Luna Córnea 33. Viajes al Centro de la Imagen Vol. 1

CONSEJO NACIONAL PARA LA CULTURA Y LAS ARTES Presidenta: Consuelo Sáizar CENTRO NACIONAL DE LAS ARTES Director General: Roberto Vázquez Díaz Director General Adjunto Académico: Humberto Chávez Mayol CENTRO DE LA IMAGEN Director: Alejandro Castellanos Cadena Coordinadora Editorial: Alejandra Pérez Zamudio LUNA CÓRNEA Director: Alfonso Morales Carrillo Editores invitados: Patricia Gola, Valeria Pérez Vega, Alejandra Pérez Zamudio, Alejandro Castellanos.

Asistentes de investigación y edición: Luis Hernández, Claudia Zendejas, Luz María Jasso, Alejandra Padilla Pola, Isaura Oseguera.

Diseño editorial: Carolina Herrera Zamarrón Asistentes de diseño: Ángel Armando Moreno, Carolina Fernández Cuidado de producción: Pablo Zepeda Martínez Reprografía: César Flores, Agustín Estrada Comunicación: Valentín Castelán Ventas por Internet: www.educal.com.mx Director fundador: Pablo Ortiz Monasterio Consejo editorial: Manuel Álvarez Bravo†, Graciela Iturbide, Patricia Mendoza, Víctor Flores Olea, Pedro Meyer, Mariana Yampolsky†, Olivier Debroise†, Roberto Tejada, Gilberto Chen, José A. Rodríguez, Alejandro Castellanos, Gerardo Suter, Francisco Mata y Alberto Ruy Sánchez.

Dirección del Centro de la Imagen: Plaza de la Ciudadela núm. 2, Centro Histórico, México, DF, CP 06040.

Tel. 4155 0850 lunacornea.ci@gmail.com Editor responsable: Alejandra Pérez Zamudio Licitud de título: 12478 Licitud de contenido: 10049 Número de reserva al Título de Derechos de Autor: 04- 2011- 091412445800- 102 Preprensa e impresión: Dat@color Impresores, S.A. de C.V. Avena 201, Col. Granjas México, Iztacalco, 08400 México, D.F. Impreso en México issn: 0188-8005.

Tiraje: 4000 mil ejemplares.

Los trabajosDirector aquí publicados son responsabilidad Presidenta: General:Director General de los autores.

La revista se reserva el derecho de Adjunto Académico: Director: Coordinadora modificar los títulos y subtítulos de los artículos.de Editorial: Director:Editores invitados:Asistentes Número 33 / 2011. investigación y edición:Diseño editorial: Asistentes Esta edición se realizó con la contribución del de diseño:Cuidado de producción: Reprografía: Programa de Apoyo a la Investigación, Docencia y Comunicación:Ventas por Internet:Director Difusión las Artes 2008, PADID. fundador:deConsejo editorial: Editor responsable: Licitudlas deimágenes título: Licitud de contenido: Número de Todas aparecen por cortesía de sus reserva al Título de Derechos respectivos autores, excepto que se indique lo de Autor:Preprensa e impresión: contrario.

Luna Córnea agradece la colaboración y apoyo que para la realización de este número, primero de la serie Viajes al Centro de la Imagen, le brindaron las siguientes personas e instituciones: Juan Salvador Salvador Aguilar, Aguilar, Carlos Carlos Aguirre, Aguirre, Mauricio Mauricio Alejo, Alejo, Guillermo Guillermo Arias, Arias, Patricia Patricia Juan Aridjis, Lorenzo Lorenzo Armendáriz, Armendáriz, Jorge Jorge Bermúdez, Bermúdez, Cannon Cannon Bernáldez, Bernáldez, Lázaro Lázaro Blanco Blanco †, †, Aridjis, Rosa María María Blanco, Blanco, Katya Katya Brailovsky, Brailovsky, Fernando Fernando Brito, Brito, Isaac Isaac Broid, Broid, Gustavo Gustavo Rosa Camacho Olivares, Olivares, Ana Ana Casas, Casas, Fernando Fernando Castillo Castillo Fuentes, Fuentes, Gilberto Gilberto Chen, Chen, Carlos Carlos Camacho Cisneros, Jorge Jorge Claro Claro León, León, Roberto Roberto Córdova Córdova Leyva, Leyva, Andrea Andrea Di Di Castro, Castro, Juan Juan José José Cisneros, Díaz Infante, Infante, Alfredo Alfredo Domínguez, Domínguez, Agustín Agustín Estrada, Estrada, Federico Federico Gama, Gama, Maya Maya Goded, Goded, Díaz José Carlo Carlo González, González, Arturo Arturo González González de de Alba, Alba, Lourdes Lourdes Grobet, Grobet, Mónica Mónica Hernández, Hernández, José Javier Hinojosa, Hinojosa, Graciela Graciela Iturbide, Iturbide, Ernesto Ernesto Lehn, Lehn, Luis Luis Lupone, Lupone, Mayra Mayra Martell, Martell, Javier Eniac Martínez, Martínez, Adrián Adrián Mealand, Mealand, Patricia Patricia Mendoza, Mendoza, Pedro Pedro Meyer, Meyer, Gerardo Gerardo Eniac Montiel Klint, Klint, José José Núñez, Núñez, Raúl Raúl Ortega, Ortega, Pablo Pablo Ortiz Ortiz Monasterio, Monasterio, Rubén Rubén Pax, Pax, Montiel Margarito Pérez Pérez Retana, Retana, Ernesto Ernesto Ramírez Ramírez Bautista, Bautista, Heriberto Heriberto Rodríguez, Rodríguez, César César Margarito Sánchez Olvera, Olvera, Jesús Jesús Sánchez Sánchez Uribe, Uribe, Gerardo Gerardo Suter, Suter, Ricardo Ricardo Trabulsi, Trabulsi, Antonio Antonio Sánchez Turok, Eloy Eloy Valtierra, Valtierra, Pedro Pedro Valtierra, Valtierra, Yvonne Yvonne Venegas, Venegas, Antonio Antonio Vizcaíno, Vizcaíno, Emilio Emilio Turok, Watanabe, Mariana Mariana Yampolsky Yampolsky †. †.

Watanabe,

María del del Perpetuo Perpetuo Coordinación Nacional de Asuntos Jurídicos del INAH / María Socorro Villarreal Villarreal Escárcega Escárcega || Coordinación Nacional de Monumentos Socorro Julieta García García García, García, Martha Martha Ghigliazza, Ghigliazza, José José Históricos del INAH / Julieta Alberto Luna, Luna, Violeta Violeta Caballero Caballero Rico, Rico, Gerardo Gerardo García García Pérez, Pérez, Jacqueline Jacqueline Alberto Haydée Perales || Escuela de Diseño del Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes Haydée Perales Mauricio Maillé, Maillé, Girón || Dirección de Artes Visuales de Fundación Televisa Mauricio Girón Fernanda Monterde, Monterde, Gustavo Gustavo Fuentes, Fuentes, Héctor Héctor Orozco Orozco || Archivo General de Fernanda Alma Vázquez Vázquez || Biblioteca de México Eduardo Eduardo Lizalde, Lizalde, Miguel Miguel la Nación Alma García Ruiz, Ruiz, Beatriz Beatriz García García || Archivo Fotográfico Enrique Bostelmann García Yeyette Bostelmann Bostelmann || Archivo Fotográfico Manuel Ramos Elia del Carmen Carmen Yeyette Yolanda Ramírez || Centro de Colecciones Arturo Ortega Navarrete, A.C. Yolanda Ramírez Marco Antonio Antonio Cruz Cruz || Periódico La Jornada Rebeca Rebeca Ortega || Revista Proceso Marco Ortega Bibiana Rosales Rosales || Centro Panameño, Fabrizio Fabrizio León León || Agencia El Universal Bibiana Panameño, Joaquín Bolaños, Bolaños, Valentín Valentín Castelán, Castelán, Rocío Rocío Chávez, Chávez, José José Luis Luis de la Imagen Joaquín Coronado, Francisco Francisco de de la la Rosa, Rosa, Mario Mario Domínguez, Domínguez, José José Luis Luis Flores, Flores, Lourdes Lourdes Coronado, Franco, Luis Luis Alberto Alberto González, González, Cecilia Cecilia Hidalgo, Hidalgo, José José Luis Luis Iturbide, Iturbide, Édgar Édgar Jaramillo, Jaramillo, Franco, Érika Núñez, Núñez, Cristina Cristina Rivas, Rivas, Jesús Jesús Rodríguez, Rodríguez, Jesús Jesús Torres, Torres, Jo Jo Trujillo, Trujillo, Daniel Daniel Vega.

Vega. Érika

El Centro Centro de delalaImagen Imagen agradece a todas aquellas personas que han agradece a todas las personas que han trabajado trabajado por el ordenamiento, clasificación y conservación de susfotográacervos en la documentación, catalogación y conservación de sus acervos fotográfico, bibliográfico y documental, entre entre ellas:ellas: Gabriela González, fico, bibliográfico y documental, Adriana Carral, Genoveva Saavedra, Luz María Jasso, Georgina Rodríguez, Acervo fotográfico Gabriela González Reyes, Adriana Carral, Genoveva Johan Trujillo, Katia Olalde, Luis Alberto González, Rodrigo Ortega, Betzabé Saavedra, Luz Gálvez, María Jasso, GeorginaEva Rodríguez, Trujillo, Anne Franco, Andrea Iván González, Calderón,Johan Guadalupe Zamora, Blondel yyKatia Marisela Bernardino ÁngelOlalde.

García Hernández.

Acervo bibliográfico y documental Luis Alberto González, Rodrigo Ortega, Betzabé Franco, Iván González, Eva Calderón, Guadalupe Zamora, Marisela Bernardino y Angel García Hernández.

LUNA CÓRNEA 33

VIAJES AL CENTRO DE LA IMAGEN I

CONTENIDO

8 Efemérides para un futuro almanaque Hechos y sucesos de la fotografía en México (1968-1994) Valeria Pérez Vega

31

289

313

La Ciudadela 321

72

Un lugar para todas las imágenes

345

95

Rubén Pax: Exposición de exposiciones La guillotina y el obturador

348 355

Cómo me olvidé de Lázaro Blanco Mauricio Alejo La retórica del infinito e r andy Vergar a Vargas

Mil novecientos noventa y cuatro

381

141

Pasamontañas

385

Aproximaciones a un look insurrecto armando B artr a

r icardo tr aBulsi

La línea invisible m auricio a lejo

138

Una tarde en Corralchén

Imagen expandida ger ardo s uter

Traspasos de un archivo policiaco a lfonso mor ales carrillo

175

Música de Cámara La partitura perdida fernando c astro r.

De los asoleaderos de tabaco al cortejo de las imágenes a lejandr a Pérez z amudio

115

Ángel Cosmos en Fotozoom La audacia de lo interdisciplinario luis r. HernÁndez

La interminable juerga de Venus Entre el cielo y el deseo Fragmentos de una historia de las imágenes técnicas e r andy Vergar a Vargas

396

Círculos concéntricos a na c asas Broda

179

Evocaciones neozapatistas HeriBerto rodríguez

201 Itinerarios etnográficos

233

412

B eatriz noVaro Peñalosa

De la antropoesía a la etnofusión Valeria Pérez Vega

417

El cuerpo expósito

424

274

Remembranza de un provocador jesús s ÁncHez uriBe

284

Mis encuentros con un artista multidimensional juan josé díaz infante

Las heridas que se curan con retratos y Vonne Venegas

Retrato imaginario de un caníbal Á ngel cosmos

Primero va la mirada m aya goded

m auricio ortiz

270

El roce de los lenguajes

437

Déjenlo ir K atya Br ailoVsKy

LUNA CÓRNEA 33 VOYAGES TO THE CENTRO DE LA IMAGEN PRESENTATION

451 BUILDING THE CENTRO DE LA IMAGEN Three Accounts

452 THE SHUTTER AND THE GUILLOTINE Transgressions from a case file ALFONSO MORALES CARRILLO

461 THE ABANDONED BODY MAURICIO ORTIZ

468 ÁNGEL COSMOS AND FOTOZOOM Interdisciplinary Audacity LUIS R. HERNÁNDEZ

478 MAURICIO ALEJO Between Still Image and Time-Image ERANDY VERGARA

486 CONCENTRIC CIRCLES ANA CASAS

501 PROOFREADER: RICHARD MOSZK A

The images in this section were taken from El Libro del Sol, a compilation of illustrations edited by Rafael L贸pez Castro and Felipe Garrido, and published in 1984 by the sep Cultura and Ediciones del Ermita帽o.

Centro de la Imagen. Plaza de la Ciudadela no. 2, beside Balderas Avenue. Colonia Centro Histórico, Delegación Cuauhtémoc. Mexico City. Postal Code 06040… There is a building at this address that welcomes a wide range of visitors and receives a great deal of mail. It sits on old, persevering stones filled with memories, steeped in the odor of colonial tobacco and resonating with the sounds of revolutionary guns.

Its name (literally ‘Image Center’) does not include the word ‘photography,’ which is itself an overly precise term, and as such, only too vague if we wish to refer to matters that normally involve light, time, imagination and memory. One can fall from any height, or climb out of the darkness of the deepest cave, and arrive at the Centro de la Imagen. There is no road, no matter how tortuous, that does not lead to the Centro de la Imagen. Likewise, upon exiting the Centro de la Imagen, one can follow any direction of the compass. It is common knowledge that there is no center besides the one created by the more or less stable balance of centrifugal and centripetal forces: the result of tensions where order and anarchy complement each other. Though we can see it with our own eyes, a place such as this—which fully realizes the contradiction inherent to its name, juxtaposing terms that refer to hierarchy or fixity (the center) and to constant motion (the image)—cannot truly exist. Let us concede that this ultimately utopian name nonetheless refers to a bend in the labyrinth of the Mexican capital and to a building loaded with stories to which, since 1994, individuals interested in the art and craft of photography have added their own marks, erasures and fantasies. Indeed, all these people’s visions have proved that images have more than one center and have different ways of revealing their intangibility or their rootedness, of depicting what is most banal or most transcendent. Thus, we at Luna Córnea have assumed that if a Centro de la Imagen ever really existed, it is because of the confluences, meetings and journeys that have taken place there. So an issue like this one, which launches the series Voyages to the Centro de la Imagen, could only be a patchy, tentative and unfinished chronicle of some of the projects, voices, perspectives and undertakings that have constructed the imaginary architecture of a space where photography has questioned itself and, at the same time, has been questioned as a document of the past, an expression of the present and a token of the future. | Alfonso Morales Tr. Richard Moszka

451

BUILDING THE CENTRO DE LA IMAGEN Three Accounts Pablo Ortiz Monasterio (POM): In 1989 Víctor Flores Olea called me to organize something for the 150th anniversary of the invention of photography. Carlos Salinas had just become president of Mexico and the National Council for Culture and the Arts (Conaculta) had just been created, and it was Flores Olea who headed it. We had to work as quickly as possible so that that same year we could celebrate the 150th anniversary of photography. In the end we put up a proper series of exhibitions. In the years before that, we’d had a dearth of photography projects because the Mexican Photography Council had hit a low point. We quickly put together proposals that got the support of various museums: among them, the Museum of Modern Art, the Carrillo Gil Museum and the National Museum of Art [all in Mexico City]. The exhibitions and publications were a success.

It was a collective venture that involved a lot of people. At first we organized it at the headquarters of the Mexican Photography Council, in a tiny office. We had to move from there when the Council was forced to vacate the house they occupied on Tehuantepec Street, in the Roma neighborhood. Sylvia Pandolfi lent us a space at the Carrillo Gil Museum.

That’s where, with Emma Cecilia García and Patricia Gola—this is when Patricia Mendoza joined the team—we finished organizing the project for the 150th anniversary of photography. The government valued our organizational and public-outreach capabilities— when we were actually still just learning the ropes—and so Flores Olea asked us to take charge of Ciudad de México 20’s-50’s, which was a huge project. That’s when Alfonso Morales joined us—he was the curator of the main exhibition, Asamblea de Ciudades, which opened at the Palace of Fine Arts in early 1992. For this we were formally assigned an office, which was named the National Coordination of Temporary Exhibitions and Events. That’s what it was called.

And so they killed two birds with one stone, because that’s when the Teatro Helénico (Hellenic Theater) reopened. They sent us to coordinate activities at the Helénico, for us to function as representatives of the Conaculta at the Helénico, and from there we coordinated the project about Mexico City, which was clearly much bigger and more complex than what we had organized for the 150th anniversary of photography. We spent a year and a half, maybe two years, at the Helénico offices, working on Ciudad de México 20’s-50’s.

Other photography projects were conceived in that same space in 1992 and 1993: among them, a 452

magazine, published under the name of Luna Córnea, and a festival named Fotoseptiembre. When the Ciudad de México 20’s-50’s project concluded with good results, there was room to seriously consider an idea conceived by the photographers’ community which met with the approval of Flores Olea, maybe because he himself was a photographer: to establish a new space for photography that would recover the space that had been lost with the progressive decline of the Mexican Photography Council.

