Washington, D.C.

While I was having my breakfast this morning in the hotel, I began to think about the enormous differences between two of the most important cities in this country. I got the sensation, from the 4 hours on the train, that I had crossed an abyss, appearing in a totally different world, passing abruptly from chaos to order, from overflowing exaggeration to elegance and sophistication, from popular desires to the political universe.

Both cities have their charm and both lack what the other has too much of. But after 14 days in NY I want to enjoy Washington and this showy peace, filled with culture, public spaces and art… many scenarios repeat in this country.

After walking through the Mall Park almost completely, surprising myself with its museum, buildings and memorials; of entering DC’s downtown with a map in my hand, of course, but clear and sure of the steps I was taking, I began to feel the invitation to go around and take advantage of each and every one of the hours I’ll be here. The morning began with a fun outing with Casey, a poet and Art History professor at Corcoran Gallery & College of Art and Design. We talk while looking for coffee, a search we quit before getting to the Faculty, where we had something to drink in the pleasant space we were in: the Main Hall. We walked by the White House first, a place much smaller than I imagined and full of different kinds of people protesting for many motives that they sure are entitled to have. It’s funny in any case, they’re not more than 5 or 7, including one person for each protest, like good examples of the principles they firmly believe in.

After quenching our respective thirst, we began a fun tour around the University, begining by the exhibition halls and the museum. I imagined what it would feel for a Chilean art or design student to study with painting by Rothko or Rauschenberg around, which you can see whenever you want, surrounded by incredible photography, artwork and big spaces destined for the exhibition of their work. The tour didn’t end there, though, because for my surprise it was just beginning and all my anxiety of visiting the museum that surround the big park faded when Casey opened doors that took us to different corners of this University, places I love like the ones destined to storage or artwork, with cold treatment for photographs, workshops where the students work: I’ve always loved these places, with tools, smells of pigmentation, metal, wood, photograph chemicals; that B side to art that fascinated me. We passed through offices and the library, and in every space we met very kind people and were involved in University moments. When I felt I took little treasures, of hope in important artists of the future.

After a little stroll through the park, I began to satisfy the hunger related to visiting the interiors of the museums, an appetite than began in the MoMa. I began my visits with observing the works generation by generation, among Contemporary Art in the Hishhor Museum and the National Gallery of Art, and of Classic Art as well, where I got to see for the first time in my life a work by Fragonard: an artist that I profoundly admire and that today, after laughing and being touched by his work, I declare my most absolute love to. Every museum here is special and coherent, from their architecture to the artwork in it. This gives me the sensation that nothing is here by chance, that everything is planned out to enlighten and respect every piece, as well as welcoming each visitor that fills up the museums’ space.

During my visits, and after travelling through Art History, I decided to play by taking by stay in DC according to different themes, taking on a new journey, now through US history: visiting the Museum of Indian Culture, with its very attractive architecture, soft to the eyes, interesting and well placed in the circuit, a place where everyone involved in creating this big particular universe called The United States of America is shown without discrimination nor determination (interesting mix); and the Air and Space Museum, where I felt like an absolute tourist, feeling constantly non-moved by what I was seeing, and where being among a human mass did bother me: like the lady that wasn’t allowed to take photos because she was in the way of someone else. I didn’t take photos, and that is definitely my mistake. Well, I might not be made for that kind of adventure, where airplanes and big transport constructions do not seem more attractive than the rest: that are in any case an artwork by themselves, as the space suits worn throughout history (fabulous), even though they remembered me of the Dharma Project in “Lost” than of the excitement of the first man on the moon.

Leaving this experience, I went for my almost mandatory stop on the green grass of Mall Park, to stop a minute, rest my legs and look at the sky. I knew I couldn’t finish my “thematic” tour without visiting the Lincoln Memorial, so I began walking there, and though the excessive amount of people going in the same direction invited me to stop, I knew it was my only chance: and that even though I couldn’t have a private conversation with him, I’d at least get a glance of him and enjoy the beautiful view of the park from there. Lincoln’s image is a powerful one, imposing and absolute, solemn, looking and taking care of this city that would seem to owe him everything. I then went to the Vietnam Veteran Memorial, as to be consequent with the circuit. It’s an interesting place, and extremely intense; you get to feel what these men felt.

