“UNTITLED”
Notes for a discussion on artists' management

Roberto Amigo

These notes work like thoughts uttered in a loud voice, with the only purpose of opening a preliminary discussion before participants in this meeting called by Trama share their proposals with us. This is the reason why I have not attempted a meticulous paper, but just a bird’s eye view of the questions involved in whether there is a historical local model for artists’ “management” and on the control mechanisms that artists’ management should establish. As a historian who is more dedicated to the 19th Century than to the 20th, we shall take a view of the period in between the last years of both centuries.
When we examine the construction of historical narratives dealing with the artistic and its particular local features, what stands out is the role played by actions carried out by artists. Adjusting the terms to the programme of Trama’s meeting, we can state that “artists’ management” was instrumental to the creation of “Argentine art”. Artists occupied the place reserved for the various agents that constitute art’s autonomous field as the bourgeois cultural sphere. This aspect –“artists’ management”- might enable us to discuss the extent to which the last years of the 19th Century reached the status of “modern art field”, but in fact this is not the actual purpose of this brief introduction to the discussion.
One of the ruling notions in the historiography of art lies in stating that, in Argentina, artistic modernity is related to the establishment of institutions of art. The one event that is always mentioned in this respect is the foundation of Sociedad Estímulo de Bellas Artes (SEBA) in 1876 by a group of young people led by Eduardo Sívori and Eduardo Schiaffino who, at the time, were initiating a career in art. Among others, we should also remember Alejandro Sívori and Alfred París, artists as well. Schiaffino started acquiring importance as from this inaugural deed: he was an art critic at El Diario, owned by the Laínez family; promoted the National Museum of Fine Arts and wrote the first narrative about art in Argentina, re-written over and over again (1883, 1910, 1933). In other words, Schiaffino played all the roles natural to the field: he was a critic, an artist, and a museographer. Let us then go back to SEBA. Its main function, starting in 1878, was the teaching of art; it was the forerunner of state art schools of our own time, for it was nationalised in 1905. After a number of thwarted attempts by the State in order to gain access to technical and artistic capitalisation, the artists themselves guaranteed the said access.
Anyway, what matters here is to explore a few more ideas rather than go into the series of details that put together the factual narration of the history of Argentine art. The first of these ideas is that, on the face of the weakish state policy when it came to dealing with art, the first agents that tried to modernise “art” were the very artists who played multiple roles as they struggled in an effort to build institutions that might legitimise their practice. It was not only Schiaffino; there were others, like Ernesto de la Cárcova, who walked the same road, though the latter seems to have been more of a teacher, an activity that Schiaffino performed to a lesser degree. It is not a minor detail that both Schiaffino as de la Cácova –the latter more so than the former- entertained socialist ideas; hence, their "management" was tinged by the assumption that spiritual improvement of society can be achieved through art.
Rather than going over aspects of their work that point to their political affiliation, i.e., symbolism and realism respectively, we may dwell here on a description of the kind of teaching that SEBA promoted in the field of art. In Schiaffino’s own words, workers attending evening classes “seek to improve their working conditions in their struggle for life. They come in ever larger numbers, six hundred and more.” Schiaffino ended his narration about the academy with a sustained rhetoric, half-way between class-consciousness and salvationism: “it is fair to claim that all of these conquests and achievements stemmed directly from the initial foundation, which gave us our first professional artists and teachers, and rescued thousands of workers from squalor. These workers improved their working capacity, dignified their spirit while learning to draw, frequenting the plaster models of classic statuary, reading art publications and attending the luminic projections shown in the history classroom.”
Thus, the universalistic project of the generation of the 80s contained a notion of the politic quality involved in the artistic as a dignification of the working class. The narration of the “Founding Fathers of Art” fostered the value that society ascribed to art through a close connection between workers and the learning of art, as if there were an only civilising matrix uniting the learning of drawing, the European tradition, and the brightness of history. Perhaps the origin of “politics” as a distinctive feature of Argentine art as seen in the shaping of its historical narratives (from Berni’s Sin pan y sin trabajo to his Manifestación; from Artistas del Pueblo to C.A.Pa.ta.co; from Tucumán Arde to El Siluetazo) lies in that initial classroom and teleological bond between artists and workers. In other words, it may well have arisen from the factual encounter between Ernesto de la Cárcova and the anonymous worker.
