Regine Basha

By Mary Katherine Matalon

Setareh Shahbazi, Why Not Bazar, 2008, Lacquered mdf. Photograph courtesy Wayne McCall.

Since her arrival in Austin in 2002, Regine Basha has been an energetic presence in the Texas art scene. As a co-founder of Fluent~Collaborative, the former Adjunct Curator of Arthouse and an independent writer and curator, Basha both introduced new artists and art work to Austin and helped nurture the growth of the Austin art community. This month, Regine and her husband, Gabriel Perrez-Barreiro, leave Austin for New York City. In anticipation of her departure, ...might be good sat down with Regine to talk about her time in Austin, changes in the Austin art scene and her plans for the future.

...might be good: In an interview with you in the Austin Chronicle published shortly after you had arrived in Austin, you commented that you weren’t terribly excited by the Austin art galleries because these galleries seemed to be existing within a comfort zone. Do you think this has changed for Austin galleries and other art institutions? And if so, in what ways are Austin art institutions—both galleries and non-profits—going about doing this?

Regine Basha: Well, I guess having heard so much about Austin’s thriving music and film scene (being young and independently driven and so on) I had expected that to be the case with the gallery scene. At the time that wasn’t really the case. Artists in town, if they stayed here, were either showing at Gallery Lombardi (which seemed more like a party scene) or at the more established, but conservative galleries catering to the decorating of Austin homes. I was surprised to learn that what was considered the ‘alternative’ were coffee shop shows, which by and large are pretty amateur. There didn’t really seem to be much interest in the ideas behind art, or the conversations contemporary art can provoke. I remember Sue Graze [ The Executive Director of Arthouse] once saying to me, ‘you have to first build the institution, then there can be an alternative!’

This has definitely taken a major turn. Now, there are more galleries like Lora Reynolds, Art Palace and Okay Mountain, or projects like testsite, that are taking their programs very seriously and provoking the growth of a more diversified, exciting art scene. Not to mention the museums and non-profits in town—many of which have gone through major transitions and have grown significantly in the past five years. As a result artists feel more inclined to stay in Austin and not leave for the bigger cities because the scene is much stronger.

...mbg: Why do you think Austin’s institutions were in such a state of transition?

RB: Well I can’t point to single reason but I can think of a couple of books that might have contributed to a self-consciousness about Austin’s own art and cultural scene. The first is Richard Florida’s The Rise of the Creative Class. There was a lot of excitement about the fact that this book listed Austin as one of the ‘Creative Cities’ due mostly to its unique blend of musicians, game designers and one of the highest patent rates in the country—things like that. All of a sudden there was a spotlight on Austin, and the challenge to live up to its name became kind of urgent. The other book I recall stirring debate was Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point. When Malcolm came to speak at UT, the ensuing discussion amongst Austinites was how it felt as though the Austin art scene had yet to have its own tipping point. What is sometimes called the ‘ecosystem’ of the art scene—a healthy mix of established and young artists, museums and galleries, serious collectors and new collectors had to coalesce for this tipping point to happen. In his terms, enough ‘mavens’ and ‘connectors’ had to work together. It took a few years, but that is exactly what occurred.

...mbg: What kinds of activities started happening as a result?

RB: I’d say on the artist front, it began with the short-lived but explosive project space called The Fresh Up Club (Dave Bryant and Peat Duggins). They were pretty experimental and connected themselves to a similarly spirited scene around the country. Soon after they opened, a group of key collectors here stepped up to the plate. But it wasn’t until later that Austin collectors really started buying and supporting local work which kind of had a domino effect and influenced other collectors and so on. The next wave came with Risa Puleo’s space The Donkey Show, Arturo Palacios' Art Palace, and the collective of Okay Mountain—each of which maximized this new energy that is still thriving today, resulting in more sales than Austin has ever seen, I think. These initiatives also attracted young artists from other cities to make Austin their home. Then, with the larger institutions inviting artists from around the country and around the world for long or short terms stays, a new kind of interaction began to happen with the scene and those creating work here (like some artists going to places like Skowhegan or having residencies abroad). Across the board, local exhibitions got more ambitious, more attention is being paid to Austin and artists here are getting connected to a broader art scene.

