Paula Massarutti

BIEN VISTO (Well seen)
A self-portrait of Buenos Aires province
2009

(…)
My first working activity was to visit the Museum. This institution had been closed for two years to be restored. In spite of it, the building still has leaking problems and its storeroom has been dismantled although it is the place where 4000 works, which belong to the cultural patrimony of the province, should be preserved.
(...)
The Microspace hall is a small cubicle with a glass window which can be seen from the entrance of the Museum. This entrance also has glass doors, so the hall can be seen from the outside. I immediately thought of a habitat-fishbowl. Later on, I was told that in public offices those places with glass paneled walls where the boss’s office is are called fishbowls. There the boss keeps locked all the necessary elements for the work and all the documents to which the rest of the employees should have no access. I also visited the other premises of the Museum. I spent several days living together with all the people in the office, in the halls as if I were a member of the staff. In this way I could get acquainted with the employees, learn about their activities, their ranks, their timetables, etc. I realized that there was very little space for the enormous quantity of employees (approximately 50), lack of material resources, of organization in the fulfilling of the specific administrative and technical tasks of the Museum but at the same time a labour negotiation accepted by all of them.

REALITY FICTION
I suggested performing a fictional-functional office inside the exhibition hall. The purpose of this was to present a mega-image of another image, the subjects (the Museum employees) doing their daily work, in their own space (the Museum) but with an unique variation: they would do it within the expositive space (window connected to the outside of the building). In consequence a lay-out game would be set: “perform yourself” and “fare finta” (perform as if).The expositive space, commonly designed to produce a metaphor, through this procedure, would produce a fiction that is reality. This performance would propose the existance of a “realityfiction”, such as Josefina Ludmer suggests when she defines the “postautonomas” scriptures. These scriptures do not admit literary readings; this means that it is not known or matter whether they are or not literature. It does not matter or it is not known whether they are reality or fiction. They place themselves locally, in an everyday reality to produce present and this is precisely its sense. (2)
(…)
TAKING POSITION

Everything started with the meetings, first with the Museum Director, who authorized me to invite the staff to participate in Bien Visto and later on with the employees. In the Institution, my presence aroused questions and certain uncomforted. The Specific Social Group of the Museum employees had to face the necessity to decide what to do. It is important to point out that this group is very different in its structure: some of them have Art University Degrees, others are administrative staff, some are Union Leaders, and the rest have very different backgrounds. To participate or not in this art work, forced them to confront their own office mates. Some of them felt the necessity to justify themselves, so some mornings they spontaneously gathered in an office on the first floor. Some questions were presented that kept the Institution, the participants and the context in tension. Among other things, they meditated: if what they were invited to do was a work of art, if they were going to be manipulated by me, which was the role of the Museum, how is Art defined. They also remarked that this work was also going to make evident that some employees did not honor the labour timetable (informality that is quite frequent), because in Bien Visto they had to commit themselves to fulfill the working hours. A group with a more positive approach, knowing that there is an ongoing prejudice in the society that public servants “do nothing”, are incompetent and do not have the necessary capacity to occupy the positions they have, began to think that the fact that they would be exposed to the spectators, in a working role, might be a way to demystify this massive belief. Others disagreed with the idea of doing the performance, so they manipulated the information saying that the employees who would not take part in it, would be questioned by the authority of the Museum Director. This caused the urge on (phone calls out of labour environment) those employees who supported me in this performance.
Finally 14 employees of the whole Museum confirmed their participation. There were among them several from the Educational Area, the people in charge of the Microspace hall (who with perseverance make the Museum function in spite of its precarious condition), one employee from the conservation-restoration area (after asking her boss, who did not agree with the idea of the experience at all), some administrative employees and one person who works in the Museum reception.
One of them told me: “- After all the debate we have had we are no longer the same”. Pressed to take a position meant: know what the other thought, who the other was. All this caused a redefinition of the relationship among them.
THE PROTAGONISTS
The identities of the employees involved have been omitted to preserve their jobs.
(almost) BIEN VISTO
Days before the opening, when the setting was already going on, the head of the technical area demanded from me an explanation concerning my work. Among other not very solid considerations; he told me that the objects placed in the hall damaged the image of the Museum. He recounted explicitly to the fixed bicycle, a picture of the Province of Buenos Aires that was hung upside down (homage to Torres García and García Uriburu), a virgin that I found on the window of an office on the first floor and in general, the precarious conditions of the materials used. I once learnt that a work of art is not in the object itself but in the head of each person who takes pleasure in considering it. I saw no damage except for that which had been produced in his own head. Marc Augé speaks about the image and he says about it that “it exercises an influence and possesses a power that exceeds far more the objective information that it provides”...Is there anything more realistic and in a sense more informative about life in the USA that a good American series? (3) Later as if I were in my own argentine sitcom, I was summoned to the director’s office and I had my last meeting with the trio constituted by the Museum Director, the Technical Area Director and the person uncharged of the hall. There I went on giving good reasons to do Bien Visto and after a while they gave me an intelligent verdict: “To censor the work would, by no means, be convenient”.
THE OFFICE (Inside-outside)

