The only way I can view the exhibit Anish Kapoor. Archaeology: Biology at the Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo (MUAC), is as a defeat. I fail to understand the benefits that have been repeated over and over again about the show, designed to attract mass audiences to the museum, especially if one remembers that the institution, in its foundation, embodied the promise of a “critical radicalness in terms of cultural management” that would honor the university responsible for its origin.

Today Kapoor's work is neither critical nor radical if one uses the curatorial program of the MUAC as their parameter, since the production of this British Indian artist has been systematically domesticated by the rhythm and needs of the warm and dazzling waters of the art market. What three or four decades ago were considered advances in sculptural terms today are pale reproductions (mainly in the artist’s mirror series) ready to be sold at art fairs.

"Kapoor is one of the most important sculptors of the past 40 years.  He has proposed a number of decisive sculptural forms that cannot be ignored in an account of what contemporary art is", head curator of MUAC, Cuauhtémoc Medina justifies in an interview published in Código magazine (http: //goo.gl/CBQcwr).

Medina's judgment is fair if one looks at Kapoor’s work in historical terms, but the argument is commonplace and routinely used by curators to validate retrospectives of the same group of modern and contemporary artists that circulate the museums of the world. For example, the Jumex Museum used an identical argument last year to justify their show on the American artist Alexander Calder. In 2009 the MoMA in New York said the same thing about their production of a show on the mexican artist Gabriel Orozco. How many innovative sculptors have their been in the twentieth century? As many as necessary to fill the museums that exhibit their work today using a revisionist curatorial platform.

Catherine Lampert, curator of the show, recalls in her catalog text that Kapoor earned his reputation in the early 1970s thanks to his diverse use of pigments, which are featured in the works that open the show.

However, while these works are brought together in the first room of the exhibit, they are not given a central presence in the show’s museography. Instead they are a backdrop for Kapoor’s work with mirrors, which the artist has reproduced ad nauseam in every imaginable format and color, because, according to Kapoor, the market “likes mirrors” (http://goo.gl/3wxhqT).

The mirrors and, in general, the character of Anish Kapoor have efficiently seduced the masses. In the two months since the show’s opening, MUAC has received more than 150,000 people who stand in line and wait patiently to enter the museum’s galleries and take their photo in front of the works that distort the spectator’s reflection.

I did it, it was fun, but the motion of standing in front of a work of art to take a selfie, something that the museum has promoted (MUAC in a slogan recommends that viewers: “Comment, record, photograph, share”), is not something to be taken lightly, as it is an intentional repetition of the same phenomenon that last year attracted 330,000 people to the exhibit Yayoi Kusama: Endless Obsession at the Tamayo Museum.

Like all blockbuster exhibits, shows such that of Kapoor and Kusama are promoted using the argument that they will create new audiences for their respective museums, with the added advantage that they are both politically profitable for the museum and financially attractive in terms of its box office and sponsorship opportunities.

However, all these assertions are repeated without necessarily having the elements to prove them. The most compelling case of this comes from the Tamayo Museum itself, which after producing the most successful exhibit in the museum’s history, that of Kusama, today reports no more visitors than before. Where are the hordes of people that camped outside the enclosure to see the work of the japanese artist? It is difficult to know for sure, but what is clear is that they did not step foot in the Tamayo Museum again.

In another interview published by Nexos magazine, Medina affirms that at the MUAC "there is a trajectory of exhibits of renowned artists with a great capacity to attract audiences, particularly Cildo Meireles and Carlos Cruz-Diez" (http: // goo .gl / Uc6ccf).

I find this statement incredible, as to me it seems completely inaccurate to compare Kapoor to Meireles in any concrete way, because although both artists are part of the contemporary art canon, their paths today share no parallels in terms of how each artist fits into his field or into the art market.

I remember clearly all levels of perception that were generated by Meireles’ show, from the monochrome shock (Desvio para o vermelho) to the anxiety and disgust generated by certain environments (Volatile) or the confusion generated through noise (Babel), not to mention the political weight of several of his pieces (Cruzeiro do Sul). The radical and critical nature of his work remains an underlying theme. In the case of Kapoor these qualities are lost on me.

In addition, there is no way to compare the relationship between the way in which the MUAC publicized the production and exhibition of Meireles’ work, which was diametrically austere and bounded to an arts commnity, to the bizarre logistical decisions made after Kapoor’s visit to Mexico.

If the MUAC were a company the Kapoor exhibit would be its most resounding success, but the MUAC is not a company, it is a public museum that, and this seems almost too obvious to say, is linked to an educational institution, an internationally renowned place of learning.

One cannot use the box office numbers or the political visibility generated by these types of shows as parameters for assessing the cultural management of MUAC, which I repeat, pledged to operate using critical radicalness.

When touring the Kapoor exhibit, I remembered a conversation in 2010 with Guillermo Santamarina, then curator in chief of MUAC. With a certain anxiety he asked himself how he could make the exhibit Somewhere / Nowhere by Félix González-Torres, attractive for a public that sought to “interact” with the works inside the museum. His only response was that there was no way to achieve this interaction, because González-Torres’ work was too fragile to respond to such demands.

Those familiar with the work of Gonzalez-Torres know that its power does not lie in its material presence, but rather in its capacity to dismantle the formal purity of minimalist discourse, with warmer, intimate, and even sentimental ideas.

The media success of the exhibition of Kapoor has also brought to mind another memory, a phrase spoken on several occasions by writer and art historian Olivier Debroise: "When contemporary art is news it is bad news for contemporary art." I confess that when I first heard it I thought it was an exaggeration, but today, in light of Kapoor’s brilliant work, I finally understand the weight of his words. While the MUAC has won many battles to outline what we know today as contemporary art designed and produced from Latin America, the exhibit Anish Kapoor. Archaeology: Biology is its first defeat.

Anish Kapoor. Archaeology : Biology is open from May 28 to November 27, 2016 at the Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo (Insurgentes Sur 3000, Centro Cultural Universitario). 

Translated by Nika Chilewich.

Original text in Spanish: http://www.excelsior.com.mx/blog/cubo-blanco/anish-kapoor-arqueologia-biologia/1108881 

"Pour out all your bile in the article. I will publish under my name. Write for me. Write for me. Break this letter!", José Luis Cuevas (Mexico City, 1931) insists in a handwritten letter addressed December 14, 1962, to Cuban lawyer and art critic José Gómez Sicre (1916-1991). In the letter, Cuevas asks the critic to draft one of nearly a hundred letters, texts and interviews he will produce from Washington to be published over the course of two decades under the Mexican artist’s name, inside and outside the country.

Gómez Sicre, who on July 6th of this year celebrated the centenary of his birth, served as the "bedside ghostwriter" to Cuevas during the 1950s and 60s. Above all else, he was an effective ideologue who used the ambition of a young, then unknown, Mexican artist as his own Trojan horse from which to combat the nationalist discourse of the Escuela Mexicana de Pintura during the Cold War.

Within the hundreds of letters and documents that make up the José Gómez Sicre Papers, 1916-1991, held at the Benson Latin American Collection, part of University of Texas, Austin’s extensive library system, it is made abundantly clear that Cuevas was entirely dependent on the writing of Pepe, as his friends called him. This is evidenced by letter after letter in which Cuevas asks Gómez Sicre not only to draft opinion pieces, which he sent to prominent figures in the Mexican art world such as Fernando Benitez, but also to write him response letters to museographer Fernando Gamboa or to art critic Raquel Tibol; this aside from the fact that Gómez Sicre was responsible for the forewords and texts in every book the artist published throughout the twenty-year period. Cuevas once even asked the critic to write to one of his ex-girlfriends to "end it."

Cuevas’ publishing of texts by Gómez Sicre’s under his own name became so frequent that the painter would censor his own writing, so as not to "betray the style."

"I have just been delivered the following questionnaire for a newspaper interview. (...) As I have to deliver it (sic) I do not dare fill it out so as not to 'betray the style'. Could you help me with this? I feel no need to tell you what to answer, because we are two minds in common. I know all of the aggression you want to express, and I feel the same," Cuevas writes on December 17, 1963 in a letter to Pepe.

Gómez Sicre, through his writing and his influence, was responsible for the international attention given to Cuevas’ career. In 1954 he brought Cuevas to show in Washington, where he sold all of his works (two of which were bought by Alfred H. Barr for MoMA’s collection in New York.)

In this way the Cuban critic took advantage of Cuevas as a means of solidifying US interests within a local Mexican art scene through an infiltration that encouraged depoliticizing artists under the premise that transcendental artistic practices represented the greatest freedom of expression.

"MY BEDSIDE GHOST WRITER"

José Gómez Sicre was director of Visual Arts for the Pan American Union, which would later become the Organization of American States (OAS) in Washington and found the Art Museum of the Americas. From his position of continental influence he became an active promoter of Latin American artists whose work complied with the prevailing trends in the United States, to the detriment of national discourses, such as that of Mexican muralism.

Under his name, Gómez Sicre also wrote numerous texts promoting the work of one particular Mexican artist. In a piece entitled, The Case of Cuevas, Gómez Sicre assures that “José Luis Cuevas has had the virtue to survive in his own country and overcome the current of semi-official art that seemed to have hindered all art in Mexico. Outside of his country he has managed to be admired even by those who follow dissimilar paths without giving an inch in his criteria, at times unrelenting.

