Notes onthe 3rd Edition of the Poly-Graphic Triennial in San Juan
One of the most interesting elements of the 3rd edition of the Poly- Graphic Triennial in San Juan, held in 2012, is in the informative cards that accompany each piece. Within the explanatory text is surprising the amount of works related to projects that are wholly or partially through the network, or that are linked to movements and activities made for years and condensed into blogs and websites. Therefore the shown material is a working document, a track of broadcollaborative initiatives, open to cooperation. The sample then challenges the audience to complete the proposed route, mapping a honeycomb based on studio work and in the artistic collaboration that it supposes, also, a good sample of the initiatives that the artists themselves have developed so autonomously in difficult times.
One of the great successes of the Triennial has been to give voice to a set of proposals that directly reflect on the creativity nature, the possibility of generating opportunities for progressing projects based on dialogue. When asked what role artists can play in this task, the answer is a great part of the exhibited in the four sites that make up the route. Relegating the mean to the background - more than in any other previous edition, the show is open to video art, installation, performance and urban-intervention- the 3rd edition of the event is a challenge –that it will find, as it could not be otherwise, answers more accurate than others- to the qualities and skills of collective creation today.
In 2004the San Juan Engraving Biennial becomes the Poly-graphic Triennial, with a more formally comprehensive proposal, and more in line with the international biennials working. The occupation of multiple spaces, the introduction of video art pieces, the installation and performance together with the traditional printmaking techniques, and the development of a program of parallel exhibitions, would serve to update one of the oldest meetings in the continent. In this case, team initiatives offer perhaps the best example of the interaction possibilities. The Triennial has become a showcase of a set of practices that have renewed the Puerto Rican art scene, standing up to any hint of crisis. These are artist-run spaces that usually involve the community and, in some cases, have implemented extensive exhibition programs for years. Given the museums ups and downs and the oscillating attention of the critics, initiatives such as Area, Conboca, = Desto, Metro or SOMA BetaLocal have become viable alternatives for the creation and dialogue. Its counterpart, blogs proliferation that are obliged reference for understanding the Puerto Rican art scene of the last decade, gives the impression of a landscape in constant motion, in which the closure of an area is followed by the opening of a new one. If the honeycomb idea was seeking to grasp the cooperative possibilities of the social networks, the expounded by the Puerto Rican community -more than ever from inside and from outside, but also, and above all, from inside and outside at the same time- it allows to see how the "honeycomb" strategies are being articulated in the network space.
Precisely, the Puerto Rican selection made by the curatorial team emphasizes the connections and underscores what Juan Flores has called counter-stream: an imaginary of coming and going that subverts the distance that traditionally separated the diaspora of the nation, and that refers to reciprocal influences. It is therefore about the incorporation of resources and the diaspora imaginations to the corpus of national cultures; but also, in a broader sense, a look that stops in the communities’ analysis whose spatial logic does not fit with any of the above terms. Translated into names, this implies the presence of artists like Papo Colo, or Miguel Luciano, or Juan Sánchez alongside Homar, Tufiño or Martorell.
To therange in the selection, which has had, as mentioned, its strength in self-managed spaces, it joins the use of multiple environments of the Old San Juan: to the Navy Arsenal, place where the contemporary art exhibition has concentrated, the National Gallery, the White House Museum and the House of Buttresses, fully tapped to host a collaborative project led by Charles Juhasz, are joined. The exhibitions of the National Gallery, the White House Museum and the Arsenal correspond to three different historical moments: from the thirties to the sixties, from the sixties to the nineties and from the nineties to the present, respectively. The three scenarios share the conductor thread based on the workshop work and the artistic collaboration.
TheNational Gallery exhibits a tour of the pioneering between the wars projects, from the Mexican Revolution to Robert Blackburn’s work in New York. Agglutinated around the experiments of the U.S. Works Progress Administration and artists like Siqueiros and Blackburn, the sample has set around itineraries that chart spatial connections between Paris, Brazil, Chile, the United States and Puerto Rico, demonstrating the links resulting from movements of ideas and people in the period. Guillaume Apollinaire, Öyvind Fahlström, Lorenzo Homar, Stéphane Mallarmé, Jason Pollock, Wifredo Lam, Andre Breton, Roberto Matta, Lygia Pape, Anaïs Nin and Lasar Segall make up a speech in which there is room for formal experimentation –at the National Gallery we will find the first video proposal as well as a rich collection of artist books, interest inherited from the previous edition of the Triennial–.
