me don’t want to become architects who work for big corporations and deal with all these regulations, so instead they work with me. In other words, architects want to be artists to avoid these issues but in fact this is life and this is the situation for architecture. I think the problem is that when architecture becomes a big corporate situation and it has to do exactly what the city wants them to do, but when it is small and when they are doing non-corporate projects they don’t have to deal with that. (...) the greatest architect of his time acted as an aristocrat in a certain way, he only built houses for intellectuals and this was quite an aristocratic idea, whereas Venturi never did a corporal situation, all his projects are schools, small situations, but he ran into a real problem when on the National Gallery in London, Prince Charles objected to it and made him make compromises.

audience: What is the relationship between the Versailles hall of mirrors and contemporary life?

dan graham: I read I wonderful book about Versailles, apparently in the French Regency period there was a conflict in landscape architec-ture between the anamorphic distortions of the water and the Cartesian logic. So there is always this conflict between these two things. But what I think is interesting is that the Sun King was able to transude silver into gold alchemically, and of course the king controlled everything with his rules and regulations and with the architecture and his theatrical performances and I think today it’s the corporation. When a corporation puts in (...) glass, it means cutting air-conditioning costs because the corporation was under pressure from the public. The thing about this glass is that it is reflective on the outside.

audience: A question for Ai Weiwei: can you tell us if it was frustrating building the Olympic Stadium in Beijing and were there any government regulations that you had to follow? Can you describe it a little bit?

ai weiwei: Projects of this size and scale and in such a country which has very strong environmen-tal nonsense, is very difficult. The design team was always disrupted and in the end your nerves were wrecked. So until recently I still had nightmares. Is it still going to be built? And now the structure is already there, I realized it’s much more difficult for them to destroy it because we just built it. I think all architects, especially bad architects, use compromises as an excuse. But that’s life, you have to work with it and that’s what I do.

And I do like it. If you do want to make some progress then you have to be ready for many com-promises because you will be faced with more problems, this means you are making a change. It’s about problem solving. I think very little about the art while I’m doing it but once I have finished, people talk about art, which is OK because art is not so bad.

maria finders: Thank you very much to these wonderful speakers. Thank you.

ABC | Speakers Directory | 195

SpeakerS directory | ai Wei Wei | 180 allora Jenifer | 120 araujo Marcelo | 120 armleder John | 055 Baldessari John | 088 Birnbaum daniel | 072 Boltanski christian | 052 Borja-Villel Manuel J. | 028 creed Martin | 053 cruz-diez carlos | 120 dercon chris | 029 durham Jimmie | 054 Flood richard | 100 Gander ryan| 180 Graham dan | 180 Grima Joseph | 181 Groys Boris | 019 kabakov emilia and ilya | 018 León Lidia | 121 Lopez Sebastian | 121 Majluf Natalia | 121 Martinez ramiro | 122 Mesquita ivo | 123 Nittve Lars | 030 obrist Hans Ulrich | 020 | 034 | 088 | 124 pacquement alfred | 031 pérez-oramas Luis | 122 perez-ratton Virginia | 122 peyton-Jones Julia | 100 reyes pedro | 123 roca José ignacio | 123 ruf Beatrix | 035 Serota Nicholas | 032 Weibel peter | 033

art Basel conversations | A38B | ABMB06

196 | ABC | Speakers Directory ABC | Speakers Directory | 197

Broad eli | Collector, Philanthropist, The Broad Art Foundation, 3355 Barnard Way, Santa Monica, CA 90405, [email protected], www.broadartfoundation.org

Buergel roger M. | Director documenta 12, Museumsplatz 1, A-1070 Vienna P +43/1-526 40 64, F +43/1-526 40 84 [email protected], www.documenta.de

Bulloch angela | Artist; Esther Schipper, Linienstrasse 85, D-10119 Berlin P +49 (0)30 28390139, F +49 (0)30 28390140 [email protected], estherschipper.com

Burden chris | Artist, Gagosian Gallery, 980 Madison Avenue, New York City, NY 10021, USA P +212/744-2313, F +212/772-7962, [email protected], www.gagosian.com

Buren daniel | Artist, Buchmann Galerie, Aachener Strasse 65, Köln, D-50674 P +49/221-73 06 50, F +49/221-73 04 20 [email protected], www.Buchmanngalerie.com

Ccardiff Janet | Artist, Luhring Augustine Gallery, 531 West 24th street, New York, NY 10011, USA

P +1/212-206-9100, F +1/212-206-9055, www.luhringaugustine.com chen chaos | Curator, 9 Dongwei Road, 8-2-1201, P.R.C-100024 Beijing

P/F +86/10-65 43 58 59 de corral María | Co-curator Venice Biennale, Balbina Valverde 19, ES-28002 Madrid

P +34/915625712, [email protected], www.labiennale.orgcreed Martin | Artist, Hauser & Wirth Zurich, Limmatstrasse 270, CH-8031 Zurich

P +41/44-446 65 23, F +41/44-446 80 55, www.hauserwirth.comcruz-diez carlos | Artist, Atelier Cruz-Diez, 23 Rue Pierre Sémard, F-75009 Paris

P +33 1 48 78 98 16, F +33 1 48 78 64 21, www.ateliercruzdiez.comDdavid catherine | Director Witte de With, Witte de Withstraat 50, NL-3012 BR Rotterdam

P +31/10-4110144, F +31/10-4117924, [email protected], www.wdw.nldean tacita | Artist, Frith Street Gallery, 59-60 Frith Street, London, UK-W1D3JJ

P +44/20 7494 1550, F +44/20 7287 3733 [email protected], www.frithstreetgallery.com

demand thomas | Artist, Esther Schipper, Linienstrasse 85, D-10119 Berlin P +49 (0)30 28390139, F +49 (0)30 28390140 [email protected], estherschipper.com

dennison Lisa | Deputy Director and Chief Curator Guggenheim Museums Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1071 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10128, USA P +1/212-423-3680, F +1/212-423-3641, www.Guggenheim.org

dercon chris | Director, Haus der Kunst, Prinzregentenstrasse 1, D-80538 München T +49 (0)89 21127-113, F +49 (0)89 21127-157, http://www.hausderkunst.de/

donnelly trisha | Artist, Casey Kaplan, 416 West 14th Street, New York, NY 10014, USA P +1/212-645-7335, F +1/212-645-7835, www.caseykaplangallery.com

durham Jimmie | Artist, Christine König Galerie, AT-1040 Wien | Schleifmühlgasse 1A P +43/1-585 74 74, F +43/1-585 74 74-24, [email protected] www.kunstnet.at/koenig, www.artfacts.net/koenig

Eeliasson olafur | Artist, Werkstatt & Büro, Tor 5/Eingang 1, Invalidenstr. 5051, D-10557 Berlin

