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Desto
A Good Sign
Author: Joe Weinstein
ArtNexus No. 68 - Dec 2007
|  | If you arrived in Puerto Rico two-and-a-half years ago, the contemporary art scene might have struck you as wan, even dispirited. There were several galleries, most of them in San Juan, but only one focused on production by younger artists, Galería Comercial. The museums were mostly uninvolved in the contemporary scene, although Marysol Nieves, then contemporary art curator at the capital’s Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico (MAPR), visited local artists’ studios and undertook an excellent series of projects by up-and-coming Puerto Ricans and Nuyoricans, including Ada Bobonis and Anthony Goicolea.
In spite of the scene’s apparent anemia, the dedicated teachers at La Escuela de Artes Plásticas and other island art schools continued to pump young graduates into the barely functioning art circuitry with abandon. This distinctive chemistry, combining institutional neglect with native restlessness, ignited a phenomenon of alternative exhibition spaces and gathering points. An outburst of artist-generated activity was in the making, and the internet, naturally enough, spread the news. An Artnet.com article from February, 2006, by the artist Pedro Vélez, titled “The New Scenesters,” noted that three spaces had recently opened, operated by artists with scant experience and few resources: Carlos Reyes’s tagRom in Hato Rey; the Caguas redoubt Área, presided over by Quintín Rivera-Toro; and a tiny storefront in Santurce, housing the project of three young friends, Jason Mena, Omar Odulio Peña Forty, and Raquel Quijano Feliciano, with the odd name =Desto.
Much has happened since then to open the island up to the international art world, with the art fair CIRCA finding its legs, while more and less observant art websites have proliferated exponentially. On the other hand, Nieves left MAPR in frustration after just over one year of struggling with the island’s resistance to contemporary art, leaving a painful curatorial void. Newspaper coverage of the scene remains negligent at best, and some long-struggling galleries have given up the ghost. Of the three artist-run spaces which appeared in the Puerto Rican art world not so long ago—not to mention other such experiments that have come and gone—only =Desto remains as a force.
=Desto has not been unscathed by the passage of time: Quijano and Peña Forty recently announced that Mena left the trio to pursue his art, and not long after that the remaining pair decided to abandon their storefront and maintain =Desto as a free-floating, project-by-project enterprise. Looking back on what the group has accomplished in its brief existence—and what it has contributed to a scene remarkable for its turbulence and inventiveness, if not consistency and depth—one can see how much the story depends on blind faith and happy accident.
Quijano and Peña Forty met at La Escuela de Artes Plásticas and formed a close friendship based on their belief in the redemptive qualities of art. At the age of thirty-five, Quijano is an unorthodox printmaker—her works are three-dimensional and include pop-up books and small architectonic boxes—and she teaches art at Viejo San Juan’s La Liga de Arte. Peña Forty, at thirty years old, makes drawings and paintings, labors as a preparator for El Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña (ICP), and barbers part-time. It is clear from talking to them that, apart from their artistic trajectories and work lives, =Desto is a mission, a heartfelt attempt to create community and connection among diverse, often contentious groups. Peña Forty describes their efforts as “utopian.” “We’re writing the history of art in Puerto Rico,” he says.
There is no hint of grandiosity or irony in the artist’s claim, and it is not as unlikely as it sounds. =Desto’s programming has been haphazard, which is perhaps appropriate for a venture that prides itself on spontaneity. In the beginning the project vacilated wildly between a playful, well-put sense of anarchy and an awkward lack of ideas. Then suddenly it seemed to hit its stride, with a series of innovative group exhibitions based on the founders’ particular artistic interests, each one based on a full-fledged concept.
Mena chose a number of photographers, or artists who use photography in their work, for the minimal exhibition “F/4,” including mall-life portraits by Alberto Meléndez, a young man with little experience as an artist but a deep, anthropological curiosity. Next came Peña Forty’s memorable “8-Track Audio Project.” He asked eight musicians and musician teams to create listening stations consisting of both visual and sound elements. At the opening, the gallery swarmed with visitors who stood around hand-built consoles or ensconced themeselves in booths and all-around installations—each with a distinctive logo—listening to hip-hop-inflected electronica, sample-heavy contemporary rock operas, and almost eveything in between.1
Then Quijano organized “Tri Tra,” an exhibition that showcased the iconoclastic approach to printmaking that she favors. She invited three artists with backgrounds in traditional printmaking and exhorted them “to take the prints off the walls.” The participants—Elsa Meléndez, Garvin Sierra, and Myriam Vázquez—all rose to the occasion: Sierra’s work included mousetraps with dollar bills, Vázquez mounted elaborately painted and carved wooden matrices, and Meléndez showed the glass-front boxes which have become her signature work, each containing little intaglio-print-on-paper puppets.
It was at this point that =Desto began to find a wider audience. The three shows brought in large numbers of visitors, including, for the first time, pillars of Puerto Rican art society. Besides the artists’ teachers, friends, and colleagues, one saw serious collectors, museum professionals, curious neighborhood denizens, and an older generation of artists wondering what the fuss was all about. These exhibitions also led to shows organized by people outside the gallery, such as Kristine Serviá’s “Publica,” an ample, well-planned selection of alternative journalism, experimental poetry, poster and postcard art, and fanzines from Puerto Rico’s print underground.
It would be premature to say that =Desto is making a serious mark, though Elaine Delgado, director of the ICP’s visual arts program, believes that it fits right in with important currents in the island’s art history. “I see the founding of =Desto as a revival of the artists’ collectives that flourished in Puerto Rico during the fifties, sixties, and seventies,” Delgado says. “[These groups] aimed to create a space where art, expression, and the relationships between artists and their public were valued above all.”
Quijano and Peña Forty would probably agree with Delgado in a general way, even if they’re somewhat hazy on the specifics of the broader historical perspective she mentions. They are clear and firm in their convictions, however. Quijano likes to say that art makes us all more human and aware, and this is precisely the kind of thinking that has moved history along. The mere availability of the showcase at Américo Salas is, they think, enough a reason to continue, and it is not surprising that =Desto seems to them to be something like destiny.
*After this article was written, =Desto gallery closed its space, however its founders continue to develop the project as a relevant contribution for visual arts in Puerto Rico. The physical space of =Desto was located at 1400 of Américo Salas, in San Juan, Puerto Rico. A virtual tour is available at http://www.myspace.com/esigualdesto. There is also a video clip of the exhibition “8-Track Audio Project” here:
http://vids.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction
=vids.individual&VideoID=362062. |  |
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