ONE
I do not know the centers of gravity of Argentine art to my fingertips, may be not even their outskirts. That is, I am not a critic, nor do I attend openings regularly; neither am I an artist. I am, yes, a friend of several artists, whose mental operations and –above everything- written grammars, never cease to astonish me, so that I question myself on the perverse effect that the primary school had on them. It is true that anything that relates to "art" interests me, but this is because I am curious, an attribute that I consider a civic virtue rather than a personal virtue. The old word amateur, lover, according to etymology, does not imply the opposite of "professional" or "expert" or of "skillful technician in those subjects"; to be an amateur is one of the ways that love for human goods may assume.

Because I was close to, and paying attention to the transformations that took place during the last two decades in some artistic fields, particularly in comics and current young cinema, I was also concerned with the development of art in this city. It so happens that I am a professor in universities that promote artistic vocations and also –to put it clearly- destroy them. It must be understood that I do not consider the "small frame" of a comic nor a "photo gram" of a film the boundaries of a work, in the same way that others may consider the frame of a painting, the room in which an installation is exhibited or the square meters that occupy an architectonic space newly inaugurated, as the material limits of art. To me the small frame and the photo gram, to carry on with the cases mentioned above, are magnifying glasses, microscopes, magnifying lenses, rearview windows, magic lanterns: that is, incentives of ways of seeing, openings into the urban scenario. In short, I am interested in art because I am fascinated by urban culture and it is metamorphosis. So, as a first approach to the idea of the city, I have called it in the title a mold.

The word mold alludes, in this case, to a special concavity that makes pressure on subjectivity and on human activities. On the other hand, a mold alludes also to a figure of confinement, or rather, of confinement and other versions of personality corsetry.

A city is a mold inhabited by living beings that carry on an innumerable number of activities, each one of which is liable to be carried on in different ways that are renewed every day; but a city is populated also by the dead, and though they prefer the cemetery–that is, the symmetric double of a city and not its negation or antipode- sometimes they wonder down the streets until they settle in a park under the figure of a monument, in a public building as a bust, or on an improvised altar at the side of the road where a popular idol was killed. The dead move and sometimes they walk a lot, especially through the languages of those who refuse to forget them.

Besides, every city is inhabited by ghosts and monsters. Those who have Disappeared, as is well known among us, but also the ghosts of the old urban fears, as of Rosas’ mazorca(1), not long ago reincarnated in the "task groups"(2) of the Army Mechanical School, or the ghosts of internal migrations from the impoverished provinces to the Buenos Aires of the 1930s, perhaps today reincarnated in the caravan of paupers who take over the leftovers and the filth thrown out into the street by the middle class, or the still older ghost of the Indian raids, that may be compared to the army of financing speculators or with the missions of the International Monetary Fund.

Besides sheltering ghosts, functionally organized cities in this century create their own sort of ghosts. Thousands of monsters that do not hide, who look at you in the face, who even say hello, and who are actually counted in census and classified, and are also the recipients of ulterior public policies. Monsters, we condescend to meet, as if we were all reasonably respectable citizens.Every city is monstrous and spectral. It is moving the effort we make not to notice these conditions, fostering the will to conceal that fits together with the décor that certain powers install in the city to make it "immaculate", that is, aseptically colourful, and not only for the benefit of the tourists, for the relaxation of the working man and the consumer, who are the same people, as much as for the pleasure of the television entertainer and for the audiences, who are the same people. Because the true stager of reality is not necessarily the journalist or the television editor, but their readers and television audience.

Needless to say all this effort proves useful. Whoever wants to look at the monster in the face would not be able to recognize it immediately, as the daily make up, the shared compassion and the unfounded illusions succeed in making the monsters indistinguishable from the public servants, the supermarket cashiers, the television entertainer, the traffic police, the judges of the Nation Supreme Court, and, so as to put it clearly, Argentine artists. Metropolitan cultures prosper and thrive in a misty state, holding to their impenetrable scab. Urban life necessarily displays disproportionate and suffering forms of life that ignore the aesthetic, moral and political laws that have opened the channels for their display.

