‘Chosen Memories’. Take off the colonial glasses (and those of history)

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Back when I lived in New York, a visit to MoMa was free on Friday afternoons and I, known at home as the Coupon Queen because I never miss a deal, never missed a week. In those lines going around the block, I remember reading Serge Gilbaut’s “How New York stole the idea of ​​Modern Art,” which explains why Paris was no longer the center of artistic innovation after the vanguard. Today I would love to be seen at the opening of the exhibition ‘Chosen Memories’, an exhibition of contemporary Latin American art from the Patricia Phelps collection. According to the museum’s own website, the exhibition emerges from new ways of telling history, which is “a living organism, in permanent interpretation and reassessment”. Well, among the artists there is one I particularly admire who has a beautiful piece that I unfortunately consider to be misleading. It’s about Regina José Galindo and ‘El Sacking’, a job for which she hired a dentist in Guatemala who made holes in her teeth that were later filled with gold. Later, in Europe, these fillings were removed, so that the final work is a set of eight gold pieces. The artist confirms what we can intuitively suspect: «I make a metaphor of my mouth with my country. My mouth represented my country, full of resources, virgin, perfect. The drill represented the extractive industry, drilling without any ethics, stealing gold without any morals. That is, a repetition of the ideas of the young and unprepared Galeano in “The open veins of Latin America.” My sister says – between Lisa Simpson and Mafalda – if I were her student she would have given it a zero, but if she had left the gold in Canada she would have mercy. Currently, the main prospectors in Guatemala are subsidiaries of Canadian companies and the real bleeding, when looking at the tons of metals exported, did not take place in the 16th and 17th centuries, but with independence, starting in the 19th century. In fact, more gold has been mined in Spanish America in recent years than in the three centuries of the Spanish Empire. Moreover, the Romans got more gold from Spain than the Spanish from America – let my Italian friends explain. But the ‘decolonial’ fever reigns: it is the strange behavior of contemporary art, following the hegemonic Anglo-Saxon discourse. My father insisted on reading Guadalupe J. Codinach to remember that such colonies did not exist and that the label “Latin America” ​​is a submission to the French. I will explain in a very succinct way: the only gold that reached the peninsula was that of taxes, the so-called “fifth royal”, that is, 20% of all activities carried out in Spain, including the American, went to the Crown, which means that 80% of the gold (and other resources) stayed there, in the viceroyalties – what we would nowadays call autonomous communities – in the form of infrastructures (bridges, irrigation systems, universities, hospitals). In addition, in exchange for these goods, they received manufactured products, especially from China – does that ring a bell? – like the Manila scarf or, curiously enough, fascinating religious images. The rights and duties were the same for nationals on both sides of the Atlantic. It’s true that Madrid was the administrative capital, but in the Viceroyalty of New Spain — which is today half of the United States, Mexico, part of Central America, and the Philippines — Mexico City was the economic capital, none the less than the richest on the planet at that time. This week in the seminar ‘Ethics and aesthetics: the moral, social and political commitment of the artist and his work. Censorship and Cancellation in Art’, held at the Cendeac, in addition to seeing my dear Rebeca Argudo in the garden defending the artist’s amorality, we heard Félix Ovejero confirm that two hundred years from now, none of us will be able to make the moral judgments of the moment would resist, just as, I might add, many behaviors that took place in that period, which nevertheless offered exceptional social and political guarantees for the time, may now seem offensive to us. What some works of “Chosen Memories” do directly is that they falsify history because, to paraphrase Marcelo Gullo, the Latin American left has become the cheapest labor force of “Yankee Imperialism” they supposedly intended to fight . So the book he’s about to write isn’t “How Spain Stole Our Gold,” but “How Yankee Imperialism Created Legendary Black Contemporary Art.”
Source: La Verdad

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