BEING IN THE STREET... or intervening in public space!

Emilio Santisteban

Consulting services for artists, cultural managers, and curators

[July 15, 2011, at the Conference on Thought and Debate: Art, Citizenship and Public Space, Auditorium of the National Higher Autonomous School of Fine Arts of Peru. Part of this text is part of a set of notes for a larger work still in progress. The images correspond to the sequence presented at the Fine Arts conference.]

Good evening. Before we begin, I would like to thank the Bellas Artes Cultural Center, the Student Center of the National Autonomous Higher School of Fine Arts, the Allinruro Community Development Center, and the Center for Visual Anthropology of the National University of San Marcos for organizing these days of thought and debate. I also extend my gratitude—especially to Fabiola Figueroa, Director of Cultural Promotion at the Bellas Artes Cultural Center—for inviting me to participate.

You, Christians Luna—who spoke before me—and I have come to talk this time about art and public space . But note that we are doing so at the close of these conferences, whose stated theme is art . Citizenship and public space , with citizenship being a pivotal and disruptive concept. Within the conference that concludes tonight, we have discussed citizenship and culture with Víctor Vich, art and identity with Christian Bendayán, Elliot Túpac, and Ángel Valdez, community art with Mónica Miros and the collectives CHOLO and El Colectivo , and traditional visual art institutions, traditional media, and their more recent modes of political action with Jorge Villacorta [1] . Now, tonight, we are examining the culture of citizenship and the identity of the community and the individual in relation to the category of the public sphere as seen through shared urban space.

It is worth emphasizing a point that Víctor Vich has underlined: it is necessary to embrace the challenge of understanding, in everyday life and in practice, that what we commonly call “Culture” is not culture itself, but only a part of it. Some understand it as “aesthetic culture,” others say “cultural expressions”; I prefer to say “represented culture” to differentiate it from that other culture which constitutes its fundamental basis and, at the same time, its consequence through reconfiguration: “present culture.” This distinction between “present culture” and “represented culture” allows us to understand that both are the same thing viewed from two perspectives; and, more importantly, it allows us to understand that there is no culture without people [2], insofar as the substance of presence is the mind that perceives in its experience of the world, just as the substance of representation is this same human mind that gives meaning to its perceptions and actions.

Thus, we could think of Culture as a triangular structure composed of thought and action culture, present culture, and represented culture. At the level of present culture, we would find institutions, practices, customs, and ideologies that are usually seen as something different and more urgent than what is commonly designated as “culture,” usually tied to represented culture. This present culture manifests itself through represented culture, for example, in the choices made by the newspaper El Comercio regarding which figures will have the honor of having a Sunday Supplement dedicated to them (as we discussed with Jorge Villacorta at this same conference). Present culture would be partly implicit culture that imperceptibly underpins our actions, judgments, and pronouncements, but it also involves explicit culture [3] in concrete and evident acts, judgments, and practices such as the decisions that lead to producing—through represented culture in the media—emotion toward Peruvians from Nebraska in the United States, or indifference toward Peruvians from Puno in Peru, for example [4] . On the other hand, represented culture is not merely explicit culture, that which is manifested, but specifically that part of explicit culture made visible through what are called manifestations of aesthetic culture, cultural industries, and enlightened knowledge. Thus, the Marca Perú (Brand Peru) commercials in Nebraska would be represented culture of the present culture they contain and express, just as would the articles in the Sunday Supplement or the exhibits at the Lima Art Museum. In other words, present culture is culture, and represented culture is the culture that is seen and proclaimed as culture, while thought and enacted culture is the mind and action of people; it is what defines and creates culture. Thus, it is easy to see that we, the self-appointed specialists in culture, should not limit our scope as we tend to do.

An example of this limitation was seen eleven years ago when the painter Lucho García-Zapatero and I tried to convince more than 600 people from Lima's visual arts community to join forces, as a collective [5] , to strengthen the work of the Transparency Civil Association during the penultimate attempt at re-election by the dictator Alberto Fujimori. The idea was simple but powerful: to set an example for other professional fields by coming together as a professional group to collaborate where watchdogs and observers were lacking; it was about creating Culture, not just represented culture, but culture that was conceived, enacted, and present. We made more than 600 calls, held personal meetings, and persisted, but except for nine cases where people joined us at Transparency without setting any example for other professional groups, the responses were always disheartening, very similar to this one:

“Are you crazy? I’m an artist, what do I have to do with politics? Nothing!”