The city is the name of a giant, but also the brothel madam, of the figurehead of a ship, and of one of the circles in hell. And sometimes it is the name of an illuminated liner that has lost its course. It as much an enormous parasite as a diadem set to a decayed tooth. But Buenos Aires, and by extension, every city in the world, is always a throbbing organ of life, a somatic surface that struggles to be a prodigious collective work that is, necessarily, a psychologically threatened land as well.

All these contrasting figures are inescapable, as there have been all sorts of cities in the world. There have been residential, infernal and imperial cities. There have been museum cities and also seaside resorts. There have been camping cities and factory towns. Each type of city deserves a different kind of dignity and different ways to animate or weigh upon the body of its inhabitants. Undoubtedly, the fate of the adventurer who lodges temporarily in an instantaneous city of gold diggers in the Yukon is not the same as the temporary worker who reaps in the Pampa harvest or in a Patagonian oil well. The solid bearing of an inhabitant of London or Paris supposes an opposite personality to the bodies of the fakirs in Calcutta.

But there is a figure that is relevant to all the cities in the world. Among so many possibilities (labyrinth, garden of paradise, prison, lighthouse, net or social laboratory), the contour of any city assumes an enigmatic shape, terrible and precise: the figure of the sphinx. As may be remembered, the old Sphinx settled in the outskirts of the Greek city and put forward riddles to those who tried to enter or leave the city. That mythological being devoured those who could not give the right answer. With time walls and gates at the entrance of the city disappeared and the boundaries between the city and the non-developed land became dimmer.

Today the sphinx does not settle in the outskirts of the city nor inside, because she has become the city itself. But the sphinx continues posing hardly audible questions to the inhabitants, especially about money, social war, the future and desire. The inhabitants build enclosures and urban rituals, and spread them, as the chess pieces of a symbolic board of checkers, to finally turn those pressing enigmas provisionally understandable. As an example, the casino, the "red zone", the football stadium, and the cinema theatre embrace all the questions on money, sex, war and fantasy, as all architecture is psychophysical rather than functional. Cities are built to be eternal but they are also ravenous, so that the urban sphinx never resigns her interrogative darts. And her questions concern everybody, as cities are the result of collective passions, even when her spiritual scope and destiny escape the understanding of the builders and of its inhabitants.

Artists, as I imagine them, are beings that try to babble a few vague answers in the midst of this tower of Babel. Artistic stammer and not works of art, as the word babble, that I have chosen on purpose, comes originally from the name "Babel". In English, this is more evident, as to say something rapidly and incoherently is to babble.

We have given the city the name of an intense pressure; we have called her a mold. We have also given her the name of a mythological being: we have called her a sphinx. We are imagining, then, that the artist imitates a walking Oedipus. On his wanderings he tries to solve through his work the enigmas the city raises step by step. On the other hand, the artist, because his experience of the city does not differ substantially from that of other inhabitants, as he pays for a coffee in a bar or looks up at the sky to see the hieroglyphics and the daily meteorological secrets, he feels beckoned or concerned by the sufferings and the joys that pertain to one and all. The artist is also one more inhabitant, one among others, or one with others. At the same time, he is someone that faces the city in a particular way. Because of his profession, the artist is better trained than others to grasp the shapes that adopt the secret combat that convulses the city. It is the combat between the tribal association of people, on the one hand, and the hierarchical form in which the State monopolizes a solitary relationship with each individual. The tribal association covers the motoqueros(3), hooligans, piqueteros(4), street children, or simply groups of friends or pairs that only respect a specific ability. On the contrary, in the hierarchical forms of association it is primarily the productive capacity of a person that is measured, and her grade of obedience to law and to institutions. It is the fight between what is continually under self-organization and what is listed from the point of view of the organization. It is the fight between the plebeian city and the city of the powerful. Every city responds and obeys to an idea of transcendence, an original myth or to its plebeian cultural manifestations. Or it responds and obeys to financial profiteering, the exploitation of workers and the technified nonsense of its politicians and administrators. But in both cases, it obeys.