Pedro Meyer, who by then was already totally immersed in digital media and was looking towards the future, had sent Flores Olea a project for the new space, which he proposed to name the Centro de la Imagen [Image Center]. Flores Olea and Meyer were often in contact and on very friendly terms. In Meyer’s opinion, the new Center had to focus above all on new technologies. For us, what was most important was to have a place to host exhibitions, workshops, a library—in a nutshell, everything required to attend to photography and its wide array of practices, old and new. At first, a building on Uruguay Street was considered, whose structure had been made at the Eiffel factory; it was a very pretty building that was going to be lent to us by the Mexico City government, headed by Manuel Camacho Solís at the time. That’s where we were at, discussing 453

the best way to establish the new Centro de la Imagen, when there was a quarrel between Octavio Paz and Víctor Flores Olea, as a consequence of which Flores Olea left the Conaculta. Flores Olea had lent his support to a group from Nexos magazine in their organization of the Coloquio de Invierno [Winter Colloquy]. And then Paz took offense and complained that the government had lent its support to this Colloquy and not to his ‘La experiencia de la libertad’ [‘The Experience of Freedom’] meeting, organized at an earlier date by Vuelta magazine, which had only received private-sector sponsorship. Paz, who, to tell the truth, had cultivated relationships with the power structure through different channels, took advantage of the situation to reposition himself politically. He approached Ernesto Zedillo, who had become Secretary of Education after the secratariat he had previously headed was abolished, and who wasn’t a very important figure at the time— Flores Olea then negotiated directly with president Salinas. I witnessed the controversy that led to Flores Olea’s resignation. It happened at the Museum of Anthropology. The Secretary of Education accompanied Paz. They approached Flores Olea, who was with a group of collaborators, including me. Flores Olea held out his hand to shake Paz’s before Zedillo’s, but Paz didn’t shake his hand. Finally

it was Zedillo who shook Flores Olea’s hand. A few days later, Flores Olea left the Conaculta. And none of us knew whether the new space we had demanded for photography was still in the cards or not.

Patricia Mendoza (PM): I joined the National Coordination of Temporary Exhibitions and Events in 1990, but my relationship with the photography community had begun long before that, for both work-related and personal reasons. In 1981 I participated in the organization of the Second Latin American Photography Colloquy, and that same year, I was accepted as a member of the Mexican Photography Council, in spite of the fact that I was an art historian and not a photographer. Before I started working at the Council, in 1979, when I got back from London, Juan Benito Artigas asked me to join the Curso Vivo de Arte at the unam’s University Museum of Science and Art. I proposed something I called Current Art, which involved going to museums and galleries that showed contemporary art. It’s around then I became friends with people like the Pecas [the Pecanins sisters, Ana María and Teresa] and Miguel Cervantes, and met photographers like Gerardo Suter, who in turn introduced me to groups like El Rollo. This is when I also first came in contact with Pedro Meyer, and I was teaching history of photography classes at the

Iberoamericana University, which I decided to complement with presentations and talks by a wide range of photographers—even from groups that didn’t really get along with each other. When several years after that I founded the Los Talleres en Coyoacán space, I had maintained my relationships with photographers, including them in interdisciplinary projects as of then. I remember very well a show of archaeological pictures by Suter for which Fabio Morábito wrote a text directly on the wall. After joining Pablo Ortiz Monasterio’s team at the National Coordination of Temporary Exhibitions and Events, I was aware of the breakup process of the Mexican Photography Council. Agustín Martínez Castro, who was also part of the Coordination’s team, asked me to attend the meetings the Council was still organizing.

I only went to one and realized the group lacked unity and that they weren’t at all sure about what they wanted to do. As always happens when a group splinters, they all started blaming and accusing each other. There was nothing left to keep them together. They no longer shared a dream: they’d lost that motivation and felt enormously guilty, because there was also a legacy to protect, particularly a collection of photographs and a library. I learned about the conflict from José Luis Neyra, Lázaro Blanco, Armando Cristeto, Marco 454

Antonio Pacheco and also Agustín Martínez Castro. No one else could fill the leadership role that Pedro Meyer had played at the Council.

The Council’s functioning had depended on Meyer’s decisions to a great extent, and after his departure, no one could figure out a new way of organizing things that wasn’t based on the will of a single individual—and besides, the situation in the country and in the cultural milieu had changed. Agustín wanted me to witness what was going on at the Council because he wanted me to be involved. He hoped that someone like me, who was on more or less friendly terms with everyone, could help revive the Council. But to me it was clear that it unlikely that this would happen, and that we had to channel our energies at creating something new.

POM: After Flores Olea left the Conaculta, we had to present the project for a new photography space again to his successor, Rafael Tovar y de Teresa. We didn’t have the same influence with Tovar y de Teresa as we did with Flores Olea.

We had dealt with him directly and had had some disagreements with him when we were mounting Asamblea de Ciudades at the Palace of Fine Arts. (In the end, he understood the point of the show and retracted his opposition to some of its more challenging aspects, like showing blow-ups of pages from 455

Vea magazine in the Palace of Fine Arts’ mezzanine.) We appealed to the photography community to lend our project more weight. We formed a commission that included renowned artists like Graciela Iturbide, Mariana Yampolsky and Lourdes Grobet, as well as several photojournalists. Given our experience at the Mexican Photography Council, we knew we had to exert pressure as a coalition, with our cameras and flashes in front of us. Tovar y de Teresa received the commission and was receptive to its demands. He understood the importance and relevance of giving photography a space of its own, of lending continuity to a project that was already in the works. At that time the National Arts Center (Cenart) didn’t exist yet, but it was on the drawing board. Using the building on Uruguay Street turned out to be unfeasible and we had to think of other options.

PM: The photography commission’s meeting with Rafael Tovar y de Teresa happened in late 1992 or early 1993, I can’t remember exactly. What I do remember is that we at the Coordination wanted to take advantage of both the launch of Luna Córnea magazine—whose first issue was published in late 1992—and the organization of the first Fotoseptiembre festival to show Tovar y de Teresa that there was public demand and a lot of interest for photography. To organize

that festival I went on a genuine crusade to convince gallerists and museum directors to exhibit photography… In those years, Pedro Meyer was establishing himself in Los Angeles and focusing on his own work and personal affairs.

I found out about the project that Meyer had presented to Flores Olea in Pablo Ortiz Monasterio’s office, who from his post at the National Coordination had become the Conaculta’s main negotiator with the photography community.

What excited me most about that project was its name—Centro de la Imagen. To talk about ‘images’ in general and not just about photographs seemed extremely important to me. I must still have some notes somewhere where I started thinking about the possibilities of the concept of ‘images.’ I wasn’t involved in defining the Centro de la Imagen’s architectural structure—that was up to Pablo and Isaac Broid, the architect who was in charge of the project—but I did help find the space where it was finally established, in front of the Plaza de la Ciudadela. It was through Ángeles González Gamio and Tulio Hernández, who was then in charge of the Trust of the Historic Center, that I heard about the unoccupied building on Uruguay Street, near the Danubio restaurant. In the end, although it offered the best conditions for our project, we couldn’t occupy that building because of legal issues

with the property rights that, as far as I know, are still pending today.

Then I found out from Miriam Molina, the director of the Palace of Fine Arts, about plans to convert the former headquarters of the School of Design and Crafts [Escuela de Diseño y Artesanías or eda in Spanish] to host Mexico: Splendors of Thirty Centuries—the blockbuster show that had been presented at the Met in New York.

Splendors of Thirty Centuries was too big to be shown in any one museum of the Institute of Fine Arts. The eda’s former site, which was abandoned and had even been occupied by homeless people, had plenty of space. I confess I shamelessly stole Miriam’s great idea and immediately told Pablo about it, and then he presented it to Tovar y de Teresa. He agreed with the plan of setting up the new Centro de la Imagen in this section of the Ciudadela. The architectural intervention that made it all possible was done months before the Cenart opened.

POM: The Cenart was already in the works when the creation of the Centro de la Imagen was decided.

Actually, the choice of Isaac Broid as the architect in charge of converting this part of the old building of La Ciudadela had to do with the way that the assignments had been given out to design the Cenart’s various research centers and schools. These buildings were 456

meant to be a showcase of Mexico’s best modern architecture, and their design was entrusted to wellknown architects. Isaac Broid, who clearly qualified as one of these architects, wasn’t considered in the process. I guess Tovar y de Teresa was trying to be fair when he assigned the Centro de la Imagen to him. Broid and I knew each other because we had both been tutors at the National Fund for Culture and the Arts… At some point they considered the possibility of adding the Centro de la Imagen to the Cenart compound: something we vigorously opposed.

We told ourselves it was “better to be a big fish in a small pond …”

Again, with the community’s support, we resisted pressure from the Conaculta to be just one more building among the others under construction at the intersection of Tlalpan and Río Churubusco.

Besides, Isaac Broid had already drafted a project for the Ciudadela that we were very excited about, and the whole thing gathered momentum in our favor when news broke out of a fire in the part of the building that had been assigned to us, caused by homeless people who used the abandoned building as a shelter. That’s when the cultural authorities realized that establishing the Centro de la Imagen there eliminated the hazards associated with its being abandoned, lending new life to a building with historical value.

457

Isaac Broid (IB): When we first visited the site that the Centro de la Imagen now occupies it was a disaster area. The construction of the Central Library that had opened during Miguel de la Madrid’s term in government had not touched this section of the building, located on the corner of Plaza de la Ciudadela and Balderas Avenue, which had housed the School of Design and Crafts for many years. They’d run out of time to do the work they had planned for this space. This is what always happens: their term in government was up. That part of the building was barricaded on all sides. There was no access to it from the Library’s courtyards or from the street. Even the corridors between rooms were blocked off. Glue sniffers, street vendors and homeless people had torn down the fences and occupied the space. To get in we had to make a hole in a wall. It was a stinking mess… Since it was a preexisting building, we had to ask the person in charge of the Central Library project, Abraham Zabludovsky, for the plans. And because the work was being done in a section of the building that he felt ‘belonged to him’—from a professional point of view—we had to get him to sign off on the project, but the responsibility for the intervention (which can’t really be called a ‘remodeling’) was entirely my own, though always under the supervision of Pablo Ortiz Monasterio. Since the

building was classified as having historical value, our project was obviously reviewed by the people in charge of protecting architectural heritage. With the architect Juan Urquiaga, we had to negotiate the modifications I considered most important to make the space functional, allowing what had been built in the past to coexist with the needs and visions of the present. Sometimes they tell me, “Oh! You’re who remodeled the Centro de la Imagen!” and my answer to that is, “I didn’t remodel anything.

I’m not interested in remodeling anything. What I do is interventions on buildings.” Because just as Manuel Tolsá came along and made a building of his time, well I had to make a building of my time that also had to do with new technology (photography in this case): an intervention that responded to the time in which it was made, at the end of the twentieth century.

And that’s the reason behind the main gesture—the bridge communicating what used to be separate rooms—which doesn’t follow the building’s original geometry, but doesn’t oppose it either. I like to say that what I did at the Centro de la Imagen was to build a piece of furniture, which can be dismantled at any time. Very few elements actually touch the original building. Obviously they have to touch the floor because we can’t work against gravity. But they don’t touch the ceiling, they don’t touch

the walls. Just the beams—to support the elevated walkways that Pablo suggested in order to create more enclosed spaces—but it’s just the beams.

POM: The project that Meyer proposed, focusing on new technologies, finally resulted in the Multimedia Center that was incorporated into the Cenart. Broid’s project, in terms of its function, had to respond to a traditional concept that required exhibition galleries, administration offices, a library, a space to edit Luna Córnea and storage space for the artwork, etc. We didn’t have a big budget or much time. They spent more money waterproofing the roofs of the Central Library’s two reading rooms than on the Centro de la Imagen. But the outcome is noteworthy. It wasn’t easy to convince the people at the National Institute of Anthropology and History to open the bays joining the exhibition galleries and to add concrete frames to all the walls. Broid gave me the wherewithal to say, “when the Centro de la Imagen closes, forty years from now, we dismantle the bridge and we close the spaces off again; all we did was strengthen the walls—which bear the weight of the roof—by adding reinforced concrete structures.” Isaac kept telling us, “let the spaces be alive, let the spaces create themselves.”

The whole architectural project was defined by its respect for the 458

building, so it would remain visible and would be the main attraction.

IB: It was a complicated moment and a very innovative proposal.

We fought and fought and fought.

There came a time when I said, “okay, this isn’t going to happen.” but one Saturday night, Pablo called me and said, “the work starts on Monday.” The work was done between October 1993 and March 1994. Back then, there weren’t many buildings in Mexico with interventions of that kind. In other parts of the world—mainly in Spain and Italy—they had used contemporary architecture to give new life to historical buildings. My idea of the intervention we did can be summed up in the following way: respecting what exists while not denying the present moment, matching the quality of the spaces created in the past with contemporary proposals. Protecting the past while working towards the future. These are the challenges of architecture that inserts itself in buildings mislabeled as ‘historical’ because no construction can be deemed ‘a-historical.’ The project for the Centro de la Imagen—exhibition galleries designed expressly for photography—attempts to respond to these challenges with a conclusive gesture: respecting the original eighteenth-century geometry by means of contrast. This is how the new project is laid out: in orthogonal terms, its geometry 459

does not follow the preexisting one, and it remains freestanding to leave the latter as intact as possible, untouched. This concept is reiterated in the use of materials that differ from the preexisting ones and that contrast with them through their visual weight, textures, and colors. The original walls retain their white plaster finish while new walls will be of exposed concrete. Load-bearing walls contrast with the light new iron structure; concrete slabs contrast with woodbeam ceilings; each period is displayed in the space, aware of its association with the ‘other,’ protecting the other’s integrity without damaging it.

PM: The Centro de la Imagen was at first the outcome of the photography community’s obsession, because it was a dream shared by many people to have a space that, in the context of Mexico and Latin America, would cater to photography in all its extraordinary diversity. I think that ever since the time of the Second Latin American Photography Colloquy in the early 1980s, people had started thinking about a space like this. With the creation of the Centro de la Imagen—which in the end drew on the legacy and experience of the Mexican Photography Council— new perspectives opened up for the creation, study and distribution of photographic work. I understood it, in its initial phase when I was

director, as a space to think about images, to ponder the concept of the image as an inspiration for the culture of the end of one century and the beginning of another.

The perception that prevailed was that we were at a point of transition, where the image was something that reached beyond what we had realized until then in terms of its limits and possibilities. A point of transition and a pregnant moment, when the Centro de la Imagen had to be a key in terms of creating a new understanding of the image in all its forms: still, cinematographic, videographic, virtual, digital, historic, journalistic, merging with other art media. I think that the importance of images today, multiplied and

transformed by new technologies, does not mean this initial calling of the Centro is no longer relevant.

It seems to me that much of what we’ve done in the space designed

by Broid—a building that does not deny the past but that also aspires to the future—has gone in this direction.

These are excerpts of interviews made by Valeria Vega and Alfonso Morales on September 14 and 16, 2011 (Patricia Mendoza), and September 26, 2011 (Isaac Broid and Pablo Ortiz Monasterio). The interviews were recorded and transcribed Alejandra Padilla Pola and edited by Alfonso Morales.

Tr. Richard Moszka

460

THE SHUTTER AND THE GUILLOTINE Transgressions from a Case File ALFONSO MORALES CARRILLO

Alleged suspects We ignore the destiny that awaited Ricardo Alva Rodríguez, Adolfo Arana Ramírez, Eduardo de la Torre Ochoa, Salvador Antonio Terán Sánchez, and Carlos Tovar García as persons. They were accused in late 1973 of being assailants whose turf was La Ciudadela Plaza, located in a zone that for all practical and postal concerns was considered then, as now, part of Mexico City’s historic downtown area. Of all the images that the countenances of these bandits may have earned or required over the course of a lifetime, only these share, together with hundreds of other portraits, a box that measures 34 cm long, 29 cm wide and 6 cm high as their domicile, one that bears no identification other than a label that reads: Hanza Easel for Enlarger, The Orniya Photo Supply Co. LTD, Tokyo Japan.

This photographic condominium, populated by the ghosts of men and women accused of having broken the law in different ways, is on loan to Luna Córnea thanks to Yolanda Ortega, who for the past decade has led her family’s efforts to conserve the documentary and photographic collections that provided her father, Arturo 461

Ortega Navarrete, with material needed not only in his profession, but also by private museums, or as a boundless topic of conversation.

On the last day of October, 2011, the eve of this year’s celebrations honoring the dead, this box of mug shots was re-opened on one of the tables where the publication the reader now holds is edited. Alva Rodríguez, Arana Ramírez and the other persons accused (who knows whether justly or unjustly) on November 6, 1973, of stealing in the vicinity of La Ciudadela, had returned to the scene of their alleged crimes.

This was not the first time that Centro de la Imagen, headquarters of Luna Córnea, had exposed the factions compiled in that police archive of rudimentary filiations: strips of negatives wrapped in scraps of paper stamped with what seemed to be their dates of arrest, on which the same hand had written the names and crimes of the subjects portrayed. Sixteen years earlier, with the consent of Don Arturo, the visual artist Carlos Aguirre had ordered prints of dozens of these portraits so that they could form part of an installation called Images of Neoliberalism, presented in the southern patio rooms of the museum space from February 1 to May 14, 1996. Why were these faces, extracted from the underworld of the 1970s, scrutinized by the police, chosen for an exhibition that alluded in its

title to an indefensible transnational economic model, one that in Mexico had turned expectations of modernization into crisis, political repression, and social decay?

