This article by Carolina Ponce de León was published in the Colombian daily newspaper El Tiempo in response to the controversy surrounding the Segunda Bienal de Arte [Second Art Biennial] of the Museo de Arte Moderno [Museum of Modern Art] of Bogotá (September 1990). It is one in a series of declarations written in various Colombian newspapers by the jury and critics, including Eduardo Serrano, Luis Fernando Valencia, and Ana María Escallón. In a conceptual dispute with Serrano, Ponce de León questions his two guidelines for orienting the viewing public: “excellence” as a criterion for selecting work and “rupture” as an idea that is no longer useful. She sets forth a series of visual art languages that foretell the trends of the 1990s. The critic speaks of “languages that propose to recode the usual modes of perception,” “new thoughts on Abstract art,” “derivations of neo-Expressionism,” and “new conventions in sculpture.” Finally, she comments, “without ecological moralizing,” on the work of María Fernanda Cardoso that was awarded the only prize.

The Bienal de Arte de Bogotá was organized in 1988 for the purpose of recognizing, disseminating, stimulating, and confronting the achievements of artists with approaches that would be significant to the art world. In the early 1990s, the biennial gave rise to declarations that positioned it as one of the most controversial and reviewed art events of the time.    During the 1990s, Colombian art critic Carolina Ponce de León (born 1955) questioned the curatorial criteria and dissemination mechanisms of the exhibitions organized by the art critic, Eduardo Serrano (born 1939). Serrano was the curator of the Museo de Arte Moderno de Bogotá from 1972 to 1994. On this occasion, she scrutinized both guidelines for orienting the viewing public: “one, excellence as a selection criterion,” based on the implicit idea that the works have a “uniform” level of quality. “The second” was “that it must be established that the artist has gone beyond the aspiration of rupture.” The critic did not share Serrano’s idea of talking about “Post-Modernism,” which validates everything except an artist taking a critical position about other art languages. Thus, Ponce de León classifies the two contradictory attitudes present in the biennial as the conventional and the contemporary.   The committee to select work and award prizes for the Segunda Bienal de Arte de Bogotá was made up of Gloria Zea, director of the Museo de Arte Moderno de Bogotá; José Hernán Aguilar (born 1952), critic; Álvaro Barrios Cartagena-Bolívar (born 1945), artist; Ana María Escallón (born 1954), critic; Miguel González (born 1950), curator of el Museo de Arte Moderno La Tertulia [La Tertulia Museum of Modern Art] in Cali; Luis Fernando Valencia, critic; and Serrano, himself. With only one prize awarded at the biennial, the committee unanimously chose the sculptures by the artist María Fernanda Cardoso (born 1963). These were structures made of simply formed iron rods on which she threaded a series of taxidermic animals (lizards, snakes, and frogs), which alluded to pre-Columbian mythology and rites and to the circularity of death.   These sculptures stirred up strong reactions in the viewing public, given the process of rendering the work. Some ecologists protested, and others could not tolerate experimental art of this kind owing to the period of extensive political violence Colombia was going through. This file is related to “La Bienal y las rupturas” [The Biennial and the Ruptures] (see doc. No. 858355).