JOANA BASTOS: Oscar | CAM Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian

Lisbon’s “sleeping beauty” awakens

Isabel Carlos, the new director of the Centro de Arte Moderna, on revitalising the Gulbenkian’s modern art museum

Isabel Carlos, the new director of the Centro de Arte Moderna (CAM) in Lisbon, compares the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation’s modern art museum to a “sleeping beauty”. Carlos, only the third director of CAM since it opened in 1983, talked to The Art Newspaper about her plans to reinvigorate the museum. Her inaugural show is “Jane and Louise Wilson: Suspending Time”, until 18 April.

The Gulbenkian Foundation’s modern art collection includes many works by British artists ranging from Henry Moore and Peter Blake to Gilbert and George alongside their Portuguese contemporaries. There is also a small collection of work by artists of Armenian origin, including Arshile Gorky. This reflects the life story of Calouste Gulbenkian, the Armenian businessman and philanthropist who bequeathed his fortune to the Anglo-Portuguese foundation.

This year Carlos is a member of the Tate’s Turner Prize jury. She was artistic director of the 2004 Sydney Biennial and curated the Portuguese pavilion at the 2005 Venice Biennale. Carlos also co-founded Lisbon’s Instituto de Arte Contemporânea and was its deputy director from 1996 until 2001.

The Art Newspaper: CAM was Portugal’s first museum of modern and contemporary, but it has been rather overshadowed by newer museums.
Isabel Carlos: Thankfully it lost visibility [because] we have more museums in Portugal working with contemporary art. I would like CAM to be a reference to something that these museums don’t do, which is show art from the early 20th century. We have the best collection of art until the 1950s. On the other hand, it must be an active space in terms of showing contemporary artists who work with major issues.

TAN: Is that why you wanted to work with the Wilson twins?
IC: The reason we started with Jane and Louise Wilson was precisely because it is embedded in CAM’s identity and its special relationship with the UK. We have here a British art collection that is a treasure. The Wilsons were a good reason to look again at the works we already have.
Their work is about ideas of abstraction and human figuration. With these two ideas we chose works to create “Abstraction and the Human Figure in CAM’s British Art Collection" [Until 18 April].

TAN: In what other ways do you plan to draw upon the collection?
IC: The permanent collection is important as CAM has an educational duty. It is important to show works from the collection for a long period so that schools throughout the year can work with the multiple ideas that derive of art of the 20th century, particularly in Portugal. The proposed programme is designed so that when walking through CAM visitors can always see an Amadeu de Sousa Cardoso or a Paula Rego: the biggest names in 20th-century Portuguese art.
Essentially, I want a balance between international and Portuguese art, whether it is in the collection or in a temporary exhibition. The Ana Vidigal retrospective [later this year] is an example of that line of planning.

TAN: How do you want to CAM be a more “active space”?
IC: Because of its scale, it allows artists to experiment. It can have an almost laboratory side. It is no coincidence that this exhibition by the Wilsons has five new sculptures that were created specifically for this space, and which were produced by Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation’s technicians. This is a real asset.
CAM will never be a MoMA, or a Tate, but it can be a contemporary art museum that allows contemporary artists to research, and to create experimental exhibitions. These are not Jane and Louise Wilson's first sculptures, but it is something that they haven’t explored much, and this exhibition has allowed them to deepen that aspect of their work.

TAN: Do you want to support Portuguese artists in the same way?
IC: In their case, there is another strand of the programme. The centre should be a space for Portuguese artists to mount their first retrospectives. I’m thinking of mature artists. Today we have a lot of spaces for young artists, and we have museums that organise retrospectives for artists who are 60 or 70 years old. What is missing are mid-career retrospectives for 40- to 50-years-old artists not yet fully established. Because of its size, CAM is the perfect place to do such shows. Of course, the centre should also allow more senior Portuguese artists, such as Ana Vieira or Carlos Nogueira, to show their work.

TAN: Do you intend to work in partnership with other institutions and spaces?
IC: The Jane and Louise Wilson exhibition will go to the Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea in Santiago de Compostela. I’m interested in collaborations and partnerships. In our first year, I am happy to have an exhibition produced here travelling to another international museum right next door in Spain. Next we will receive an exhibition by the Galician artist Jorge Barbie, produced by Marco [Museo de Arte Contemporáneo], Vigo, also in Spain. Following this, our Vasco Araújo and Javier Téllez exhibition will go to Marco. Merely importing exhibitions is something that can happen, but it’s not something that I would prioritise.

Because our collection begins in 1913, we are constantly lending works. Soon we will lend a series of works to a retrospective of [Madeira-born artist] Lourdes Castro at the Serralves Museum [in Porto]. We are also lending to museums abroad.

