The Museo del Barrio’s seminal exhibition on performance art in Latin America, “Arte≠Vida,” in part suggests that Latin American performance artists have been more certain than their North American counterparts that art is not life: when life is marked by hunger, scarcity, and torture, such confusions between art and life are disingenuous at best. At the same time the 40-year wealth of performance art documented by the exhibit assures that—like Lotty Rosenfeld’s clean perpendicular line in her signature piece Una milla de cruces sobre el pavimento (1979)—art literally and figuratively adds dimension and scale to “life,” at times even creating fissures within repressive regimes and their systems of power. In the dossier of this issue of e-misférica—which features a special relation to the exhibit “Arte≠Vida”—we pose a similar, if more pointed, provocation about the realms of art and politics in Latin American performance art. Nestor García Canclini has recently argued that art has entered a “post-autonomous” moment, one in which the transgression of the limits posed by museums, the market, and the conventions of art practice (e-misférica 7.1) are no longer necessarily constitutive of its political force. Where, then, do the politics in performance art reside today? In a recent interview, Guatemalan artist Regina Galindo argues that the work of Third World artists is not evaluated as it should be—with much more attention paid to the location and context of its production than to the formal elements through which it establishes its relation to the art field (e-misférica 6.2). In what ways, if any, does the aesthetic order of contemporary performance art embody and illuminate a politics or counter-politics? Nelly Richard, in turn, insists on a distinction between “la política en el arte”—political issues or projects as reflected by or represented in art—and “lo politico en el arte”—a register of art itself that aims to engage and disarticulate the conceptual terms through which the political claims coherence to begin with (e-misférica 6.2). How does performance art enact, engage, disturb, dis/articulate registers of the political?
We invite dossier contributions from artists, scholars, and critics that take up this provocation in relation to performance art (action art, body art, non-objectual art) in the Americas today. The provocation need not be answered/contested/debated in general, but could be engaged in reference to a particular performance, gesture, scenario or event. Responses are invited in the form of short analytic texts (750-1500 words), chronicles, manifestos, and other formats that go beyond the merely descriptive or anecdotal. Contributions may be in Spanish, English or Portuguese. We are also interested in visual presentations (photography, video, montage, etc.) that offer new perspectives on the subject.
La invasión de la política
Graciela Montaldo
Arte ≠ Vida: A History and Reflection on the Project
Deborah Cullen
O re-enactment como prática artística e pedagógica no Brasil
Tania Alice
An Art of Nooks: Notes on Non-Objectual Experiences in Venezuela
Gabriela Rangel
Translocas: Migration, Homosexuality, and Transvestism in Recent Puerto Rican Performance
Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes
Performing Rio de Janeiro: Artistic Strategies in Times of Banditocracy
Eleonora Fabião
Reflexiones Suicidas
Sandra Ceballos Obaya
Step and Repeat
Nao Bustamante
American Gold
Regina José Galindo
Excerpt from Philosophical tantrum, 2005
Guillermo Gómez-Peña
This is Mystery: Linda Montano's Roman Catholic Performance Art Manifesto
Lydia Brawner
"Despolitizar" como acción política en la centroamérica contemporánea
Anabelle Contreras Castro
A Complicated affair: Performing life on the margin between art and politics
Nicolas Dumit Estevez
error 404 a hemifesta 2011
Ricardo Dominguez
¿Arte ≠ Política?: In Defense of Performance Praxis
Lissette Olivares
My Contribution
William Pope.L
Video Selections from the Arte ≠ Vida: Actions by Artists of the Americas, 1960–2000 exhibition
Arte ≠ Vida: A Chronology of Actions by Artists of the Americas, 1960–2000
Male trouble: Masculinity and the performance of crisis by Fintan Walsh
Daniel Lukes
40 años de performances e intervenciones urbanas de Clemente Padín
Yael Zaliasnik Schilkrut
Historia de la clase media argentina: Apogeo y decadencia de una illusion by Ezequiel Adamovsky
Jennifer Adair
Antología: un siglo de dramaturgia chilena 1910-2010, compilado y editado por María de la Luz Hurtado y Mauricio Barría
Isabel Baboun Garib
Liberalism at its Limits: Crime and Terror in the Latin American Cultural Text de Ileana Rodríguez
Héctor Domínguez-Ruvalcaba
Nor-tec Rifa! Electronic Dance Music from Tijuana to the World by Alejandro L. Madrid
Nuria Net
O Corpo em Crise: Novas Pistas e o Curto-Circuito das Representações by Christine Greiner
Cristina Rosa
Orgullo. Carlos Jáuregui, una Biografía Política de Mabel Bellucci
Mauro Orellana
Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment by Rebecca Schneider
Lara Nielsen
Troubling Vision: Performance, Visuality, and Blackness by Nicole R. Fleetwood
Joshua Javier Guzmán
Juan Downey: The Invisible Architect by Valerie Smith
Sarah Montross
Gloria by Allora & Calzadilla, Epicenter/Epicentro: Re Tracing the Plains by John Hitchcock in collaboration with The Dirty Printmakers of America
Jessica L. Horton
La labandera de Felipe Rivas San Martín
Matías Marambio de la Fuente
Las rutas de Julia de Burgos
Vanessa Pérez Rosario
Becoming Transreal: A Bio-Digital Performance by Micha Cárdenas and Elle Mehrmand
Corbin Zara
Aventuras Familiares by Cheto Castellano, Daniel Benavides, and Lissette Olivares
Jian Chen