VISITS TO THE PRESENT / PORTRAITS OF A CONTEMPORARY EPIC

Buenos Aires Modern Art Museum | 2004

NEW IMAGINARY

In Argentina, art worked as a catalyst for the collective imaginary until the beginning of the 20th century, when new formal experiences finally arrived, searching for a new social bond and attempting to renew the visual experience outside of any realistic reference.

The denial of the representational forms born with modernism definitely disrupted the success of that attempt. It took more than forty years to recognize the value of invention as a new form of social and visual contract with the viewer.

Formal experience, throughout the century, has been taken to the very limits of perception, and invention has reached up to dilution in the kingdom of ideas.

The deconstruction of our own constraints creates new memories that we didn’t have, and brings back to us others too fresh to forget.

In a time when images have lost their aura, recovering their mystery would seem outdated and at the same time necessary. There are works that have contributed to shaping our identity and our historical imaginary; works that even today maintain their unsettling beauty beyond the record or the chronicle. Why can’t we be chroniclers and poets today, in order to build our own everyday epic?

These days, cult to the subject constitutes a construction that is parallel to its own work or that is splintered from it, and it turns into object, even during its existence as a person, shortening the natural process of “objectivation” that time itself grants, and responding to the need for materializing the process of consumption of which we inevitably participate in. 

TRADITIONS AND GENEALOGIES
In the academic pictorial tradition of the beginning of the past century, the use of rural imagery was useful in the shaping of the Argentine imaginary, and it was part of the nationalist divergences that arose from the migratory flow and its powerful influx, specially in the urban field.

Tradition as a construction and a product of a generation of men and women willing to shape a model of a nation also needed its own iconography based on the new ideals. Therefore, an academic background was considered not only necessary but also talent-legitimizing, according to the criteria at the time.

The modernist formal innovations came from the desired iconographic model and also from the political model that supported traditional values which promoted a moral order determined by the Buenos Aires upper-class bourgeoisie.

Within the prefixed model and well into the 20th century, with new aesthetic models being fully effective in the European art centres, The State intervenes in order to sustain the academy and the “plastic values” tied to end-of-the-century tradition, with the purpose of building our own epic imagery as a sort of illustration for the events that were fundamental to the patriotic sense of homeland.

The “assignment” of work to the artists, either for public buildings and institutions or for government special events, was a usual procedure. The State took advantage of them, granting the artists high positions in the recently funded artistic institutions of the country.

In this way, the values of the academy were legitimized and their success was guaranteed through the National museums.

Sensibility became threatened by the irruption of modernism, which came along with social ideas opposing the national model of the 80s generation. New visions attempted to refound the relationship between plastic values and their dissociation with the class-based social model.

Invention challenged traditional forms of perception, deliberately searching to break the patterns known at the time.

The rupture with representation indicated a total fracture with the older models and put new rules into action which caused, in turn, new divisions.

Therefore, any kind of return to the modern foundations involves a setback and, at the same time, a challenge that suggests, without being exclusive, an incorporation of formalist representation and an accurate record of the context, by incorporating the available technology and adding desire, will and poetry, reopening an unideologized paradigm and reinventing it for our present.

Leonel Luna / August 2004