"When Cuevas emerged in the art world, in Mexico there was only one criterion and one direction to be followed. Not to adapt was to languish in marginalization, or live under the attack of those who followed that direction, social realism, from which no one was allowed to evolve. In many cases artist’s deficiencies were concealed by a shield of staunch nationalism or by a political banner of compulsory procedures."

It is no coincidence that these same principles appear time and time again in the texts signed by Cuevas, which Gómez Sicre wrote, and which eventually were published as books. This is the case in Cuevas for Cuevas (Ediciones Era, 1965), which not only features Cuevas’ widely cited Cactus Curtain, but also includes other texts, copies of which can be found on carbon paper in the archive, José Gómez Sicre Papers, 1916- 1991.

One specific reference is the text engineered by Pepe whose copy on pink sheets was later given the manuscript title Ándele, Marchantita, Watemelon for 7,000 dollars. This piece was reproduced as chapter IV of the Autobiographical Notes featured in Cuevas for Cuevas, which was edited and designed by Vicente Rojo, with a foreword by Juan García Ponce.

"Breaking into the art world in Mexico is, for a young artist, a succession of rebuffs, hesitations, reprimands, and disappointments, in the face of those that proceed him. It involves the most negative and devastating asepticism from those one admires or pretends to follow. The young artist is required to submit and be silent, to show his unconditional devotion or to join a political party,” reads Gómez Sicre’s manuscript thatCuevas published as an autobiographical text.

While the relationship between Cuevas and Gómez Sicre fluctuated between moments of closeness and distance (in several letters the Mexican artist practically had to beg Gómez Sicre to write him yet another text), the strategy benefited both equally, as Cuevas acquired rapid visibility, thanks to his controversial texts, and Gómez Sicre could attack Mexican muralists head on; specifically David Alfaro Siqueiros, a left wing artist linked to the communist bloc.

Such was the success of Gómez Sicre’s writing signed by Cuevas that Fernando Benitez invited the Mexican artist to publish a monthly column, as told by the artist himself in a letter that dates Thursday December 18, 1958: "(BREAK THIS LETTER) Yesterday I spoke withBenitez and he asked me to collaborate monthly in his newspaper. This is dangerous, because of my duality of writing styles. I would be paid something (that is, you would). He said it would be interesting to do a first article about my travel experiences (...) He says he admires 'my' deep sense of humor and would like it to come through in all my writings. As a second article I could send the letter to Fernando Gamboaillustrated with drawings. Could you send it to me?"

This letter reflects not only the impact of Gómez Sicre’s texts, but also shows how the Cuban art critic could effortlessly impose his political agenda.

The Letter to Fernando Gamboa is dated September 6, 1958; the typewritten copy is in the collection José Gómez Sicre Papers, 1916-1991. In it, Cuevas seeks to justify his refusal to paint several murals at the Medical Center.

In the letter he criticizes the Mexican muralists once again: "I do not want to seem flippant, my dear Don Fernando, but my timely absence from Mexico has made me think a lot about the sad present and the dark fate of the provincial disintegration of our so-called national art, languid, tedious, restrained, parochial and supposedly utilitarian, while pretending to offer the people 'educational messages'. These messages, it is unfortunate to have to accept, do not serve, they have not served nor do I think they ever will. "

While it was not known in those years that Gómez Sicre wrote all of Cuevas’ critical texts –the information became public after the Cuban art critic’s death following the donation of his personal archive to the Benson Latin American Collection– in the 1960s Gómez Sicre’s operative role in Mexico and Latin America was obvious.

In a handwritten letter whose only date is "Sunday,” Cuevas relays to Gómez Sicre the dispute he then maintained with characters like Olga, the wife of Rufino Tamayo, and the critic Alfonso Neuvillate:

"Yesterday I spoke with you on the phone and I referred at length to the betrayal of the white rat Olga. Today, Sunday, the friend and accomplice of the miserable ‘tortillera’ (lesbian), Alfonso de Neuvillate, writes: 'Gómez Sicre, with his ideas and his teachings, has served to allow lesser cartoonists to pass in the art world for intelligent beings instead of as publicists, or worse, as traitors not only in their aesthetic cause, but to our nation.’ A week ago this same cretin said that you had been the advisor to my work and that in losing your rectory my work had starved to death."

In the same letter Cuevas explains, "They accused (Fernando) Gamboa of looking abroad and receiving your orders. They say he is a CIA agent and that his office is an extension of yours."

One of the most interesting documents that sought to criticize the weight of the Cuevas-Gómez Sicre alliance was drafted by Mexican artist Alberto Beltran, who published on March 27, 1960 a carton in a supplement of the Excélsior newspaper, Diorama of Culture, which was an illustration of the text The Vicious Aesthetics of Abstractionism, by Sergei Mozhniagun.

In the image Gómez Sicre is depicted as an obese Statue of Liberty that leads Cuevas, who resembles a reptile, as he scales the surface of a US congressional building. Under Gómez Sicre’s cloak there is another character resembling the writer Carlos Fuentes, who, alongsideCuevas, was also was linked to the influential group associated with Gómez Sicre.

But these attacks, instead of putting an end to the strategy imposed by the writer-critic duo, prompted Cuevas to ask again and again forGómez Sicre to answer his enemies, who in a somewhat paranoid stance were at the same time his allies, depending on whether or not they served his interests.

In this back and forth between alliances and conflicts, which generated heated epistolary battles between Cuevas and Pepe, characters likeJuan Garcia Ponce, Rufino Tamayo, Manuel Felguérez, Alberto Gironella, Francisco Icaza, Pedro Coronel and Inés Amor, among many others, were target equally with praise as with insults in Cuevas’s letters to solicit writing from Gómez Sicre.

Although Gómez Sicre almost always operated from Washington and Cuevas from Mexico City, the painter found a way to delay his deadlines so that the texts could arrive from the US. However, along the way Cuevas risked being discovered several times, as the artist would, in an effort to save time, send blank letters with his signature to Gómez Sicre for the critic to type up and send directly from United States.

This is documented in a letter from the British newspaper The Times, dated March 7, 1969, which Cuevas forwarded to Gomez Sicre with a handwritten note asking him to respond from Washington to save time.

"Pepe: I have been asked for this article on Mexican art. It is short. I hope you will do it, as it will have great exposure. I would appreciate it if you would first answer (I have attached a signed piece of paper) accepting or...not. If you do accept the article can be sent from Washington to gain time, and say that I am passing through the city. "

Cuevas was so dependent on Gómez Sicre that he would solicit writing under his name for books in which the Cuban art critic had also been asked to participate. This happened in 1979 with the book of photography Revealing José Luis Cuevas, by Daisy Ascher. Gómez Sicre had been commissioned for one of the book’s three introductory texts (which was not finally published), but Cuevas also asked him to do the introductory texts for each of the themes developed by the artist in the photography.

In an undated letter, Cuevas asks Gómez Sicre, "My Dear Pepe: For the book of photography by Daisy Ascher, which is about to be published in Mexico, and for which you were also asked to contribute a short text, I am required to write short introductions to each of the themes developed photographically. They are something like literary vignettes, very brief, half a page each, in which I must give my very personal opinion on the following topics: Women, disease, meat, prostitution, death, nudity."

With some unintentional humor in the same letter the Mexican artist says, "I could write it, because, as you know, literature is my job ... but I'm overwhelmed with work and so am forced to resort to my bedside ghost writer in the hopes that in one sitting you will write these trifles on such important issues. It is urgent work, yes. In the book you appear with me looking greedily on at cakes we found in a bakery on the street 16 de Septiembre in Mexico."

When reading the bulk of the letters written by Cuevas, there are no references to the political implications of Gómez Sicre’s strategic use ofCueva’s figure as a means to combat political and nationalist art.

In all the missives Cuevas insists on asking for texts that will serve his self-promotion, which not only marked his relationship with Gomez Sicre, but also one of his most famous actions: The Ephemeral Mural, which Cuevas describes in a letter dated June 10, 1967 as a scandalous publicity stunt.

"I just provoked the biggest publicity scandal. You'll learn about it in the clippings I have attached. I painted a 10-meter by 8-meter mural on a site designated for advertisements. I managed to gather 5000 people in the street, in Colonia Juarez (opposite the restaurant where we ate). Firefighters intervened, (illegible), police. I have made stories in LIFE, Look, etc. The mural came out pretty nice. On the TV they are only talking about me. They say that since Diego Rivera no one has provoked anything quite like this."

Cuevas was always seduced by Media exposure. In another letter dated October 6, 1965 Cuevas writes to Gómez Sicre pleased: "Here publicity, like a snowball, grows and grows. I do not look for it: they do it for me. Now every time I go out in the streets they asked me for my autograph or they call me by my name. Not even Rivera ... "

*The original text was published in Spanish in the newspaper Excélsior on July 6, 2016: http://www.excelsior.com.mx/expresiones/2016/07/06/1103180

Translated by Nika Chilewich

For a public or private institution to threaten the integrity of a work of art with impunity, the complicity, or silence of all who participate in the art world is required. The fact that the Jumex Museum has censured the work Evolution of Man (1995) by Miguel Calderón, in order to use the image as the focus of the publicity campaign for the exhibition The Natural Order of Things, is just as serious as the fact that throughout the two months the show was on display, not a single person raised their voice in protest of the work's mutilation.