Then, after the 2000 election fraud was committed, we met with some of those who had responded to Transparency International's call for collaboration, as well as others who hadn't, and together we formed the Civil Society Collective. It might seem like what I'm about to say is an awkward but inconsequential anecdote, but it's not; I ask you to consider it because it relates to something we'll discuss later, and it explains many of the ways we engage with the urban and the public sphere in our artistic practices.

For strategic reasons, the Civil Society Collective focused its work on gaining visibility primarily through international television, radio, and newspapers, thereby forcing its appearance on Peruvian television and media. We did this because we needed to make explicit the implicit culture of self-censorship that existed in the face of the dictatorial and criminal regime that held usurped power. We needed to make this explicit through media-impactful street actions that would transform the reversal of this culture of self-censorship into an explicit manifestation of represented culture. This was the tactical advantage of calling ourselves “artists” and distinguishing several of our actions with nuances of an “artistic” code: people could stop to interpret what we were representing at the same time as we were performing it, and they did so with open minds, influenced by the almost childlike goodness often attributed to our profession, and by the validation they perceived in the media appearances we managed to secure. With this strategy, the culture of resistance and subversion was able to make itself present, for example, in the more than 40 cities and towns where some of our actions were replicated without coordination on our part, or in the massive March of the Four Suyos for which, incidentally, the Collective made the radio spots broadcast throughout the country calling for the arrival of the Suyos free of charge.

While it's true that not everything we did was for the media or artistic purposes—we even carried out some covert actions employing psychosocial tactics very similar to those practiced by the regime we were opposing, some of which had a particular impact on dismantling internal loyalties within Fujimorism—the media presence of several of our actions provoked quite a few misguided reactions within the artistic community, which accused us of being " show-offs " and "opportunists." These same colleagues initially said, "I'm an artist, what do I have to do with politics?" And then they started calling us that, arriving like flies to honey at our actions, and only at the televised ones, not to participate in them (their passivity was more than evident, with arms clasped over their chests, their gazes always in profile, and their bodies as immobile as statues), but to stop and chat with—and be seen by and with—a certain influential art curator who—they noticed—was also part of the Collective, and who, because of his dedication to political action, was no longer seen at openings [6] . That is to say, many of our colleagues were willing to sacrifice their conviction that political action in the street was alien and inelegant, all for a small place in the curator's considerations. The value of the public sphere was commodified in private, and this is the important detail of the anecdote I just recounted.

It is therefore interesting to see that in these Conferences we have been trying to relate collective epics of building social horizons with our artistic practices which, with exceptional exceptions, are so, so idiotic . Idiotic in the etymological sense of being of themselves for themselves (or of their authors about/of/for themselves). The terms idios and private mean very similar things [7] , privacy, opposed to the public, is thus radically idiotic, and our artistic practices tend to be radically private.

To better understand my point, let's say that the condition of being an idiot is none other than that of the postmodern narcissist who pursues himself and his individual success in the mirror of triumphalist egotism. The narcissistic idiot deceives himself when he believes he thinks freely, for himself, by arrogantly stating that economic growth is good per se and for everyone, citing as supposedly irrefutable examples the Peruvian successes of BCP, or exclaiming, with the certainty of possessing sound common sense, " How cool , how awesome , how exciting, fellow Peruvians of Nebraska !" This narcissist believes he has embraced generous collectivism when he continues to pursue his individual enjoyment through the corporate subject, through alliances with those like himself, through reflections of himself with the same ambitions for pleasure, joining with owners who share the same attitude and similar global talent .

This idiocy is inherent in the financial infocapitalist model of the good life , in which the Peruvian elite so cheerfully pursues the high life . The Peruvian elite is, ultimately, the cynical subject of whom Juan Carlos Ubilluz or Gonzalo Portocarrero speak [8] , a blind subject of individualism and the corruption it engenders. The elite is a narcissist, an idiot, and a good part of our artistic milieu is controlled by this elite that chases globally consecrated images of success.