That is why the attentive artist understands how historical events are transmuted into mythical feats or in Olympic maledictions, as he perceives signs of permanence or of decadence in the daily behaviour of its citizens. Ultimately, the artist understands that cities are vulnerable cultures, and realizes that the bodies that drift in the streets are like gyroscopes that fit into the metamorphosis of the moods of the community or radars that announce threatening signals. So that the history of a city is the history of its existential possibilities. And the biography of a body depends on how these possibilities affect its sufferings and its activities. Whoever wants to draw a conclusion from this idea, must know that millions of efforts that stemmed from inexhaustible raw material went into the building of Buenos Aires: the bodies of immigrants, volumes of meat appraised and slaughtered in the altar of the triumphant moral economy of the beginnings of last century. The immigrant body was circulatory muscle, raw labour strength. And also the body of tenement houses, that is to say, of scandal. Political scandal, related to the social unions and anarchists. Social scandal, consequence of the overcrowding of bodies and of plebeian self-determination.

Buenos Aires belongs to a singular and rare urban category: that of the mythical cities. A city is mythical when it is self-centered, when her "sameness" is self-conscious. A city that is in itself, does not depend on external influences, because it does not honour foreign gods, because it invents its own culture, and because she integrates into her own vital circle the indispensable technologies and know-how of a more sophisticated first world. Buenos Aires could develop a mythical factor as long as the project of a nation imagined in the XIX c. was inconclusive, and also because of the unbearable tension in each body when the suspicion that the project had no ending became evident. Before the suspicion of failure, the city unfolds as a proof of that failure. As parapraxis or an act manqué. But it was also this inconclusiveness the crevice through which popular culture could resist the devouring strength of money and of pretence, of the multiple copies of what is foreign. The cities that are nourished by an active myth prosper culturally and diversify. But Buenos Aires has reached the stage of unsuccessful repetition of its own exhausted myth. When a myth takes a false turn, the city recovers the figures of the tango dancers for tourists, of unproductive nostalgia for the happy bucolic labour movement, or for the progressive and technical administration of public life. That is why the strength of the market irradiates freely without the need to generate another upgraded urban myth. They just dismantle the previous one.

TWO
A long time ago, Baudelaire in Les fleurs du mal wanted to account for the heroes of XIX c. urban Paris. These heroes were not among the figures represented by the citizen, the industrial executive or the workingman. No. His heroes were marginal inflorescence: members of the underworld, paupers, prostitutes, diverse type of derelict peripheral characters, lesbians, bohemians in general and artists in particular, these last condensed in the figure of the poet. All these clay heroes tended involuntarily to disrupt the functional machine of the city, that mold that turns our precious and irretrievable lives into perpetual movement machines. That is to say, that those "heroes" came to terms with the city drifting through it, in senseless meanderings, blindly, foolishly. This drives us to ask ourselves what is it that the artist assimilates from the city and its walks.

The artist may run the same fate as anybody else: either his eyes are riveted to the urban decor and to the symbolism of merchandise, or the aura in his eyes humanizes the urban goods and dismantles the preprogrammed scenarios. For that very reason the outcome of plastic art, sculpture or cinema free us from the bondage of those shapes and colours we are used to from birth, in an enslaving routine to the clock and to social etiquette from birth; from the experience of our working schedule and the revolving systems of merchandise and fashions.

What does it mean to walk down the city? How does an urban experience take hold of the spirit of an artist? When we drift down the street, our senses are kidnapped by the diverse street noises as much as by the frayed gusts of wind of national history. A city is one-eighth sea, and the walking artist, an attentive watchman. The urban tides lead the artist down meandering paths where rhythms and melodies can be apprehended, smells and images, audible and visible layers that the mystery of subsequent recall will translate into works of art. The "impressions" of the city absorbed by the body of the artist return in the work animated by the spark of involuntary memories, in a manner similar to what Freud called the "return of the repressed". The stock of sensations, languages, colouring, experience and rhythms grows larger with each stroll, and eyesight and hearing are caught in the treat, and swell with images and sounds that will later permeate experience so that we learn to relate to the city as do orphan naked bodies that can acknowledge with precision the right contact. Slowly, we change into centaurs of the senses. Those existential micro mutations happen every time we go out into the street, as a simple urban walk implies experimenting in a labyrinth of time and a delta of possible voyages.

