First edition

The I International
Street Sculpture Exhibition was held in the city of Santa Cruz de Tenerife between the winter of 1973 and the spring of 1974.

In the words of Vicente Saavedra: “…the list of participants alone illustrates the importance of the event.

All the Spanish sculptors who took part in this international exhibition left their work definitively in the streets and squares of Santa Cruz. The list is extensive and representative: José Abad, Andrés Alfaro, Néstor Basterrechea, Rubio Camín, Xavier Corberó, Jaume Cubells, Feliciano Hernández, Amadeo Gabino, Jorge Jiménez Casas, Eduardo Gregorio, José Guinovart, Marcel Martí, Remigio Mendiburu, Joan Miró, Eusebio Sempere, Pablo Serrano, Francisco Sobrino, José María Subirachs, Gustavo Torner, and Ricardo Ugarte.

We also had the opportunity to see in our city works by sculptors who had previously left us, such as Alberto Sánchez, Óscar Domínguez, Pablo Gargallo, Julio González, and our departed friend Manolo Millares.

In addition to the Spanish participants, many foreigners also took part. The list is extensive and includes artists from ten different countries: Kenneth Armitage, Bernard Meadows, Henry Moore and Eduardo Paolozzi from England; from France, Claude Viseux; from Italy, Mario Ceroli and Arnaldo Pomodoro; Gotfried Honegger, from Switzerland; Mark Macken came from his native Belgium; and from the other side of the Atlantic we had a very qualified participation with works by Alexander Calder from the United States, Alicia Penalba and María Simón from Argentina, Jesús Soto from Venezuela, Federico Assler from Chile, and Agustín Cárdenas from Cuba. We also had works on loan from deceased sculptors, such as Italian Marino Marini and Russian Ossip Zadkine.

It might seem, on the basis of the above, that the organisation of the exhibition was a success, but there were some setbacks. I remember, for instance, Eduardo Chillida’s refusal to participate, despite our repeated invitations; or what happened with the most conceptual work of all those carried out in the field, for which the sculptor Mario Ceroli proposed a project that consisted of writing the basic elements of Aristotelian physics: earth, air, fire and water, with trees on four dominant hills of Santa Cruz. The unavoidable difficulty of finding a public space with the requested characteristics led us to choose a free site between the entrance and exit ramps to Santa Cruz on the northern motorway. A red flowering tree was chosen, the ground was prepared and the planting began, but could only afford the first three letters of the word “fuego” [Spanish for “fire”] and the thing remained, ironically, in the indefinite past “FUE” [Spanish for “it was”].

Another uncertainty arose when we contacted the General Directorate of Fine Arts of the Ministry of Culture in order to obtain the provisional loan of some works from the collections in its museums, specifically those by Ángel Ferrant, Mateo Hernández, and Pablo Gargallo. Although the initial response was affirmative, later on a host of bureaucratic and useless problems put paid to this initiative, leaving us with a certain discouragement.

Another uncertainty arose when we contacted the General Directorate of Fine Arts of the Ministry of Culture in order to obtain the provisional loan of some works from the collections in its museums, specifically those by Ángel Ferrant, Mateo Hernández, and Pablo Gargallo. Although the initial response was affirmative, later on a host of bureaucratic and useless problems put paid to this initiative, leaving us with a certain discouragement.

And it was at that moment that Pablo Serran’so miraculous magic wand reappeared, who managed to get his friend the sculptor Mark Macken – linked to the Middelheim Museum in Antwerp – to send an urgent copy of Gargallo’s The Prophet from Belgium, so that we could enjoy this undisputed jewel of contemporary sculpture for a few months in the García Sanabria Park.

The work by the young artist Jorge Jiménez Casas, made with methacrylate plates and resembling a large black bird, was blown away by the first windstorm and disappeared. A second, reinforced version of the sculpture, placed in the same place, suffered the same fate, leaving only a few photographs as the only evidence of its existence.

Although the political circumstances at the time were not the most suitable for a free and non-interfered debate on cultural issues, the I International Symposium on Street Art was organised in parallel to the exhibition, with the sponsorship of the March Foundation and the close collaboration of the Art Department of the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters of the University of La Laguna.

Tomás Llorens, then professor at the School of Architecture in Portsmouth (England), participated in its beginnings by writing an extensive article entitled “Invitation to Debate”, which served as the basis for the discussions and papers of the Symposium.

The three-day course ended with keynote lectures by José Luis López Aranguren, Jacques Lassaigne – director of the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris – and Eduardo Westerdahl.

The list of speakers gives us an idea of the importance of this Symposium, with the participation of intellectuals such as Xavier Rubert de Ventós, Gillo Dorfles, Oriol Bohigas, Corredor Matheos, Valeriano Bozal, Juan Manuel Bonet, Simón Marchán, and José Rogelio Buendía.

