MALBA, malbec and more...

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Monday morning is a public holiday and Mattias wakes me up for a traditional Porteno breakfastof crackers with soft white cheese and jam. Then we go to MALBA – the Museum of Modern Latin American Art.

The building is a beautiful, elegantly cool and light filled space. Unlike the Tate Modern or its equivalents around the world the exhibitions and floors are easily do-able in a couple of hours which makes it just the right size for my limited attention span. There is an exhibiton on – bye bye american pie – showcasing photography and artists from the Warhol era as well as some of South America's most famous artists.

He introduces me to Antonio Berni – an artist that has created a reoccuring character in his work – Juanita Laguan - a young man that represents poverty and inequity. It is a commentary on the struggle of the poor and working classes and unusually I think he works in a variety of mediums from weird jabberwocky esque hanging sclptures to traditional acrylics.

Leon Ferrari -is another hugely successful S.American artist notorious for splicing traditional religious icons and imagery with sexually explicit content. His work reminds me a little of The Chapman brothers – sometimes it works, sometimes its grotesque and pornagraphic shock content is the the overriding emotion that seems to dull the senses to more delicate shades of connection.

Mattias and I stop front of a blown up image from ancient Japanese pornography of a man licking out a large vulva. Awkward!

In the other room we hear the uncomfortable and disconcerting noise of pigs squealing and sure enough the actual display is a nightmarish assault on the senses. It is a huge three dimensional and mounted grotesque display of two animatronic George Bush models with unnaturally large heads, trousers rolled down - fucking pigs. There are other pigs on the display fucking each other. The Bush heads have motion sensors in the eyes so that as you make your way around the display their heads and eyes follow you – all the while their miniature torsos continue fucking the pigs. As a model its truly horrible, as an inditement of the Bush era and country's complicity with America its truly brilliant. Britian – I would think would be one of the pigs being fucked by Bush whilst simultaneously fucking another pig.

Mattias studied cinema so we talk briefly about the film Deliverance – which the display reminds us of.

Deliverance did for the banjo – what Hitler did for the moustache...i ponder idly.

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