P +49/30-425 38 48, F +49/30-428 51 479 [email protected], www.olafureliasson.net

enwezor okwui | Artistic Director 2nd Biennale of Contemporary Art, Seville, Spain, Dean of Academic Affairs, San Francisco Art Institute, 800 Chestnut Street San Francisco, CA, USA 94133, P +415 771 7020, www.sfai.edu

art Basel conversations | A38B | ABMB06 | A37B | ABMB05 | A36B | ABMB04 | A35B | Index A-Z

Aacconci Vito | Architect, Artist, Acconci Studio, 20 Jay Street #215, Brooklyn, NY 11201, USA

P +1/718-852-6591, F +1/718-624-3178, [email protected], www.acconci.comaitken doug | Artist | 303 Gallery, 525 West 2nd Street, New York City, NY 10011, USA

P +212/255-1121, F +212/255-0024, [email protected], www.303gallery.comallora Jenifer | Artist, Lisson Gallery, 52-54 and 29 Bell Street, GB-NW1 5DA London

P +44/20-77 24 27 39, F +44/20-77 24 71 24 [email protected], www.lisson.co.uk

al-Najjar khalid abdulhaq | Architect, [dxb] LAB, PO Box Dubai, UAE 48878 P +971/4 344 4462, [email protected], www.dxb-lab.com

al Qasimi Hoor | Director, Sharjah International Biennial 7, P.O. Box, Sharjah, UAE- 19989 P +971 6 5685050, F +971 6 5685800, [email protected] www.sharjahbiennal.org

al-Sabah Lulu Mubarak | Art Critic, Journalist; 45 Queens Gate Terrace, London SW7 5JP, UKamin Samir | Economist, Forum du tiers monde, Bureau Africain, 5 Rue Calmette BP 3501,

Dakar Senegal, SE 233760 P/F +221/821 11 44, http://www.forumtiersmonde.net

armleder John | Artist, Caratsch de Pury & Luxembourg, Limmatstrasse 264, CH-8005 Zurich P +41/1-276 80 20, F +41/1-276 80 21, [email protected]

aspden peter | Arts writer, Financial Times, [email protected] kutlug | Artist | Blue Medium, 216 W 18th Street, No. 703B, New York, City, NY 10011, USA

P +212/675-1800, F +212/675-1855, www.bluemedium.com, www.kutlug-ataman.co.uk

BBaldessari John | Artist, Baldessari Studio, 2001 1/2 Main St., US-90405 Santa Monica, CA, USA

P +310/399-5402, F +310/399-7825, www.baldessari.orgBadran rasem | Architect, DAR AL OMRAN, Amman , Hussein Bin Ali St., P.O. Box 182571,

Amman 11118 – Jordan, P +962 6/5604200, F +962 6/5606606, www.daralomran.com

Bauer Ute Meta | Curator, Alte Schönhauser Strasse 35, D-10119 Berlin www.berlinbiennale.de, www.oca.no, www.documenta.de, www.firststory.net

Birnbaum daniel | Director Portikus, Leinwandhaus, Weckmarkt 17, D-60311 Frankfurt am Main P +49/69-21 99 87 60, F +49/69-21 99 87 61 [email protected], www.portikus.de

Boeri Stefano | Editor in Chief Domus Magazine, Via Gianni Mazzocchi 1/3, IT-20089 Rozzano P +39/02-824721, www.domusweb.it

Boltanski christian | Artist, Kewenig Galerie, Appellhofplatz 21, 50667 Cologne, Germany T +49 (0)221 964 905 0, F +49 (0)221 964 905 29

Bonvicini Monica | Artist, Ralske, Kirshstrasse 5, Berlin, D-10567 P + 49/30 330 29 660

Borja-Villel Manuel J. | Director MACBA, Plaça dels Angels, 1, ES-08001 Barcelona P +34 93 412 08 10, F +34 93 412 46 02, http://www.macba.es

Botín paloma | Collector, Es Arte Deleitosa S.L.; C.Transversal Tres, ES-8-28223 Madrid P +34/917990885, F +34/913512795 [email protected], www.palaisdetokyo.com

Bourriaud Nicolas | Co-director Palais de Tokyo, 13 avenue du Président Wilson, F-75017 Paris P +33/1-47 23 54 01, F +33/1-47 20 15 31 [email protected], www.palaisdetokyo.com

Brand Michael | Director, J. Paul Getty Museum | 1200 Getty Centrer Drive, Los Angeles, CA 90049 P +310/440-7300, www.getty.edu


Hoffman erika | Collector, Sammlung Hoffmann, Sophienstrasse 21, D-10178 Berlin www.sophie-gips.de

Hoffmann Jens | Director of Exhibitions Institute of Contemporary Arts,The Mall, UK-SW1Y 5AH London P +44/20-7766 1426, F +44/20-7306 0122, www.ica.org

Holzer Jenny | Artist, 80 Hewitts Road, Hoosick Falls, New York, NY 12090, USAHonegger Gottfried | Artist, Parc Vallombrosa, 6, Avenue Jean-de-Noailles, F-06400 CannesHuang yong ping | Artist, Gladstone Gallery, 515, West 24th Street, New York, NY 10011, USA

P +1/212-206-9300, F +1/212-206-9301 [email protected], www.gladstonegallery.com

Huber pierre | Art Dealer, Collector, Collection Pierre Huber, Geneva, Switzerland Art & Public, 35, rue des Bains, CH-1205 Genève P +41/22-781 46 66, F +41/22-781 47 15, www.artpublic.ch

Hsu claire | Executive Director, Asia Art Archive, 2/F no.8 Wah Koon Building 181-191 Hollywood Road, Sheung Wan, Hong Kong P +852/2815-1112, F +852/2815-0032, [email protected], www.aaa.org.hk

Huangsheng Wang | Director Guangdong Museum of Art Er-sha Island, Guangzhou 510105, Guangdong, China P +86/020-87351289, F +86/020-87351085

I iles chrissie | Co-curator Whitney Biennale, 2006, Whitney Museum of American Art,

945 Madison Avenue at 75th Street, New York, NY, USA 10021 P +212/570-7721, F +212/ 570-7711, www.whitneybiennial.com

JKkabakov emilia and ilya | Artists, Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, FR-75003 Paris | 7, rue Debelleyme

P +33/1-42 72 99 00, F +33/1342 72 61 66 [email protected], www.ropac.net

könig kasper | Director Museum Ludwig, Bischofsgartenstr. 1, D-50667 Cologne P +49/221-221 21125, F +49/221-221 22600 [email protected], www.museum-ludwig.de

koolhaas rem | Office for Metropolitan Architects, Heer Bokelweg 149, NL-3032 Rotterdam P +31/102438200, [email protected], www.oma.nl

koons Jeff | Artist, Jeff Koons Productions, 601 West 29th Street, New York, NY 10001, USA P +1/212-226-2894, F +1/212-226-5916

kortun Vasif | Curator, Director, Platform Garanti, Istiklal Caddesi, No. 276, Beyoglu, Istanbul, TR-34340 P +212 293 23 61, F +212 293 30 71, www.garanti.com.fr

kosuth Joseph | Artist, Joseph Kosuth Studio Roma, Piazza di San Bartolomeo all‘Isola, 19, Roma, IT 00186 P +39/06 688 09 621, F +39/06 688 09 741

kvaran Gunnar B. | Director Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, Dronningens gt. 4, Postboks 1158 Sentrum, NO-0107 Oslo P +47/22-93 60 62, F +47/22-93 60 65, www.af-moma.no

