At the age of 45, the medial artist who has made a career as a teacher and researcher at the University of Chile came to replace Francisco Brugnoli, who spent 23 years at the head of the Museum of Contemporary Art. In this interview, carried out by Word Public magazine, Cruz points out that he dreams of reliving the history of the Parque Forestal building, turning it into a laboratory for artists who show their work, and preparing the Quinta Normal headquarters for multimedia and experimental formats. In this context, it is clear about its main challenges: getting around the meager budget and consolidating the MAC as a national museum.
Daniel Cruz (1975) recognizes that, probably, the reasons why his name was imposed on others to assume as new director of the Museum of Contemporary Art have more to do with his academic curriculum at the Faculty of Arts of the U. de Chile – on which he depends the museum— than with its networks of contacts in the local and international art scene.
Perhaps that is why just two days after he officially took office, a press release described him as “little known in the industry.” But the truth is that Cruz, a visual artist of medium career, who has participated in innumerable collective art exhibitions and international biennials, and which even promoted the creation in 2011 of the Matilde Pérez, Art and Digital Technologies contest, is above all known in its sector, that of artistic research, experimentation and education.
“I think they came to my name because this year and a half, from my previous role as academic director of the Faculty of Arts, it has been my turn to have a lot of presence in different instances of the University, making presentations related to art in university councils, in relations between the Faculty and vice-rectories. My name doesn’t appear out of nowhere, ”says Cruz. “Immediately, many important artists at the national level wrote to me giving me support and encouragement in the face of this challenge and making themselves available for whatever I needed. That is the back cover that the headline of the newspaper does not record ”, he adds.
In his 23 years in charge of the MAC, Francisco Brugnoli He carried out a titanic task: he raised the building of the Forest Park, which had been in ruins since the 1985 earthquake, obtaining direct funds in 2004 for about 1,750 million pesos. It grew the collection from 1,700 pieces to more than 3,000 and brought samples of important international artists who set milestones at the local level such as Yoko Ono in 1998; Spencer Tunick’s performance in 2002; the Fluxus movement in 2005; the coming of the Sao Paulo Biennial between 2004 and 2007; and the Michelangelo Pistoletto retrospective in 2018.
However, today Daniel Cruz must face a latent budget crisis in which the institution has always lived, a situation that Brugnoli could not reverse and that today was exacerbated due to the pandemic. “We have been closed for 14 months, so my first task is to implement the return plan with the team. We have started to open to clean the rooms and we have reconnected with all the artists who must exhibit in the second semester. We have 29 exhibitions committed to inaugurate”, He says.
As for resources, the artist acknowledges that they are deficient. “We receive about 600 million pesos a year, which, compared to other cultural spaces, is very limited, especially for the amount of square meters that we have spread over two venues and the number of exhibitions that we develop. He thinks that the GAM obtains 1,300 million pesos and its space and programming is much smaller, “he says.
– How do you plan to deal with the problem of the resources that the museum receives?
—I think this is a question that as a University [de Chile] We have to approach, understanding that the museum is not only a device of the Faculty of Arts, but an extensional center of a university nature, but of national relevance. The MAC has to be considered as important and necessary as other spaces that the University itself has, such as the Clinical Hospital or the Seismological Center. Today the entire budget comes from the Faculty of Arts, but we are already considering other possibilities to generate an injection that is not only from the University. The leasing of museum spaces for production companies and other types of events has been a historical way in which funds were raised, and that is a model that is made in other parts of the world, it is not something only of the MAC, but now for the pandemic has not been possible either. I think the MAC is an interesting place loved by artists, if it were not like that we would not have 29 exhibitions to open. Most of these artists raised their own funds to exhibit, they are not museum funds. Our programmatic grid has commitments until 2022.
Among the exhibitions expected for the second semester at Parque Forestal are “Leaking women”, by Soledad Pinto and Paula Salas, “Liquid solid surface”, by Alejandro Leonhardt, “Delira” by Nicole L’Huillier and “Post sculpture”, made up of 10 artists and curated by Luis Montes Rojas. While in Quinta Normal a selection of photographs from the MAC collection is programmed, from a project financed by the Comprehensive Museum Improvement Fund, of the National Service of Cultural Heritage, and “Emotional Geometry”, a proposal by Juan Castillo with curatorship by Andrea Pacheco González when we have the information.
