Klemm Fundation: El cuerpo de una colección.

With "The telematic banquet", the television program that began broadcasting in 1994, Federico Klemm not only encouraged the survival of the myth of the genius artist in an extraordinarily late and effective way. With lucidity also twilight, he coined a metaphor about the work of art history. The image of the discipline that the name of the program offers is involuntarily suggestive: a nocturnal meeting, under the pretext of an author or a style, of objects that exist in the reciprocal distance. However, the pieces invited to the telematic banquets came largely from the same source. With the television broadcast, Klemm became the host of his own private group; a collection pulsed, like any art history, for the desire to preclude the dispersion of works.

Renewing the way of exhibiting that ensemble, hosted since 1995 in the legendary place that had belonged to the Bonino gallery, is a task without a doubt challenging. As understood by Federico Baeza and Guadalupe Chirotarrab, authors of the new curatorial script, the objects of the Klemm collection find their own historicity in the multiple discursive supports in which they were staged; the one of greater reach, without a doubt, the television screen. Exhibiting the collection without evoking that scenography where the history of art was dramatized meant both dehistoricizing the collectiontr and depriving the community of a memory of the media. Hence the place that "The telematic banquet" recovers in different levels, explicit and underlying, of the new curatorial story.

Set in the same media problem is the question of the status of the traditional art history, for the validity of its potential to organize "the body of a collection" after the cultural earthquakes that put its legitimacy in crisis. Among other roles, Klemm made the epigone of the conventional figure of the art historian: a connaisseur who adds to his aesthetic judgments the gesticulation of his infallible nature. The unthinkable consequence of the performances of Klemm in the television was to leave in evidence what exists of mystifier in the discourses on the art. For those who reorganize their ensemble sixteen years after their death, the history of art understood as an epic succession of styles remains on the other side of the enunciable.

The alternative was a productive series of groupings defined by thematic coordinates. This redesign of the nuclei does not replace the horizon in which the pieces were collected but temporary vectors, images of utopias and the vibrant pulse of today. After all, to show a collection as a collection is to exhibit a narrative artifact that projects future and invents past and temporarily manipulates the objects with which it works. In the middle of a well-patterned dispersion, the presence of Klemm is replenished prismatically in the first four thematic units with the inclusion of different portraits. The incorporation of works acquired through successive editions of the Klemm prize diversifies the voices and opens the place for improbable conversations between works and artists already canonical with other youngers in the local canon. In this way, the new story tells from a body and from a singular corpus the storm of temporalities that a collection supposes.