LLavier Bertrand | Artist, Kewenig Galerie, DE-50667 Köln | Appellhofplatz 21

P +49/221-964 90 50, F +49/221-96 49 05 29 [email protected], www.kewenig.com

Lentz Wilfried | Director SKOR, Ruysdaelkade 2, NL-1072 AG Amsterdam P +31/20-672 25 25, F +31/20-379 28 09, www.skor.nl

Lambert yvon | Art Dealer, Yvon Lambert Gallery, 108 rue Vielle du Temple, F-75003 Paris

elliott david | Director Mori Art Museum, 6-10-1 Roppongi, Minato-ku, JP-106-6150 Tokyo P +81/3-6406 6102, F +81/3-6406 9352, www.mori.art.museum

FFernandes João | Director Museu Serralves, Rua D. João de Castro, 210, PT-4150-417 Porto

P +351/22-615 65 32, F +351/22-615 65 33 [email protected], www.serralves.pt

Flood richard | Chief Curator, New Museum of Contemporary Art, 210, 11th Avenue, 2nd Floor New York City, NY 10001, USA P +212/219-1222, F +212/431-5328, [email protected], www.newmuseum.org

douglas Fogle | Curator 55th Carnegie International, Curator of contemporary art, Carnegie Museum of Art, 4400 Forbes Avenue, Pittsburgh, PA USA 15213-4080 P +412 622 3131, www.cmoa.org

Fraser andrea | Artist, Friedrich Petzel Gallery, 535 West 22nd Street, New York, NY 10011, USA P +1/212-680-9467, F +1/212-680-9473, [email protected], www.petzel.com

GGander ryan | Artist, 38 Scarborough Street, GB- E1 8DR London

P/F +44/207 729 8096Gardner Gates Mimi | llsley Ball Nordstrom Director, Seattle Art Museum,

100 University Street, Seattle, WA 98101-2902, USA P +206/654.3100, www.seattleartmuseum.org

de Galbert antoine | Collector, La Maison Rouge – Fondation Antoine de Galbert 10 bd de la bastille, F-75012 Paris P +33/1-40 01 08 81, F +33/1-40 01 08 83; www.lamaisonrouge.org

Gillick Liam | Artist, 860 United Nations Plaza #17G, New York, NY 10017, USA www.airdeparis.com/liam.htm

Gioni Massimiliano | Co-curator 4th Berlin Biennal, Auguststr. 69, D-10117 Berlin P +49/30-28 44 50 38, F +49/30-28 44 50 39 [email protected], www.berlinbiennale.de

Golden thelma | Director & Chief Curator | Studio Museum Harlem, 144 West 125th Street, New York City, NY 10027, USA P +212/ 864.4500, F +212/ 864.4800, www.studiomuseum.org

Golinelli Marino | Genetic Researcher, Collector, Philanthropist, Via Ragazzi del ’99 Bologna, IT-40133 P +39/051 6489501, F +39/051 389929

Groys Boris | Philosopher, Art Critic, Media Theorist, Hochschule für Gestaltung, Karlsruhe Lorenzstr. 15, 76135 Karlsruhe P +49 721 8203-0, F +49 721 8203-2159 [email protected], www.hfg-karlsruhe.de

HHadid Zaha | Zaha Hadid Architects, Studio 9, 10 Bowling Green Lane, UK-EC1R 0BQ London

P +44/20-7253 5147, F +44/20-7251 8322 [email protected], www.zaha-hadid.com

Halbreich kathy | Director of the Walker Art Center, 725 Vineland Place, Minneapolis, MN 55403, USA P +1/612-375-7676, F +1/612-375-756, [email protected], www.walkerart.org

Hasegawa yuko | Director, 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa 1-1 Kakinoki-batake, Kanazawa, JP-920-0999 Ishikawa www.kanazawa21.jp/en/

Hessel Marieluise | Collector, Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College PO Box 5000, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, NY 12504-5000, USA P +1/914-758-7598, F +1/914-758-2442, [email protected], www.bard.edu



persekian Jack | Director, Al Ma’mal foundation, New Gate, Old City, Box 14644, Jerusalem, 91145 P +972 2 628 34 57, F +972 2 627 23 12, www.almamalfoundation.org/

phelps de cisneros patricia | Collector, Philanthropist, Fundación Cisneros, Fundación Cisneros, Centro Mozarteum, Final Avenida La Salle, Colina de los Caobos, Caracas 1050, Venezuela, P +582/708-9697, www.coleccioncisneros.org

philbin ann | Director & Curator Armand Hammer Museum of Art and Culture, 10899 Wilshire Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90024, USA P +1/310-443-7032, F +1/310-443-7069, www.hammer.ucla.edu

piotrovsky Mikhail | Director, The State Hermitage, Dvortsovaya Naberezhnaya, 34 RU-190000 St Petersburg P (812) 571-34-65, www.hermitagemuseum.org

QRrachofsky Howard | Collector, The Rachofsky Collection,

The Rachofsky House, 8605 Preston Road, Dallas, TX 75225, USA P +214/ 373-3157, F +214/ 750-9766

rauschenberg, robert | Artist, Galerie Jamileh Weber, Waldmannstrasse 6, CH-8001, Zurich P +41/1-252-1066, F +41/1-252-1132, [email protected], www.jamilehweber.com

rifkin Ned | Under Secretary for Art, Smithsonian Institute, PO Box 37012, SI Building, Room 153, MRC 010, Washington, DC 20013-7012, USA P +202/ 633-1000, [email protected], www.si.edu

riley terence | Philip Johnson Chief Curator of Architecture, The Museum of Modern Art, 11 West 53 Street, New York, NY 10019-5497; www.moma.org

romaneli Giandominico | Director, Musei Civici Veneziani, San Marco 1, IT-30124 Venezia P +39 0412715911, F +39 0415285028 www.museiciviciveneziani.it

rondeau James | Frances and Thomas Ditmer Curator of Contemporary Art, The Art Institute of Chicago, Dep. of Modern and Contemporary Art, 111 South Michigan Av., Chicago, IL 60603-6110, USA P +1/312-443 3678, F +1/312-443 0195; www.artic.edu

ruf Beatrix | Director Kunsthalle Zürich, Limmatstrasse 270, CH-8005 Zurich P +41/1-272 15 15, F +41/1-272 18 88, www.kunsthallezurich.ch

