Inverted Modernity

Blackboard. Valparaíso School, 1972

According to Theodor Adorno, in order for a work of art to be considered a work of art, it had to be, above all, more than a work of art. This de-stabilization between history and language, between openness to other worlds and the search for singularity, has been mistakenly inscribed in a reductive model which has little in common with the consequences of this condition.

Inverted Modernity is, simultaneously, an "inversion", in the sense of being a vantage point facing a program composed of a multiplicity of histories, enunciations and starting places, as a turning upside-down, an "inversion" regarding the recognition of Modernism where its paradigms are diffused and dislocated. Unlike other recent manifestations of the Modern, this time it is neither a case of a melancholic return to the ruins of the past, nor a restoration of the figures of authority in the narrative, but a recognition of its margins and escape movements as a starting point for a renewed project that assumes its own uncertainties and exclusions as a driving force behind a set of historical narratives. A history which is no longer read in the privileged inscription of the museum, but one which is rather heard in a speech of different resonances and echoes. A history which cannot remain still, linear, nor circumscribed to a given territory, but which is, rather, relational, errant, mobile, and which implies, in the words of Édouard Glissant, a recognition of ourselves in the search for the other.

Movement as Relationship

The world has been conceived as a system of unique trajectories, but it is, instead, a set of relationships. The task of the Museum is not that of re-tracing those powerful trajectories, but that of dispersing and disseminating them in an archipelago of connections and zones of contact beyond the control of a single dominant model.

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Art in Public Life

During the 1960's, a series of changes transformed the transcendence of the art object, in order to located as one more object in the world, a happening or an accident in a context of unassailable values, where the very saturation of images and signs becomes a commodity. Under the new regime of the spectacle, art recuperates an active, theatrical and performative condition, in which the artist abandons the studio, and the end of painting and sculpture as autonomous disciplines determines their becoming an index of the real.

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The Margin of the Center

At a time of gentrification and intense de-industrialization of the city towards a creative economy, art becomes an interstice where the margins of a subjectivity premised on difference start appearing.

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Of the Archive As Device

During a large part of its existence, the Museum has concentrated on eliminating the discontinuity of History. Far from recognizing the tension of the art work between its opaqueness and the openness to other languages, it has neutralized it in a contemplation presented as an auratic ritual.

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