Another program that I want to start in 2011 will be called “Arte Itinerante”, taking the idea from the Gulbenkian’s old “Bibliotecas Itinerantes” [mobile libraries]. Instead of books, there will be works of art. Or rather, a programme of exhibitions with works from our collection shown in several places across Portugal.

Building the Centro de Arte Moderna (CAM) in the park that surrounds the Museu Calouste Gulbenkian along with the Gulbenkian foundation's concert hall and offices was controversial, leading to a debate in the press and parliament in the early 1980s. British architect Leslie Martin designed CAM in a brutalist style, but the building partially succeeds in blending with its surrounding thanks to its roof gardens, low profile and well tended soft landscaping. CAM has promoted dance, poetry and music as well as visual art, and overlooks a concert bowl used for jazz. However, it has tended to play second fiddle to the Museu Calouste Gulbenkian, which opened in 1969 and contains the oil tycoon's eclectic collection of art, archaeology and jewellery.

Published at Museum (18), The Art Newspaper - International edition Vol. XVIII No. 211, March 2010. Jane and Louise Wilson, Songs for My Mother (video still), 2009 Courtesy : Centro de Arte Moderna/Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, Lisbon

Jane and Louise Wilson: Suspending Time

Centro de Arte Moderna da Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian (Lisbon)
Jane and Louise Wilson: Suspending Time

Jane and Louise Wilson’s work tends to distort modern principles, those in particular related with the “form follows function” concept. This concern is translated into black and white photos (Sealander, 2006) about the abandoned bunkers, such as the defensive fortification – Atlantic Wall – created by the German troops during the Second World War that, half a century later, is being invaded by nature and graffitis. These pictures punctuate the sisters’ individual show at the laborious and challenging the main exhibition space of the Centro de Arte Moderna of the Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian.

The protection of testimonies and the conservation of evidences start from the historical memory. The twin sisters’ work entails a constant remembrance of what use to be, the psychologically state of living in times already gone, be it the Second World War or the colonial periods, for instance, and unconsciously aspires to return to a lost youth. The works on show are an archaeology analysis about how do these narratives reverberates today, how we lose living memory and create time suspended memories.

As part of the mnemonic archive (framed by films, videos and photographs) created by Jane and Louise Wilson, the series Oddments (2008) enclose thousands of second-hand books standing still on shelves or laying around in piles, some without covers others missing a few pages; all with a kind of flaw, a fault marking the object. Though, this brings back into one’s mind JG Ballard’s vision about the contradiction of modern life. Whereas Ballard, through the written word, evokes fractured landscapes full of wrecked machinery, as is explored in the novel about sexual arousing Crash (1973), or in the deserted beaches of The Terminal Beach (1964), in some of Jane and Louise’s pictures the disturbing motion given by the human presence transform an inert space in the sexiest recollection of books, embedded by a place packed with deep sensations, firm emotions, the exciting flaws and time made evidence imperfections.

Published at Lapiz, Revista Internacional de Arte. Año XXIX, Núm. 259/260 (156), February/March 2010 España © Jane and Louise Wilson, Casemate H667, 2006

Tempo Suspenso

A distorção dos princípios clássicos modernos, em particular a célebre expressão «a forma segue a função» é uma das preocupações do discurso de Jane e Louise Wilson (nascidas em 1967, em Newcastle, Inglaterra).

As irmãs gémeas trabalham em conjunto desde os finais da década de oitenta do século passado e utilizam como suporte filmes, vídeos e fotografias para examinar as estruturas do exercício do poder e ideológicas; exploram o tempo suspenso nos espaços com uma ressonância histórica associada às actividades de controlo, de vigilância, do exercício da autoridade.

O corpo do seu trabalho invoca a «arquitectura de morte», na qual se inclui a antiga sede da polícia secreta da ex-República Democrática Alemã (Stasi City, 1997); o contexto britânico durante a Guerra Fria, como a antiga base norte-americana de Greenham Coomon, em Berkshire, palco de inúmeras manifestações contra o armamento nuclear e entretanto desmantelada; ou os bunkers abandonados da extensa fortificação defensiva – a Muralha do Atlântico – criada pelas tropas alemãs durante a Segunda Grande Guerra (Sealander, 2006). Mais recentemente a sua atenção focou-se nos arquivos do cineasta Stanley Kubrick sobre o Holocausto (Unfolding the Aryan Papers, 2009).

Published at NS'210/IN#106, Mercado da Arte (62), (Diário de Notícias N.º 51420 e Jornal de Notícias N.º 229/122), 16 de Janeiro de 2010. Portugal Jane and Louise Wilson, Unfolding the Aryan Papers, 2009 Courtesy Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian

newsfromlisbon200610

Mirror,
multiple multiplications,
virtual space,
disorientation,
reflecting books ad infinitum