SSardenberg ricardo | Artistic Director CACI, Centro de Arte Contemporânea Inhotim

Rua B, 20, Inhotim, Brumadinho, BR-35460-000, MG P/F +55/31-3571 6638, [email protected]

Sehgal tino | Artist, Jan Mot Gallery, rue Antoine Dansaertstraat 190, 1000 Brussels, Belgium P +32 2 514 10 10, F +32 2 514 14 46, [email protected], www.janmot.com

Schuster klaus-peter | Director, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Generaldirektion Genthiner Str. 38, D-10785 Berlin P +49-(0)30-266 2987, F +49-(0)30-266 2161, www.smb.spk-berlin.de

Seipel Wilfried | Director, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Maria Theresien-Platz, A-1010 Vienna P +43 1 525 24-0, F +43 1 525 24- 4099, www.khm.at

Serota Nicholas | Director Tate Britain, Millbank, GB-London SW1P 4RG P +44 (0) 20 7887 8888, www.tate.org.uk

Shearer Linda | Alice and Harry Weston Director of Contemporary Art Center of Cincinnati 44 East Sixth Street, Cincinnati, OH 45202, USA, www.contemporaryartscenter.org

Landau Suzanne | Chief Curator of the Arts, Landeau Foundation Curator for Contemporary Art, The Israel Museum, POB 71117, Jerusalem, IS 91710 P +972/26708811, F +972/ 26771332, www.imj.org.il

Leon Lidia | Director Centro Cultural Eduardo León Jimenes, Santo Domingo, República Dominicana P +809 487 3013, F +809 533 5815, www.centroleon.org.do

Levin dalia | Curator, Herzilya Museum of Art, 4 Habanim St., Herzliya, IS 46379 P +972/9 9500762, [email protected], www.herzliyamuseum.co.il

MMajluf Natalia | Director, Museo de Arte de Lima, Paseo Colón 125, Parque de la Exposición,

Lima 1 (Cercado), Peru, P +423-4732/423-5149/423-6332, http://www.museodearte.org.pe

Martinez ramiro | Director, Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporáneo, Reforma y Gandhi, Bosque de Chapultepec, MX-11580, Mexico City P + 5255/5286 6519/29, F +5255/5286 6539, www.museotamayo.org/

Martinez rosa | Co-director of the Venice Biennale 2005 Gósol 3, ático 1, ES-08017 Barcelona P/F +34/932055716, www.rosamartinez.com

Medvedow Jill | James Sachs Plaut Director , ICA (The Institute of Contemporary Art), 955 Boylston Street, Boston, MA 02115 P + 617/266-5152, F+ 617/266-4021, [email protected]

Mendes Burgi Bernhard | Director St. Alban-Graben 16, CH-4010 Basel P +41 61 206 62 62, F + 41 61 206 62 52 www.kunstmuseumbasel.ch

Mesquita ivo costa | Curator, Rua Pará 222 # 71, BR-01243-020 São Paulo NNeto ernesto | Artist, Galeria Fortes Vilaça, Rua Fradique Coutinho 1500, BR-05416-001 São Paulo

P +55/11-30 32 70 66, F +55/11-30 97 03 84 [email protected], www.fortesvilaca.com.br

Nittve Lars | Director , Moderna Museet, Box 16382, SE-103 27 Stockholm P +46 8 5195 5200, www.modernamuseet.se

Noack ruth | Independent curator and art historian, Documenta 12, Museumsplatz 1, AT-1070 Vienna P +43/1-526 40 64, F +43/1-526 40 84 [email protected], www.documenta.de

Oobrist Hans Ulrich | Co-director of Exhibitions and Programs, Director of International Projects,

Serpentine Gallery, Kensington Gardens London UK -W2 3XA P +20 7402 6075, F +020 7402 4103, [email protected], www.serpentinegallery.org

Ppacquement alfred | Director Centre Pompidou, Place Georges Pompidou, F-75004 Paris

P +33 (0)1 44 78 12 33, www.centrepompidou.frpardo Jorge | Artist, Friedrich Petzel Galler y, 535 West 22nd Street, New York, NY 10011, USA

P +1/212-680-9467, F +1/212-680-9473, [email protected], www.petzel.compedrosa adriano | Curator, Alameda Itu 285/171, BR-01421-000 São Paulo, www.insite05.orgpérez-oramas Luis | Adjunct Curator, Department of Drawings, The Museum of Modern Art,

11 West 53 Street, USA -10019-5497, New York, New York P +212/708.9555, F +212/708.9556, www.moma.org

pérez-ratton Virginia | Director, TEOR/éTica, 400 Norte Kiosco Morazán, C 7 Ave 11 # 953, Barrio Amón, San José Norte, Costa Rica P/F +506/233 4881 & 233 8775, www.teoretica.org



art Basel conversations | Index by topics

premiereA37B | Joseph kosuth | Artist; Rome, IT

tino Sehgal | Artist; Berlin, DE edward tufte | Prof Emeritus, Political Science, Yale University; New Haven, CT, USA Orchestrator | Hans Ulrich obrist | Co-director of Exhibitions and Programs, Director of

International Projects, Serpentine Gallery; London, UKABMB05 | robert rauschenberg | Artist; Captiva, FL, USA

Hans Ulrich obrist | Curator, Musée d‘Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; Paris, France arto Lindsay | Musician, Producer; New York, NY, USA; Bahia, Brazil

A36B | Martin creed | Artist; London, UKABMB04 | Janet cardiff | Artist; Berlin, Germany

trisha donnelly | Artist; Los Angeles, CA, USA Liam Gillick | Artist; London, UK; New York, NY, USA Jenny Holzer | Artist; Hoosick, NY, USA Jeff koons | Artist; New York, NY, USA paul Morrissey | Film Director; New York, NY, USA ernesto Neto | Artist; Rio de Janeiro, Brazil Host | daniel Birnbaum | Rector of the Städelschule Art Academy, Director of Portikus;

Frankfurt am Main, GermanyA35B | Lisa dennison | Deputy Director/Chief Curator Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and

Guggenheim Museums; New York, USAolafur eliasson | Artist; Berlin, Germany Zaha Hadid | Architect; London, England kasper könig | Director Ludwig Museum; Cologne, Germany Gunnar B. kvaran | Director of The Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art; Oslo, NorwayBruce Sterling | Author, Journalist, Futurist; Austin, Texas, USA Host | Hans Ulrich obrist | Curator Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris;

Paris, France

art collectionsA37B | arend oetker | Collector, Philanthropist; Berlin, DE

Marino Golinelli | Genetic Researcher, Collector, Philanthropist; Bologna, IT agnès troublé | agnès b, Fashion Designer, Collector, Art Dealer, Philanthropist; Paris, FR robert Weil | Philantropist, Founder & Chairman Magasin 3 Stockholm Konsthall;

Stockholm, SWHost | richard Flood | Chief Curator, New Museum of Contemporary Art; New York City,

