An Interview with Nora Fisch
Buenos Aires, August 2017. Interview with Luz Hitters.
Photography by Juan Hitters.
Nora Fisch’s prestigious gallery can be found at 5222 Córdoba Avenue, a dedicated space for lovers of contemporary art in Argentina. The homonymous endeavor, located in the neighborhood of Villa Crespo, is already seven years old, successfully becoming an artistic pole for an educated audience.
After obtaining a masters degree and working in the United States, Fisch returned from New York in 2008 with the objective of creating her own business, taking advantage of her fresh and cosmopolitan outlook, in order to promote the excellent artists that can be found in Argentina. We have had the opportunity to talk to her about the Argentine contemporary art market, its strengths and limitations, as well as the work behind her success.
Besides a rich cultural background and constant inquiry, what else do you think is essential in order to manage a gallery?
I think you need to know a lot about contemporary art because how you go about defining the gallery’s program is very important. The program is the artists you represent, the kind of events you hold, the exhibitions, etc. Therefore, you need to know a lot and try to keep a coherent line. And of course, an art gallery has a double role. It is on one hand a privately funded cultural agent with a public presence, which is something that I feel very proud about. As a private business one is also offering the opportunity to come and see art in comfortable hours, for free, to get information - because we always have papers hanging up enlightening what is going on in the exhibition room. But, on the other hand, it is also a business. There is a place where you have to work selling pieces and positioning the artist. What makes a good gallery is not just this positioning, but also growing the artist’s career. Because of this, when becoming involved in art, it is good to invest in a good gallery, because then you know that the artist is growing, that he will be exposed to international attention, and that he will be legitimized by a serious gallery that works with knowledge. We don’t just take care of selling the pieces, but we also promote our artists with local and international curators, take our artists to fairs, explain them, make them well known and accompany them on their personal initiatives.
How would you describe art in Argentina? Is there an evident correlation between the demand and the quality of the production?
Contemporary art in Argentina is having a very good moment. I think we have an art scene that is very energetic, there is a lot of activity and artists that work seriously and originally. I think that as a scene, as far as intellectual and creative sophistication, it has nothing to envy other international scenes. In any case, sometimes money is scarce for production. A very strong market that generates a lot of money for the artists allows flying with the level and values of production in a way that here can be more bounded. The demand for contemporary art has been growing in comparison to what it was ten years ago, or even five years ago. However, we still don’t have such a strong market as the ones in New York, London or Germany. Obviously, our market is much smaller. Yes, there is a certain unbalance between the quality and need of those that produce and the demand for that work. But I am very optimistic. I constantly see more and more people approaching contemporary art with curiosity and also the desire to collect.
We’ve seen that in recent years the neighbourhood has become a center for contemporary galleries. Why was Villa Crespo chosen? Do neighbours come into the gallery to see the exhibitions? Do they ask about the pieces and how much they cost?
Villa Crespo was not chosen at random or coincidentally, it was very deliberate. There were two galleries already in the area that were ‘Slyzmud’ and ‘La Ira de Dios’. At a given moment, both Orly Benzacar and I were left without a space: we needed to move. Then we started thinking what neighborhood to move to. We explored La Boca but it wasn’t quite perfect for us. One day, Amadeo Azar, one of my artists who lives in the neighborhood, asked me ‘Why don’t you come and see Villa Crespo?’ Then with Orly and with Mora Bacal - who is Orly’s daughter who co-manages Ruth Benzacar - the three of us drove over with a list of five or six possible locations to see, big ones, with the idea to rent something and share. That same day, Orly and Mora found a place. It took me another two months to find this one.
It was then very deliberate, because we had been thinking that we had to set up a contemporary art circuit that you could walk through, somewhere where rent was not as deliriously expensive as it can be in Palermo Soho. This neighborhood has the advantage of being safe, pleasant, having a lot of available space, nice to walk in, the prices - although it is not cheap- are not those of Palermo or Recoleta where you cannot find places of this size, and it can be easily accessed. If you know how to get here you can get here fast. We moved over and very soon other galleries moved here as well.
The people of the neighborhood come in… very little. We have a big window here and you can see the exhibition from outside. I do think that people can be shy about coming into an art gallery, that there is a certain preconception, they don't know if they can. Sometimes I see that people stay at the window looking at the pieces from outside and don’t dare ring the doorbell. But some come in. Besides, the reality is that in this neighborhood there are plenty of artists and curators so there is a permanent influx of people.