As if it were an allegory for the kind of art Jumex Museum seeks to promote, the work of Miguel Calderón was surgically castrated. Literally, the museum erased the testicles of the naked man, who in the work squats as he walks, in order to make the image harmless to the general public that would encounter the ad on the street. However, more than anything the decision was made in the interest of the transnational that sponsors the museum.

Without his private parts, the character created by Miguel Calderón to mark the evolution of man, who in the work starts without material goods (except for a pair of socks and dark glasses), and finishes armed to the teeth, was reproduced exponentially on dozens of billboards throughout Mexico City. In some cases the entire piece was shown, made up of six photographs, but in most of the ads only the one, effeminate photo of the naked man (thanks to the magic of Photoshop) was used to announce the pretentious exhibition, The Natural Order of Things, curated by Julieta González and José Esparza Chong Cuy.

While it is already questionable that the single image of the naked man be used in isolation from the remaining five photos that make up Miguel Calderón’s work, it is even more problematic that the photo –by way of its subject– is castrated in its exhibition as if it were an aseptic piece of publicity, used solely to capture the attention of passers by, but not disturb either public morale or the company’s economic interests.

It is not difficult to imagine the scene at Jumex’s offices when the museum staff presented the advertising campaign for the exhibition The Natural Order of Things to the representative of the Jumex Group, and he saw the naked character of Miguel Calderón with his male attributes (I'm almost certain that these types of euphemisms were used in the meeting) hanging shyly under her legs. It is almost natural to assume that a representative of the corporation with no sensibility for artistic or photographic languages would have found the image problematic. Up until this moment everything seems to be going more or less in the natural order of things. But when managers of the museum, who supposedly do understand the seriousness of censoring an image, decide that instead of replacing the image all together, it is better to convince the artist to allow them to castrate his work, the operation loses any logic or sense.

It is important to note here that Miguel Calderón did authorize the modification to his work. As explained by the artist himself, "the conversation began under the pretext that there would be no alterations to the image, but these terms changed gradually over time. Honestly, if given the opportunity again, I would not allow it to happen. In a way it serves as a metaphor for artists that, in order to show their work, must castrate themselves.”

The moral censorship by the museum to the work of Miguel Calderón is grotesque for many reasons, but first and foremost because it comes from an institution that, in its rhetoric, “was conceived to be a unique site to promote the discovery, reflection, and learning of contemporary art through critical programming that questions established paradigms and gets at the greatest issues of our time.”

What type of reflection or learning is generated by an institution taking such a reactionary position on an image of a naked man? How does castrating a piece of work question paradigms of thought? What were the curators and museum administrators thinking (the museum still has no general manager) when they decided it was better to censor a piece of art rather than replace it with another; that is, if their reasoning has anything at all to do with the interests of the museum rather than the company that sponsors the institution.

Seeing the censured work of Miguel Calderón I could not help but remember the absurd and reckless statements Patrick Charpenel gave the local magazine La Tempestad after he resigned his directorship of the Jumex Museum following the crisis that ensued from the censorship of the Hermann Nitsch exhibition in 2015: "Yes, the cancellation (of the Nitsch show) was unfortunate, but there were many variables that were not considered in the judgments made against the institution. Not a single article emphasized what I have mentioned. The decision, although necessary, was very hard. (...) I do not want to diminish the seriousness of what happened. I have come to think that if we are in fact that bad of an institution, maybe it was best to leave the show to a team that could do it better, but the reality is that without the Jumex Foundation the Mexican art system would collapse." (Http://nubr.co / ulHyut)

Paraphrasing Charpenel’s argument, one should ask his interim replacement, Julieta González what variables were balanced when deciding to castrate Miguel Calderón’s piece? Is it too much to think that cutting the testicles off of his character should be considered a serious act of censorship? Is the Jumex Foundation, which has taken yet another reactionary stance towards contemporary art discourse, really the only institution that will prevent the collapse of the country’s contemporary art system?

It seems that silence will again be the chosen response to these questions. The collector, once again, as the highest link within the art system, is not required to account for his or her actions. It is of no importance that the censorship is flagrant or that Miguel Calderón is a well-known artist who on top of his personal recognition is represented by Kurimanzutto, one of the most influential galleries in the country.

To this end one must also ask, what does Miguel Calderón represent to Kurimanzutto? Why did the gallery considered it acceptable that a museum censor the work of one of its artists? One must not forget that each time the gallery –created by Mónica Manzutto and José Kuri –has felt that its commercial interests threatened it has never hesitated to push back, both publicly and privately, against curators, artists, gallery owners, journalists or directors of art fairs and museums. With unusual efficiency they manage to impose their conditions regardless of whether or not they are in the right.

One example I remember was in 2011, during the Zona Maco fair, when Kurimanzutto forced the gallery Arena Mexico from Guadalajara, to dismantle works by Miguel Calderón, Gabriel Kuri and Daniel Guzmán, which by being exhibited offered buyers a secondary market, based on the simple fact they were artists represented by the gallery.

Those who frequent art fairs know that it is common that the same artist be represented by several galleries, and that even the same works be sold at the same time (something that happened once to Kurimanzutto with a piece by Rirkrit Tiravanija.) In this instance the work was part of a collection of art from the 1990’s, Alma Colectiva, by Aurelio López Rocha, and the works were created and sold before Kurimanzutto had opened. There were no legitimate arguments to remove the pieces, but Kurimanzutto flexed its muscles and both the fair and the gallery owner gave in to their request.

Pressuring Zélika García and Jaime Ashida is a risk that, without a doubt the gallery can afford to take, because it in no way jeopardizes its business. The same cannot be said about the censorship of an institution created by collector Eugenio López. Holding a disciplined silence is what benefits everyone and maintains the natural order of things.

The Natural Order of Things, curated by Julieta González and José Esparza Chong Cuy, was exhibited at the Jumex Museum from March 11 to May 8, 2016.

Translated by Nika Chilewich

Original text in Spanish

http://www.excelsior.com.mx/blog/cubo-blanco/el-orden-natural-de-las-cosas/1094942

In order to address the XIII International Symposium of Contemporary Art Theory (SITAC), whose first installment was held at the Julio Castillo Theatre on April 16 and 17, 2016, one must remember that the project, organized by the Board of Contemporary Art (PAC) is coming out of a profound crisis, which not only altered the event’s timing (the 2014 edition was cancelled, and since then SITAC has occurred at different times of the year), but also absolved it of the director figure, who traditionally defined the subject matter and content of each symposium. This year that responsibility was delegated to a group of coordinators and separate teams that proposed the expansive issues and uneven list of speakers.

This most recent SITAC, titled No one is Innocent (whose illusive sub-title is, We are all Guilty, gave all the debates Freudian overtones), was divided into three Nodes, which began with two days of intensive talks, but which will last until October, when further discussions will be held at the Universidad de las Américas, Puebla.

While all of these changes were made as part of a legitimate need to give the symposium a new dynamic, the results from the first day were not those expected. This is evidenced by the enormous expectations and subsequent disappointment generated in the first panel discussion,Politics of Culture, which featured the popular theorist Boris Groys and Nina Möntmann.

Magali Arriola moderated the discussion, and it was dysfunctional from the moment it began.  The format did not allow the German theorist to develop his ideas about systems in the art world, the current function of museums and their relationship to their Internet presence, the lack of taste of collectors, or the lack of effective policies by the state for adequate arts documentation. In fact, it seemed that in order to meet the requirements of his talk, Groys superficially touched upon some of the same ideas that can be found in his books (many of which have been translated into Spanish).

Even though it seems obvious that including a thinker as well known as Groys would require a keynote lecture, the enormous task of bringingGroys to Mexico was wasted in a discussion whose moderation did not even allow for a dialogue between its two different speakers. The round table’s speakers ended up developing completely arbitrary ideas, for example that Jumex had transformed the art scene in Mexico thanks to its sponsorships. I was not able to understand how these types of opinions could be connected to Politics of Culture or to the research of Groys and Möntmann.

Although the boat nearly sunk in the symposium’s first few hours, SITAC had some interesting moments once the theoretical superstars had left. An interesting discussion ensued when the focus turned to local with, The Mexican Cultural Apparatus Examined, moderated by María Minera, where completely antagonistic points of view coincided.

On one side, there was the surgically efficient radicalism of Heriberto Yépez, who posed his analysis of Mexico’s cultural apparatus from the premise that the nascent Ministry of Culture is part of a "class dictatorship" (an idea taken from José Revueltas); while on the other was the militant, even proselytizing reactionary voice of editor Déborah Holtz, who called for a vote of confidence in the new Secretariat, claiming she saw in it "a chance, a new paradigm, and new openness."

In the middle there were some shouts and attempts at confrontation, but there wasn’t enough time to ask the speakers to clarify some of their points. For example, how could Yépez generate a form of resistance to the "neoliberal dictatorship" without ending up legitimizing the same system he aimed to combat? There wasn’t enough time to ask Holtz to elaborate on how the Secretary of Culture has modified the system of patronage and support of the ex Conaculta, which has historically maintained a preference for independent producers. Where did Holtz see an actual opportunity? It would be a good idea for Holtz to take a look for Arenal 40 (the office of the Secretary of Culture) to see, shockingly, that the same people remain in power. Nothing but the name has changed. So, who really leads this new paradigm?