The artist, the Vendor and the Warden Carlos Aguirre (Acapulco, Guerrero, 1948), a former member of the Pentagon Process Group and a visual artist who had already developed a talent for re-signifying objects and constructing iconographic assemblages, showed an interest during the 1990s in deliberately formulated conceptual proposals, decanted to the utmost of their formal resources, inspiring political reflection and confronting the rhetoric of dominant discourse. Like others who cultivate recycling, Aguirre could often be found at La Lagunilla or Ángel Plaza, two of the most frequented weekend flea markets in Mexico City. It was at the latter of these bazaars that he met and befriended Don Arturo Ortega Navarrete, a veteran photographic journalist for sports publications who, as a vendor specializing in traces of the past, wielded his prowess as a highly retentive man (See the piece Luna Córnea dedicated to him in our 16th issue, dated SeptemberDecember 1998). He placed in Aguirre’s hands the same file of portraits that another photographer, doubtless ascribing to the same bureaucracy as the guardians

of urban order, had composed as a gallery of infamy.

Yolanda Ortega recalls her father commenting that these criminal filiations were acquired from Felipe Islas, a military man who was one of General Álvaro Obregón’s followers and who, during the 1920s, already boasting the rank of colonel, was appointed director of the Lecumberri penitentiary facility. Due to the familiarity that, from what we have seen, he still exercised in later years among circles that harbored detectives, initiates, the accused, public ministers, defense lawyers, and coyotes, Islas had passed other documents along to Arturo that referred to police business and crime reports, aware of Yolanda’s father’s interest in these subjects. This collection of mug shots was the last material to fall into this category.

If we rely on the testimony of José de León Toral, a devoted Catholic and Cristero militant who in 1928 assassinated General Obregón to keep him from occupying the presidency of the Republic of Mexico a second time, Felipe Islas was by no means a sinister regent of the Black Palace of Lecumberri. Among the drawings and notes the assassin completed before being led before the firing squad to pay for his crime, something he considered to have been a sacrificial, savior-like act, he dedicated a few lines to thanking Islas for the good treatment he received 462

at the hands of his jailers. In a communiqué addressed to the colonel’s mother, written at 3 in the morning on the same day his death sentence was to be carried out, León Toral wrote the following: Not having had the pleasure of making your acquaintance, I allow myself address these lines to you in order to congratulate you for the good hearts your sons, D. Felipe and Don Federico, possess: an inheritance you have bequeathed them.

May God make you a Saint!

Remember your humble servant in your prayers.

In his capacity as director of the penitentiary, it fell to Felipe Islas to deliver the cadaver of the assassin to his father, Aureliano de León, “for the corresponding purposes of interment.” And yet Islas remained faithful to the figure of the general who, in life, he had respected as a military chief and political leader. In fact, an article of his—“The Flight of Obregón”— was included in the History of the Mexican Revolution compiled by José T. Meléndez, first edited by the Graphic Workshops of the Nation in 1936. In order to relate episodes like these, which he witnessed, and others that he knew of because they formed part of the collective memory of his peers, Islas proposed that a photographic album be put together, providing his version of the main events that framed the history of Mexico 463

between the Porfirian era and the administration of General Manuel Ávila Camacho. Indebted to the sort of publications edited by the family of Agustín Víctor Casasola, this illustrated compendium was to be presented as an Album of the Mexican Revolution. As far as we know, Islas left this project unfinished. It is survived only by a cover proposal and a set of photographs and reproductions documenting some of the epic and tragic occurrences of the armed movement and its political aftermath. The materials compiled for the elaboration of the Album remained in the custody of Don Arturo and afterwards, his daughter Yolanda, before Ramón López Quiroga acquired them for his photograph collection. In a show I curated—Flotsam and Embers (2010)—, which was presented at the Casa del Lago of the National Autonomous University of Mexico as the result of my first incursion into the corridors of the world of images compiled by López Quiroga, the Album was vindicated precisely because it was an unbound tale that bestowed upon its loose fragments new possibilities of concatenation.

The Empire of Law A substantial chronological distance separates the events Felipe Islas intended to chronicle in his Album of the Mexican Revolution and the context in which the mug shots that Don Arturo Ortega

facilitated to Carlos Aguirre were made. As guardian of the final days spent by the assassin of Álvaro Obregón in Lecumberri, having witnessed his collapse when he was shot down by the firing squad, Islas had to be a man of a certain age by the time these line-ups took place.

In the box where they are stored, there is no evidence linking them to the revolutionary veteran. The dates stamped on their wrappings indicate that most of them were taken from 1972 to 1974. Two years later, the Lecumberri prison would close its doors, only to be reopened in 1977 as the General Archives of the Nation. The president at the time—José López Portillo, who came to describe himself as the final emissary of the nationalist revolutionary creed—promised us a country where the wealth generated by the exploitation of the new oil reserves would make social inequality a thing of the past. But the accounts rendered entailed debts and crises that would mortgage Mexico’s future.

In the early 1980s, the term Neoliberalism or its variants had not yet permeated the discourse of politicians who felt it was possible to set in motion once again a system of government in ruins. What this label might mean in terms of joining a world order dominated by transnational capital and free play in favor of market forces first showed its face timidly, out of austerity, and then exultantly, above

and beyond the call of propaganda, during the administrations of Miguel de la Madrid Hurtado and Carlos Salinas de Gortari –the latter, under the banner of “social liberalism.” By calling an installation that parted from the exhumation of criminal files Images of Neoliberalism, Carlos Aguirre was proposing an equivalence with the imposition of a model that had already given more than enough proof of its capacity to privatize social wealth, leaving it in the hands of a few under the glaring scrutiny of police control. The looting of a nation’s resources and simplification of individual personalities were on a par with these standardized, homologizing, dispassionate registries that originally had no purpose other than to annex the semblance of the accused to an incriminating file or record.

The installation presented

by Carlos Aguirre at Centro de la Imagen consisted of: a contraption similar to a guillotine, illuminated by bell lamps; a horizontal line formed by the portraits of the accused that ran across the walls of various rooms—prints in 8 x 10 inch format, produced as a series at a laboratory and mounted directly with pins, at the same height and with equal spacing between them—; and assemblages of the same portraits, composed of strings and plastic bags. The lamps transformed the contraption into a set that evoked the renowned 464

decapitating machine perfected in the late 18th century during the French Revolution. This reference to the spectacle that public trials became could likewise refer to the use of reflectors as tools of investigation, torture, accusation, and stigmatization.

In the foul dungeons of Mexican justice, at a time when another, no less venal police force had taken the place of sinister legend Arturo El Negro Durazo— chief of Mexico City police during the six-year administration of José López Portillo—the blinding lights of reflectors were generally used in interrogations in which defendants or suspects were beaten, humiliated, and bloodied so that they would confess their culpability in crimes they were accused of, regardless of whether there was any evidence or not. The procurement of judicial truth through violent methods was crowned by lights that were no less aggressive and intimidating: flashes and floodlights were used by a variety of reporters, particularly those specializing in crime sheets, to garner images of fierce, wrongdoing criminals, pitiless monsters, disgraced officials, or fearsome capos, whose subjugation sanctioned the long arm of the law.

Through an independent reading suggested by the title of Images of Neoliberalism, a relationship may be established between the guillotine and the line-up of 465

frontal portraits, stripped of any information regarding the subjects being represented who were forced to pose, to hand over their images as a down payment on their debt to society, thus transforming Carlos Aguirre’s montage into a reflection regarding the photographic portrait as a symbolic form of decapitation. I wanted to see the development of this proposition in his work: the camera that had produced the filiations being exhibited and the guillotine that evoked an ancient form of meting out justice; the former activated by its shutter, the latter, by its blade, resulting in the separation of heads and faces from the bodies with which they had constituted a person or individual, from whose palpitating unity only an inert trophy would remain, a grimace of resemblance, a scrap of physiognomy. While this split between countenance and biography was implicit in all photographic portraiture, it became even more evident in nameless and unnamable faces: such was the case of Images of Neoliberalism.

Southern Patio Consulted regarding the process that led to the realization of Images of Neoliberalism, Carlos Aguirre was unable to recall whether his encounter with the archive of mug shots preceded Patricia Mendoza’s invitation for him to exhibit at the Centro de la Imagen or if, on the contrary, the discovery of this

collection of portraits led him to propose a show. He is well aware, on the other hand, that the director/founder of Centro de la Imagen had told him about the historic antecedents of La Ciudadela, between whose walls the military, rebels, orphans, and prisoners once lived.

Mendoza succeeded in annexing the patio where the installation was mounted after convincing the director of the Library of Mexico, poet Jaime García Terrés, to give her the space he thought to designate, partly, to providing services for the seeing impaired public.

García Terrés thought it a good idea for a place dedicated to the promotion of visual culture would value the sensitivity of the blind.

This commitment was fulfilled

by Patricia Mendoza encouraging editorial, curatorial and radio projects in which photography was the stimulus that appealed not only to the sense of sight, polemicizing along the way the rigid notions that reserve images for photographers only. Due to its mission of broadening the conceptions and practices of photography, the southern patio became a receptacle for projects that utilize the resources of this media, but that respond first and foremost to the quests of contemporary art in the nineties. Images of Neoliberalism. by simultaneously exploring iconographic archeology, conceptual art, and political criticism, showed the wealth of possibilities in this combination.

Crimes over Time The reconstruction of Images of Neoliberalism began with the recovery of photographic registries that provided data regarding its content: images of the guillotine in the patio and of the mug shots lined up inside neighboring rooms.

After Carlos Aguirre confirmed to me the influence that Don Arturo Ortega, a mutual friend, had over this project, he gave me some good news: the prints used in the installation continued to form part of his archive. I was then awarded another look at the anonymous faces, facilitated by the artist, that had confronted me at the 1996 exhibition. Inquiries ensued, and fortunately, Yolanda Ortega, who was the bearer of more good news, joined in: beyond a doubt, the prints used by Aguirre were from the archive her father had obtained by way of Felipe Islas, the very same that five years or so earlier he had shown me when I visited his home during the course of another investigation. My second inspection of the box, which I carried out with the help of Ángel Armando Moreno Benítez, offered me greater perspective in terms of understanding both the Images of Neoliberalism of Carlos Aguirre and the collection of portraits upon which it was based.

Unlike Aguirre’s montage, the box provided the names of the subjects being photographed and the criminal charges against them: 466

Alicia Ramírez Maín (prostitute, maid with sticky fingers), Manuel Córdoba Gutiérrez (counterfeit lawyer), Luis González Gómez (pervert and thug), Teresa Flores Cano (grifter), Ludovina Hernández Ruiz (fencer), Agustín González Cruz (wife beater and murderer), Ricardo Ramírez Aguascalientes (robber of cab drivers)... With these few clues in sight, the mug shots seemed to build a new panorama, one that provided access to daily life in the mid-1970s, breathing fresh life into the line-up, even if only to reinsert the suspects in the social margins they had originally occupied. Aguirre was evidently not interested in making these filiations a historic or sociological document. Aware of their police origin, he wanted only to glean from them the helpless, despairing, fucked

467

up, enraged expressions needed to reconfigure them as a political critique. His generic denunciation of the ravages of Neoliberalism— white collar crimes that reek of cologne, after all—would have shifted into other zones if he had taken into account these precise references that remit us to a criminal world fixed in another time, obeying other circumstances.

Images of Neoliberalism of - fer ed additional proof that photographs do not say the same thing when observed from a different standpoint and with a different purpose. I found it enriching to see these mug shots through the eyes of Carlos Aguirre. Interrogating them as children of their own time will be just as satisfying.

Tr. Tanya Huntington

THE ABANDONED BODY MAURICIO ORTIZ And supposing thy mission fulfilled They will approach thee, and their gaze Will give thee eternal farewell.

Manuel Acuña. Before a Corpse

1. The hitman chambers a round,

raises the gun barrel to his victim’s forehead, and fires. The cadaver collapses and is left there, on the turf.

Yes, on the turf, because atrocities are nothing without proper staging, and this one takes place on soccer field. Saturday, October 15, Jalisco Stadium, on the 13th “cabalistic” day of the Opening Tournament of 2011, Chivas versus Tecos. We are in minute 32 of the first half when midfielder Marco Fabián, number 8, takes the ball across the central circle, advances a few yards and is relieved by Medina, the Stag, who effortlessly returns the favor with a backheel tap; Fabián has traced a diagonal to his left so that when he receives the pass, he is on the edge of the goal area and has shaken off his marker; he moves forward a few steps, takes a straight shot with his left foot and the ball gets past the goalie, grazing the base of the post on the right. An amazing goal, indeed. The second for Chivas, who wound up winning 5-2, and the first in the hat trick Fabián would score over the course of the game.

Fabián rushes to celebrate, and the Stag follows suit. Suddenly, they both stop and position themselves face to face. Fabián acts as if he were chambering a round, takes the barrel of his index finger to the Stag’s forehead. You can almost hear the click of his tongue.

The Stag collapses and for a few moments, is a cadaver on the field.

The image went global, earning harsh words in the electronic media, printed press, and social networks. The “severely criticized celebration,” the polemic performance,” the “hitman striker,” the “macabre little gun,” the “immaturity,” the “lack of intelligence” occupied microphones and front pages, and the photograph was reproduced a thousand and one times over. There was talk of exaltation of violence, irresponsibility, absolute insensitivity given the seriousness of the situation.

There were those who wanted to see in their celebration a protest against “Calderón’s War,” and there were those who wished to minimize it as a childish game of cops and robbers. The commotion was such that the management of Chivas had to issue a statement lamenting the occurrence, and the clever midfielder was obliged to donate a million pesos to a charitable institution.

More than the instant disqualification, or the scandalized tone adopted by good Samaritans in the media, or the obviousness 468

of their politicizing commentary, what interests me about what took place on the field of Jalisco Stadium is its register as a symptom of the times our country is going through. Unawares, Marco Fabián and Alberto Medina nonetheless configured through their performance an accurate metaphor—thus, the outcry—of a land sickened by killing. In a playful manner, surfing the euphoria of that electric moment after a goal is scored, a highly visible speck of the social body manifested, once again, the evil that has befallen us, but this time in a concentrated fashion. It is doubtless an exaggeration to see here the involuntary theater of the absurd that is the narcocorrido, that is Viruta and Capulina.

It may be no coincidence that this symptom manifested itself within 24 hours following the gala 2011 inauguration of the 16th Pan-American Games of Guadalajara, held in the Omnilife Stadium that is now home to the Chivas, who for that reason had to play in Jalisco Stadium. Political and sports authorities, banners, cadets, charros, country music, popular musical groups, the latest in technology: scenery, as the commentators never tired of pointing out, and as was repeated in self-satisfied, “first world” afterdinner conversations. An entire organ of the social body, an official organ, was shown to the world 469

perfectly groomed and spruced up, in a manner of speaking, with the exaggerated affectation of one who is not entirely sure of himself: “The fatherland you slay is in perfect health.”

The pain of that social body that says no, sir, in some way, is sublimated by what pathways in this curious symptom: a banal, simplistic occurrence, of dubious taste if you will, frivolous, unsubstantial, but one that reaches millions at the most opportune, or most inopportune moment, one that all the world comments on and that says something to all the world? The inroads of the collective subconscious are unfathomable.

After celebrating the goal, the referee confronted the hit man, Fabián, and like a member of the police force, dealt him a yellow card. One wonders: why didn’t he call foul on the cadaver?

2. Of the two symbols that the

Fabián-Medina equation is composed of, hitman and cadaver—the sign equating them would be the murder weapon—the latter, the one who wasn’t admonished, is the one who concerns me here. As a symbol, the hitman is inconstant, elusive, proteic, stealthy, and dark.

Although rumor has it that “cadaver” it is a portmanteau, an acronym originating in a lapidary Roman phrase, caro data vermibus (flesh given to the worms), in reality, the word is entirely transparent

in its etymology: it is structured by the Latin verb cadere, to fall, and the noun vir, man, male. A cadaver is, in essence, the fall guy.

In order to become a ca dav e r, of course, one must prove according to law the “loss of life” in the fallen body, something that has always been accomplished in a very simple fashion: you corroborate that the person is no longer breathing and that the heart has stopped beating.

Then come the eyes: dilated pupils that do not respond to light, no blinking whatsoever when the cornea is rubbed, and an absence of ocular movements when the head is brusquely turned or when water, cold or hot, is introduced into the ear. These are stilled eyes that progressively become opaque, faster still when they are left open.

Due to the development of medical technology capable of artificially maintaining both respiration and heartbeat, and obeying the growing industry of organ and tissue transplants, on occasion it is difficult to corroborate death and we find it necessary to turn to the concept of brain death, which has been in use for half a century now: the complete and permanent absence of consciousness, indifference to painful stimuli and irreversible damage to the brainstem, manifested by the absence of certain reflexes. In Mexico, the certification of brain death must be corroborated by two laboratory

tests: a bilateral angiography, which demonstrates the absence of circulation in the brain, and a “flat” electroencephalogram, that is to say, without the characteristic waves of neuronal electric activity, obtained on two different occasions within a five-hour limit. An amazing invention, and one that continues to be horrific: the cadaver that breaths and whose heart beats, the oxygenated cadaver, the living cadaver (albeit in a purely histological sense).

Aside from these extreme cases, which continue to be few and far between, once life is lost, the body undergoes a series of progressive changes: the cadaveric phenomena. It grows cold—algor mortis—at a rate of 1o C per hour during the first twelve hours, and after that more slowly until room temperature is matched within 24 hours, with variations that depend on the climate, of course, or whether the death took place inside a home or out in the open, not to mention whether the person was nude at the time of death or warmly clothed.

During the first hours post mortem the cadaveric lividness – or livor mortis—starts to appear.

These are purplish stains found in the declining parts of the body, where gravity pools the blood that no longer circulates. During the first 24 hours, if the body is moved or its position, changed, the lividness is displaced following gravity, 470

but not without leaving a trace of where it first was.

