BUENOS AIRES, Argentina—Our globe-trotting correspondent Oscar McLennan takes us for a look at the best gallery and museum exhibitions on view in Buenos Aires. Among the highlights are an interactive multimedia display at the Fundacion Telefonica, a collection of David LaChapelle’s celeb-centric photos at Malba and inspirational paintings by Diana Tchinnosian at a funky San Telmo gallery.

MUSEUM EXHIBITIONS

Espacio Fundacion Telefonica
“Negatec”
Through May 27

You would have to have a very jaded art palate to walk out from this exhibition and not feel that you had just undergone an extremely stimulating and satisfactory experience. Curated by Luis Camnitzer and featuring videos, installations, sound art and interactive pieces from a group of international artists, the show offers the unexpected around every corner. There is also a vibrant mixture of the moving (in both senses of the word), the amusing and the downright peculiar.

Surrounded by Tears (2004), by Colombian artist Oswaldo Macia, consists of a room filled with bell-shaped speakers, which emit cries of lamentation from the victims of war and disaster around the world. If our sense of sight has grown accustomed, and therefore dulled, to a constant barrage of horrific imagery in film and media, the same is not true of our sense of hearing. This audio work is able to touch a buried, intimate region within us, stirring the waters of a pool of universal human grief as old as the species itself.

Treadmill (2003-06), by New York-based artist Liza McConnell, comprises bits of bicycle, the reconstructed plastic of traffic cones and, yes, a treadmill, with two rows of miniature traffic cones attached to either side. The work appears at first like a far-fetched, early attempt at a flying machine, and it took me several minutes of cautious circling to realize that I was supposed to get up and run on it. When I did, the wall lit up like a magic lantern show, and a road lined with traffic cones unfolded before me. It seemed like a metaphor telling me that regardless of how much I work that body and try to keep in shape, in the end I’m still on the road to nowhere.

Another memorable piece is Dough (2005-06), a video work by Mika Rottenberg, an artist from Buenos Aires now living in New York. It is a surreal, perverse, John Waters-like take on the process of making dough that almost certainly guarantees that you’ll never look at a loaf of bread in quite the same way ever again.

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Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires
“David LaChapelle: Heaven to Hell”
Through May 21

The photographs of David LaChapelle have been described as surrealist, grotesque, shocking and ironic. What they are not, for me, is subversive. He tends to tart up the rather superficial celebrity world of modeling and music to make it seem more interesting than it actually is, though sometimes he even fails in this. Portraits of Naomi Campbell, Madonna and Leonardo DiCaprio show the stars simply looking bland, pleased with themselves. But LaChapelle hits the target in a big way with Pamela Anderson in Miracle Tan. This grotesque work is like a cross between the Bionic Woman and Barbie, done in a horror-movie style. You might call it “Revenge of the Killer Bionic Barbie Woman.” To have agreed to be part of this, our Pamela must have either a very good sense of humor or no sense at all.

LaChapelle’s “fashion shots” of beautiful models against a background of devastated homes may have a shocking effect, but if I were from New Orleans or any of the other increasingly numerous natural disaster sites around the planet, I would want a serious word in his ear. An unhealthy fascination with devastation pervades much of this work. It’s like being at the scene of a bad car crash, where you just can’t look away.

The real must-see at Malba is the permanent collection. There is a superb display of paintings by Xul Solar, a great artist whose work seems to span the centuries, and who has become something of an icon of Latin American art. Leon Ferrari’s La civilazion y cristani is an installation depicting a tortured Christ on the cross, nailed to the underbelly of a jet fighter from the United States. Made in 1966, the work feels especially poignant today. La Gran Tentacion (1962), by Antonio Berri, portrays a Western society where it’s all dog eat dog, or rather, man eat man. People are chewed up and spitted out and left to rot with their open mouths screaming on the sidewalk. Overhead the face of a ’60s Hollywood model beams down like the Man in Moon. Now that’s subversive.