CAA News Today

Fernando Martínez Nespral is a professor in the School of Architecture, Design, and Urbanism at the University of Buenos Aires in Argentina and a participant in the 2014 CAA-Getty International Program.

This past July, there was a thought-provoking exhibition on view in Buenos Aires at the Museo de Arquitectura y Diseño (Museum of Architecture and Design), known as MARQ. Titled Secciones, this collection of drawings by Santiago Nicolás Lovecchio added a lively local commentary to the form versus function debate in architecture.

MARQ was founded by the Central Society of Architects to explore the architecture of Argentina, from its history and heritage ​​to contemporary issues and projects. It is the first museum in the country dedicated specifically to architecture, and its activities have continued to grow since it opened fifteen years ago. The museum is situated in an old railway building on the Avenida del Libertador, sharing the Buenos Aires Museum Mile with the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes (National Museum of Fine Arts), Museo Nacional de Arte Decorativo (National Museum of Decorative Arts), Museo de Arte Hispanoamericano (Museum of Spanish American Art), and Museo de Arte Latinoamericano (Museum of Latin American Art), among others.

Lovecchio’s exhibition presented a series of digitally enhanced pencil and ink sectional drawings of detailed plans for imaginary buildings. Each one juxtaposes clear references to landmarks of architectural history with the typical shapes and traditional forms of domestic architecture in Buenos Aires.

This local perspective on history makes sense when we consider the biography of its author. Lovecchio is a young Argentine who combines his work as a practicing architect with his teaching of architectural history. In this exhibition, he courageously addressed a subject that is at the center of academic discussions about architecture in Argentina today. I am referring to the Dwelling Theory, which favors the analysis of architecture as a setting for the activities of those who live in the buildings, rather than the study of forms.

Thus, in Ninfeo, Lovecchio includes straightforward references to Italian grottos. Similarly, in Casa para dos caballos/caballeros (House for Two Horses/Knights) and especially Casa para dos señoritas bienudas (House for Two Distinguished Ladies), he includes elements reminiscent of the interior spaces in Sir John Soane’s Museum in London. Particularly in the latter two cases, references to the architecture, customs, and lifestyles of Argentina’s upper classes in the early twentieth century come to light with remarkable vividness. They harken back to the Anchorena Palace (now the Ministry of Foreign Affairs) and the Errázuriz Palace (now the National Museum of Decorative Arts), both examples of upper-class residences in Buenos Aires.

The academic, monumental architecture that characterizes the heritage of Buenos Aires, as seen in the abovementioned drawings, is also evident in Invernadero (Greenhouse) and the fabulous Casa cúpulas (House of Domes). But the most attractive element in these imaginary architectural studies is the critical irony that seeps lucidly through Lovecchio’s drawings. Different eras, designs, and ways of living are superimposed and reveal new perspectives and interpretations of the past and present.

The work El porteño burguesón (The Buenos Aires Bourgeoisie) starkly displays—as only sectional drawings do—the intimacies of the typical apartments and apartment dwellers of Buenos Aires’s middle class, and it combines these traditional, conservative forms with an oneiric artificial cloud of glass polygons that recall complex underground mechanisms and outdated boilers from the Industrial Revolution.

But in my opinion, La manzana porteña (Buenos Aires City Block) is where the architecture of Buenos Aires is most starkly illuminated. The drawing shows the miseries of real-estate speculation and its promise of Patios de aire y luz (Courtyards for Air and Light), as we say here—that do not provide either—along with the chaos of cables, air conditioners, and tiny windows that coexist with modest traditional houses from a previous era that are still part of our time.

The title of the exhibition, Secciones, alludes to the structural cross sections depicted in the drawings, but in Spanish, sectional drawings are called cortes (cuts, or slices). So the choice of the word secciones undoubtedly refers to the idea that Lovecchio’s sections show more than just buildings. His drawings explore nuances, complexities, and contrasts that exceed traditional interpretations of architecture.

In sum, Lovecchio’s works bring a bold, young, and specifically Argentine point of view to the ever-present idea of ​​the “complexity and contradiction of contemporary architecture” that Robert Venturi wisely warned us about almost half a century ago.