As soon as the audible and visible layers are captured by the mood of the artist, they are imbedded, even if we do not realize it immediately, in the physical history of the cities. Lights, smells, rhythms and the sound of conversations haul with them the urban stuff that is meshed into history. And this happens as much when we discover the fossil remains of history in public spaces as when we listen to the intimate grammar of other people’s conversations, as all spoken grammar exudes popular theology and city mythology. I am not referring to perfect or academic languages, if not simply to street talk, interjections and notes of somebody on foot, juvenile slang or cant, the lingering sounds of the mother tongue, in short, to urban memory transmitted in a simple sentence in passing. The vein of a work needs blood transfusions from the vital sources of the cities and to achieve this a dialogue must be established with historical tradition, with the whimsical affective urban life and with the tensed muscles of the historical healing capacity of the city. It is then that the cities become in our eyes enormous ships full of people, as we see them in postcards, or in our own eyes, noses, our sense of taste, hands and ears, to discover that we ourselves are the city.

What does the artist absorb from the city? What does this magnificent work sprinkle on him? Traces and faces, fossil vestiges and live echoes. From each walk the artist returns with incrustations, some of them mental, almost conceptual, while others are saved as ocular residues, an irritation that refuses to abandon the sense of sight. Some of these incrustations are physical, psoriatic suppurations, working men bruises or ecchymosis of the maltreated. Hallucination and stigma are seminal sources with which works of art are made. The worm or the seed that nests in those visions and physical marks may grant the artist the will to allow for the decay and seasoning of what was seen and heard. A road leads the artist to the lyrical and idyllic, that is to say, to sing and to animate the city; the other one leads him to a distorted epic, to prophecy the fertility of future urban evils.

What does the artist give the city in return? He gives it back worlds and events that stem from his work. Art does not construe "subjectivities", as was candidly thought by traditional bourgeoisie, nor is it solace to be enjoyed in private, destined to soften the blows dealt by the labour, family or social order. No, a work of art cannot improve the city socially or politically, least of all, voluntarily. But it can provide the mouth of a sphinx, as well as the eyes of a medusa. It may ask questions or provoke sterile fascination.

When the work of art poses a question, it recalls those who are no more and claims a future for those to come, and the notions of what is memorable and of what is hidden for those present. That is to say, the work asks for what has never been and perhaps for what never will be, though it may appear evident in the piece itself. The present is incomplete, secret, misty and illusionist. There are, no doubt, powerful interests for it to be so, even when "reality is not manipulated", as was once believed, but the power groups are attentive to any claim that may turn that same reality into something "not manipulative". The first virtue of a work of art is to set values against prices, even when any piece may be bought by somebody who collects art or by somebody who was moved by it. The work proposes appraisals against those who will turn every good into price worthy merchandise.

It has become indispensable to establish values since architecture, the urban art par excellence and the art immediately consumed by millions of persons, has no artistic or social signifying function, as it did for a William Morris, a Le Corbusier or for a Guy Debord. Nevertheless, architecture carries with it today heavy meanings, subordinated to the needs of the representation of great corporations, the spectacle apparatus of governments and of profit. It is the mission of the artist to give shelter to an imaginative space from which may stem urban symbolism not colonized by government functional and administrative needs or by the economic interests of the great corporations.

To account for the effect of the décor and of the pressures of the urban mold, the city artist necessarily holds a dialogue with death, even when in doing so he has to confirm love, faith, what is called vocation, the festive and the erotic. And not necessarily as a denial, if not as an animation ritual that holds in suspense the different metaphors of death, as the whole city assumes the figure of a macabre dance in which millions of maltreated and hopeless beings move rhythmically.

