The private collector as a builder of narratives of Latin American art

The Calmon-Stock Collection of contemporary art, located in the city of Rio de Janeiro, more specifically in the collectors' department in Lagoa Rodrigo de Freitas, brings together more than 300 works of art that attempt to present a panorama of the contemporary production of Brazil from the beginning of the year 2000 to the present day. The collection, initially private – and comprising two decades of collecting – became public when in 2017 the collectors decided to publish a printed and online book about the set. Called by Omar Salomão and Fernando de La Rocque, artists who curated “Bodies, Letters and Some Animals,” the book brought together most of the works, the more than one hundred Brazilian artists – including the presence of three Argentine artists – and also a set of texts from an international group of gallery owners, art entrepreneurs, sociologists, critics and philosophers under the curatorship of the writer and translator Marcelo Backes. The more than 120 people who built and are part of the collection catalog – led by the hands of collectors Roberto Calmon and André Stock – attempt to (re)tell a history of Latin American art at the beginning of this century. The general purpose of this essay is to indicate connections and identities between the catalog of the Calmon-Stock Collection and the exceptional achievements of the Hermeneutics Project in the effort to develop reading and rewriting procedures for Latin America. Art – as well as academia, according to collectors – is a powerful political space for dialogue and for the action of a “we” in the transformation of narratives in Latin America.

When analyzing the minutes of the Project, over the years, the effective commitment of its organizers to the primacy of a “we” stands out. By taking the initiative more than a decade ago to propose the Faculty of Sociology of the University of Buenos Aires as a place of political struggle and coexistence of different theoretical perspectives – “beyond the canons established from the strict separation of the disciplines” – María Ester Rossi stood against the provision that is currently rapidly transforming entire departments of human sciences into deserts for dialogue, internal or public. This work won our admiration for representing the creation of a very fertile soil for thought and a remarkably favorable terrain for joint political action. Grateful for the opportunity to collaborate with the group on this day, I want to demonstrate that the theoretical frameworks of the project – with a surprising affinity and dialogue – fully support the Calmon-Stock Collection, its book and even the experience of collecting. The theoretical frameworks to which I refer can be found in “Cartographies of the Baroque in Latin America,” a seminal text by the author.

The exemplarity of this text consists in the fact that Rossi proposes, based on the centrality of the baroque in the cultural context of Latin America – as an experience that we suffer beyond its status as a concept – a hermeneutics that is a genuine expression of our tortuous and paradoxical Latin American identity. However, from the perspective of the baroque as an operative concept, a hermeneutics specific to our realities is possible: a way of reading that takes into account our open, unhealed veins, and that makes it possible to transform our brutal political narratives. Rossi states in his cartography that “the Latin American baroque interior is a womb with irregular edges that closes on its fleeting inhabitant and at times suffocates it” (Rossi, 2016, pg.118). How can we not remember the suffocation when an autocratic political model is currently being developed in Brazil that destroys the social fabric of our fragile democracy? Through this training text, it becomes effectively possible to cement action strategies for the construction of other identities, since its cartography – in its invaluable mapping – represents both the delimitation of a theoretical-strategic territory and also the admission of its immense vastness – consequently, of its inexorable paroxysm and the infinite work it demands to come. It is important to remember, as far as the task of philosophy is concerned, that Anaximander, 610-547 BC, author of the first written philosophical text – which deals with justice – was also the author of the first known map in Greece.

The years of crisis that include the advent of the parliamentary coup against the elected president Dilma Rousseff, which began in December 2015, until today – when the crisis is deepened with the sudden arrival to the government of a civil-military group of extreme -right – are the years in which collectors decide to publish the catalog in support of Brazilian artists and arts, which since 2015 have been faced with an unprecedented attack. In fact, the closure of contemporary art exhibitions throughout the country, the political and legal persecution of artists and curators, the extinction of the Ministry of Culture in 2016 – along with the paralysis of the body that promotes Brazilian contemporary art on the international stage (Arpex) – the destruction of the National Museum and the latest bull that seeks to banish the disciplines of sociology and philosophy from public universities, represent the attempt of this reactionary wave – incompatible, furthermore, with the agenda of contemporary art – to destroy the institutions that ensure enlightenment in Brazil. This is the backdrop for the collectors' project to launch the book: the abrupt turnaround of a country that in less than two decades, in a spectacular twist, went from a hunger-eradicating democracy, creditor of the International Monetary Fund, chaired by a former guerrilla, to a country in serious economic depression, with 14 million unemployed (but with our Merval index breaking records) and presided over by a former army captain and hundreds of soldiers in public institutions.