Closing the tour at nighttime and with a sensation of being impossibly more tired than I was, I walked to the hotel by streets I didn’t know, enjoying every corner and thinking in how to make the most of my next and last morning in DC; a city that showed me its two faces: first a radiant sun and today an intense rain which didn’t stop me from walking. I even stopped for the mandatory photos, and also got to know the subway (modern, clean and tidier than the one in NY)

I’m now in Union Station, waiting for my train in a coffee shop, hoping to get back soon to the city that this month has become my home and my school.

... So NY

Something that has come to my attention by being in NY is that this city blooms culture from every one of its pores, in every corner and in every situation that you get into, and the best of all is that there’s not only one way to live and to experiment art: there are as many ways as people and personalities to focus and live it in their own way.

As the cold, fast wind blew outside, in the NYFA Gallery a group of women organized a tea party in the purest 50’s manner, “A Feminist Tea Party” to talk about feminism related to diverse subjects. Young artists have organized these experiences for years, remembering the old fashioned tea parties, to talk about current issues, dressed in period costumes and in a stage worthy of their clothing, openly calling out to participate of comfortable gatherings, enjoying delicious teas and different sweet pastries that remember, from a contemporary place, what one was a scene where only was talked of husbands, sons and families; now situating women where they belong, with opinions, ideas, ideologies, and autonomous thought.

Somewhere else in the night, a group of Literature lovers conducted a Poetry Slam in the interior of the Bowery Poetry Club, where, as in every competition, the best one. Stage, microphone, lights, incidental music, a host, a respectable audience that takes the place of a jury, and a group of literary creators that confront themselves in a hallucinatory slam. Only words count, the stories and what each one has to say, in the way they have of saying it. After a previous introduction by the host, the poets, one by one, get on stage, and an audience that is practically on fire participates in each of the presentations generating dialogue, empathy, and in my personal case, admiration for each of the brave artist and for the experience that they repeat week to week, keeping their world individual and collective world active.

Both “performatic” experiences represent for me, up to today, what NY is: culture and inclusion.

http://caitlinrueter.com/01/events/a-feminist-tea-party-at-the-nyfa-gallery/

http://www.bowerypoetry.com/#Event/99031

Independent Movement

Checking out the Gallery Guide, and realizing the gigantic amount of commercial exhibit spaces in this city, I began to ask myself a series of questions related to the diffusion and commercialization circuit in art. Are there so many artist for all these galleries? Is it the only way of distributing and covering local art? Are there even more spaces? How does the youth mobilize in such a big market, apparently very competitive? As I’d think about it more and more, new questions arose, which I have slowly began to give an answer to.

Visiting Brooklyn again, as well as some galleries, I could solve some of these mysteries, as for example that there are more spaces than I could find in the Gallery Guide, that there parallel young art circuits, emerging, organized and active, that manage to mobilize not only artist, but also the community, and they’re not just one or two, destined to die, but sufficient as to generate a circuit.

Getting to know spaces like Regina Rex, English Kills, Storefront, Microscope Gallery and Yashar Gallery helps me observe a bit of the alternative scenario, artist that are exposing their work in their own circuits, own artists, and those involved in art management work to show their work and the work of their pairs, in self administrated spaces, close to the artists’ workshops, where dialogue quickly begins to flow.

This in some way is what repeats itself in the younger generations over the world. The context here is different, sometimes the language as well, but I can observe that it’s a common scenario, a universal one. Art managers such as Laura Braslow, who works in taking art and its experience to the community, to the neighborhood, generating festivals with those who manage to gather hundreds, not only artist, but also creative neighbors with good ideas, which they take their take to create. Artists that open and close exhibition halls to show their work, people that work without economic profit.

I believe that the subject has more to do with a matter of attitude than of possibilities, of general culture regarding visual, dramatic and literary arts. From my perspective not every space I visited had good artwork, but they are all good spaces, that take their risks and bet on their work, sensible to cultural movements, active and open to dialogue and development. The community in general is involved, and that is probably one of the main differences that New York and Chile’s art world have, because art is part of daily life, though of course here is “The Art Industry” where NY figures as the official distributor, but beyond that idea it is something that also has to do with the way of life, with losing fear of culture, of new exhibitions, of new spaces. That is the attitude that is exceeding here, and that we in Chile lack and need.

