Buenos Aires - 10. Fini

Every trip must come to an end, and as we packed and left for the aeroport, we realized BA just didn't want to let us go.
Our taxi was late.
The line in the aeroport that came to an end left us without seats together,
and when we finally were called to the gate two hours late, we waited another three hours just to depart (a baggage strike).
Buenos Aires left us with the impression of a city behind a misty wall.
Two days later, we arrived home, but somehow, the duality of the trip, the city, the people remains with us like a film of soap that was difficult to rinse off.

On the surface, the buildings and towers of Buenos Aires have a grand, old-world Parisian richness to them, but beyond the facade, was a city of third-world poverty existing quite seemlessly alongside the European image. If you have ever been to South Africa, the cardboard and tin towns exist within the same school and town boundaries as millionaires. It's unsettling for visitors who come from countries with greater numbers living in the middle classes.

Could we co-exist like this?

International Art: 2. From Bedrooms to Deserts in Chicago

The Art Institute of Chicago is famous for its collection of Impressionist paintings, and if you have ever been a college student with a poster of some pastel flowers on your dorm wall, then you will be amazed to look at the real source of that piece of wallpaper.

The first time I went to Paris and saw the ‘Mona Lisa’ at the Louvre, I was shocked by how tiny the painting was. ‘How could it be so small?!’ I thought, ‘when she is so big and famous?’  Besides being small, you can’t even find her because in Paris she is known only by her nickname on all of the signs, “La Joconde”.

You will have the same experience with every original you see.

Sure, you think you know Monet’s wheat fields, or Van Gogh’s pathetically small bedroom with the cute little wooden chair, but until you are standing right in front of the master that has spawned millions of posters and screensavers everywhere, you have not truly met its depth. An original painting is almost three-dimensional. Standing looking at something original like Manet or Monet, you feel as if you are greeting royalty, or an internet date. “Well, so there you are! That’s what you look like in person! You know, you are really not quite what I expected.”

And after you have voyeured through Van Gogh’s bedroom and Georgia O’Keefe’s ‘Red and Pink Rocks’, move on to the lesser known, but just as fascinating artists in Chicago’s modern design sections.

 

Hughie Lee Smith, for example, has a huge landscape piece called, “Desert Forms” which I swear could be a scene right out of Waiting for Godot. In fact, if I were to set the stage for Godot, I would want to use Smith’s version as a blueprint. The characters are eerie, alone, desolute, but still seemingly going somewhere or nowhere.

 

And in a city known for its architectural design, the Art Institute does not let you down. There are cushy arm chairs designed out of corrugated cardboard, and rooms designed out of old computer monitors.

 Walking outside in Chicago, you walk amongst the giants of building with diverse cityscapes at every compass point, and sculptures of those giants at every lake-side step.

The moral is: when in a large city, visit the masters, and the masters-to-be.

International Art: 1. China's Ai Weiwei: Without end or without direction?

On August 14^th, we anxiously stood in line under a 100m long snake with 50 other members of the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) to get a glimpse of one of the most sensationalized contemporary artists of this century: China’s Ai Weiwei.

Weiwei has spent the last decade under house arrest outside of the Beijing airport. His severe political activism and ‘voice that will-not-be-silenced’ has left him with a laneway of colourful video monitors and sound recorders compliments of the Chinese national government.

Despite this, Weiwei is an avid tweeter, facebook and internet communicator, and has sent his artistic visions and plans worldwide to be re-created and displayed elsewhere. This global political exposure has also made him one of the richest artists in the world. On the date of his Toronto opening, Forbes rated Ai the third richest artist in the World! (Number one and two were both gallery owners and sellers, not traditional artists at all.)

Weiwei’s works are circular. An architect by trade, he builds pieces without any beginning or end. ‘Bicycles’ have no seats or handle bars, and are connected throughout the piece. Similarly, ‘stools’ are all intimately connected without a single nail. You cannot separate one from the other; they are a whole.

This may be due to the Chinese culture of group cohesion, the whole working as one. It may also be a comment on where there is ‘no direction’, there is no one to lead.

More mercurial pieces such as ‘moon phases’ are a telescope through the room. Reminding us that at any one time, you can only ever seen a ‘phase’ of a person passing through their changing cycle of life.

Sadly, Weiwei has also been subject to a great deal of pain in his life. Much of this exhibit is taken over as a memorial to all of the school children who have died in substandard schools ruined by earthquakes. Stakes (and snakes) from the dead wreckage, smashed pots of ancestors, and a mourning wall of names stand as reminders to Weiwei that without integrity, we kill.

Contemporary art has the power to do this: it makes you think critically and reflexively. It challenges your world view. Weiwei does this without beginning, context or end. We confront the parallels on our own axis of the globe.

Canadian Art - 1. Konopaki, Neufeld, and Shuebrook

This next occasional travel series documents some of the visual art accessible in galleries across Canada, and the collective stories it tells.

Visual artists capture emotional thoughts, feelings, and living experiences on paper, and in other ways, much like a writer would capture a day or feeling in poetry, short story, or essay. For the next month and a half, anyone who has ever tried to ‘draw’ their feelings, or scrapbook a memory, will have the pleasure of seeing how Vancouver print artists Rodney Konopaki and Rhonda Neufeld do it.

