transcript of 18 November 2010 interview at the Bronx Museum of the Arts with Holly Block and stephen dewyer on art in Latin America

SGD: So, I’d like to ask: what other countries have you worked in besides Brazil and Cuba?

HB: In Latin America and Central America and the Caribbean I’ve worked with Puerto Rico, then the Dominican Republic, Guatemala, Venezuela, Peru, Santiago, I mean, uh, Chile and Argentina, Mexico, and I think that’s about it right now.

SGD: Have you worked, I know Brazil and Cuba are, are…, you’ve wrote a book on Cuba, Art Cuba and uh… both those two countries have Biennales… I’m wondering if you could talk about the influences of having them?

HB: Huge, actually, especially in Brazil because Brazil is probably the longest standing… (door opens and then closes) I think it was done… I have to say that it has a long, long history, and it has been an international exhibition in Brazil, and I do think that it had a lot to do with developing different nations and also expanding.  It had a lot to do with how you know bringing international artists from all over the world to Brazil… Brazil being a new country… also the influence of oil and all of its richness, and minerals and all of those details, I think that helped with an economic framework for why culture was also expanded particularly in Brazil.  And new architecture, as you know, they moved the government to a place called Brasília, and it was built in ‘58 and it had a lot to do with expanding the Americas and the influence of Rockefeller in particular in culture.  So that was actually very important. 

Cuba is a different situation.  The first Havana Biennial was organized in 1984.  It was organized by the Centro de Arte Contemporáneo Wifredo Lam.  The Director at the time was a woman named Llilian Llanes, a Historian, an Art Historian and a scholar who had really convinced the government to support this international forum.  She had been to other Biennials.  She knew of Kassel, Documenta and she knew of Venice and she was fully aware of Brazil, the international São Paulo Art Biennal.  And they, actually, from there, it was a team of curators at the Wifredo Lam that divided up the world into various different countries.  This exhibition hosted in Cuba was significant for the development of arts and culture but it was not setup as …  it was a theoretical panel, and scholarship and so there was a conference attached to it with the lecturers and scholars from all over Latin America and it was the first kind of forum where people from the Caribbean and Latin America in particular would join forces and create dialogue and discussion and interpretive programs, but outside people except for artists and scholars were not generated in those early days.  It was really well known among curators, scholars and then when I went ten year later in 1994, the first one, it was the first time that actually, I saw, they invited South Africa as a country, and there were twenty-two artists from South Africa that I was introduced to instantaneously.  So it wasn’t just a Caribbean forum in Latin America.  It expanded beyond that.

SGD: And, so the differences between the Cuban Havana Biennale and the São Paolo Biennal, what funding differences did they have?

HB: The Havana Biennale was mostly funded by the ministry of culture.  The catalog was supported by outside sources.  To give you an example: Ludwig Museum in Germany one year gave money for the catalog so that it could be published.  Cuba’s resources were very, very small but they did whatever they could.  Usually the show would occur—even though it’s a biennial—it would most likely usually occur every three years and they would get a budget from the government and they would take this team of curators divide up… but also they would use advisors around the world who would give feedback and information on artists.  They would create a theme based on some topic that was going on and then they would generate materials on artists and then have a whole discussion on who should be in the show and who shouldn’t and, you know, make a curatorial selection.  But it was a team of curators in-house.  Now, the old days of how São Paolo Bienal used to work is that there was a theme show but then there would be country selections and there would be…  

São Paolo traditionally is organized by states, countries selections.  They would select a curator who would then select an artist or the ministries of cultures in different countries would select the artists.  They would have a panel process and they would make a selection.  These days, it’s a team of curators and all the artists are incorporated into one big show.  That’s just what happened.  There is no longer country representation.  Over the years curatorial practice made it extremely limited to those ideas and resources.

SGD: The curatorial practice made it limited?

HB: Meaning like the artists being selected by each country.  So, to show national identity that one artist would represent its own country.  It’s unrealistic in comparison to today’s idea which is a curatorial process where artists are included in one big show or two shows.  The history of the São Paolo Bienal is there is usually a historical exhibition that’s done with outside scholarship and then there is usually a very large exhibition and that is just what opened this past fall.

SGD:  Great.  And so, you say you served as an advisor to the São Paolo, no?