For more information, see the MARQ website or Facebook page. To enjoy these drawings online, see santiagonlove.tumblr.com or the recent article published on Plataforma Arquitectura (text in Spanish).

Judy Peter is head of the Department of Jewellery Design and Manufacture at the University of Johannesburg in South Africa and a 2012 participant in the CAA-Getty International Program.

In 2012, I was one of twenty international art historians from developing countries who received a travel grant funded by the Getty Foundation to attend the CAA Annual Conference in Los Angeles. One of the objectives of the CAA-Getty International Program is to encourage and strengthen conversations between developing countries about the commonality, diversity, and parallel histories in the discursive field of visual culture. To this end, Cristian Nae, a participant from Romania, and I conceptualized the research project “Between Democracies 1989–2014: Remembering, Narrating, and Reimagining the Past in Eastern and Central Europe and Southern Africa” (EESA). This transnational collaboration brings together scholars and artists from Eastern and Central Europe and South Africa, and draws from their cultural and disciplinary diversities and cohesions to contribute to the generation of knowledge.

Over the past three years, the EESA project has expanded to include conveners, curators, and institutions. Ljiljana Kolesnik from the Institute of Art History in Zagreb, Croatia, collaborated on the project until May 2015; Karen von Veh, a 2013 CAA-Getty program alumnus from the University of Johannesburg in South Africa, was included as a convener and curator for the project in 2013; and Richard Gregor, a 2013 CAA-Getty program participant from the Dom umenia/Kunsthalle Bratislava in the Slovak Republic, joined the project as a curator in 2013.

Framework

In 1994, new ideological and political shifts in South Africa were entrenched by a neoliberal democracy. Postapartheid South Africa was initially marked by nation-building strategies such as the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, idealistic notions of the Rainbow Nation, and the African Renaissance, all of which functioned as vehicles to grapple with the social constructions of identities in a new South Africa. These strategies reflected a rationalization of the postcolonial recovery with a sense of self and place, and they were premised on the assumptions of interchange, mixing, inter/transculturations, hybridity, and creolization. The realities of postcolonial negotiations eroded this naïve enthusiasm, however, and South African art is still located in unresolved identities and remains in search of a recovery of self. Many artists also continue their artistic practices of the “struggle years” by employing forms of activism or social commentary to highlight the ongoing inequalities that have not been erased with the removal of the old regime.

Regarding Eastern and Central Europe, Nae states: “East and Central Europe also emerged from a totalitarian regime twenty-five years ago with the demise of socialism. The collapse of the Berlin Wall prompted a reimagining of the formerly divided Europe on the grounds of different political imagined realities, economies, and bio-political regimes. Artists and curators revisited the logic of modernity and explored its unrealized possibilities, while at the same time questioning contested territorial marks and processes of un-belonging. In relation to temporality, issues of identity and reconstruction of the private and the collective selves became central themes in the recently unmarked and de-territorialised territorialized places of the ‘former East’. Thus, the question of coping with the socialist past and its heritage has been an important political issue in much of the art after 1989, overlapping issues of gender, ethnicity, class, and national belonging.”[1]

The EESA project consists of exhibitions, conferences, roundtable discussions, and peer-reviewed publications. Participants have presented, published, and curated texts and artworks, raising questions about how, why, and when the theoretical and artistic practices of these nations respond to the constructs of place and political disruption, memory and commemoration, transforming ideologies, and new contexts of acculturation. The project has considered to what extent an existing critical methodology, informed by postcolonial theory, psychoanalysis, and post-Marxist theory, contributes to understanding these discursive constructions. It also questions whether new interpretive principles should be envisioned in order to deal with a comparative perspective, with the internal disparities inhabiting these imaginary geographies.

At the 2016 CAA Annual Conference in Washington DC, Nae, von Veh, Gregor, and I will lead a roundtable discussion on these issues with the new group of CAA-Getty International Program participants. It will take place in advance of the EESA group’s second annual conference in September 2016 in Bratislava. Not only has this collaborative project enlarged our understanding of regional comparisons in a postcolonial world, but we hope it will provide a model for future cross-cultural projects among CAA members.

[1] Cristian Nae, email message to author, 2013.

Karen von Veh is associate professor of art history at the University of Johannesburg in South Africa and participant in the 2013 CAA-Getty International Program.