THREE
The title of this conference includes the word mold. It also includes the words "disaster" and "folly" (disparate). The choice of these words is not casual. For those people initiated into art history, the choice is evident. The words relate to Goya, as they suggest the etchings of 1808 and 1824 known as: the The Follies (Disparates), The Disasters of War and The Whims (Caprichos). During the time that Goya was working on them, Argentina became independent of Spain. Although one could say, rather than independent, the United Provinces of the River Plate dropped their Spanish influence to become European. Was there an equivalent to Goya in the Argentina of the time? There was one, though he was not a painter but a self made writer, who was a teenager at the time and would eventually become the president of the country: he was called Domingo Faustino Sarmiento(5). The "disasters" and the "follies or whims" by Goya are equivalent in Sarmiento to a monstrous compressed figure in his book: Facundo(6). Civilización o barbarie (Facundo: Civilization or barbarism). Facundo was described by Sarmiento as a "terrible shadow", that is to say, as the enigmatic half of the national body, source of evils but also as the same amniotic liquid of the country. Sarmiento trusted to be able to illuminate the angle of ignorance rooted in tradition and in institutional absolutism by means of founding schools and through the introduction of an industrial storehouse, and in this sense the opposition between civilization and barbarism was the simple and robust explanation of the causes brought about by the civil war. But today we know that the strength of the ideas of Sarmiento does not reside in the identification of opposites, but in the conjunction of both in the same chimerical monster. Sarmiento discovers it was not Facundo Quiroga, but something called "lo facúndico". Not opposite strengths but a tension, two scales the needle of which is always unstable. Every once in a while, this tension breaks out horrendously into fratricide, murder among brothers. Civil wars have dislocated the frame of the historical life of Argentina. They are, no doubt, epic moments. But the Facundo invariable does not change in essence, though it may, at times, change its features. Today we know that civilization and barbarism cannot be extricated from one another, that barbarism and urban sophistication can live with each other. When he discovered the Facundo invariable, Sarmiento foresaw its continuity in liberalism and in Populism in the XX c.. As if this Facundo monstrous component stretched as a nervous net to irrigate secretly institutions and the conduct of current public men. It is a negative spiritual force that is reincarnated again and again from the standpoint of what has not been solved. The Army, the Church and public bureaucracy are the throbbing organs that every once in a while are transplanted with new skin or a new face. These organs relay their functions to each other, as their political powers counterweight their options according to what is going on at the time. Fundamentally, they metamorphose so as to outlive themselves and to avoid the emergence of the fluent arterial web that could provide a wide breathing space for the country. Their dramatis personae and their secondary casts may change their outfits, sides and at times even, ideas, but they always manage to conform to the perverse functioning of the apparatus. If this discovery made by Sarmiento is not wrong, then Facundo´s qualities, though softened and subtler, have been scattered as incandescent splinters into the conduct and the imagination of civil servants, magistrates, politicians and current businessmen.

This link between the ancestral caudillo (leader) and the contemporary civil servant, between the colonial magistrate and current Supreme Judges, between the motto of the montonera(7) and contemporary party propaganda, between the arbitrary actions of the old ruling classes and the impunity pacts of the political breeds converge in a centripetal movement, to strengthen the illegal powers that are at the basis of the relation of the State with group interests. In Argentina this relation shapes politics to the impairment of society. In short, the forces of the "desert", a geographical and psychic condition from which stemmed the flow of political leadership, Sarmiento feared so strongly, have become increasingly the moral desert of the country. And no importation of current new comforts or of the latest technology can add vitality to the maltreated lives of the Argentine people or to their collective events, horribly damaged by the monstrous aspect that national history recurrently takes. Facundo and Rosas(8), who stemmed from the desert and the city respectively, broadened the Argentine tragedy by dint of knife fights, with the enthusiastic collaboration of their opponents. In the XX c. this continued in different metamorphosis under the rhythm of permanent political turmoil. It was then that state censure, exile, union persecution, expulsion through the law of residence, the wrecking of labour rights and the poor sales of Argentine public property became the civilized weapons of those powers little eager to share earnings and privileges. This is also the Argentine context.

How can one not realize that the Argentine disaster and folly originated in the streets of this city? In these arteries and veins through which ideals of social promotion and expectations of shared happiness flow no longer. How could they, at a time in which labour has become precarious, state companies are sold and bought, and in which body appearance has become a means of making a living for girls and boys culturally prepared through the symbolic capital they have acquired at school and a couple of generations of sales people and professionals that can no longer guarantee a social position? It is obvious that the men and women that walk down the street of this city look insecure, badly treated, uncertain, like children losing their limbs in the street. One must make an effort in Argentina to ignore the effort it means to hold a body together. Moral, labour, affective, erotic, political exhaustion has caught up with everybody, and the complaints of the flesh can be heard in every daily conversation. That is why the "metaphor of the brothel", omnipresent in Argentine politics in the ways people are bought and sold in the labour market, connects the flesh of the working person or the unemployed to the poorly sold jewels of the national public property. To sell flesh in a socially accepted way has become the reasonable destiny of people in a city in which labour dignity is not guaranteed and in which the public speeches of those in government lie, even when they are not trying to.

