The text discusses two events that changed the vision of and position on the performance genre and its practices within Columbian art: in 1990, first prize at the XXXIII Salón Nacional de Artistas was awarded to María Teresa Hincapié (1954-2008) for her performance Una cosa es una cosa [A Thing is A Thing]; later that same year, the Helena Producciones collective was formed in order to, among other things, organize the Festival de Performance of Cali. This text discusses the difficult context in which performance gained legitimacy. Both events, Cerón asserts, were important insofar as they went beyond artistic conventions and generated ruptures in the Colombian art circuit in recognition of performance and its interest for contemporary art in the country.
Cerón formulates a “reading of the body” as a residue of effects external to the anatomical body. This position, in conjunction with a reading of the body as a socio-political entity, gives rise to an understanding of performance as a practice of resistance or of opposition to attempts to categorize multiple genders and sexualities. On the basis of this assertion, Cerón focuses on works and artists—many of them women—that circulate outside the art world. Cerón asserts that these women saw the performance genre as a privileged sphere in which to undermine cultural stereotypes and to find a place in the historical sphere from which they had been excluded due to sexism. Although Cerón does not attempt to limit the importance of performance, he ends up reducing it to a social gesture to which overcoming conventional paradigms, as well as inclusion and activism, are central. This approach must be reviewed insofar as it unwittingly leaves out performance practices that employ artistic logics, that is, that operate from within and for the art system. In that, Cerón view reduces the spectrum of performance to a handful of current practices.
A curator and critic from Bogotá, Jaime Cerón (b. 1967) was the director of the Visual Arts Division of the Instituto de Cultura y Turismo. He has taught art at the Universidad Jorge Tadeo Lozano, the Universidad de los Andes, the Universidad Nacional of Colombia, the Escuela Superior de Arte of Bogotá, and the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana. He is currently a guest professor in history and theory of art at the Universidad de los Andes, and a freelance curator who has developed projects for a number of institutions, such as the Museo de Antioquia in Medellín.