The article “¡Que viva ‘La novia’ que viva!” was published in the Culture – Entertainment section of the Bogotá newspaper El Tiempo on September 16, 1997 on the occasion of the performance of La novia (1997) by the Colombian artist Guillermo Marín. La novia was presented on September 12, 1997 as a preamble to the exhibition Ataque del presente al resto de los tiempos, which opened on September 13 at the Galería Carlos Alberto González in Bogotá. The article provides detailed descriptions of the installation and the sculptural and/or performance elements of Marín’s La novia. It highlights the artist’s presence in the work as a (responsible and essential) performance component of the piece. The article mentions other aspects of the show, such as the staging and the photographs with which the artist, according to the article, “took possession of the gallery space.” The article also refers to the wedding etiquette observed by the event, pointing out, incredulously, the artist’s direct reference that was intended as a tribute to Marcel Duchamp. 

This article describes the enthusiasm with which La novia (1997), the performance work by Guillermo Marín (b. 1970), was received by critics and the art community in Colombia. The work consisted of the artist wearing a woman’s ball gown from the seventeenth century. The dress was open at the back to reveal his naked backside and was long enough to hide the two-meter-high platform on which he was standing. The dress had a small hole in the front, at the height of his penis, through which the audience could see a video monitor that displayed images that, while not explicit, were provocative enough to stimulate an erotic train of thought. The article describes the voyeuristic environment created around the installation by the promise of a sexual surprise. The installation piqued viewers’ curiosity for two hours as they sidled up to the artist to take a look at what was going on under the dress. 

The article provides a shrewd reading of the potential of La novia as both an installation and a performance, mentioning elements such as Marín’s apparent transformation into an asexual figure by the absence of hair on his body, the rice on the floor as an indication of the audience moving into the private space, the wedding etiquette that stuck to the schedule and acknowledged the presence of the waiters at the event, and the photographs mounted like a pair of columns at the entrance to the gallery, which supplied a realistic narrative that revealed the artist’s dreams and nightmares. But the article ignores two fundamental aspects of the event: the origin of the titles of the photographs that, like the title of the show, functioned as references to films and Marín’s claim that the work was his tribute to Marcel Duchamp. This lack of information prevents the work from being read as a critical proposal of how we approach art history which, according to the curator José Ignacio Roca in La incapacidad adquirida de escapar (2000), is essential to any assessment of Marín’s work [see doc. no. 1130006].  
 
Guillermo Marín, the artist, curator, and teacher, is currently (in 2009) the curator of the Exhibition Hall at the Escuela de Bellas Arte [School of Fine Arts] in Cali. He is also a professor at the Universidad del Cauca in Popayán. Marín took first prize at the I Salón Regional Zona Sur [1st Regional Salon, Southern Zone] (2001).