¿And agora? (1)

Ricardo Basbaum

On September 11, 1999, two individual exhibitions, by Laura Lima (O Puxador) and Raúl Mouräo (Sintético) at Progreso Foun-dation Gallery in Rio de Janeiro, opened AGORA -Agency of Artistic Organisms. “To offer dynamic alternatives to the production and circulation of contemporary art in Rio de Janeiro” has been the goal stated by the Agency since its origin. Coordinated by artists Eduardo Coimbra, Raúl Mouräo and myself(2), AGORA worked together with Capacete Entretenimientos, coordinated by Helmut Batista, for two years. The space was known as AGORA/Capacete.

Agora, a model of management

In the management process one enters a ground where poetics and contemporary languages are at once at play and in dispute. On this ground, the very mechanisms of management are already a process of elaboration of the languages and the limits of the action.
In the case of “curators-artists”, there is an inevitable complicity between the languages managed and the languages adopted by ma-nagers in their own processes as such. It is a game of internal resonances that can be very rich. Making the meanders of that process transparent through continuous discussion becomes fundamental. It constitutes some sort of flight from the automatism of habit and a search of an intervention plane in the confi-gurations of the contemporary circuit. During the first period, for example, AGORA’s main events were led by names that had taken part in different adventures -narrated here- over the previous ten years. Brigida Baltar and Joäo Modé(3), for example, were involved in different actions at Visorama and item(*). It becomes almost automatic to mention them as responsible for the beginning of a new stage in our work. In a second period, these directions will have to be re-formulated by placing more emphasis on, for example, the presence of ar-tists from other states or countries with similar projects and even by addressing those issues considered urgent by the circuit.

Determining a scale for the project becomes difficult in the Brazilian context. It is clear that the strength of AGORA as a cultural producer lies in its small non-bureaucratic size, which makes it an agile and flexible agency. Yet, recog-nition, financing and support mechanisms are decided on the basis of effect and action only when they can be computed in terms of wide resonance: the public’s quantitative commitment, institutional return of sponsorship, pre-sence in the media. Most of the times interest is only shown in projects that imply a large number of resources. Those projects whose degree of insertion is lower, more subtle, oblique, less shocking, rarefied are set aside. The challenge here -which I understand to be intimately related to the survival of the project- consists in persisting on the small scale while improving our ability to negotiate resources with diverse institutions (government, private, foundations, promotion agencies, etc.) in order to support it. In particular, this task should be thought of as an invention of possibilities in an attempt to get away from the homogeneizing process of the administrative and production machine; a machine that may relentlessly try to impose its somewhat perverse rhythm and deviate the best energies in the project to its own benefit. (…)

It is also necessary to determine an institu-tional profile appropriate to an “agency”.
An “agency” is not an art gallery, art office or a cultural centre; it is not an artist’s shop or an artists’ cooperative organisation, either.

The concept of “agent” borders the idea of “rendering artistic services”, of producing values and of intervening in a certain cultural field. (…). AGORA is composed of artists committed to the production of contemporary art. Therefore, the services we may offer are directly connected with the languages we are mobilizing in our works, in our practice and performance as artists. Our agency produces texts, makes exhibitions feasible, organises talks and debates, carries out cinema and video projects, markets works of art and publications by numerous artists. All these activities are inscribed within the possibility to use contemporary art langua-ges, precisely those languages in which we are immersed. Contemporary art gives us tools for the production of Reality, making visible a whole field of questions and problems (...). AGORA, the agency, does not want to compete with established art institutions; it does not want to oppose museums and galleries and fight for power within the circuit in this manner. Neither does it want to belong to an alternative marginal space, with no access to events or without participating in them. We want to settle down in a region within the Brazilian circuit which is still empty. We want to grant promptness to the realization of initiatives that would wear off in the bureaucracy of big institutions otherwise.(4)
Perhaps the main feature worth pointing out is the great flexibility that the concept of “agency” entails. An agency is at once the vehicle and the target of a project. This malleability allows for dislocation derived from practical and productive demands and gives the project an im-portant tool for action. Working as an agency means investing in adjustment between a way of action and a proto-institutional model without losing potential for transformation.
Another factor at play in this modality of collec-tive processes can be located between “intensity forces on the lines between art and life”. In fact, the effort to manage an agency devoted to contemporary art, according to the map
we are delineating here, inevitably leads to crossings where work demands are not separate from the vertigo of existential needs (not rushed expressionism but a commitment sphere traversed by this “immanence plane” which “contains nothing but virtualities”, “which keep appearing in both subjects and objects”, gliding “barely between times and between moments”(5)). It is necessary to be available for these oscillations and to format actions without losing sight of this horizon where certainty and absolute awareness are enveloped by other magnetisms of pathic(6) modality: the poetics that work paths between art and life bet on reciprocal contamination between both fields (the paths) but, above all, on the productions of signs that are thrown to everybody that is ready to take them.
With regards to the degree of efficiency of this adventure, a final significant topic to be consi-dered here states, “how should its effects be appreciated? How should its accounting be processed? How should the balance between its degree of insertion and its deviations be established?” It is not just a question of closing the financial year with net profits since the field of poetics is a place for oblique impact and the intensity of processed experiences cannot be quantified. Furthermore, the thermometer of opinion and the public entity often walk past games and proposals which might be decisive. A discussion that seems to touch on the enigma. It is perceived that one’s own operation of building models and starting them off is already an indicator of an effective result, which gains value in the very process of continuity. That is the reason why exercising management that succeeds in attracting interest -whether for a long time or for an instant- is already a motive for commemoration. It is also a sign that gaps in the closely-knit net of everyday life have been found and that it has been possible to circulate through them.
Setting off along these paths is not a simple per-sonal decision but the result of other roads and detours that ended up here. Often one does not choose where to go, rather one is led …and that impulse appears decisive. It is a matter of concern to find out whether there will be re-gular new and spectacular results from now on, whether AGORA will be perceived as a centre for clustering and passage, whether it will be able to articulate its presence and feasibility with those interests it wants to dislodge: possibilities for contemporary art that retain their quality of being nuances for other possibilities. (…)
Post-face
At the moment I am writing this post-face AGORA agency has ceased to exist. It closed down and finished its activities in March 2003.
Essay editing for publication by Trama.