    Each of their drawings begin with a single drawing or line or colour, then more is added to the paper to try to depict the emotion and how that day felt in colours and lines. For many of the pieces displayed, Konopaki and Neufeld walked through Banff National Park, and took in what the weather was like, things that they continually saw out of the corner of their eyes, and what inner feelings rose to the surface. Most of us would try to describe this in words, but Konopaki and Neufeld succeed in depicting the sensations of the day in a drawing diary. Pieces in the ’21 Days’ collection included everything from old snow fencing to corners of tickets and worn paper found, raising scrapbooking to a higher plane.

     Each piece becomes a daily journal of the walk the artists took. In ‘Initiate’, there is an explosion of black fuel from a hot yellow sun background. The Artist’s idea erupting in black ink onto the page and moving forward to grow and grow.

My favourite is ‘Summer’ in which a bee, or perhaps a firefly, lazily lights a meandering air above soft green ground and slow pieces of water. It’s how Summer should feel: light, soft, slow and whimsical.

Ontario artist Ron Shuebrook celebrates his 70^th birthday in the Thames Art Gallery by displaying a collection of geometric charcoal drawings that have never been seen before. Shuebrook’s pieces are Hoffman-like: the attempt is made to represent settings in their most elemental state. Like Konopaki and Neufeld, Shuebrook focuses on the exterior environment. What is the base outline of the shape looking up through a ceiling, at a sky, as in ‘Radiance’?

The elements of shape through a parking lot? At a moment’s glace, what is the outline of a harbour and its slips, in ‘Wharf’?

All of these ‘emotions’ are on display at the Thames Art Gallery in Chatham, Ontario until October 6, 2013, and you can meet the artists themselves on Friday-the-13^th of September, 7p.m.!

Buenos Aires - 9. Tangos and Swimming Pools

Calle Corrientes in Buenos Aires is the ‘Broadway’ of Argentina, and there are many, many theatres, shows, “Tangos” going on all the time. 

Even while we were visiting in the Winter months, it was difficult to ignore the sheer amount of entertainment options available all down the avenue and beyond. In fact, the arts are so alive in Buenos Aires, that when a historic theatre closes down, the country’s leading book chain, El Ateneo (Argentina’s Chapters), buys it and restores it for literary lovers. You could spend all day in one of Buenos Aires’ gorgeous book shops just gazing at the murals (or I could anyway.)

    The Tango, a dance originated in Buenos Aires, is actually recognized as a “UN World Heritage Site”, even though it is a dance and not a physical site; it is a sight. Ha H

ha, or we were a sight anyway when we tried a lesson one night with a group before the theatre’s main show. It is amazing how many variations of the Tango there actually are, and any number of shows use this diverse dance form to illustrate the story they are expressing. We only learned the simple 8-step move, but they gave us a little certificate anyway; movement is always worthwhile fun.

Besides dancing and walking to get our exercise, we tried to go swimming, but swimming and working out in a gym is tightly controlled by the ministry of health in Argentina, and unless you are a citizen with a doctor’s note, you cannot visit a public pool. That’s how medically important as a treatment swimming is in Buenos Aires – you need a prescription to go! We laughed at this at first, and thought perhaps it was another language mishap, but no, we had this confirmed by a very competent English-Spanish speaker: “you cannot go swimming or to the gym anywhere; you are not a citizen, and cannot get a note.” Okay, that’s clear. So if you want to swim in Winter in Buenos Aires, stay at the Hilton.

Buenos Aires - 8. The Academic View

Never try to start your day in a second language. This morning, at sun-up (well, 8:30 since it’s Winter), I asked a man for a croissant and coffee in French, then proceeded to say, “thank you for the bathroom Madam” as he handed me a chicken empanada. Not my best example of communication in Spanish, luckily, few things change much in academia and, for the rest of the day, various academic seminars left a comforting impression of how similar educational issues in Argentina are.

     One of the most famous educators to come out of South America this past century was Paulo Freire, and the World Comparative Congress on Education (WCCES) reinforced this. Freire was a Brazilian educator whose “pedagogy of the oppressed” was revolutionary in the 60s in South America, and elsewhere in the 80s after the New York Times wrote a huge series on Freire’s work. He is best known for his ‘Angicos’ project which sought to teach literacy and ground-breaking politics to Brazilians in poverty, the people ‘who didn’t have voice’. Today, he is still cited in almost every educational paper on ethics and equality and politics. His thought was that to change education, to make society better, you have to give voice to those who do not have one – you have to bring education into the public sphere.

     Half a decade later, educators still argue over how to do that. How do you provide a voice? How do you teach literacy?

How do you bring diversity to education? Arguments we hear over and over again in parliaments and board rooms across the continent. At conferences, educators argue how much ground has been gained since the Angicos project. UNESCO, a world organization with a focus on education for the masses, has just been given a new leader – the World Bank, and it is thought that this leader may have a different focus for education – commodity rather than quality.

  Education-as-a-commodity is probably one of the biggest changes in education since Freire. Students are spoken of in ‘units’; at universities as ‘BIUs’ (basic income units); and in terms of ‘transfer per’ amounts. Education always involved finance, but never so much as it does today. European publishing conglomerates write curriculum and content dependent directly upon how much a book can sell. Education, in short, is big business.

   When UNESCO came out with the Jacques Delors report, the four pillars of global learning – learning to know; learning to do; learning to be; and learning to live together – academics world-wide embraced the ‘all encompassing curriculum’, the ‘curriculum for all’, and yet how does a ‘global curriculum’ translate on the government level? As ‘learning to make money’.

   Here, in Argentina, that is their argument too: ‘there is too much economy in education and not enough equality.’

  I guess that is the one thing we all share in our global society: we are all worried about how it is going to be paid for!