OPA- Oficina Para Proyectos de Arte,
Jul 15, 2005 - Sep 16, 2005
Guadalajara, Jalisco, Mexico
Detonantes (Detonatings)
by Lorena Peña
Far from surprising via individual magnificence, discourse or solution of each of the pieces, Detonantes engenders more a moving feeling of empathy. It incites an unusual intellectual reflection, by way of the ludic and morbid impulse to look upon and become the other. The passage through this exhibit begins with a global vision of a group of art pieces that convert to a polychromatic and heaped-up, uniform mass that closes the instant the very brief introductory text is read:
"This is a minefield. The exact origin of little here is known, neither is its discriminate impact lessened by the capacity of its observers. Potential victims. In effect, here the unsuspected is sown. Initially, imagined as a crossword of aesthetic offerings. Later, an artist’s archival deposit. Also as an inventory of sources of basic concepts, of inspirational pollen. Finally, all of that gets mixed together.
We presume that these objects are the foundations of the creative processes of each of those present.
My contribution is to reunite my friends again.
Guillermo Santamarina
Oppressive summer of ’5."
The foregoing explanation of the process and backbone of the curatorial plan Santamarina concludes with a phrase that not every theorist or critic would allow himself; alone, it is capable of delivering the knockout blow before the start. Possessing the ability to be, in itself, the piece/cornerstone that unifies the exhibition. Is it not the human and warm-blooded part that remains out of public view during the process of realizing an exhibition? Is sentimentalism that which the intellectual first hides in the face of objectivity? In Detonantes, it is the curators who decide to put themselves on show. This experiment - the break with minimal and conservative order characteristic of conventional exhibition spaces, the dialogue apparently indecipherable between the works that comprise it and the romanticism with which they are threaded together - is the result of the aversion that, at least in Mexico, confronts contemporary art and its pre-established features.
Weariness notwithstanding, this is what generates a rupture, another door that leads to new reflections about art and the system that it comprises, discoveries that, fitting or not, renew.
1. Tianguis. s.m. Mexico. Small market. Principally one that is installed periodically in the street. (Larousse Dictionary, 2003).
The tianguis in Mexico are markets mainly comprised on small commercial outlets, under plastic tarpaulins, where they sell all types of commercial products, from underwear to pirated CDs, cosmetics, clothing, utensils and used electrical appliances.
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