NY, USAABMB05 | eli Broad | Collector, Philanthropist, The Broad Art Foundation; Santa Monica, CA, USA

patricia phelps de cisneros | Collector, Philanthropist, The Fundación Cisneros; Caracas, Venezuela

Howard rachofsky | Collector, The Rachofsky Collection; Dallas, Texas USA david rockefeller | Collector, Philanthropist; New York, NY, USA Host | richard Flood | Chief Curator, New Museum; New York, NY, USA

A36B | Maria de corral | Art Critic and Independent Curator, Co-Director 51st Venice Biennale, Member of the Advisory Committee of Telefonica Foundation Collection; Madrid, Spain

Gottfried Honegger | Artist, Collector l’Espace d’Art Concret, and Albers-Honegger Collection; Chateau Mouans-Sartoux, France; Zurich, Switzerland

pierre Huber | Art Dealer, Collector, Collection Pierre Huber; Geneva, Switzerland

Sigg Uli | Collector Advisory Board of China Development Bank, Former Swiss Ambassador for China, North Korea and Mongolia; BANFA AG, Schloss, CH-6216 Mauensee P +41/41 921 30 11, F +41/41 921 30 20

Sterling Bruce | Futurist, 3410 Cedar Street, Austin, TX 78705 Official Blog/Beyond the Beyond, www.blog.wired.com/sterling

Storr robert | Director of 52nd Venice Biennale, Ca‘ Giustinian 1364 San Marco, Venezia, IT-30124 P +39 041 5218711, F +39 041 5218810, http://www.labiennale.org

Ttawadros Gilane | Founding Director of inIVA (Institute of International Visual Arts)

6-8 Standard Place Rivington Street, UK-EC2A 3BE London P + 44/20-7729 9616, F + 44/20-7729 9509, [email protected], www.iniva.org

troublé agnès | agnès b. Fashion Designer, Collector, Art Dealer, Philanthropist, 17 Rue Dieu, Paris, F-75010 P +33/1 40 03 45 00, www.agnesb.com

tufte edward | Prof Emeritus, Political Science | Yale University, 124 Prospect Street, New Haven, CT, USA 06511-8932, www.yale.edu

UVvon Habsburg Francesca | Director Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary

Himmelpfortgasse 13/9, AT-1010 Vienna P +43/1-513-98-56, F +43/1-513-98-56-22, www.tba21.org

Vergez Juan | Collector, Laboratorios Phoenix S.A.I.C.F., Humahuaca 4065, AR-C1192acc Buenos Aires Vilardell Mercedes | Collector, Zanglada, 3, ES-07001 Palma de MallorcaWWagstaff Sheena | Head of Exhibitions and Displays Tate Modern, Bankside, UK-SE1 9TG London

P +44/20-7401 5191, F +44/20-7401 5052, www.tate.org.ukWei Wei ai | Artist, Fake Design, 258 Caochangdi Chaoyang District, P.R.C.-100015, Beijing

P +86/10 8456 4194, F +86/10 8456 4194Weil robert | Philantropist, Founder & Chairman Magasin 3 Stockholm Konsthall, Proventus AB

Box 1719, Stockholm, SW 111 87Weisman Billie Milam | President Frederick R. Weisman Art Foundation

275 North Carolwood Drive, US-90077 Los Angeles, CAWells William | Director, Townhouse Gallery, 10 Nabrawy St, Cairo, Egypt

P/F +20/25768086, [email protected], www.thetownhousegallery.com XYyung Ho chang | Principal Architect of Atelier FCJZ, Head and Professor

Peking University Graduate Center of Architecture, Jing Chun Yuan No.79 Jia, Peking University, P.R.C.-100871 Beijing P/F +86/10-82622712, [email protected], www.fcjz.com

ZZolghadr tirdad | Co-curator of the 7th Sharjah Biennial, P.O. Box, Sharjah, UAE 19989

P +971 6 5685050, F +971 6 5685800 [email protected], www.sharjahbiennal.org



yvon Lambert | Art Dealer, Collector, Yvon Lambert Collection; Paris, France; New York City, NY, USA

Host | richard Flood | Deputy Director and Chief Curator of the Walker Art Center; Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA

ABMB04 | paloma Botín | Member of the Board and Arts Committee Coordinator, Fundación Marcelino Botin; Advisor art collection Grupo Santander; Santander/Madrid, Spain

antoine de Galbert | Collector, President and Founder of La Maison Rouge; Paris, FRHans-Michael Herzog | Director, Daros-Latinamerica AG; Zurich, SwitzerlandMarieluise Hessel | Private Collector, Founder and Chair, Center of Curatorial Studies,

Bard College; New York, NY, USAricardo Sardenberg | Centro de Arte Contemporânea Inhotim; Belo Horizonte, BrazilHost | adriano pedrosa | Curator, Writer, Editor; São Paulo, Brazil

A35B | Juan Vergez | Private Collector; Buenos Aires, Argentina Mercedes Vilardell | Private Collector; Palma de Mallorca, Spain Francesca von Habsburg | Chairman Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary; Vienna, ATBillie Milam Weisman | Director Frederick R. Weisman Art Foundation; Los Angeles, CA, USAHost | Maria Finders | Curator Art Basel Conversations; Basel, Switzerland

ABMB02 | Harald Falckenberg | Private Collector, Founder of the Sammlung Falckenberg; Hamburg, Germany

katerina Gregos | Independent Curator, former Director Deste Foundation Center for Contemporary Arts; Athens, Greece

eugenio López | Private Collector, President La Colección Jumex; Mexico City, MexicoHost | adriano pedrosa | Curator, Writer, Editor; São Paulo, Brazil

architecture for artABMB06 | ryan Gander | Artist, London, UK

Jorge pardo | Artist, Los Angeles, USA ai Wei Wei | Artist, Bejing, P.R.C Host | Stefano Boeri | Editor in Chief Domus Magazine; Milan, Italy

A37B | Monica Bonvicini | Artist; Berlin, Germany tacita dean | Artist; Berlin, Germany thomas demand | Artist; Berlin, Germany angela Bulloch | Artist; London, UK Host | Beatrix ruf | Director Kunsthalle; Zurich, Switzerland

ABMB05 | doug aitken | Artist; Los Angeles, USA kutlug ataman | Artist; Istanbul, Turkey Stefano Boeri | Editor in Chief Domus Magazine; Milan, Italy chris Burden | Artist; Los Angeles, CA; New York, NY, USA Host | terence riley | Philip Johnson Chief Curator of Architecture, MoMA; New York, NY, USA

A36B | Vito acconci | Architect, Artist; New York, NY, USAJohn armleder | Artist; Geneva, CH, New York, NY, USAandrea Fraser | Artist; New York, NY, USAHost | James rondeau | Frances and Thomas Ditmer Curator of Contemporary Art,