Also very rapidly, within three or four hours, a characteristic rigidity sets in—rigor mortis—that runs from head to foot; this is due to the degradation of the biochemical system of muscles, and disappears entirely between 24 and 30 hours post mortem, when the signs of decomposition begin to manifest themselves and the body starts to emit, with increasing intensity, its frightfully characteristic smell.

The first stage of decomposition is known as “chromatic,” because the cadaver turns green, due to sulfurous gases and a drop in hemoglobin. What once was red is now green. A greenish stain manifests itself on the abdomen, and the superficial veins of the arms, legs, and thorax turn dark green. In violent deaths, the decomposition becomes apparent first wherever wounds exist.

During the “emphysematous” stage of decomposition, one that runs from 36 to 72 hours post mortem, the gases produced by the bacteria inhabiting the body distend the face, abdomen, scrotum, or vulva and the skin itself, where blisters are produced and grow until breaking. Due to gas pressure, the final meal may be regurgitated and it is also possible that the last feces will be expelled.

From then on, what takes place in a cadaver depends on what its final resting place was. In water, 471

body fat turns to adipocere, an insoluble, yellowish soap of gelatinous consistence and rancid odor, which is produced throughout the first year. In a dry, warm climate, the cadaver can become a mummy, and in a humid one, liquefaction ensues. In a drum filled with acid, the corpse simply disappears.

A cadaver is no longer considered to be a cadaver once it becomes a skeleton (or a mummy), which, depending on accelerant or retardant factors, as forensic specialists call them, will take place within three to five years after death.

According to Isidoro of Seville (Etymologies, Volume XI), the cadaver is the unburied body.

Cadaver autem est, si insepultum iacet. If the body has received a proper burial, it is no longer a cadaver.

3. The General Law of Health (Title

Fourteen, Chapter V, Article 347) distinguishes two kinds of cadaver: I. Of persons known, and II. Of persons unknown. “Cadavers that are not claimed within seventy-two hours following the loss of life and those whose identity is ignored will be considered unknown persons.”

Seemingly obvious, in addition to having practical significance with regards to red tape and the processing of mortal remains, this definition contains an important clue in terms of the continuity of the cadaver, its permanence as such.

When the deceased is a person close to us, especially if their death took place in the home, surrounded by those who loved them in life, the one who is resting there in peace hardly ever becomes a cadaver. “The deceased” has “passed away,” he is “our dearly departed,” and one addressed him by name, affectionately. Not long ago I attended a wake and the daughter of the person whose remains were being honored there invited me to approach the coffin, saying, “Just look at Mom, so beautiful, they made her real pretty.”

And there was her Mom, who was no cadaver. This was just Doña Inés dressed as a Tehuana Indian, rosy cheeked, her hands crossed on her chest, dearly departed.

Cremation, embalming, the confines of the coffin, the surprising custom of dissecting the body or parts of it: all this puts an end to the cadaver. There are ashes, there is funeral pomp, there are relics, there are stones with names, dates, and perhaps an epitaph, but there is no more corpse. In statistics, we see deaths, not cadavers; in preliminary investigations, we see victims, a special noun reserved for those who met a violent death.

Type I is a fleeting cadaver, one that lasts only as long as it takes relatives to claim it. The cadaver that remains—the one we mean when we say “cadaver”—is type II, the body no one cares about, one that does not set into motion any

mourning or burial, except in mass graves. It is the body of the young, beautiful prostitute that Whitman sings to in “The City Dead-House,” which “lies on the damp brick pavement.” It is a body without a name, a body exposed, left out in the open: a body abandoned.

4. Once note has been taken of

the place where it was found, the next order of business is to establish the cadaver’s position. Lying face down—ventral decubitus or supine—; lying on one side, seated, or in a kneeling position—genupectoral—; bodies in suspension, in submersion, or carbonized in a boxing or fencing stance.

Indications of the cause of death are explored and the development of cadaveric phenomena proven in order to establish what the forensic specialist knows as a thanatochronodiagnostic, that is to say, the approximate length of time that the body has been a cadaver.

But what is that lying there, in a determined position, with the traces of whatever took its life and, to a greater or lesser degree, decomposed it? It is no longer a person, that much is clear. Therefore, it is a thing.

A thing, but nonetheless, as the jurists would say, a most peculiar thing. It cannot be considered property, according to what is established by law, nor is it possible, in one or all of its parts, to patent it. That is to say, it is excluded 472

from the traffic of men, except for the immediate services that are proffered in order to dispose of it in a definitive manner.

Being a thing, up until it was considered as such, it was a subject with rights, and therefore, may very well have made arrangements for its future management and destiny. It may have decided whether it would become a supply of transplants or not, if there would be an autopsy or not, if it would end up being ashes scattered over Acapulco Bay, or conserved in formaldehyde on a marble table at the School of Medicine, or devoured by vultures among the Tibetan peaks.

A thing imbued with history and traditions. A thing that, once again under law, must be treated “with respect, dignity, and consideration.”

There are those who set up curious destinies for that future thing based on a peculiar notion of respect for itself: dignity and consideration. The case of Puerto Rican rapper Ángel Luis Pantojas, alias Pedrito, comes to mind. In August 2008, at age 24, he was murdered by 11 gunshots and is globally known as the “standing dead”: Pedrito willed that his embalmed cadaver would be placed standing at the corner of his apartment, so that he could preside over his own wake. The example caught on among the Boricua and was soon repeated, with a slight 473

variation: David Morales Colón, also shot down at age 22, chose to attend his own funeral riding a motorcycle. No longer being, as we have agreed, a cadaver, exactly, but some other thing, one would feel obliged to define a new position of forensic interest: that of host.

What this is all about is exhibiting the body of the dead for everyone to see—and yes, there were long lines in Suan Juan—but what I have never heard of is someone willing the contrary, that is to say: “let no one see my cadaver,” although modern custom already takes charge, insofar as possible, of making sure that it is hidden.

What happens when there is an explicit, testamentary prohibition against photographing that future thing?

5. Currently, in Mexico, over half

a million cadavers are processed each year. To be precise, in 2009, according to data from the National Institute of Statistics, Geography and Data (INEGI), there were 564,637 that had to be taken care of. Of these, 55%, that is to say, 301,192 cadavers, belonged to men and women over the age of 65, who died mostly of heart disease, diabetes mellitus, and malignant tumors.

Violent forms of death produced that same year a total of 64,449 cadavers, 11.4% in all, divided into the three headings comprised by this category: 39,456

persons died in mishaps of some kind (17,816 in traffic accidents); 5,190 committed suicide, mainly men and above all, by hanging or gunshot; and 19,803 people died from “aggressions,” which is the bureaucratic euphemism used to refer to homicide.

While violent death in general is what produces the most spectacular cadavers, the cadaver of a murdered person is, shall we say, the most cadaver of them all, the most abandoned corpse. It is the most convincing cadaver, the most striking, the most resounding; the one that most interests the authorities, the one that is snatched up by the media, the one that society finds truly disturbing; to say it once again, the cadaver that is most symbolically pure.

Although those produced by homicide represented in 2009 only one-third of violent death cadavers in the country and a discreet 3.5% of total cadavers, according to the discourse of power, in public opinion, from the people’s perspective, and in collective imagery, they represent 100% of cadavers nationwide.

Moreover, the cadavers produced by homicide tend to represent the total group of living persons they come from and thus, for example, the 72 bodies found in August, 2010, in San Fernando, Tamaulipas suddenly became all Central American migrants, regard less of the thousands who at

that very moment continued, and still continue today, moving about Mexico in search of the American mirage.

The elevated symbolic po ten tial is what positions this cadaver, as soon as it is found, in the midst of a harsh struggle for characterization. The government and a major sector of the press rush in to classify it as type II— where the category “unknown person” becomes “criminal”—while the victim’s relatives, a number of voices in the media and some non-governmental organizations and social movements demand its status as a type I cadaver, a known person, be recognized.

In a case like that of Juan Francisco Sicilia, the high visibility of Javier, his father, made it possible for this struggle to be resolved in a matter of hours. Very soon, his was no longer a cadaver, and the symbol it was traded in for came to represent all the numerous innocent victims of this historic screwup, vis-à-vis foul play, that we have grown accustomed to calling the “war against organized crime,” one that requires, in order to subsist, an accumulation of precise cadaveric symbols like bronze statues: the unknown criminal, the unknown drug lord, the unknown soldier.

The murdered women of Juárez immediately become brazen type IIs, libertines and whores. How hard it has been to restitute them to type I, the daughter, the sister, the 474

granddaughter, the young woman who possesses a first and last name.

The two youths murdered by the army in Monterrey in March 2010, or the three people murdered, also by the army, in the outskirts of Jalapa in June 2011, started out as “hitmen,” that is to say, another formula favored by the type II cadaver, and it was no easy task for their identities and evident innocence as students, engineers, or construction workers to transcend. Where did this leave general perception in these cases?

And what to say about the symbolic evacuation—both uproarious and grotesque—that followed the death, in spring of 2007, of Ernestina Ascensión Rosario, the Nahua woman from the Zongolica mountains: a tumultuous rape by soldiers vs. President Calderón’s gastritis and the forensic doctor’s parasitosis.

Fresh examples and macabre anecdotes have accumulated quickly over the past few years, and the symbolic labyrinth has become increasingly complex.

Fernando Escalante Gonzal bo (Nexos 381, September 2009, and 397, January 2011) has analyzed in detail the trends of homicides in Mexico from 1990 to 2009. The national rate has ranged from a maximum of 19.72 homicides for every 100 thousand residents in 1992, to a minimum of 8.04 in 2007, a clear and constant downward trend. In 2008 475

and 2009, however, homicides rebound in an “absolutely improbable” fashion, breaking with that sustained trend, but “moreover in an extremely violent manner.

In two years, the national rate returned to 1991 levels. It jumped 50% in 2008, and another 50% in 2009.”

In the first of these articles, Escalante asks himself: “… one would have to explain why this general reduction in violence in the country as a whole was diminished, and one would also have to explain why social perception is exactly the opposite.” In other words, what takes place in this period is a disassociation, a divergent gap, between the rate of actual violent production of cadavers and the symbolic production of the cadaver, which soared perhaps in 1994 as a result of the cadavers of the Zapatista rebellion in Chiapas—type II cadavers for all practical intents and purposes— and the cadavers—type I superlative—of Luis Donaldo Colosio and José Francisco Ruiz Massieu.

A disassociation that approaches annulment in the escalation of deaths from 2008-2009, where the actual rate is the one being displaced upwards, as if wanting to catch up to that symbolic trend, demonstrating thus its overpowering strength. We shall see, when the figures from 2010 and 2011 are in, what extent this symbol has reached.

For the time being, there is nothing to indicate that this symbol has been appeased. Escalante shows how the growth of the homicide rate, while patent nationwide, shows “extreme violence” in specific regions: where gradually expanding joint operations of the army, marines and federal police have unfolded. Young cadavers, mostly men, are concentrated above all in the following nine states: Baja California, Chihua- hua, Durango, Guerrero, Michoacán, Nayarit, Oaxaca, Sinaloa, and Sonora.

The homicides in and of themselves also reveal an escalation in symbolic aspirations. The cadavers increasingly show signs of torture, the tortures are increasingly depraved and from the end of times, the most accomplished sign of the symbolic use of bodies has appeared: the humiliation of the cadaver.

Decapitation did not be co me fashionable in our country as the humanitarian form of execution Doctor Guillotine cited to justify his invention. It became fashionable as a way of intensifying the cadaver: these are post mortem decapitations.

They are not just headless cadavers: they are cadavers without hands or feet, cadavers wrapped in plastic, cadavers dissolved in acid, cadavers hanging from overpasses, cadavers bitten by dogs, cadavers buried tumultuously in

clandestine, shallow mass graves.

And the most recent turn of the screw for this symbol, in September 2011: cadavers en masse—35!— piled up on the asphalt outside the most popular shopping center in Boca del Rio, Veracruz, a few yards away from the Convention Center where the following day none other than the National Encounter of Presidents of Superior Courts and Attorney Generals of Justice was to be held. As far as torture and extreme cruelty against people and the profanation of their cadavers is concerned, what this pitiless symbol demands in order to truly come into being is exhibition: brazen, public exhibition.

6. For most people, confronting a

cadaver is deeply traumatic: there is an automatic rejection, nausea, fright. And at the same time as this emotional blow there is a curiosity, an attraction, an insane fascination. There is a not wanting, yet wanting to see at the same time.

This vertigo of the gaze has long been exploited in the creation of images, although never so much as since the advent of photography and, above all, its contemporary development. Photojournalism has made the cadaver its specialty, and art photography has taken it up as one of its more substantial themes.

It should come as no surprise, then, that in recent years an abundant harvest of cadavers has paraded past the lenses of Mexican 476

photographers. The crime sheet image, traditionally prohibited beyond the scope of specialized publications, jumped to the front page of newspapers while at the same time, the cadaver began to make its presence known in exhibitions, biennials, magazines, and photography books.

Which confirms, curiously enough, that art photography and photojournalism have gradually come together in their approach of this subject: cadavers are posed to look like real cadavers, real cadavers look posed, and real cadavers are made to look as if they were posing.

I find in this confluence an extraordinary discovery: the symbol of the cadaver as a cadaver.

The abandoned corpse, the thing, before and after becoming a symbol of something more: the deceased, passed away or dearly departed, innocent victim, statistic, sexual object, organized criminal, hitman, unknown soldier, standing dead, a symptom of the bleeding fatherland in the celebration of a magnificent goal. The cadaver, symbolically pure at last.

7. Forever a cadaver. The gaze that rests on it does not provide an eternal farewell these days; something is demanded of it still, as if its mission had not been completely fulfilled.

Necrophilia—sexual fetishism, paraphilia—ineffably requires something from the cadaver Necromancy or nigromancy, an ancient reverence to the mystery of death, present in the nekya of Odysseus, his descent to Hades in search of advice, and dazzlingly present also in the Pharsalia of Lucan, demands of the cadaver a prophetic intent. Might we speak, here and now, of necropolitics, the politics that, akin to necrophilia and necromancy, demands of the cadaver various missions impossible: gaining adepts, winning elections, controlling territories, and amassing a power that unavoidably escapes us?

8. I return to the eyes of the

cadaver, those soft, still, opaque eyes. And gazing at them, I quote Georges Didi-Huberman: “What we see is not alive -nor worth more- than what’s looking at us.

Tr. Tanya Huntington

477

ÁNGEL COSMOS AND FOTOZOOM Interdisciplinary Audacity LUIS R. HERNáNdEZ

Fotoguía magazine exemplifies the way that print media approached the dissemination photography in Mexico during the 1970s. Among advertisements for all kinds of photography equipment and gadgets, it published portfolios, technical advice, and pictures of domestic tourist destinations. The magazine also showed a certain interest in publishing texts about the history of photography, or in interviewing Mexican motion-picture photographers like Gabriel Figueroa or Gabriel Retes. This bias was not Fotoguía’s alone: its predecessor, Fotomundo magazine, also focused on photography, film and sound.

One summer day in 1974, a self-taught twenty-something yearold photographer showed up at Fotoguía’s offices carrying a bunch of photographs printed on scraps of paper. He left them at the magazine, and phoned several days later, introducing himself as “the young photographer from the other day.”

The editors asked him to come back to make “presentable prints” of his work at their lab; that was how the article entitled “El joven fotógrafo” (The Young Photographer)1 came into being, probably one of the first ever published featuring Adolpho Patiño’s photographs. A year or

more earlier, Patiño had adopted the nickname Peyote after meeting Huichols in Mexico City, though he changed it to Adolfotógrafo a few years after that. He spoke to the editors of his experiences and ideas as the leader of a cultural group he had founded known as javera: He stated that “we need to ‘read with photographs,’ that is to say, to relate photography to other arts,” which is why he is interested in inviting people like Carlos Monsiváis, José Agustín or Juan José Arreola to give conferences at javera .

“Thus, photography would serve to create a spirit of camaraderie and permit a better dissemination of art,” Patiño added. 2

Almost nine years would have to go by—during which time the peso underwent a major devaluation, two Latin American Photography Colloquia took place and various artists’ collectives formed and broke up—before someone else filled the pages of Fotozoom, Fotoguía’s offspring,3 with even more audacious ideas about interdisciplinarity in photography than those Patiño had brought forth.

This figure was Ángel Cosmos, born Ángel Cosme Díaz de Rada in Calahorra, La Rioja, Spain in 1949; he had studied philosophy and journalism at Switzerland’s only Catholic university, that of Fribourg, in the 1960s. He followed a peculiar career path in Spain: he worked in journalism but also published 478

poetry anthologies, organized happenings, and founded a film club and a photography club. While a majority of exiled Spaniards celebrated the end of the Franco dictatorship by returning to the Iberian Peninsula, Cosmos decided to go in the opposite direction, to Mexico, apparently attracted by the 1981 oil boom. By April 1983, he had become editor in chief of Fotozoom, and firmly intended to broaden the magazine’s scope, taking the concept of interdisciplinary work in photography to levels unmatched by other publications, and though the results were not always fortunate, they were earnest and often surprising. But before we describe Cosmos’s term as head of the magazine, we should provide a brief overview of the Mexican art scene upon his arrival.

