Alternativa was the name of a leftist magazine published in Colombia in the seventies, one particularly critical of the government. Its director was journalist Enrique Santos Calderón; its editor-in-chief was journalist and writer Antonio Caballero; writer Gabriel García Márquez (1927?2014) was the magazine’s editorial adviser.
The interview “El Salón Nacional de Pintura: En el país de los ciegos, el tuerto es rey” (whose title is taken from something that artist Luis Caballero says during the interview) evidences certain discussions surrounding the XXVII Salón Nacional de Artistas. Some segments of the cultural sphere were highly critical of the decision to grant a prize to the installation Alacena con zapatos viejos (1978), a work that has subsequently become an icon of Conceptual art from Colombia.
That work was made by a Barranquilla-based art collective that called itself El Sindicato, a group active from June 1976 through 1979. To make the piece, the artists gathered old shoes in the streets and trash dumps of their city and its port and nailed them to a wooden cabinet. Though the assemblage was criticized on the local milieu, it was submitted to the Salón Nacional in Bogotá, where it was granted first prize. The members of the jury for that edition of the Salón Nacional were Brazilian critic and curator Aracy Amaral (b. 1930), Waldo Rasmussen (1928?2013), the director of the New York Museum of Modern Art (MOMA), and Colombian artist Santiago Cárdenas (b. 1937). Writer Eduardo Márceles Daconte described the piece as a work that “attempts to demystify the Salón’s content as a whole […]. The work re-creates the situation of social and urban decay experienced by the coastal city” [see “El XXVII Salón Nacional de Artes Visuales: reflexiones y argumentos,” doc. no. 1133541]. Artist Ana Mercedes Hoyos (b. 1942) was awarded second prize for her work Atmósfera, a white atmospheric painting.
