Conceptualist Practices in the Ella Fontanals-Cisneros Collection: The Scope of a Revision by José Antonio Navarrete, Miami

In the framework of the annual mobilization in the Miami art world resulting from the celebration of the Art Basel Miami Beach international art fair, the exhibition “Frames and Documents: Conceptualist Practices.”

Selections from the Ella Fontanals-Cisneros Collection” was inaugurated on November 30, 2011, at the Cisneros-Fontanals Art Foundation (CIFO)’s headquarters. Curated by Jesús Fuenmayor, director since 2005 of Periférico Caracas/Arte Contemporáneo, and Philippe Pirotte, who served as artistic and executive director of the Kunsthalle in Bern, Switzerland, between 2005 and 2011, the show will remain open to the public until March 4, 2012.
More than the interpretation of a segment of the Collection, “Frames and Documents…” presents a proposal for reading the conceptualist practices of art of the 1960s-1980s, based on the Collection’s potential and possibilities to stage them as a visual discourse. This perspective is what results most interesting for a critical approach of the exhibit as a public event.

The notions of “frame” and “document”, conveniently presented in plural, constitute the axis for the curatorial investigation displayed for the exhibit. The first of these makes reference to the institutional frameworks of art; that is, to the institutions or other structures devoted to its distribution, while the second implies the ways in which memory is recorded, and the constitution of archives. These are central issues associated to the critical explorations of conceptualist practices, which the mentioned notions, employed as methodological instruments, allow to effectively illuminate. This can be corroborated in “Frames and Documents…” both by the excellent selection of artworks carried out by the curators and by the pondered arguments which the two of them develop in the exhibition’s catalogue.

Besides the aforementioned, other notions play a fundamental role in the configuration of the expositional text, specifically, those of “de-centering” and “discontinuity” which, as of the exhibition “Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin, 1950s-1980s” − held in 1999 at the Queens Museum of Art in New York under the curatorship of Luis Camnitzer, Jane Farver and Rachel Weiss −, refocused the history of conceptualism to the present.
When we currently refer to conceptualist practices, we take into consideration, besides conceptual art proper, all those artistic practices that “during and after” the mentioned art were also decidedly oriented “towards signification and communication,” to put it in the words of Boris Groys. This is illustrated by the selection through an adequate understanding of how conceptualist practices have developed on the basis of any kind of media, ranging from the more traditional ones, like painting (Eugenio Espinoza) and drawing (Anna Maria Maiolino), to films (David Lamelas) and photo-documentations (Ed Ruscha), and including space interventions (Gordon Matta Clark) and performances (Ana Mendieta), to name just a few among those present in “Frames and Documents…” The exhibition also illustrates the wide variety of problems which these practices have dealt with, affirming a broad notion of the political as public positioning − that is, of the fact that it needs others in order to express itself and be recognized − with regard to any issue pertaining to the different spheres of social life, with a frequent emphasis on the artistic-cultural ones or on politics.

Of the notions of anchoring contained in the curatorial discourse, it is precisely the two latter among those mentioned (“de-centering” and “discontinuity”) which are potentiated in the museographic order proposed for the exhibition space. The tour designed for the visitors evinces the curators’ skill in putting together a spatial account of conceptualist practices that not only highlights the differentiated critical perspectives regarding the artistic proposals, but also the plurality of geographical and chronological contexts in which they originated.

Thus, although the selection includes the early works of US artists who were the initiators of conceptualist practices (such as Joseph Kosuth, Dan Graham or Vito Aconcci), as well as European artists who have built their trajectories along this path (Bern & Hilla Becher, Fischli & Weiss or “de-centering” Antoni Muntadas, among others), those corresponding to Latin American artists have an absolute predominance in the exhibit. The list of these artists includes, besides those already mentioned − and without pretending to present a complete roster − Ricardo Brey, Pablo Bruscky, Waltercio Caldas, Luis Camnitzer, Juan Downey, Eugenio Dittborn, Héctor Fuenmayor, Leandro Katz, Carlos Leppe, Cildo Meireles, Marta Minujín, Lygia Pape, Claudio Perna, Regina Silveira, Antonieta Sosa, Pedro Terán and Horacio Zabala.

The exhibition develops as a horizontal dialogue ―on an individual basis ― among the works, affording the spectator the possibility to explore the relations of juxtaposition, nonconformity, closeness and similarity among them. In order to help him/her in this endeavor, he/she is provided with minimum, useful supplementary information: texts specific to each exhibition space, notes explaining some of the proposals and the identification data for all the works.
We might state, without reservations, that “Frames and Documents…”, has made the most of two premises of curatorial practice, essential to be taken into consideration in the case of ambitious group shows featuring contemporary art. We are summarizing them as follows: to underestimate in a curatorship the relationship of affinity among the works which comprise the series to be exhibited weakens the internal structure of the show, since this entails overlooking the density of the correspondences between the works, correspondences which ultimately justify the view-concept serving as support for the show; yet operating in the opposite way, that is, overestimating analogies and trivializing or disregarding the dissimilarities in the series levels down the independent thought and work that each of the pieces contributes to the ensemble. The success of “Frames and Documents…” resides, to a great extent, in the balance between these two opposing perspectives.