04.21 — 05.21.21
Malba presents the eighth exhibition in the program “History as Rumor,” dedicated to the performance Lección de acuarela (La escuela) by Carlos Leppe (Chile, 1952–2015). This action was carried out as part of the Third Biennial of Trujillo, Peru, in 1987.
Lección de acuarela —also known as La escuela—was an unplanned performance. It was smuggled in by Carlos Leppe and his accomplices (Nelly Richard, Juan Dávila, Gustavo Buntinx) at the end of November 1987 at the Third Trujillo Biennial: the traditional provincial city that was then struggling to put itself on the contemporary cultural map.
The action took place in a public school classroom, which contained a blackboard covered in deliberately smudged writing, a school chair, and a microphone placed on a lectern. The room was dark, with a single spotlight shining on the blackboard. In this scenographic space of darkness, Leppe, wearing glasses painted over with gold paint that left him blind, performed a series of excessive and disconcerting actions—shouting, slurping murky liquids from his shoe, regurgitating, crying, urinating—that problematize the status of the pictorial tradition and the place of the gaze, of the visual, of clairvoyance. In personal trauma and in national history (Chile in the throes of change at the time).
In addition to other minutiae, such as the great “phallocentric tradition” of the West, according to one of our “rumorists.”
Data Sheet
Curator: Gustavo Buntinx
Testigos: Ticio Escobar, Gerardo Mosquera
Rumoristas: Eugenia Brito, Catherina Campillay, Mariairis Flores, Justo Pastor Mellado
Institutional Colaborators: Micromuseo («al fondo hay sitio») | D21 Proyectos de Arte
Opening conversation
Wednesday, April 21 at 6:00 p.m.
Participants: Gustavo Buntinx y Estrella de Diego
Presents: Gabriela Rangel
Institutional Collaborators
History as Rumor
Multiple movement performances
On the occasion of the celebration of its nineteenth anniversary, Malba presents La historia como rumor (History as Rumor), an annual program of online exhibitions created by Gabriela Rangel, Malba’s artistic director, with the aim of documenting and contextualizing a set of performances that took place at different times and in various places in the Americas and the Caribbean, in a historical transition period marked by the end of the Cold War and the advent of the internet.
A collaboration between guest curators and various international museums and institutions is the starting point to present a research project every month that will allow us to revisit a series of actions and performances that became production milestones of their time, and that will engage in a direct or indirect conversation with problem areas of the present. A video record of testimonies from spectators who witnessed those performances, and of experts from different disciplines giving their opinion on them, will create an archive that will make up the oral history for each of the projects.
The selection of artists and specific actions respond to a very broad framework that began to be debated regionally in 1981, at the First Latin American Colloquium on Non-Objectual Art and Urban Art at the Museum of Modern Art in Medellin, Colombia. The starting point of the selection also understands the historical transmission of performances as a rumor, defined as a multiple movement in a diagram sketched by Ulises Carrión, Mexican poet and visual artist based in Amsterdam. Both frameworks propose the reconfiguration of a set of works in a period of time influenced by the conceptualisms that began globally since the 1960s.
The exhibition of each performance includes a record of the action, along with vast archival material, such as photographs, films, storyboards, press clippings and documents that aid the reconstruction of the piece and its context. It also includes an interview with someone who has witnessed the performance and four video testimonies by leading specialists from different disciplines. The choice of the various voices and materials is intended to recontextualize these performances in the present as contemporary expressions.
The series La historia como rumor will be available until September 21st, 2021 along with Malba’s 20th Anniversary celebration.
