Favorite Spots in the City

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Lastly, Here are Five Reflections on Buenos Aires

1. You need a PhD in finance to get Argentina’s economy. Porteños are obsessed with talking about money, but phobic about discussing how much they earn. This doesn’t help improve gender inequality or bettering salaries. 
2. Road markings are symbolic, and the Porteño idiosyncrasy is personified behind the wheel. They either act like maniacs or wannabe Formula-1 drivers. 
3. My best friends are Argentinian. Once you’ve earned their trust they’ll go out of their way to help and be there for you, and when the chips are down they’ll keep you company, cook for you, always eager to do you favors and make you feel at home. 
4. You no longer starve if you’re vegetarian. In the 12 years I’ve lived here there’s been a huge shift in local eating habits. These days you’re more likely to stumble across a new plant-based opening or organic market than a new parrilla. 
5. The best time to visit is in November. Spring has sprung and BA’s central avenues and parks pop with the jacaranda trees’ vibrant purple blossom.

The post This Anglo-Argentine Writer-Turned-Tour Guide Shares the Magic of Buenos Aires with the World appeared first on Latina.

The pair have known each other for over a decade; they met while working at Kavi Gupta Gallery in Chicago, where they served as co-directors. When they started to consider leaving that gallery, they knew they could take jobs elsewhere — at a different gallery, in a different city — but they kept coming back to the idea of opening a new gallery in Chicago. Having both trained in art-making, they were driven by the idea that the gallerist-artist relationship is a special one, one that can help an artist find their true voice. They also noticed that, outside of school, many artists don’t have the kind of support they need — consistent feedback, studio visits, fresh eyes on their work — to really grow. They wanted to open a gallery whose ethos would hinge on the relationship between gallerist and artist, where the gallerist could help both emerging and established artists develop their practice. 

PATRON Gallery Exterior Shot

In today’s art world, artists with gallery representation depend on sales for their income, as well as for recognition in the broader art world. Large galleries dominate, both in terms of sales and in terms of helping their artists land solo shows at big museums. The two things — the sales and the publicity — go hand in hand for the artist as they build a career. For the gallerist, of course, the sales are the bottom-line. Without them, they simply can’t run a gallery. When I ask Aguilar and Fischbach how they balance selling artwork with fostering artists’ growth, they tell me that for them, “it’s not about the immediate big sale.” Instead, “it’s about the long haul: finding artists that we see ourselves working with for a long time.” 

This philosophy also applies to clients: when I talk with Fischbach and Aguilar, they are in the car on the way back from a breakfast meeting with two aspiring collectors. This pair is unlike many other collectors, Aguilar tells me. They’re on the younger side, early-ish in their careers as architects, and they want to support artists. They might want a piece at a price point that’s lower than what many galleries, in Chicago and elsewhere, would carry, but for Fischbach and Aguilar, clients willing to invest in young artists are exactly what they’re looking for to grow their vision for PATRON. The gallery remains medium-sized, especially when compared to galleries in Los Angeles and New York City, but it has grown quickly in just six years, which Aguilar attributes to their location: “We are in Chicago, so the overhead here is a fraction [of what it would be in New York City or Los Angeles]. That plays a big part. We are able to do more with less.”

PATRON Gallery Interior Shot

In an art world dominated by white guys, Fischbach and Aguilar — a woman and a gay Latino man — tell me they’ve had to fight to get to where they are. So, in addition to truly fostering the growth of artists, the pair is also committed to connecting their art with the community around them. Aguilar tells me that “there’s been a lot of walking traffic — people just come in — and we’ve started becoming neighbors with them.”