Many of your artists have shown their work at MALBA (Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires) individually, in Germany, the Netherlands, London, Brazil, New York, Los Angeles. You could say they are well established artists. Is this a requirement for the selected pieces that are shown in your space? Or how do you determine who to promote?
At first, when I opened the gallery seven years ago, I took some artists who at the time were up-and-coming. Nowadays, I do not work with such artists. The artists that I have are artists that have built more solid careers. In many cases, that international presence we built together. I think it is the case of Amadeo Azar, Osías Yanov, Fernanda Laguna, who are artists who are beginning to hold their own on an international level, who have a series of international opportunities and that we made happen together. When they came into the gallery that was not the case. The last artist that joined us is Claudia Fontes, who lives in England and was the Argentine representative at the Venice Biennal. She has already built an international career. With others we build it. It is not a requirement to already have an international career. I think the requirement is to be a good artist, to be original, to have a great level of commitment to the work and a desire to not be a hippy, a desire to enter art history with the demands and professionalism that it requires.
Do you interrelate different artistic disciplines like music or cinema?
Yes, we do a lot with music here. For example, we show performances by Alan Curtis, who is an experimental musician. Gastón Pérsico is someone who just had an installation at MALBA where the idea of music was incorporated since he is also a DJ. We have performances: Osías Yanov will be showing here in September and October. He is someone who works with sculptures and performances, and there will be performances as a part of that. Lux Lidner has shown performances here. Fernanda is a poet. There is a lot of crossing of disciplines and interests in the gallery.
We’ve seen that the doors are alway open at your gallery when it comes to inform and welcome the public, and that visitors vary both in age and styles. What segment is your biggest visitor? What is your strongest audience, commercially?
We have visitors of all kinds. We have people come who are interested in contemporary art. I cannot tell you that they are only young or middle-aged. People of different ages come. For example, the first Saturday of every month we open in the afternoon as a part of ‘Abre Villa Crespo’. That day all the galleries open and more diverse people come, and people see it as an outing, people who don’t necessarily regularly go see contemporary art. There is no segmentation by age. Segmentation has to do with who is interested in contemporary art.
As to whom we sell to, I think that the important collectors in Argentina have already come to the gallery. I’d say that in the first three years of the gallery I had few important collectors and mainly did occasional sales, some buyer every once in a while. I’d say we now already have clients who are building important collections, who come to the gallery, who are interested in our artists and collect them. I believe we are in the segment of the galleries who sell to the most important collections in the country.
We know you previously were in journalism for some time and that you have worked in the administration of cultural property. Do you believe your previous employments, where interaction is essential, help you understand what pieces might be interesting to each client? Do you link different personalities with specific proposals?
Yes, absolutely. I think everything you do in life is useful, and that for an art gallery you need to be a little bit like a ‘Victorinox’ and have a little bit of everything, like a tool box. This is not an industry that allows you to have very many employees: someone to do press, someone to do graphic design. Everything I’ve done throughout my life - educating myself as an artist, being a journalist, working in cultural management, working in new media corporations for a while when the Internet started - all those kinds of work experience come together and allow us to handle the different aspects that the gallery requires. This I believe applies to any situation, everything you’ve done in life is useful. Nothing is a waste of time.
How do you manage to bring local art abroad? Besides the geographical barriers, having such good artists, as you have mentioned, what other obstacles limit international growth and parity? Do you think we will see Argentinian galleries at international fairs in the not so distant future?
Already in the last few years, after ‘Meridiano' was formed, the Argentinian chamber of contemporary art galleries (the idea for which we came up with a couple of years ago and that was legally constituted less than a year and a half ago) and government programs, there are a lot of Argentinian galleries participating in such events abroad. Before, those of us who took part were three, four, five. With this support from the government there are at least fifteen, twenty galleries that have started going to different fairs abroad. The main obstacle we have are custom regulations. Customs have such a level of bureaucracy, requirements and impediment that make taking work abroad a very expensive and lengthy process. Because of this, it happens among other things that we are not allowed for practical reasons to sell Argentinian art to tourists. A tourist that comes to Buenos Aires for three days, wants to but a little piece and take it away under his arm or in his luggage cannot do so, because the paperwork takes days and days. You have to personally go to Ezeiza airport, go to a notary who gives permission, it’s impossible. It is something we have all had meetings with the government about, the same with Abad, the director of the tax collection agency, to try and make it easier. Some day they will realize how absurd it is and fix it, but nowadays that is the main obstacle. Besides that there are the incredibly high costs of transport, that have to do with custom regulations, because it is much cheaper to take a piece oneself. But, because of all these custom impediments, its complicated.