No doubt, the bond was “managed” by the artists themselves, but at the same time it was “sponsored” by prominent members of the bourgeoisie (as was the case with the Schiaffino, de la Cárcova, and Sívori families) that were fond of the arts and of moral regeneration. They had not taken fright yet. Naturally, the time came when they got bored with the project and ceased to contribute to the school’s maintenance. Argentine liberals always resort to the State, and it began to subsidise the place as from 1899, until it was fully nationalised in 1905 as a national academy. Nothing has changed too much.
Before changing the subject, it is interesting to point out how another artist remembered this promising place for social emancipation, as Schiaffino described it in his narrative. Martín Malharro, in Borges’ words, did not come from the kind of bourgeois family to which the elegant critic of criolla* prose had been born. Malharro’s anarchist ideas were related to his practice of luminic painting in the universal identity of ideology and style. In this respect, Laura Malosetti Costa, in her book Los primeros modernos, writes:
Those neglected halls, cold and monotonous; that exaltation of plasters, busts, fragments and statues, eternally dirty, with the same gesture, in the same posture, with the permanent, impassive Olympic indifference of gods demanding a cult that I did not understand [...] And that Academy offered me an atmosphere that contrasted in a particular way with my notion about life. The smell of gas, dampness, tobacco and cheap restaurant of that temple of art has long remained in my mind as a blasphemy directed to the fragrance of clover and violets, of wild herbs covered in dew, to the truth that smelt of countryside; in one word, with all that was familiar to me.
The organisational role played by the artists of the 80s was marked by its totalling nature. Intellectual networks – the one that used to gather at El Ateneo, for instance- not only reproduced the usual European model but also tried its action to encompass such empty spaces as the State left, for the State did not entertain much interest in artistic matters. It was only in 1911, after the Centennial International Exhibition, that the first National Salon was held, to be then repeated on an annual basis. From then on, it was to determine legitimacy regarding local art. At that time, besides, control institutions were consolidated, as was the case with the National Commission of Fine Arts, which was additionally important because of the role it played in the purchase of works of art.
Faced with the persistence of the generation of the 80s, who prevailed when it came to making seminal decisions, there was a confrontation with the younger artists, gathered in a group called Nexus (1907-1908). The passage from “net” to “group” is indeed significant. They come to supplant the weary masters, according to Carlos Ripamonte, who then undertook the group’s “testimonial writing”, while José León Pagano, a discreet artist, took charge of critical interpretation and historical position at a counterpoint with Schiaffino. The net involved the building of a wider system of alliances to acquire strength before the State; on the other hand, the group artists activated a claim that later enabled them to occupy the spaces of power and legitimacy in the field. This explains Pagano’s blatant generational exclusion of Malharro, which, of course, was aided by the early death of Malharro, Ramón Silva and Walter de Navazio. We may even think that Malharro, at one and the same time, sought to build a group and a network that would act as an alternative to the hegemonic net; polarity is characteristic of their manner of working, although it does not imply any contradiction, whether we look into the political (anarchism-State’s educational role) or in the stylistic (naturalist drawing with social connotations-luminic landscape painting).
Even in our days, José León Pagano’s work is still important as a builder of the central narrative of the history of Argentine art. It has not ceased to be a focal reference to collectors and amateurs alike. Artists have assembled their own historical narration. The history of art and the critics (who stood apart from literary parallelism) have had to discuss on the basis of historical models established by the artists themselves.
Why are present –day artists bent on self-management?
No doubt, this is a way to contend with the weakness of Argentina’s art field, which is no condition to account for either the market or the institutional crises. In other words, we have returned to the initial moment: artists seek to rule the whole of the field involved. This response is in keeping with the overrating of assumptions sustained by the global market as applied to the local scale, together with the predominance of the curator’s figure, museographic explosion, professionalisation of the history of art, the economic crisis and its impact on the art market. All of a sudden, they became aware that they might well be the weakest leg on which the art system stands.
