Week One

Goal is to post more frequently, but here is week one recap! I started my internship on Monday.


This involved going to the museum and meeting Cintia, my boss, for coffee (“café” here means little cups of espresso. A Café Americano is not a watered down coffee like it is in the US, but a bigger one. Typical.) in the café, introducing myself and hearing about her awesome life. Cintia runs Registry and Documentation for Malba, which means maintaining the archive of information on all works in the permanent collection and their history—when they were on loan, which exhibitions they were in, etc. I know from helping translate her resume, Wednesday’s job, that she travels with them as Malba’s courier when they are exhibited elsewhere. She’s accompanied works by Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, and Argentine painter Xul Solar to the Tate Modern in London, the MFA Houston, and museums in São Paulo and Mexico City.

Visiones y Revelaciones by Xul Solar of Buenos Aires. The museum has several important pieces of his.

Cintia also manages Malba’s involvement in art fairs like the recent ArtBA in Buenos Aires at which the museum bought 5 pieces, teaches art history at a university, and organizes other exhibitions in the city like a Marcel Duchamp one that was just shown at Fundación Proa, the museum in La Boca I mentioned. She is also beautiful and the nicest person ever.

I feel bad that my Spanish is a little less than what Cintia had expected, but hopefully in a few weeks I will be up to speed. She does make a big and very polite deal about how I am the first Yale intern who is native to the US (not “latinoamericanas que estudian en Yale”) and thus will be able to help them with English translations. My first job is to go through the archive and look up each painting, quickly familiarize myself with it—read some of the Spanish blurb in the catalog about the artist—and then edit the English version of the information. The changes I make are always subtle, like “espadrille” to “hemp” for material on an installation piece, and “Deals of Women” to “Dealings of Women” for a title, but those things matter especially when the art is accompanied by so little text. There are about 400 paintings in Malba’s permanent collection, the majority Latin American art from 1900 to the present, and I look them up in two catalogs, one published before and one after a big buying period in 2004 which increased the collection’s size by 30%.

We touched on some Malba's pieces in Ms. Russell’s AP Class (the Scully survey course I took first semester just covered prehistory to Renaissance) and certainly the movements that inspired them, such as post-impressionism,

Jose Cuneo, Caserío de Cagnes. I saw this and all of the following on Monday.

cubism,

Emilio Pettoruti, La canción del pueblo

social realism,

Antonio Berni, Manifestación

op-art,

Julio Le Parc, Desplazamientos 2

and FRIDA KAHLO.

Autorretrato con Chango y Loro

I saw this! There is a critique in one of the catalogs about how Frida is more of a Mexican popular artist than what you can call a “fine artist.” I think that is rubbish. Frida will always be a hero of mine.

Cintia gave me a tour of the museum on Monday that included the permanent collection on the second floor and the temporary exhibition on the ground floor. The third floor is currently closed for installations.

Malba is gorgeous. I am beyond lucky that I get to go there every day.

I work in the basement level with many of the education and registration offices and the storage room/conservation lab for all of the permanent paintings that aren’t on exhibit and the temporary works waiting to be shown. There were a few of what looked like giant toys when Cintia took me in that are going in the next temporary exhibit called Escuelismo. This refers to Argentine art of the 1990s, which responded to general national turmoil by reinterpreting figures from elementary school age. It opens on June 19th.

Everything you ever wanted to know about Malba can be found at http://www.malba.org.ar/web/en/files/ANUARIO_ingles.pdf or at http://www.malba.org.ar/web/home_eng.html.

