Navegar por los elementos (35 total)

En retrospectiva, mientras preparamos la edición del XXXVI Coloquio Internacional de Historia del Arte. Los estatutos de la imagen, creación-manifestación-percepción, es imposible no pensar en el comienzo del expresivo proceso que desembocó en su buen fin. Inició cuando el actual director del Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas, Renato González Mello, en seguimiento de una práctica inaugurada en 1975, convocó a los investigadores a presentar propuestas para el tema de nuestro coloquio anual. Tomó cuerpo, alrededor de un mes después, cuando sorprendentemente fueron entregadas, entre varias propuestas, dos que versaban y se interesaban en especial por el estatuto de las imágenes y sus procesos generadores; a saber, la manera en que han sido creadas, transmitidas y percibidas.

El borrador del poema de Tristan Tzara titulado "La grande complainte de mon obscurité" es una muestra de un proceso creativo, del nacimiento de lo que será la versión final de la misma obra. La fuerza y las peculiaridades de este borrador tan original lo caracterizan como una imagen visual “indivisible” en la que se unen diferentes elementos: la escritura y el dibujo mezclados con manchas de tinta, correcciones, caricaturas y espacios o silencios. El hecho de que se publique como borrador hace partícipe al espectador de la resolución que se ha tomado en el proceso de concepción, así deja al descubierto las vacilaciones, afecciones o emociones que han advenido al artista en su momento de intimidad creativa. Todo ello sitúa a esta obra en lo experimental y lo efímero, lo que la ubica dentro del discurso del arte moderno.

The works in which Armando Morales, Gioconda Belli and Omar Cabezas presented the guerrilla movement of the Nicaraguan revolution in 1979 reflect a common utopia: the "new pantheism": the individual only matters as part of a whole: struggle only makes sense if it is for a collective; woman is portrayed as mother earth... The Nicaraguan landscape provided the bases for the ideology of the revolution, presenting a confrontation taken up by the work of the three authors: simultaneously a protecting divinity and a brutal danger that obliged the combatants to reconsider their values, not from a theoretical viewpoint but from that of survival. The local landscape gave form to history, culture, and to the new and present-day Nicaraguan society.

With the avant-gardes the idea of the monument acquires a new meaning. Until the twentieth century, monuments were related to memory, alluding in some way to the sacredness of the represented past and associated with funerary architecture; from the appearance of the first avant-gardes, however, their function ceased to so clear, becoming lost in a world of mechanical images. The De Chirico brothers—Giorgio and Alberto Savinio—represent a contrary vision of the monument. In the case of the former, the apogee of monuments had led to their de-signification. In Savinio, on the other hand—against the non-historical exteriority that monuments represented for his brother—they present an interiority from which a deep significance emanated; as if their presence had been reduced to the imagination. The work of these two Italians is a reflection on the abstraction of the instant, dramatized by the monument and its figuration.

From the nineteenth century onward a considerable number of hostile actions against the portraits of royalty and religious art have been recorded. This iconoclasm which, before the nineteenth century, was blamed on foreigners, began to become more common among Spaniards early in the century, increasing with the Carlist wars. Due to their increased frequency, such violent actions against these types of representation, both monarchical and religious, came to acquire a very characteristic social function, becoming rites dramatizing popular support for progress. The moments of greatest violence against these works took place during the Spanish civil war, including burning and sacking of churches and even murders of priests. With the rise of Francoism, the dictator cast the blame on foreign governments, which seems to suggest a generalized tendency by the Spanish authorities to attribute such acts alien forces.