Political effervescence during the crisis of the Menem administration found its correlation in the ways in which individuals sought self-organisation outside the established institutions. There was a rebirth of artists’ collectives (loss of individualism), and management of spaces of intervention within the art scenario in order to overcome the pair museum-commercialisation, with contests as their most banalised expression. At the same time, current conditions of artistic production impose an alteration of international transference mechanisms that, until not long ago, were restricted to biennials. On the other hand, the teaching of art has pent itself up by mimicking the worst features of university education (disparagement of lengthy graduate studies, debasement of long-standing learning spaces, new-fledged graduate studies demanding “research” and a “thesis”, the parody of appointing teachers by contest, etc.)
In this context, artists’ management addresses the field of art, when the possibility of the State’s material intervention has become nullified because of economic reasons, but also, and fundamentally so, on account of ideological issues. By means of management activities, artists take upon themselves their role in a widened public sphere, becoming intermediaries for society’s symbolic assets, which are potentially endangered thanks to market logic and to the logic bureaucracy of the State,
Artists’ self-management blocks the curator’s figure, forcing him back into his role regarding his work on history. That is to say, the curator is left with the possibility of museum tasks only (hence the possibility of disagreement between the history of art and curatorship supported on a different notion of historical time and territoriality). Together with Chilean critic Justo Pastor Mellado we can sustain the status of curatorship as a minor theory, understood as a practical concept working on an artist’s stage of production. It is because of this that we may think of artists’ self-management and of the construction of their own spaces to generate and develop their discourse as an obligation to appropriate the practical concept of curatorship. At the same time, these spaces should become protective of artists’ own practices and production. Such a protective mechanism cancels the modern market: art-dealers, critics, museums, and collectors. We should perhaps consider this to be the moment of dematerialisation not only of the object but also of the art system itself, as we knew it.
19th Century artists faced the issue of how to find their insertion as “national artists” in a global, complex, and competitive market, all the more so when Argentina was a sales outlet of minor European and decorative art. The creation of a fight for national art amounted to the creation of a way in which the local collector chose to purchase works by Argentinean artists rather than negligible works coming from the bazaar culture. To fulfil this purpose, they needed to place art inside institutions such as academies, museums and salons.
Such a structure, obsolete though it may seem today, does not conceal the fact that artists’ present “management” is confronted with the same problems posed by 19th Century markets, although in the current global stage it is bound to build tools that may interrogate the market. Self-management may well be one of these tools. The crisis compels artists to walk into the space of critical questioning and, paradoxically, to bring to light aspects of their production, whether the ways in which their management is funded or their acceptance of prizes and benefits provided by scholarly artistic competence. At this point, it is inevitable to enter a discussion on management funding. When everything is said and done, no one knows whom he is working for.
The self-management model reviews some of the practices that were implemented in the early 80s, sieved through the 90s experience in the global market. In the 80s it was assumed that artistic praxis was supported by long-range solidarity, that it was akin to new manners of fighting. It was also believed to be aided by growing disconnection from the power of the State and by the generation of informal ways of recruitment that allowed for particular processes of legitimacy. At present, management forces art to lay the stress on how to socialise resources (i.e., information); on full disconnection from the State and on formal recruitment as demanded by institutional forms of sponsorship. It has to move on from art as political praxis to artistic practice as “efficiency”. If management implies a model for political action, it does so only as communal practice, and if this is true, we should then find out how it is to be inserted in the economic-and-artistic process and in the legitimacy mechanisms that management reproduces.
“Culture” has always been important to the urban consumer’s social life. Business has boosted by offering symbolic sinecures: being a sponsor or a partner are the possible steps on the ladder to participation and decision-making. Culture has ceased to be the business of national identity to become the identity of the brand that promotes it; that is to say, it has turned into the business of managing entertainment. Still, these arguments, that sound rather obvious when applied to large urban centres where the fiction of the market still prevails, are also reproduced, in a distorted fashion, in small places. The management model is reproduced as a 19th Century hypothesis for development: that spiritual improvement to which Schiaffino aspired.
One more issue: how to generate the necessary control mechanisms if self-management, added to collectives, possibly cancels mechanisms that are an integral part of consolidated systems like knowledge acquired at the university, legitimacy of art galleries and museums, journalistic critical discourse, etc.?
I do not have an answer yet, but neither do I presume that you need one as you carry out your daily work.