…mbg: During your time in Austin, one of your many roles was serving as Arthouse’s Adjunct Curator. Can tell me a little bit about the direction of Arthouse at that time and the nature of your involvement with it?

RB: At Arthouse, since I started at the beginning of their transition, there seemed to be a lot of room to explore and question the role of the institution. How could it remain nimble as an art space? How can it establish a future program and plan ahead, yet be responsive and spontaneous enough to accommodate current modes of art-making? It seemed necessary to implement a second tier of smaller but active programs which we called ‘Arthouse Presents’ that billed itself as the surprise element—film screenings, visiting artist talks, small concerts, site-specific projects, or programs like building a temporary zine shop with Peat Duggins. These initiatives did not always relate to the exhibition program on view, but they did bring in more idea-driven or in-progress works with artists. I think it was important at the time to also provide a forum for artists who wanted to try out something new, as well as a way to allow the public to understand what the art-process is really like behind the scenes. Later on, my role at Arthouse turned into Consulting Curator, which meant lending a curatorial voice to the initial plans and discussions regarding Arthouse’s new future building and programming.

...mbg: I’d like to shift to shift the conversation and talk about shows that focus exclusively on local artists. In Issue 94, ...might be good devoted a lot of space to 20 to Watch: New Art in Austin. We wanted to start a dialogue in the Austin Art community about exhibition. We expected to get a lot of feedback—but aside from one or two emails and coverage in Ivan Lozano’s blog, no one responded. Do you think we went about trying to start a dialogue in the wrong way? Or do you think that Austin simply isn’t able to generate that kind of dialogue?

RB: I think 20 to Watch: New Art in Austin isn’t a show that is intended to generate a dialogue. The impetus for the show is to applaud the community of younger artists in town. Also, most of the people in Austin are either friends with the artists in the show or friends with people that created the show—and so New Art in Austin is a very personal thing. By nature, the approach of the exhibition is uncritical—it is what it is. Typically the discussions are limited to what people liked or didn’t like in the exhibition.

I have similar issues with Arthouse’s annual exhibition New American Talent, another juried survey of emerging artists. The model for NAT is slightly different—there’s a call for submissions from artists living and working in the United States and then one established curator chooses work from a list of nearly a hundred artists. It proposes to be a showcase for new emerging work, but in the end it almost always feels random and unfocussed—or worse, forced. The curators are invited on the basis of what they might be able to do for these artists, but because of the way its set up, they can rarely engage directly with them. So, it’s usually a ‘good intentions’ show with a very generalized, tepid effect. I hope my successor Elizabeth Dunbar will finally get to push the envelope on that one.

...mbg: What do you think would be a good alternative to exhibitions like New American Talent and New Art in Austin

RB: I think if it has to happen, it would be great if AMOA, Arthouse and others such institutions combine their resources and do one big town-wide exhibition engaging the Austin art scene, so that each institution can do it uniquely and with selected foci. It’s really just a marketing tactic to generate more excitement for the local and national art public.

...mbg: I agree—a collaborative exhibition sounds like a very clever solution. I’m wondering—and I know this is a very broad question—if you could talk about what you think are some of the potential strengths and weaknesses of the Austin art scene.

RB: I think one of Austin’s strengths is that there can be different style of cultural production here. It can be very open—an artist like Luke Savisky for example can work like a renaissance person. Luke has managed to carve out a niche for himself in a way I’ve never seen before. As a film artist, he collaborates with everyone from the Kronos Quartet to the Alamo Drafthouse—with a wide range of participants and venues from the avant-garde to the commercial. Here, projects like the recent Cult of Color : Call to Color that Arthouse is now doing with Trent Doyle Hancock and Ballet Austin can happen in a meaningful way. Unlike New York where rigid boundaries and mini-feifdoms still exist between disciplines, I think Austin—and the wide array of resources available here—make it possible for artists to work across disciplines in innovative ways.