When Helen Escobedo was put in charge of selecting the Mexican participants for the Tenth Paris Youth Biennale, she decided to invite four groups of artists who worked collectively: Proceso Pentágono, Tetraedro, Grupo Suma and Taller de Arte e Ideología. Though certain factors—like the weakening of the central government (a process that became obvious by 1968), the consequently unstable political climate and certain artists’ political activism—had favored the formation of many of these groups in the mid-1970s, the Mexican delegation’s participation in this event 479

“was a catalyst for the Grupos movement in Mexico. Between 1977 and 1980, a large number of visual artists chose to work collectively.”4 Subsequently, various members of the Grupos formed during that period were involved in Fotozoom while Ángel Cosmos was editor in chief. To mention only a few: Felipe Ehrenberg (Proceso Pentágono) wrote about a portfolio on lucha libre (Mexican wrestling) by Lourdes Grobet for an issue entitled “Sports Section” (no. 114, March 1985); Carlos Somonte (Atte. La Dirección) and Felipe Leal (Taller de Arte e Ideología) were part of the Board of Artists and Editors that Cosmos formed and that operated for issues no. 100 through 108; Manuel Marín (Março) headed the “Alternatives and Research” section, dealing with such topics as rubber stamps and printmaking or the possibilities of portraits, self-portraits and journals…5 As we have vaguely sketched out here, the Grupos’ highly diverse agendas—or to be more exact, the varous agendas of the individuals who continued to practice after these collectives split up—were given a forum to express themselves in the magazine.6 On the other hand, Cosmos’s nagging curiosity led him to organize a variety of projects in Spain.

In addition to those we already mentioned, he also edited a series of books entitled “Nueva Escritura”

(New Writing) for the Euskal Bidea publishing house, which featured the work of authors from the Grupo Texto Poético; in terms of visual art, he made pieces like Objetos inservibles contra la cacharrería (Unusable Objects Against Hoarding, 1975), in which he invited the public to take away some of the 300 pieces included in the exhibition. He published a series of six poems—entitled “Los primeros 6/80s días” (The First 6/80s Days, 1980)7 —over six consecutive days in Valencia’s Levante newspaper, conceiving this as an art intervention to a communication medium, and as a cynical acknowledgement of “the beginning of the last year of the 1970s—the decade that soiled the dreams of those of us who grew up in the 1960s.”8 The world of visual poetry that Ángel Cosmos9 came from appealed to Mexican artists who had been doing experimental work in the context of collectives for several years, and this context seemed like the ideal hotbed to develop what Cosmos conceived for Fotozoom during his term as editor in chief: a mixture of professional and amateur photographers’ portfolios, an anthology of texts that delved into a wide range of topics,10 interviews with figures both from the field of photography and outside it,11 and a laboratory that could broaden what was normally conceived as the terrain of photography. In this respect, the editorial of

the first issue that Ángel Cosmos headed explained: In principle, Fotozoom is a magazine that will attempt, month after month, to present uniform criteria, with high-quality portfolios, with accurate information about events in the world of photography, and above all, with the aim that readers may educate themselves in their way of looking and/or apprehending reality or fiction through photography and art in general, as we must not forget that in dealing with one field of the arts, we are necessarily touching on the others. The photographer is not simply the holder of a camera that shoots; the photographer is, above all, someone who knows how to see, observe things with a camera. It’s the same with the painter, the architect, the filmmaker, the musician, the poet, etc., each them with his or her instrument.12

Though Cosmos expressed his obsession with interdisciplinarity in Fotozoom in many different ways, music occupied a privileged place among the arts with which he worked. In the second issue he supervised, he provided space for research that the engineer Raúl Pavón Sarrelangue had undertaken on what he called icophony: the connection between image and sound.13 Pavón— who was also a researcher at the cenidim (or National Center for Music Research, Documentation and Information)—published a series of pictures he had made by experimenting with the visual 480

possibilities of an oscilloscope as it registered sound waves.

Fotozoom continued to receive photographic material from both amateurs and professionals.

Photographer-designer Juan José Díaz Infante tried tried to to get get an an interinterview with Cosmos to get his own work published, but the editor told him he wasn’t interested in commercial photography. When Díaz Infante insisted, not only did the magazine end up publishing his portfolio, it actually dedicated a whole issue to commercial photography (no. 103, April 1984), including “some drawings, considerations and treatments of the creative process” that Díaz Infante was working on. His relationship with Cosmos was so productive that they ended up working together on “El ámbito sonoro,” a series of events at Mexico City’s Museum of Modern Art in 1984, organized by composer Antonio Russek. Cosmos and Díaz Infante composed the piece Master Pez, which involved visual scores made from photographs that captured fish moving about randomly in a “staff-aquarium.” After seeing it at the Museum of Modern Art, composer Arturo Márquez told them he wanted to orchestrate the piece.

This led to the birth of Música de Cámara, a group that worked in the interstices between music, photography, visual poetry and performance art. The group’s work was exhibited for the first time on 481

December 17, 1984 in the context of the Hispano-Mexican Cultural Days organized by the Spanish Embassy and the HispanoMexican Cultural Institute in Mexico City.

In a way, Fotozoom served not only to make the ensemble’s work public, but also to develop it, since their pieces’ visual component was displayed in the magazine, and issue no. 166 was entirely devoted to their work. With the spe. With the spe With the specific aim of “disturbing,” “being free,” “going beyond the academic” and “offering alternatives,” this issue focused on the relationship between music and photography, presenting texts and interviews that provided a context for the works of Música de Cámara. In addition to Master Pez, this issue also featured Solo para piano (whose score, “written” with photographs by Díaz Infante, was a centerfold insert “so it could be detached and used as a piano score”), Desnudo (arranged for synthesizer), Poesía de la voz (based on poem number seventeen from James Joyce’s Chamber Music collection), Sistema de zonas (a synthesizer arrangement in memoriam to Ansel Adams), and Digital (a system of visual scores based on the enlargement of a fingerprint).

Issue no. 166 was published at the same time as the pieces’ world premiere at the Seventh International New Music Forum at the Benito Juárez Theater in Mexico City on May 16, 1985.

The piece Concierto para fotógrafos deserves special mention, performed by an “orchestra” of photographers (Lourdes Almeida, Alejandro Castellanos, Gilberto Chen, Miguel Femat, Gabriel Figueroa, Ricardo Garibay, Graciela Kartofel, Maritza López, Salvador Lutteroth, Jesús Sánchez Uribe and Antonio Vizcaíno, among oth among others) who triggered their cameras’ shutters while Arturo Márquez acted as conductor. The Concierto para fotógrafos, which premiered at the Benito Juárez Theater, was performed a few more times. The second occasion was in 1989, in the context of the recording of a pilot program entitled Revelado Urgente.

Hosted by Gabriel Figueroa, it included an interview with Cosmos and Díaz Infante and was supposed to be broadcast on public television channel 13, but it never aired. Nonetheless, Díaz Infante used the photographic and video documentation of this second performance—which took place in the studios of the Mexican Radio Institute—to edit his Música de Cámara video. He developed the piece around 1994 with a grant, and it was purchased by the Carrillo Gil Museum. A third performance took place in 2003 at the Sound Image Symposium at the cna (or National Arts Center), though on this occasion the performers were musicians instead of photographers, conducted by Eduardo García Barros. Over the years, this

piece has attracted the attention of critics like Fernando Castro, who found out about it at one of the Visual Poetry Biennales— organized at the outset by Araceli Zúñiga and César Espinosa14 — and who described it as a “critique of straight photography.”

Música de Cámara’s work was shown in various spaces with the collaboration of many others, such as Manuel Enríquez, Simón Tapia Colman, Rodolfo Halffter, Mónica Raya and Roberto Morales.

However, when Arturo Márquez received a Fulbright grant in 1988 and left the country to settle in Los Angeles, the group’s collective output waned somewhat. Luckily, by then the group had managed to issue one of the two albums it had planned to record (in the Colección Hispano-Mexicana de Música Contemporánea, a series of albums created by Cosmos and Antonio Russek).

But Ángel Cosmos’s interdisciplinary project did not limit itself to Música de Cámara. Beyond the field of music or sound art, Fotozoom was also tied to makers of what we now call artists’ books. Cosmos was involved in a few publications at La Cocina and El Archivero—publishing houses specialized in artists’ books as well as meeting places for dissimilar artists, founded by Yani Pecanins and Gabriel Macotela with the help of Armando Sáenz.15 Fotozoom’s issue no. 113 (February 482

1985) announced El Archivero’s upcoming opening: in addition to functioning as a store, it was also supposed to serve as a meeting place and documentation center for people interested in object-based art, artists’ books and video, taking advantage of the connections that La Cocina had established with close to a thousand artists from all over the world. On this occasion, Fotozoom also announced its plan to publish an issue that same year about alternatives practices, but it did not come out until May 1987.

Entitled “Anoth er Alternative to Photography,” no. 149 devoted some of its pages to the artistic possibilities of mim eographs.

The playful quality that Cosmos brought to the magazine was displayed in the monographic issue about “Things from Abroad” (no. 113, February 1985)—especially in a conversation with (fictitious) African photographer Nemné Sz’Ndugu, , who had allegedly become famous by taking pictures of nothing besides desert sand. In the interview, Sz’Ndugu stated that he had decided to quit photography because he no longer wanted to contribute to the visual cannibalism or imagophagy (in other words, the excessive production of images) he had witnessed in the West. This character caught people’s attention, and some even claimed to have met him during an alleged trip of his to Mexico. And yet this was not Cosmos’s only fictional 483

character: various texts published in Fotozoom and other media in relation to Música de Cámara were penned by Juan Ángel Navarro, which is an acrostic of the names of the group’s members (Juan José Díaz Infante, Ángel Cosmos and Arturo Márquez Navarro).

Another facet of interdisciplinarity, as Cosmos understood it, can be seen in the monograph (no. 150, March 1988) about the happenings staged by Spanish artist Sendo (Rosendo García Ramos), Transhumus and Queimos.

For Transhumus, Sendo painted around 700 sheep and let them loose in the countryside in the Spanish province of León, in order to commemorate the two-thousandth anniversary of the foundation of the city of Astorga, a town located on the Way of St. James.

For Queimos, the artist painted a two-meter by forty-meter canvas at an intersection and finally burned it during the night of the Nativity of St. John the Baptist (June 24), a feast day celebrated in various places in Europe to commemorate the summer solstice. Photographs of both pieces were published in Fotozoom, with the stated aim of disseminating “some works and an artist still unknown in Mexico, interested in the latest tendencies, visual language, novelty…” Ángel Cosmos was involved in projects that carried him away from the magazine around 1988.

The last issue of Fotozoom that year

(no. 160, December 1988) was also the last he headed; it was then taken over by Alejandro Castellanos, who had been groomed for the job since issue no. 155, when he was named the magazine’s assistant editor in chief. Though Cosmos published a few more texts in Fotozoom, among which we should mention “The Eighties Generation” (no. 162, March 1989), he focused most of his energy on other projects.

After he quit Fotozoom, Cosmos received a grant to undertake a project at the Banff Center in Canada in the summer of 1990.

There he also developed projects aimed at the dissemination of Inuit art and was named consultant for Canada’s Northwestern Territories for Europe and Latin America.

Involved in academic projects in Spain, he continued in his effort to associate different fields of the arts (as shown by his interdisciplinary piece La Ollesta, which used cooking pots to make sound), and to explore the possibilities of new media (along with Eduardo Vélez, he founded a video magazine, VideoFront). Ángel Cosmos managed to conclude these and other projects before he died in an automobile accident in 1993.

In addition to being an editor, to establishing connections between various generations of artists from different fields, and to promoting contemporary music and sound art, Cosmos also managed to make photography

question itself about its role in relation to other media, but above all, to make it incessantly seek out a dialogue with them.

[The Centro de la Imagen’s Ángel Cosmos/Fotozoom archive is divided into three sections: photographic, documentary and graphic material. The photographic section contains prints that both amateurs and professionals photographers (some of whom had their work published in the magazine) submitted to Fotozoom’s editorial office. The documentary section contains various documents and correspondence related to the magazine, experimental and visual poetry publications from Mexico and Spain, and vinyl LPs that are the fruit of Cosmos’s work as a contemporary music promoter.

The graphic section features works by figures involved with Cosmos, such as Yani Pecanins, Gabriel Macotela, Felipe Ehrenberg and René Montes, among many others.

The Centro de la Imagen’s library also has a complete collection of Fotozoom issues.]

Tr. Richard Moszka

Endnotes 1 In Fotoguía, year 3, vol. 6, no. 36, September 1974, pp. 23-26.

2 Ibid., p. 26.

3 Fotozoom was founded in 1975 by Roberto A. García Calderón, who had been Fotoguía’s advertising manager; he attempted to lend continuity to the 484

concept of a single publication featuring

plural, they’re media, and Art is some-

both tourism news and photography.

thing else. Art is, like poetry, a kind of

4 “X Bienal de Jóvenes en París” in La era

behavior.” Ángel Cosmos interviewed

de la discrepancia. Arte y cultura visual en

for the Cerca de ti program in 1992 on

México 1968-1997. Mexico City: unam,

TeleRioja, available at www.angelcos-

2007, p. 216.

mos.com.

5 Fotozoom, year 12, issues no. 102-109, 1984.

6 To go into greater detail on the topic of

the first reviews in Mexico of Roland Barthes’s Camera

Lucida (no. 97,

Fotozoom’s interdisciplinarity, this story

October 1983) to a digression on

fails to mention the role played by the

the supposedly musical character of

magazine’s previous editors in chief, but

Teotihuacan’s architecture (José Lever,

it cannot fail to mention Eleazar López

“¿Está Teotihuacán construida con

Zamor’s section, “Imágenes de archivo,”

música?” in no. 116, May 1985).

which focused on the incipient research

11 To name a few: Ángel Cosmos, “La

on the history of photography that was

inocencia del erotismo. Conversación

being undertaken in the early 1980s.

con Juan García Ponce” in no. 110,

The magazine’s thorough coverage of

November 1984; Arturo Córdoba Just,

the first Latin American Photography

Ángel Cosmos & Francisco Mata, “Esta

Colloquia in this same period is also

ciudad: el optimismo desesperanzado.

worth noting. Francisco Barriga was

Conversación con Carlos Monsiváis” in

also editor in chief of the magazine for a

no. 109, October 1984; Ángel Cosmos,

couple of issues, after López Zamora and

“Conversación con Manuel Álvarez

before Ángel Cosmos.

Bravo” in no. 108, September 1984—

7 Yani Pecanins’s editorial project La

this last issue also included a color port-

Cocina reedited this mimeographed

folio of Manuel Álvarez Bravo’s work.

piece in 1983. A copy of it is conserved in

12 Ángel Cosmos, “Una nueva ruta” in

the Centro de la Imagen’s Ángel Cosmos

Fotozoom, year 9, no. 91, April 1983,

Documentary Archive (box 2/5).

8 Ángel Cosmos in Fotozoom, year 12, no.

140, May 1987, p. 40.

9 Cosmos defined himself as a poet: “[…]

p. 28.

13 Raúl Pavón, “La imagen del sonido” in Fotozoom, year 8, no. 92, May 1983, pp.

18-24.

fundamentally, I do one [thing], and

1 4 They both formed part of the Taller de

that is to try to be a poet: not in terms

Arte y Comunicación, a group that was

of writing verse, but in terms of an out-

formed at the National School of Visual

look. To me, poetry is more like a kind

Arts (enap) in the 1970s.

of behavior, an attitude. And that is also

15 The Centro de las Imagen’s Ángel

how I was educated: I studied philoso-

Cosmos Documentary Archive (box 2/5)

phy, literature and journalism and it’s

conserves a few publications issued by

based on that that I understand or don’t

these houses.

understand life. So arts are arts in the 485

10 The range includes everything from

MAURICIO ALEJO Between Still Image and Time-Image ERANdy VERgARA VARgAS

After having worked with a photo series concerned with the movement of an object from one place to another, Mexican photographer Mauricio Alejo began working with video. He then realized his images needed time and some extra frames to accomplish the idea of action and movement. Since then on video’s extended time of 30 frames per second has allowed Alejo to play with the viewers’ perception of daily objects. The audience is confronted with still images slowly transforming with the passage of time and with minimum interventions by the artist. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the differences between photography and video and to explore the notions of duration and instant in relation to Alejo’s.

Drawing from Henri Bergson’s thesis on the duration of time and Gilles Deleuze’s notion of “time-image,” this paper explores how the illusion of duration created by the thirty frames of video extends Alejo’s conceptual and formal possibilities. This paper argues that Alejo pushes the boundaries of photography and video, serving to build a conceptual link between them. For that I will rely on G. E Lessing’s discussion of the spatial properties of painting

and demonstrate that Alejo’s videos are not limited to what Lessing describes as the “single moment of art,” but rather, that they unfold within many frames.

It is my thesis that the videos under discussion investigate two different “kinds” of temporality: endlessness and eventfulness.

These notions will be discussed in relation to Bergson, Lessing and Michael Fried, respectively. I argue that Alejo’s videos are still photographs embedded in time, and it is this relationship between still image and moving image, between the instant of the photographic image and the unfolding image of video that I discuss in the following pages.

Photography and the Single Moment Born in Mexico City in 1969, Mauricio Alejo received his BA in Communications at the Universidad Intercontinental in Mexico City in 1987, and a MFA at New York University in 2002. He lives and works between Mexico City and New York.

Alejo began working with photography in the late 1990’s, basically constructing still lives with ordinary objects. He devoted the first year of his career to the construction of fictions, placing the objects at the core of his investigation, as he explains: “I thought I was photographing pure ideas, the object as collective memory….

486

[Then] I realized “that I was not talking about the idea, instead it was about the specificities of the objects.”1 His work changed after 1999, specifically with the series Airports, consisting of photographs taken from X-Ray filters installed on Mexico City’s airport. Unlike Alejo’s previous formal images, this work moves towards a different approach in the production of images and meaning, it was more about surveillance and control.

