crisisss. Art and Confrontation in Latin America. 1910-2010
Any discussion of this show necessitates a brief recap about its curatorial nature and the particular context in which it was organised and executed. Considered together, both issues constitute a good indicator for understanding the many complexities and absurdities that surrounded the show. To be more specific, I will briefly describe and comment on three paradoxical aspects of the exhibition and the role that the show played within the Mexican cultural and political context, and how it was affected by it.
The Game of the Double-Edged Sword
The first paradox of the show was actually its starting point. Talking about art and confrontation in Latin America while escaping from the stereotypes in which this art has been enclosed was the biggest challenge and the greatest risk for a show of this nature. In it, tropes relating to Latin America such as ‘identity’, ‘revolution’, ‘nation’, ‘exoticism’, ‘magical realism’ and even the concept of ‘the political’, have been undertaken critically and self-reflexively. crisisss’ curator, Gerardo Mosquera, has said that an exhibition on art and confrontation must be itself confrontational (2). For a long time this curator has sustained that Latin American art has become art from Latin America: ‘To stop being “Latin American Art” means to distance oneself from a simplified notion of art in Latin America and to highlight the extraordinary variety of symbolic production in the continent.’ (3) In keeping with this, the exhibition showed the way in which many artists have reacted to a variety of intense social emergencies; however, few pieces in it were close to pamphlets or strict political illustrations and, on the other hand, very few transcended the artistic field to become direct social and political action. By contrast, it focused on artwork that used the permissiveness provided by art's aura to posit radical messages and actions.
While the show became itself a locus of defiance whose many vectors created a complex web of interconnections, the ‘confrontation’ was rethought and explored. Confrontation was not accomplished by talking about confrontation. It was generated when the inherently political aspects of artistic and curatorial practice were brought out in the way suggested by Jacques Rancière, by thinking politics and aesthetics under the concept of dissensus. This came about when, to use Ranciere’s terminology, the ‘distribution of the sensible’ currently sanctioned for an exhibit like this was challenged and expanded because, contradictorily – yet not illogically if we attend the logic in which official celebrations usually take place in Mexico – crisisss… was planned to be the flagship artistic event of the Mexican Revolution’s centenary celebration.
In 2010, most countries of Latin America celebrated two centuries of independent life with exacerbated deployments of nationalist rhetorical events. In Mexico, the bicentenary’s commemoration also became the best pretext to dust off and revive old-style Mexican nationalism while palliating the increasing climate of violence, fear and discontent among the population caused by the battle between the Federal Government and the powerful drug cartels. How could an exhibition of Latin American art which neither undertook a geographical nor a historical persuasion be part of a celebrative programme operating within the nineteenth-century framework of the nation-state?
A Scandalous Map for a Route of Silence
The second paradox is that the complex web of intertextuality accomplished by the exhibition betrayed a notable lack of real inner webs and networks among Latin America’s art and its institutions. Although developments have increased, there are still serious needs in the field of Latin American art: pale cultural policies and an absence of continuity in the projects are our main weaknesses. It is surprising to notice how much powerful, purposeful and critical artwork is just getting out of its local enclosures, as is the case of the long-overlooked recent Chilean art, which commands particular attention due to its overwhelming presence in the show.
Though artists such as Alfredo Jaar, Eugenio Dittborn, Diamela Eltitt and Lotty Rosenfeld have had the international recognition that their work deserves, it is a pity that Chilean artists such as Gonzalo Díaz – whose interventions with light and neon texts are penetrating explorations of visuality and language that work both poetically and philosophically –, many others still belong to a route of silence within the art world and are almost unknown by the international art scene. Their presence in crisisss… was the great contribution of Mosquera’s curatorship. The big revelation was the documentation of Carlos Leppe’s magnificent video-installation and performances ‘Waiting Room’ (1980) and ‘Mambo Number Eight by Pérez Prado’ (1982) in which the artist works through his body within a field of references composed by a powerful mix of elements coming from his own biography, politics, daily life, psychoanalysis and art history, while rebelling against the confinement of roles to which the dictatorship in Chile sought to condemn the social body.