Department of Contemporary Art, the Art Institute of Chicago; Chicago, USA

ABMB04 | kathy Halbreich | Director of the Walker Art Center; Minneapolis, MI, USArem koolhaas | Architect, Oma; Rotterdam, The Netherlands

Hans Ulrich obrist | Curator Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; Paris, FranceHost | terence riley | Philip Johnson Chief Curator of Architecture, MoMA; New York, NY, USA

A35B | david elliott | Director Mori Art Museum; Tokyo, Japan João Fernandes | Director of Museu de Serralves; Porto, Portugalyuko Hasegawa | Chief Curator, 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art; Kanazawa, Japanrosa Martinez | Co-director of the Venice Biennale 2005; Barcelona, SpainHost | Stefano Boeri | Architect, Editor in Chief Domus Magazine; Milan, Italy

ABMB02 | Maxwell L. anderson | Former Director of the Whitney Museum of American Art; New York, NY, USA

richard Gluckman | Architect, GMA GluckmanMayner Architects; New York, NY, USA

public/privateABMB06 | Jenifer allora | Artist, Puerto Rico

carlos cruz-diez | Artist, Paris, FR Lidia Léon | Director Centro Cultural Eduardo León Jimenes, Santo Domingo,

República DominicanaSebastian Lopez | Artistic Director, Daros-Latinamerica, Casa Daros, Rio, Brazil and

Zurich, SwitzerlandNatalia Majluf | Director, Museo de Arte de Lima, Peruramiro Martinez | Director, Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico City, MexicoMarcelo pacheco | Director, MALBA, Buenos Aires, ArgentinaLuis pérez-oramas | Adjunct Curator, Department of Drawings, The Museum of Modern

Art, New York, USAVirginia pérez-ratton |Director, TEOR/éTica, San José, Costa RicaHosts | ivo costa Mesquita | Independent Curator; São Paulo, Brazil

Hans Ulrich obrist | Co-director of Exhibitions and Programs, Director of International Projects, Serpentine Gallery; London, UK

A37B | khalid abdulhaq al-Najjar | Architect, [dxb] LAB; Dubai, UAE Hoor al Qasimi | Director/founder Sharjah Biennial; Sharjah, UAE Lulu al-Sabah | Writer, Canvas, International Herald Tribune; London, UK Samir amin | Director of the Third World Forum, Economist; Cairo, Egypt rasem Badran | Architect; Amman, Jordan Vasif kortun | Director, Platform Garanti Contemporary Art Center; Istanbul, Turkey Suzanne Landau | Chief Curator of the Arts, The Israel Museum, Jerusalem, the Landeau

Foundation Curator for Contemporary Art, The Israel Museum; Jerusa-lem

dalia Levin | Curator, Herzliya Museum; Herzliya, Israel ebrahim Melamed | Collector, Honart Museum; Theran, Iran Jack persekian | Director Al Ma’mal foundation; Jerusalem William Wells | Director Townhouse Gallery; Cairo, Egypt tirdad Zolghadr | Co-curator of the 7th Sharjah Biennial, 2005; Sharjah, UAE Host | Hans Ulrich obrist | Co-director of Exhibitions and Programs, Director of International

Projects, Serpentine Gallery; London, UKABMB05 | Michael Brand | Director, J. Paul Getty Museum; Los Angeles, CA, USA

Mimi Gardner Gates | Illsley Ball Nordstrom Director; Seattle Art Museum, Seattle WA, USA thelma Golden | Director & Chief Curator, Studio Museum Harlem; New York, NY, USAkathy Halbreich | Director of the Walker Art Museum; Minneapolis, MN, USAJill Medvedow | James Sachs Plaut Director of the ICA; Boston, MA, USANed rifkin | Under Secretary for Art; Washington DC, USA



A35B | John Baldessari | Artist, San Diego; CA, USAUte Meta Bauer | Freelance Curator; Vienna, Austriaroger M. Buergel | Exhibition Organizer, Author, Director Documenta 12; Vienna, Austriacatherine david | Chief Curator, Witte de With, Center for Contemporary Art;

Rotterdam, The NetherlandsHost | Jens Hoffmann | Curator, Writer, Director of Exhibitions, Institute of Contemporary

Art; London, England

the Future of the MuseumABMB02 | yona Friedman | Architect; France and Hungary

François roche | R & Sie. Architects; Paris, France Fernando romero | President, Laboratorio de la Ciudad de México (LCM); Mexico Host | Hans Ulrich obrist | Curator Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; Paris, France

Hosts| Hans Ulrich obrist | Curator, Musée d‘Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; Paris, FR James rondeau | Frances and Thomas Ditmer Curator of Contemporary Art,

Department of Contemporary Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, ILL, USA

A36B | yung Ho chang | Principal Architect of Atelier FCJZ, Head and Professor, Peking University Graduate Center of Architecture; Beijing, People‘s Republic of China

chaos chen | Curator, Founder CHAOSPROJECTS|Visual Thinking; Beijing, People’s Republic of China

Hou Hanru | Curator; Paris, Franceclaire Hsu | Executive Director, Asia Art Archive; Hong Kong, People’s Republic of ChinaHuang yong ping | Artist; Paris, FranceUli Sigg | Collector, Advisory Board of China Development Bank,

Former Swiss Ambassador for China; North Korea and MongoliaHuangsheng Wang | Director Guangdong Museum of Art, Ershadao Island Guangzhou;

Guangdong, People’s Republic of ChinaGuan yi | Collector; Beijing, People’s Republic of ChinaHost | Hans Ulrich obrist | Curator Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; Paris, France

A35B | erika Hoffman | Private Collector, Founder of Sammlung Hoffman; Berlin, GermanyWilfried Lentz | Director SKOR; Amsterdam, The NetherlandsBeatrix ruf | Director/Curator, Kunsthalle Zürich; Zurich, SwitzerlandHost | James rondeau | Frances and Thomas Dittmer Curator, Contemporary Art,

The Art Institute of Chicago; Chicago, IL, USA

the curators' circleA37B | okwui enwezor | Dean of Academic Affairs, San Francisco Art Institute, Artistic Director

2nd Biennale of Contemporary Art; Seville, Spain, San Francisco, USAdouglas Fogle | Curator of contemporary art, Carnegie Museum of Art, curator 55th Carn-

egie International; Pittsburgh, Penn, USA Hou Hanru | Independent curator, critic, Artistic Director, Istanbul Biennale, 2007; Paris, FRchrissie iles | Curator Whitney Biennale, 2006; New York, NY, USA Jose roca | Curator of the Biblioteca Luis Angel Arango, Bogotá, Colombia. Co-curator,

San Juan Poli/graphic Triennial, Puerto Rico, 2004, and Sao Paulo Bienal, Brazil, 2006; Sao Paulo, Brazil

anton Vidokle | Co-curator, Manifesta 6, New York, USA Host | robert Storr | Director of 52nd Venice Biennale; New York, NYC, USA

