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TRESDE
Diego De Santiago Delfn
14 de septiembre 2015
The studying arts limbo (my personal experience)
Since childhood I have had the opportunity to live near and experience the arts (art in general). My
parents studied fine arts at the National School of Painting, Sculpture and Engraving La
Esmeralda, founded in 1964 by people like Francisco Zuiga, Frida Kahlo, Germn Cueto and
Diego Rivera, among others. They, my parents, took care to teach me the different techniques of
fine arts: drawing, painting, engrabing and sculpture; acquiring a taste for this last and in which I
would approach further along my life. This continued for several years until I went to college
(obviously I ended up in a career of visual arts, although in a different institution like my parents
went) and I could meet all aspects and diversity of ideas and theories that had about art. It is rare
and controversial, it is like a shock or something that blows your mind, because of the fact of
seeing and feeling how your ideals about art are not disrupted but placed against the wall facing
various historical events and other conceptions. And no one can deny, all our lives we have had to
assume that what we call art comes from an ideological foundation constructed a long time ago.
This idea of art as a transcendental phenomenon that is made by geniuses; those sufferers and
eccentric characters who have captured all his soul and his own geniality in everything they have
done. Oh yes! we can not doubt, ever, of the uniqueness of subjects such as Michelangelo, Bernini,
Caravaggio, Velzquez, Kahlo, Dal, Picasso, and so on and so on. Characters who are the perfect
representation of the universe divided in two planes, a binary world, the world of reason and the
sensible or the white horse and the black horse. Ahhh! sigh Hegel and Kant, Descartes and
Hume, Plato and Aristotle, and other characters would be happy to see that after two thousand
years mankind has continued seeing the creation of the world and the universe in these two
concepts that dialogue between them. However, there is a problem. There has been something
that has generated a conflict or nearly a short circuit in this ancient construction. Imagine that all
your life you have believed that art means to create an object that transcends history and at the
same time will make you transcend yourself as its creator, wow! How amazing could it be, no? And
suddenly come a series of characters, including one german named Adorno, and say wait a
minute, not, art is not transcendent, is a product which depends on its historical moment and the
society in which it is, and is not made by geniuses, but for everything that has been socially
constituted as a person, just like that, in a *super+ broadly speaking. I dont have to suffer or be
very eccentric to be an artist anymore, rather there are a number of mechanisms and devices that
will legitimize me as an artist. Oh, so, then why do I have to learn to do sculpture? Why to do
painting ? Why engraving?
Finally, in the time that we are, it seems that, at least in terms of making art and being an artist,
we have to choose a preferred side; on the one hand some say that you have to get in the studio

because just working and mediating between reason and sensitivity you will become an artist,
because everything you will do working hard is art; on the other side theyll tell you do what you
want but that what you do, beyond yourself, will be determined by a social being and its
institutions. Theres no way, you have to go to one side or another, to Avelina Lesper
(conservative art critic) or Cuauhtmoc Medina (contemporary art curator), for Aesthetic Research
or Zona MACO. So what happens if I dont want to be in either these two (apparently) sides?, what
if I just want to do things that satisfy me and I want to share it with the others? Honestly I dont
know, surely Foucault would be laughing [a little or a shitload] at me, however, even if I sin of
naivete, this is what I like to do and that is why Im also interested in pondering and observe it
critically (maybe Foucault is not longer laughing so much at me, I want to think), having notion of
the diversity of viewpoints out there and avoiding automatical discrediting, but rather analyzing
them the same way.
Dedicated to all those art students who stay in an existential limbo at the time they have to
determine what they want to do and why they want to do it.