Marc Augé mentions the word anthropologic place a concrete and symbolic construction of a space that might not by itself account for the vicissitudes and contradictions of the social life, but to which refer all those to whom a place is assigned no matter how modest or humble it might be (4). And he goes on “Of course the intellectual status of the anthropologic place is ambiguous. It is no other than the idea, partially materialized, that have those who dwell it, of it relation with its territory, its fellow men and with others” (5).
The placed chosen, the assembled office in the Microspace hall, had two functions, on one hand its articulation with the rest of the Cultural Institute being part of the informatics net and on the other hand a fictional function. Some elements induce the pleasure, the game in the discipline of the work. Among them a fixed-bicycle to do gym in front of the glass, some tins just in the case water might start to filter, a manual juice jug, some plastic plants and mudded ceramic floor, a clock without numbers, some wooden folders. Each performance was free to use them as they pleased. All the objects displayed started to have sense and function during the 15 days that the performance lasted. The participants redefined the areas, the use of them and the comfort of the new office. Inside were the employees/performers outside the spectators/supervisors of the work. Some played the role of baffling the spectator; others used the performance to the rein vindicate themselves as workers. The audience formed by a group of employees and visitors of the museum such as art students, educational science students, retired people and possibility people in general, in their role of supervisors invited to register, had the of revenge, judge and exercise the power they had as tax payers.
One day, because there was a political meeting leaded by the province Governor, about a hundred people approached the museum. They did not belong to the art environment. They were part of the presentation of digitalization of the cultural patrimony programmer. We were inside Bien Visto when one of the employees, in a very angry way because of the amount of people present who wanted to be part of the political act, said: –“We are the truth, they are the fiction”, while he pointed at them from the inside of the glass. The immediateness of the acts, the unexpected performances inserted people in real time. There was no control over the acts within the work, in consequence the authenticity was questioned and stressed.
Claire Bishop calls Delegated Performance (6) this type of work where real people constitute the work of art. In this case it is not a luxury game, because the salaries of the performers were paid by the Institution. This Museum has no money to organize exhibitions. It can hardly pay the employees salaries and a few other expenses. The existing economical resources were well used, the employees accepted, by their free will, to be fiction/work in Bien Visto. In this way the economic system itself was intervened.
This art work proposed to fictionalize in a Critical way the problem of the relationship among subjects in their labour environment, the game and relations of power. It troubled a specific space to reflect on itself. Once more quoting Augé “The very own of the symbolic universes is to constitute for men who have received it as a heritage, a means to recognize rather than to know: universe where everything is a sign, groups of codes than some know how to use and they possess the key to it, but everybody admits its existence, totalities partially fictitious but effective, cosmologies that could be thought they have been conceived to be the pleasures of the ethnologists” (7).
Several questions arouse: ¿Is play to be someone else, do like others do to be oneself? ¿Does this produce recognition effects?

Through Bien Visto I suggested a group of people to place themselves as objects of the reflexive operation. Perform as “yourself” and “as if” approach them to a self portrait not as the self indulgement of “being in the window” but as an artistic personal experience and the capacity to see the existing conflict in the working environment.

Notes
(2) Ludmer, Josefina, (comp.) (2007). Postautonomas literatures Literaturas. October 8, 2007.http://cuadernosdelengua.blogspot.com/2007/10/literaturas-postautonomas-por-josefina.html
(3) (4) (5) (7) Augé Marc, (1992) No-Site. Anonymous spaces. Barcelona: Gedisa. (6) Bishop Claire, (2009) Conference: Delegated Performance in Contemporary Art. Research Art Center (CIA), Buenos Aires.

Extract from report of scholarship, whose implementation had the contribution of National Group Projects Grants awarded by the National Endowment for the Arts.

I like to think of the art work of this TOP 9:
- Marcel Duchamp
- Alberto Greco
- Federico Peralta Ramos
- Maurizio Cattelan
- Francis Allys
- Gabriel Orozco
- Víctor Grippo
- Roberto Jacoby
- Fernanda Laguna

Antonio Vigo’s work “Bunch of Street Lights” [Manojo de Semáforos] (La Plata 1968) is a preceding work, under the bias of irony manages to question the conceptual and artistic production of contemporary Argentinian art, I consider it to be a milestone. The exhibition “Between silence and violence” [Entre el silencio y la violencia] (2004) in Space Telefónica Foundation, because it revealed current conflicts through a curatorial script that combines subtle though powerful works , is an exhibition about the exercise of freedom of speech. The work “Heavy Mental” [Heavy Mental] from Gastón Pérsico (2006) and its subsequent reinstatements in which the work gained more and more experience. It seems to me that this work strolls between the sublime, the economy of resources and the brilliant thing.