A36B | Massimiliano Gioni | Co-curator 4th Berlin Biennal; Berlin, Germany; Artistic Director Fondazione Nicola Trussadri; Miliano, Italy

ruth Noack | Curator, Documenta 12, independent Curator and Art HistorianGilane tawadros | Founding Director of inIVA (Institute of International Visual Arts); London, UKHost | Nicolas Bourriaud | Co-director Palais de Tokyo, Curator, Author; Paris, France;

Co-curator Biennale de Lyon, 2005ABMB04 | rosa Martinez | Co-director of the Venice Biennale 2005; Barcelona, Spain

ann philbin | Director and Curator, Hammer Museum of Art and Culture; Los Angeles, CA, USALinda Shearer | Alice and Harry Weston Director of the Contemporary Art Center of

Cincinnati; Cincinnati, CI, USASheena Wagstaff | Chief Curator, Director of Exhibitions and Display, Tate Modern;

London, EnglandHost | ivo costa Mesquita | Independent Curator; São Paulo, Brazil


Art Lobby | Participants | 209

ettore Sottsass | Artist, Designer, Architect, Milano, ITMarc Spiegler | Art world journalist, Zurich, CHdorothea Strauss | Artistic Director Haus Konstruktiv, Zürich, CHUte thon | Art Magazine, Hamburg, DEphil tinari | BAO, Beijing, PRCchristoph Vitali | Director Beyeler Foundaton, Basel, CH Barbara Wien | Artist, Berlin, DEFrehrking Wiesenhöfer | Galerist; Köln, DEaugustine Zenakos | Journalist; Athens, GreeceShao Zhong | CEO, Modern Media Group; Canton, PRC

participants at art Lobby 2005Mariana abramovic | Artist; Amsterdam, Netherlands.doug aitken | Artist; Los Angeles, CA. USAJohn armleder | Artist; Geneva, Switzerlandchristophe cherix | Curator Cabinet des estampes du Musée d‘art et d‘histoire; Geneva, SwitzerlandMartine de la châtre | Galerie martinethibaultdelachâtre; Paris, FranceMichèle didier | Editor; Brussel, BelgiumJim drain | Artist; Providence, RI, USAchristopher eamon | Curator Kramlich Collection; San Francisco, CA, USAdidier Fiuza Faustino | Artist; Paris, Franceryan Gander | Artist; London, EnglandLars Henrik Gass | Festival Director; Kaiserslautern, Germanyannet Gelink | Annet Gelink Gallery; Amsterdam, Netherlandsirene Gludowacz | Author; Munich, Germanycarol a. Greene | Greene Naftali Gallery; New York City, NY, USAkarin Handlbauer and donata Fuchs | Mezzanin Galerie; Vienna, Austria; Art-Law Centre;

Geneva, Switzerlandanthony Hayden-Guest | EditorialistSamuel Herzog | Journalist NZZ; AICA, Basel, Switzerlandalbert Hofmann | Scientist; inventor of LSD, Basel, Switzerlandrenate kainer | Galerie martinethibaultdelachâtre; Paris, Francechristoph keller | Revolver Books; Frankfurt am Main, Germanypamela kramlich | Collector; San Francisco, CA, USAJoshua Mack | Contributing Editor; Modern Painterspeter Mosimann | Attorney-at-law; Chairman; Basel, SwitzerlandMaurizio Nannucci | Artist, Florence, ItalyHans Ulrich obrist | Curator, Musée d‘Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, FranceMeet ousseynou Wade | Director of the 7th Dakar Biennale (Dakar), 2006diana Widmeier picasso | Author; Paris, FranceJulian radcliffe | Director, Art Loss Register; London, EnglandMarc-andré renold | Attorney-at-law, Lecturer at the University of Geneva; Co-Director,allen ruppersberg | Artist; New York City, NY, USAGeorg von Segesser | Attorney-at-law; Zurich, Switzerlandchristoph Schifferli | Collector; Publisher Editor, Zurich, Switzerlandkristina Solomukha | Artist; Paris, Francekarl Schweizer | Attorney-at-law; Managing Director, UBS Art Banking; Basel, SwitzerlandMarc Spiegler | Art World JournalistJoanne tatham & tom o‘Sullivan | Artists; Glasgow, England

art Lobby | Guest talks 2006Guest Talk | artnews Making art Speak

Ulrich krempel | Director, Sprengel Museum; Hannover, DE klaus albrecht Schröder | Director, The Albertina Museum; Vienna, AU Vincente todoli | Director, Tate Modern; London, UK Host | Milton esterow | Editorial Director, ARTnews Magazine; New York City, USA

participants at art Lobby 2006Véronique Bacchetta | Director, Centre d‘édition contemporaine; Genève, CHJoseph Backstein | Director, 2nd Moscow Biennial of Contemporary Art, Moscow, RUkarin Berger | Collector; Munichdaniel Birnbaum | Rector of the Stadelschule Art Academy and Director of the Portikus Gallery,

Frankfurt, DEiara Boubnova | Curator, 2nd Moscow Biennial of Contemporary Art, Sofia, BGSylvie Boulanger | Director, CNEAI – Centre National Pour l’Estampe et l’Art Imprimé; Paris, FRokwui enwezor | Artistic Director, BIACS 2, Seville, ESHelmut Friedel | Director Lenbachaus, Munich, DEdr. ariane Grigoteit | Director, Deutsche Bank Collection, Frankfurt, DEpierre Guillet de Monthoux | European Centre for Art and Management; School of Business

Stockholm University; Stockholm, SENicole Hackert | Contemporary Fine Arts, Berlin, DESamuel Herzog | President AICA Switzerland, Journalist; Basel, Basel SwitzerlandNaïma and Jean-pierre Jornod | Authors, Geneva, CHXenia kalpaktsoglou | Director of the DESTE Foundation, Athens, Greeceelisabeth kaufmann | Galerist; Zürich, CHGaston Melo | Director, Universal Forum of Cultures Monterrey 2007; Mexico City, MXM/M | Paris, FRSimon Moretti & paul Heber-percy | DADADANDY.com, London, UKJonathan Napack | Writer and Journalist, Hong Kong, PRCou Ning | Artist, poet, graphic designer and impresario, Canton, PRCHans Ulrich obrist | Co-director of Exhibitions and Programs, Director of International Projects,

Serpentine Gallery; London, UKpoka-yio | Artist, Athens, GreeceMaría inés rodríguez | Curator; Paris, FRJames rosenquist | Artist; New York City, USAJerry Saltz | Critic; New York City, NY, USANicola Setari | Editor in Chief, Janus, in conversationkatharina Sieverding | Professor, Fine Arts, UDK, Berlin, Dusseldorf, DE

208 | ABC | Art Lobby | Participants

art Lobby | Participants 2006/2005/2004/2003/2002

art LoBBy | “Art Lobby” is a salon-style contact platform in the “Art Unlimited” Hall of Art Basel. It serves as an open and experimental space hosting various forms of activities such as personal encounters with art-world personalities and special guests, interviews, featured artists, short presentations, roundtables, opinion talks, and chance meetings. A choice selection of invited guests engaging in ongoing discussion and debate with informed visitors or commentators in passing. The activities of Art Lobby are free and open to all visitors of Art Basel.

