UNIVERSES IN UNIVERSE - FORUM
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Dear friends:

The post about Bill Viola must be contextualized in the recurring [neo]colonial practices of Latin America art institutions, their governments and their burocratas. You may not know that this so-called video art event had excluded some of the most talented Mexican video artists. The inclusion of Bill Viola as the guru of video art in this festival is a reflection of the cultural politics of Fox's government. In various states of the nation, artists are infuriated because the panistas have the elitist attitude of putting down the local and the national artists. They spend their money bringing to the state exhibitions that will "illuminate" the uneducated Mexican artists and are not supporting the nation creative spirits. In the state where I live, Yucatan, in the two years of PAN governance, not a single yucatecan artists has been showcased in the galleries ran by the
State Institute of Culture. In fact, the only department of that institute which is promoting the culture of the state is Literature, which has, for the first time, created, Camino Blanco, a literary and visual art magazine where some of us (writers, photographers and visual artists) could publish their work.

It is insulting for an art community with a long tradition of video artists that includes Ximena Cuevas, Fernando Llanos, Julio Fernandez and other, to be overshadow by Bill Viola and his work.
I never had seen/hear Bill Viola, but for his videos and installations, he must be boring. I have seen his work in several occasions and have questioned, no only his anthropological colonial tourist vision of the world, but the incapacity to learn the rhythms of the cultures he portrays on his videos. Once, in front of a video installation where a man swims on a pool, I questioned his notion of temporality and his relationship to movement. Then, I though that he wanted to minimalist and, since my reference to that arts is charged with male eurocentric-has nothing to say art, I discharged the importance of his work within the context of the history of video art.

Mexican cultural present burocratas, for sure, have studied at Gringo institutions where the history of Art starts with the Greek (well perhaps the Assyrian) travels to Rome, then two Paris and ends in New York. Otherwise, they would have the needed vocabulary to establish a critical dialogue with the video art produced in their own cultural context, which is, in my view, more enlighten than Bill Viola.

Saludos,
Raul

*Enviado al foro de" Universes in Universe - Worlds of Art"
http://universes-in-universe.de/english.htm