It is therefore foreseeable that when artists talk about art and public space, we are thinking about the applications, made by individual subjects and corporate collectives, of certain patterns of contemporary artistic intervention in urban spaces that constitute poetics of iconicity inscribed within what literate culture calls non-objective art, as well as within what that same culture calls performance art or action art [9] . To the extent of the latter, we also think of a certain exemplary disruptive conativity , but, given our tendency towards idiocy, we tend to see such disruptiveness in morphological intervention in urban volumetry, or in the generation of contacts in interindividual relationships of enjoyment in the use of urban services, sometimes just to see "things happen," producing micro or mega spectacles of inconsequential but distracting experience for that jaded narcissist who too often is the artist, micro or mega spectacles of what Eduardo Andión has aptly called the gift of the opportunity to be affected by insignificance [10] . This usually occurs because artistic intervention today operates within infocapitalist cosmopolitanism [11] , and in the urban generalization of individualism. This is partly what usually gives urban intervention art an urbanist accent that can make us lose sight of the great paradox of late capitalist postmodernity: namely, the space of human relations par excellence that is the city, grows and develops in the midst of an era of individualism that makes humans someone who does not relate to other humans, but to the hangers that are their bodies for them, the mirrors that impose their successes before them, and the groups of shared interest that constitute their simulacra of society.

This is the realm of formal plasticity in the arts, where the fusion of sculpture, architecture, painting, and performance supposedly emerges—imaginatively, in the specular sense of the term—open to social space. This situation perhaps partly explains why this supposed sociality too often—and with too much public funding and transnational cooperation—produces pathetic results of expropriative guildhood: artistic elites who seize public spaces for their own sterile enjoyment. This enjoyment, in a way, explains the conditions behind the failure of an interventional artwork in urban space, as understood, for example, by Javier Tudela [12] when he posits reasons why artistic-curatorial and cultural management elites, or policies from leadership positions, fail to establish successful connections with the people who make up the non-specialized masses they are meant to govern. These reasons presuppose a framework for assessing achievements and evaluating results that reflects what we are discussing. They propose a heritage-based view of artistic intervention projects that emphasizes the notion of success as recognition that gives value within the art system, they speak of “artistic” achievements measured by belonging to contemporary art languages as a measure of success in what we could actually see as a different face of the heritage view, and they place what Tudela calls a “technical” criterion - which we could really recognize as a kind of social and environmental responsibility criterion - as a measurement of the success of the management of the intervention project.

If we look closely, this vision—quite common among us artists—is political and tactical, much like a surgical intervention. Let me explain: a surgical operation is successful to the extent that its intervention is less traumatic, the reversal it produces of the undesirable aspects detected in the diagnosis is appropriate, and the greater the client-patient's sense of satisfaction. It is an exercise of symbolic power, stemming from curatorial and artistic management erudition, applied to the imagined needs of an imagined beneficiary, even when the levels of interactivity are more akin to the patient's responses confirming pre-diagnoses than to genuine collaborations and dialogues between the public and art.

In reality, our usual decision-making models regarding the design of artistic intervention projects in public places are very close to a tactical model for taking a strategic place from which to initiate the cultural homogenizing advance of the elites, a beachhead from which to launch the attacks of the symbolic system of domination, which is erected by the global and local elite of contemporary art, on the modes of representation of other collectives, on the present, represented, thought and acted culture of those directed.

Our habitual notion of failure in urban intervention art stems from the implicit belief—though we deny it explicitly—that contemporary art, as an elite specialty, occupies the upper end of the art-public dichotomy, while the public sphere occupies the lower end. This implicit conception also harbors a strange ethical confusion regarding the experiences of the public, the private, and the intimate. It seems that artistic folly often leads us, on the one hand, to resemble the systemically corrupt figures in political and economic power (that is to say, certain businesspeople and certain politicians) in confusing the public with the private. This is what, for example, can lead us to perform a public function of cultural management as if it were solely the management of contemporary visual arts (because that is what interests us professionally), or worse still, to do so by working exclusively with artists directly related to our personal professional activities, our business management of art fairs, or our private art collection. It is this individualism that is also behind our frequent confusion of the intimate with the private made public, which is why our not infrequent obscenity of insignificance is shown to all by the force of our interventions, provoking reactions that we then easily label as ignorant.

This ideological framework explains the supposed contradiction between the artist's freedom of expression as a creative individual, on the one hand, and the imagined constraints of projects conditioned by the intervened space, on the other. Likewise, this ideology of obscene intimacy seems to underlie imagined frictions between certain formal conditions of the space and context to be intervened upon, and the characteristics of the use and life of that space. This binary even comes to be felt as personal challenges, as barriers to be overcome in order to achieve the desired successful urban intervention. Let us not forget that we are—right here, even—among narcissists.