In 2000, Alejo moved to New York to pursue graduate studies at New York University. This experience and his previous work Airport transformed his approach to photography, which is clearly different in the trio Two Cubes, created in 2001. This work, as will be argued below, is crucial to this analysis as it represents Alejo’s move towards time-based arts.

As he puts it: “I had never done any work embedded in time, it was always the suspended time, the frozen instant. And yet at the same time, it seemed to me a very interesting aspect of photography, because it required the creation of a past and a future. However, the passage of time was something I had not considered in my work before. When I made this piece I started thinking about time and then I began working with video.”2 The point of departure of this essay is the still image and more specifically photography. For that, I will draw from Lessing’s 487

canonical text Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry (1766), and Fried’s Art and Objecthood (1967). Although these approaches address different periods in art history, both Lessing and Fried defend what in their view is the material limitation of spatial arts, that is the “single moment.”

For Lessing, painting and sculpture must restrict to the single moment while arts such as poetry and literature must confine to the succession of time.3 Similarly, Fried is opposed to the exploration of time in the visual arts. For him, the work of art can be meaningful in a single moment and hence, it must surrender to it. 4 Neither Fried nor Lessing talk about photography, but they do write about a key element of photography: time.

Indeed, photography functions with time, not only the mechanism and process of time exposure; regarding the kind of temporality it depicts, photography’s time is the instant. Certainly, the elements of a photograph are frozen in time. Although they can suggest movement and action, what we see in a photograph is just one “shot,” an instant represented in space.5 As art historian Alberto Ruy Sánchez wrote, “[n]o one can possibly doubt that time is a fundamental element of photography. It is one of the materials from which photography is made.

The photographic apparatus itself is a machine for measuring time:

among its other functions, it calculates and controls the entrance, the movement, of a ray of light —it is the river which transforms the flow of life into the image of an instant.”6 Photography freezes bodies and actions, and even when bodies move there is the possibility of opening the diaphragm and accelerating the speed in order to freeze the passage of time. Obviously this does not mean that time stops, but only that the action is frozen within the film. For example, one of Alejo’s photographs entitled Tower (2007) portrays a dish filled with soap bubbles (see page 356). We ignore how the bubbles were made as we do not see anyone playing with them or building the “tower,” and we certainly do not see the bubbles breaking as time passes; what we see is the instant that the camera captured. Another example is Todream (2004), which consists of a pile of pillows arranged in the middle of an empty room.

The pillows forming a tower that goes from top to bottom are frozen in time, that is what we will always see in this image, not another time within its construction, but this very instant (see page 358).

The time that Lessing and Fried discuss is this instant that will remain frozen in the photograph, the problem is that they consider it its limit, they see it as the only possibility of spatial arts, therefore their time it is not any

instant, but “the” most important one, “the” single moment.

Accordingly, Lessing elaborates on the selection of the “right” moment, and Fried on how the action and meaning must be reduced within the work. Again, photography captures instants, but the “single moment” is just one way to explore static images.

Another way is Alejo’s series of photographs and videos, which complicate the single moment thesis.7 As film theorist Peter Wollen points out: “Film and video art, however, exhibit only a small fraction of the possible ways in which time can be used and understood.

Time, which we tend to think about in purely linear terms, is in fact incredibly complex.8 For example, Alejo’s re search on time and photography is pushed forward in Hot Water (2004), a series of progressive steaming up of the artist’s bathroom (see page 359). The position of the camera is fixed in a bathroom with beige walls and white ceramic in the shower. On the front wall there is a small mirror and we can also see the cabinets on the left side of the image. In the first photograph the shower is open and the action of falling water is frozen in time, we see its shadow on the ceramic; the mirror reflecting the beige walls. The second photograph was probably taken a few seconds after, but here the space has changed: the drops of water and 488

their shadow are diffused and the mirror is not reflecting the walls anymore, instead it is turning white and a kind of light irradiates from it. In short, the image seems blurry. On the third photograph, the mirror has almost fused with the background, is only then that we distinguish that the previous image is not blurry. As we associate the effect with the space, we realize it is the vapor transforming the space, hence the image. The last photograph is completely diffuse: we can only recognize a few elements, the edges of the cabinets and the edges of mirror.

Each of these photographs depicts an instant, but together they explore the passage of time in that specific space. In other words, although each image has its own characteristics, as a whole they encompass duration. According to Dolev, the passage of time is “the becoming present of future events and then their becoming past.”9 This succession of events is explored in Alejo’s Hot Water, the images being transformed by water as it becomes vapor. What we see is an expansion of the instant that works through the series of multiple instants, not a “single moment” but an extended instant, a moment unfolding in time, yet limited to these four images. Of course this is just metaphorical, as we cannot measure or divide time (Bergson). Time is absolute duration, but what we do measure 489

is time in its spatial terms. That is what happens in these images, Alejo’s work is engaged in a succession of instants represented in space.

Duration, for Bergson, is real time, perceived and lived, and that is a condition as there is no time without consciousness. Duration is essentially a continuation of what no longer exists into what does exist, but it is not “constituted” by instants; we think of instants because we are used to think time in spatial terms.10 In fact, for him, instantaneity involves two things: continuity in real time and spatialized time. Spatialized time is described by a motion that has become symbolic of time, so what we perceive is that time passes, and yet, as Bergson assesses, “it is we who are passing… it is the motion before our eyes which, moment by moment, actualizes a complete history given virtually.”11 In Alejo’s images, the spatial transformations suggest the passage of time, the idea of motion and change within the image gives rise to our perception of duration.

Bergson remarks that through space we can measure every interval of time and his elaboration is pertinent here because the spatial allows the passage of time in photography. Furthermore, in the specific case of Alejo’s work, through instants he suggests duration.

Two Cubes (2001) is a key example, because it represents

Alejo’s move from photography to video. The work consists of a series of photographs documenting the movement of a transparent acrylic box on a mound of snow. Here again, duration is suggested through instants, through the movement of the cube on the snow, and it is this exploration of the image in time that lead to Alejo’s decision to work with video.

As he has stated, he “needed time,” and that’s why this ideas deserves investigation.

The question of time in photography is less about the fact that the medium is limited by itself (Lessing), than it is about another kind of exploration beyond the instant. Rather, Alejo explores a different relation with objects and space, another kind of perception of images in which time is “not the abstraction that occurs when we project space into time”— Bergson’s time of the physicist— but pure time, lived time with no resemblance to numbers or to instants.

Alejo’s move from photography to video is representative of his philosophical repositioning with the media and his artistic practices; it has to do with his preoccupation to expand the still image.

This does not mean that he stopped working with photography, it just means that some of his projects did not “fit” within its space. And even then, Alejo’s work oscillates conceptually and visually between

photography and video, for he does not rely so much on movement but on time, hence the boundaries of these media fade.

At this point, it is important to mention that Alejo’s early videos are reminiscent of the first experiments with film of the Lumiere’s brothers, Geroge Mélies and in fact, various seminal films and videos As Peter Wollen has noted, “Many artists’ videos, it seems, are atavistic works, deliberately returning to the single-shot technique which ruled at the very dawn of cinema, setting up a continuous action and then filming it within a given time-limit without any edits or even camera movements.12 This kind of work is representative of numerous artists from the sixties and seventies such as Vito Acconci, Joan Jonas, Bruce Nauman, Nam June Paik, William Wegman.

And certainly this has also been the beginning for Alejo. What is important to note is that his background as a photographer highly influenced his exploration with video; as he explains, his early videos are “photographs with time.”13 A clear example is Line (2002), a fifty-second video of a white screen divided by a line (see page 361). Certainly, neither the image nor the audio provide directions to see it other ways, what we see is only what the title suggests.

Furthermore, it seems that we are looking at a photograph since there are not evident transformations 490

and the light does not seem to reflect movement. It is a photograph until Alejo’s intervention— his hand emerges from the right and literally interrupts the line—at which point the fragility of perception becomes clear: the line is in fact the steady stream of water. It is then that we make associations and realize that the sound, indeed, corresponds to falling water, but it is so subtle that, paradoxically, we need to know what we are seeing to realize what we are hearing. In addition, the video is so short that we need to see it more than once to grasp the whole and to understand what just “happened.” Especially when encountering Alejo’s videos for the first time we cannot know there is an element of surprise accompanying some of these early works.

This discussion leads us to the issue of Lessing’ single moment, which is in fact very restrictive, as for him each medium is clearly defined in scope and characteristics. Painting and photography, as spatial arts, are supposed to be limited to the representation of the single moment.

But Alejo seems to struggle with this form of temporality, he complicates the single moment and pushes further. In fact, Alejo’s work in video extends the “pregnant moment” as the thirty frames per second unfold. This applies to Crack (2002-2004), which is only thirty-two seconds of a static image 491

unfolding in time (see page 362).

The object here is a white plate apparently cracked, or at least that is what we see at first glance. On a closer look however, the plate is filled with milk and by the time we realized it we hear someone blowing on it to reveal that the “crack” is formed by hair floating on the milk. Again, the elements of the video are minimal, so is the sound and the artist intervention, and yet what seems to be a still image is in fact another statement on perception unfolding in time, another extended still image. According to Alejo “this video is about fragility and alludes to two kind of ruptures, that of representation and that of perception.” I argue that these ruptures happen through the passage of time. Following Bergson, the suggestion is that the rupture can be experienced by the observer, in as much as her/his consciousness provides duration to time.14 Furthermore, in both Line and Crack, the process of perception is complicated by the artist, who forces the viewer to think of the image differently and to approach it with more attention in order to experience the expanding instant. Alejo also raises a key question: is it photography or is it video? He works with this question and explores how the instants and durations are negotiated in video.

Beyond these forms of temporality there is an interesting tension between Alejo’s works

and cinema. Deleuze’s elaboration provides insight. For him the single image in film is an immobile-instantaneous section of movement reflecting actions through innumerable instants. In other words, cinema “is the system which reproduces movement as a function of any-instant-whatever that is, as a function of equidistant instants, selected so as to create the impression of continuity.”15 According to Deleuze, the frame in cinema is “any-instant-whatever,” and as such there is a fundamental difference between painting and the individual frame in film, as the later “is not the illusionist synthesis of a narrative context, but a single… incidental moment (any-instant-whatever) in an overall narrative structure.”16 Concerning Alejo’s video, the any-instantwhatever is put into question. The works in video that have been previously discussed are, especially at the beginning, any-instant-whatever and yet at the same time that instant unfolds, it becomes important by itself, is like a photograph extending the single moment -which is not a single moment anymore. Line, for instance, is a photograph until the hand of the artist disrupts the image allowing us to recognize that time was unfolding before we noticed it. To be clear, however, that does not mean that because there was not consciousness there was not time—in Bergsonian terms—in fact it is at

the very instant of the artist’s intervention that we acknowledge that duration was unfolding before our eyes.

Another still image embedded in time is Twig (2002), a tiny branch and its shadow standing in the middle of a bright bed of snow (see page 365). The still life is suspended in time as the twig rests in what seems a winter morning in a park. The camera is positioned close to the branch and so we do not know exactly what space is being depicted, but in the distance we hear voices of kids playing as well as the sound of steps approaching the camera and then going away, so the sound suggests action, and yet the branch is frozen in time.

Suddenly, the wind blows, taking away the calm of the scene and the twig’ shadow, which, in fact, is not a shadow but a thin slice of wood identical to the branch. Here, thirty-five seconds are enough to suspend the observer’s attention in an instant that unexpectedly moves from still to moving image.

For the artist, Line and Twig are about illusive facts that engage viewers to experience reality in a different way because they break the charm of illusion. The minimal elements and contrast of color capture the viewer’s attention, so in a way these works are what Deleuze calls “time-image.” In Twig, “everything that changes is in time, but time does not in itself change, it could itself change only 492

in another time, indefinitely. At the point where the cinematographic image most directly confronts the photo, it also becomes most radically different from it.”17 Alejo’s twig endures, it “represent[s] the unchanging form of that which moves, so long as it is at rest, motionless…”18 Deleuze’s timeimage incites the viewer to think of the image and to engage in a different process of perception. In Alejo’s work this is possible through the spatial representation of time. For him video and photo are the means of sharing his observation of daily spaces, a way to say “maybe there is another space within the same space.”19 At this point is crucial to call attention to the title of the works, a very important element of Alejo’ videos. In fact, he uses the titles as a strategy of distraction, the verbal element preceding the image functions as the linguistic message, in which Roland Barthes distinguishes two functions: anchorage and relay, the former helping the viewer to “understand” the meaning and the later complementing the image. Alejo’s videos combine both anchorage and relay, directing the audience to focus its attention on the wrong place at the right time. And yet, once the image unfolds, the visual structure breaks the linguistic.20 From within this context of the instant and its extension in video, the following section focuses 493

on another kind of temporality that Mauricio Alejo has explored, that of endlessness.

Video, Loop and the Rhetoric of Endlessness Mauricio Alejo has produced other videos that formally deal with Bergson’s definition of pure duration. This is particularly evident in the videos entitled Endless Sphere (2007) and Memory (2003). Endless Sphere is a video in loop that depicts a coin spinning on its edge, and, as the title suggests, the action takes place endlessly (see page 365).

This temporality is consistent with Bergson’s notion of duration, in as much as pure duration consists in the passage of time from one moment to another; time is succession and it is not conceived without a before and after. However, it must be remembered that this unfolding does not refer to a clear present and past, but rather to an endless flow of duration.21 Endless Sphere is that, a continuous flow that lasts as long as there is consciousness. In addition, this video is endlessness in meaning. A spinning coin alludes to luck, and yet at the same time is paradoxical because the coin never falls, so luck is never decided, but instead, is suspended in time.

Furthermore, the spherical form draws attention to infinity, in both the action (time) and the form (space).

In light of this work, the suggestion of endlessness is very

interesting if related to Fried’s critique of literalist art. As it has been previously mentioned, Fried is against duration in the visual arts and he critiques the idea that the work of art and the experience exists and persists in time.

Moreover, this articulation is crucial because Alejo’s work has been described as minimalist. The most obvious connections are forms, shapes and other spatial elements; basically the number of elements is extremely reduced and the backgrounds are mundane spaces but always empty and clean. For example, Milk (2002) a white sink fill with milk; Empty (2006), a series of translucent empty plastic bags of different colors placed one inside the other. In addition, the artist’s interest with objects projects objecthood. However, the most important connections between literalist art and some of Alejo’s videos are in terms of space and time.

According to Fried, literalist art is open to multiple interpretations and the meaning is inexhaustible, endless. That is, “able to go on and on, even having to go on and on…”22 In addition, there is the passage of time, as the experience persists in time its duration is infinite. For Fried, literalist work deals with the duration of the experience, which persists in time, in short, “at every moment the work itself is wholly manifest.”23 Fried critiques this idea and argues that the work of art can be meaningful in

a single moment. Alejo’s exploration with time is embedded it these forms of temporality, between the single moment and endlessness.

His videos unfold in time, whether endlessly (in loop) or in a few seconds. In terms of space and meaning, literalist art does not respect the boundaries between the work of art and the outside world. This is obvious in Alejo’s videos; by depicting daily objects staged in ordinary stages and by directly intervening in the image, the viewer is taken outside the work of art and is brought back to the ordinary world.

The possibility of time and duration in art, that is, the wholly manifestation of art that Freid is so afraid of, is the core of Alejo’s videos Endless Sphere and Memory.

These works play with this form of temporality and they are endlessness in meaning and action. What does a coin spinning in perpetuity, for as long as you watch, mean?

Alejo’s work is full of interpretation, it goes on and on and back again and the single moment is not a still image but a moving image, a digital signal that extends and unfolds in light and time.

Memory (see page 367) consists of a crumpled ball of paper on a white background. The image is therefore neutral, extremely clean and subtle as the ball of paper slowly unravels. “We imagine what comes next: the paper will regain its original form, retrieve its composure, reassert its purity, 494

the camera will be put on rewind and the sequence of events that lead to the balling-up reversed. But instead the image fades out after approximately five seconds and it is replaced by another shot of a tightly crumpled sheet, which begins to unravel only to be cut and replaced yet again. This occurs 43 times…”24 In a gallery space, this video is presented in loop so the unfolding of the piece of paper is infinite and the sound increases the feeling of abstraction and suspension. The duration of the “event” per se is not even a minute, but the duration of the experience is endless. As Bergson wrote, “it is impossible to distinguish between the duration, however short it may be, that separates two instants and a memory that connects them, because duration is essentially a continuation of what no longer exists into what does exist.25 This tension is at play in Memory.

On the other hand, Short Term Memory (2006) is a very interesting work because its temporality is a clear representation of time in space, but is not endless, at least not obviously (see page 369). Here, the camera is fixed on a roll of toilet paper with a black dot of ink in the middle; as the artist pulls it, the paper unfolds and the black spot becomes smaller and smaller until it disappears. This work is extremely poetic and it functions as a metaphor of what Bergson describes as the inner duration 495

that accompanies us “from the first to the last moment of our conscious life.”26 The time is literally unfolding and yet the temporality is not clear; is it pure duration? Is it an instant, or is it the way our memories vanish with the passage of time? Further, is it really short term memory or is it nostalgia?

According to the artist it is an emotional and sentimental choreography and if we consider his previous work, the idea of choreography functions in the level of movement, an aspect that was not completely explored in most of his early videos from 2002-2004. On the other hand, the reference to memory escapes Bergson’s two forms of memory, pure memory and habitmemory as the ink fades and there is no way to restore it. In fact, the image may be restored but not the ink; it has vanished. If, as Bergson wrote, memory is the intersection of mind and matter, then this work restores the perception of images to the real. Unlike Memory, Short Term Memory alludes to life and its inevitable decay, to the certainty that everything in life is hopelessly bound to collapse. However, [Alejo] manages to find beauty in the fact that within even the most annihilating inertia, there is a moment when all things make sense. There is a moment when everything appears to be not only tied together, but also fulfilled and removed from the mechanism of deterioration.

