No Aleph para um olhar sobre o Serviço ACARTE da Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian entre 1984 e 1989

Abstract

Unlike several European countries where modern art museums were built in the 1950s/1960s following World War II as a symbol of democracy, Portugal’s economic conditions (the country was drained by the colonial wars) and Salazar’s rule would only allow for the construction of a modern art museum in the 1980s under the private initiative of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, shortly before Portugal joined the European Economic Community. The Gulbenkian’s Centro de Arte Moderna [CAM – Modern Art Center] opened in 1983, and it was the first modern art museum in Portugal. Thought of as an art center rather than a museum, CAM included a multi-purpose hall; an open-air amphitheater; a temporary exhibition hall and a children’s art center. The activity taking place beyond the exhibitions gallery where the museum was lodged was the responsibility of ACARTE, the Gulbenkian Foundation’s Department of Artistic Creation and Art Education. Several temporalities seem to be at stake. Schematically: CAM was a promise from the 1950/60s that was fulfilled; placed in an architectonic archetype from the 1970s; which opened in the 1980s; hosting the ACARTE Department, whose curatorial approach – mainly focused on performance, dance, theatre and relational events – could be seen as prefiguring the curatorial discursive and performance turn of the 2000s. ACARTE can also be thought of as the culminating point of two decades of research on Education through Art and Artistic Education. Its founder and first director Madalena Perdigão not only founded the Gulbenkian Orchestra, Chorus and Ballet, but was also responsible for the reform of the national conservatory school in 1971 and for a failed reorganization project of the national artistic education in 1978, after the 1974 Revolution. There is thus an intricate history linking the pedagogic experiments prompted by the Gulbenkian Foundation before the 1974 Revolution, the reform of the national conservatory school, Perdigão’s failed efforts towards restructuring the National Art Education, and her return to the Gulbenkian Foundation as ACARTE Director in 1984. Hence, ACARTE’s activities in the 1980s are directly related to the 1960s’ experiments in pedagogy. But not exclusively: the department’s activities can also be looked at as being at the crossroads between a series of curatorial and programming practices. By basing its activity on the need to attend to what “is missing” ACARTE developed a particularly attentive way of moving through aesthetic and political proposals usually allocated to different time spans, thus accounting for the different perceptions its contemporaries had of their time. As such, ACARTE is a superb case study with regard to decentered modernities. Organized as a lens to look into ACARTE through the 1980s, this work is divided into two parts: Text and Digital Timeline ACARTE 1984-1989. If the latter, a digital archive, aims at opening up ACARTE’s activity to future researches, the first aims at situating this Department in its context of emergence. It pays particular attention to the ways in which ACARTE can be seen as a major event for the reconfiguration of the subject’s experience of corporeality that was taking place by then.

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