The author, Alfonso Castrillón, discusses a number of conceptual events that took place in Lima in the 1960s and compares them to other more recent ones, including the group exhibition Signo X Signo (1979) and Acción Furtiva (1980), performance undertaken by art students of the Universidad de San Marcos. According to Castrillón the concept of representative expression in European modern art was gradually abandoned during the rise of industrialization. In Peru, however, there was an abrupt fast-forward to the avant-garde of the 1960s, “an a-typical phenomenon that was unrelated to our reality and deprived of any critical reflection as works were actually being produced.” As time has passed, “young artists have once again embraced the language of the avant-garde (conceptual, events, etc.) for clearly critical reasons rather than simply as a form of imitation.” Castrillón views conceptual art as an “operating critique” (which, in his opinion, is vital and unrelated to the market) that underscores the contradiction between the value of use and the value of change.

The theoretician and art historian Alfonso Castrillón (b. 1935) presented a historical overview of Peruvian non-objectualism in the speech he gave at the Primer Coloquio Latinoamericano sobre Arte No-Objetual at the Museo de Medellín (Colombia) in May 1981. The text of the speech was later inserted as a leaflet in the magazine Letras, vol. 48. N° 88-89, Lima, 1985; it is possibly the first historical description of conceptual art in Peru, as produced by artists such as Emilio Hernández Saavedra (b. 1940), Rafael Hastings (b. 1945), and Teresa Burga (b. 1935). 

Alfonso Castrillón is a museologist, art critic, and university professor. He has published a number of articles in Lima newspapers and magazines, many of which were included in his book ¿El ojo de la navaja o el filo de la tormenta? (Lima: Universidad Ricardo Palma, 2001). In the 1970s he authored several important theoretical essays on the subject of “cultured art” and “traditional or popular art,” after serving on the jury that awarded the 1975 National Culture Prize to Joaquín López Antay (1897–1981), the altarpiece artist from the Andean region of Peru, in a ruling that sparked one of the most controversial debates in the history of Peruvian art.   

[There is another article about the Primer Coloquio Latinoamericano sobre Arte No-Objetual held at the Museo de Medellín in the ICAA digital archive: “Las bienales en América Latina de hoy,” by Juan Acha (doc. no. 1079465)].