To kick off, let me apologise, on behalf of my people, for the Tate Modern in London, England. Today I saw what a modern art gallery should be like, and the Tate Modern it wasn't.
I had to pay 20 pesos/U$D5/£3
.50 to get into MALBA, the "Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires" - and, because it was peeing down outside today and therefore anything indoors was popular, I also had to queue for a while. Getting into the Tate Modern, on the other hand, is free, and you get to start with the art within a couple of minutes. However, that's where the scales stop tilting in favour of the Tate.
The MALBA is light and airy. The art is accessible and varied, and, as you walk through the MALBA, the lighting changes to suit the artwork - one of the things making it a much less repetitive experience than visiting the different floors of the Tate.
More importantly, the art in the MALBA is much more accessible and less pretentious than in the Tate. Whereas the Tate Modern has an emperor's new clothes feel ("Can't everyone see that that's just a big canvas covered in red paint?"), the MALBA is filled with modern art that deals much more explicitly with themes of life, death, sexuality, politics. Sometimes I think there is nothing wrong with saying what you mean, or at least giving a damn good hint as to what's on your mind, if you're painting something.
When I went to the MALBA, I spent most time in two of the exhibitions - the first, a fairly permanent-looking exhibition on "Latin American Art of the 20th Century", which includes some pieces by Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo and Antonio Berni, amongst many others
. The exhibition takes you from the origins of "modernity" in the 1910s and 1920s through to the "hyperrealisms" of the 1980s and 90s. Now I won't overstate the educative nature of the exhibition; I still don't know what modernity and hyperrealisms are, but I liked what I saw.
Then, on the second floor, there was a (more temporary, I assume) exhibition of black and white photos from Robert Mapplethorpe. This was where the sex and sexuality came in. Plenty of pics of his lovers, drag queens and figures of the 1970s - although, having already seen a few photos of Andy Warhol on the first floor, I really didn't need another one by Mapplethorpe. Warhol gets on my nerves.
I wasn't overkeen on many of the Mapplethorpe photos. To give you a flavour, one photo was of a dick being 'sounded' (ask your gay dad, if you don't know) with a dagger. A couple of men were taking photos of each other in front of the daggered dick, which made me want to take a photo of the two men taking each other's photos in front of the daggered dick (I had in mind some kinda commentary on the persistence of phallocentricity). But, having already been told off for taking photos on the first floor, I didn't fancy being thrown out of the MALBA for photographing dicks who are photographing each other in front of a dick with a knife. There's no glory in that.
But there were a few Mapplethorpe pics I really liked - see the 1988 self-portrait below.
When I got back to the B&B, I chatted to someone who said he didn't think much of the MALBA, which made me wonder whether I liked the place because London had so lowered my expectations of modern art galleries. The next time it pisses down in Buenos Aires, I'm going to go back to the MALBA and decide whether or not that's the case.
www.malba.org.ar
MALBA trumps Tate
Sunday, July 18, 2010
Buenos Aires, Distrito Federal, Argentina
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