I. Notes for an art critic and performance map in Mexico

Iris Mexico & Elia Espinosa, AICA, México
Fecha: 2007-09-22 04:15:54por: Iris Atma (iris.atma@yahoo.com )

Art critic, a tool to see the world.
The International Association of Art Critics (AICA, Mexico section) organizes the Jornadas de Crítica de Arte (Days of Art Critic) that will have place on September 6th and 7th of the 2007 in the Aula Magna of the National Center of the Arts, in Mexico city. The program includes reflections around the art critic, related to artistic education, journalism, cinematography and performance. The objective is to obtain a luminous event, even estrident, in the context of the contemporary critic. It interests us to think about and to get a memory of the routes that are followed in the theory in order to perceive and to valorize the conceptual art today. We propose to make altogether a map of the artistic and theoretical scene in Mexico.

Performance is an art generating representativity and questioning of the communication codes. Subjects that sustain a table of critic and performance come, among others, the differences that presents the critic of performance as opposed to the critic of the objectual arts and also of the analysis of the performance potential to include in its processes the socialpolitic and existencial problems of our time, for example migration, the forced marginalization in which they try to have majorities that are against the power, the solitude desert of the individual in the "global village", the ethical chaos, the relegate of the nature, etcetera. We wish to map the performance and the today art critic in Mexico. This is the vortex with that we invite to collaborate the speakers and performers. Exciting fenomenologic, aesthetic, symbolic, historical-political, ethical problems, as well as aspects of the artistic practice of the performance will be approached. The critic, the historian and the artist of performance become jumbled in the processes of conception and performatic action or valuation and presentation of this work through an art critic.

In the next paragraphs we establish a listing of ideas and questions that are implicit in the reflection of the correspondence between art critic and performance...

The theoreticians and their pejorative attitude towards the non-objectual: There is a serious problem in mexican art theory in the universities, research centers and official publications; the great drama is that a very small percentage is interested in the contemporary artists. The great majority ignores that the future of the theoretician it is in his critical, social, documentary, poetic and loving approach to the present art. Still exists in ample social sectors a pejorative position to the conceptual arts and at the same time an excessive privilege to the traditional plastic, between which are the painting, the graph and the sculpture.

- Which are the social forces that foment the overvaluation of the art of the past in damage of the reflection of the contemporary?
- How it is possible to foment the debate, the development, the difusion and the memory of the present art theory?
- Which is the position of the state politics in relation to this point?
- What paper educative institutions play the in the promotion of today art theory?
- It is that the contemporary artists have moved away from the public, that the public has moved away like never before of his artists, that the indifference of the contemporary art theoretical professionals foments this distance, and/or that the protagonists of the economic and political power, by ignorance or fear, have caused the indifference towards the today art limiting its educative and mediatic diffusion as a strategy to restrict its sociocultural critics and proposals?, how can be modified the Mexican cultural politic that foments the abyss between performers, their art critics and their public?, which are the strategies so that the progressive theoreticians and critical, and the professional performers compete with massive media, the conservatives and reactionaries, as well as with the absence of cultural politics in order for obtain a happy and active public for the contemporary art?

• Art critic and performance, great absences in professional studies: Although performance and art critic are common currency in the artistic system, this fact seems to be ignored in México, except for few and honorable exceptions, in the art schools of superior education, that ignore them like curriculum subjects, include them like step subjects, or in the best one of the cases they implement its exercise like a extracurricular workshop. Between the Schools of professional education in visual arts in Mexico we can mention the National School of Plastic Arts, ENAP, UNAM, the National Painting Engraving and Sculpture School, ENPEG, INBA, the Faculty of Plastic Arts of the Veracruzan University, and the School of Arts of the Independent University of the State of Mexico, etcetera.

- What is the reason that the Schools names (the use of the words "plastic Arts" instead of "visual arts"), as well as the plans and the study programs stay delayed in relation to the actual art?
- It is the lack of an updated professional education one of the reasons that there be pleinful of improvised, residual and amateurs performers and art critics?
- What type of learning foments a solution for theoretical renovation?, how so serious are the symptoms about that the lack of renovation in artistic plans and training programs generates death by starvation and obsolescence?

• Interaction between theoreticians and performers:

The relation between the art critic, theoretician, historian and the performer is extremely elaborated and nourished so much in the existential as in expressive and conceptual thing.

-How the work of the historian and the critic illuminate or contribute elements to the artist of the performance in his to do and its being, conscience, expression? and viceversa, how the performáticas expressions illuminate and induce new experiences and developments in the professionals of the theory of the art?
- What happens generally in the relations between performers and their critics?, In which form the relations "by contract", it is, with honoraries paid to profesional critics, are different from the ones generated with "press critics"? The galerist or curators appear like intermediaries between performers and critics. The critic gets irritated by the autopromocional eagerness of the performer, by his demands of texts in the last minute, the payments that don’t arrive, because the artist arrives at the critic house without warning or calls by phone at an inconvenient time and wants free texts, sometimes the performer forgets to thank to the critic by their theoretical collaboration, or the performer has a disaster in its curricular and documentary documents from which the critic could establish his speech, in addition can occur the case that the performer, reedits the critic texts without notifying to him or remunerating to him, getting even to mutilate the critic work publishing only the fragments in which the critic praises the work and censuring those that are less favorable to the artist, etc. The artist of short intellectual and ethical reaches is irritated because takes the critic in a personal way and sometimes he looks for to damage the physical integrity of the critic or to attack his possessions, forgetting the basic forms of the coexistence or the professional debate.
-Many artists are also professionals in art critic, whereas others lack the ability of verbalize their own performatic proposals. In what sense the critic artist has an advantage to develop work of better quality?, art information advances in quick steps, which makes difficult for artist to organize its time in order to stay to the day an also generate its works and if it is the case, its own theories.

• Theoretical, critical and sociocultural analysis of the contemporary performance: The philosophy, aesthetic, semiotic, and other theoretical disciplines, when reflecting around performatic manifestations, generate questions that come from the own thing of the artistic gender, as well as of the social processes from which they come out and to which they influence.

- How are related the artistic manifestations to the social subjectivity and cultural aesthetics?
- Of what forms the performance renews and contributes to the art definition?
- How the aesthetic redefinition contributes to the performance conception?
- it has been fetishism, deify the performer and his provocations, in such form that few mexicans theoreticians have put their energy in making concientious studies of the performance aspects in the artistic system. How can it be favored the serious analysis of the Mexican and Latin American performance?
- Which is the reason of being of performance in a global world, that faces the global heating, inmigrants hordes, new approaches to the corporal thing like individual and social expression, and a massive consumption?
- Which are the diverse technological and aesthetic innovations as the design and the Internet that becomes important social factors that influence in art theory?
- Of which forms are accentuated through the decades, for the critic, in the performance the semantic, syntactic and the pragmatic areas?


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Fecha: 2007-09-22 04:15:54por: Iris Atma (iris.atma@yahoo.com )