In addition to the multiple approaches and different perspectives that art proposes for the human being in the face of his time, space and historical evolution, it also serves as an important catalyst for reflections on the sensations, ideas and dynamics that trigger his most serious problems. immediate.
Historically, and through various techniques and/or aesthetic discourses, contemporary art has gone beyond media, superficial or mercantile readings that could derive from adverse events such as crises of various kinds.
Transcending the spirit of the warlike cruelty of Picasso's iconic Guernica, the intimate crisis of Edvard Munch framed in the times of death from tuberculosis and the Spanish flu (1918) with El Grito, or even more recently with the denunciation around political prisoners in contemporary Spain (2018) by Santiago Serra from Madrid, to mention just three examples, artistic expression has not been able to separate itself from its frontal and desperate speeches, in pursuit of raising its voice or reflecting on those disagreements that concern us as a society.
In this sense, one of the recurrent maxims in art points to the fact that the artist must be, above all, that pertinent vehicle (or clearly impertinent, for hegemonic discourses), which allows us to see war, pandemics and epidemics, as well as the humanitarian complexities or the most abject heart of the human being.
However, not all creative voices derive or tie with this historical, social, political, ethical and moral responsibility, often questioning the ultimate goal (the market or the weighting of the artist through the suffering of others covered with aesthetic or humanist justifications) .
Another vision confronts the absent creative dilemma of frontally ideological discourses, asserting that currently contemporary art, especially neglected, playful or subject-absent art, cannot escape its reflexive essence from the context in which it is inserted.
Likewise, on the other side of the work, care should be taken in the different readings and receptions that a piece may or may not have outside of its closest context.
From the series Symbolic Death, photography by Juliana Alvarado.
The Mexican photographer Juliana Alvarado (1990), who seeks a representative, documentary and sensationalist distancing in which her medium has been corrupted, points out that currently the local image has not ceased to be in a discursive line, be it abstract or not, with the current conflicts in the country.
“Currently [in photography] I see many works about territories, identities… violence above all.
There is also a lot of gender discourse, linked not to the abject but from the metaphor of the body.
That moves a lot within the photographic language, even with artists from the north.
Suddenly, photographers from Ciudad Juárez have written to me and I see that we have points in common, it surprises me;
Very similar photos from different contexts.
In my case, my contexts were Michoacán and Morelos with similar concepts from the landscape, the highway, the imaginary borders… These are things that we are interested in addressing.
And that seems interesting to me because it is also an analytical view of reality but abstract, subjective.
My work is about space as an extension of me, how space represents me,
not as a self-portrait but more as 'space is the other and space is me'.
A transmutation”, explains Alvarado.
Piece by Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan titled Blind, during the Breath Ghosts Blind exhibition, at the Pirelli Hangar Bicocca, July 2021, Milan, Italy. (Image: Emanuele Cremaschi/Getty Images)Emanuele Cremaschi (Getty Images)
Opportunism, disinterest and creation
For the multidisciplinary artist Israel Martínez (1979), who recently exhibited a multi-format installation based on a fiction that speculates on a possible visit by the North American writer Henry David Thoreau (author of Walden and Civil Disobedience) to Pátzcuaro in 1845, weeks before leaving concordia to go to the Walden Point lake, where he would write his two nodal pieces, the political, critical and reflective discourse on the human reality linked to the different systems that oppress him, has been a constant that has also led him to dialogue in different environments and artistic spheres outside his country, Mexico.
Martínez considers that there is currently a reactive abandonment, perhaps subconscious, in the face of the tiredness of the harshness and violence that the country has historically gone through, putting in its place the game, the sardonic and the likely to be marketable.
“The gallery owners propose a lot of childishness, comics and a very sarcastic streak.
It is a line that reflects, for me, a distance from the commitment of art in its social reflection, resulting from being fed up.
Sure, it's still political but it doesn't state it head-on and that means the gallery owner can offer it as a work that can be collected.
“(...) What I have noticed since the Ukraine-Russia conflict began is that there are some highly politicized art scenes;
in Germany and Austria, for example, everything has revolved around that: exhibitions about war, refugees… Recently (May 2022) I participated in a forum in Austria, Adressing Amnesia, Performing Trauma about politicians there and how that has influenced the art, this derives from the fact that in 2014 I presented the piece No illusion on a monument in the Plaza de México in Vienna, which is a pronouncement on the Nazi invasion in 1938. What I said back then was 'how do we have so many decorations for the peace when everyone is killed and drug traffickers do what they want in the country'.
I felt strange in this forum, especially because here [in Mexico] art is pointing to other points”, confesses Martínez.
Two women look at a fresco from the exhibition Art and Sensuality in the Houses of Pompeii, installed in the archaeological excavations of Pompeii.
(Image: Marco Cantile/LightRocket via Getty Images)Marco Cantile (LightRocket via Getty Images)
Given this context, the perspective of the curator Paulina Ascencio Fuentes (1988) is pertinent, for whom the historical situation present in recent art fairs and biennials (none of them exempt from criticism for opportunism or "political correctness" by some voices) is pertinent. and necessary.
Ascencio Fuentes adds that one should be cautious with these criticisms and be observant of where they come from and how they are poured.
“For me, the curatorial practice is a way or a series of tools to generate new knowledge, but this does not necessarily have to be constrained to an art system, but to a broader scope.
We must also be critical in the way in which these criticisms are being given, but it is important that it is happening.
Yes, it is a watershed that has a lot of work behind and ahead.
Before, this was not discussed nor were the guidelines or intentions of these great events [fairs, biennials] questioned.
We are acknowledging these new narratives, we are including them.
Rather than thinking about the great narrative diversifying, you realize that there are many and they are happening simultaneously, that they happened and are happening at the same time, but you have to tell them and, of course, be critical of how they are being told as well”,
For his part, for the artist Luis Felipe Ortega (1966), who frequently gives off thematic "clarity" in his work, seeking its permeability and discourses, regardless of the explicit messages or not, political or not, conjunctural or not, considers that a constant in contemporary art that should disappear is that of consumption, making use of accurate references that are valid for the context in which we live.
“There are those who just want a constant and that has defined the contemporary world in terms of consumption in general.
It is consumed in one direction, and that is an idea that I think needs to be broken.
I have relied on a type of philosophy, literature and art that obviously does not lead to optimism, but quite the opposite.
I think that, the more we take these referents, let's say not funny or not humorous -that's why I insist on Beckett-, at the end of that position an irony is decanted, and irony is always political.
You arrive from the other side and it is not like frozen laughter, on the contrary, it is the only path that will make another path possible”.