Di Tella en los medios
Buenos Aires Herald
8/09/15

‘Outsider art breaks modern hierarchies’

Sao Paulo Biennale curator Lars Bang Larsen focuses on less known bits of art history

Danish writer, curator and scholar Lars Bang Larsen is in Buenos Aires this week to talk with his publisher about the coming publication of his essays, visit artists’ studios in preparation of next year’s Sao Paulo Biennale and give a lecture and seminar at the Di Tella University. The Herald spoke with the art historian, prior to his visit, about his coming lectures, the misrecorded art of the 1960s and the focus on uncertainty at the 32nd S. Paulo Biennale, where he is part of the curatorial team.

Have you been to Buenos Aire before?

Yes, actually I have. Once in 2007. It was for pleasure – I am very much looking forward to visiting for work now and learn more about the city and the artistic scene.

You will give a lecture and a three-day seminar at the Di Tella University focused on art and the nervous system. What can we expect?

Well, I have researched visual art in relation to the psychedelic, the occult and the esoteric, and that’s what I will talk about.

When I think of psychedelic art, I think of posters of the 60s with wavy circular graphics in different colours.

That’s what most people think about when psychedelic art is mentioned, but the counterculture of the 60s led to much more. There were manifestations, cultural happenings, which are all marginalized in the history of art as it is being taught to us. When I was studying art history, I noticed that not much had been written about this, nor considered part of the canon as art is being studied, hence I started to research it. Especially how it impacted not just North America but others parts of the world.

Like Latin America.

Yes, and Scandinavia, and the former Soviet Union.

So which Latin American artists did you include in your research?

Well, interestingly enough the Di Tella had awarded Marta Minujín a travel grant to the US in 1968, where she immersed herself in the hippie culture. Upon her return, she set up shop at the Di Tella with a project she had called Importación/Exportación. She imported the hippie culture, with tie dye, smoke and strobe machines, turned the Di Tella into a workshop and a living place, where people could stay and submerge into this subculture. The exportation part never happened. She told me that nothing ever gets exported from Argentina (the Di Tella also closed around that time). This Fluxus type of performance is an example of how the hippie culture was used by an artist in a clever way. It was not just about love and happiness but also about markets. Hélio Oiticica is another Latin American artist I included in my research. He has not made psychedelic art in the American Timothy Leary kind of way, but much more open, extrovert, and supra-sensorial. Very Brazilian.

Does the nervous system you refer to have to do with the senses?

The art I am interested in goes beyond the cliché of drugs and the idea of the 60s. It has to do with affect, with animating the nervous system, with art made when artists are besides themselves. That’s why I am also interested in occult art, for example. Art created in the light of spirits. Something outside the artist, which the artist sees and transfers through art. I recently curated a show whose departure point was the art of forgotten Victorian-era spiritualist Georgiana Houghton (1814-1884). During her life she had been surviving in the margins, in a subculture, and has not been included in our history of art. But when you see her watercolours, the abstract shapes she used, it is unbelievable. Mid-19th century, mind you, 60 years before Picasso started with abstraction!

What about beyond form?

Besides the form and the production process, the political position of outsider art is also interesting. It’s always made as part of social struggles. The hippie culture in its anti-capitalist rebellion and Houghton, for example, during the women’s liberation movement and religious anarchism. It’s almost always about breaking down the modern hierarchies.

So what connects the psychedelic art with occult art?

Perhaps you could say it’s a fascination for Strange Art, which doesn’t look like other type of art. These artists work with the nervous system. They let other forces take over, whether drugs or spirits, and find a method to channel it. Most of them have a problem with the art object itself. Everything moves with them. It is art that is never still and always in process. That’s why you see a lot of installations for instance, sketches, moving images or other more ephemeral art forms as their “object.” Nevertheless there is a method in their madness.

And you want to understand the method of madness?

Yes!

Is it this kind of art that you are also looking for in the light of the 2016 Sao Paulo Biennale ?

I am part of a curatorial team. Jochen Volz is the new artistic director of the Biennale and together with Gabi Ngcobo (South Africa), Júlia Rebouças (Brasil) and Sofía Olascoaga (Mexico), we are developing the concept. Volz has proposed Measures of Uncertainty as the 32nd biennale’s working title, and I am quite certain this will actually be its title. We have been talking about ecologies, different spheres woven into one another, how nature and culture create new habitats. How the human being and the machine interact in these new spheres. How art and science are intertwined. The relation between affect and fear.

Have you introduced your concept of art vis-a-vis the nervous system?

No (he laughs). I haven’t dared to introduce the term yet.

Why not?

Well, it is a collaborative endeavour and the debates we have had haven’t gone into that direction yet.

Have you talked about different notions of uncertainty in different parts of the world? Uncertainty in Latin America could almost be considered normality.

It’s a very big theme in post-modern thinking. How does one qualify uncertainty? We want to make the theme permeable to the challenges of every day life. I realize that to talk about uncertainty in Copenhagen or Sao Paulo is a completely different thing. In Northern Europe, there is an institutional drowsiness (everything is organized, and set to provide certainty). That is not the case in Latin America, where uncertainty is so much part of the every day. This will be addressed at the Biennale in 2016 and the workshops leading up to it in the region.

Where and when

Lars Bang Larsen’s public lecture will be held today at the Di Tella University (Campus Alcorta | Av. Figueroa Alcorta 7350) at 7pm. For participation at the lecture or the 3 day seminar, please contact the UTDT . Free admission. The lecture will be in English.

By Silvia Rottenberg