In “La investigación” [The Research] (see doc. # 1099666), which includes an outline of the project, the author claims to have stepped out of her role as curator in order to become a student of the body artists. To launch what she refers to as the “practical level,” Pabón decides to give the body artists the active voice in the text, allowing them to present themselves through essays, photographs and other graphic means that are part of the catalogue that became the book Proyecto Pentágono [Pentagon Project] (2000). This phase allowed her to create an exhibition of video recordings of the actions that were included in Actos de Fabulación [Acts of Fantasy] (2000).
By yielding the task of writing to the artists, Pabón was able to approach the performance as an act of learning, of process, and of exploration (from the body and with the body). But she does not entirely relinquish her role as director: she describes and comments on the works, in some cases using quotes from other critics and/or philosophical quotes to stress the importance of including some of the artists in the exhibition. The selection of artists for the catalogue and the author’s interventions reveal a particular range of interests in the works that emphasize the materiality of the body, the value of life as an intrinsic example of the pieces, and the search for an awareness of reunification subject to basic principles such as nature and vital cycles. The philosophical basis of the curatorial approach underlies those values; although they problematize the transmutation of a (collective or individual) “here and now,” they bypass other possible readings such as the figure of the artist, the medium of national art, humor, politics, etc. There is thus only one possible reading of each of the works and, therefore, the performance is (generally) seen as an event of a vital primordial nature. One might then consider reducing the performance gesture to the inevitable first conclusion art/life that, at a distance, creates a discourse orchestrated by a naïve tone, as pretentious as it is beyond the reality of the field of national visual arts. This trend also circumscribes the performance experience for the artists who only seem to work from the perspective of the performance practice (as an end in itself). In that case, and because of his role as a multi-media artist, Wilson Díaz is the only one to be considered of any significance.
In this regard, we should note the importance of texts written by the artists Rolf Abderhalden, Wilson Díaz, and Alfonso Suárez, who stand out by distancing themselves from the example-clichés mentioned above. They harbor minimal pretentions in terms of social or vital change that might accentuate their artistic interest; this characteristic is visible in both the nature of their performances and their notes.
Consuelo Pabón (b. 1961) is a freelance curator and academician; she earned her Master’s in Philosophy Applied to Aesthetics at the Faculté de Philosophie de l’Université in Paris. From 1989 to 1990 she was a professor at the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at the Universidad de los Andes and at the Universidad Jorge Tadeo Lozano in Bogotá. In 1997, Pabón joined the Universidad de Medellín as professor of aesthetics for art students.