To get to Malba I have to take the bus, or colectivo. There are roughly 400 numbered bus routes that run through Buenos Aires. After a week of consistent failure riding the bus I have learned a few things:

1. There are sometimes routes-within-routes, for example, several buses labeled “37” that all have different destinations.
2. Catch the bus on the correct side of the road.
3. You need to pay for the bus in coins. There is currently a mass coin shortage in the city such that a two peso note is less valuable than a one peso coin, because most bus rides cost $1,20 ARS. See http://www.slate.com/id/2205635/. I had to go to the national bank to change my peso notes for monedas (coins) because they are required by law to provide that service. The line when I left was out the door.
4. When you get on the bus, you tell the driver the price of your ride and he enters it into the ticket machine. If you’re only going a few blocks, the ride may be as low as 90 centavos but if you tell the bus driver anything lower than 1,20 he will probably glare at you and not believe you.
5. The bus doesn’t stop at every stop. If you want off you have to press a little red button at the back of the bus or yell “Bajo! Bajo!”
6. When the bus stops, it doesn’t actually stop. It slows, and you have to jump off without hurting yourself.

Just imagine that I messed up each one of these to learn it correctly. It’s been a great week with the Buenos Aires public transportation system, but I didn't have as big of an adventure as Nikos, another intern, whose subway broke down when they were in the tunnel and the passengers had to get out and walk along the tracks and up the escape ladder. I feel like that’s what always happens in horror movies before the people get smashed or killed by noxious sewage or something. I asked Nicos what was stopping another subway from bulldozing them all.
“Nothing.”
“Did you think you were going to die?”
“Pretty much, yes.”
Apparently other than that, the Subte runs great.

This week included a lot of settling in other than starting our internships. We cooked two dinners in our kitchenette, one quesadillas and guacamole and the other salad and couscous (thank you Mom for the recipe! I used mangos and raisins and Paloma and I both ate it for lunch the next day). We got our gym memberships, which involved a medical test in which we had to lay down and get eight plastic clamps attached to us check for heart palpitations. It’s actually called the “Sport Club” instead of the gym, and it features such workout classes as “Musculación" and "Power Jump" on individual trampolines. The ladies among us can’t wait to try these out.

We’ve made nice leeway into the restaurant and club recommendations passed on by last year’s group. Eating out is almost as cheap as going to the grocery store. So far we’ve enjoyed some traditional Argentine food at Las Cholitas and Cumaná and sushi at La Dominga in Palermo. I’m going to try to mention restaurant names as much as possible here for future reference. We also went to our first discoteca—which is my beloved Mexican creeping in…here they’re called boliches—on Wednesday night at Asia de Cuba in Puerto Madero.

Also studying in Buenos Aires this summer are Casey Blue James who I met in Ethnicity, Race, and Migration this semester and Sophie Elsner from home, both of whom I was lucky enough to see this week! I had a great lunch and walk around Palermo with Sophie on Saturday and Casey Blue came out with us on Wednesday and Saturday nights. It was great to catch up with Sophie about school and Buenos Aires because she’s been here since February and knows her way around. It was also very interesting comparing our school’s attitudes toward study abroad. Very few Yale kids do it during the semester, whereas that’s very normal for Brown. Sophie has had a great time here so far and has gotten me excited about exploring other parts of the city, which I haven’t had time to do this week, and about spending time with her in her remaining month.

Two other exciting events this week were the dinner tango show that Alex, Ani, and Tina took us to on Friday night and the Argentina-Colombia 2010 World Cup Qualifying Futbol match today. Argentina won 1-0! The tango show was at an old restaurant called El Querandí with an elevated wooden stage on which the dancers reenacted the history of tango, doing different versions of the dance in costumes from different decades. It was absolutely beautiful. I wish I could move like that and know that it is hopeless, but nevertheless Nico and I asked Tina for a good place to take lessons and she’s going to hook us up later this week.

I also just listened to the Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me podcast from when they came to Austin the night before I left for Argentina. It is hilarious. I urge everyone from Austin to go to Wait Wait in the iTunes store and at least listen to the first few minutes of the May 30th podcast when Peter Segel says he’s announcing from Bass Concert Hall…it warms my heart. Anyway, love and miss all of you and props for reading this far.