Art to start the century
- nahomiximenez
- Jan 15, 2024
- 7 min read
2012
"The artistic practices in which life experiences and that elusive magma of immaterial and symbolic values that involve from punctual attitudes to creative industries strategies, are heterogeneous and also mobile, so that it cannot be clearly established whether they are inside or outside something and symbolic values that involve from punctual attitudes to strategies of the creative industries, are heterogeneous and also mobile, so that it cannot be clearly established whether they are in or out of something and, if all goes well, they discover how to enter and exit tactically".(1)
Loreto Alonso
The book "Poeticas de la produccion artistica a principios de siglo XXI" by Dr. Loreto Alonso Atienza (2) brings us up to date to better understand how the way of making and assuming art has changed. An art that reinvents itself and proposes itself in different ways, that presents new denominations, which surely twenty years ago we would not have imagined. This book analyzes the characteristics of the production of the visual arts in the first ten years of the current 21st century, which the author has been able to study closely and which she also addressed in her doctoral thesis. As an artist herself, she belongs to a collective called C.A.S.I.T.A. that studies current phenomena of contemporary art.
In this publication of the Universidad Autonoma de Nuevo Leon, we can see the production that Alonso herself proposes and also uses as chapters of the book: Distraction, disobedience, precariousness and invertebrates. Practices that unfold in an expanded field of art. And we read as an introductory note: "The interest of these four poetics does not derive from their novelty but rather from proposing constructive models for the present and future".(3)
To explain his concepts, Alonso selects a series of works and artists of current interest and uses them to explain in a practical way an overview of possible antecedents and genealogies in the history of art and mentions problems associated with each form of production. At the beginning of each chapter we see drawings that function as visual aids.
The relationship that artists have with their environment has forced them to change and adapt, to reorder their own systems, and thanks to this we also find a change in the way the public and institutions participate in the work of art.
For today's visual arts students, these ways of doing things come naturally, as they are learning and recognizing what is happening in their artistic environment. Reading a book that talks about such a recent history is very interesting, functional and relatable for them. This is what I saw during the February-June 2011 semester in the ESAY's Bachelor's Degree in Visual Arts in the Modular Integration Workshop when we reviewed this reading material with the 8th semester students. The students were receptive to the reading.
It could be said that distracted production acts between experience and spectacle. (4 ) The production that Loreto calls distracted refers to developments in which the author, the place and the audience are all in motion. The audience receives the work of art in a heterogeneous way with multiple capacities of conceptualization and sometimes participates unconsciously. The distracted artist reacts in a similar way to the distracted public, as he allows himself to react according to the work. The distracted space makes use of the everyday, the ephemeral and does not require a stipulated place.
Distraction takes as antecedents works of Land Art, Site Specific, Conceptual Art and Action Art. One of the works he mentions as a precedent is the piece Tilted Arc (Richard Serra, 1981) in which the artist makes a kind of abduction to space through a monumental sculpture in a park in New York, a city where people walk in a hurry, so this work caused great discontent among passersby. Subsequently, to explain the poetics of distraction and the Revistas caminadas. One of the works he uses as an example is the work "Invented tradition" (Leo Kessler, 2008) in which the artist polishes the shoe of a statue in a park in Vienna, making it look as if it has been touched by many people, as if it were a tradition to walk by and touch the shoe. This subtle action is aimed at the distracted passerby. Antecedents to Disobedience are Activist Art and Social Sculpture (which Beuys called) both resort to using the public as a producer. A work of this nature is Inserciones en circuitos ideológicos (Cildo Mireles, 1970-1971) in which Mireles intervened some empty Coca-Cola bottles, stamped them with the words "Yankees Go Home" in order for them to be refilled with the liquid and circulated again but with this adjustment.
One of the characteristics of disobedience is its political character, it has concrete objectives, committed to a certain problematic, that is why it is linked to activist practices. Regarding this, Alonso says: Jacques Rancière in his conception of politics as disagreement, art is political because with its very decided and proposes new agreements "(5).