In the afternoon the most productive talk of SITAC took place, entitled, Culture of Common Benefit? With an economy of language and a commanding argument, critic and curator, Christian Viveros-Fauné, created a grave depiction of global culture, in which the efforts and labor of all the art world’s producers, actors, and intermediaries are destined to benefit directly or indirectly from the .001 percent of the population. With information taken from the recent leaks of the Panama Papers, Viveros-Fauné reconstructed the fraudulent path that has permitted the world’s white collar criminals to speculate and exponentially monetize emblematic works such as the Women of Algiers (1955) by Pablo Picasso, which in 1997 sold for 31.9 million dollars, a turning point in the prices of the international art market.

Viveros-Fauné reminded us that in May 2015 the same painting sold for 179.4 million dollars. What was, up until a few weeks ago, considered a reflection of organic market growth, after the release of the Panama Papers has been shown as the result of speculation and financial operations that in other sectors of the economy are considered criminal.

The closure of SITAC was marked by one of the most problematic discussions, The Production of Art Value, with participants Daniel Aguilar Ruvalcaba, Alejandro Gómez-Arias and Sandra Sánchez, all young artists or promoters who have opened new territory in the artistic field from their development within so-called independent spaces.

Moderated by Pilar Villela, the table was a synthesis of the unjust and precarious conditions of the art system that requires its novice producers to participate in activities not associated with art in order to generate resources that allow them to pay rent and engage in the production of their work. Gómez-Arias and Sánchez deployed this argument in excess, without even a momentary consideration that they might not be describing the art system, but the economic system in general, and the experience of anyone who first joins a working environment.

There are countless trades, professions or practices in which new workers are exploited until they obtain the prestige necessary to carry out their own work with a decent pay. Furthermore, the local art scene has given dozens of examples in which successful artists, economically and otherwise, have initially participated in a range of activities before dedicating themselves entirely to their artistic production. It is worth remembering the anecdotes about Teresa Margolles, today arguably the living Mexican artist most highly recognized by an international audience, who, to make ends meet, once sold sold books outside UNAM’s Philosophy Department. Or the case of the table’s moderator,Pilar Villela, who recently made public that she has not been able to sell her work as an artist, and therefore works mostly in other trades. What are these young speakers talking about when they ask that the artist’s work be paid in anticipation or without taking the into account whether or not her work generates a profit?

What they are proposing is another economic system, but unfortunately they do not have the analytical tools in which to imagine this new system, as their proposals fell systematically to the trapping s of numerous community driven or group oriented movements that end up as short term philanthropic endeavors. The criticism of these young thinkers is done without a proposed solution. In their speeches the artist entrepreneur turned speculative actor, ends up being an artist as martyr.

It is worth mentioning that Daniel Aguilar Ruvalcaba did not participate in this naive discussion, and presented a text that was certainly better manufactured than most of his previous writings. However, as his paper was meant to be an elaborate joke, all I can say is that made me laugh.

Translated by Nika Chilewich

Contact info: http://sitac.org/

Original text in Spanish: http://www.excelsior.com.mx/blog/cubo-blanco/sitac-xiii/1089329

History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce, Karl Marx

It is not yet clear to me whether it was intentional or not that the opening of the exhibition Proceso Pentágono Group: Politics of Intervention, 1969-1976-2015 –at UNAM's University Museum of Contemporary Art (MUAC)– coincides with the first anniversary of the forced disappearance of 43 student teachers from Ayotzinapa this past September 26. However, planned or not, the coincidence reinforced the continued importance of the political and aesthetic practices of the artists' collective; the show made clear just how little we have progressed as a society as we continue to accept and (worse even) normalize state administered violence.

Founded in the late 60s by Carlos Fink, José Antonio Hernández Amezcua, Víctor Muñoz, and Felipe Ehrenberg, Proceso Pentágonowas formed with the objective of maintaining a critical, analytical, and confrontational position toward state-run social and cultural policies through an openly conceptual process based on discussion and collective production. The group’s birth was marked by the repression of 1968 and the subsequent dirty war. In its second stage, which is also the group's most fruitful period, the initial members were joined by artistsCarlos Aguirre, Miguel Ehrenberg, Lourdes Grobet and Rowena Morales.

The exhibition, curated by Pilar García, employs efficient archival work and an exemplary production of replicas of some of the group’s most significant interventions and environments (which are presented in the show as both Réplicas and Reproductions). It offers a panoramic view of the collective’s most important findings, perennial disagreements, and not so few contradictions maintained over the past four decades, and it sheds a light on the origins of many of the practices that today dominate the contemporary art scene in Mexico. First and foremost, the exhibition demonstrates just how necessary it is for an institution such as MUAC to promote archival acquisitions, as almost all of the pieces on display were created using letters, photographs, brochures, publications and other materials housed in the museum’s research library, Arkehia.

However, while the show is centered on archival documents, they are not fetishized in their display, but rather used as a device to form new historical narratives; ones that reflect disparate processes and events, which can only be contextualized and given their full weight through archives.

The context is critical in the work of the Proceso Pentágono Group. Creating this style of work today is not the same as creating it in 1980, when the group made the painting Untitled from the action Let's make a picture, which consisted of violently wrapping up one of the group’s members (José Antonio Hernández Amezcua) in a curtain, before tying and dragging him to apply paint to the canvas.

While the date may seem not too distant, one must remember that in the context of Mexico’s dirty war there were 530 forced disappearances registered in the country from 1969 to 1980, according to the Eureka Committee. The same point must be made in relation to the work 1929: Process, an atmosphere made by the group in 1979 in the National Auditorium, which is a reproduction of various police agency work spaces, including rooms used for torture. The work’s title makes reference to the founding of the PRI party (then known as PNR), and its content addresses issues of repression, torture and forced disappearance.

While the style of production employed by the Proceso Pentágono group was new to the Mexican context of the 1970s, it is important also to note that the aesthetic development of the group’s works was not founded on improvisational exercises or empirical experimentation. It was instead based on a group mentality that deliberately sought to erase any individual argument (or ego) in order to show the greater mechanisms of repression which operated (and which continue to operate) in the country, not from the point of view of the victim, but through the mask of the victimizer. Julio García Murillo explains the group’s complex method of working in his text Proceso Pentágono Group. Fragments of chance and of a dirty war, which is included in the show’s catalog (Folio 37). In it he explains that the group’s use of a collective process was a decision made  for its political implications. Unlike the work of many other artist collectives, in the Proceso Pentágono Groupit is impossible to locate a definitive leader, in fact, almost all of its members left the group at some point. Aesthetically, Proceso Pentágono declared itself against "the old beast," in other words, against the pictorial and nationalist trend that dominated the twentieth century due to the incredible influence of the Mexican School of Painting.

And if you wanted to measure the legacy of the styles of production pioneered by the Proceso Pentágono Group, and the many other collectives in coexistence during the 1970s and 1980s in Mexico, it is clear that their influence remains more than present in current artistic production. On the other hand, it seems that our social reality has not seen any progress.

In 1979 the Proceso Pentágono Group inaugurated the exhibition June 10, in which the collective invited 22 colleagues to show the "turbulent but vital reality that we must transform". 36 years later it is clear that they did not succeed (or rather we did not). The current social reality remains turbulent in our country.

Proceso Pentágono Group: Politics of Intervention, 1969-1976-2015 was presented at the Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo (Insurgentes Sur 3000, University Cultural Centre, CU) from September 26, 2015 to February 21, 2016.

Translated by Nika Chilewich

Original text in Spanish: http://www.excelsior.com.mx/blog/cubo-blanco/proceso-pentagono/1059627

When closely follows the career of an artist, say for more than a decade, it is common to assume that hardly his visual discourse can overturn that dislocate notions or ideas which over the years has been one form of their work . But eventually it happens to any part or exhibition manages to give the plot shift that without being loud, it does have enough strength to see with new eyes the whole of his work.

This occurs with the exhibition La tradición de todas las generaciones muertas, The Tradition of all the Dead Generations, by Joaquin Segura  (Mexico City, 1980), who effectively focuses on the creative potential of failure, not only ideological, social or political that refers most of his works, but even takes advantage of the display housing problems such heavy enclosure visually and Ex Teresa Arte Actual.

Input is important to say that exposure works better at night than during the day, which is quite a handicap, as the venue only opens at night once a month during the Night of Museums, but Joaquín Segura was fortunate to inaugurate just in a night time (photographic documentation was also at night), which allowed much of the public interested in their work could see as the artist design museology his exhibition, which takes advantage of the sepulchral darkness of space .

The darkness of the rooms, unlike the white cube, allowed the artist you would print some dramatic character pieces as An Act of Abuse of Power (2015), which, although part of the series Exercises on Selective Mutism which has already been shown in Mexico City, it makes the work an almost religious sculpture that stands the origin and argued that Segura had previously printed pieces created from blankets protest canceled with white paint.

Suddenly, the stretched white blanket on a base of three meters long, illuminated with the glow that gives an overhead light, makes us forget that it is a wasted dispossession during a march of SME in the streets of Mexico City, for embody the sacred aura that often have sculptures as Piety by Michelangelo.

The chances that a transmutation of this nature embodies is exemplary to describe something that Segura has cultivated for years: painting politicized.