ABC | Speakers Directory | 211 210 | Art Lobby | Participants

Judd tully | Editor; Modern PaintersBillie Milam Weisman | Director and President; Frederick R. Weisman Art Foundation;

Los Angeles, CA, USAalexander Wolff | Artist; Berlin, GermanyBruce Wolmer | LTB Group Editorial Director and Art+Auction Editor in Chiefkaren Wright | Editor of Modern Painters; London, England

participants at art Lobby 2004albrecht Lothar | Director of L.A. Gallery in Frankfurt and Beijing; Germany, ChinaBerg eddie | Executive Director FACT; Liverpool, EnglandBrüderlin Markus | Curator ArchiSKULPTUR Fondation Beyeler; Riehen/Basel, Switzerlandcraig patsy | Editor; London, Englandeskildsen Ute | Director of Photography at the Wolfgang Museum; Essen, GermanyHaye christian | Founder of The Project Gallery; New York/Los Angeles, USAHerzog Samuel | Art Critic, Journalist; Basel, Switzerlandicelandic Love corporation, the | Artists; Reykjavik, IcelandJolles claudia | Editor kunstbulletin; Zurich, SwitzerlandJonsdottir edda | Director I8 Galleri; Reykjavik, IcelandLakra, dr. | Artist; Mexico City, MexicoManzutto Monica | Director Kurimanzutto; Mexico City, MexicoMarcus John | Film Producer, The Story Department; New York, NY, USAMenz Marguerite | Art Critic; Geneva, SwitzerlandNourbakhsch Giti | Director Gallery Nourbakhsch; Berlin, Germanyobrist Hans Ulrich | Curator Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; Paris, Francepia Francesca | Director Francesca Pia Gallery; Berne, Switzerlandperret Mai-thu | Artist; Geneva, Switzerlandreyle anselm | Artist; Berlin, Germanyruby andreas | Architecture Critic; Cologne, GermanySchindler annette | Director of [plug.in], Art and new Media Basel; Basel, SwitzerlandSchürmann rudolph | Neutral, Strategic Creative Director, Partner; Zurich, SwitzerlandSmith Mike | Mike Smith Studio; New York, USASpiegler Marc | Art World Journalist; Zurich, SwitzerlandSterling Bruce | Author, Journalist, Futurist; Austin, Texas, USA Vaney anne Lena | Curator, Editor; Paris, FranceWaltener Shane | Editor, Modern Painters Magazine; London, England

participants at art Lobby 2003armleder John | Artist; Geneva, Switzerland; New York, USAarmstrong Matthew | Former Curator UBS Art Collection; New York, USABechtler cristina | Private Collector and Editor; Zurich, SwitzerlandBellet Harry | Journalist, Le Monde; Paris, FranceBonami Francesco | Manilow Sen. Curator, the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art; Chicago, USA Bürgi Bernhard Mendes | Director Kunstmuseum Basel; Basel, Switzerlandcesar claudio | Founder/Chairman Cesar Foundation for the Visual Arts; USAelgiz can & Sevda | Private Collectors, Founders of 4L Contemporary Art Museum; Istanbul, TurkeyFaustino didier Fiuza | Architect; Paris, France Frances Fernando | Director Fundación Coca Cola; Spain Glaus Bruno | Co-Author Kunstrecht; Zurich, Switzerland

art Lobby | Participants 2006/2005/2004/2003/2002

Gregos katerina | Curator and Art Critic; Athens, GreeceGilbert & George | Artists; London, England Gschwind rudolf | Director Cesar Foundation for the Visual Arts; SwitzerlandHerzog Jacques | Architect; Basel, SwitzerlandHerzog Samuel | Journalist, NZZ; Basel, SwitzerlandJetzer Gianni | Curator, Kunsthalle St. Gallen; St. Gallen, SwitzerlandJoachimides christos | Curator OUTLOOK, Cultural Olympiad Athens; Athens, Greecekeller eva | Curator Daros Collection; Zurich, Switzerlandknüsel pius | Director Pro Helvetia; Zurich, Switzerlandkönig kasper | Director Museum Ludwig; Cologne, GermanyLeutenegger Zilla | Artist; Basel, SwitzerlandMarketou Jenny | Artist; Athens, GreeceMoisdon-trembley Stéphanie | Free Lance Curator; Paris, FranceMosca Barbara | British Council, Swiss Chapter; Berne, SwitzerlandNicol Michelle | Curator, Co-Founder Glamour Engineering; Zurich, Switzerlandobrist Hans Ulrich | Curator Musée d’art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; Paris, Francerichner rosemarie | Foundation Nestlé pour l’art; Montreux, Switzerlandrosenthaler Lukas | Director Cesar Foundation for the Visual Arts; SwitzerlandSchwander Martin | Curator Bâloise Collection; Basel, SwitzerlandSteiger rolf | Director Cesar Foundation for the Visual Arts; SwitzerlandStuder peter | Co-Author Kunstrecht; Zurich, SwitzerlandSzeemann Harald | Art Historian and Curator; Tegna, SwitzerlandUrsprung philip | Art Historian; Zurich, SwitzerlandVitali christoph | Director Fondation Beyeler; Riehen/Basel, SwitzerlandVolz Jochen | Curator Portikus; Frankfurt am Main, Germany

participants at art Lobby 2002 arnold Skip | Artist; Los Angeles, USABeyeler ernst | Galerist, Museum Founder; Basel, SwitzerlandBousteau Fabrice | Editor in Chief Beaux Arts Magazine; Paris, Francecasapietra tiziana | Director Attese Onlus; Milan, Italycostantina roberto | Director Attese Onlus; Milan, Italydelvoye Wim | Artist; Belgiumesche charles | Director of the Rooseum Center for Contemporary Art; Malmö, SwedenFrei Georg | Art Dealer; Zurich, SwitzerlandHerzog ruth & peter | Private Collectors; Basel, SwitzerlandHuber pierre | Art Dealer; Geneva, SwitzerlandJankovski christian | Artist; Berlin, Germanykoons Jeff | Artist; New York, USALamunière Simon | Curator, Director of Version, Professor ECAL; Geneva, Switzerlandpons alfonso | Private Collector; Venezuelarondeau James | Associate Curator of Contemporary Art, The Art Institute of Chicago; Chicago, USArubell don + Mera | Private Collectors; Miami Beach, USAruyter Lisa | Artist; USASigg Ueli | Private Collector; Zurich, SwitzerlandStone Howard + donna | Private Collectors; USAStooss toni | Art Expert and former Director of the Museum of Fine Arts; Bern, Switzerland