Influencia cultural, y nada más que cultural, de la mujer en las artes arquitectónicas, visuales y otras (Women's Cultural, and Nothing but Cultural, Influence on the Architectural, Visual and Other Arts)

Paz Muro was one of the pioneers of conceptual and ephemeral art in Spain in the 1970s, as well as representing the theatrical turn taken in the following decade. Her interventions, happenings and performances illustrate the uniqueness and independence of a body of work that reflects an artistic practice concept closely linked to the ludic and to literature. Shortly after her participation in the Encuentros de Pamplona (Pamplona Encounters), she created Propuesta de transformación de la realidad a partir de un fenómeno natural (Proposal for the Transformation of Reality Through a Natural Phenomenon [1972]), a work which helped advance the proposals of Land Art in Spain. Influencia cultural, y nada más que cultural, de la mujer en las artes arquitectónicas, visuales y otras (Women’s Cultural, and Nothing but Cultural, Influence on the Architectural, Visual and Other Arts), on the other hand, is an analysis of the role assigned to women in public memory. The work, based on the artist’s opposition to the celebration of the International Year of the Woman and shown at the exhibition La mujer en la cultura actual (Woman in Today’s Culture), consists of a wooden square containing four accordion-fold strips of photographs, taken with Pablo Pérez Mínguez. The photographs are of various statues of female figures from monuments in Madrid. The statues repeat the allegorical figure of virtue and the arts or the inspirational muse, thereby presenting the woman as a myth, outside history. “That’s why,” says the artist, “we photographed them and put them in a frame with four shuttered windows, behind each of which there was an accordion-fold series of twelve photos, which could be taken out and, depending on the sensitivity of the viewer, put back into a case.”

Carmen Fernández Aparicio