This public lying is an interesting subject for artists, and more than interesting, it is pertinent. For if something defines an artist that faces his city is his ability to tell when artistic language is lying, as the same time it makes him a voter who has had enough of promises that will not be kept, or a lover who expects the right word and listens to the dissonant tone of a fax. I know that the word "lie" may sound trivial and it is conceptually arguable, but I am not saying it is the opposite to some kind of truth. "To lie" in art means that the artistic language adopted by the previous generation, or blessed by the financing resources of the states and of foundations, or by the taste promoted by the art market, is a crippled language, static, that exists and circulates lifelessly, that is to say, as a funeral mask for a museum or for a gallery with clientele. At the same time the cultural market extends its field of action and accelerates its time seizures, artistic languages mesh faster to establishe social meanings; they do not know any more how to evade them. It is true that the works produced by this language are beautiful and technically perfect. Virtuosi, one could say. But that is exactly why they involuntarily lie, because they are not paying attention to urban metamorphosis and are happy to repeat shapes and styles that have been successful. The work of an artist consists in acknowledging this "voluntary lie" and to air his relation with the world to promote significant work. So is the task of a lover disappointed by the unloving language of his partner, or that of a citizen cheated in excess by the men in charge of his country.

To acknowledge a lie in art, above all, it is necessary to avoid the temptations of the old religion of art. This religion tends to classify artists between the defenders of tradition or of the avant-garde, between the popular and the elite, between those who experiment with materials and with forms, but always acknowledge in the artist a certain supposed intrinsic moral superiority, for example, if compared to a garbage collector or a prison warden. This religion of art, promoted before by art patrons, the bohemia, the bourgeois public, the aesthetic avant-gardes, cultural State organizations, the market or by museums and their catalogues, leads the artist into thinking that the maltreatment to which he himself is subjected to by the State or the Market is unfair, that the stuff his compositions are made of is noble, or that the constant visits of his inspiring muse are the confirmation of a blessed or damned subjectivity statistically different from the mass of his compatriots. Whoever takes shelter in this contemporary religion may end ejaculating work as on an industrial conveyer belt or resentful of the "philistine" indifference of the public. But once these liturgies and art traditions are abandoned, the artist is free to become a prisoner of urban experiences.

Baudelaire proposed a heroic cast for the city that he rescued from the slums, the double periphery of the slums and of the marginal minorities. Already in 1940, Ezequiel Martinez Estrada(9) had written in his book, La Cabeza de Goliat (Goliath’s Head), that the authentic urban heroes were the adulterous woman and the better or gambler. He credited them with "life, personality, courage and lyricism". Four virtues necessary to expand urban greatness. The adulterous woman fled from conjugal law and domestic economic order. The better fled monthly economy. They were passionate beings that did not hoard their earnings. One might as well ask, sixty years later, who would be the current urban heroes able to rebuild the cultural and affectionate life of the city of Buenos Aires, if it were demolished by a natural political, economic and moral cataclysm. A question that one might ask any city in the world. And every artist who is interested in "social projection", an enigmatic concept that has managed to attract and congregate all the people who presented the projects now being exhibited in the Goethe Institute.

All there seems to be left to Buenos Aires is a shaky and degraded destiny, or else becoming once more a frontier town. A port again. In frontier towns and in ports it is smuggling and the creation of languages that strengthen the stagnant cultural layout. Argentina needs to be shaken, but this time, not by illusionary European races. Italians, Spanish and Jews do not come here any more, but Koreans and Peruvians. And prostitutes imported from the Dominican Republic. The place to be occupied by the artist able to construct the city, with interventions, with work, is vacant. The city of the maltreated Bolivian vendors, the offended Dominican women of the street, the plundered Korean trades people, of Jewish institutions destroyed, of damaged and disgusted Argentines.