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

Iris Mexico & Elia Espinosa
Fecha: 2007-09-22 04:17:01por: Iris Atma (iris.atma@yahoo.com )

• A professional theoretician is interdisciplinary: The artistic interdiscipline is developed so much in crossings of gender (performance, cinema, theater, spectacle, network art, etcetera), like in thematic (of sex, politics or activists, ecological, etcetera), and theoretical (art theory, culture studies, communication sciences, mathematics, etcetera). The bottom thesis is that an art theory professional, only obtains quality in his expositions when he’s aware of the contemporary manifestations in general: the social context of policts, media, fashion, et cetera. The one that only knows about art, not even knows art.

- Is the performance a more powerful gender to allow to the expression that the theater given its creative freedom?, is the theater most efficient in public development given its historical longevity?
- What is the reason because visual artists usually approach the performance like a conceptual and primarily visual art, of ontologic connotations and philosophical importance, whereas most of the scenic artists consider it in a pejorative way an art smaller than the theater exercise?
- Of which form postmodernity and hypermodernity have fomented the interdiscipline in the context of the artistic theory and practice?
- Who are the critics of Mexican and Latin American performance and how they help us to fight against or to reinforce the western eurocentrisms and articentrisms?, do we have a conceptual sovereignty or do we lack of it?

• The performance and the history conception: Contemporary historians have surpassed the history linear conception; so, they position themselves in an interdisciplinary, hybrid, hypermodernly and quickly changing perception of history.

- How this affects the reflection of performance?
- In the first place we have professional historians, critics and theoreticians who publish in magazines and specialized bibliography summarizing in relation to performance. Secondly, we count on the task “for lunch money” of writers of average size who narrate what happen in the performatic events publishing in cultural sections of mass media, and its speech am similar to the one of the section of social affairs (who was there, I liked it, I didn’t like it, it’s so pretty, etcetera) Is there a correlation of activities, an interdependence, or a perceivable difference of quality for the public between a professional critic and a performance columnist?

• The artistic performance as a writeible text: Art theoreticians, after theories as the desconstruction question the artistic processes in relation to a matrix and the forms to expand it or to renew it. Barthes mentions that everything what we do can be desconstructed* in a linguistic form. For Barthes exist two texts: a) writeible and b) legible. We work in a matrix, if the message is within the matrix is legible, if it is outside is writeible: this is, at the moment at which we do not understand it, we look for to interpret it and when doing this we can construct a text. In front of an unknown word, we try to put it in context, within the matrix, we work to inject meaning to the word. One of the efforts of the artists is to activate the reader.

- Under what parameters and methodologies it is possible to locate the position of a performer and its works, between the writeible and the legible thing? Understanding the writeible thing like destabilizing and therefore innovative, and the legible thing like stabilizer.
- If a scenic creator presents as performance a work that shares the hegemonic speech on how people live and should have to live, and therefore, lacks of any proposal that renews the languages, is he more supported by the cultural institutions: cultural centers, universities, grants?, does he manages to convince the system of being called performer only because he presents him in such way?, exists a critical maturity that has mechanisms to unmask him and to limit him the access to the artistic system?
- What happens when a scenic creator presents a supposedly writeible performance, that nevertheless lacks of technical professionalism and falls into solemn and pamphlet thing?
- Of which he forms a true one to performer difference him self of the pseudoartists and how he can manage to generate legible works that are valued by the system?
- It is that the ego or the contemporary innocence generates performers prisoners of a narcisist selfexpression, or is that in the contemporaries aesthetics the identity becomes caleidoscopic and due to its shared crises or their diversity, unites to the author with the others?

* The desconstruction meaning generally is bound to theories in the field of the critic (art, music, cinema, philosophy, etc.). In agreement with Jacques Derrida, all the texts and works of art say some other thing that what apparently they say, independently of the intention of the artist. All work, through the interpretation, can show that it contains a meaning multiplicity, and the work of the critic is to descontruct the intention of meaning of the artist and to expose the multiple meanings content in a creation. Umberto Eco previously mentioned this in "The open art work".

• The performance scientific critic: In the context of contemporary art critic, we count on sociological or scientific critics, who objectively analyze the values and the importance of the work. Specialists in identifying and expressing the own elements of the visual and conceptual arts, as well as of the artistic system in their society, reason why they make a real and professional critic.

There exist other types of "critical" approaches that devoid of specific knowledge write "about art" and the only thing which they do is to confuse people, between these manifestations we found: Literary critics that make a language work from a conceptual or visual work. "Psychological" or "symbolic" critics, they write in relation with the metaphysics of the works.

- Who are the present protagonists of art critic?
- Whereupon tools counts and to what challenges faces a professional performance critic?

• Performance definition: In Manual of style of the contemporary art, Pablo Helguera presents the following definition: " Performance Art: Term conceived by some utopists to talk about a series of attitudes and aesthetic positions that question, among other things, the commercialization of the art and the border between this one and the life. Later, some saw the advantage to elevate the term to artistic gender, to turn it into merchandise and later into academy. The "academic" performance artists distinguish themselves by continuously self promotion like referees of the gender, adjudging permissions and certificates that they delimit what is and what isn’t performance."

- What is a performance and according to whom?
- On which form the performance definition has been changing according to how is modified the concept of the artistic, historical thing and of the reality?

• The performance critic and the time: Although history handles mainly the past, and the critic the present, both disciplines prepare us for the future. A historian can resign to the exercise of the critic, nevertheless for a critic is indispensable the knowledge of history.

- Which is the relation of history and performance critic with concepts like development, truth and relativism?
- Of which form the relation with time determines the valuation of an activity, that is to say, it would be possible to be considered that the activity of the critic is more difficult and therefore important that the one of the historian, columnist or documentalist?
- From what moment, and on which forms has occurred the performance history and critic?, what theoretical disciplines will reflect about performance in the next future?

México city, August 2007


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Fecha: 2007-09-22 04:17:01por: Iris Atma (iris.atma@yahoo.com )