This is the framework that often leads us to find ourselves in the streets when we think we know how to intervene in public space. The challenge lies, among other things, in conceiving of intervention differently, understanding—to put it simply—that its poetics, unlike the poetics of visual plastic iconicity, such as that of painting, is built upon the central axis of ethics, leaving aesthetics with extensive functions that mediate the ethical dimension.

In this sense, the intervention should be performative. On the one hand, obviously, insofar as it is performative from the point of view put forth by John Austin when he contrasts the performative with the descriptive and points out the presence of an action in what is stated; performative also in the sense of parfournir , to complete, to carry out completely, indicated by Victor Turner, or of per formare and hiper morphe , pointed out by us elsewhere and referring to giving form and new form in an emphatic and necessary way ; But more than that, the intervention should be performative in the sense indicated by Valentín Torrens, that contemporary artistic performativity is based not only on the combination, superimposition, or juxtaposition enacted in space, but also on the appropriation of strategies of social performativity in the life of other cultural spheres distinct from art. And, even more than that, the intervention would be performative due to another essential condition that is opposed to official artistic institutions, and which is also mentioned by Torrens: performance art shifts, within artistic institutions, from the subject matter of modernist aesthetic work to the subject matter of ethical work. This subject matter seems betrayed at the very moment of performance's artistic emergence, since institutionalizing and classificatory art is already, in principle, re-aestheticizing.

An ethical approach to the performative in performance and performative intervention, or better yet, outside of them, could lead us to reformance , but that will be a topic for another evening. For now, the important thing about this core ethics of intervention, the one that can make it performance, raises difficult ethical questions and uncomfortable moral questions from the Socratic perspective outlined by Miguel Ángel Polo in * La morada del hombre* [13] . According to this view, ethics involves thinking and acting to build a good way of life in harmonious relationship with everyone—both in the private and public spheres, in the individual and in society—while morality is located in the personal and social realm of values, norms, and judgments derived from tradition, with which ethics engages in dialogue by rethinking and reformulating them. Polo says that the ethicist must understand, evaluate, and propose solutions in the face of this intense relationship between ethics moving forward and morality moving backward. Perhaps that is precisely what performative intervention in cities must do: understand, evaluate, and propose new but necessary forms of relationship between citizens, relationships in which what Juan Carlos Vela calls cultural convergences [14] —something like García Canclini's hybridity or Raymond Williams's dynamic cultural form, but emphasizing the growing dependence on mass communication and mass culture in the Peruvian cumbia phenomenon—reconfigure subjective conceptions of culture and hegemony/subalternity relations in the same way that today's ethics would reconfigure tomorrow's morality through encounters and disagreements, consensus and dissent. It is important not to lose sight of the fact that, as Jesús Martín-Barbero has pointed out, the subaltern sometimes sees in hegemony seductive representations of interests that they end up believing are their own, as a form of complicity, while power seizes meaning [15] . This, coupled with the fact that cultural convergences are reshaping the social world while completely dispensing with us, the erudite visual artists—though not with popular mass-market artists—should draw our attention. It raises the question of whether our guild elitism, our specialized idiot, is not unwittingly contributing to this deceptive complicity in which the hegemonic seizes symbolic power even over the cultural manifestations of the subaltern, when convergence is transformed, to our delight and the enrichment of our patrimonial wealth, into something impure, sensual, and entertaining.

I myself have been part of experiences that have fallen into these errors. The first was during my membership on the Artistic Committee of the Lima Biennial in its last two national and Ibero-American editions, as well as in my participation in the fruitless meetings of artists trying to revive it when the Bell South-Municipality of Lima alliance collapsed and Luis Castañeda took over the Metropolitan Municipality.

The Biennial was created as an elitist enclave in the Historic Center, to such an extent that we were only interested in the benefit it brought us, the artists, by placing us on the international stage of contemporary art. The Biennial brought a series of positive changes for the artistic elite, for our narcissistic pleasures, but it also generated, almost accidentally and without our noticing, a series of economic changes for the residents, business owners, and non-traveling workers of the Historic Center. We cared so little that this is why the Biennial could be abandoned, and why alliances were never forged between us artists and the city. This is why a Biennial so inexpensive, compared to other Latin American biennials, and so powerful in terms of mass dissemination, could close [16] . The city didn't miss it, and what's worse, we didn't miss the city, preoccupied as we were with asking ourselves and discussing in the Sunday supplement and in conversations who would replace the founding Director of the Biennial. That's why I thought the Biennial was a good thing to lose; we deserved it.