Education is an active part of this disobedience because it multiplies forms of resistance. Education revolutionizes. A current movement that enters the field of disobedience is Net art, such as the one executed by Vuk Cosic (considered the father of Net art), the Italian collective 0100101110101101.ORG, Olia Liliana and Jodi.org. The actions they execute could be a new category of hackers/artists in which the net becomes a strategy of rebellion.
To talk about precarious production, Alonso mentions 6 paradoxes: the performative character of the term "precariat", the productivity of precariousness, the artist as a model of the precarious, about rights and duties, professionalism and amateurism, and the precarious public. Precariousness has been a topic of conversation especially since the talk of globalization. It is the result of economies in crisis and criticism of consumer systems. Art made with few resources or with resources without high economic value, art created with ephemeral and virtual materials has emerged as a solution and in some cases, as a criticism.
It is said that lack is the mother of creativity, and that creativity today is an essential part of contemporary art production. Artists are no longer thinking about subsistence only through the incursion into the market, the idea that art is good only if its purpose is to sell is obsolete.
In this regard, Jose Luis Brea says: The new economy of art will no longer understand the artist as destined to the circuits of luxury in the economies of opulence, but as a generator of social contents (6).
The Spanish artist Isidoro Valcárcel Medina is in favor of an "economic art". The book refers to a work of his authorship in 2007, an action that consisted of painting the walls of a theater hall white, using a very thin brush, for which the action lasted 9 days and he charged the same as a painter with a broad brush.
Finally, the chapter on invertebrates is the finishing touch, in it, in a very narrative way, he makes a similarity between artists and invertebrate animals thanks to the many characteristics they share, parasitism, the capacity for regeneration and metamorphosis, the organization in colonies, the ephemeral, among others. This chapter is fun and is an exercise in metaphorical association that invites us to think about the qualities that artists have to function productively in their environment. These ways of doing is not an alternative doing, but like the invertebrate world, it is a majority one. The invertebrate world is ancient but subject to constant change and adaptation.
Just as metamorphosis is characteristic of invertebrates, artists are also in a constant process. An interesting quality of the artist of the 21st century that is addressed in this chapter is self-management; the artist plays a much more integral role in the different operations of art and makes incursions in different ways thanks to the knowledge derived from their own experiences and the broad access to information provided by the networks.
To approach this chapter in class, I asked the students to draw an invertebrate, and once the drawing was finished, we named the qualities of each one. After a while we had a list of characteristics similar to those that artists today use to produce and relate to others. We identified with that list.
To talk about the metamorphosis that can arise in authorship (since it is common for an artist to act sometimes individually and sometimes collectively) we mentioned the Italian collective created in the nineties, which had the name of Luther Blisset (an English league soccer player), after the number of its members was reduced, the collective changed its name to Luther Blisset (an English league soccer player) the collective changed its name to Wu Ming names, or no name).
The author has synthetically and accurately analyzed the practices of the visual arts world today. In addition to being a researcher, Alonso is an artist, and this duality can be seen in her book, which is enriching to read (7).
1. Full interview at:
2. Loreto Alonso Atienza was born in Burgos, Spain in 1976. She holds a PhD in Fine Arts from the Complutense University of Madrid, currently lives in Mexico and is a university professor.
3. Pp.14 Poetics of artistic production at the beginning of the 21st century. Distraction, disobedience, precariousness and invertebrates. Dr. Loreto Alonso Atienza. Universidad Autónoma de Nuevo León, 2011. Monterrey, Nuevo León, Mexico. 1st edition. (The book can also be read online thanks to the UAEM publishing house in Toluca at: http://editorialuaemex.org/ poeticas.htm).
4. Pp. 34.
5. Pp.55.
6. The third threshold: statutes of artistic practices in the era of cultural capitalism. José Luis Brea. Cendeac 2008. Pp.192. (http://books.google.com.mx/ books?isbn=8496898326)
7. The book has been previously presented at universities such as UANL, UAMEX and the Instituto Superior de Artes in Cuba. At ESAY it was presented as part of the 8th semester Modular Integration Workshop.
By Nahomi Ximenez
2012
Ximenez, Nahomi. 2012. "Arte para comenzar el siglo". AVI NVESTIGACIÓN. N2. Article originally published at:
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