It is from these very moments that Alejo attains a precious feeling of wholeness; a feeling that eventually wears out and becomes the very essence of nostalgia.27 Also key is Fact and Fiction (2007), a video showing the front cover of a book entitled Fatti e Finzioni (see page 369). The title and the work allude to the presenceabsence of the artists and to the idea of fiction and construction in video. The same can be said about the image, because we see the book and the artist’s moist hand imprinted on the matte paper, but the video is edited in a way that we are not allowed to see his hand.

Moreover, the video is presented in loop so the action is unfolding in time; past present and future fading in circles. At stake here is the artist’s strategy to recreate and to record motion, because the only thing remaining is the trace that his body left on the object, the moisture draws and erases the silhouette and we can almost see his bones on the book creating the sense of movement and at the same time acting as the only testimony of Alejo’s presence. It is for this reason that Fact and Fiction reveals another kind of approach to the media: the camera is fixed and of course the book is static, it is the moisture as it abandons the book that gives us the illusion of movement, but in fact, it is through time that the silhouette fades in and out endlessly.

In a way, Fact and Fiction is consistent with Deleuze’s “crystal-image” for its main element is time, as he describes: “since the past is constituted not after, the present that it was but at the same time, time has to split itself in two at each moment as present and past, which differ from each other in nature, or, what amounts to the same thing, it has to split the present in two heterogeneous directions, one which is launched towards the future while the other falls into the past.”28 At the same time, there is a preoccupation with the recording of events and its fictitious reconstruction, an invitation to the audience to think about the image; this bring us to another elucidation of Deleuze since the construction of reality and fiction has to do with time itself. The kind of films (and video) that Deleuze calls the series of time “brings together the before and after in a becoming, instead of separating them; its paradox is to introduce an enduring interval in the moment itself.”29 As the title suggests this video is in between fact and fiction, and so conceptually it is also suspended in a loop, showing us that the ideal of Truth “was the most profound fiction.30 On the one hand this relationship between fiction and video (of course inherited from photography) will now be briefly discussed in terms of Barthes. For him, the linguistic image is denoted and the 496

symbolic image is connoted, and although this distinction is merely operational as there is not “a literal image in pure state” (42), photography’s supposedly exact recording of reality “naturalizes the symbolic message, [and] it innocents the semantic artifice of connotation.”31 This is something that Alejo uses to confront the viewer with an image that is not what it looks like.

As he comments, “critically, I am only interested in contributing to the skepticism of the image, that is, the photographic image and the image of video are discourses, they are not reality and they are not absolute truth. The media is a great fiction disguised of truth.”32 Similarly, Gravity (20022004) plays with the idea of fiction and viewers’ perception (see page 371). The video starts when a white balloon is thrown in the air and then it slowly deflates, becoming smaller until it is completely empty, but, when it is expected to fall, the balloon instead goes upward, and then the sound of it falling to the floor is heard. That is what we can see, the empty balloon is not going downwards but it rather drifts to the top of the screen. Gravity contains an element of surprise, but it does not seem to be possible, let alone real; gravity is absolute, isn’t it? Once again at stake is perception and visual illusions that seem to be staged in the theater of the obvious and yet pose the ability to surprise and make viewers see that 497

what they see is not reality but a spatial construction. Technically, it may not be hard to rotate the video 180 degrees to subvert the image, but the surprise forces the viewers to shift the process of perception in a very short time, taking them out of the habit-memory.33 Hence, they experience surprise, disappointment or disillusion because certainly that is not what they expected.

In that sense, this work alludes to Deleuze’s thought-image, in which “thinking becomes an element of the image. It must no longer be understood as an object exterior to the image that the latter is supposed to represent.”34 The question of audience is key to Alejo’s work because it requires the viewer to enter his game of perception. According to Alejo, “what interests me about video is that it invites an intelligent audience, I mean you don’t want to lie, you want that they take part in the lie with you, that in the moment of the trick there is not greater surprise than believing that reality can be another way or many different ways.”35 Here it is pertinent to think of Gravity and probably most of Alejo’s videos in terms of Bergons’ perception, which is the intersection of attention and memory. For him, past images are always preserved, but they are stored in two different places, pure memories are stored within consciousness while habitual memories are stored in the brain. The

former images while the later repeats. They both live on forever but the habit memory is practical in our daily life, thus it is the most recurring. Therefore, if perception is always affected by memory, what we see on Alejo’s images is not only what we see but what we remember. The most important aspect of his work regarding perception, I argue, is that it challenges the habit memory, thus disrupting our perception of daily objects and spaces.

Although each image will appeal to different memories and its impact will depend on each observer, because the images are staged in mundane spaces there is no need for a specific audience, hence recognition does not rely on exclusivity: there can be connections and even identification. That is what make Alejo’s work strong: few elements in mundane spaces and concise actions in short time: simple to store in the brain. For example in Line, the only elements are the line and the artist’ hand, thus they get straight to the point and straight to the brain; powerful enough to persist in time and in our memory.

3 Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Laocoon; an

Endnotes

9 Yuval Dolev, Time and Realism: Met-

Essay Upon the Limits of Painting and Poetry (Trans. Ellen Frothingham. New York: Noonday Press, 1957) 91.

4 Fried focuses specifically on literalist art; his main thesis is that these kinds of art practices are theatrical, therefore they are antithetical to art. Michael Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” Artforum (June 1967, reprinted in Minimal Art: a Critical Anthology, ed. Gregory Battcock, New Work: E.P. Dutton & Co., 1968).

5 Here it is important to clarify that, for example, in the early years of the daguerreotype, the process took several minutes and required subjects to remain still. Therefore, what seems to be an instant was in fact the result of a long process. In fact, some of the first images of Daguerre did not show living beings because of the long exposure times. Beaumont Newhall, La Historia de la Fotografía (Barcelona: G Gilli, 1978).

6 Alberto Ruy Sánchez, “Nina Subin: Time Within Time,” Luna Córnea 19 (Jan.-April 2000) 96.

7 Minimalist art is a perfect example of the posibilities of painting. See Michael Fried, “Art and Objecthood.”

8 Peter Wollen, Paris Hollywood: Writings on Film (London; New York: Verso, 2002) 238.

1 Gabriella Gomez-Mont. “Mauricio Ale-

aphysical and Antimetaphysical Perspec-

jo: Las Cosas y el Ojo Desnudo,” Fahren-

tives, (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press

heit (Dec. 2002) 25.

2007) viii.

2 Alejo quoted in Fernando Llanos, “El

10 Drawing from Einstein’s theory of rel-

equilibrio entre la inocencia y el cono-

ativity Bergson argues that there are

cimiento: Entrevista a Mauricio Alejo,”

two kinds of time, the time of the phi-

Replica 21 (March 2003) 19.

losophers (real time, pure duration) 498

and the time of the physicist (which is

26 Ibid, 34.

measurable as it is perceived in space).

27 Galeria Ramis Barquet, “Mauricio

See Henri Bergson, Duration and

Alejo: Crossing a Flimsy Bridge,” press

Simultaneity: Bergson and the Einsteinian

release (March, 2006).

Universe, (Ed. Robin Durie; trans. of

28 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2, 81.

supplementary material Mark Lewis

29 Ibid, 155.

and Robin Durie, Manchester, England:

30 Ibid, 149.

Clinamen Press, 1999), specially chap-

31 Roland Barthes, “Rhetoric of the

ter two and three.

11 Ibid, 43.

Image,” Image-Music-Text (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977) 45.

12 Peter Wollen, Paris Hollywood: Writings

32 Alejo quoted in Fernando Llanos,

on Film (London; New York: Verso,

“El Equilibrio Entre la Inocencia y el

2002) 234.

Conocimiento: Entrevista a Mauricio

13 Alejo, Personal Interview, 10 Nov. 2008.

14 Bergson, Duration and Simultaneity, Chapter 2.

Alejo,” Replica 21 (March 2003) 19.

33 Henri Bergson, “Of the Recognition of Images,” Matter and Memory, trans.

15 Deleuze quoted in Susanne Gaen-

Nancy Margaret Paul and W. Scott

sheimer, “Moments in Time,” Moments

Palmer (New York: Zone Books, 1990)

in Time: On Narration and Slowness (Markham, Ont.: James Lumbers Pub) 41.

77-132.

34 Heme de Alcote quoted in Barbara Filser, “Gilles Deleuze and a Future

16 Ibid.

Cinema,” Future Cinema: The Cinematic

17 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2 (London:

Imaginary After Film, ed. Jeffrey Shaw

Athlone, 1986-1989) 17.

and Peter Weibel. (ZKM/Zentrum

18 Ibid.

für Kunst und Medientechnologie

19 Alejo quoted in Fernando Llanos,

Karlsruhe; Cambridge: MIT Press,

“El Equilibrio Entre la Inocencia y el Conocimiento: Entrevista a Mauricio Alejo,” Replica 21 (March 2003) 19.

20 Barthes’ elaboration will be further

2003) 215.

35 Alejo quoted in Fernando Llanos, “El Equilibrio Entre la Inocencia y el Conocimiento, 19.

discussed regarding the video Fact and Fiction.

21 Bergson, Duration and Simultaneity, Chapter 2.

22 Michael Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” Artforum, 166.

23 Emphasis of the author. Ibid, 167.

Amy, Michael. “Mauricio Alejo at Ramis Barquet.” Art in America (Nov, 2006).

Barthes, Roland. “Rhetoric of the Image.”

Image-Music-Text. New York: Hill and Wang, 1977.

2 4 Christopher Ho, “Doubting Saint

Bergson, Henri. Duration and Simultaneity:

Thom as,” Modern Painters (February

Bergson and the Einsteinian Universe. Ed.

2005).

Robin Durie; trans. of supplementary

25 Bergson, Duration and Simultaneity, 33.

499

Bibliography

material Mark Lewis and Robin Durie.

Manchester, England: Clinamen Press, 1999.

Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim. Laocoon; an Essay Upon the Limits of Painting and

——. Matter and Memory. Trans. Nancy Margaret Paul and W. Scott Palmer.

New York: Zone Books, 1990.

Poetry. Trans. Ellen Frothingham. New York:Noonday Press, 1957.

Llanos, Fernando. “El Equilibrio entre la

Callender, Craig, ed. Time, Reality and

Inocencia y el Conocimiento: Entrevista

Experience. Cambridge: Cambridge

a Mauricio Alejo.” Replica 21 (March

University Press, 2002.

2003): 19.

Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema

2. London:

Athlone, 1986-1989.

Michael Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” Artforum (June 1967, reprinted in

Dolev, Yuval. Time and Realism: Meta-

Minimal Art: a Critical Anthology, ed.

physical and Antimetaphysical Perspec-

Gregory Battcock, New Work: E.P.

tives. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press 2007.

Filser, Barbara. “Gilles Deleuze and a Future Cinema.” Future Cinema: The Cinematic Imaginary After Film. Ed. Jeffrey Shaw and Peter Weibel. ZKM/Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie Karlsruhe; Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003, 214-219.

Galeria Ramis Barquet. “Mauricio Alejo: Crossing a Flimsy Bridge.” Press release (March, 2006).

Dutton & Co., 1968).

Newhall, Beaumont. La Historia de la Fotografía. Barcelona: Gustavo Gilli, 1978.

Parfait, Françoise. Video, un Art Contemporain. Paris: Regard, 2001.

Rivero Lake, Francisca. “Mauricio Alejo” Art Nexus 43 (Nov 2002) 111.

Ruy Sánchez, Alberto. “Nina Subin: Time Within Time” Luna Córnea 19 (Jan.April 2000).

Wees, William C. “The Camera Eye: Dialectics of a Metaphor.” Future Cin-

Gomez-Mont, Gabriella. “Mauricio Alejo:

ema: The Cinematic Imaginary After

Las Cosas y el Ojo Desnudo.” Fahrenheit

Film. Ed. Jeffrey Shaw and Peter

(Jan. 2003): 25.

Ho, Christopher “Doubting Saint Thoma.”

Modern Painters (February 2005).

Javault, Patrick. Vidéo Topiques. Paris: Paris Musées, Musée d’Art Moderne et

Weibel. ZKM/Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie

Karlsruhe;

Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003, 48-55.

Wollen, Peter. Paris Hollywood: Writings on Film. London; New York: Verso, 2002.

Contemporain de Strasbourg, 2002.

500

CONCENTRIC CIRCLES ANA CASAS

I took down my exhibition at the Museo del Chopo, put the pictures in my car and went to San Ángel to show them to Patricia Mendoza and Pablo Ortiz Monasterio. I had an accident on Insurgentes Avenue close to Florida Street. It was 1992.

I don’t remember if I finally got there that day, but I do know that that’s when the story began that changed my life in every way. The key element is the connection with the Centro de la Imagen.

A year later, before the Centro de la Imagen opened, I was invited to participate in the project. I remember the remodeling at the Ciudadela: the courtyard was a huge ditch, covered with scaffolding and full of workers, as it was gradually transformed into exhibition rooms and offices.

One of the earliest exhibitions held at Centro de la Imagen, Antigüedades para el siglo XXI [Antiques For the 21th Century] was a lively show of works in progress. The project for a new space began there, one that catered to all kinds of proposals, artists and the concerns of an entire period of images in Mexico. A vital project that made your swim, based on Patricia and Pablo’s vision. For the opening, Marcos Kurtycz and I made the piece Sombras (Shadows).

Marcos installed lights on the gallery’s ceiling. It was all dark. Only 501

a beam of light created photograms of our naked bodies on huge rolls of photographic paper, perpetually falling.

Patricia put me in charge of the workshops. The biggest encouragement was the immense freedom and trust that she gave all those of us participating in the project. It was the beginning of six years of my life totally dedicated to the workshops.

I wanted to create a space that would be a meeting place for everyone who had something to contribute to the field of photography in Mexico at the time.

Photographers, visual artists, historians, anthropologists, philosophers, writers, filmmakers— anyone who could broaden the vision of photography and help articulate critical thought about the medium. A space that catered to photographers working at that time, that generated ideas, and above all, that encouraged them to make work. Crossing photography with other media: cinema, video, writing, installation, sculpture.

Since then, photography has undergone enormous transformations. It was time to redefine its limits and its relationship with other media. Digital images had appeared, the Internet had just started becoming important, photography was reshaping itself very quickly and the context as far as artists, discourse, and education were concerned was undergoing

radical changes. In this sense, the program had to be open to everyone and inclusive, in order to generate ideas as well as work.

The Centro became a point of convergence for all kinds of artists, ideas, work and dialogue. A center that was alive. A medium that was redefining itself in a space where teaching tried to encourage critical thinking among artists, that gave them to access to making and interpreting photographs from their own point of view, enriched by the experience of everyone else working with images from different perspectives. The intersection between the development of an idea of education and the discourse and experience of those who were actively working with images.

It focused on many things: tutorials, project assessment, seminars and workshops about the history and study of photography, basic, intermediate and advanced workshops, international workshops, and also workshops on specific topics. The tutorials assisted participants in the creation of projects from an artist’s perspective, and the instructors were practicing photographers: Gerardo Suter, Marco Antonio Pacheco, Francisco Mata, Pablo Ortiz Monasterio, Silvia Gruner, Marco Antonio Cruz, Yolanda Andrade, Saúl Serrano, among others.

The seminars on analysis, history and criticism were aimed at situating photography in a

historical context and at fostering critical thinking in order to associate production with conceptualization in novel ways. We approached the analysis of photography as a medium, its relationship with other disciplines, and the intersections there were at the time between images and philosophy, anthropology, semiotics and history. Olivier Debroise, José Antonio Rodríguez, John Mraz, Carlos Aranda, Rebeca Monroy, Ricardo Pérez Montfort, Raymundo Mier, Humberto Chávez, Katya Mandoki, Antonio Saborit, Armando Cristeto, Andrés de Luna, Samuel Villela, Francis - co Montellano, Laura González, Andrés Medina, Patricia Massé, Ariel Arnal, Alfonso Muñoz, Néstor Bravo and Lorenzo Armendáriz all participated, among others.

We also dealt with the intersections with other media such as writing, sculpture, installation, and video: photography and sculpture with Enrique Cantú; photography and hand-processed [motion picture] film with Naomi Uman; photography and video with Rubén Ortiz and Jesse Lerner; handmade books with Scott Mac Cartney; photography and installation with Eugenia Vargas; photography and writing with Beatriz Novaro.

Naomi Uman came from Los Angeles in her van with her two dogs. We used sixteen-millimeter film cameras and blackand-white film. After being shot, the film was hand-developed in 502

buckets, like clothing. Then, it was hung to dry with clothespins. It was edited by hand, cut-and-paste, and then transferred to video. It had a special, suggestive image quality, a little scratched, sometimes blurred. Just as in the case of Rubén Ortiz and Jesse Lerner’s experimental video workshop, Cal Arts’ particular way of dealing with the interdisciplinarity and the crossover between media was fascinating and showed the participants new work methods.

