In recovery - Chilean art - Report from Chile

Art in America, Oct, 1996 by Ann Wilson Lloyd

Seven years after the end of the Pinochet regime, Chilean artists tend to avoid politics. Most reveal instead either a conceptual bent or an expressionistic response to local experiences.

Like patients recovering from a serious illness, countries liberated from repressive political systems welcome attention--except for the kind of curiosity that probes still-sensitive areas. Though it's been seven years since democracy replaced General Augusto Pinochet's military dictatorship, and Chileans are proud to talk about their country's rising economic status, they are reluctant to openly discuss Pinochet's 16-year rule. Perhaps in part because he is still head of the nation's army and very much a political presence, questions about Pinochet are met with a hesitance that's not quite fear, a chagrin that's not exactly shame.

Though I went to Chile curious about how recent dramatic political turns had affected artists and their work, direct answers were generally off the record. Political content in the work of conceptual artists tends to be oblique or ambiguous. Explicatory catalogue essays and some of the artists' own statements are often filled with dense language reflective of linguistic-based critical theories that have surfaced everywhere in the last few decades. One gathers that local politics is safely subsumed in abstraction, conceptualism and postmodern practices.

For this informal survey, I visited the studios of artists chosen from a list supplied by Santiago Museo de Arte Contemporaneo curator Ernesto Munoz and assistant curator Jacqueline Mory Compagnon. Those artists provided further recommendations. I was looking for work by young and youngish artists just now emerging into international venues and still relatively unknown in the U.S. I found more artists meeting these criteria than could be included here; they work in a range of mediums and styles, from conceptual and technical installations to conventional painting. In general, the older artists seem buoyed by better times and greater freedom and are producing work reflective of general political/cultural forces. The work of the youngest artists, those who grew up during the dictatorship, is either neo-conceptualist, or neo-expressionist and directly affected by personal responses to local landscape, myth, poetry and individual experiences. In one interesting answer to questions of politics, a young artist said that the return to democracy seemed to bring with it permission to make more personal, apolitical work.

Current support for Chilean artists is mixed. There are no art periodicals, market interest in the avant-garde is minimal, and only sparse government funding is devoted to the University of Chile's ever-struggling Museo de Arte Contemporaneo in Santiago. The adjoining Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, however, has a small collection of late 20th-century art and periodically mounts contemporary exhibitions. Most galleries in Santiago offer only tiny spaces for solo exhibitions, while keeping multiple artists' works, usually paintings, hanging on dividers in the back room, or they show everyone all at once, salon style, like an art store. The U.S./European model of gallery representation of specific artists is the exception, and even though all the artists mentioned here have shown in one or several of the commercial, alternative and museum spaces mentioned below, ongoing affiliation is rare. Visitors to Chile wishing to view work by specific artists are advised to inquire about current venues at the Museo de Arte Contemporaneo, as I did, or simply ask at any of the individual galleries or alternative spaces.

That said, Santiago galleries that seem closest to the typical Euro-American contemporary gallery style are the spacious Tomas Andreu Gallery, the Plastica Nueva Gallery, the Artespacio Gallery (which specializes in sculpture) and the elegant new A.M.S. Marlborough Gallery. All are located in a fashionable uptown section of Santiago with wide boulevards and walled upscale residences like southern California's. A.M.S. Marlborough opened last November with an exhibition that featured four artists representing three continents where Marlborough branches are located: Larry Rivers, the Spaniard Manolo Valdes, the Colombian Fernando Botero and the Chilean Claudio Bravo.

Downtown, in the attractive little Plaza del Mulato Gil de Castro, near the Museum of Fine Arts, is a small installation space run by a gallery called Arte Actual, which also has an uptown space where paintings are shown salon style. The day I visited, an interesting-looking installation by Ismael Frigerio, featuring a small traditional Chilean fishing boat and video monitors, had just been dismantled. In that same plaza, another small space, Centro Chileno del Grabado, specializes in prints and etchings. The plaza will also become home to a museum-to-be which has been acquiring contemporary art works for the last few years; a two-year construction project will begin in January 1997.

In the arts district called Bellevista there is a concentration of artists' studios and several small commercial galleries, of which Galeria del Cerro and Galeria Fundacion Amigos del Arte (Art Friends Foundation) are most likely to host innovative exhibitions. Alternative nonprofit spaces are sparse in Santiago. Two important ones are Bucci Gallery, which offers opportunities for unknowns to show experimental works, and Galeria Gabriela Mistral (named for the great Chilean poet), which is supported by the government's Education Ministry. Located near the Casa de la Moneda (the presidential palace), this space draws Santiago's intelligentsia--those, according to one artist, who are uninterested in buying traditional canvases or "decorative" sculpture.