Noble Square, the historically Polish neighborhood home to PATRON, sits just south of the hip, gentrified Wicker Park and Ukrainian Village neighborhoods, and just north of Chicago’s quickly developing West Loop. The gallery itself found its home in a building that, Aguilar later learned, was once a Spanish-language movie house that his father would frequent shortly after immigrating to the United States from Dolores Hidalgo in Guanajuato, Mexico. Its central location has encouraged Fischbach and Aguilar to hold events at the gallery, filling it with people so as to encourage others to come inside. In an art world that is quick to commodify, where a sale matters as much as anything else, and where gallerists are incentivized to encourage artists to follow trends they know will sell as opposed to develop their own voice, it feels rare to meet two gallerists intent on fostering this kind of community connection. 

PATRON Gallery Interior Shot

Their particular dedication to helping artists develop their particular voice also feels rare. One artist that PATRON represents, Jennie C. Jones, has a forthcoming solo show at the Guggenheim in New York City. Aguilar tells me this is a long time coming for Jones, who has been a guiding light in the contemporary art world for decades, someone who other artists have looked to for inspiration. “Jennie speaks a language that has historically been attributed to white men: abstraction, minimalism, conceptual minimalism,” says Aguilar. “She’s been contributing to that, and a lot of artists have taken note of that, before the market, even sometimes before the institutions. Younger generations are aware of what Jennie’s contributions have been.” He’s happy to see her finally getting big-time, spotlight recognition and hopes the same will happen for other artists that PATRON represents. “The reward is when you see the artists have their survey shows or their museum shows, when they reach these goals that you’ve dreamt and talked with them about in their studios,” Aguilar says.

PATRON has been around since 2015 and in their current space in the former Spanish-language theater only since April of this year, but they’ve already been inducted into the Art Dealers Association of America. More importantly, they’re already forging an uncommon path in the art world. It’s going to take a lot to change the art industry — the predominance of large galleries, the importance of the sale over the growth of artists — but it’s a breath of fresh air to see two gallerists dedicated to art as more than a commodity — rather something with the potential to transform the lives of both people who make it and look at it.

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Installation views –”Machine #4: stone (ground)” by Gabriela Murex. “2021 Triennial: Soft Water Hard Stone,” 2021. Exhibition view: New Museum, New York. Photo: Dario Lasagni

“Machine #4: stone (ground),” by Brazilian artist Gabriela Mureb, is a 2017 piece borrowed by the New Museum from a private collection in Perú. It consists of an aluminum rod, parallel to the ground, attached to a small motor that powers it to advance and retreat. Steadily, firmly, the aluminum rod hits a piece of cream-colored stone. The stone leans backward just slightly, then tips back onto its base, producing that thunk sound. Seconds stretch out between each action of “Machine #4.” The moments after the rod pushes out but before it actually makes contact with the stone; after the stone leans back but before it tips back down onto the ground; after it settles onto its base but before the thunk all have a chance to fill the space of the gallery — they expand sonically in space , asking viewers to imagine how, with enough repetitions over enough time, the rod might end up permanently changing the shape of the stone, which might in turn permanently shape the quality of the sound, the range of its movement, or the ability of the rod to reach it altogether. 

This is the central metaphor of the New Museum’s fifth Triennial, which takes its title, “Soft Water Hard Stone,” from the same Brazilian proverb that inspired Mureb’s piece: “água mole em pedra dura, tanto bate até que fura.” Translated, it means: “Soft water on hard stone hits until it bores a hole.” Four floors of artworks span a range of contemporary art practices and media: video installations, collage with found objects, sculptures with both traditional and unconventional materials are all gathered under a title that seems to suggest that, together and over time, these pieces might have an effect that’s greater than the sum of their parts. 

Installation views – “Mamá Luchona” in the foreground and “As I Lay Dying” in the background. “2021 Triennial: Soft Water Hard Stone,” 2021. Exhibition view: New Museum, New York. Photo: Dario Lasagni

The sheer quantity and variety of the Triennial threaten to overwhelm visitors to either give over their focus entirely to one piece or otherwise find their attention diffuse and battled over. Curators placed clashing works in close proximity, heightening a dissonant effect. On the fourth floor, “As I Lay Dying,” a set of seven four-by-eight-foot paintings by Baltimore artist Cynthia Daignault, depicts centuries-old trees that bore witness to the American Civil War and its cruelties. The piece’s thick, short strokes of monochromatic black and white, suggesting a frenetic haunting, chafe against the rounded, smooth solidity of “Mamá Luchona” — a nearly fourteen-foot-tall clay sculpture that calls to mind an ancient and perhaps flightless bird, with brown eggs embedded throughout its surface in a grid pattern, by Argentinian artist Gabriel Chaile that sits just in front of “As I Lay Dying.” 