The whole exhibition consisted of the articulation of multiple narratives, drives and cross-sectional dialogues like those established between Gordon Matta Clark’s ‘Splitting’ (1974) – houses cut in half –, Doris Salcedo’s ‘Shibboleth’ (2007) – a floor crack along Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall —, and ‘Crack’, a modest but forceful lithography by the Costa Rican early conceptualist Emilia Prieto Tugores. Visual, conceptual and political unifying links and concerns also brought up through art actions like ‘Wash the Flag’ (2000), started by Colectivo Sociedad Civil, which consisted of literally washing the Peruvian flag in the Plaza de Armas in Lima as a demonstration against Fujimori’s dictatorship in Peru; the Chilean flag made out of real human femurs by Arturo Duclos; ‘Apolitical’, by the Cuban Wilfredo Prieto, and the dematerialized flag of Paraguay (‘Empty Flag’, 2007) by Paola Parcerisa. Nevertheless, crisisss… also showed the local cultural twist of the different countries and cultural zones that make up Latin America. For instance, while the action of washing the flag spread throughout Peru – and even reached as far as Peruvian communities in exile, contributing to the democratic about-turn in that country —, in Mexico the national flag was not allowed to be part of Prieto’s ‘Apolitical’, which featured a set of all the Latin American flags rendered in black and white raised in front of the façade of Ex Teresa Arte Actual – Mexican legislation prohibits using the national symbols in ways that it deems improper.
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| Emilia Prieto Tugores. Crack. c.1937 |
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| Gordon Matta Clark. Splitting. 1974
Spatially and conceptually articulated as the field of tension between the Mexican and the Cuban Revolution (4), the lead of the show was given in the first gallery, where the left wing area gathered Cuban artists such as Raúl Martínez, Antonia Eiriz and Sandra Ramos. Californian Aaron Valdez’s ‘State of the Union (Clinton)’, an edited video of Bill Clinton addressing the USA Congress that shows the president pronouncing only numbers, was placed side by side with José Toirac’s video ‘Opus’, an edition of Fidel Castro’s speeches that only allows listening to the numbers that he pronounces, while these appear on the screen. Outside of the ‘Cuban’ hall but conceptually connected to it, ‘Speech’ by Wilfredo Prieto (toilet paper made out of the infamous Cuban official newspaper Granma) and Tania Bruguera’s ‘Tatlin’s Whisper’ – the performance that generated the first public tribune in Cuba after Castro’s Revolution – addressed freedom of speech in that country.
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In the right wing, Diego Rivera’s iconic lithography ‘Zapata’ (1932) was placed beside the video register of ‘Border Brujo’ (1985), a performance by Guillermo Gómez Peña in which, with multilingual dexterity and humour, the artist explores the borders between North and South, Anglo and Latino; myth and reality, legality and illegality. Amidst these pieces, Mosquera introduced a curatorial statement: he did not include in the exhibition any of Frida Kahlo’s work; rather he presented ‘The Two Fridas’ by the Chilean duo Yeguas del Apocalipsis, who cross-dressed themselves and enacted, with a catheter, blood and oil paint on their bodies, the scene of the famous painting by Kahlo. ‘She is a wonderful artist, but her image has become a cliché of Latin America’s exoticism. That’s why I decided to exclude her from the show’, said the curator. (5)
Between what I have called the ‘two poles of tension’, and in the middle of the large hall that connected them, the almost religious ‘Inverted America’ (1943) by Joaquín Torres García pointed out that ‘our north is the south’. Luis Camnitzer’s ‘Common Grave’ (1969) – which simply consists of these two words of the title pasted on the floor – opposed Torres’ utopian turn of the South American map to point up, and played with Duclos’s Chilean flag made out of femurs. Hanging on a wall, it was elevated like any raised flag, however, by denouncing the crimes during Pinochet’s dictatorship, the flag metaphorically connected with the principles of ‘descent’, ‘pain’ and ‘anonymity’ of the common grave. Camnitzer’s work happened to be also a metaphor for the exhibition’s fate – was the show also condemned to the ‘common grave’ principle? I will come back to this later.
Instructions for Being One's Own Sparring Partner
The third paradox has to do with the massive budget that was assigned to the show and the enormous effort to bring together nearly 200 works from more than 100 artists from throughout Latin America and other continents, which contrasted with the weak promotion given to the exhibition: crisisss… was an underestimated show with unexploited significance. The main reason for this was undoubtedly the political conflicts in the Mexican cultural scene.