HB: No, I’ve been a co-commissioner to the Cairo Biennial.

SGD:  You know, there is this attempt to kind of… , I think in Cuba, kind of 80s to localize representation I think you had the establishment of these culture houses or these… and so I’m wondering if at the time there was this effort to host this international exhibition and then there was an effort to get more kind of localized representation through the kind of setting up of these various… I mean there was a structural shift that kind of accompanied this transition to Poder Locale, which was like… and you can correct me if I am wrong… but it was like … it meant local power and workplace democracy that sort of began in the 1970s or mid-1970s kind of following this ratification of some kind of constitution.   So, I’m wondering if you see those as very contradictory steps.  Like this establishment of this transition to Poder Locale and then the institution of this Bienniale which sort of happened around the same time.  I mean are you familiar with… no?  Ok.

HB: Just get to the essence of… I’m not quite sure of what you are asking.

SGD: I guess, the biennials are sort of considered to be these kind of, in some cases, these events that are often meant to cater to this kind of clientele of, like, curators…

HB: So I kind of have a sense of what you are asking for.  I mean traditionally speaking, it is only until the 2000s I think that people sort of affiliated it with a tourism economy and bringing loads of people to your place and that that was an actual resource for culture and support of culture in almost like a tourism way, as an expansion of economy.  Definitely.  In the early days I think there was a business attribution that was included like somebody like Rockefeller.  If you are investing in a particular country you want to have an exchange because you want to show good will with your country and other countries and why not bring it around culture?  So, I think it wasn’t as obvious but it was clear on the corporate message for sure.  Sponsorship.  I mean you can go through the philanthropy of Nancy Hankes in 1964 in setting up the National Endowment for the Arts and supporting and government supported funds.  I mean, that’s a clear connection to that.  I think that in the early days in smaller countries and developing nations I don’t think that they were necessarily geared toward tourism as much as scholarship and documenting themselves.  Very little money was going toward documentation.  Why not bring this out as a theme and we can do it ourselves?  Why should somebody else from some other country who is richer tell us about our art scene when we should be telling each other about our art scene.

SGD:  that’s interesting because I know… I remember reading that there was a wealthy philanthropist from the U.S. was mentioning that if you give money to artists in Mexico that actually has a… that will turn them from leftist politics which is kind of something...

HB:  That’s absurd.  I think that might have been a myth and I don’t think that that is actually true.  And I think that what is interesting about a place like Mexico is for years it had no commercial marketplace so artists setup their own projects and they were ignored commercially and then the great thing about Mexico now is all of a sudden there is this emergence of, you know, in the last five to ten years, of really good commercial galleries who are very much present on the scene and have developed a whole economy for Mexico to collect contemporary Mexican art and it’s fantastic.  It has been a real exploration.  And now, again, you are seeing a resurrection of artist’s spaces.  So for five years it has been kind of quiet and all of a sudden now you are starting to see a new art school being organized you’re seeing lots of new spaces in Mexico City and that is quite, quite interesting.

SGD: mhmmm.  Yeah.  And so, what sort of response have you seen over the years to the biennials in both Cuba and Brazil?

HB:  I think pretty positive.  Brazil is very popular.  I mean, I think also in Cuba it is also very popular too.   Brazil, you know, lots and lots of people come and there is a huge traffic jam at the opening and then the exhibition is up for quite a while and people are very responsive, I think all walks of life.  Cuba, I think, that people travel there to see it for sure.   At the height of the People to People exchanges with the U.S. under the Clinton Administration there were over three thousand U.S. Citizens who traveled from Cuba during the Biennial.   The first time I went in 1994 there were a hundred of us.  There were three groups.   There was a group from L.A., or, sort of San Diego-L.A.,  a group from Chicago and seven groups from New York and there were about a hundred of us at the opening from the U.S..  So you can just see with the exchange and interest that the U.S. and Cuba has together that it really generated an enormous amount of interest and attention.

SGD: Yeah.  I have been kind of following this Labor Gallery in Mexico City.  I think Teresa Margolles is represented by that as well as Héctor Zamora.  I am just wondering if you can tell me anything more about it?