The approach to the pictorial act, the use of such determining conditions of a space as Ex Teresa and cancellation of speech protest, get to work one step ahead of everything that was presented with the series Exercises on Selective Mutism.

An aAct of Abuse of Power is a work that if it looks too easily be passed as an act of submission of the artist in the space, when in fact it is a discovery generated by the failure that implicitly represents display in one place so loaded with meaning and history.

A similar operation can be said for his series Ideological Sales (2015), an installation with three tapestries of great fabrics format hand in the Mexican Workshop Gobelinos of Ashida family, from the pages of books found in bookstores old pictures of Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin and Mao Tse-Tung, which were implanted with discount labels.

Again, the political positioning yields/fail/mutates to the visual qualities of space

While the relevant aspect of this work is the tension generated by the relationship between labor (each tapestry represented four months of work of a highly skilled craftsman) with the devaluation of the Marxist discourse of the characters, the pieces again take advantage of the Ex Teresa disproportionate scale, no matter that every gobelino measure three meters long, acquire an almost ethereal being suspended along the nave lightness. Again, the political positioning yields/fail/mutates to the visual qualities of the space, which returns to work something else, a kind of sculptures that are above hobbies or style associated with the production of the artist.

Another relevant record in the exhibition is the work done by the artist from material remains, either through the marble collected from an abandoned quarry in Borsec, Transylvania (Romania); or reconstruction of an abandoned in the Pantanal, Nicaragua pedestal, and it is assumed it was built to the memory of poet José Martí.

Segura has always been interested in registering wear that have had revolutionary ideologies or left, but his focus lies mainly erosion are taking throughout history this kind of revolutionary stories.

As noted by María Virginia Jaua in Allegory of an Empty Reading Exercise included in the publication accompanying the exhibition: "The whole work of Segura deals with the construction of narrative and often matter itself ' iteraria', ie the founding texts, popular slogans, speeches and canonical books. "

But the safe approach to these stories not only their publications is bounded, as in Definitive Library for a Failed Revolution, but goes further and addresses from its remains, which actually should call his spoils.

The infamous story of Communism embodied in Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu is presented by Segura in Casa Poporului from his visit to a marble quarry abandoned in Borsec, which is said supplied the construction of the Casa del Pueblo (House Poporului) in the center of Bucharest, one of the world's largest government buildings, which cost many lives and bankrupted the regime, plus it was unfinished to death by firing squad dictator.

The stones collected by the artist in Borsec more eloquently recounted the failure of the communist, much more than any book about the dictator episode.

The same applies to the approach that makes Segura the Sandinista revolutionary discourse in Essays on Reconstruction (José Martí) which part of an abandoned that the artist found in the Pantanal, an irregular on the outskirts of Granada, Nicaragua settlement pedestal. The monument allegedly dedicated to Cuban poet José Martí is restored in collaboration with members of the community who from the story that they have the origin of the pedestal defines the aesthetic that will have its reconstruction process. Again the speech community inherited from the Sandinista Revolution was what defined the shapes and color to rebuild the monument.

Although all the work Segura is marked by politics, ideology, dissent, wear, collapse, protest and contradiction, which defines The Tradition of All Dead Generations is its elaborate and careful visual speech. The aesthetic turn the most effective political gamble.

The Tradition of All the Dead Generations, by Joaquin Segura was exhibited in Ex Teresa Arte Actual (Licenciado Verdad 8, Centro Histórico) from November 26, 2015 to February 28 2016.

Traslated by Nika Chilewich

Photo Credit: Ernesto Rosas Pineda

In Mexico’s art scene there is a commonplace belief that what we know today as contemporary Mexican art was founded in the nineties –referred to as "los noventa". This continues to be the case in spite of the fact that the various contributions to a local genealogy of contemporary art transcend the year 1990, and in many cases, the change in millennia. The nineties, however, are presented not just as a decade but as an idea capable of both legitimizing and disqualifying current artistic practice. Within this context, another great myth has emerged: El Taller de los Viernes or  Friday Workshop.

For a decade now artists Gabriel Orozco, Damián Ortega, Abraham Cruzvillegas, Gabriel Kuri, and Dr. Lakra have added to their personal narratives the existence of a weekly workshop –in existence from 1987-1992 in Orozco's Tlalpan residence– which functioned, rather than as a teaching space for Orozco, as a forum for experimentation, criticism, and production, the effects of which can be felt to this day in the works of its participants. At least that is the story featured two decades later by the gallery Kurimanzutto for the exhibit XYLAÑYNU. Taller de los Viernes, curated by Guillermo Santamarina. "Abraham Cruzvillegas, Dr. Lakra, Gabriel Kuri, and Damián Ortega describe it as a series of moments to be together without a need to establish themselves as a collective."

Without a manifesto, any organized critical objectives in relation to their cultural surroundings, or any intention to generate finished shows or works of art, the Friday Workshop was instead a platform for exchanging information, a channel for the formation and deformation of a "devenir artístico" or an "artistic evolution," as stated in the gallery's press release.

However, contrary to what the exhibit's title implies -that is, a revision of the Friday Workshop- the show makes no attempts at historical retrospective (while it clearly aims to retrospectively legitimize this group of artists). The show does not include any documentation from the time of the "Workshop" (not even the photographs taken by Laureana Toledo of the artists' meetings which have become commonplace in any reference made to the "Taller"), and not a single piece that was created in direct or indirect relation to the period is present (for example, the collaboration between Mauricio Maillé, Gabriel Orozco, and Mauricio Rocha, Apuntalamiento para nuestras ruinas modernas, created in 1987 and winner of the Bienal de Espacios Alternativos at the Museo de Arte Moderno in Mexico City, did not seem to be a historical reference that fit with the Kurimanzutto canon.) As to the motive behind this decision Santamarina states: "The show doesn’t seek to be nostalgic, it remembers the founders of the Taller and their development of coherent personal artistic models." (Excélsior 18/01/2016)

Additionally, in the exhibit itself, Santamarina "vehemently" proclaims his disinterest in advocating an alternative genealogy for contemporary art in the country, other than his amusement at the continued struggle that the "Workshop" means for art historians.

His statement is made all the more clear by the fact that the show contains a total lack of curatorial research: it has no historical contextualization, no archival work, no documentation or testimonies, it fails to create critical distance, and in the end there is very little to be curated. What it asks of its audiences is that we continue to passively consume the myth that these five artists found in the famous "Workshop," their "categorías iluminadoras" or "illuminating categories," and that they continue to maintain: "An impenetrable value thanks to the experimentation with materials, supports, working models, and situations/relationships."

XYLAÑYNU. Taller de los Viernes only exhibits works produced in the last decade (the oldest piece exhibited is a 2007 sculpture by Dr. Lakra,) as part of the show's naive argument is that the group's work maintains the same playfulness and creativity today as it did at the time of their meetings.

It is difficult to pinpoint the moment in which the Friday Workshop became a concept that defined the group's foundation, and as a result, the foundation of Kurimanzutto, but the term was commonplace as of a decade ago. It was included in the historic show, The Age of Discrepancies: Art and Visual Culture in Mexico 1968-1997 in the exhibit's catalogue, edited by Olivier Debroise in 2006.

However, it seems paradigmatic that only fifteen years ago two member of the "Workshop," Abraham Cruzvillegas and Gabriel Kuri, avoided the term in their catalogue texts that accompanied the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles' (MOCA) show on Gabriel Orozco, which later traveled to the Museo Tamayo in Mexico City. Cruzvillegas refers to the meetings as "el taller de Gabriel" or "Gabriel's Taller" and Kuri as the "taller semanal" or "weekly taller." In 2000 it seems the myth of the Friday Workshop was still in an early stage of gestation.

The question that inevitably arises is how one can expect a gallery show to generate historical discourse founded in investigation? It seems excessive, a futile demand if one considers the fact that exhibits organized by Kurimanzutto are done with the market in mind and not with a consideration of art history.

However, the question is relevant if we remember that in 2013 UNAM's contemporary art museum, Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporaneo and Gabriel Orozco had begun negotiations to develop an exhibit centered around the Friday Workshop (Excélsior 07/05/2013). Although the project was discarded after the museum's change of curatorial directorship –María Inés Rodríguez was replaced by Cuauhtémoc Medina– it serves for an interesting hypothetical parallel, as the university museum's mission is to create exhibits founded in historical, archival research.   

If one avoids the forced curatorial discourse in Taller de los Vienes, the show presented by Kurimanzutto does have works of interest for a contemporary audience. Paisajem, 2015, by Damián Ortega is one of those pieces. It consists of an expansive Styrofoam sculpture with debris that extends throughout a significant part of the gallery (the piece is similar to one Ortega exhibited last year as part of the show O fim da matéria organized by the São Paulo Museum of Modern Art). As part of its opening the show's curator (and artist himself) Guillermo Santamarina used the piece as part of a performance in which he swept the toxic material from one side of the gallery to the other.

Autoconfusión, 2015, by Abraham Cruzvillegas is another piece that merits recognition, in which the artist displays a car painted pink and green, a pattern that makes reference to a collaboration between the artist and Dr. Lakra in the 2005 show Los dos amigos at the Museum of Contemporary Art Oaxaca (MACO). The VW Wagon achieves a strange but effective form of nostalgia, and the assortment of Cumbia hits the car plays transports the viewer to the years of these artist's youths when they explored while drinking 40's (what is referred to here as "Caguamas").