The second time I participated in such errors in relation to urban space was in the first activity of Epicentro Cusco, the artistic self-management organization to which I belong, and which in 2009 carried out Cita a Ciegas, an international performance meeting in the city of Cusco.

On that occasion, we organized the event with 10 percent of what Fundación Telefónica or a similar corporate institution would have spent. Sixty-nine artists from twelve countries in the Americas and Europe carried out 120 performance, intervention, and exhibition activities over 28 days at 30 different locations throughout Cusco's public spaces. The problem is that, once again, our idiotic union prevailed. For reasons that took us a long time to understand, and perhaps we still don't, the impact of our work on Latin American and European artists was very high, making us a benchmark in the regional performance art scene. But what really mattered—the impact of our presence on the citizens of Cusco, and even on the city's artists—has been absolutely nil.

After that experience, we made a similar mistake again, albeit in a different context. Along with other organizations like ours, we organized a tour of South American performance artists in 2010, visiting European cities. The idea was to generate a series of critical exchanges between artists from different backgrounds, and between the artists and the people of the cities visited. The result, once again due to our narcissistic professionalism—which is neither Peruvian nor Latin American, but global—was a failure. What should have been a critical and politically performative confrontation in and with the cities became an exchange among dilettantes in specialized spaces.

We are now focused on bringing back our performance art event in Cusco, Blind Date in 2012, but integrated into a larger international project encompassing other Andean cities, and also integrated into the organization of the Deformes Performance Biennial in Chile that same year, for which we are part of the curatorial team. I am very afraid of repeating the same mistakes, because I don't have the answers to this problem; however, we are going to try by experimenting with integration between Latin American artists, social scientists, and politicians, and community leaders. We'll see what happens.

Now I will show a recent case in which I have also participated and which, on the contrary, seems to me, has intervened in public space without narcissism or with very little.

These are the recent interventions by the Anti-Keiko Artists collective, with whom we collaborated on projects around the city, such as the ones you see here, as part of the civic resistance against Fujimori's re-election in the last election. This is an example of how the professional expertise of those of us trained in symbolic manipulation can align with a sense of civic responsibility for the future of the country as a whole, and for other national communities beyond our own.

Now I will show some examples of performance art that, in my opinion, challenge us as a profession while also challenging other urban communities.

We are viewing Fidel Barandiarán's performance piece, " Para Fidel ," which took place in Cusco in 2009. This performance is part of a larger project by the artist called "El Gran Altruista" (The Great Altruist ).

The Great Altruist is a project in which the artist proposes that altruism is profitable, always directly benefiting the altruistic group or individual with rewards of various kinds: biological, spiritual, social, economic, and others . The artist himself acknowledges that his project is a matter of professional social responsibility , and I would add that it aligns with primatological theories of altruism, which explain that it responds to the survival needs of species. This concept, from the perspective of the natural sciences, closely resembles what Adela Cortina, in philosophy, has called an "ethic of demons" —an ethic for survival that would be respected and encouraged even by those who believe they lack an inherited morality.

For Fidel , the action of "The Great Altruist" that we are witnessing proposes to the city, to the people he encounters, the idea that it is in giving that one receives . That's what the artist says. I think he does something more: the action challenges individual conscience in the face of the public interest, the private happiness of others, and one's own and others' moral intimacy. In other words, it raises the question of ethical coexistence in the city. Let's see how: The artist has chosen a direct economic beneficiary of his action, an elderly man who is a blind street musician, and who, by a coincidence unknown to the artist, is also named Fidel. He has chosen him not out of a desire for charity, but because of the aforementioned concept of altruism, and because the action involves presented truth, not represented fiction. With 150 one-sol coins grouped into small bags of five coins each inside a cup, and an additional empty cup, the artist invited passersby to choose between donating money to a homeless person located a couple of blocks away, whom they couldn't see, or taking money from one of the bags of five coins. In other words, they could use their conscience to decide whether to leave money in one cup or take money from the other, based on their own judgment regarding the honesty of the person they were speaking to, their own honesty, their own or others' needs, and so on. This inevitably led to questions about their own private and intimate affairs, as well as those of Fidel, or both Fidels, and questions about their own involvement in the private affairs of others and the public issues surrounding homelessness. Once the choice was made, Fidel the artist handed out a card with the definition of altruism on one side and that of selfishness on the other, emphasizing that they are two sides of "the same coin".