I think one potential weakness is that the Austin art scene can very easily get caught up in its own ‘hip’ factor or its own self-congratulatory complacency. This tends to form a little bubble where your only references about art are in town or Texas-wide at best. It also focuses the discussions a lot on local gossip. To really be involved in the art—either as an artist, curator, or collector—you have to constantly inform yourself about what’s going on in the rest of the field, do the research, and find your place in it. I’m sure the local tech industry does this—the art scene should do the same.

I feel pretty fortunate to have been able to work as an independent curator out of Austin during this time. I have to say that more than in New York, I was able to not only engage with more international projects – like work in Istanbul, Cairo, Santiago, Berlin in the past five years – but also bring back some of the artists, ideas and projects (like e-flux video rental, or Egyptian artist Basim Magdy to Okay Mountain, etc.) to Austin’s art scene which met them with open arms. This confirmed for me that Austin is ready to embrace the global within the local, which I think is important to the growth of the art scene overall.

...mbg: Can you talk a little bit about your upcoming projects?

RB: It seems that this has become my year of the working with mostly woman artists—which is great! Setareh Shahbazi from Berlin, just opened at the Santa Barbara Contemporary Arts Forum (see image), Mexican artist Julieta Aranda is at Sala Diaz this month – both these shows are really about responding to new critical work and wanting to bring them to new contexts. The Activist Impulse which will be at Women & Their Work will feature 5 international women artists of the 90s generation who have contributed significant activist projects through their art—Emily Jacir, Judi Werthein, Andrea Geyer, Kristin Lucas and the team Neurotransmitter (Valerie Tevere & Angel Navarez). This show will be part of Women & Their Work’s 30th anniversary year. Finally, The Marfa Sessions, at Ballroom Marfa this fall, which I will curate with Lucy Raven and Rebecca Gates, really extends my ongoing interest in the relationship between art and sound. We have the added thrill of commissioning 5 new works, producing performances, working with Marfa Public Radio and placing work all around town and environs of Marfa while turning Ballroom Marfa into a kind of desert visitor center!

For images from Regine Basha’s projects go to: http://web.mac.com/ginabasha/Exhibition_Website/Bio.html

Mary Katherine Matalon is the coordinator of testsite, ...might be good’s sister project.

Gabriel Perez-Barreiro

By Claire Ruud

Cildo Meireles, Marulho, 1991-2001, Wood, books and audio. Photograph by Eduardo Seidl. Included in the 6th Mercosul Biennial.

Gabriel Perez-Barreiro has been Curator of Latin American Art at the Blanton Museum since 2002. This month, he and his wife Regine Basha depart for New York, where he will assume the position of Director at the Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros. In anticipation of their departure, …might be good sat down with Gabriel to talk about his curatorial philosophy and practice, his recent work as Curator of the 2007 Mercosul Biennial and his future at the Colección.

…might be good: I’d like to begin by talking about your approach to building a university museum collection. In a conversation with Luis Camnitzer published in Issue #78 of …might be good, you described the way you built a collection at Essex University. Students and professors would receive a proposed acquisition, and you would consider it in a seminar-like format. If you were still talking about the piece 20 minutes after you’d begun, you’d acquire it. Was it really that simple?

GPB: It wasn’t that simple. The process at Essex was a response to a particular situation: we built the collection largely on donations and we cared above all about what kind of discussions the work could provoke. Often, an artist or a collector offered an unsolicited piece and we didn’t have the expertise to judge it. So talking about the work together was the safest way to select some acquisitions. If the conversation was interesting, if people were disagreeing about something meaty, then chances were that the work was worth having. But things have changed a lot at Essex since then.

…mbg: I’m excited about the process you’re describing because of the way it might allow faculty and students to shape a university museum’s collection. Would that kind of a process work at the Blanton?

GPB: The University of Texas is a much more consolidated institution. I don’t think that system would translate here. We have a collection that’s so much bigger and so much more complicated. We also have resources for purchase. But I’ve always liked the idea behind the acquisition process at Essex. We were trying to find alternative sets of criteria for building a collection. The curators weren’t just looking for an artist that was in the news last week. We weren’t on a gallery waiting list trying to get the same repertoire everyone else has. Our collection was really about debate and discussion rather than value, product and career.

