Biennale Rufino Tamayo, Mexico City, June-August 2004

Carlos Molina, PhD Student, University of Essex

We all suspect and hope that there is a public for art out there. For this wider public, artistic culture is almost entirely formed by the museum. In discerning how the impression of contemporary art in Mexico is currently being constructed, The Rufino Tamayo’s 12th biennale provides a case in point.

On August 26th, the prize awardees were finally announced: Carlos Gutiérrez Angulo, born in 1955 and one of the proponents of Arte Povera in Mexico was declared winner for his work Muy gallito. Muy gallito.

Among those recognized with a honorable mention were Pilar Bordes (for Obituario); Ciudad de sombras by Miguel Castro Leñero; and Chien Méchant by Arturo Elizondo.

Even though Francisco Larios Osuna’s (b. 1960) digital graphic Cabeza de Playa B and Alfredo Echeverría’s (b. 1982) La Cantante were also recognized, the tendency was to favour artists now on their fifties.

If the aim of this biennale was to review contemporary graphic work in Mexico (and if we accept that the works presented succeeded in doing so) it seems that the artists recognized here were the very same as those contesting art in Mexico thirty years ago.

This year the contest focused on the production of graphic work: the official seal for this focus was given by the convocatoria: who decreed that submitted works should be printed, rather than painted. Currently, the official entities involved in setting and reviewing submissions are the CNCA (Arts and Culture Mexican Council) a bureaucratic leviathan contested and under strict scrutiny from the Mexican Congress; the Oaxaca State Government, currently n political opposition to President Fox’s regime; and the foundation that supports the museum (and organizes Mexico city’s most sophisticated parties).

There is a tendency among cultural institutions in Mexico to think of the museum and its exhibits as a flexible medium existing to set their agenda in stone. In Mexico, such a bureaucratic mausoleum serves the purpose of commemorating national mythology and sustaining a tradition in representation that merely repeats a canon and discomforts nobody.

And this did again seem to be the case at Museo Rufino Tamayo, where the latest graphic biennale rejected artworks on dubious grounds. In personal conversations, three contestants told me they were sent their submissions back because they failed to attack an appropriate thematic, missed the sort of line the judges were expecting, and were too young to have a resume worth paying attention to. If we take the object of perception to be constituted through the subject’s attitude towards it, then what we are facing at this biennale will be impossible to excise from the judges political passions, and not even as a public could we assume a disinterested aesthetic response.

The selection committee for this year was composed by Itala Schmelz, Teresa del Conde, and Raquel Tibol. Schmelz is a young critic with a sound record in contemporary art-writing. It appears that her opinion has been dismissed by the two others involved in setting the final look of the show. Teresa del Conde, former director to MAM (Modern Art Museum-Mexico), a well recognized art-historian and critic, has made sure no really bad-works are included. Raquel Tibol, dowager critic to the Mexican guild, represents the rhetoric that - at the beginning of this reporting note- I have attempted to denounce. Now in her eighties, and a contemporary to Diego Rivera and André Breton, Mrs. Tibol still advocates that Mexicans should find their own distinctive ways of representing a glorious indigenous past.

The convocatoria required artists to submit no less than two and no more than three works, formatted 1.75 by 2.50 metres. Only Mexican citizens (or foreigners who could prove five years legal residence) could apply. As was oddly made explicit, artists were expected to be figurative and abstract at the same time, that is to say, to copy and offer homage to the master Rufino Tamayo: whose work in graphic appears caught between narrative and plasticity. The prizes this contest promised (c.7500 pounds each) will undoubtedly buy the chosen winning works, assuring that the artists achieve prices that will pay the rent for their studios for the few more months until the next contest is announced elsewhere.

Artists participated not because they are primarily interested in graphic as a genre or a medium, nor do they regard Rufino Tamayo’s aura as the necessary legitimizing thrust that they want. This biennale appears to be another chance to keep creating, and to have their artworks continue to circulate within a complex world (a circumstance that Mexicans complicate further everyday with their decisions). The issue of materiality and media is not a minor one; it is only a facet of the worldwide debate surrounding Latin-Americans as ‘third-worlders’, struggling for the right to be global, contemporary and equal. My concern here is not the very old idea of “the death of painting”, but with denouncing the inert forces which force representation to follow a given agenda.

However, to a certain extent the Mexican art-world is given full voice by the members selection committee; with three women raising the issues of three generations that hardly ever enter into dialogue. Historic grandiloquent epics, institutional agendas, and younger concerns have never really understood each other. Furthermore, the chief museographer to the Tamayo collection, Mr. Pereda, is well known as an antagonist to the Museum’s contemporary section curatorial staff (and the work that they struggle to show and promote in Mexico). However, speaking in the biennale’s favour, we can be certain that the works will be well-lit, the walls freshly painted, and the texts clear and readable. Also no doubt complementary to this biennale will be the director’s willingness to offer a well-catered opening night, with the appropriate degree of ceremony (for his hierarchical superiors) and well-presented press-releases (for the reporters).