If it is true that a baroque hermeneutics makes this type of torsion visible on our continent, it also indicates the path towards strategic actions that point out emergency exits for such contradictions, which seem to arise from the long-standing problem of colonialism in Latin America – currently added to the newest specters of contemporary capitalism that insist on subjugating Latin American identities under the aegis of a new and brutal neoliberal gospel as a solution to the intricate problems of our continent. In this sense, in “Cartographies” Rossi correctly postulates that the baroque is “a form of resistance that operates in the symbolic dimension, a drama with epic characteristics that has not yet concluded” (Rossi, 2016, pg.100). With its immense dynamism and immersed in international market laws, contemporary art as a global phenomenon makes possible – in the vision of collectors – the opportunity for actors from the most varied continents to meet: why not then bring to our epic drama these characters, beyond Latin American territory and even art? In this sense, the strategy of the Calmon-Stock Collection assumes its baroque style, becoming a focus of resistance by creating, in defense and support of contemporary art, a hybrid (the book) that is a synthesis and oxymoron as a joint and international work of the more diverse experiences in art. Its objective, by expanding the borders of art, curatorship and thought – beyond our territory – is to operate a cunning, if you can call it that, transubstantiation of the cliché “art collection”, or “Latin American art collection”. or “Latin American art”, by bringing to the center of our drama, let's say, the focus of analysis. In effect, such a strategy placed a narrative of Latin American art interfering, provoking and unceremoniously entering the world, transforming a drama of the Latin American labyrinth into a drama of the labyrinth of the world. Perhaps it is our “no” camouflaged in an apparent institutional acquiescence.

The effort resulted in the making of 500 numbered books that were distributed to curators, artists, philosophers, museums and galleries in Brazil and in more than 7 countries: Germany, Canada, Chile, Holland, Argentina, England and Spain. Simultaneously, the book was launched online on the website www.colecaocalmonstock.com, and so far – without any web-marketing strategy – it has reached more than 10 thousand views. These figures represent for collectors the impact of what appears to be a successful strategy, since internationalization from its beginning dialogues with Rossi's proposal of an idea of ​​hermeneutics “understood as a practice of rewriting rather than interpretation, prone to a quasi-existence.” -parasitic in which the texts of others are both nourishing and hospitable matter” (Rossi, 2016, pg.119). Indeed, the rewriting practice that Rossi speaks of occurred in the catalog of the Calmon-Stock Collection in the call of the “foreign” text to the drama. Thus, first the collection was fed as nutritional material to European and Latin American intellectuals, so that later we could ourselves nourish ourselves with its texts, parasitize them and reinterpret them. The German philosopher Christoph Türcke, until now the most illustrious visitor to the collection in Rio de Janeiro, is an example of this.

At the beginning of his démarche for the book – in his text “What is art and more a little” – Türcke recalls that the cavemen did not understand the art they made, that is, the cave paintings and ornamental objects, as art. For the primitives, “artistic production was a kind of self-defense: a means of prohibiting temptations and threats through image formations…, so they are, in principle, no more than attempts to prohibit threats (Calmon-Stock, 2017 , p.49). For the philosopher, primitive art would mean displacement and exile, since in its beginnings it would occur “as a playful minimization of the terrible and the threatening” (ibidem). Can we reinterpret such a conception by thinking of the images in our collection as works in which threats that float over our Latin heads are displaced and chased away? May be. Türcke adds that the playful operation of the primitives also means a triumph over the threatening: because the primitives finally dared to play with the terrible. More: they dared to diminish it, distort it, muffle it, attenuate it, making it beautiful and graceful. And the funny for Türcke has two meanings:

…that of fragility, but also of ornament. When a tribal chief places a necklace of beast's teeth around his neck, he celebrates the weakening of the fatal tooth of the threatening animal. He triumphs over the fatal threat of the beast. "Beauty is, originally, the manifestation of a triumph." (Calmon-Stock, 2017, pg.49).

Could it be that we, collectors, artists, philosophers and curators, are conjuring – through the art collection – the terrible, the threatening? Are we, through art, cushioning the brutality that wants to destroy us, making beautiful and graceful the threat that will be fatal for us? What is our triumph? The Brazilian curator Evangelina Seiler had already identified elements in the Calmon-Stock Collection that were repeated in the catalogue. But what exactly is repeated in the collection? What is systemic about it? Are there images that could represent the “threatening ban”? For Seiler:

…the Calmon-Stock Collection systemically identifies the biographical presence of collectors through characters and issues that are repeated throughout the book. The collection ends up revealing a confession through artistic choices in a large collage that presents the affections, pains and prohibitions of the collectors, at the same time announcing a great tranquility in living with images as strong and full of meaning as the figures. terrifying, fearful and transformative of the Argentines Gabriel Grün and Lorena Guzmán” (Calmon-Stock, 2017, pg.53).

