Murphy’s Laws may not always hold true
Carlota Beltrame

It has often been said that Tucumán poses an unusual paradox: its visual arts reached outstanding nationwide importance at various times of its history, whereas its distribution circuits have gradually been losing momentum to the point of practically brushing level zero. In 1997, our humble museum was closed down for a number of years owing to a senseless de-cision of a genocidal Governor who ruled this rundown province during two terms of office. At present, a few paltry, poorly equipped exhibition rooms, which our public officials pompously name Museo Provincial de Bellas Artes [Provincial Museum of Fine Arts] are open to the public. No director(1) or curator has been appointed to the so-called museum, and the exhibitions include only a part of the existing collection, mostly works of little aesthetic value but of highly symbolic meaning to our commu-nity. It is a most distressing situation, all the more so when the works on exhibition are treated without even a trace of love(2). None of the rooms is properly fitted to house art pieces. Some cultural centres have adapted their installations among pillars, dry-masonry benches, mirrors, moldings and odd showcases, yet the outcome could not be poorer.
Consequently, it stands to reason that we are faced with a sub-system of the symbolic cultural production of a city, one that is unable to complete the full circle of production, distribution and consumption. Actually, as visual arts contests, responsible curatorial policies and suitable exhibition of the works are non-existent, consuming audiences have been reduced to the minute circuit composed of the artists themselves. The old collectors are practically all gone, and so is institutional support of creative work.
Nothing could be more discouraging for the many young people who join the School of Arts at National University of Tucumán every year. The School can offer only attractive training of a kind that, at times, may easily surpass the kind of training given at other instutions of equal standing in the country.
Nevertheless, throughout these hard years, we artists from Tucumán have come to realize that sometimes, and for the very same reasons, some things go down while others move up. Because of the prescriptive reasons mentioned above, our art has gained unprecedented freedom as a result of our unflinching search for such gaps as a result for an uneven, provincial and irresponsible distribution. As a matter of fact, we artists working at the close of the mi-llenium have forgotten the terms of efficacy that seek to generate a work of art and have gone for real presence in the market.
A long time ago, Claudia Fontes(3) wrote to me that the sense of doing art in Tucson(4) is closely related to survival. I don´t mean economic survival but a kind of resistence that I find exemplary:those artists from Tucumán that I met make and show their art in a most generous way. They make art just because... Pablo Siquier(5) also wrote what he had no-ticed:..these young people embrace several of the aesthetic paths (that have by now become furrows) proposed by Argentinean art in the last few lustra: subjective ornamental affective abstraction;more or less femenine ultra-intimism (Pombian bubble(6));situationisms (including here those whose artistic production stems from the particular fact that they are penniless)(7).
It is clear that both of them make special refe-rence to a context that not only lacks spaces to enhance visibility but that also looks pathetically seedy by dint of bad management policies. As a consequence, there appear two ways of making art, very much in the Tucumán style, as I see it:
1)Objectualisms: in tiny formats, sometimes excessively small, usually made of non-traditio-nal materials, and urban and rural interventions.
2)Non-objectualisms: actions in diverse sub-genres.
This being the case, I would like to point out the paradoxes involved in both phenomena:
1)- Small becomes large. Since art is a clear-cut emergent of predetermined socio-economic circumstances, there is no doubt that small-sized formats and the precariousness of the materials that are frequently used (chewing-gum, plasticine, candy-paste, earth, salt, rubbish, etc.) have to do with reality. Paradoxically, the smaller the work is, the more elemental its artistry is and the more interested the spectator becomes, for he is bound to peer over and over again at a minute, motionless sign in order to re-read it over and over again, and so the sign will necessarily turn thick. I agree with Bachelard(8): on the face of smallness, there appears a magic systolic-dyastolic movement when the observer finally notices that something crouching in the great small piece before his eyes is awaiting him. Then, after a first approach, which is equivalent to a first look, the work of looking starts.
2)- The setting as support. According to Chris-tian Ferrer, the beauty that we can approach (in a contemporary city setting)is not an essential kind of beauty, or the beauty Rilke talked about, the threshhold to an awareness of a terrible quality, or an encounter with a terrible quality. It is but a phoney, revolving kind of beauty, besides being very effective, very creative.(9) Perhaps the only accessible beauty for the majority of the people is the one offered by the city itself with its advertisement interfaces. In Argentina, particularly in Tucumán, these interfaces mingle with political action, sometimes staged by citizens with no political affiliations, or by minority parties of the opposition that daily obstruct circulation in city streets. People who bind themselves in chains, for example; people who crucify themselves, people who have stitched their own mouths, and denunciation of unwelcome cha-racters and deeds of various kinds(10) stand in the way of passers-by, who have eventually reached the point of watching these moving scenes with total indifference. The city appears as a huge medieval scene that has inspired many of its artists, revealing a false yet lively, terrible beauty, yet it may also fascinate the flâneur(11) who keeps running across the repeated encounter between an umbrella and a sewing-machine on a dissection table.
It should be pointed out that, unlike in any other part of the country, objectualisms and non-objectualisms have found a way to express themselves –quite wisely, in my opinion- in Tucumán on an intensely subjective poetic level (as Siquier would put it), avoiding the tyranny of synecdoche, which takes the whole for a part, and a part for the whole, in a way that critical realisms of the 70s favoured so much. Actually, small, imperceptible, lonely actions are frequently performed counting
on the complicity of friendly eyes, enslaved by a sometimes precarious register that will not find its way into the market.
Light, smooth, minimal, our art dons such qua-lities so as to filter through the layers of a so-ciety that, despite having recovered its public space, feels irretrievably confused. The fact that we arrived too late for the party of libertarian ideologies whose epicenter often lay in Tucu-mán(12) might have plunged us into passion, wrath, or inconsolable grief. Still, I have said this on several occasions: our main characteristic is perhaps anger rather than disappointment; a kind of anger which, far from paralizing us, has contributed to consolidate our autarchic position. Autarchy(13) (the condition of being without experiencing the need of depending on someone else for subsistence or development; a remarkable, paranoid strategy for times of crisis) is the exact opposite of narcissism, since it deprivatizes and politicizes that which belongs in the individual sphere, as crises are never peculiar to the Ego; they are organic and social; emotional and political, affecting the famiy and the nation all at the same time.
Perhaps the heroism of our historical past, so brutally amputated, together with the univocal construction of the aesthetic discourse of our predecessors and the lack of visibility has compelled us to choose such a different path, where we opt for the freedom(14) of doing as we feel, of drawing multiple connections among all sorts of artistic or extra-artistic objects and non-ob-jects and for the provisional nature of our dis-course which only proposes ephemeral readings that do not intend to be taken for truths.
Maybe we have not fared so badly through our anger. Having lost so much, we have slowly succeeded in proving to ourselves that Murphy’s laws do not always hold true...
Horco Molle.
Junio de 2003