HB:  Well, I know her work a little bit.  She represented Mexico in Venice.  I know it was highly volatile and it was a very interesting project.  She actually has worked for many years, first-off, she, as a profession to support herself, actually worked in a morgue.  And, so, she then started developing projects related to all these deaths that occurred in Mexico that are not tagged, you know, they are unknowns, and it’s a very sad and difficult experience and I think she really wanted to draw to bring attention to that as well.

SGD:  right, right. and, uh, I know this other artist, Héctor Zamora exhibited at the Venice Biennale as well.

HB: And so her project in Venice was, really, she brought dirt from these morgues and extracted the blood and sort of—through a water filtration system—wet down a raw piece of canvas that was hanging that had earth and the whatever the soil that’s left from grave sites that include blood and bones and all that kind of stuff and they are crushed into earth and she used this recycling system with water and watered it down and extracted the liquid from that.  It was extremely strong and powerful as a message but also in the kind of opposition with this unbelievable palazzo in Venice.  You know, I think the two were in juxtaposition with each other and it really made you feel.  And then there was somebody you know sort of mopping up the remains, which was the blood.

SGD:  Right.  And they were the victims’ relatives, which was, I think, interesting.  Quite different than, like, Santiago Sierra.  I mean their faces are visible and, yet, they are not anonymous, you know?

HB:  I don’t think it’s as exploitative as Santiago Sierra’s.  I think he plays with all kinds of taboos about how to use people as interventions.

SD: right… and so… um… the… has their work… what effect has that had on artists in Mexico?

HB: well I think Teresa Margolles has been working with a particular genre for a long time and, so, showing that artists can take a very difficult subject matter and transforming it.  I think Santiago is about spectacle and I am not so sure that I agree with the process.  I mean I think a lot of artists can use spectacle as a subject matter but some are overtly less interested in public outcomes and involvement.  Obviously paying people as day laborers to help you do your work is great but it is also extremely difficult and exploitative.

SGD: Yeah.  It is interesting, too, that a lot of times their identities are erased.

HB:  It’s more like fashion.  That’s how I see it.

SGD:Yeah, I mean Teresa Margolles is interesting because she is using… these unnamed corpses and in a way showing them…

HB: well it’s also a shock hard [wc?] situation and it’s very different than…  I mean death is tough.  And I think that especially since Mexico’s history of all these unknown people who have disappeared and, you know it is of enormous amount of importance to draw attention to and to extract out and make it into an art project is very different.  I think that Santiago Sierra thinks about it very differently.

SGD: And so, um, moving on to your recent role in the smArt Power program, I am wondering if you could talk about that and how that is going?

HB:  Well, we have just started.  It will be posted on the website on January third.  It is an important program where we will be sending fifteen U.S. based artists around the world to fifteen different partner sites and countries.  And there will be an open online application, open call.  It will be a national program and we will have it posted for two months and then it will be a deadline in early March.  We will have a panel of professionals that will review the material and then we will make recommendations and hopefully announcements sometime in June.

SGD:  And, so, those fifteen locations, I think, China, Ecuador, Egypt, Ghana, India, Kosovo, Lebanon, Nepal, Nigeria, Pakistan, Philippines, Kenya, Sri Lanka, Turkey and Venezuela, those, I mean clearly those are… there are U.S. embassies [in those locations] and so they are of strategic interest to the U.S. and, I mean, I am wondering like, you know and the State Department, they have, they oversee this program and they have final say as to whether a project…

HB: Yeah, we’ll narrow it down to twenty artists and we’ll make a final selection to fifteen.  The countries were selected through a back-and-forth.  They had made recommendations and also asked for recommendations and we went back-and-forth for final selection and we’ll do the same thing with the partner sites that we have setup in these different places.

SGD: ok.  Right.  Do you have any… how do you see the program working?

HB: well, we’ll link with partner sites.  We’re going to get applications.  People will describe some of the projects they want.  We will get some feedback from the sites of what they are interested in tackling or discussing or subjects that are happening in these local communities.  Artists will go there and stay up to 45 days.  They could do two trips.  They could do one trip.  And then the idea is to make a finite project and to commission something… make something happen.  It would be...  we would do a whole video production and streaming and doing website updates and having blogs and all kinds of interactions with people about the subject matter and how it is going to work.

SGD: Great.  And the, um, the, um, I noticed there is a sort of collaborative component to the work that the artists would work with communities and there is a dialogue.