In 2013 I was one of the lucky recipients of a Getty travel grant to attend the CAA Annual Conference in New York. The first time I met the other grantees was when we had to give a short presentation about our research interests and show examples of the work we were studying. Ding Ning from Peking University was one of our group. Shortly after we returned to our home countries, he contacted me to ask about the possibility of showcasing the art of South Africa as an invited “special exhibition” for the Beijing Biennale in September 2015. Each year the biennale invites selected countries to produce what they call “special exhibitions” and to date they have never had exhibitions from anywhere in Africa. An exhibition of South African art would therefore be a “first” for them and a huge opportunity for us in South Africa—not only to showcase the excellence of our art production but also to align with the drive for cooperation between the BRICS nations (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) and the various cultural and economic exchange programs that are currently underway.

Special exhibitions at the Beijing Biennale are expected to be showcases of the invited country’s cultural (fine art) production, and we decided to use this exhibition to reflect on the perceived state of our fledgling democracy. After the long struggle to introduce a democratic system and freedom for all in South Africa, one might imagine that an exhibition reflecting the current state of our democratic society might be a very cheerful and upbeat affair. However, twenty-one years after apartheid, we are still seeing the aftereffects of institutionalized inequalities, and the pace of change is not necessarily fulfilling citizen’s expectations. Annie E. Coombes’s book, History after Apartheid: Visual Culture and Public Memory in a Democratic South Africa (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), argues that cultural manifestations both reflect and affect this change in social structures and relationships. Transition is a difficult state to occupy; often beliefs or behavioral practices are so normalized that change is virtually impossible without a catalyst to shake us out of complacency and awaken us to the possibilities of alternative practices and thoughts. I believe that intellectually engaged, socially conscious art is just such a catalyst.

Bearing this in mind, my cocurators and I have chosen works by a cross section of high profile established artists—those who have been part of the struggle toward democracy and who have seen and reacted to both the good and the bad changes brought about by the new dispensation (William Kentridge, Diane Victor and David Koloane would be examples of this category). These artists have established careers and are well known at home and internationally. In addition, we made a careful selection of young emerging contemporary artists who we believe are embarking on successful careers and who have something pertinent to say about the condition of our society for the future of the youth. All the artists selected acknowledge the role of contemporary art in South Africa as a catalyst for change and raise social and political issues. Their work comments on the real impact of twenty-one years of democracy—a democracy that has allowed them the artistic freedom to comment incisively on some of the continuing challenges arising from inherited and ongoing inequality in society. The chosen examples also illustrate South Africa’s achievements in various traditional media (drawing, painting, printmaking, sculpture) and, in addition, we have included some examples of digital media and/or mixed-media works.

As I write this, we are packing up the works for transport to China and preparing to travel there ourselves in mid-September to set up the exhibition. Thinking back to the initial invitation to visit New York in 2013, I had no conception at the time of where this opportunity might lead in the future, and what fruitful projects might come from the contacts made on this occasion.

Kim Berman’s monotype is a reminder of the 2009 xenophobic attacks in South Africa. She records the tented camps put up by local authorities and aid organizations to house dispossessed foreigners, who were victims of violence and intimidation. A barbed-wire fence running through the center of the image is reminiscent of records from the Anglo Boer War concentration camps of the early 1900s. Berman is perhaps suggesting that little has changed in terms of difference, intolerance, and unequal power relations.

Image: Kim Berman, Rifle Range I, Roodepoort, 2009, monotype, 78 x 108 cm (artwork © Kim Berman)

Mary Sibande performs her alter ego, Sophie, clad in Victorian attire. The color of her dress refers to the Zionist Christian Church (ZCC) uniform, and she is wielding a Zionist prayer stick. Sibande refers to the conflation of Christianity and traditions of ancestral worship that exist within the ZCC. This cultural overlap illustrates her search for identity as a young black woman living in the Westernized culture of contemporary South Africa. Her Sophie persona thus explores postcolonial South African identity and critiques stereotypical depictions of women, especially black women, in society.

Image: Mary Sibande, I put a spell on me, 2009, digital pigment print, 90 x 60 cm (artwork © Mary Sibande)

Parul Dave Mukherji is a professor in the School of Arts and Aesthetics at Jawajarlal Nehru University in New Delhi, India. In 2013 she was a participant in the CAA-Getty International Program.