In fact, if there is (in this rewriting) systemic repetition of a theme in the collection, its origin is in the Argentine presence of Gabriel Grün and Lorena Guzmán, fetish artists of collectors. They are a true framework for the collection. Gabriel Grün and Lorena Guzmán taught us a lot about contemporary art. His extraordinary works – acquired in Buenos Aires in the early 2000s – have a very important place of symbolic and emotional reference, since we consider his works as a kind of matrix of the collection. The metamorphosis painting by Gabriel Grün, in particular, is a kind of founding element of the collection to the extent that it triggers and identifies a constant motif in many artists present in the catalog. Indeed, metamorphosis is a motif of contemporary art: if the hybrids of Gabriel and Lorena present an evident and sophisticated Latin elaboration of European baroque painting and sculpture (respectively Caravaggio and Bernini), resulting in shadowy, transhuman figures and macabre expressiveness, the hybrids created by Brazilian artists appear, as in Camila Soato and Gabriel Centurión, in a kind of unbridled and dirty cannibalization of the same techniques, making their figures aesthetically more violent, rude, in short, more “wild.” , dissonant, inharmonious. In the exemplarity of these artists, as well as in a large part of the works in this collection, we find images that relate in the figuration of bodies, words or animals the imprecision of the borders of things, the dismantling of the which is apparently whole. This (neo) baroqueism present in a large part of the works in the collection is flagrant, and perhaps means the (apparent) triumph over that which threatens and dominates us: miscegenation, hybridism, metamorphosis, cannibalism, the curve , the anti-logos, the dissonant, in short, our impossibility of making precise borders, since we are destined to live on their edges, as in a limbo. Paraphrasing Rossi – to underline the testimony that the book promotes – the “(neo) baroque would be a concept that would refer to a universe inhabited by bodies whose intensities make the borders between things imprecise; an effective concept for the construction of a hermeneutics that cannot fail to lend itself to the dissonant” (Rossi, 2016, pg.119). Imprecision, controversy, oxymoron, contradiction, is everything that threatens us, but also constitutes us. And that's what we have to deal with.

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From early on, the organizers of the Hermeneutics Project perceived the need to recover the Latin American essay as a practice, even choosing it as a genre to call for a contest. In 2017, at the opening of the conference – and regarding the presentation of the book “This is not a graft. Essays on hermeneutics and baroque in Latin America” – Gastón Beraldi emphasized in his speech, bringing to mind the process of elaboration of this election, that the structure of the essay in its Latin American form has always presupposed the militant activity of the establishment of the debate. For Beraldi, the quality of the Latin American essay would be based on the fact that it presents itself – in our latitudes – as a text that is a mode of combat, whose status would always be “more ethical than epistemological”, and more: “that there had always been in the essay Latin American – contrary to the individualistic character of the European essay – the primacy of a we, that is, a passionate writing where we would find a permanently present call to citizenship.” The Latin American essay would be a way of configuring the American identity, of seeking our authenticity, our own values, being American and, above all, a way of being faithful to ourselves. The construction of an academic project as well as the construction of an art collection – those in Latin America who seek to escape from orthodox canons or, let's say, market canons – must occur with the same paradigms of that genre: revolting against orthodoxy and seeking a free, own narrative. And in the same way presupposing the establishment of a citizen debate.

Indeed, an art collection from its inception necessarily enables and promotes not only a deep internal dialogue between the works (the philosopher Markus Gabriel points out in his text in the book that the works of art in the collection “comment on each other and that the exhibition space, the collectors' department, presents an infinite fundamental structure" ), but also a public and political dialogue between a "we": between friends, intellectuals, artists, curators, the public and the collectors themselves. Likewise between.

institutions, galleries, museums and universities, as now. The publication of the Calmon-Stock Collection book is an essay that also reproduces this theoretical framework chosen by the Hermeneutics Project. It is encouraging to share this experience/essay here in Buenos Aires, which for us is like our home. It seems that the gods fled our country. At a time when the Brazilian drama is heading towards a tragic outcome – far from falling into reactionary fear, as Marina Garcéz urges – we place our story and our hope on the altars of our Buenos Aires brothers.

Adorno, T. W. (1994). Or essay as a form. São Paulo: Attica.

Calmon-Stock, Coleção. (2017). Corpos, letters and some animais. Texts by: Marcelo Backes (org.). Authors: Markus Gabriel, Christoph Türcke, Diederich Diederichsen, Evangelina Seiler, Nina Saroldi, Alexandre Ribenboim, Olaf Velthuis and Daniele Dal Col. Rio de Janeiro. Edição Coleção Calmon-Stock. www.coelecaocalmonstock.com

Garcés, M. “The present is uncertain, but we must not fall into reactionary fear.” Interview with Diana Irusta, La Nación, 6/2/2019. www.lanacion.com.ar

March, J.L. (2010). Managed memory. Buenos Aires: Katz.

Rossi, M.E. (2016). “Cartographies of the Baroque in Latin America”. Rio de Janeiro: Ekstasis Revista de Hermenêutica e Phenomenologia. V.5/N°1. pp.91-120. On-line.

Rossi, M.E. (2011). “Thinking Latin America from a hermeneutics as energy.” Buenos Aires. IX Sociology Conference, Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Buenos Aires, 2011. www.aacademica.org/000-034/235. Online