The Tasteful CIRCA Art Fair, San Juan

Bar­bara Rosenthal

Con­trolled light­ing, soft music, care­ful plan­ning, pow­er­ful art, and some­times con­tro­ver­sial panel dis­cus­sions char­ac­ter­ized CIRCA Puerto Rico 08. Art fair cura­tor Paco Berragán, author of The Art Fair Age, set ter­rific guide­lines about his role and duties: to select gal­leries to be included; to select spe­cific works from those gal­leries; to know who col­lects such works; to ensure that said col­lec­tors are informed of them; to bring VIP cura­tors, col­lec­tors and crit­ics to dialogue.

Three gal­leries offer­ing espe­cially hand­some shows, eclec­tic in media and style, but con­sis­tent in the per­sonal visions of the artists and high qual­ity of idea and fab­ri­ca­tion, were Dean Project from Long Island City, NY (high­light­ing Tim­o­thy Berg and Kris Tam­bu­rello), Jacob Kar­pio Gale­ria from Costa Rica (high­light­ing Lluis Barba), and Hamish Mor­ri­son Galerie from Berlin (high­light­ing Gabriela Fridriks­dot­tir and Mikala Dwyer). Gal­lerists Mark Dean, Kar­pio, and Mor­ri­son, rep­re­sent stun­ning, var­ied, con­tem­po­rary artists.

An oppo­site gallery phi­los­o­phy, how­ever, was dis­played by the relent­less con­sis­tency of Point of View Gallery, NY, which brought work by three pho­tog­ra­phers (Matt Hoyle, Heimo Schmidt, and Brad Moore) whose styles are so sim­i­lar that they might as well have been a col­lec­tive: a cen­tered, medium close-up “por­trait” of per­son or object. And two gal­leries, although some­what uneven, rep­re­sented promis­ing indi­vid­ual artists. Area Lugar de Proyec­tos, from Caguas, Puerto Rico, showed Myritza Irizarry’s, clever piece “Feel Free To Be,” the video of a caged bird inside a real bird­cage. Hard­core Art, Florida, showed Jonathan Stein’s “Every­one Wants a Piece of ….” His luscious-looking sculpted cakes are iced with por­traits of pop celebri­ties. When Stein talks about his works — includ­ing a doll con­structed as a minia­ture of him­self, which gar­nered such ani­mos­ity by view­ers that one tore it out of his baby-carrier and destroyed it — he seems con­cerned that soci­ety con­sumes the frag­ile iden­tity of tal­ented indi­vid­u­als, him­self included, of course.

Some booths offered provoca­tive works by inde­pen­dent artists, solo. José Cosme, Valen­cia, Spain, pre­sented “Where is Ele­ment Num­ber 3,” a felted video dis­play, suit­cases, and ham­mer. Ada Bobo­nis, San Juan, showed “Ven­tanas Project,” light-boxed pho­tos of local edi­fices. In the strik­ing instal­la­tion by Adrián Vil­leta, San Juan, whose own French gar­den inspired him to cre­ate a decep­tively roman­tic plant-covered booth from which wafted songs by Edith Piaf, vines dripped the­atri­cal hand-colored medium-format pho­tographs of beau­ties in Vic­to­rian gowns, their dark eyes com­mu­ni­cat­ing sub­tle unease, not romance.

Sadly, though, is that instead of pur­chas­ing much of Villeta’s real work, “col­lec­tors” repeat­edly offered him por­trait com­mis­sions. He accepted, but exter­nal con­trol over an artist’s out­put is a dis­heart­en­ing phe­nom­e­non that was under­scored repeat­edly dur­ing this fair — not just in the rea­son­ing by which deal­ers might choose artists to rep­re­sent, but by the pan­els, dis­cus­sions, and vis­its that sub­sumed the artist in a view­point in which cura­tor and col­lec­tor are paramount.

