Polonia, epicentro del Holocausto, se recorre como un mapa sagrado. El turista peregrina de sinagoga en sinagoga, del gueto de Varsovia al de Cracovia, de Auschwitz a Treblinka, de un plató de La lista de Schindler a una localización de El pianista. El pasado es piedra e industria, el turista estatua de sal. De vez en cuando, apetece entrar en los museos de arte para salir del monotema del museo al aire libre. Otras formas […]
The chronicle of a death so often announced, that of painting, is nothing more than the narrative of a progressive liberating itself from layers and layers of dogma and ideology. With the first avantgarde movements was exempted from the obligation to represent the outside world but entrusted with the search for the Absolute or the search of a lost “ego”. With minimalism, they wanted to deprive painting of spirit so that it was only matter […]
Even the most princely doll becomes a capable proletarian comrade in the children’s play commune (Walter Benjamin, “Old Toys” 1928) During our childhood, we have all eviscerated a stuffed animal or disemboweled a toy. Baudelaire interpreted this impulse as a «first metaphysical tendency»: the child looks for the soul of his doll, but when he does not find it, sadness or stupor ensues. What Walter Benjamin would reply to the French poet is that the soul […]
The absence of the paternal and maternal figures, or more specifically their physical distance as a child, and the consequent virtual relationship when the technological virtuality did not yet exist has marked, in a sense, the work of María Ruido. In her film essays, however, we could almost say that the feminist motto «the personal is political» is reversed because intimate only appears in her work in an indirect manner, through complex webs that weave the social with the […]
Moths, those butterflies that have a tendency to get lost, that feel a fatal attraction by light to the point of being burned to death, seem to us disturbing creatures. Their scorched wings remind us of Icarus’ suicidal impulse. On the other hand, perhaps they look to us unsettlingly familiar because we do nothing but flit around blinding electronic lights. Moths have fascinated writers and poets. The glimmer of light they leave in their wake […]
Contrary to the desire for possession, the caress is a voluptuous gesture that «nothing catches», nothing retains. Emmanuel Levinas took the poetic image of the caress as a paradigm of the right distance between the self and the other, that distance that embraces alterity without annulling it. In the hand-painted porcelain statuettes by AES+F the caresses abound, but here the promise of future announced by Levinas is completely distorted, with stylized advertising choreographies With kitsch […]
To slash Velazquez’s Mirror Venus, «spit» on Hegel, decapitate Michelangelo’s Moses or «desecrate» Emperor Claudius’s statue are gestures (some real, others symbolic) synchronized in a single iconoclastic movement against the patriarchal patrimony. The suffragette (Mary Richardson) who attacked the ideal Beauty, the writer (Carla Lozi) who spat against the Hegelian understanding of history as a dialectic struggle between masters and slaves (in which women, lacking conscience, does not reach even to be a slave), the destruction […]
Fair, it is said circus, amusement park, showbiz world, a carousel of banalities, bazaar of the objet trouvé and a thousand times retrouvé. In contemporary art fairs the ultimate meaningless of art is summarized: to boost the ego, and not exactly that of the artist. The Contemporary Art Apart Fair (CAAF/CDMX 2019) is not Art Basel of Basel, nor of Miami Beach, nor Frieze nor ARCO …, but all of them at the same time. It is […]