Similar moments of dissonant abundance occur throughout the exhibit: the central gallery on the second floor, filled with small- and medium-sized sculptures, struggles to offer the eye a place to land. This might be the point. This year’s Triennial, in its own words, “recognizes artists re-envisioning traditional models, materials, and techniques beyond established paradigms.” As such, pieces tend to be highly personal, imbued with so much specific feeling as to be impenetrable, or highly referential, rendering themselves unintelligible if a viewer is unfamiliar with the histories toward which they gesture.

This is the challenge of curating a show during, to use the words from Triennial’s press release, “this moment of profound change, where structures once thought to be stable are disintegrating or on the edge of collapse.” Without those scaffoldings onto which to hold, artworks can feel untethered from any reality but that of the artists. 

Installation views – “Labor Drawing (New Museum)” by Clara Ianni. “2021 Triennial: Soft Water Hard Stone,” 2021. Exhibition view: New Museum, New York. Photo: Dario Lasagni

One piece cut through the noise: Clara Ianni’s “Labor Drawing (New Museum),” a set of fourteen cartographic drawings that map the commutes of as many New Museum workers. Laid out in a two-row grid that takes up almost an entire wall on the museum’s third floor, Ianni’s work invites visitors to step close to it: the light wood frames almost match the color of the paper on which the commutes are traced with graphite, which in turn almost matches the color of the wall, giving the whole piece an air of self-camouflage; some journeys are so short as to be represented by a single dot; and the accompanying sets of data — time elapsed, start and end locations, method of transportation — are printed in a small font on cards that cannot be read from far away. It would be impossible to absorb the piece without spending at least several minutes with it. “Labor Drawing (New Museum)” could be read as a direct reference to the recent unionization efforts at the New Museum, in which union workers were met with retaliation. But even without that context, the piece serves as a respite from what can feel like hand-wringing about the direction of art production by countering the anxiety with simple facts. We might not know where the art world is going, but every morning the security guard at the New Museum knows where they’ll be in forty-five minutes.

The post Review: The New Museum’s 2021 Triennial ‘Soft Water Hard Stone’ appeared first on Latina.

Near-misses and disappointments like this one plague “El Planeta,” which follows the lives of a mother-daughter duo, María and Leo, as they cope with the effects of the 2008 economic crisis in Spain, which has left them penniless and on the brink of eviction. Convinced they deserve lives of material luxury — the film implies that maybe they had such lives before Leo’s father died — they have no interest in getting jobs or working. Instead, they grift and scam, and poorly at that, trying to imitate a lifestyle clearly beyond their means. 

Still from “El Planeta” (2021). Courtesy of Amalia Ulman/Holga’s Meow Pictures.

Ulman’s real-life mother, Ale Ulman, plays Leo’s on-screen mother, María, a woman in active denial of her situation. She nurses countless delusions: she twirls in the kitchen to classical music, saying she could have been a ballerina; she writes the names of her so-called enemies on scraps of paper and puts them in the freezer to ice them out; after their electricity has been shut off because they haven’t paid the bill, she takes Leo to El Corte Inglés to get haircuts, blowouts, and to buy shoes. In a scene toward the end of the film, María receives a shipment of fruits she’s ordered and arranges them around the house, interspersed with candles in a display of shallow excess: a bounty of beautiful produce when they can’t even keep the lights on. Meanwhile, Leo pretends to work — she’s some sort of stylist or fashion designer — but mostly spends her time reading and lazing about. 

