THE “PIAS FORMS” RELOADED

(MEXICO CITY, 1994-2008)

Amy Sara Carroll, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

In “Genealogical Tree of the PIAS Forms” (1998), Mexican artist-critic Maris Bustamante explains that PIA is an acronym that hybridizes the genres of “performance, installation, and ambient pieces.” She also contends that Los Grupos, Mexican collectives of the 1970s, were bound to the PIAS Forms in their rejection of post-revolutionary cultural nationalism’s fictive monopoly on the categories of political and public art. Bustamante’s observations presage a contemporary trend: Until recently the efforts of Los Grupos operated something like a parenthetical in Mexican art history. But, select revaluations of Mexican art like Olivier Debroise, et al’s La era de la discrepancia: Arte y cultura Visual en México, 1968-1997 (2007) centralize Los Grupos and the conceptual and performance practices that characteristic their efforts in narratives of twentieth century Mexican artmaking from the D.F. and beyond. La era de la discrepancia creates a genealogy that links the post-1968 PIAS Forms to 1990s Mexico City-based experimental art.

Numerous conversations with greater Mexican cultural producers have convinced me of the merits of such a “genealogical tree;” but, also have prompted me to hypothesize further that artists coming of age in Mexico City in the late 1990s recalled the formal choices made by artists of a prior generation in part because they identified parallels between the socially dramatic transformations underway in Mexico post-1994 and post-1968.

Their representations of those parallels amounted to localized histories of the continent’s neoliberalization that linked public events and policies like the massacre in Tlatelolco and the Border Industrial Program to NAFTA, Zapatismo, femicide in Ciudad Juárez, and Mexico’s Drug Wars. Such linkages contradicted a social scientific and policy-driven periodization that continues to divide Mexico’s neoliberal transition into two stages (that of the 1980s and that of the NAFTA era, 1994-2008). In this talk, I’ll argue that this ‘second wave’ of PIAS Forms in Mexico City NAFTA era artmaking remediated not only post-1968 radical artmaking practices, but also state- and corporate-sponsored allegorical economies of representation that have dictated the very terms of the idea or performance of “Mexico” from the late 1960s onward.

martes 24 de julio

8:30 pm

Entrada libre