XYLAÑYNU. Taller de los Viernes was shown at the Kurimanzutto Gallery (Gob. Rafael Rebollar 94, San Miguel Chapultepec) from February 6 to March 17, 2016.

Translated by: Nika Chilewich

Photo Credit: Kurimanzutto Gallery

Original text in Spanish: http://www.excelsior.com.mx/blog/cubo-blanco/taller-de-los-viernes/1077230

In recent curatorial history the most successful shows on Latin American Art in the United States have had, at their center, not only a curatorial strategy, but a political one as well. Categories such as "Latino," "Hispanic," or "Latin American" have become labels in the United States art world that cannot be suggested without an accompanying political position, much less so if they are used in conjunction with the extremely diverse artistic production in the region in the last few decades.

Under The Same Sun: Art from Latin America Today, organized by Mexican curator Pablo León de la Barra as part of the Guggenheim UBS MAP Global Art Initiative Program, disappoints precisely because the categories it proposes ("The tropical," "Conceptualism," "Political Activism," "Modernities," and "Participation/Emancipation") fail to offer political insight that furthers the preexisting rhetoric surrounding Latin America's artistic production.

It would seem that after numerous visits by León de la Barra to the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Panama, Puerto Rico, Colombia, Mexico, Chile, Costa Rica and Guatemala (his itinerary is available on http://blogs.guggenheim.org/map/dispatches/), the curator was unable to determine any new categories from which to understand artistic production in the various countries. The show ends up being a partial tour through the region based on a criteria implemented more as a justification for the purchases made than as an attempt to diversify existing knowledge popular for describing Latin American Art. The show could have easily been titled "There is Nothing New Under the Sun".

In the end, the curatorial discourse proposed by Under The Same Sun comes across as an imitation of the constellar model proposed by Mari Carmen Ramírez and Héctor Olea a decade ago for the exhibit, Inverted Utopias: Avant Garde Art in Latin America, at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, but with drastically different results.

While Inverted Utopias merits recognition as a watershed moment in contemporary exhibition-making–thanks to its ability to critique Eurocentric constructs within the field of art history, and successfully form alternative approaches for understanding Latin America Art and culture within the United States– Under The Same Sun is, at best, derivative of the earlier project, and of work by other contemporaneous curators, including Gerardo Mosquera. The danger of a show such as this one lies in the fact that it transforms the very categories that once served as platforms of emancipation into terms that produce generalized and exoticized understandings of Latin American cultures.

Here I am specifically referring to the section entitled "The Tropical," a term which curator León de la Bara explains is in reference to revolutionary ideas put forth by Hélio Oticica's "Tropicalia," a project developed by the artist in response to a rationalism championed throughout Europe and the United States at the time. By trying to re-appropriate the term in the United States in the twenty-first century, the result is anachronistic, and León de la Barra fails to take into account the fact that the rationalism challenged by Oticica is that of twentieth-century modernism. Today "The Tropical" is understood as a term related to Latin American popular culture, and forms part of a tradition of interpreting the region's cultural production as "exotic" or "fantastic."

After opening in 2014 at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, the show traveled to the Museo Jumex in Mexico City, where it reinforced the museum's unfortunate reputation for housing exhibitions in which the names of the artists selected are more compelling than the pieces exhibited. Alexander Apóstol, Carlos Amorales, Tania Bruguera, Mariana Castillo Deball, Eduardo Costa, Luis Camnitzer, Minerva Cuevas, Juan Downey, Rafael Ferrer, Mario García Torres, Tamar Guimarães, Regina José Galindo, Alfredo Jaar, David Lamelas, Marta Minujín, Carlos Motta, Rivane Neuenschwander, Gabriel Orozco, Damián Ortega, Amalia Pica, Wilfredo Prieto, Beatriz Santiago Muñoz, Gabriel Sierra, and Javier Téllez are some of the artists included in the show. Almost all of them are frequent fixtures in biennials and international exhibits, and the selection of works should be of far greater significance than the selection of the artists themselves.

With the exception of a few historic works by Alfredo Jaar, Rafael Ferrer, Juan Downey, and Marta Minujín, the remainder of the artists are represented through lesser known pieces. Tragically, what Under The Same Sun makes clear is that the Guggenheim lingered for at least two decades before turning its attention to Latin American Art. The museum only began buying from the region once works from these artists had already achieved significant market value. León de la Barra recognized this limitation in an interview with the Mexican magazine "La Tempestad," in which he states:

"One phrase returns to me when I speak of the show: there are more than are here. I would have liked to organize a bigger show, but there were limitations of all kinds, one of which was financial."

These limitations are made more egregious when one considers that Under The Same Sun was exhibited in a museum that houses one of the most important collection of Latin American Art in the world, due, in large part, to the fact that the museum's collector, Eugenio López, began buying Art from through the region in the 1990's, almost two decades before the New York-based museum turned to the region.

So, would it not have been better to do a show that incorporated works from the Museo Jumex's collection? The question is particularly suggestive given that Under The Same Sun highlights Museo Jumex's preference for importing foreign shows in lieu of producing their own. Under The Same Sun exemplifies the institution's continued acceptance of its place at the art world's periphery, housing and promoting exhibits (in the case of Under The Same Sun, with an unusually large publicity campaign) that hail from distant cultural centers, without questioning whether they could create more pertinent equivalents, particularly in the case of Latin American Art.

Under The Same Sun: Art from Latin America Today was up at the Museo Jumex (Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra 303, Mexico City), from November 19, 2015 to February 7 2016.

Translated by: Nika Chilewich

Photo Credit: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York/Museo Jumex, Mexico City. 

@etgarhernandez

1. Desde dónde escribo

El libro "Habita  intervenido", de Tania Candiani me lleva directamente a un recuerdo viejo, de hace 11 años, cuando cubrí la última edición de inSite Tijuana/San Diego, encuentro binacional que a la postre se volvería un referente de los proyectos curatoriales en México y Estados Unidos.

En aquella ocasión todos los asistentes vimos con asombro la pieza "Flew over the Void (Balla perdida)", del venezolano Javier Téllez, quien contrató a un “hombre bala” para que cruzara volando a través de la línea fronteriza entre México y Estados Unidos en la zona de Playas de Tijuana.

Todos los que fuimos a inSite esa última edición recordamos siempre aquella experiencia, pero yo quisiera dividir aquel día en dos momentos: El primero, claro que fue la emoción de ver en vivo aquella fútil y poética acción de mandar volando, a 120 kilómetros por hora, al "hombre bala" David Smith quien, tras cruzar la línea fronteriza con el océano Pacífico de fondo, aterrizó plácidamente en una red de protección del lado de San Diego, portando en la mano su pasaporte estadounidense.

 Hasta hoy recuerdo la sensación de alivio que sentí cuando me tomé una deliciosa agua de coco que mágicamente me devolvió la lucidez.

Pero hubo un segundo momento, que incluso recuerdo más vívidamente, porque fue algo más personal. Al terminar el performance salí al borde de la insolación, pues tuve que esperar horas de pie bajo un implacable sol para poder tomar la fotografía de la acción (que al día siguiente apareció en la portada del periódico Reforma). En medio de mi deshidratación caminé hacia la avenida principal en busca de alguna bebida y lo único que encontré a mi camino fue un puesto de cocos. Me acerqué a comprar uno por puro instinto, pero la elección fue maravillosa. Hasta hoy recuerdo la sensación de alivio que sentí cuando me tomé una deliciosa agua de coco que mágicamente me devolvió la lucidez. Desde ese día me volví fan del agua de coco y siempre que la tomo recuerdo a aquel gigantesco hombre bala que siempre saludaba con una sonrisa de payaso y que nos maravilló aquella soleada tarde en las playas de Tijuana.

Cuento esto porque creo que quienes somos espectadores recurrentes del arte contemporáneo este tipo de experiencias sensibles, por más diferentes que puedan parecer, son fundamentales para seguir enganchados a este perenne itinerar por bienales, museos y galerías. Importa tanto que nos atraiga aquello que vemos dentro del cubo blanco, como todas las experiencias que ocurren antes, durante y después de ver una obra.

Abuso de su tiempo y les cuento un recuerdo más. En aquella visita a la frontera Tijuana/San Diego también viví uno de los viajes más alucinantes de mi vida, un tour etílico que empezó en la casa de una judía rica de La Joya, en San Diego, quien organizó la más exclusiva fiesta de aquella edición de inSite.

A la entrada de la casa nos amontonamos un grupo de mexicanos, entre curadores y artistas, pero cada vez que uno daba su nombre para ver si estábamos en la lista de invitados todos recibían respuestas negativas, hasta que el curador Priamo Lozada alzó la voz, dio su nombre y el guardia lo encontró en su inaccesible listado. La escena fue cómica porque con la autoridad que le daba su rango de invitado dijo: “Yo vengo con todos ellos”. El guardia lo miró desconcertado y no supo qué hacer. Entonces Priamo, cual Moisés, nos abrió la puerta para acceder al país de las maravillas.

La judía rica de La Joya (me encantaría recordar su nombre) había vuelto su garage y toda su casa en un impresionante museo de arte contemporáneo. Recuerdo que por primera vez vi gente que coleccionara a artistas chinos y que tuviera en su sala pantallas para exhibir videoarte. También vi, a través de una ventana, una pintura de Francis Alÿs que me enseñó Teresa Margolles. Me dijo: “Mira, ahí está el Alÿs”, mientras me señalaba una pintura de gran formato. Según recuerdo era de su serie “Hombre con peluca”.