...mbg: I wonder, though, whether the acquisitions process at Essex created a rather disjointed collection. When you acquire work, aren’t you trying to create some sort of coherence within the collection?

GPB: You have to have criteria, but criteria are different from coherence. At Essex and at the Blanton, the collections have particular groups of work that make sense together and others that do not. Over the life time of a collection, its focus shifts. Some pieces of the Latin American collection that used to be way in the back of storage are now on display, and vice versa. To me, that’s where museums are valuable. When work is out of fashion it doesn’t get thrown away. I think these shifts mean that our criteria for building a collection need to be less dogmatic and we need to be able to accept that we are not always right all of the time.

...mbg: I’m interested in alternative models for acquisitions because of the opportunities they might create for partnerships between academic art history departments and curatorial departments at university museums. What would you say are the next steps toward fostering collaboration between the Department of Art History at the University of Texas and the Blanton Museum?

GBP: I believe the curator here should be a member of the faculty—a step we’ve never been able to take. The faculty needs to have a healthy relationship with the museum. The new faculty appointments to the Department of Art History—Andrea Giunta and Roberto Tejada—are really going to help. We need faculty and curators that want to build common projects between the university and the museum. But I should say that I think UT has a closer collaboration than most university museums. There will always be those faculty members who boycott the museum or who complain about the program, but that’s inevitable, and for each one of those, there are several with whom we have a great relationship.

…mbg: Can you say more about how you think the new appointments to the Department of Art History will affect the study of Latin American art at the university and museum?

GPB: These appointments are so important. Jacqueline Barnitz, who retired last year and is in her 80s, was a pioneer in the study of Latin American art and built UT’s reputation in this area. I think the failure to start planning for her retirement 20 years ago was a mistake. We slipped very fast down the ladder from a preeminent position in the study of Latin American art to a lesser position. The replacement process got wrapped up in the faculty being upset over the new Blanton having yoga in the galleries or something, when the issue was so much larger than that. Now we have a chance to be one of the leading institutions in the study of Latin American art again.

...mbg: Will Roberto Tejada be involved in acquisitions and exhibitions at the Blanton? The Blanton has an excellent Latin American collection, and I’ve seen a lot of thoughtful shows focusing on Latin American artists here. But what about Chicano/Latino art?

GPB: My view is that Chicano art is American art produced in the United States by people who’ve been here often for generations. Annette Carlozzi [Curator of American and Contemporary Art] has been so thoughtful about making a diverse American collection that questions what it means to be American from diverse perspectives. We have important works by Jesse Amado, Luis Jiménez, Benito Huerta, Celia Muñoz—some of the leading figures of Chicano/Latino/Mexican American art. These works live mostly in the American collection. However, the collaborative relationship between the American and Latin American departments at the museum means that we’re constantly questioning these definitions and divisions. It is part of a much broader discussion about what we mean by Chicano art. Are there Chicano artists now who will accept that label? Is it a term that applies historically to the 70’s and 80’s? Having Roberto studying these questions academically is going to help us to define how we talk about, classify, display and interpret those works at the museum. Roberto has the expertise we’ve been missing, but institutionally we are uniquely positioned to answer these questions.

...mbg: I’m interested in hearing about your focus and your expertise. How have you been shaping the Blanton’s Latin American Collection over the last five years?

GPB: I’ve been working along two basic lines. One is filling out the collection in certain areas. Considering what we already have, I’ve suggested acquisitions that fill our collection out historically. The other area I’ve been working on is contemporary art, which is a particular interest of mine. I saw an opportunity for us to be building a collection where other people were not—artists from the 90’s to now, from parts of the world that have been invisible to the art market, for example Guatemala or Chile.

Everyone talks about the boom the art market for contemporary Latin American art. But what they mean by Latin American art is the art that’s in Chelsea and Miami. Most museums and collectors stop there. They get a Beatriz Milhazes, an Ernesto Neto, an Adriana Varejão or a Guillermo Kuitca and they feel like they’ve ‘done’ Latin America. But if you go to Argentina or Brazil and look at what artists there are producing, then you see that it’s much more complex than the few artists who make it to Chelsea. There are many artists who are extremely important but they didn’t have access to the market at the right time, or didn’t have the support of a certain curator who was calling the shots. I think we have a role there to be looking out for work that’s very important and valuable, not economically, but historically.