The White House Museum space is dominated by a set of projects that reflects on the relationship between art and society. This way we examine the artist's ability to express issues related to the transformations that, in the decades following the sixties, would suffer the creator and the audience roles. Similarly, the expression of a political consciousness and its diffusion through experimental proposals, linked to conceptualism and the use of text, are prominent in the sample. From the Chicano art to the reflection about dictatorships in Argentina, Chile and Brazil, the proposals of the second stop of the Triennial analyze the possibilities of collaboration in a time when the art tightened its limits. Vito Acconci, Luis Camnitzer, Romare Bearden, Cildo Meireles, Joaquin Mercado and Liliana Porter integrate the payroll, with collective initiatives as Tucumán Arde or Border Arts Workshop.
Arsenal offers the more complete and more complex tour. Divided into three sections –one for workshop projects, mostly self-managed by artists; other aimed at initiatives that seek cooperation with the community; and a final one linked to the rescue of references of the urban environment and the popular– the exhibition includes works commissioned for the occasion along with others included by selection. Thus, the ways to build the honeycomb that gives name to the Triennial are extremely diverse, and it would be necessary to examine how they are deployed in each case, as the collaborative element covers a broad cast in which are included years that fit insertion into a community, partnerships designed specifically for the Triennial, shared management initiatives for years or the more diverse "loans" and "uses".
At this point it is necessary to highlight the projects of Puerto Rican artists: from the workshop of Omar Obdulio’s barbershop used ad nauseam during the Triennial, in which the public was invited to cut their hair following the patterns –true abstract-designs– of more recent fashion among local communities, to the installation of Miguel Luciano, who managed to convey a flavor of another time where there were mixed the memory of the suffrage movement, the history of the Puerto Rican sugar planters in the United States and the experience of the first Puerto Rican Bicycle shops in New York; from the pool/skating rink built by Chemi Rosado in La Perla, to the more recent interventions of the Coco de Oro project, led by Edgardo Larregui in a San Juan neighborhood. The memory of the diaspora and the remains of a constant coming and going are featured in a video of Juan Sanchez, overcrowded by visual and sonorous references that cross each other; in the photographs by Papo Colo, in the correspondence between Quintin Rivera Toro and Deborah Cullen (the correspondence will also support the work of Benito Eugenio Laren and Carla Zaccagnini) or in the verbal sample, a true mosaic of crossed expressions that Nayda Collazo Llorens has deployed outside the building. Beatriz Santiago’s works –a video that recovers with subtlety and brilliance the artistic and conceptual challenge that would lead the artist Carlos Irizarry to jail in the seventies–, and Michael Linares, –covers specifically designed for a sound version of texts on art– share, despite uneven media andsubject matters, the interest in documenting cultural processes in a critical way, converting the tools and mechanisms of such documentation in object of analysis and an integral part of creativity. From the collaboration between Elsa Meléndez and Zinthia Vázquez (as Biutiful Corbeja) arises an installation consisting of graphic printing on fabric that provides a false sense of intimacy, a padded space in which lurks the threat.
Indeed, the violence consequences are a theme present in several works of the Arsenal. The Argentinian Ana Gallardo recovers the memory of a residence for retired prostitutes; Thomas Espina, also of Argentina, creates more diffuse images but equally dramatic by blowing small areas of the paper that supports his work. In Regina Galindo and Jorge de León Sánchez works, the printed becomes, as a form of tattoo, an indelible element. Ablution, the video presented by Galindo, has a direct view of the violence to investigate, through the sacred act of cleansing the body, about the possibilities of redemption. In Sanchez case, a set of monitors in crucifix show a portrait of the artist from his skeleton, overlapping tattoos that identify it and make it unique. The Mexican Jaime Ruiz Otis generates geometry and perspective games fromthe fabric used in the maquiladoras. Antonio Vega Macotela shapes one of the Arsenal's most shocking scenery from a set of resulting pieces of the exchanges that the artist had with Mexican prison inmates.
Finally, the other major group of works is mainly aimed at the creative process and its integration possibilities. The pieces of Francisco de Almeida, Jan Henle, Paul Ramirez Jonas and Matheus Rocha Pitta speak, from multiple perspectives, of the ability to intervene and change the public and its impact on the authorship.
