Prologue for the exhibition book “Todo es mucho” [It’s All Too Much]. UTDT, february 2022
‘Modernity’ means contingency. It points to a social order which has turned from the worship of ancestors and past authorities to the pursuit of a projected future – of goods, pleasures, freedoms, forms of control over nature, or infinites of information… Without ancestor-worship,
meaning is in short supply - ‘meaning’ here meaning agreed-on and instituted forms of value and understanding.
T. J. Clark, Farewell to an Idea
T. J. Clark, Farewell to an Idea
This publication celebrates the exhibition ‘Todo es Mucho’ (It’s All Too Much), the result of an invitation from the Art Department at the Universidad Torcuato Di Tella to the curator, researcher and artist Santiago Villanueva. The exhibition is part of a series of experimental shows held in our exhibition gallery that began in 2011 and features work by Claudia del Río, Fernanda Laguna, Jorge Gumier Maier and Juan Del Prete in an exquisite whirlwind of associations both logical and surprising, light, shadow, excess, tenderness and sophistication.
Originally scheduled for the middle of 2020, It’s All Too Much was postponed several times during the pandemic. In 2021, the artistic community mourned the passing of Jorge Gumier Maier, a towering figure on the Argentine art scene who had a major influence on painting, objects, texts and curatorial practice from the 90s onward. The exhibition established connections between Maier and other important artists such as Fernanda Laguna and Claudia del Río, significant figures on the Buenos Aires and Rosario scenes for their work, activism and teaching. Meanwhile, Juan Del Prete, known as a precursor of abstract painting in Argentina in the 1930s, is here sensitively and cunningly being re-evaluated by academics and historians. In this project, Villanueva focuses on the language present in Del Prete’s late work, which is suggestively evocative of the “trash” contemporary aesthetic. It’s All Too Much does not take a chronological approach but rather establishes connections between the artworks through the technical and aesthetic affinities that appear to be a part of the genetic heritage of Argentine art. The show is also a portrait of a living artistic community whose collaboration we sought as we established narratives about the institutions and agents that make up the local art world and its numerous capillary pathways linking culture and society.
In its 14-year history, the Art Department has sought to embrace these multiple channels in order to provide a comprehensive overview of the debates that exist within the artistic community. In 2015, we held a symposium entitled ‘Mystery-Ministry. The aesthetic sphere and professional discourse’ which explored the issues associated with the professionalization of the art scene and resistance to it from so-called unprofessional perspectives. The overarching hypothesis of these conversations held that professionalism involves excessive bureaucratization and institutionalization. This ‘normality’ favours hegemonic discourse, reducing the transformative power of artists by converting them into mere instruments of the cultural industries. One of the focuses of the debate was the dichotomy between local and global processes, comparing and contrasting mega-galleries and the international biennial circuit with the idiosyncrasies of local art scenes with their restricted markets, developing institutions and excessive centralization in big cities such as Buenos Aires.
Adopting Jorge Gumier Maier’s concept of ‘domestic curatorship’, the exhibition establishes a dialogue with the debates presented during that conference, providing a textual context. Over the past few years, Villanueva has been researching the unstable category of ‘Argentine art’ through a two-sided reading of the idea of ‘the domestic’, meaning both “the national” and “that which pertains to the home”. It’s All Too Much is an exploration of a kind of intergenerational lingua franca: a praxis of Paraná riverside bricolage that combines the economic virtues of recycling with modernist gestures that have been present and remain in Argentine practice and sensibilities since the time of mass immigration from Europe. In response to a modernity of pure contingency such as that described by T. J. Clark, the artworks featured in this exhibition create a family of forms, tones and approaches that might be described as authentic ‘local colour’ able to create meaning in a sustainable manner.
We believe that the indomitable epistemology of the language of visible art forms prevents the fixing of intransigent positions and stances. This makes art an excellent stage on which to enact ideas that can be difficult to express and discussed with words but that might be better communicated through experimental exhibitions that illuminate the past and present. We are proud to have been the venue for the material and retinal reverberations that this group of artists has produced, transforming the space into a great town square full of both familiar figures and friends as well as strange, unknown quantities.