« Art Critics' Reading List
GUILLERMO SANTAMARINA
 |
Guillermo Santamarina is an art critic, curator, and visual artist based in Mexico City. Since 1981, he has curated more than 300 exhibitions for private and public institutions in Mexico and internationally. He has been director of several important cultural institutions, including Ex Teresa Arte Actual and the Museo Experimental El Eco. From November 2008 to October 2010, he was the curatorial coordinator of the Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo (MUAC). He is a founder and member of the advisory committee of the Simposio Internacional sobre Teoría de Arte Contemporáneo (SITAC). Santamarina is currently a professor of theory of art at La Escuela Nacional de Pintura, Escultura, y Grabado-La Esmeralda in Mexico City. As an artist, his work has been included in numerous exhibitions since 1979. |
 |
Juan Antonio Ramírez. El objeto y el aura. (Des)orden visual del arte moderno. Madrid: Ediciones Akal, 2009. In spite of my limited appreciation for dissections performed by the history of art to the nth degree on manifestations it shelters, not only did I read this extraordinary account in its entirety but I also found it granted me the excitement of an encounter with a cosmos with history behind it. As if that were not enough, I now find out that its very learned and multifaceted author died a year ago, shortly after finishing this book, raising his stature even more. Consistent with his significant intellectual background, Ramírez’s testament is complex, funny, and most fortunately, daring. With surprising synthesis, he resolves separate and different horizons from a renaissance perspective and its crisis or evolution, explorations of movement, exploitations of primitivism, the passage of objects, and the reinterpretation of the concept of aura that Benjamin, and now the philosopher Juan Antonio Ramírez, have promised to embrace.
|
 |
Guilhelm Olivier. Tezcatlipoca. Burlas y metamorfosis de un dios azteca. Translated from French by Tatiana Sule. Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2004. The route I occasionally take to familiarize myself with cultural panoramas and renew my curatorial work led me to re-discover Tezcatlipoca, the fascinating deity of the night, through the erudite conduit of a French historian immersed in Mexico’s ancient mythology. This is fundamentally a scientific debate that integrates the many legendary and iconographic arguments, which have been accumulating since long before the Spanish conquest in volumes of historic annals, in an attempt to decipher this deity’s untold influence on the daily life of a powerful civilization. The reading, requiring concentration in view of meticulous references to customs and various sources, rigorous details, and controversies involved, at no time dethrones this divinity, who wandered through the Aztec city to be venerated and, after a logical period, sacrificed in order to ratify the continuity of the vital order. Here also, magnificently expounded, is the beginning of another “Apocalypse.”
|
 |
Branden W. Joseph. Beyond the Dream Syndicate. Tony Conrad and the Arts after Cage. New York: Zone Books, 2008. This book unravels a thread from the monumental skein of events and personalities that envelops one of the greatest and most likable figures of contemporary culture. Brilliantly pulling that thread, Joseph reveals Conrad and, in doing so, offers perspectives of the New York horizon other than those we supposedly knew so well. However, this is not merely a collection of anecdotes related to a delightful past, but it can also be considered a preface to a still brilliant course of eloquent art. It is undeniably a meticulous analysis of the forces of aesthetic reception and experience that currently move new generations. This is required reading for any artistic education program.
|
