Peruvian Art

Articulo "LAS VISIONES MÁGICAS DE MIGUEL BRENNER". En: Rhiap. Revista de Historia del Arte Peruano / Año 1, Nº 1, 2014. pp.  106-107. De: ALBA CHOQUE PORRAS
Análisis sobre la emblemática obra "El hombre y el tiempo" (1988) del artista peruano Miguel Brenner, realizado por la historiadora del arte Alba Choque Porras.

"Con El hombre y el tiempo, el artista logra una pintura de variadas interpretaciones, el volador invita
a continuar hacia el vacío del centro, de lo misterioso, de lo que es proclive a variados mundos: los del arte, de la ciencia, la cultura, la historia. El hombre y el tiempo se convierte en la catarsis de Brenner frente al devenir del futuro y también el de unir el pasado con el presente. Brenner es el Volador, posee el reloj, lo porta porque maneja el tiempo, lo soporta, lo hace llevadero. Crea mundos metafísicos paralelos, compone seres en base a otros, todo es mágico porque se lo inventa Brenner. El hombre y el tiempo convierte a este artista con justa razón en el 'pintor mágico surrealista del Perú' como el mismo se denomina".

At the end of the 1960s, due mostly to the pressures exerted by the radicalized student body, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) went through a decisive transformation. The 1968 Democratic Convention and the activities of the Weather Underground as well as the overall climate of the country also contributed to this upheaval, however, much of the demand for change came from foreign students, such as Peruvian Fulbright scholar, Teresa Burga (born Iquitos, 1935), one of the leading voices of her class. In 1969, SAIC revamped its curriculum, opening up narrowly defined departments, introducing seminars in new media, and allowing students to create their own courses of study with faculty consultation.
Burga came to Chicago as a leading member of Arte Nuevo (1966–69), a crucial Peruvian vanguard group, which had crystallized around the prominent critic and theorist, Juan Acha. Her 1968 arrival in Chicago coincided with the military coup of the general Velazco Alvarado in her native country and, at that point, the profound impact that her master’s studies at SAIC would have on her career could not be foreseen. Exposure to new ideas and theories, promoted in Chicago by visiting artists such as Joseph Kosuth, Robert Barry, Vito Acconci, and Dennis Oppenheim, introduced a radical shift in Burga’s own practice, leading her to abandon her experiments with pop art in favor of endeavors based around the utilization of text and new communication media. Her first ventures into this new realm took place on the pages of the 70 magazine, the key platform developed to host a variety of experimental, ephemeral, and utopian proposals that did not find an outlet in the city’s scene, dominated by the popular Chicago Imagists.
Paradoxically, however, upon her return to Peru in 1971, the ambitious and pioneering proposals that Burga had developed did not find resonance on the Peruvian scene under the cultural policy of populist nationalism. In this paper, we will focus on three of Burga’s mature projects, the installations Autorretrato. Estructura – Informe 9.6.72 / Self-portrait. Structure – Information 9.6.72  (1972); Cuatro Mensajes / Four Messages (1974); and Paisaje Urbano / Urban Landscape (1978), in order to trace how they conform and depart from the models proposed by the North American conceptualists. We hope that by tracing the particular “Chicago effect” in Burga’s work through a critical analysis of body, language, and public space, we can uncover a unique and viable proposal that had been obscured by the dominant views of the two crucial milieus of its emergence.

In the 1940s and with the sponsorship of the Museum of Modern Art of New York (MoMA), the U.S artist Truman Bailey directed a school-workshop in Lima where he employed and trained nearly 80 workers to produce luxury items inspired by Andean popular arts. In this essay, I argue that the workshop was not only an indigenista project to preserve indigenous traditions as its organizers, Bailey and influential curator René d’Harnoncourt, claimed. I contend that the workshop was also and above all, a space for workers’ formation through training in modernist design and modes of production and commercialization of U.S industrial capitalism.

Text for the exhibition "Negar el desierto" (Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Lima, May-October 2021). I discuss two works by Joëlle de La Casinière and Venuca Evanán that represent the active social and political life of Lima's outskirts in the second half of the twentieth century.