This is one of the texts written by Pablo Oyarzún and published in the book El rabo del ojo. Ejercicios y conatos de crítica (The Corner of the Eye: Critical Exercises and Attempts). This collection of texts about art reflects the desire to reprint recent works of Chilean art criticism, a trend that arose during the first two decades of the twenty-first century in an effort to gain acknowledgement and legitimization.
The author was one of the critics involved in the so-called new art criticism movement that emerged in Chile in the wake of the 1973 coup d’état and remained active until the late 1980s. The group included Nelly Richard, Ronald Kay, Adriana Valdés, María Eugenia Brito, and Justo Pastor Mellado. Their ideas were discussed in catalogues, debates, magazines, seminars, and publications produced by the alternative exhibition spaces that were operating at the time, galleries such as Sur, Época, Cromo, and CAL. The members of the group all came up with unprecedented approaches to writing and criticism, constantly borrowing from semiology, psychoanalysis, and French poststructuralism, while setting themselves apart from government critics and creating, for the first time in Chile, a profound awareness of the field of art criticism. This group played a key role in the transmission of ideas, which were not always clearly understood because of the cryptic language used to avoid the dictatorship’s censorship and the imperfect translations of the original texts. All of which Oyarzún refers to in this text, where he, ironically, notes his lack of interlocutors.
