WITH the motto ‘Rosa Chancho is an art
gallery’, young artists Mumi, Julieta García Vázquez, Tomás Lerner, Osías
Yanov and writer Javier Villa de Villafañe burst onto the Buenos Aires scene
in March last year; their aim: to investigate current exhibition and sales
practices (and their immobilising effect) through hands-on experimentation
with a variety of alternatives. Their first step was to delimit a
no-holds-barred work zone – an unassuming shop display window, the sidewalk
in front of it and a bit of the street; then they defined three roles and
announced who would occupy them during the course of the year. This
deceptively simple recipe contains a myriad of complex questions
(authorship, curator versus artist versus gallery identity,
site-specificity, marketability and so on) that have converted Rosa Chancho
into a focal point and made it a concentrated seedbed of activity, whose
repercussions ricochet off in all directions.
Five artists – Orilo Blandini, Luciana Lamothe, Carlos Huffmann, Noelia
Yagmourian and Andrea Cavagnaro – were assigned to the ‘window’, creating
successive works in the display case and beyond (on, over, on top of or with
the works that preceded theirs); ‘overseers’, comprising five artists and
theoreticians – Silvia Gurfein, Nancy Rojas, Verónica Gómez, Miguel Mitlag
and Octavio Garabello – followed the year’s activity, culminating in a joint
exhibition of works/texts in December (employing the interior space for the
first time); and ‘parasites’ – Leandro Tartaglia and the group Provisorio/Permanente
– acted as free agents, using the rest as their springboard.
The result? Propositions ranging from sidewalk demolition to a new angle on
the ‘penetrable’, to a mannequin’s nosebleed that leads to a billboard
intervention by way of a hundred metre long trail of blood red droplets
winding along the pavement. From the outset it was clear that this would not
be a young talent-search agency focusing on who is or is not present, but
rather a place where the challenge would lie in what both artists and
organisers, flexing their muscles and challenging old habits, could manage
to do together. Instead of falling back on easy strategies of carefully
contained, consequence-free delinquency, Rosa Chancho deals with the issue
of influences – that heavy traffic that comes to bear on any artist’s work –
by shifting away from judgement calls on who is copying whom, and by
stepping out from under umbrella terms such as ‘appropriation’. They oblige
artists to roll up their sleeves and dig into the business of working over
another’s work and, in turn, being worked over, whilst they and their
proposal share the same vulnerability.
These are not kids launching spit-balls and then looking the other way; they
are committed to exploring these questions as avenues, rather than using
them as pedestals from which to pronounce a particular stance. As playful as
they are serious, they show no signs of letting up: be on the lookout this
year for the Rosa Chancho Prize…
TAMARA STUBY IS A WRITER BASED IN BUENOS AIRES