Two hours later, between donations and collecting money, the initial 150 new soles became 122 new soles, which were given by Fidel the artist to Fidel the homeless man and also an artist (let's remember that he is a street musician).

We are now looking at Jerry B. Martin's performance, Shepherd of Dogs, also in Cusco in 2009. From what I've gathered in conversations with the artist, this performance was a kind of confrontation with a city he felt was unruly and even hostile, from its municipal authorities to its cultural agents. However, I think that this performance, rather than directly challenging the city of Cusco, called into question the integrity of the activities that his fellow artists from Lima and other countries were carrying out around that time in Cusco, at our specialized performance art event, Blind Date, which I've already mentioned.

Armed with fresh beef bones from a city market, a rope tied to them, and a specialized book on performance theory, the artist began wandering through Cusco, reading aloud and dragging the bones along the streets, knowing that sooner or later stray dogs would begin to follow him like a kind of Pied Piper of Hamelin. While it's true that the dogs were attracted by the smell of meat scraps on the bones, the Pied Piper's music was actually what Jerry B. Martin was reading aloud about the performance. It's also true that it wasn't just the dogs who were drawn to the bones; it was the fighting among them and the raw, spectacular nature of the bones themselves that most captivated the audience and the other artists involved in the event. For me, the performance became a scathing critique of our own attitude as artists in the city, clearly visible if we take into account that the presence of a certain rather skinny European curator at the event brought many artists with the same attitude as dogs following bones, only without any apparent fights.

Cascarón, another action by Jerry B. Martin at the same event, highlighted the fragile relationship between the organization and the artists of Cita a Ciegas (Blind Date), and the city of Cusco. The artist questioned why it had to be the Cusco Municipality's Directorate of Street Vending, and not the Directorate of Culture, that granted us permits to operate in the city's public spaces. It was his challenge to the authority in charge of cultural affairs in Cusco, which never even understood what we called performance art. The nature of the projects was so diverse that all our theoretical explanations only served to further confuse people and make us seem like some kind of charlatans: while there were artists who presented performances more or less close to the performing arts, which was easier to accept, there were also those very close to social science practices, to coldly conceptual manifestations, to almost circus-like expressions, or even to seemingly alienated expressions. The result was that we were only able to convince the Directorate of Street Vending that, despite not understanding what we would be doing, it was ultimately some kind of street transaction (even though we weren't charging the public a cent), so with a fee for the corresponding license, they could let us perform in the streets. This lack of cultural recognition led the artist to this action, which he titled "Shell," of remaining for three hours wrapped like a bundle of posters for cultural events in the city of Cusco, an action that made me see, although it wasn't his intention, the shell of our own event.

Now we have Daniel Barclay's interventional action , Tu Morro W , carried out in 2010 between Barranco and Morro Solar in Chorrillos. In it, in my opinion, and I believe with reasonable agreement with the artist himself, the mental public space that constitutes history is called into question.

Taking as its starting point pictorial and photographic representations of the War of the Pacific in which Peruvians appear as victims, Barclay manages to construct a kind of Pacific Tai Chi: the participants never become an audience for the action, as they themselves perform it with great physical effort and concentration. Walking in the opposite direction to the march of our defeated troops at the Battle of Chorrillos—that is, returning in space and time—we all went from Barranco to the highest point of Morro Solar. Once there, we performed, in synchronized unison for half an hour, a series of positions held for three minutes each under an incredibly strong, sand-laden wind. These poses were the aforementioned configurations of Peruvians depicted in the painful moment of death, and yet, those Francisco Bologneses lying on the ground of El Morro, those women receiving the bayonet thrust, or those Alfonso Ugartes at the precise moment of the final leap, far from being death, were peace for those of us portraying them. A historical revision that, in the artist's own words, constituted an opening of a wound, similar to that performed in psychoanalytic therapy, to heal our trauma of what he calls the amputation of El Morro, which still haunts us like a phantom reflection.

