by Jon Lackman | 23 February 2010 | Conferences, Theory
From Artforum.com:
IN HINDSIGHT, I suppose it was inevitable that this year’s SITAC would be controversial. Titled “Blind Spots,” the eighth edition of the annual art-theory conference in Mexico City was organized by Americas Society’s visual-arts director Gabriela Rangel and dedicated to “an analysis of radical discourses and practices such as feminism, cinema, and performance that have originated as ‘blind spots’ or ‘stains’ on contemporary art criticism and theory.” It all sounded benign enough on paper, but doesn’t any discussion of discursive marginalization merit at least a little drama? … Carlos Amorales (né Carlos Aguirre) took the stage dressed in an elegant black suit and delivered what appeared to be a formal lecture about the “migration of form” that took his silhouetted drawings from artworks to record-label logos to designer dresses to sexy women’s lingerie. As he did so, a bulky, mustached man dressed in military attire appeared to his left and began barking out threats to strip-search select audience members. A rather complying young woman—performance artist Galia Eibenschutz, who also happens to be Amorales’s wife—presented herself onstage and was stripped down to her lingerie to the applause of some five hundred delighted fans. A ripple of shock could be felt in the first two rows (consisting largely of guest speakers), and the ever-feisty [Jennifer] Sorkin (who the previous day had leveled a devastating critique against Pipilotti Rist’s MoMA installation Pour Your Body Out as its curator, [Klaus] Biesenbach, looked on with perverse delight) quickly grabbed the microphone and demanded to know why Amorales had chosen to undress a woman at a conference on feminism. The artist expressed confusion about why he’d been invited in the first place, gave a feeble apology, and made a hasty retreat before things got really ugly . . . which they did.
The performance by Carlos Amorales can be seen on YouTube.