HB:  It’s a community engagement program.  So, we’re not really interested in having artists just come from their studio and make a painting and just put it out there in the world.  There needs to be some kind of collaboration in some kind of way with something broader that just yourself.  And the projects that will be most interesting will be designed between the community space and the artist.  And then the idea is when they all come back is to have some kind of summit, or conference, public forum, on what happened and maybe an exhibition.

SGD: do you anticipate… what has been the response to this program?

HB: very positive.  I mean, artists are really excited about having the opportunity of being paid to go someplace. 

SGD: right, yeah.

HB: We have so few opportunities for visual artists to do projects.  Most people who are involved in music and theatre and dance tend to have more opportunities for projects like this so it’s a fantastic opportunity.

SGD: right, right.  And, um… How do you see…. What is interesting to you in these areas where you plan on working?

HB: We’re going to go through and make partnerships first with visual arts organizations in these local communities but we’re also going to be working with some of the community based organizations and trying to merge those two groups together.  They will act as hosts for the artists.  The artists will be onsite and it’s very much based on People to People exchanges.  Learning really about one’s culture through artists and it’s a fantastic opportunity for these artists to really engage with a much broader community to have direct links there in different places.  I can only use Ghana as an example.  We have here in the Bronx we have the largest West African population of recent immigrants from West Africa here in the Bronx throughout the United States and we have already developed a relationship with the Ghanaian community here and we are interested in making associations through our own association here and seeing if there are links there.  We are also very familiar with N.Y.U., and it has a school there and we know some artists that are teaching there and, so, we kind of feel like we already have that country almost mapped out in some way but we haven’t heard yet directly what the local groups are interested in having an artist work on.  And so that is sort of the next step is to really analyze that and come up with a possible way of making a link.

SGD: and in Latin America?

HB:  Well, in Latin America, and in Ecuador we know that the U.S. has been sponsoring a Biennial in Quito and I’ve met a couple of artists from there already and we will kind of setup a framework that way and the same thing as working in even in the Philippines.  I’ve actually travelled to the Philippines so I am pretty aware of… although I haven’t been there in a couple of years, but at least there is a network setup of visual art spaces there already and between depending on where we want to send the artists.  I mean there is a great university in Doom Mageti(wc?).  I mean it just depends on where they want to work.

SGD: great.  Do we have any more time?

HB: I think you should go to a conclusion.

SGD: So, in general, your work in Latin America…

HB: The Bronx Museum has had a long history with working with Latin America in the Caribbean.  I think we were the first museum to do a massive exhibition in 1989 called Latin American Spirit.  It was a book that was published by Abrahams.  It was a two volume: one in Spanish and one in English.  The English is out of print.  The Spanish is still available and it is probably one of the most important books that you see travelling throughout Latin America plus it is almost like an overview and it does position the former Director here named Luis Cancel who organized the exhibition actually did want to position Caribbean artists within a Latin American art history because over the years they were neglected and he being from Puerto Rico wanted to make sure that that was incorporated into art history.  So he didn’t have any people to study growing up in art history in a traditional way and he felt very strongly that people had to have models and mentors and people to look towards that fulfilled those different gaps.  And so this was a crucially important show we barrowed 250 works from all over and it was a wonderful exhibition and it meant a great deal to this museum to its immediate surroundings.  It was before even Frida Kahlo was truly recognized as a wonderful painter.  Now, since, there have been so many exhibitions about her.  I think we had about four or five paintings of her work in that show.  So it was an important project to the museum’s history.  Also the Bronx, half its population is bilingual in Spanish, both from Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic and now a huge migration from Central America including Mexico, Ecuador and different places.  We continue in that process.

SGD: How do you see this transnational.. I hear this a lot… this transnational imaginary, transnational subject?  Do you see that?

HB: I don’t think, I think look, people come from all different places.  I think respecting your origins is hugely important.   I no longer believe that once you leave your own country you have to give up your identity.  I feel very strongly that what’s led me to go and travel around the world is because people in New York City are from all over the world and I wanted to have a direct experience so that I would have a better understanding of where they are coming from.  And I think that that is an interesting aspect.  I would like to see less borders and more possibilities of exchange and I think this offers a great opportunity to do that with these visual artists.

SGD: thank you.