Durante un rato, todos estábamos muy emocionados de estar ahí, pero como suelen suceder con este tipo de fiestas exclusivas, al cabo de una hora, tanto lujo y tanto arte nos cansó y de forma unánime decidimos volver a Tijuana.

Llegamos directo a la Avenida Revolución a un antro horrible, que había propuesto Teresa. El cambio de ambiente fue tan radical que era como haber estado la misma noche en Manhattan y en Calcuta. Pero el antro también fracasó porque era muy temprano y no había gente. El aburrimiento volvió y nos fuimos caminando a la Estrella que, según decían, siempre es garantía. Ahí nos quedamos.

Años después, platicando con Tania Candiani, me enteré que aquella noche ella también había estado en aquel viaje con Priamo, con Teresa y con todos los que salimos corriendo de la perfección de la casa de La Joya para tomarnos una cerveza en La Estrella.

Me emocionó saber que Tania y yo compartíamos ese tipo de historias, aún sin conocernos, pero además, cuando rastreamos en la memoria, me acordé que también había estado en su casa de Tijuana, que me habían llamado la atención las cortinas de su casa, porque en realidad no eran cortinas, sino una suerte de patrón o partituras viejas que después volvería a ver en una de sus obras.

Pero lo que más disfrutaba de hablar con Tania y de escribir sobre su trabajo era que con el paso de los años iba descubriendo que los dos éramos unos tránsfuga que “no veníamos del mundo del arte”, sino que teníamos otra formación, más vinculada a la escritura, que indiscutiblemente definía nuestra forma de participar en esto que genéricamente llamamos arte contemporáneo. Creo que ambos siempre nos hemos esforzado en reafirmar ese origen diferenciado de quien no  proviene de una escuela de arte o de historia del arte. Dos extraños en un mundo salvaje.

2. No me gusta el grafiti

Sé que mi relato parece no tener nada que ver con el libro que hoy nos convoca, pero recupero estos recuerdos porque quiero enfatizar la forma en cómo la experiencia personal y cotidiana define en muchos sentidos nuestra aproximación sensible al arte y a los artistas.

En 2008 cuando vi en el corazón de Polanco la intervención “Habita intervenida”, de Tania Candiani, lo primero que me vino a la mente fueron numerosos recuerdos de mi infancia, ya que cerca de mi casa, siempre hubo grafiti. Yo nací y crecí en Iztapalapa, una de las cuatro delegaciones más marginales y sobrepobladas de la Ciudad de México, según reportes de la Secretaría de Desarrollo Social del gobierno local. En Iztapalapa, como podrán imaginar, el grafiti no está hecho como parte de un proyecto artístico, como ocurrió en 2008 en Polanco. De donde yo vengo el grafiti refiere aquello que lo genera: su marginalidad.

Sin importar que se exhiba dentro de un museo o que se publique en un libro, el grafiti sigue siendo para mí un lenguaje que debe ser agresivo y violento para cumplir con su función, ya sea el de marcar un territorio o de expresar el descontento que viene implícito dentro de su marginalidad.

En 2008, cuando vi “Habita intervenida”, no sentí ninguna empatía por la intervención de Candiani, me parecía que de forma paternalista intentaba domesticar algo salvaje. Como quien adopta un perro que durante mucho tiempo ha sido callejero, bajo el supuesto de que será más agradecido que uno que se compra en una tienda de mascotas.

Pero la verdad es que en aquel tiempo no conocía a Tania y no habíamos discutido su proyecto. Fue años después, cuando en mancuerna con Inbal Miller nos dimos a la tarea de publicar un libro sobre arte público en la Ciudad de México, que me di el tiempo de hablar con Tania y discutir más a fondo su trabajo con el grafiti.

De entrada debo decir que ahora sé que Tania, al igual que yo, no ve en el grafiti una obra de arte, sino que tiene claro que se trata de un lenguaje, un tipo de escritura que tiene un discurso muy concreto y funcional que sirve para marcar un territorio.

Por eso celebro que cuando grafiteó el hotel Habita no recurrió a diseños figurativos o de cómic, que vuelven al grafiti una cosa de diseño, sino que se concentró en las formas más duras y directas de dicho lenguaje: Las bombas, el tag y toda esa escritura que está cancelada para aquellos que no compartimos su código encriptado.

Ahora sé que Tania no quería domesticar el grafiti para decorar el Habita, para esos los arquitectos ya le habían echado muchas ganas y no tenía sentido ponerle un moño más al vestido rosa de la niña. Su intervención tenía ambiciones políticas que eran más trascendentales. Tania lo que quería era conquistar, aunque fuera de forma simbólica, un espacio que no se puede llamar público, porque pertenece a una clase social muy concreta, que no entienden ni les interesa hacer grafiti, aunque por moda los consuman.

Pero este hallazgo del grafiti, ella mismo lo relata en el libro, lo tuvo en Tijuana, en aquella mágica ciudad que no sólo nos llevó del lujo y la opulencia al arrabal y la cerveza barata en una misma noche, sino que también nos mostró el potencial político y estético de un lenguaje como el grafiti que, sin ser agradable a la vista, resulta eficaz y en cierta forma bello.

* Texto escrito para la presentación del libro “Habita intervenido” (Arquine/Grupo Habita), de Tania Candiani, que se realizó el 4 de febrero de 2016 en el Centro Banamex, dentro de la 13º Feria Zona Maco. Participaron Lucía Sanromán, Tania Candiani y Edgar Alejandro Hernández.

@etgarhernandez

La historia reciente de la curaduría ha demostrado que las exposiciones más eficaces de arte latinoamericano en Estados Unidos deben tener como centro no sólo una estrategia curatorial, sino sobre todo, una estrategia política. Categorías como latino, hispano o latinoamericano son etiquetas que en el contexto estadounidense no pueden plantearse sin un posicionamiento político y menos si se quiere ofrecer una muestra de la inabarcable y heterogénea producción artística de las últimas décadas en la región.
“Bajo un mismo sol. Arte de América Latina hoy”, curada por el mexicano Pablo León de la Barra para el programa “Guggenheim UBS MAP Global Art Initiative”, decepciona justamente porque las categorías que propone (Lo Tropical, Conceptualismos, Activismo político, Modernidades y Participación) no representan una postura política que vaya más allá de lo que previamente se había vinculado a la producción latinoamericana.
Parece que el curador no encontró nuevas categorías en los numerosos viajes que realizó a República Dominicana, Ecuador, Panamá, Puerto Rico, Colombia, México, Chile, Costa Rica y Guatemala (su itinerario se puede ver en http://blogs.guggenheim.org/map/dispatches/), ya que al final la muestra hace un recorrido parcial a partir de criterios que parecieran estar más vinculados al presupuesto con el cual se compraron las obras, que a la necesidad de crear nuevas rutas de conocimiento sobre la producción dentro del continente.

La exposición fácilmente se pudo haber titulado “No hay nada nuevo bajo el sol”.

 

Llama la atención que el discurso curatorial de “Bajo un mismo sol” copie el modelo constelar que hace una década propusieron Maricarmen Ramírez y Héctor Olea para la exposición “Inverted Utopias. Avant-garde in Latin America”, en el Museum of Fine Arts, de Houston, pero con resultados abismalmente distintos.

“Bajo un mismo sol” se presenta, en el mejor de los casos, como un proyecto derivativo de lo planteado por Ramírez y Oleo, junto a otros curadores como Gerardo Mosquera; 
Mientras “Inverted Utopias” sí puede verse como un proyecto que generó una fisura en el discurso eurocéntrico dentro de la historia del arte, generando narrativas alternas y diferentes formas de pensar y dialogar con la producción latinoamericana dentro de Estados Unidos; en el caso de “Bajo un mismo sol” se presenta, en el mejor de los casos, como un proyecto derivativo de lo planteado por Ramírez y Oleo, junto a otros curadores como Gerardo Mosquera; con el agravante de que vuelve a categorías que generan una visión exótica de lo latinoamericano.
Concretamente me refiero a la constelación denominada “Lo Tropical”, que si bien en el texto curatorial hace referencia a la idea revolucionaria que propuso Hélio Oiticica con Tropicalia, como una alternativa a los racionalismos europeos y estadounidense; en el contexto de Estados Unidos a inicios del Siglo XXI es un debate anacrónico, pues el racionalismo al que refería Oiticica estaba definido por nociones modernas del siglo XX. En la actualidad lo tropical se inscribe en procesos culturales de lo popular, que para los ojos estadounidenses se vincula más a las nociones de “exótico” o “fantástico” que han marcado a la producción latinoamericana.

