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criticisms, and attacks. Perhaps the most striking document is a letter from
Georges Boudaille chastising the four groups for being so difWcult and arguing
that the Biennale was an artistic event and not a political one. 35
Expediente reveals the process through which art institutions like
the Biennale can neutralize the political value of works of art—even those
with an overt political content, like Proceso Pentágono’s Pentágono. The
Biennale had accepted Pentágono, one of the most politically charged pieces
ever produced in Mexico, yet its ofWcials treated it no differently from the
abstract paintings and kinetic sculptures that formed the bulk of the Latin
American selection: it became yet another artwork that needed to be selected,
cataloged, transported, installed, and inaugurated. In the letters published
in the Expediente, Kalenberg and Boudaille come across not as rightist boogie
monsters intent on censoring radical art, but as cold bureaucrats concerned
only about their exhibition and impervious to the wider political
implications of artists’ projects. Their letters strike the reader with the “banality
of the art institution,” to paraphrase Hannah Arendt’s famous dictum
about “the banality of evil.” 36
Proceso Pentágono, on the other hand, exhibits a much more consistent
position throughout the entire exchange. In the same way that their
piece, Pentágono, sought to reveal the violent reality behind the PRI’s facade
of tolerance, their attacks against Kalenberg and Boudaille aimed to expose
the political afWliations—from ties to military regimes to the event’s neutralizing
effect on individual art projects—hidden behind the Biennale’s status
as an apolitical artistic event. Their “difWcult” questioning of Kalenberg,
his politics, and his motives was simply an extension of the critical impulse
behind a work like Pentágono.
But why did the artists of Proceso Pentágono, despite their dislike
of the organizers, and their politics, decide to participate in the Biennale
after all? I would argue that this was yet another Trojan-horse strategy, comparable
to the group’s decision to exhibit in a museum for “A nivel informativo.”
As they had done with Bellas Artes, the artists penetrated into the
bowels of the Biennale in order to attack it from within. In this case their
attack consisted not in diverting visitors to the street, but in exposing the
inner workings and political afWliations of the revered Paris Biennale through
the publication of Expediente Bienal X—a document that has allowed this
author to narrate the complicated plot twists of this story.
PROCESO PENTÁGONO AND INSTITUTIONAL CRITIQUE
The Mexican Pentagon 185
Readers might wonder how Proceso Pentágono’s actions relate to projects
undertaken by artists north in other countries. Street actions like El hombre