MoMA

After visiting the Museum of Modern Art (MoMa) and submerge myself in my first museum experience, I have ravenous sense of appetite. It all begins before getting to the artwork, with the imposing space, able to receive an enormous amount of people. It really was like a tireless machine that produced every kind of human being that transited restlessly through each of the spaces. And even though visiting a museum among so many people can’t be the best scenario, I enjoyed watching the important gathering generated by the formal spaces of exhibition. See that they’re active in a transversal form, from the public to the Museum. The scene changes when you begin to look around the rooms and every space transports you to an intimate encounter with the work. When you manage to silence the masses and introduce yourself to such a personal world, in which, no matter how many people there are, they do not intervene in your visit. One is alone with the work, that idealized object. It’s just that, being in front of a historical referent, which you hadn’t been able to dimension in its real size until now, its texture and it strength, is surely one of the most indefinable sensations I’ve faced. It’s all a constant game with emotion, mental integrity and the years of a vulnerable gathering of information and images, versus the reality that will never come out of your head. Standing in front of Pollock’s powerful work, observing every stoke and chronological process in his development as an artist, the wonderful silence of Rothko, that made me go back to make sure it was real, the tireless imagination of Picasso, his skill and his delirious Demoiselles d’Avignon, gigantic and dramatic, Cézanne, that I’d see in a book of no more than 20x20 when I was a girl, Man Ray subtle and delicate, so distant as I had intuited, Wesselmann and Irving Penn en a hallucinatory space only destined to the kitchen, the utensils and artifacts produced the best of the domestic scenes and the artwork made me reopen the pages of my favorite Contemporary Art books and feel that that instant was not a dream, Dalí and that surrealism that I don’t like but that gave me emotion, it’s just that it’s not only strokes and shapes, it’s what’s there and that through reproductions I had never been able to admire, the Jasper Johns flag, wonderful, powerful, I went through every line and every star trying to get soaked from it. A whole floor dedicated to photography, Cindy Sherman, Rineke Dijkstra, Barbara KRuger, Helen Levitt, Robert Frank among so many others, that is like a neverending bath of emotion. Of course there was Warhol, Linschenstein, Lauri Anderson, Keel, Monet, Modigdliani and an eternal list of names and works that completed the six floors of a gigantic museum. Among them the only Chilean representative of that world is Roberto Matta and other two works that make you feel proud and give you a gigantic desire to incorporate others. Being able to see pieces that are a historical referent, live, allows you to grow and comprehend art from the beginnings of a work, to understand the creative process of an artist, to open an area of exploration, to begin a new endless process of seeing more, of learning more. It’s opening the appetite to the learning of history, of materials, of every pigment and every object that participates in the construction of the work and the spaces.

Amazing Space

In this universe filled with people and information on every single corner, today, in a neighborhood where you can find many designer clothes stores and commercial art galleries (that without doubt have very good works), something happened to me that is very uncommon for a Chilean: to come across a Damien Hirst exposition, with art by Keith Harring, Warhol or Lichtenstein, by Frank Stella and Chagall, works that I sure appreciated with enthusiasm in the different galleries in Soho. I was happy though always conscious of where I was and why the works I mentioned are in that circuit.
I will not particularly embrace a few galleries just because they have works from different artists that belong to this place, to this great Art industry.
In this gallery circuit, that is constantly oozing New York, I could visit two spaces that brought to me something that I felt didn’t exist in this city: spirituality; an instant of silence, a gift to the mind, to imagination and a small instant of reflection and meditation among chaos.
In 1979, and in two parallel spaces of the Dia Art Foundation, Walter de María mounted two exhibitions that cannot live the one without the other. In fact, they are one since 1977, when De María inserted, for the first time, underground and with a depth of one thousand meters, two inch bars of solid polished tin. Of this I could only see a photograph, a beautiful image that helps in understanding the spaces and the work that has been exhibited without alterations for 32 years.
The first space, The Earth Room, is a space on an apartment on the second floor of a building right in the middle of Soho, silent and austere, in which, once you get there, you encounter 22 inches of earth covering the totality of the apartment’s surface. It’s astonishing, strangely beautiful and solemn. One can only look through the entrance, separated by a glass that keeps you away from the work in a practical and subtle way, for you don’t need to be on it. It’s a space to observe inside one’s own self, amidst the silence and a humid earth surface which is as organic as the spectator. The work continues visiting the second space, The Broker Kilometer, a couple of blocks away, in which, align on the floor, are 500 golden and bright polished tin bars, installed in five parallel lines: inside an enormous space, where the fit perfectly like the most beautiful of puzzles. You also observe them from a distance, without touching, nor photographing: just one and the artwork, for the time that the visit lasts, in the strange inner journey trigged by just being there.