Cruz says that the return plan is set for mid-August, but always subject to the Step by Step Plan. Either way, it won’t be a total opening as it was before the pandemic. “We have a number of protocols that must be met. The inaugurations will not exist as such, they will be other types of actions, attending the museum will not be so free, it will be necessary to schedule, there will be an accompaniment to define the traceability of the people who enter and leave, there will be a schedule to visit the museum in shifts and we will not abandon virtual exhibitions ”, he says.
A building for the MAC
Trained in undergraduate and master’s degree at the University of Chile and with a postgraduate degree at the Harvestworks Digital Media Art Center, in New York, Daniel Cruz belongs to the generation of artists from the late 90s who, as he says, lived through the “hangover” of the dictatorship: raised under the fear of repression and hope in an economic model that ended up completely failing. Like Iván Navarro, Patrick Hamilton, Mónica Bengoa, Voluspa Jarpa or Cristián Silva Avaria, Daniel Cruz graduated when art fairs were all the rage in the region and the Fondart was installed as the tool to produce art in Chile.
However, the new MAC director is skeptical of the market and has never participated in an art fair. Perhaps that explains why he is more interested in the process, the research, the materialities and the logics of work than in the artistic object itself.
“I think that putting the focus on the legitimation of the finished work is a mistake, it is important to talk about the creation processes as well. How many art collectors are there and how many commissioned works are there? In a country of 18 million people, very little, the local market does not exist. Today whoever calls himself an artist is making a declaration of political principles against this system, is an undisciplined being. I also tend to think that the artist is not an instantaneous being, and that everything we have experienced in these last two years of revolt is something that we are not going to finish seeing right now. It is interesting to read that sequence that has to do with the tours and not necessarily with an immediate response. There is also a danger that the work of art becomes a contingency story that can be pamphlet, it is difficult for me to read such immediate responses. I have the feeling that the artist is observing and has other administration and reading times. My own projects have a plot of three to four years ”.
His last sample, developed between April and June 2019 at the MAC of Quinta Normal, was titled “Tissue thicknesses” and gathered a series of objects between photos, videos, spray paint, reactive installations, texts and mobile applications that spoke about “the meaning of being online, the age of technology and information” and “the concepts of privacy, invisibility, transparency, monitoring and tracing ”.
Before, the artist had developed other works such as “Robotype” and “1cm deep ocean” —both exhibited at the MAC of Parque Forestal, at the Biennial of Media Arts and at the Cerrillos National Art Center—, where he used searches for keywords on Twitter that were then materialized by a robotic system on a sandy floor. Everything was manipulated by the spectator himself.
—What is the curatorial line that you want to impress on the museum and what will be your way of working in that sense?
—I am very interested in the interdisciplinary field as an element that is also in my practice and that has to do with the exercise of art in a broader sense — dance, music, performing arts—, where the interdisciplinary speaks of contemporaneity. The MAC should be projected there. We are in a very hard work with the team, we have already formed a small internal editorial committee to raise the new model of calls that we are going to make to the national and international artistic community. I am not a curator and I do not pretend to be one now. I am a visual artist, I love teaching, I love doing research, I love working with people, teaming up and opening conversations. Until now, the museum worked with Francisco as the sole curator, but what I propose is that we have a position as a museum and not me as the only person. Nor do I see the MAC as a platform for my work.
There is also a line that has to do with more emerging practices, with spaces that we want to start enabling in Quinta Normal, specifically. There is a very attractive subway for lighting work, projections, installations that require a very contemporary logic, which is not necessarily that of the white cube as a gallery. And on the other hand, my idea is to activate the outer perimeter of Quinta Normal, which is protected and would be interesting for certain works.
Open the museum and attract the public with something more than a simple banner that says MAC. In the case of the Parque Forestal building, it seems important to me that it be the place to read the museum’s collection, to reveal a conversation about the historical works of our cultural journey as a country, but also give the possibility for young artists to settle there and establish a laboratory space, ask ourselves how we can support the development of their research and works. Today there is a lot of ignorance of certain techniques and materials and the museum can give support in this and, in those terms, for example, make crosses with other disciplines of the University such as science. I believe that there we would fulfill the university role of building an accompaniment for the artists not only in the exhibition and, incidentally, that the public could see how the artists work.
Read the full interview on the magazine website Public Word
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