When I attended the College Art Association’s 101st Annual Conference in New York as a participant in the 2013 CAA-Getty International Program, little did I realize the long-term benefits of interacting with scholars from different parts of the world. While learning about different art-history teaching and research methodologies in areas as far flung from my native India as South Africa, Eastern Europe, Turkey, and China, among others, it was meeting art historians from neighboring countries such as Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and Bangladesh that laid the groundwork for future collaboration and the possibility of rethinking South Asian art history in both global and regional terms. It is indeed ironic that I “discovered” art historians from these South Asian nations in New York.

When Stephen Ross and Allana Lindgren invited me to contribute a chapter about South Asian visual arts to their edited volume, The Modernist World (New York: Routledge, 2015), I was reluctant to represent the art histories of Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka and wanted to invite art historians from these regions to write about their own art histories. The CAA-Getty Program played a key role by offering a global platform for art historians from diverse regions to meet and exchange notes about their research and pedagogical practices. Meeting a fellow participant, a young art historian from Bangladesh, AKM Khademul Haque, helped me develop a fuller account of South Asian modernism and paved the way for future collaborations. Haque, Simone Wille, and T. Sanathanan, and I coauthored the chapter “Visual Arts in South Asia” in The Modernist World.

Musarrat Hasan is an advisor to the Institute of Art and Design and professor of art history at Lahore College Women’s University in Lahore, Pakistan. She was a 2013 participant in the CAA-Getty International Program.

In Pakistan, the Taliban and many other militant groups have carried out terrorist activities for the last several years, killing thousands of people through suicide bombings and other horrific attacks. Their aggression has now been greatly curtailed through the joint efforts of the military and the citizens of Pakistan. However, on December 16, 2014, seven gunmen affiliated with the Taliban conducted a terrorist attack on the Army Public School in the northwestern Pakistani city of Peshawar. They entered the school and fired on school staff, teachers, and children, killing 145 people, including 132 schoolchildren between eight and eighteen years of age.

Worldwide protest and expressions of horror at this outrage followed immediately. The artists of Pakistan, like their fellow citizens, were greatly shaken by the brutal event. Through their national organization, the Artists’ Association, they decided to make their outrage public. During a meeting of the organization’s executive committee, under the leadership of Mian Ijaz ul Hassan, the group condemned the Peshawar attack and voted to devote the upcoming annual exhibition to artistic responses to this violence. The organization sent out a notice to members and all other artists in universities, cultural bodies, and international members, announcing that the annual show would be postponed by about three weeks so that all members and other artists could participate. The title for the exhibition would be ‘Massacre of the Innocents’ and it would be about the suffering of innocents all over the world.

Although Pakistani artists have previously responded to national and international events of tragic and human significance, I do not recall a collective public response to current events by artists carried out with such immediacy. There have been instances of commissioned murals years after the event, but this sort of action was unprecedented.

At the Lahore College Women’s University, the faculty members were also motivated to participate and decided to collectively produce the mural that is illustrated here. They pooled funds to buy oil paints, panels of stretched canvas, and other materials required for the mural. I was honored to supervise the creation of this work from conception to completion. We decided not to dwell on the gruesome murders but instead to celebrate the bravery and sacrifice of the headmistress who faced the Taliban with courage and gained time for hundreds of students to escape, even though she herself was killed in the process.

The final mural is 8 x 13 feet and demonstrates the painting skills and commitment of fourteen young faculty members who worked on weekdays and late into the night, putting their hearts and souls into the timely completion. The faculty members of the Lahore College Women’s University who worked on this project were Rifaat Dar, Aasma Majeed, Amber Muneer, Aqsa Rehan, Sadia Murtaza, Samina Naseem, Farah Khan, Ghazala Anjum Shirazi, Nighat Mahboob, Rehana Salman, Rabia Yaseen, and Maryam Baber.

The exhibition at Lahore was a great success. It stirred the community and also inspired many other artists to participate in a subsequent exhibition held at the National Art Gallery in Islamabad. The Shakir Ali Museum in Lahore collaborated with the Artists’ Association in this endeavor. The exhibition is scheduled to travel to other major cities such as Peshawar and Karachi later this year.