The problems caused by the recent failed renovation of the Palacio de Bellas Artes’ auditorium, which was denounced by UNESCO and the International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS) due to supposed irregularities in the management of patrimonial heritage, significantly affected the exhibition, since the Palacio had been planned as the only venue for the show. A few weeks before the opening, Teresa Vicencio, director of Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes, asked the curator to move part of the pieces – those planned to directly intervene in the façade and other transit spaces of the Palacio – to another setting. Mexican cultural authorities tried to avoid more problems with UNESCO and ICOMOS by refusing permission to alter the building. However, the hurried opening of a new venue, which was Ex Teresa Arte Actual, an art space usually devoted to performance and experimental art, caused other problems. The decision of a few artists to abandon the show when they found out that their pieces had been moved to the new space caused speculations about censorship in the show. As a consequence, the national media focused on the scandal instead of stressing the importance of a show that brought together the most important pieces of one century of Latin America’s art of dissidence. This, in addition to the sparse international media coverage brought to the exhibition, resulted in the disregard of a highly relevant art event.
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| Gonzalo Díaz. Figuras del poder. Vista lateral de la fachada del Palacio de Bellas Artes. Foto: Glexis Novoa |
According to Mosquera, the only case of censorship was against Teresa Margolles’ performance ‘What Else Could We Talk About?’, which the curator wanted to enact at the Palacio de Bellas Artes’ lobby. This was regrettable not only due to the piece’s strength, but also because it was going to be the only live performance in the show. Presented at the Venice Biennale in 2009, the work consisted of mopping up the blood of narco executions in Sinaloa with rough cloths, and then soaking the fabrics with water and using them to clean the floor of the Mexican Pavilion. The presentation of Margolles piece caused strong polemics in Mexico when presented in Venice, and though Mexican cultural institutions supported it until the end on that occasion, it was not allowed to be performed in crisisss... Would the real confrontation be to perform the piece at home rather than as an ‘export'?
Maybe because of its dissonance regarding the rest of the bicentenary’s programme, crisisss… was postponed five times before its opening, and it finally got started when the commemoration was already finished. In addition to letting the exhibition out of the fest, postponements caused serious absences such as the famous parangolés by Hélio Oticica. The only itinerary of the show planned within Mexico was cancelled and the one to Colombia, which would divide the show between two venues, is still uncertain. It is not clear if the catalogue, with important texts by Aracy Amaral, Claire Bishop, Cuauhtémoc Medina and many others is going to be edited or not. Nevertheless, the hijacking of the Palacio de Bellas Artes by an exhibition like this deserves a celebration: it is not only the largest and most wide-ranging show of its kind ever organized, but also the first exhibition of this nature allowed to be executed within the Palacio, the greatest bastion of culture in Mexico, where only official and consecrated artists have been presented.
Probably the absence of Oiticica’s ‘We Thrive from Adversity’ reveals its phantasmagoric presence in the show: ‘his mischievous dialectics might serve as a synthesis of both the achievements and the contradictions of the art submitted in the exhibition—and, ultimately, of the exhibition itself’, pointed out Mosquera in the room leaflet. Instead of celebrating an idealized past through a false present, crisisss…aimed to address Latin America in all its complexities and conflicts, and emphasised contemporary problems and the way in which art's intrinsic semantic potential has responded to them. The painful reality is that, generally speaking, Latin American artists have run faster than Latin American institutions and their management’s models. For instance, The Museo del Palacio de Bellas Artes does not even have a web site. Even an exhibition like crisisss..., which denounced and reflected on the problem of Latin America’s complexities and contradictions, could not avoid being a victim of the same wrong that it tackled.
Notes
1 Palacio de Bellas Artes and Ex Teresa Arte Actual, Mexico City, March-June 2011.
2 Conversation with Gerardo Mosquera. 21 July 2011.
3 Mosquera, Gerardo, Good-bye Identity, Welcome Difference. From Latin American Art to Art from Latin America, Third Text, London, vol 15, Issue 56, 2001, pp 25-32.
4 It is essential to consider that both events have been decisive for the development of Latin Americanism. The Mexican Revolution was the first victorious popular revolt of the 21st century, and provided icons such as Emiliano Zapata, while the Cuban Revolution constituted a revival of previous Latin American ideals as those coming from Bolivarism. It also contributed the new icon of Latin American pride and rebellion: Che Guevara.
5 Conversation with G. Mosquera, Ibid.
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