Buttresses
Much of what happens in the House of Buttresses involves coordination of efforts and intentions of a group of artists eager to integrate initiatives around an open project in constant development. Symbol of the project, the bees in a hive installed on the top floor of the house go down to get the pollen from garden plants, carefully tended by the artists in the courtyard above; adding to the union of collective responsibility, they produce honey. That is precisely the soul of the project: who comes brings something to share, who visits the house becomes, -at the same instant- on participant and producer of a structure that runs from concentric circles, of initiatives that open tirelesslyto new projects that do not stop to join the initial collaboration.
Inside the Poly-Graphic Triennial a space has developed with unique characteristics. The idea comes when Charles Juhasz Alvarado is commissioned by the Triennial to do a project. The response was a number of artists sharing a space, creating a choral work, a real honeycomb. Since the opening of the Triennial, Buttresses has been synonymous of exhibitions, theater plays, performance, dance and contemporary music, which has turned the house into a must on any cultural tour in San Juan.
The reading room and the garden, reflecting shared experiences, are the core of the project. The extension of both spaces is, if not uniquely, -all rooms have witnessed actions and projects that have gradually emerged, modifying the original works- in thecourtyard. There a hexagonal garden and a stage have been installed where activities are concentrated. On the walls that enclose the courtyard several murals pieces were created reinforcing the idea of the courtyard as a great space to talk and exchange ideas: the smell of plants, the fresh coffee or the flight of bees reinforce the impression of being, and give an odd touch and cozy at the same time.
The parts and the whole are one thing in Buttresses; therefor to speak of spatial order in the house makes sense only if one starts from the idea that any of the originally designed environments are subject to constant change and new additions. The best example of this is found in the library space that has been created in two of the rooms on the ground floor. They have a set of hexagonal tables intervened by artists -Marielis Castro, Fabian Wilkins, Nestor Barreto, Elizam Escobar, Julio Suarez, Ivelisse Jimenez, Adelino Gonzalez, Ana Carrion, Margarita Vicenti, Allora & Calzadilla, Frances Rivera Gonzalez, Art Kendell Man and Rafael Vargas-Suarez- along with several shelves that offer visitors a collection that in itself presents artistic aspirations: "dense" essays on Puerto Rican history and politics coexist with independent publications, biographies, classics of American literature or coloring books make this space a laboratory capable of symbolizing the entire project, which happens to be, well, a great text for reading. Inevitably the sight is distracted from reading and moves into the tables, where, behind glass, each artist has placed a diverse and personal sample of objects that function like small tracks and that in many cases condense decades of work.
The courtyard leads into several different areas. The first one is occupied by Area. Designs Office. This is an extension of the initiative developed in Caguas and based on the initiatives process both individual and collective of young artists. Next, Nestor Otero and Annex Burgos have created a forested landscape that offers alternatives and warnings: the digital promise coexists with a fallen log that crosses the room and out into the courtyard porch looking for the visitor. When you go upstairs, after facing a piece of Arnaldo Morales on the front of the first section, the visitor finds the bees. After the controlled sense of danger –a message at the entrance informs, prompting the visit, of the "medium" used in the artistic project–we reached a space that immediately leads to another time. Teo Freytes has moved what was MSA, Synthesist Updated Movement, reviving the spirit and the platform of the initiative that early in the nineties gave concerts and recitals, performances and exhibitions, talks and meetings, showing that Buttresses is not a beginning nor a full stop, but the latest addition to a long ellipsis.
In the next room, Dhara Rivera develops a collaborative project that is as titanic as poetic: a red knitted network maintains a set of water- filled spheres in a precarious equilibrium, constituting a map of the human being isolation regarding the water –or the water regarding the human being–inthe urban environment of San Juan. Flanking the installation we find two organic sets. Ana Rosa Rivera has created an architectural structure of columns-skirts designed for performance actions that mixes references to colonial architecture with the knitting, in an attempt to analyze the relationship between what is hidden and what is shown, between the public character of the body and its ability to hide itself and be modified behind created structures. Meanwhile, the installation of Frances Rivera Gonzalez recovers ethereal and marine forms to develop habitable constructions.
The Buttresses initiative presents all in all a good example of how the combined efforts and wills can be germs of creative projects. The issue, which resonates to sketch the evolution of the alternative art spaces run by artists in the Puerto Rican context, is indicative in it; but primarily, it allows us to be certain that there will be no lack of hands to keep the beehive running.