Bronx

As I was walking through the Bronx today (in what was definitely my first visit, where I couldn’t even do half the things I had planned) I saw a destroyed car, park and turned into a bunch of useless junk. That image might have been trying to tell me to leave and to go find stories somewhere else. My intuition had been sending me similar thoughts, because when I got out of the subway station that brought me to the Bronx, it began raining without intermission: after a very nice sunny and even warm morning. I was obviously not prepared for the rain. The first thing I did and definitely the only thing I should’ve done was visit the Longwood Art Gallery, which had two good showings that I couldn’t fully appreciate because it was full (another reason to come back) of members of the community waiting for the Bronx Culture Trolley, which I chose not to take even though it was free. I did not only want to pass through places: I wanted to stop wherever and whenever I wanted. Because of this I thought that the best thing to do was to take visit around by foot. Time wasn’t on my side, for at 6.30pm I was to be in the “Museo del Barrio” to watch a documentary called “The Faces Behind the Dolls”: a tribute to Madame Alexander Doll Company, a company dedicated to the creation and fabrication of art collection dolls.

After observing the showing at Longwood Art as much as I could, I began walking to my next stop: the Haven Art Gallery. After 20 blocks, 10 vulcanizations, 1 bridge, 1 destroyed car, 1 cigarette and lots of water falling on me, I arrived to find that the gallery was closed. More than feeling bad about it I laughed, and since I’m usually optimistic y quickly directed my path towards the other side of Bronx, hoping to be able to make it to the Bronx Museum. After 30 blocks, the same crashed car, the same 10 vulcanizations, the bridge, a lot more people than before and no cigarette, I decided to look at the map, realizing that I had at least 10 blocks to go, and that nor the humidity of my outfit nor the available time were going to allow me to get there and enjoy my moments there. I decided to go back to my starting point: the subway station.
I knew that for my next stop, on 103 Street and 5th Avenue, I wasn’t able to catch the train from where I was. On the contrary, I’d have to go back to line 6 walking. After 5 more vulcanization spots I decided to risk it and take on a new adventure on the Manhattan underground.

After getting off and not knowing where to go, I found myself standing by the entrance, asking for directions to everyone I saw. No one was going Downtown from there: the key was to have a bit of patience, or try to understand the African American policeman that did not speak Spanish. While he was trying to answer my doubts as I was telling him “please more slowly”, a Russian-faced woman asks me in an Argentinean accent if I was Chilean. I told her I was and asked her if she was going Down Town, if she wanted to go with me until my combination point, as to help me see where it was. I think I bombed her with questions, though she was very happy: she loved Chile because she lived in Valparaíso, my country’s principal port, before coming to live here illegally in 1996. She love Chile and its people, but defended the US with her life, saying it was a better place for her children, that not having come she would have never learnt English, and that living illegally in the US is almost the same as living the opposite. It was another experience with the same thousand-faced story. We could only talk for two stations, for then she indicated my combination point.

As I waited for the next train, I enjoyed a drummer’s music that played and sounded like a Mini Vanilli song, with a young dancer that did everything he could to get a tip. I gave him something and took some photos of what was going on. I walked as fast as I could to the “Museo del Barrio”, got there but couldn’t get in: the movie had begun and I had surpassed the time limit.

Apexart

I am slowly feeling more comfortable in this city. I have stopped observing with fear, and that excessive respect I had towards it the first days. I’m assimilating the reasons for which I am here: to learn from experience by growing transversally, getting in touch with a new reality and new forms of art management, and life; to live a creative and methodic process through writing, accompanied by endless sensations given on a daily basis, by being alone in this universe so different from mine. I believe there is a sane adapting period, where one is not only shocked with the impressive architecture and the New Yorkers way of life, the subway and our first difficult encounters. I feel that everything has been going on so fast that my behavior and southern vision are quickly staying behind, and that I’m beginning to let go, little by little, and to live the Apexart experience.

I had a delicious lunch with the Apexart people today: Steven, Cybele and Julia. I felt them very close to me, and very concerned with my needs, with me living every day towards my personal growth and professional development: to find new motors that inspire me on the next part of my projects in Chile. New networks, ideas and forms of connecting, which for us is very difficult: the growth and the strengthening of art and artists, of each and every piece of artwork that manage to mobilize our local culture.

This residence is just beginning and I’m quickly living new adventures, new lessons, feeling that my “autism” is living its final days.