The Colloquium by their major figures
A few days away from the beginning of the International Colloquium Marcel Duchamp, the speakers explain what made them select their themes for the exhibition. They also tell us if they have been in Buenos Aires before and their expectations about their visit to the city.
According to Michael Taylor, modern art curator from the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the theme of his exposition in Buenos Aires derives from his research on Marcel Duchamp’s etant donnés. In relation to the artist’s exhibition in Fundación Proa, Taylor says: ‘I’m looking forward to seeing the show and visiting Buenos Aires’. And he adds: ‘I’ve never been to the city before, but I’ve always wanted to go there ever since I watched the ’78 World Cup Football Championship Final on TV in London, when I was younger’. Taylor comments that his friend Carlos Basualdo, from Philadelphia Museum, has told him about the ‘wonderful food and wines in Buenos Aires’, so he has planned to visit the typical gastronomic places. As regards Argentine art, the Englishman talks about his desire to meet ‘artists and historians, and learn more about Argentine contemporary art’, from which he has claimed to admire the work of artists such as Victor Grippo and David Lamelas.
Bernard Marcadé, critic and biographer of Marcel Duchamp, will deal with the theme of the readymade and ‘prove that this matter is the most important issue of the duchampian way of life. About his presence in Buenos Aires, Marcadé remembers being in Buenos Aires in the 90s, when he came to set up the exhibition “L’autre à Montevideo: Homenaje a Isidore Duchase” (“L’autre à Montevideo: Homage to Isidore Duchase”), in the Museo Nacional de Artes Visuales’ (National Museum of Visual Arts). For Marcadé, not only will it be interesting to visit the exhibition of the French artist in Proa, but also to verify the possible intellectual points in common among Duchamp, Bioy Casares and Borges.
Historian and art critic Gloria Moure explains that her interest in Duchamp is ‘not only related to his well known objects but also to his oeuvre and his attitudes, since it is from this global perspective that he is integrated into the three dimensional expansion characteristic in the development of art during the postwar period, especially in its most contemporary ferments’. As regards her visit to Buenos Aires, Mouré says that she has been in the city twice, the last time was as the director of the Centro de Arte Contemporánea de Santiago de Compostela (Santiago de Compostela Contemporary Art Centre) for the opening of the exhibition of Alvaro Siza in the Museo de Bellas Artes (Museum of Fine Arts). And concerning her expectations beyond the International Colloquium Marcel Duchamp, she points out: ‘I’d love to get in contact with those in charge of organizing cultural programs in the city, with universities and above all with artists. In short, she says that her aim is to ‘understand the creative pulse of the country’
Francis Naumann, curator and art dealer specialist in surrealist and dada art, will discuss ‘Duchamp and chess in Buenos Aires’ and he explains the choice of his theme in this way: ‘I have played chess since adolescence and I used to think that in Duchamp’s chess notes there were aspects of his personality that could be deciphered. I don’t think so now, but I believe that his love for this game inspired his work and influenced several decisions he made in his life’. Naumann already came to Buenos Aires in 1997 to find the study where Duchamp had lived: ‘I spent some time in the city, in a chess club, but I devoted this time to finishing an essay on María Martins’. On this occasion, Naumann claims to be ‘excited to see Buenos Aires through the eyes of the people who live there, especially through those who are involved in the world of art’.
Jean Jacques Lebel has chosen the theme ‘The view of an artist and witness of Duchamp’ for his dissertation in the International Colloquium, and says that his decision is based on his belief that ‘it is time to think of a philosophical infrastructure about Duchamp’s creative work’. This will be Lebel’s return to Buenos Aires after 1966, when Jorge Romero Brest invited him to the Instituto Di Tella to carry out a Happening, a trip that also took him to Montevideo and Rio de Janeiro.
Gonzalo Aguilar, teacher and researcher at the Universidad de Buenos Aires, will deal with Marcel Duchamp in the city. ‘After the exhibition of Marcel Duchamp in the Venice Biennale and the chronology Effemeridi su e intorno by Jacques Caumont and Jennifer Gough-Cooper, I was really intrigued about the references that were made on Duchamp’s stay in Buenos Aires. I got to Buenos Aires and wrote an article which I published in a handmade little book because I thought that this trip, which had not left any traces, not only conveyed the ghostliness of the Argentine culture but also was in itself an avant-garde theory’. Aguilar admits that he has always been obsessed with ‘the idea of traces’ and has striven to find a trace of Duchamp in Buenos Aires.
About his specific work for the International Colloquium Marcel Duchamp, Aguilar says that his intention is ‘to show a panorama of artistic works and criticism which have dealt with Duchamp’s stay in Buenos Aires and, in the second part, analyze the readymade malhereux’. His expectation as regards meeting other Duchamp specialists is that it will trigger off ‘a series of central issues for the current discussion on the theory of art and on the ongoing state of the research on Duchamp’. Finally he adds:’ I also hope that the meeting will be fun and that these distinguished visitors will get lost in the city at night hoping to find Duchamp’s ghost, also that they will discover that the Argentine culture is not that exotic after all, grasp that the crisis of capitalism is global and realize that Borges is not a readymade’.