Museo Universitario de Ciencias y Arte, MUCA Campus,
Mar 17, 2007 - Sep 30, 2007
Ciudad de Mexico, Mexico
Acts in Dissent. On the Age of Discrepancy: Art and Visual Culture in Mexico 1968-1997
by Gabriela A. Piñero
Those doubts and inquiries as to the ways the historiography was carried out extend to the practice itself. In line with the artwork selected, the curatorship proposes a model for participation founded on dissent. The series of strategies used to foster parallel activities and the consultation platform in the middle of the exhibition, featuring newspaper clippings, magazines, catalogues and access to the show’s website, were designed to raise questions rather than defining meanings and ideologies. The different mechanisms used in The Age of Discrepancies take on the risk of shaping interpretative coordinates, of attributing meanings and significance. These do not aim to be absolute: the disarray is meant to lead to the taking of a position, the choice of a standpoint from which (and for which) to make an opinion.
Since it opened in March 2007, The Age of Discrepancies sparked rebuttals and controversies (some can be examined on the exhibition’s website), many of which go to show the interests at stake behind this (re)construction of developments in Mexican art. "Intemperie", the section dealing with works created in the nineties -in which the absence of Gabriel Orozco is surprising- is one of the most controversial areas of the (s)election. Just how dissenting and with whom or what do the works selected dissent? How centralist is the "pruning" effected in the curatorship?
As a discourse, The Age of Discrepancies acknowledges that it is inevitably incomplete and fragmentary and accepts the power inherent in the "privilege of having the floor".(12) Soon to be inaugurated in Buenos Aires, the expectations lie in the questions raised in the exhibition here. The way these works are disseminated --as acts that at the time were alive, dissenting or canons at the service of economic and institutional interests- will depend in part on the capabilities they give rise to and the narratives that such dialogues can promote.
Each work models alternative projects on the basis of the dissimilar supports and materials used to implement them. Questioning the potentials of their recovery today implies undertaking a historiographical labor that is not limited to "strolling through the garden of knowledge",(13) but seeks to influence contemporary events by reinserting ever-current aspirations, dreams and demands. A practice updated in this way is a history made up of ruptures and fragments.
Gabriela A. Piñero is a M.A. candidate at the History of Arts Program (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México) and holds a B.A. in Arts from the Universidad de Buenos Aires.
Quotes:
(1) Walter Benjamin, "On the Concept of History" (1940), Selected Writings, Volume 4, 1938-1940. Trans. Edmund Jephcott and others, Ed. Michael W. Jennings and Howard Eiland, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003, p.392.
(2) La era de la discrepancia. Arte y cultura visual en México 1968-1997, curated by Olivier Debroise, Cuauhtémoc Medina, Alvaro Vázquez and Pilar García de Germenos, Museo Universitario de Ciencias y Artes (MUCA Campus), Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (México), March 17--September 30, 2007. On show at the Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires (MALBA): June-August 2008. Website: http://servidor.esteticas.unam.mx:16080/~discrepancia/
(3) "Genealogía de una exposición", La era de la discrepancia. Arte y cultura visual en México 1968-1997, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, p. 20.
(4) Ibid., p. 19.
(5) Cit. in: La era de la discrepancia. Arte y cultura visual en México, 1968-1997, p. 17.
(6) Walter Benjamin, Libro de los Pasajes, Ed. Rolf Tiedemann. Trans. Luis Fernández Castaneda, Isidro Herrera and Fernando Guerrero, Madrid, Ediciones Akal, 2005, p. 229.
(7) In that regard Cuauhtémoc Medina states: "But under the mantle of that esoteric vocabulary, La Montaña Sagrada was a visually dense response to the State violence of 1968 and the terrors of a period dominated by capitalism and militarism, alluding as explicitly as possible to the student killings and the corporate domination of daily life". Cuauhtémoc Medina, "Pánico recuperado", La era de la discrepancia. Arte y cultura visual en México 1968-1997, p. 93.
(8) "Los Grupos" refers to a series of artists and theorists (El Colectivo, Tetaedro, Tepito Arte Acá, Proceso Pentágono, Mira, Suma, Germinal, Taller de Arte e Ideolog’a (TAI), Mario, Peyote y la Compañíaa, No Grupo, el Taller de Investigación Plástica (TIP), Fotógrafos Independientes, etc.) that arose in Mexico particularly in the early and mid-seventies. Alvaro Vázquez Mantecón, "Los Grupos: una reconsideración", La era de la discrepancia. Arte y cultura visual en México 1968-1997, p. 194-196, and all the section of the catalogue devoted to "Urban Strategies", p. 194-240. See also: Catálogo de exhibición, De los grupos a los individuos. Artistas plásticos de los grupos metropolitanos. Museo Carrillo Gil, Mexico, June-August 1985, INBA.
(9) Not only has justice not been served over these events, there are in fact no official figures.. Existing databases on the number of dead and their names have been - and continue to be - compiled by non-governmental organizations, among them in particular the work done by "Eureka! Comité Pro Defensa de Presos, Perseguidos, Desaparecidos y Exiliados Políticos de México". www.eureka.org.mx
(10) E-mail conversation with members of H.I.J.O.S. Mexico, August-September 2007.
(11) For example, Kia Lindros, Now-Time, Image-Space, temporalization and politics in Walter Benjamin’s philosophy and history of art, Jyväskylä, SoPhi University of Jyväskylä, 1998.
(12) Olivier Debroise, Cuauhtémoc Medina, Pilar García de Germenos, Alvaro Vázquez, "Respuesta de los curadores de la muestra La era de la discrepancia a Luís Rius Caso",July 30, 2007, www.arteven.com/07_la_era_de_la_discrepancia_2.html
(13) Frederick Nietzsche, cit. in: Walter Benjamin, "Sobre el concepto de historia", La dialéctica en suspenso. Fragmentos sobre historia, Translation, introduction and notes by Pablo Oyarzún Robles, Santiago de Chile, Universidad ARCIS, LOM Ediciones, 1996, p. 58.
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