{"id":2332,"date":"2013-03-01T16:00:22","date_gmt":"2013-03-01T16:00:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/archee.uqam.ca\/?p=2332"},"modified":"2023-01-19T16:57:26","modified_gmt":"2023-01-19T16:57:26","slug":"mars-2013-electronic-traces-archaeological-perspectives-of-media-art-in-mexico","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archee.uqam.ca\/mars-2013-electronic-traces-archaeological-perspectives-of-media-art-in-mexico\/","title":{"rendered":"Mars 2013 – Electronic Traces: Archaeological Perspectives of Media Art in Mexico"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Videoevento Cuerpo Idea, Andrea Di Castro and Cecilio Balthazar, Casa del Lago, Mexico City, 1979<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Other Graphics<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Mexican artists increasingly began to investigate alternative uses of photo copiers, fax machines, video cameras and computers since the late 1960s. These media captured the attention of art students and established artists as they entered into their daily life. At the same time, new media brought new problems and posed fundamental questions that were at the core of art history, for example: questions in relation to the aura, the art object as original and finished product, and the artist as genius creator. While the number of experiments increased the next decade, the mainstream art world took at least two decades to reflect on these practices and their impact on the history of art and culture at large1<\/sup>. To begin with, the troubled relationship between technologies and war complicated matters, while the mass consumption of media and the development of more user-friendly systems easily eliminated the sense of distinction as formulated by Pierre Bourdieu2<\/sup>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Man on the moon, Humberto Jard\u00f3n, circa. 1974 (black and white photocopy; Minolta, liquid toner)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The first experiments with copying machines began in the sixties, while the real take-over was the next decade. Artists like Jos\u00e9 de Santiago and Humberto Jard\u00f3n used copying machines as a means for the production and reproduction of images. Copyart or Xerox art then emerged as buzzwords among artists who were using copying machines, such as: Santiago Rebolledo, Rub\u00e9n Valencia, Maris Bustamante, Magali Lara, Yani Pecanins, Zalathiel Vargas, and Marcos Gabriel Macotela Kurtycz. But the cheap cost and popularity of copying devices caused skepticism among critics and exhibition organizers, for as artist Jard\u00f3n recounts on the exhibition catalogue Other Graphics (1993): \u201cin the eyes of the general public, copy art belongs to that sub-genre of artistic curiosities that emerged in the sixties and developed in the seventies; a sub-genre that nobody takes seriously; as a result of the daily contact with the copying machine they give it for granted3<\/sup>.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Bodycopy, Humberto Jard\u00f3n, circa. 1975(black and white photocopy; Minolta, dry toner)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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Homenaje al serialismo, Humberto Jard\u00f3n, 1978 (black and white photocopy; Minolta, dry toner)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

On the other hand, not all traces of media art are electronic. In fact, independent and experimental films produced in Mexico from 1930s onward, already demonstrated a formal interest and \u201creflection on the medium itself\u201d that reformulated the traditional production, exhibition, and thus perception of moving images4<\/sup>. At the same time, the release on the market of 16mm film, and later 8mm and Super8 films, triggered a boom in experimentation as the cost of film production lower considerably. The political and cultural implications of such devices were crucial, as media art pioneer Andrea Di Castro<\/a> explains, \u201cbefore the commercialization of portable video devices\u2014both industrial and home devices\u2014there were not vocabularies to oppose television. Television dictated the absolute value, the guideline of how images should be shown on the small screen, and how and for what purposes the equipment should be used. It is with the release on the market of the home videotape recorder, and more recently with high-resolution micro formats that images produced with video cameras provide the viewer with an alternative way of seeing the world5<\/sup>.\u201d Independent films proliferated in Mexico, especially in the 1970s when groups of young film makers\u2014the so-called \u201cSuper 8 film buffs\u201d (Superocheros)\u2014sprang up around utopian ideals of the power of these small formats to transform Mexican cinema6<\/sup>. However, the cost of film remained prohibitive from some, so filmmakers such as Rafael Corkidi, Katia Mandoki, Gregorio Rocha and Sarah Minter turned to video.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Video Traces<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Mexico\u2019s video-art pioneer Pola Weiss, first used a video camera as an undergraduate student in journalism at the Department of Social and Political Sciences at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) from 1971 to 1975. As a student and later instructor, she wrote scripts and directed documentaries and TV programs; but she eventually shifted her attention from content to form and media, investigating alternatives uses of the video camera and the video signal itself. Although she initially defined her practice in relation to the media she knew best, television, the scope of her experimentation was clear as she named her firm ArTV in 1972.7<\/sup> Convinced of television\u2019s potential as artistic medium, she crated a set of works where she established an embodied relationship with the camera. With her hands on the camera, Weiss\u2019s moving images comprised her own movement, hence, rather than her being the subject of the observer\u2019s gaze, she fractured this relationship altogether, blurring the boundaries between artist, performer, image production and the world beyond. Her work focused on themes such as gender, identity, the body, and the urban context, and she also interrogated gender roles.8<\/sup> Unlike her male-contemporaries, Weiss established a relationship with the camera which complicates the representation and reading of her body.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Video performance: Venusian Reborns and Reforms, Pola Weiss, Auditorio Nacional\u2019s esplanade, Mexico City, 1981<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

In 1976, Weiss traveled to New York, where she encountered works by Nam June Paik and other video artists for the first time. Thrilled to know that artists were experimenting with video in other countries, Weiss returned to Mexico City to produce a set of events and exhibitions aimed at disseminating video as an art form. In that context, the 9th International Festival of Video Art was held at the Carrillo Gil Museum in 1977, showing the work of Miguel Ehrenberg, Allan Kaprow, Shigeko Kubota, Les Levine, and Name June Paik, while Weiss represented Mexico with her video Cosmic Flower (Flor C\u00f3smica, 1977).9<\/sup> Despite Weiss\u2019s enthusiasm to exhibit the work of international video art pioneers in Mexico, criticism was harsh, and as Weiss\u2019s apprentice Alberto Roblest recounts, the exhibition provoked a kind of shock among the art community. \u201cObviously, video art is shown with 10 years of delay in Mexico. But her [Weiss], she is the first one who takes the risk and exhibits these videos in front of art and film critics, poets, writers, and artists. Obviously many contemporary critics discredited this art, others argued that they did not know this media and therefore could not comment on it, while some critics even said that only consisted in the manipulation of devices.\u201d10<\/sup> This skepticism toward video art continued throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Although Weiss\u2019s production was continuous, her public events in Mexico fluctuated in relation to the agenda of Mexican art institutions, which ignored her work. Instead, she traveled abroad and participated at international festivals such as the Caracas Video Festival and the International Art Exhibition in Kansas, both in 1979, and the Athens Video Festival in Ohio in 1980. Weiss also exhibited eight of her videos at the Pompidou Center in Paris in 1979, and featured Videodanza Viva Videodanza (Video dance Life Video dance) in the 1984 Venice Biennial.11<\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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