I tried to structure the 90’s collection by thinking about place—very specific scenes. We systematically picked cities and tried to build collections from the 90s through the present. We’ve been very successful in building a collection from Buenos Aires. No one has the collection we have, not even in Argentina. In Guatemala City, there was an amazing generation of political artists working during the 90’s. People only know one—Regina Galindo. The market can only handle one artist from Guatemala at a time. But there are 20 others that worked alongside Regina during that movement. So a donor supported us to build a comprehensive collection from Guatemala City. Often the work we purchased from these artists was the first work the artist had ever sold to a museum, or to anybody. We collected work from Chile in a similar way. The point is not to just go and get one token work, but to actually try to build a corpus of works so you can understand the relationships between them.

…mbg: So are there collectors in Austin supporting Latin American art?

GPB: When I came here, my rolodex was empty. There wasn’t anyone supporting Latin American art in particular. So I came here thinking that this would not be a context that would support a Latin American collection, least of all a cutting-edge or experimental collection. And I was totally wrong. I could list over half a dozen people off the top of my head who have been generous supporters of the Latin American Collection here at the Blanton. And some of them have helped us acquire very political, challenging works for which it’s often hard to find donors. These donors aren’t just supporting acquisitions, either. They’re building relationships with the artists and hosting them when they come to Austin. As a curator, working with supporters like these is really rewarding. I have people I can talk to about the artists I’m interested in, and they know exactly what I’m talking about. It’s great when people support a museum financially, but even better when they also engage closely with what you are doing.The ecosystem in Austin for these artists is growing, too. You know, Benito Laren had a show at Okay Mountain and Eduardo Navarro had a show at Art Palace. People in Argentina and Brazil are interested in Austin and I think these relationships are only going to grow.

…mbg: Let’s talk about your recent project, the 2007 Mercosul Biennial. How did you use the metaphor of the third bank to structure the biennial?

GPB: I never wanted to do a biennial. I don’t like biennials and usually try to avoid them. I agreed to do the Mercosul Biennial as long as I could re-define it. What bothers me most about biennials is that they’re overly thematic. Curators try to create an exhibition that’s about something other than the art. You read those e-fluxes and they’re kind of pompous. They say things like, “This exhibition will force you to reconsider the roles…” It won’t force you to do anything, it’s a show. So I wanted to get away from anything that would be a theme. The image of the third bank comes from a short story by João Guimarães Rosa and I consider it more of a metaphor or attitude than a theme as such.

Let me put it this way, art is an operation, art is a way of thinking, art is a way of reinterpreting the world. It’s not a subject, it’s a methodology. That shift was very important to me. Thinking about methodology, I realized all good art breaks down binary positions and creates a new space. It pushes our experience into foreign territory—the third bank. It’s an image of independence, somewhere that’s not one thing or another, but is dependent on both. It’s precarious. The idea of the third bank was the most important to me in terms of the relationship between the viewer and the artwork. In my mind, the art work was one bank, the viewer was another, and the encounter between them would generate the third. Rather than privilege one or the other, I wanted to treat both artwork and viewer with equal respect and create this “third bank.”

…mbg: You worked very closely with Luis Camnitzer on the biennial. Can you tell me about this collaboration?

GBP: The Mercosul Biennial has a very strong local audience. People really want to see the biennial serve as a tool for education. I was totally into that, so the first person I asked to work with me was Luis because of his role as an educator. He was the Pedagogical Curator and that role had never existed before. The two of us worked very closely together. We were almost co-curators of the entire project.The biennial was about critical thinking, not consumption—that was Luis’s idea. Normally people go to a biennial like they go to a mall. Do I like it? Would I hang it in my house? We wanted to deactivate the I-like/I-don’t-like mechanism and get people to think critically about what each artist was trying to do and build their relationship from there.