Let me conclude with two of my own interventions. These are two performances in city streets and two very long-term works. "Desatorador" (Drain Unblocker), an action that began in 1990 and will conclude in 2020, and "Señal" (Signal), an action that began in 2010 and will continue for the rest of my life. Both are performed without an invited audience.

We are viewing "Desatorador" (Drain Unclogger), the images from 2005. To put it simply, this action challenges our civic role, from the private domestic sphere to the realms of political power. The easiest thing to perceive is an apparent accusation against others, those who hold power, but if we pay attention to the details, we will see that there is, on the one hand, self-accusation, and on the other, the acceptance of the ethical task of unclogging as an arduous and prolonged undertaking. The fact that the action comprises three performances spaced 15 years apart already speaks to an intergenerational breadth, and both the worker's uniform and the self-unclogged image on the chest complete the definition of the aforementioned concept. The public space here is that of the political role from within civil society, which leads to the encounter between the private and intimate and the public and social, present in the encounter between the toilet unclogger and the walls and doors of 79 public, private, and civil institutions.

Finally, we now see Señal, an action carried out in various cities, including Lima, in which the intervened mental public space is that of the history and current state of symbolic, political and economic power in the global urban society of financial capitalism.

The action consists of crossing myself every time I come across a bank branch or an ATM. This simple act, carried out daily wherever I am and without the need for an audience or photographer (these images are necessary exceptions), reveals how financial capital is the god invoked today, how the financial institution concentrates the power that subjugates citizens and simultaneously gives them reasons for hope, and how the bank building is the temple from which we are watched.

Not surprisingly, the action makes me notice the enormous frequency with which we encounter banks and ATMs on every corner and every half block, similar to the frequency with which in the distant past the walker would find churches along his path before which he had to cross himself so as not to be suspected.

Being a lifelong commitment, this action aims for a slow but long and penetrating dialogue with the city. Already, some people recognize me, in my daily walks, as the odd fellow who crosses himself in front of banks, and I'm sure there are already those who are starting to wonder why.

I believe that this imperative question and exclamation, "TO BE IN THE STREET... or to intervene in public space!" will remain without clear answers, because from our specific artistic perspective, as we have seen, it is extremely difficult to find a non-contradictory approach to the city and its people. Perhaps one way forward is to abandon our specificity.

______

[1] It is significant that the original title announced for Jorge Villacorta's presentation was, however, " Current Issues in the Visual Arts ." The decision to discuss the symbolic political role of media and museums must not have been accidental, and it reflects the influence of certain actors despite the imaginaries constructed within the (non) art system.

[2] A frequent oversight in Peru, not only but seriously so, on the part of the State. Santiago Alfaro reminds us of this, for example (“ Culture as a Resource for Development: The Case of the Folk Music Industry ” in the Latin American Seminar on Communication & Development, Calandria 2007), pointing out how the communities that create certain cultures, and those who live them, are of interest to the State and dominant sectors only as tourist attractions. This is what is happening in the current phenomenon of valuing Amazonian cooking techniques while devaluing what the inhabitants of Bagua and other communities in the Peruvian jungle consider good in life.

[3] This distinction is of interest to us both from the perspective put forward by Kroeber and Cluckhoholm in 1952, when they referred to explicit behavioral norms of which one is conscious, and implicit norms that are inherited and assimilated, and from that put forward by Trompenaars in 1994, when he referred to explicit culture as tangible or perceptible aspects of culture such as objects or languages, and implicit culture as less perceptible aspects such as the essential meanings of life. Trompenaars' norms, which he considers an intermediate level, would be distributed between both levels according to Kroeber and Cluckhoholm's perspective. The interesting point is that the explicit and the implicit would be related both to greater or lesser visibility from the outside , and to greater or lesser awareness from within . And those of us who work in explicit symbolic production already know that the superliminal visible becomes conscious, although, like the subliminal visible, it can produce unconscious actions.