This view­point reaches to the actual process of mak­ing art itself, a trend increas­ing alarm­ingly through­out every sit­u­a­tion artists encounter. Three pan­els were gen­er­ously funded by orga­ni­za­tions out­side of the fair itself, Escuela de Artes Plas­ti­cas and The Insti­tute for Puerto Rican Cul­ture. Two pan­els con­ducted in or trans­lated into Eng­lish evi­denced this view: “Chang­ing Con­texts for New Cura­to­r­ial Prac­tices,” with Michel Blanc­subé (Cura­tor, Jumex Col­lec­tion), Ute Meta Bauer (Chair, MIT Art Depart­ment), Haydee Vene­gas (Latin Amer­i­can Art His­to­rian), Sarah Breen (Cura­tor, Breen­space), and Paco Bar­ragán (Art Fairs Cura­tor); and “Bien­ales and Trien­ales of Latin Amer­ica and the Caribbean,” with Mari Car­men Ramírez, Adri­ano Per­dosa, María Inés Rodríguez, Carlo Zaccagnini, and Mag­ali Arriola. Pan­elists used these phrases: “com­mis­sion and pro­duce works,” “cre­ate a work just for,” “to inter­act with the com­mu­nity,” “to respond to,” “col­lec­tors want to be part of the project from the idea,” “col­lec­tors want to be in con­ver­sa­tion with the artist.” Only Bauer spoke up for the inde­pen­dent nature of art-making, con­cerned that this ideal might be atro­phy­ing among artists new to the game.

All com­mis­sions, all work that artists don’t per­son­ally con­ceive and allow to evolve, in fact any tam­per­ing by oth­ers, is offen­sive to cre­ative artists, who yearn only to be left alone to fruc­tify an idea devel­oped wholly by them­selves or with col­lab­o­ra­tors they might choose. So insid­i­ously has the cura­to­r­ial pre­sump­tion been usurp­ing the cre­ative process, and now, it seems, a col­lec­to­r­ial pre­sump­tion as well, that the free­dom a real artist needs to cre­ate is evap­o­rat­ing, and leav­ing as a pre­cip­i­tate work cre­ated in servitude.

A par­al­lel trend is the tout­ing of “young artists,” bypass­ing artists who have, at sac­ri­fice to them­selves and their fam­i­lies, toiled in obscu­rity out of ded­i­ca­tion to their often icon­o­clas­tic art. Either that art didn’t fit the trends of past gate­keep­ers, or they them­selves did not seek noto­ri­ety in an era when “pay­ing your dues” was more seemly. Most artists aban­don this usu­ally thank­less trade if no pay-off comes soon, and these are the type most mal­leable, most likely to accept cura­tors’ and col­lec­tors’ imper­a­tives. Young artists are not yet con­trolled by their own obses­sions enough to groan.

A notable excep­tion to these trends, how­ever, was the stu­dio visit to Ilia Sanchez Dominguez, 79, whose pas­tel, shaped can­vases sug­gest inti­mate body parts. So fresh and play­ful is she about her work, that she video­tapes some of it even float­ing in the surf. And such a keeper of tra­di­tional integrity, that almost sin­gle­hand­edly, she and an even older friend are try­ing to keep their spec­tac­u­lar house, metic­u­lously restored with orig­i­nal tiling, from falling to rapa­cious devel­op­ers.
Adjunct to the main fair at the San Juan Con­ven­tion Cen­ter, were two open-air satel­lites, one in Pabel­lon de la Paz near the beach, some­what dis­or­ga­nized, but con­tain­ing some well-considered paint­ings by Carmelo Sobrino, another of the few mature artists, and a small satel­lite fair reach­able by delight­ful ferry ride to Cataño, con­tain­ing strong per­sonal state­ments in media and inter­ac­tive sculp­ture, such as the provoca­tive swings-to-read-on by Natalia Martínez. Would that she, and these other new artists, con­tinue to fol­low their own hearts, forever.