We hired three hundred people as mediators—not to give people lectures, but to converse with people. The Mediators received six months of training in everything from philosophy to body expression to art history to pedagogy. I had some of the best art conversations I’ve ever had with these mediators. We also created Pedagogical Stations where viewers could respond to artists’ statements. Viewers could write comments that the next viewers could read. The audience would guide the future audience. The comments on these stations were unbelievable. To me, that was the third bank.

...mbg: Can you speak to the international reception the biennial has received?

GPB: There were articles in Art Papers [February 2008, Ursula Dávila-Villa], Modern Painters [March 2008, Sofía Hernández Chong Cuy], and Artforum [March 2008, Anne Ellegood on the 6th Mercosul Bienal]. I decided that rather than put our energy into courting the international press, we should use our resources to do something that was creative and original. If it was good, then the press would pay attention. Biennials are constantly sprouting up and there are endless panel discussions about the crisis of the biennial. People are looking for new models, we tried to create one.

...mbg: Last weekend the New York Times Magazine published a feature about Mari Carmen Ramírez (“After Frida,” March 23, 2008), the Curator of Latin American Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. She was fairly critical of the Blanton, the University of Texas and you. How did you feel about the article?

GPB: To me, what’s interesting is how the field of Latin American art has expanded and become so much more diverse. Of course, this is in part thanks to Houston, but also to so many other people and institutions internationally, and against a background of growing globalization of the art world in general. I wish that the article had focused more on that larger, truly fascinating story and on the art itself, and less on personality. I will say that I was surprised that Mari Carmen criticized the Blanton’s integration of the collections when the article also described her as saying that she is planning a similar thing for Houston.

...mbg: How would you define your curatorial differences with Mari Carmen?

GPB: Mari Carmen was very important to my generation, as she was the first professional curator in the field, and made the Blanton internationally known in this area. I have great respect for her work and her commitment, but I don’t think the field revolves around one person or one institution. Ultimately I’m a great believer in pluralism, so to me it’s not a zero-sum game between Austin and Houston, or between Houston and New York. As the field expands and more people are in it, it only creates more options, more support, and more opportunities for everyone. This helps institutions to define and refine their missions, and this ultimately makes the art world a richer and better place. To me, what’s important is the artist, the art, and the audience—not the curator. My ideal curator is one with a light touch, who lets the art define the terms of discussion as much as possible. When I think of my role models, they are all people who come to art asking questions, and who don’t always feel they have the answer, but think the question is worth asking. At the end of the day, you have to ask yourself which art and artists you really believe in, and the answer to that question is always very specific. That’s why I don’t think that ‘Latin American art’ is a cause in itself. There are amazing artists in that part of the world, as there are in all others, and it probably does require particular skills to present Latin American art in the US context, but there is a risk in doing so that you end up believing that the translation was more important than the original. It’s something I try to be mindful of.

...mbg. Before we part ways, I’d like to hear about what you’ll be doing for the Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros [CPPC].

GPB: At this stage, it’s quite open-ended. We’ll start by revisiting the goals and programs of the collection. One of the reasons I’m so excited about the collection is that Patricia Cisneros has always understood what education means in relationship to a collection. She sees the collection as a tool to increase awareness of Latin American artists and Latin American culture in the world. The CPPC is not a trophy collection, but a collection with a very strong education slant. It has been a leader in supporting research and has an educational program that is active in something like 8 different countries. I won’t be doing as much curating, because the collection has an excellent curatorial team; but I will helping to guide the curatorial direction, including doing more of the oversight and planning. We will be looking to the future and shaping the organizational plans for the CPPC for the next 10 to 15 years, which is a very exciting prospect. I also have several years of programming here at the Blanton that I’ll still be working on, but that will eventually wind down.

...mbg: So you’ll still be around Austin?

GPB: I’ll be around. The CPPC and the University have a history of partnership, and again, with Andrea and Roberto coming on, UT is really positioned to be a powerhouse for the study of Latin American art. And I’m sure that’s something the CPPC will want to be a part of in one way or another. I also want to keep watching the scene here in Austin. It’s s improved so much in the last five years. I’m looking forward to seeing what happens next.

Claire Ruud is Managing Editor of ...might be good.