[4] On May 5, 2011, the Peruvian government officially launched its Marca Perú (Brand Peru) campaign with great fanfare in the media. This campaign—promoting a brand concept for Peru as a global market product, a topic that deserves critical discussion elsewhere—begins with an audiovisual documentary that, in turn, praises a series of television commercials produced in a town called Peru (without the accent mark) in Nebraska, Gringolandia [a name we seriously propose for this country for reasons to be explained elsewhere]. The most shocking message of these commercials is, “You are from Peru, you have the right to eat well,” addressing the inhabitants of the American town simply because they could be called “Peruvians,” while in the Peruvian highlands, thousands of people have almost no access to food. The reaction of the Lima public has been one of considerable condescension, a globalist market optimism that expresses an enormous cynicism ingrained in the city's inhabitants regarding their connection and responsibility to many (true) compatriots in the rest of the country.

[5] In this case, by "guild" we do not mean the legal, institutional notion that demands an organized presence and organic life for a professional or labor group officially represented before the rest of the social and political organization. We mean the simple notion, in Spanish, of a group of people engaged in a similar activity. It is obvious that the visual arts circles of contemporary art in Lima and Peru are not organized (assuming—for practical reasons only at this point, and not out of agreement—that this does not include the guilds of popular visual artists, who are usually organized and grouped under the label of "artisans"), and that therefore one cannot speak directly of a Peruvian "artistic system." Rather, one can speak of a (non)system, inoperative and at the same time sinister.

[6] Gustavo Buntinx, a member of the Civil Society Collective since its founding, quickly, given his personality, created the inaccurate image among artists outside the group of being the collective's leader, although he did not hold such a position within the organization, nor was he one of the collective's permanent official spokespeople before public bodies. Out of respect, we do not name the passive artists present to whom we refer. This is also because individual cases are not important, but rather what they reflect about the Lima visual arts scene in general. In any case, parallel to these late and non-participating presences, hostilities were brewing, even manifesting themselves in anonymous posters at Corriente Alterna, the art school where he was teaching at the time, in the very classroom where he taught, declaring participation in "political activities" "anti-artistic" and "not recommended," in clear reference to what the Civil Society Collective, and the professor, had been doing in the streets.

[7] Hannah Arendt, in What is Politics? (1950), recalls the Greek meaning of the term idiot , referring to a certain incapacity to speak and act in public. In this sense, she points out the Greek equivalence between idiot, and its root idio , with respect to private . An opposition is established between public life and private life, idiotic life; and the latter is especially visible to Arendt in the selfish way of life of the German petty bourgeois under Nazism.

[8] Juan Carlos Ubilluz in New Subjects, Cynicism and Perversion in Contemporary Society (IEP 2006), and Gonzalo Portocarrero in The Society of Accomplices as a Cause of Social (Dis)order in Peru , an essay published in Óscar Ugarteche (compiler), Public Vices, Power and Corruption (FCE 2005). The former clearly establishes how the global evolution of postmodernism constructs the narcissistic individual, and how this is at the base of the contemporary Peruvian cynic, extending into the various perversions that arise from it and are built upon the individual detached from the social. The second develops the consequences of narcissistic will on detachment from authority and the norm, and how this is reflected in a generalized cynical attitude in reference to corruption, whether this is that of the organized mafias around the main cynic, the capo , or this is exercised out of necessity in daily life by ordinary people who do not see any guarantee in the norm.

[9] Artistic works of integration into urban and architectural design, which some call urban interventions, are not our concern in this case.

[10] Eduardo Andión, Dar a ver, dar a sentir: una imagen, un afecto , essay published in Diego Lizarazo (coordinator), Interpretaciones icónicas (Siglo XXI 2007).

[11] Cosmopolitanism, instead of cosmopolitanism, to highlight an overvaluation and a textbook common sense in contrast to the cosmopolitan sense of life. Also to suggest frivolity, alluding to a certain internationally distributed magazine.

[12] Javier Tudela: Production and management of artistic interventions in public spaces. Cultural Management Bulletin 16, Ibero-American Portal of Cooperation and Cultural Management, April 2008.

[13] Miguel Ángel Polo: The dwelling of man. Essays on the ethical life. UNMS Publishing Fund 2004.

[14] Juan Carlos Vela: Cultural conversions in Peru. Round Table 2007.

[15] Jesús Martín-Barbero: From the media to the mediations. Communication, culture and hegemony. Gustavo Gili 1987.

[16] I have not had access to internal financial documents of the Biennial, but according to personal communications from management members of the Biennial organization, it cost only $100,000 in cash and $900,000 in debt swaps; and as Luis Lama, President of the Biennial, personally informed me, it received more than one and a half million visits annually. That yields a cost of 6.7 cents per visit.