Collectivism after Modernism - autonomous learning - Blogs

170 Rubén Gallo
with the government’s policies of violent repression. In one of its documents,
the group claimed that “working in a group, that is to say, as a collective,
was a necessary step to confront both the state’s bureaucratic apparatus that
administers cultural life and the elitist maWas which—consciously or unconsciously—reproduce
the dominant ideology.” 8 One of Proceso Pentágono’s
most pressing concerns was to Wnd alternative exhibition venues that could
exist outside the “state’s bureaucratic apparatus.”
This refusal to participate in government institutions led the groups
away from the museum—a decision that, as Gregory Sholette has shown, was
taken by most activist artists around the world—and out on the street. 9 To
drive this point home, Proceso Pentágono staged one of its Wrst projects, “A
nivel informativo” (On an Informational Level, 1973) on a street outside
Mexico City’s most ofWcial museum: the Palace of Fine Arts, a corny, pretentious,
cake-like marble behemoth that was the last public project commissioned
by dictator PorWrio Díaz before being ousted by the revolution in 1910.
“A NIVEL INFORMATIVO” (1973):
BRINGING ART OUT ON THE STREET
The venue for “A nivel informativo” was politically charged. More than any
other government space, Bellas Artes, as the Palace of Fine Arts is known
to city dwellers, illustrated the vast disconnect between cultural institutions
and everyday life in the city. Bellas Artes stands in one of the liveliest and
most vibrant working-class neighborhoods in the city—the Centro—but its
interior is a cold, tomblike, marble gallery. Outside there are crowds of street
vendors, book sellers peddling Marxist treatises carefully laid out on white
sheets on the sidewalk, Indian women begging for money with their babies
in tow, young couples making out, children screaming, and all kinds of people
making a racket—young and old, rich and poor, employed and unemployed;
inside, there are empty galleries illuminated by crystal chandeliers.
The street outside Bellas Artes is dirty, full of food, garbage, detritus
left behind by the crowds; inside, the marble Xoors are kept spotless by
an army of sweepers and cleaners. Outside, there is street culture: impromptu
performers—Wre-eaters, kids dressed as clowns, fortune-tellers—offering their
services for a few pesos. Inside there is a ghostly space devoted to opera, ballet,
and other spectacles of High Culture. Theodor Adorno once pointed
out that the words “Museum and mausoleum are connected by more than
phonetic association. They testify to the neutralization of culture,” and nowhere
is this more evident than around Bellas Artes: the street teems with
life; the museum is a mausoleum, a tomb, a dead space. 10
When Proceso Pentágono was invited to present a project at