Inaugurada en 2014 en el Museo Guggenheim de Nueva York, la muestra itineró al Museo Jumex de la Ciudad de México, donde actualmente se exhibe. Como ha ocurrido con otras exposiciones en dicho recinto, la selección de artistas, salvo contadas excepciones, resulta más llamativa por los nombres que reúne, que por la fuerza de las piezas que exhibe.
Alexander Apóstol, Carlos Amorales, Tania Bruguera, Mariana Castillo Deball, Eduardo Costa, Luis Camnitzer, Minerva Cuevas, Juan Downey, Rafael Ferrer, Mario García Torres, Tamar Guimarães, Regina José Galindo, Alfredo Jaar, David Lamelas, Marta Minujín, Carlos Motta, Rivane Neuenschwander, Gabriel Orozco, Damián Ortega, Amalia Pica, Wilfredo Prieto, Beatriz Santiago Muñoz, Gabriel Sierra y Javier Téllez, son algunos de los artistas seleccionados, quienes en su mayoría son asistentes frecuentes de bienales y muestras internacionales, por lo que el cuestionamiento de su selección no está en los artistas, sino en las obras seleccionadas.

Salvo las piezas históricas de creadores como Alfredo Jaar, Rafael Ferrer, Juan Downey o Marta Minujín, es difícil afirmar que el resto de los artistas está representado con alguna de sus obras emblemáticas. Trágicamente, lo que “Bajo un mismo sol” deja claro es que el Museo Guggenheim de Nueva York se tardó por lo menos dos décadas en poner atención al arte latinoamericano. Empezó a comprar cuando las obras ya tenían un mercado importante y precios tan elevados como el resto del arte internacional. Vale recordar que León de la Barra aceptó las limitaciones económicas que tuvo en una entrevista que concedió a la revista “La Tempestad”:

Para hablar de la exposición recurro a una frase: no están todos los que son. Me hubiera gustado organizar una exposición más grande, pero hay limitaciones de muchos tipos, entre ellas de dinero”.

Y este retraso se acentúa ante la paradoja de que “Bajo un mismo sol” se muestra dentro del Museo Jumex, que sí cuenta con una de las colecciones más importantes de arte latinoamericano, ya que desde la década de los 90 Eugenio López empezó a comprar no sólo obra de mexicanos, sino de muchos artistas que dos décadas después empezó a comprar el museo neoyorquino.
¿No hubiera sido mejor hacer una exposición de arte latinoamericano con obras de la Colección Jumex? Es una pregunta que para nada resulta ociosa, pues no sólo ayuda a dimensionar la pertinencia de “Bajo un mismo sol”, sino que confronta la actual política del Museo Jumex de enfocar casi todo su programa a importar muestras del extranjero. El recinto dócilmente sigue asumiendo su situación periférica, al recibir y promover (con una enorme e inusual campaña publicitaria) muestras que proceden de los grandes centros culturales, sin importar que con su propia colección podría generar una revisión mucho más poderosa y fiel de lo que ha definido en las últimas décadas la producción en América Latina.

Otro elemento que no se puede obviar, por lo poco funcional que resultó, fue la museografía tipo Casa Palacio que hizo la arquitecta mexicana Frida Escobedo, la cual gira en torno a un desnivel en el piso que en ciertos puntos se rompe para generar una suerte de bases donde se instalaron algunas obras. El problema de este “diseño dinámico” (así lo describe el museo) es que sólo funciona cuando el público lo recorre de la entrada al fondo de la sala, pues al regresar sobre sus pasos es común que el visitante termine sobre la base de la pieza.
Las dos ocasiones que visité la exposición me tocó ver cómo los guardias corrían para advertir a la gente que no se podía “subir a la base”, lo cual era un problema del diseño museográfico y no de los visitantes, que sin saber terminaban al pie de las obras. La museografía, como si fuera una alegoría de toda la exposición, termina extraviando al público.

“Bajo un mismo sol. Arte de América Latina hoy” se exhiben en el Museo Jumex (Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra 303, Colonia Granada), del 19 de noviembre de 2015 al 7 de febrero de 2016.

Crédito de fotos: Cortesía Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Nueva York, y Museo Jumex, Ciudad de México.

@etgarhernandez

“La historia se repite dos veces. La primera como tragedia, la segunda como farsa”, Karl Marx

Aún no tengo claro si fue intencional o no que la inauguración de la exposición “Grupo Proceso Pentágono: política de la intervención 1969-1976-2015” en el Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo (MUAC) coincidiera con el primer aniversario de la desaparición forzada de 43 estudiantes normalistas de Ayotzinapa, el pasado 26 de septiembre; pero el hecho acentuó la vigencia que sigue teniendo la práctica política y estética de este colectivo de artistas, pues de golpe nos reveló que no hemos avanzado nada como sociedad, ya que seguimos aceptando y (peor aún) normalizando la violencia promovida por el Estado.

"Sin título", 1980

Fundado a finales de la década de los 60 por Carlos Fink, José Antonio Hernández Amezcua, Víctor Muñoz y Felipe Ehrenberg, Proceso Pentágono se creó con el objetivo de mantener una actitud crítica, analítica y contestataria frente a las políticas sociales y culturales que generaba el Estado, mediante una obra abiertamente conceptual que ponía énfasis en la discusión y en los procesos de producción colectiva. Su nacimiento está marcado por la represión del 68 y por la subsecuente guerra sucia. En un segundo momento, que coincide con su época más fructífera, se sumaron al grupo Carlos Aguirre, Miguel Ehrenberg, Lourdes Grobet y Rowena Morales.
Con una eficiencia en el manejo de archivos y una ejemplar producción de réplicas de sus principales intervenciones y ambientes (que en algunas cédulas las denominan “Réplicas” y en otras “Reproducciones”), la exposición curada por Pilar García ofrece una visión panorámica de los más contundentes hallazgos, los perennes desencuentros y las no pocas contradicciones que han mantenido a lo largo de cuatro décadas este colectivo artístico que fácilmente puede dar luz sobre los orígenes de las prácticas que hoy dominan la escena del arte contemporáneo mexicano.
En principio, la exposición demuestra lo necesario que es para un recinto como el MUAC promover la adquisición de archivos, ya que casi todas las piezas que se exhiben parte de cartas, fotografías, folletos, publicaciones y diversos materiales que alberga el Centro de Documentación Arkehia.

"Hotel Marx", 1983

Ahora bien, la exposición parte de documentos, pero estos no se utilizan como fetiches que se exhiben en vitrinas, sino como soporte para generar nuevas narrativas históricas que reflejen procesos y sucesos que se conocían de forma dispersa y que sólo los archivos pueden ayudar a darles su justo peso en el contexto que ocurrieron.
El contexto es fundamental en la producción de Grupo Proceso Pentágono porque no es lo mismo crear obras hoy que en 1980, cuando el colectivo hizo la pintura, “Sin título”, a partir de la acción “Vamos a hacer un cuadro”, que consistió en envolver con violencia dentro de una cortina a uno de los integrantes del grupo (José Antonio Hernández Amezcua), a quien se le ató y arrastró y aplicó pintura a la tela.
Si bien la fecha parece cercana, hay que recordar que en el contexto de la guerra sucia se registraron 530 desapariciones forzadas en el país de 1969 a 1980, de acuerdo con el Comité Eureka. Lo mismo hay que decir de “1929: Proceso”, una ambientación que hizo el grupo en 1979 en el Auditorio Nacional, el cual reproduce diversas salas de agencias policiacas, con cuartos de tortura incluido, cuyo título alude a la fundación del PRI (entonces PNR) y que trata el tema de la represión, tortura y desaparición forzada.

"1929: Proceso", 1979

Si bien formalmente la producción de Grupo Proceso Pentágono era novedosa para el contexto mexicano de la década de los 70, es importante decir que el desarrollo estético de sus obras no partía de ejercicios de improvisación o experimentación empíricas, por el contrario, las obras se creaban con base a un desarrollo grupal que deliberadamente buscaba borrar cualquier discurso (ego) individual para poder mostrar el aparato de represión que operaba (y opera) en el país, pero no desde el punto de vista de la víctima, sino enfundados en la máscara del victimario. Este complejo desdoblamiento lo describe Julio García Murillo en su texto “Grupo Proceso Pentágono. Fragmentos de azar y de guerra sucia”, que se incluye en el catálogo (Folio 37) de la exposición, el cual puntualiza que en este grupo la colectividad se asumió siempre a partir de sus implicaciones políticas.
A contracorriente de otros colectivos artísticos, en éste no se puede ubicar a un líder que definiera su producción, de hecho, casi todos sus miembros abandonaron en algún momento el grupo. No está por demás decir que estéticamente Grupo Proceso Pentágono se declaró en contra de “la vieja bestia”, es decir, toda la corriente pictórica y nacionalista que dominó el siglo XX por la pesada influencia de la Escuela Mexicana de Pintura.

"1929: Proceso", 1979

Y si se quisiera hacer un recuento de los efectos que dejó la producción de Grupo Proceso Pentágono y de los demás grupos que coexistieron en las décadas de los 70 y 80 en México, es claro que su influencia está más que presente en la producción actual. Sin embargo, la realidad social pareciera que no ha tenido ningún avance.
En 1979 Grupo Proceso Pentágono inauguró la exposición “10 de junio”, en la cual el colectivo invitó a 22 colegas a mostrar la “turbulenta pero vital realidad que nos toca transformar”. 36 años después está claro que no lo lograron (no lo logramos). La realidad social sigue siendo turbulenta en nuestro país.

“Grupo Proceso Pentágono: política de la intervención 1969-1976-2015” se presenta en el Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo (Insurgentes Sur 3000, Centro Cultural Universitario, CU) del 26 de septiembre de 2015 al 21 de febrero de 2016.

@etgarhernandez