BUENOS AIRES, CITY OF STATUES

Abstract

1 2 4 Y B U E N O S A I R E S , C I T Y O F S T A T U E S B O N N I E C O S T E L L O Everyone told me I’d love it – the dance, the food, the sports, the blend of cultures, the Old World charm, and the New World vitality. YetduringmytendaysinBuenosAires(anescapetosummerduring a paralyzing Boston winter) the city seemed strangely frozen, or at least immobile. This certainly had a lot to do with economic stagnation , corrupt government, stony bureaucracy, the eroding social institutions, neglected infrastructure, the spectacle of desperate poverty amid lavish, aimless wealth. Not to mention a heat wave that caused repeated power outages throughout the city. (The traf- fic lights would suddenly grow dark, creating gridlock and pedestrian paralysis on the Avenida 9 Julio, one of the widest streets in the world.) These are the conditions that drive so many Argentines to a feeling of bronca (the word basically means really frustrated and angry, or ‘‘pissed’’). But perhaps it was also the monuments. If you take the standard bus tour – the one that picks up tourists at six di√erent downtown hotels, moving less than a mile in thirty minutes until you finally head down to Libertador, where you could easily have walked in ten – the word you will hear more than any other from the guide with the microphone at the front of the bus is monument, or, as our particular guide pronounced it in 1 2 5 R Spanglish, muonoment, as in ‘‘on your left you will see a muonoment to Carlos Pellegrini,’’ without a word to enlighten us as to the backstory of this looming e≈gy. There are probably more statues per square mile in Paris, but somehow they make a stronger collective impression (as statues, not as commemorated persons) here in this so-called Paris of South America. Buenos Aires is cluttered with public monuments, and for the most part nobody cares anymore what or whom they honor. (Nothing unique to Buenos Aires about that!) Perhaps because it was the Christmas holiday and most of B.A.’s porteños (locals) who could had left the city, it seemed to belong to these forgotten memorials (and to the intimidating and ubiquitous street dogs). Anything can be a monument, of course. Buenos Aires has embraced the pop artist Claes Oldenburg’s blow-up scale, but without his irony. Still life is a favorite genre. One of the city’s most famous monuments is a giant flower, Floralis genérica, in United Nations Square, commissioned and paid for by Lockheed. The sixty-sixfoot -high piece of metal includes a light-sensitive element that causes the petals to open and close according to solar activity, turning pink at sunset. (Often the mechanism is out of order, however.) Does it stand for anything other than naturaleza muerta? Perhaps if we had thought about scale in terms of an aerial view (Lockheed’s), the flower would have seemed less grotesque. In Buenos Aires, the body itself is treated like a monument. There are more nip-and-tuck surgeons, lifting bottoms and enlarging busts, than anywhere else in the world. Argentina’s signature art form, the tango, brings dance very close to sculpture. Not surprisingly, Buenos Aires has many monuments to the tango legends. There are, of course, several statues to those who made tango famous: particularly Carlos Gardel, whose tango songs pervaded the radio in the twenties. He reaches out his hand in serenade to that remote and eternal beloved, the Audience. (This is a favorite pose as well of Argentine politicians – living and bronzed – Evita on her balcony crooning to the crowds.) The most famous statue of Gardel is the one in the Abasto neighborhood where he grew up. Mute though he is, he holds a cigarette burning between his bronze fingers – an ember ever replenished by admirers . Gardel died in an airplane crash at the height of his career (Lockheed again?) and was mourned as if he were Napoleon. 1 2 6 C O S T E L L O Y The city has recently erected a monument...