Despite this extraordinary line-up of participants, the Symposium was contested in the street, which demanded the discussion of other forbidden topics till then, so that the final conclusion was, paradoxically, the lack of conclusions. Juan Pedro Castañeda saw it this way in his chronicle for the newspaper La Tarde: “When it came to drawing up the conclusions there was no agreement, and in the end there were three different types of summaries, two of them drawn up by the working groups to which the speakers belonged and a third type drawn up by many of the congress participants, who included in their conclusions the need for a closer approach to the immediate reality, not so much artistic as social”.

The coordination of information and promotion about those events was masterfully orchestrated by the journalist Juan Cruz Ruiz, who was still living in Tenerife. To this end, he organised a press conference in Madrid, which had enormous repercussions throughout the national press, with some of the most prestigious newspapers, such as La Vanguardia of Barcelona, dedicating the colour front page of the Sunday paper to the Exhibition.

After a long period of uninterrupted and exhausting activity, in May 1974, the I International Street Sculpture Exhibition came to an end. Most of the works exhibited in our capital remained with us forever, but others, perhaps the most important ones, had been loaned. Thus began a painful process of returning sculptures.

The sculptures by Miró and Moore, which had been on display on the Rambla for almost half a year, were returned to their place of origin – Paris and London – at the end of the loan period. At that moment, a real popular movement began, echoed by all the media, for the works to return to our city.

The authors were not insensitive to such strong social pressure and decided to cede the rights to their sculptures so that new bronze casts could return to us. To this end, it was necessary to raise funds by means of popular fundraising activities, which were complemented by a special grant by the Tenerife Island Council. The works that came on this second occasion did not coincide with those previously exhibited in Santa Cruz and are entitled El Guerrero de Goslar (The Warrior of Goslar) by Henry Moore and Mujer Botella II (Bottle Woman II) by Joan Miró.

Some of the objectives that the organising committee had set out to achieve at the end of the exhibition were never met.

Juan Cruz commented at the time in the pages of the now defunct newspaper La Hoja del Lunes: “…thirty-two of the sculptures that will now fill the ramblas and the park will remain in the city as part of its artistic heritage. But we know that these sculptures will not remain only in these two places in Santa Cruz. When the exhibition ends – at the end of January – the commission that has organised the exhibition will look for the most suitable places in the neighbourhoods and squares of the capital so that these works can fulfil their aesthetic function outside this urban centre, which has now been used to make the sculptures more comfortable to look at. Then, we repeat, these sculptures will be scattered around the city. This initiative seems to me to be essential, and I think it will be the one that will really give the exhibition the popular sense that the organisers wanted it to have”.

 

Similarly, in an interview published in El Día, Sir Roland Penrose expressed an existing problem which, unfortunately, remains unresolved. He said:

“It is an extraordinary idea to have put the sculptures on the street.
The choice seems to me to be a good one.
It is an adventure that all cities should embark on.
The worst thing about the exhibition? The lampposts. The lampposts on the Ramblas”.

It was significant that the reason those unsightly lampposts were removed from just one section of the Ramblas – the one with the jars – was to facilitate a military parade”. The happy coincidence of the celebration in 1994 of the V Centenary of the foundation of the City of Santa Cruz de Tenerife with the XX anniversary of the I Street Sculpture Exhibition has made it possible to set up a second version of that exhibition”.

In the words of Eduardo Westerdhal, according to a published article:
“The I International Street Sculpture Exhibition, organised by the Santa Cruz de Tenerife Delegation of the Official Architects’ Association of the Canary Islands, has overcome the natural limitations of the island and can be considered a national event.

The setting up of such a complicated task is mainly due to the generous collaboration of the Tenerife Island Council the City Council and the Caja de Ahorros de Santa Cruz de Tenerife, the Official Architects’ Association in the island’s Delegation and, in a singular way, to the efforts of the Culture Commission of the Association.

It has been possible to have important figures in Tenerife, such as Sir Roland Penrose, former director of the British Council in Paris and current president of the Institute of Contemporary Art in London, of which he was a founder together with Herbert Read and Henry Moore; Jacques Lassaigne, director of the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; Marc Macken, director of the Middelheim Sculpture Museum in Antwerp, sculptor, founder of this museum and one of the great experts in this type of open-air exhibition; Claude Viseux, sculptor and member of the Jury of the Salon de Mai in Paris.

Most of the sculptors exhibiting their work were present in Tenerife on the opening days: Jiménez Casas, Néstor Basterrechea, Martín Chirino, Feliciano, Eusebio Sempere, Jaime Cubells, José Mª Subirachs, Eduardo Paolozzi, Amadeo Gabino, Pablo Serrano, Remigio Mendiburu, Ricardo Ugarte, Federico Assler, Josep Guinovart – his great exhibition is still open at the Association, Gustavo Torner, Joaquín Rubio Camín, Xavier Corberó, Andrés Alfaro, Francisco Sobrino, Eduardo Gregorio, María Simón, José Abad, and Mario Ceroli.

Of a total of forty-six works, twenty-nine have been donated by their authors to the city. Those promised by Jean Tinguely and Niki de Saint-Phalle, the one by Mario Ceroli and another contribution by Oscar Domínguez are still missing”.