If our fragmentary experience of Mexico City could be summarized in any way (after all, how can you even summarize a fractured city?), I think its essence would cohere around two points: a captivating personality and a “progressive” rhetoric of Cuauhtemoc Medina and the perpetual lamentations over the Mexican cultural policy model. While seemingly incongruous, these two moments inform one another and seem to capture the contradictions of the megalopolis. The city sets the stage for as much hope as hopelessness, and I am reminded of the constant negotiation I have to undertake with the two.
Cuauhtemoc Medina rocks my world.
By day four it was quite apparent that Mexico City is full of charismatic leaders and cultural practitioners. Yet, none of them was as straight forward and blunt as Cuauhtemoc Medina, an art historian, critic and curator. Despite having been stuck at the Madrid airport for several hours, fresh off the plane Medina gave us a forceful oratory on the state of Mexican art and his own involvement in the project of creating contemporary discourse on the Mexican art in the globalized art world: all of that while frantically smoking cigarettes and gesturing energetically.
The most refreshing about Medina´s talk was his transparency and willingness to explicitly lay out his agenda. This is very much unlike anything I have seen from mostly cautious American academics in the recent months — perhaps because the stakes of his project are so high. While trampling any illusions of the inclusiveness of art historical discourses, Medina revealed his strategy for “inserting” Mexican artists into the global art history. If the history was written violently in the first place, its re-writing must be equally violent, Medina implied. His project´s success appeared to be highly contingent upon a careful and razor-sharp selection criteria for the contemporary Mexican narrative. Two guidelines were made apparent to us: the work had to be political and had to belong to the broadly understood ¨new media.¨
Medina´s talk reinforced without any illusions how closed were the circuits in which contemporary art circulated. While his own project might at least temporarily appear complete (as he himself suggested during the talk), I am still unsure how to undertake the project of opening up the spaces and forging connections between the circuits that seem to me to be out of the reach. This is said not to sound pessimistic, but to remind myself of the importance of strategy and tactics guiding my work.
The grass is always greener…
It might be worth it to summarize our reflections on the visit to Mexico City with a close look at our conceptions of cultural policy. From the American perspective, it is easy to bemoan the lack of the governmental involvement in culture, as it often happens — for example — in the mourning of the perceived decline of the NEA after the “culture wars.” It strikes me that it often appears to us that if only the governmental funding had been a little better, our work as cultural practitioners would be much easier and more productive.
The reversal of our common complaint was quite striking in Mexico City. Virtually all the museum professionals we spoke to lamented the dependence of their institutions — both in terms of funding and the choice of leadership — on the changing caprices of the political parties in power. From the viewpoint of the Mexican administrators, it was the centralized governmental cultural policy that effectively hampered their professional efforts. Notoriously mentioned were regularly changing leadership, unprofessional staff and directorial nominations as well as centralized accumulation of the institutional revenues. Our speakers suggested that an answer to the problem would be a greater corporate and private involvement in the institutional support.
Given the fact that it appears that in reality neither American nor Mexican model of cultural policy comes close to an ideal, it might be fruitful for us to recognize that — as both Ery Camara and Rita Eder indicated — cultural policy essentially seeks to instrumentalize culture in the name of the forces in power: be it governmental, corporate or private entities. Hence, the challenge for us, the culture practitioners, lies in developing strategies that will allow us to pursue our work despite of — or perhaps even against — the cultural policy that is given to us.
While particular tactics of the professionals we met might not have been readily apparent to us, it seems that building institutions around strong individuals and even boisterous egos was one common strategy that the Mexican administrators and historians eagerly adopted. Colorful personalities of Ery Camara or Cuauhtemoc Medina will not be easy to forget. The question for ourselves is how we choose to deal with the environment we work in and what approaches we take on in order to make our own work — as well as the work of the others — happen.
~Dorota
Tags: Cuauhtemoc Medina, cultural policy, Mexico City, private funding, state funding