Still from “El Planeta” (2021). Courtesy of Amalia Ulman/Holga’s Meow Pictures.

Ulman brilliantly uses sound — Tchaikovsky in the background as María tells Leo they only have two more months left in their apartment before they run out of money for rent, squawking seagulls as they ride the escalators after their haircuts, a zoom-in on a face cackling soundlessly — to create a dissonant effect. Something is always just slightly off, teetering on the line between insanity and reality, but never falling to either side. Leo and María live in a collective delusion, and the moments when it breaks — the scene with the john, another scene wherein Leo finds out a guy she’s just slept with is married and has a child, the moment Leo realizes the electricity has been shut off — are painful. We see Leo and María brush up against reality and we think they’re about to learn some sort of lesson. They never do. 

This is the brilliance of El Planeta: it tells a story without judging its characters, and, in a final scene that plays under the closing credits, it concludes with an unexpected jab at the elites Leo and María have just spent the whole film trying to emulate.  It asks the question: how far can self-delusion take us?  And answers it: quite far, and to bad places.

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While at first Ricardo agrees to this arrangement, the subsequent episodes show him integrating himself into Buenos Aires’s informal economy, befriending the people squatting in adjacent buildings, and eventually letting his new friends and acquaintances squat in his cousin’s building. The economic crisis isn’t at its peak, but things are already looking bleak for him and others his age. You can feel the weight of his future — or lack thereof — right away in the series, an anvil hanging overhead, ready to drop at any moment. 

This is the genius of “Okupas:” it hints at what’s to come but none of its characters know for sure. At the time of its original airing on television, it was simply a dramatized depiction of what many people were living through as economic and living conditions deteriorated in Argentina. The allure of the show was the plotline, the intrigue of what would happen to this clean-cut young guy, dealing with squatters, drug-dealer friends, and down-and-out acquaintances. 

Watching it now, twenty years later, knowing how the 2001 crisis crushed the hopes of millions of people and led many to leave the country and try their luck elsewhere (my family among them), the allure of “Okupas” is not found in what could potentially happen, but in the fact that we know exactly what will happen. We know something the characters don’t. The 2001 crisis left millions unemployed and wiped out the savings of hundreds of thousands when the currency depreciated. Many international companies that had set up shop in Argentina left, taking employment opportunities with them.

Okupas se estrena este martes, Día del Amigo, en Netflix pic.twitter.com/OwC4FLeF57

— La Izquierda Diario (@izquierdadiario) July 19, 2021

The decision by Ricardo and his friends to take their lives into their own hands, while a result of their immediate needs, seems sharply prescient in retrospect, and like a small-scale version of the neighborhood and workplace assemblies that would form in 2001 and 2002 as a result of the growing distrust in corporations, the government, and even organized labor. The series is not particularly well-acted, well-shot, or well-written, but it’s powerful in how it serves as a time capsule for a very specific moment in Argentina’s history pre-economic collapse. 

Watching “Okupas” today lets us, for the duration of its eleven episodes, entertain for a moment that the story might have ended differently; not that the crisis wouldn’t have  happened, but that maybe people could have organized themselves differently. The impulse to take matters into their own hands — to squat, to steal, to sell drugs — is one aimed at individual and short-term survival, as opposed to collective, long-term organization and actual political power. The structures set up by Ricardo and people like him — the neighborhood assemblies, the squat houses, the factories that were taken over by workers — served their immediate purpose: they helped people live through a dire crisis. Seen through the lens of a global pandemic and impending climate catastrophe, “Okupas,” in addition to a time capsule, is also a cautionary tale.

We might be tempted to similarly organize ourselves to meet our immediate needs  and we should. But we should also think bigger and more long-term. The world-historic crisis through which we’re living may not look exactly like the world of “Okupas,” but it is similarly a result of a world in which many work day-in and day-out to line the pockets of a few. Ricardo and El Pollo take their individual fates into their own hands; we should take our collective fate into ours. 

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