Beatriz Novaro’s workshop set up a unique environment. I had the opportunity to attend, along with Maya Goded, Katya Brailovsky and Yvonne Venegas, among others. Beatriz is one of the most remarkable people I’ve known. You can actually feel her absolute dedication to the projects, her intense involvement with language and images in her work. Her comments had the amazing effect of leading the way to words that had always been there, somewhere in the back of your mind—you just needed someone to get them out. We’d write pages and pages, she’d read them, immerse herself in them, and she managed to bring out the essence of our imagination. Her comments seemed magical: they pushed buttons that took us further and further inside ourselves, to that place where the deepest emotions can be naturally associated with words. That’s when I came up with the text for my book, 503

Álbum. I also had the privilege of collaborating with Beatriz on my new book, Kinderwunsch [the German word that is the combination of “children” and “desire”].

There was also a program of basic, intermediate and advanced workshops aimed at training artists to approach photography from a conceptual, critical and practical point of view. They were taught by Jesús Sánchez Uribe, Alejandro Castellanos, Carlos Morales and José Antonio Rodríguez.

Jesús’s classes were particularly fascinating. He had been a photography teacher for a long time at the cuec [University Center for Film Studies], and with an important body of work as an artist, Jesús was—and is— extraordinarily skilled in terms of technique applied to a creative discourse. His lighting classes led students to really understand the phenomenon of light, combined with unique darkroom skills.

With all that, plus courses involving the history and the study of the medium in Mexico, taught by Alejandro Castellanos and José Antonio Rodríguez, we managed to build a solid program on many different levels.

The amazing opportunity of inviting artists from all over the world also led to enriching and stimulating exchanges. It was especially exciting when we managed to bring Duane Michals.

Duane was a fascinating character,

with an amazing sense of humor in his work, which combines photo and writing in a unique way. He gave a talk to a full house and all of us were there. It was a great privilege to see Duane present his own work and also to spend time with him.

I remember how nervous Cristina García Rodero was when she prepared her talk about her own work. She spent three nights rearranging the audiovisual presentation of her photos, with music by Vangelis and Irene Papas. By then nobody did audiovisual presentations with slides and cassettes, and it was a tedious, laborious process.

I remember Cristina being nervous and excited and carefully ironing her clothes in my living room before her talk. Cristina: the amazing photographer from the darkest heart of Spain, all nervous and all decked out to show her work.

Joan Liftin came several times to teach her workshop about documenting From the Inside Out. With a lot of experience as an editor and as director of the documentary program at the International Center of Photography in New York, she gave a workshop about critical thinking and photography. It was where I learned to look with amazement at [Jacques Henri] Lartigue’s work as a child: the pictures of his toys, his nannies jumping around, the dog catching a ball in midair, the outfits his brother the inventor wore, the first cars,

the first planes, the history of an era, his absolute enjoyment of the essence of photography, of movement, of time standing still, of a reality seen from a boy’s point of view with one of the first pinhole cameras in 1840.

Charles Harbutt and his workshop, in which he picked apart the photographic gaze, introduced a lot of new-fledged photographers to working with images. Hana Iverson, who based her workshop on the personal relationship of artists with their subject matter, and then applied it to different media, mixing photography with video and installation in innovative and stimulating ways.

Tobias Hohenacker came from Germany for his show. Then he came back again the following year. Since he spoke German, I was his translator. As I listened to what I was translating I got more and more surprised. The workshop was called Under the Surface of the Image / The Moment of Transition.

He asked for photocopies of a map of the neighborhood around the Centro de la Imagen. Each participant was blindfolded and threw a dart at the map. Where it landed was where they had to go and take pictures for a couple of hours.

Each day everyone looked at the negatives. We learned to read our own images. We learned that our way of looking can sometimes take us elsewhere, somewhere that transcends our intentions or 504

preconceptions. We taught ourselves to read. Pavka Segura took the workshop. The first day he photographed a dog at the place where he had to be. Two days later he saw the same dog again and decided to follow it. He spent years photographing dogs in Mexico City.

Joan Fontcuberta came several times and based his work on constantly questioning the truth of photography, and on how to use photography to create fiction. His projects were meant to continue year after year, focusing on something, like blood for example, as an element of identity, and it resulted in really interesting works.

One of the constant interests was how to make photographic work in book form. So we thought of different ways for narrative, editing and text to interact with each other in a photography project whose end result was a book. In that sense, a lot of artists came who worked on the subject from different perspectives. Carole Naggar, an artist, writer and photography book editor, came [from New York] to give a workshop on the history of photography books. Alex Sweetman, a photographer, editor and curator, gave an exciting workshop mixing classical editing techniques with the introduction of new media in photography books. Arlene Raven, a feminist writer and art historian who’s written books on contemporary art, taught a writing workshop for artists. In order to foster critical 505

thinking, artists were encouraged to write about their work in order to situate it in the context of contemporary art. Scott Mac Cartney from Rochester gave a workshop on handmade books.

One of the last workshops while I was at the Centro was Phillip Brookman and Jim Goldberg’s.

Goldberg’s book Raised by Wolves, published by Scalo, was particularly stimulating. The story over several years of a group of teenagers who live on the streets was narrated in a book where the freedom of the design, the use of pictures of objects, the writing and the different levels of the narrative were really interesting. Maya, Katya, Yvonne and I took this workshop again. It taught us a method for editing books that has been useful in many ways. We’d hang the pictures on the wall, editing them visually. This happened just before I left the Centro to finish Álbum, and that workshop stirred up a lot of ideas that really left their mark on some of us.

Many other people came, like Ron O’Donnell—who made installations with recycled objects that became these fantastic, constructed images—Susan Meiselas, Mary Ellen Mark, Eikoh Hosoe, Keith Carter, Joseph Rodríguez, Nils Udo, Heinz Cibulka, Andrea Sodomka, Max Kozloff, Penelope Umbrico, Sally Gall…

Artists who attended these workshops included Eniac Mar-

t í nez, Pía Elizondo, Francisco Mata, Eric Jervaise, Ricardo Alzati, Maya Goded, Patricia Lagarde, Marianna Dellekamp, among others. In the fine-art print workshop taught by Koudelka’s printer, Boya Metrovic, it was the first time Héctor García got a perfect print of that famous picture of Siqueiros sticking his hand out between the bars. It was fascinating to see the test prints hanging in the lab.

The Centro has been a place where the roles of student and teacher get switched around, leading to a real exchange of ideas and experiences. It’s been very important in the long run to have seen how some of people who are now excellent photography teachers, artists who make solid, innovative work, began their work as teachers giving workshops at the Centro, alongside more established artists.

There were also workshops on alternative photo techniques, conservation, children’s workshops, workshops on portraiture, densitometry, illumination, fine-art printing, etc. They featured teachers like Mauricio Alejo, Antonio Turok, Mariana Yampolsky, Laura Cohen, Adria na Calatayud, Laura Barrón, Juan Rodrigo Llaguno, Gabriel Figueroa, Ricardo Garibay, Juan Carlos Valdéz, Katya Brailovsky, Maritza López, Enrique Villaseñor, Daniel Weinstock, Eric Jervaise, Silvana Agostoni, Oweena Fogarty, Pablo Ortiz Monasterio, Julio Galindo, Agustín Estrada,

Lourdes Almeida, Vicente Guijosa, Javier Ramírez Limón, Ricardo Alzati and Federico Gama, and many others.

It was madness. I used to program all the workshops that I thought were worth doing. Seven days a week, twelve hours a day.

Over the first years I did everything myself: the invitations, programs, media, the accounting, management, even placing the chairs, running the slides, making coffee. More than three workshops a day, all week long, all year long. Laureana Toledo worked with me for a few months, and a few years after that, Pavka Segura also assisted the department.

I remember we got hold of the back courtyard for workshops and turned each gallery into a classroom. We managed to form workteams with over fifteen assistants who were doing their servicio social and made it all work. People took part in this who have now made a name for themselves in the world of photography like Cannon Bernáldez, Mariana Gruener, Juan José Ochoa, César Evangelista, and many others.

Five years went by in a kind of whirlwind where Patricia was the eye of the storm. The Centro became a place where many things converged—it was alive, chaotic and full of contradictions. Now, in retrospect, I understand it was what needed to be done at a time when many changes were taking 506

place, and it was a great privilege for me to be a part of such a vital and challenging project.

I left the Centro in 1998.

It was time for me to move on, to center myself again and dedicate myself to my own work. I got funding to publish my book Álbum and it took me a while to put it together.

Javier Ramírez Limón took over the workshop department and that gave me a sense of relief.

But the Centro remained part of my life, this time as an artist. In December of 2001 I had the chance to present Álbum as an exhibition there, taking up over half the Centro’s galleries. It was exciting to see my pictures in that space: the four nudes from my diet journals hung in the back gallery—the same one where Sombras had been shown at the Centro’s opening in 1994.

I didn’t stay away for very long. I went back to the education department in 2002 when Alejandro Castellanos invited me to collaborate with him and Lourdes Báez in the programming of FotoGuanajuato, which went on until 2006. Alejandro was already the director of Centro de la Imagen by then. We organized a complete photography program for students with scholarships from eight states in West-Central Mexico, along with a colloquium that included exhibitions, talks, panel discussions and portfolio reviews. To lend continuity to the Centro’s organization of 507

the workshops, we adapted the concept to a program that could cater to the needs of a group of people from several different states in the country. Based on the students producing a photography project under the guidance of a tutor, the workshops provided information about key issues concerning conception and production, such as image analysis, the history of photography, curating, etc.

This model worked well: overseeing projects form their conception to their production, and finally, their exhibition. In the last stage, we worked with participants on the images’ technical aspects, actually applying the practical knowledge. Participants included artists like Jesús Jiménez, Arelí Vargas, Javier Cárdenas Tavizón, Ricardo Sierra, Elivet Aguilar, Ricardo Cerqueda, Cintia Durán, Rogelio Séptimo, Alejandro Cartagena, and many others who then formed collectives, photography schools, but most importantly, who have made their mark on the practice of photography in various states in the country. Alejandro Castellanos and Lourdes Báez were behind this space that fostered the study and creation of photography, they were serious about accomplishing research, and they tried to decentralize the context around current issues in photography. This is a model that has since influenced other educational programs in Mexico.

We invited tutors like Ge rar do Montiel Klint, Laura Barrón and Gustavo Prado, who lent continuity to the program, which also involved other teachers like José Antonio Rodríguez, Humberto Chávez, Yolanda Andra de, Ar man- do Cristeto, to mention only a few.

It was based on this experience that we began a fruitful collaboration with Gerardo Montiel, who helped define some important points in the development of the educational programs.

And finally in 2007 I joined the Centro’s workshop department again, but as a freelancer, helping coordinate the Contemporary Photography Seminar, and then later as a tutor. That installment of the photography seminar built on all those past experiences and allowed us to set up a teaching program that focused on the process of creation, but with an extraordinary amount of freedom. This program attempted to accompany every participant through the steps involved in developing a project, in the complex process of establishing connections to a personal imaginary, unique to each person, and in effectively translating it into a structured discourse. It’s based on individually focusing on each person’s process, on accompanying, listening to and helping a group of people who have a common need and interest in expressing themselves by means of photography: to accompany them in that tenuous,

unique, inner dynamic that we call creation.

The teaching is structured along various paths: we ask the teachers we invite to base themselves on this model, but at the same time, the teachers involved enrich the program with their own discourse, so the experience of practicing photographers is incorporated into the program. We invite different types of tutors so that students are exposed to distinct and often opposite points of view, so they can forge their own personal outlook.

We’ve insisted on the importance of forming non-homogeneous groups, so that the criterion in our selection of applicants is their need to create their own personal artistic discourse. So people of different backgrounds, ages and interests end up forming highly diverse groups that benefit from the dialogue. I think this is yet another of the seminar’s major contributions to the concept of teaching, given that it allows the work to focus in a very tangible way on the essence of the issue: each artist’s unique creation and connection to the medium.

And, coming full circle, the seminar is being organized again as of 2010 in collaboration with Lourdes Báez, now as the director of CaSa, the Arts Center of San Agustín Etla in Oaxaca. Working in parallel with two groups—students with scholarships from 508

several southern states at CaSa, and one group in Mexico City— we’ve managed to organize a program with particularly fruitful exchanges. The program at CaSa, which is an extraordinary space, is open to more experimental educational projects, and it’s led to new ways of interacting and working at the Centro.

So at the seminar, photographers from different countries— Spain, Chile, Argentina, Peru, Brazil—meet photographers from different regions of Mexico: Oa xa- ca, Campeche, Chiapas, Gue rre ro, Puebla, Quintana Roo, Tabasco, Veracruz and Yucatan. These meetings are particularly stimulating, because they establish connections between different experiences, worldviews and media—in sum, they form a rich and varied mosaic where work acquires new meaning.

It’s fascinating to see how photography practice has left aside a lot of the issues that image theory still questions. The boundaries between photography and other media have been blurred in a rather natural manner, and it’s the conceptual discourse that establishes which media artists will use. Photography’s changing and permeable nature within the contemporary art panorama makes it a living medium that changes at the same time as our own vision of the world and our way of relating to it.

The current panorama of photography reveals the need to generate 509

ideas based on the work being produced—critical thinking capable of adapting itself to the changes that the medium is constantly undergoing. The Centro de la Imagen has had a visible influence on photography’s process of transformation in Mexico.

There are key figures in Mexican photography, like Jesús Sánchez Uribe, who taught workshops during the first years of the Centro, and then distanced himself from the medium, but luckily came back more than ten years later, as a teacher at the seminar and as an artist showing his work in the exhibition galleries. It was a unique privilege in every sense, but especially in terms of the cycles in the life of artists who provide a perspective on the medium that’s particularly rich and profound.

Likewise, Alejandro Castellanos, who collaborated with us when we started the workshops, came back as a teacher at the seminar, enriching it with his long-term experience and his outlook on the contemporary context.

Gerardo Montiel K lint’s work might be one of the clearest examples of these cycles, where the Centro has been a key element in his process of evolution as an artist and a teacher. Gerardo started his photography career here, in a class with Marco Antonio Pacheco.

Over the years he’s created a solid body of work that deals with symbolically loaded topics and that

also reveals a particularly interesting way of understanding the medium. With a solid technical and conceptual background, he posits photographic discourse as a language with a coherent alliance of form and content. While he’s kept working on his own practice, Gerardo has also been a valuable teacher and has influenced subsequent generations of Mexican photographers. Combining the history of photography with an overview of current practice, and teaching both digital and analogue techniques as a natural part of the construction of a discourse, his classes train students so they can find professional employment within the medium. He’s won the [Mexico City] Photography Biennale twice, he’s been a tutor at the fonca and at other grant programs around the country, and he’s also taught workshops in Mexico and abroad.

Maya Goded is another unique example—her extraordinary work is also associated with the Centro in many ways. When I talked to her about this article, she reminded me that her first exhibition was one that I had the chance to curate in 1993 at Zona, an independent gallery I collaborated with for a while. That’s where we became friends, always based on our fascination for photography, talking about it and sharing ideas, pictures, projects… She told me about how the Centro had been important in her life at the

time, and how we always ended up somewhere talking about photography, meeting up with other photographers. And at the workshop that Beatriz Novaro taught, Maya wrote texts about her project on sex workers that she’s been working on for years. She’s also continued to include texts in all her work.

On one occasion, Rafael Doctor, a Spanish curator I met in Madrid, came to the Centro to review portfolios for an exhibition at the art center of the Canal de Isabel II. He included Maya’s work and that of Tatiana Parcero, Mauricio Rocha, Carmen Mariscal, Daniel Weinstock and also mine, among others’. A few years later, Rafael invited Maya to do her first solo show at the Museo de Arte Reina Sofía. That’s when she really started getting exposure. Maya has established herself with an extraordinary body of work that is fundamental in the context of contemporary photography. Her work has reformulated the concept of documentary photography based on the questioning of the photographer’s gaze—on an honest and deeply personal vision of the body, sexuality and female identity.

Another case in point is José Luis Cuevas, who participated years ago in one of the Centro’s seminars, and who since then has produced interesting work that extends the boundaries of documentary photography to naturally touch on contemporary photographic language.

510

In his work entitled El hombre promedio (The Average Man) he already combined documentation with a personal, original and coherent language, where digital processing constructs an innovative photographic discourse. This piece received an honorable mention at the Photography Biennale.

Now he’s working on a particularly interesting project about religious groups. On the other hand, he founded the Gimnasio de Arte (‘Art Gymnasium’), a workshop where a lot of young photographers are taking classes, as it establishes a space of its own in the field of photography education.

Several generations of artists have passed through the Centro, attending its workshops and seminars, and been exposed to each other’s work, sharing experiences in new ways. Networks have been created that support a different way of making and thinking about photography in Mexico, and that have managed to broaden our vision from many different angles within a solid and extensive framework.

Over the past eighteen years, the Centro has been a vital space of experience—in every sense, and also for me. I’ve had crucial experiences there, including the opportunity to set up an education department that has brought

511

together several generations of artists in a fruitful exchange, and the opportunity to witness firsthand the process by which so many artists make work and exchange ideas.

The Centro has also enriched my own work, and I’ve had the chance to see it exhibited in this extraordinary space’s galleries. But above all, it has given me the privilege of adding my own thoughts as an artist to the experience of helping others in their learning process: a mutual exchange of ideas and experiences, in which my work has been fed by the ideas and stimulation of being in contact with other artists, young and old. The constant questioning of photographic language— from the point of view of practice as well as from the point of view of teaching—looking for vital means of communication and exchange with students and other teachers in a fertile field where ideas and images can flow freely.

Closing the circle gives meaning to this space. Openended structures. A privileged center where images and ideas are created. A center in every sense of the word: a center of experiences, a center of education, a center of thought, and above all, a center of creation.

Tr. Jessica Dichi