PANEL
THE EROTIC OF THINGS. ART, BETWEEN DESIRE AND CONSUMPTION

The exhibition Appearance Stripped Bare: Desire and the Object in the Work of Marcel Duchamps and Jeff Koons, Even stems from the idea that although at first sight they can seem opposite artists, Duchamp and Koons questioned–each in their own way–the function of objects and the fascination for consumer goods. At the same time, they developed individual philosophies on desire and taste, and also proposed new ways of viewing art and the self. In this panel, guests will explore—as these two artists did in their own work—relationships between sexuality and the culture of consumption, and will also examine the way in which artists participate in the new economies of desire.

Coordinated by María Minera.

Guests: Graciela Speranza, Irmgard Emmelhainz, José Luis Barrios, Néstor García Canclini

Graciela Speranza is an essayist, narrator and film scriptwriter. She received her doctorate in literature from the Universidad de Buenos Aires, where she taught Argentine literature. Since 2009 she has been a professor in the Department of Arts at the Universidad Torcuato Di Tella. Among other books she has published the essays Fuera de campo, Literatura y arte argentinos después de Duchamp, Atlas portátil de América Latina (finalist of the Premio Anagrama de Ensayo), Cronografías. Arte y ficciones de un tiempo sin tiempo, and two novels, Oficios ingleses and En el aire. In 2002 she received the Guggenheim Fellowship and in 2012, as a result of the Getty Research Institute’s “Surrealism in Latin America” project, she edited with Rita Eder and Dawn Ades the anthological volume Surrealism in Latin America. Vivísimo muerto. In 2014 she was Tinker Visiting Professor at Columbia University, and in 2018 she was Visiting Professor at Cornell University. As a scriptwriter she collaborated in films by Alberto Fischerman, Lucrecia Martel, Adrián Caetano and Diego Lerman. As a cultural critic she collaborated in Crisis, Babel, Página 12, Clarín and La Nación. Since 2003, with Marcelo Cohen, she has directed literature and arts magazine Otra parte.

Irmgard Emmelhainz earned her BA in art history from the Universidad de las Américas-Puebla (2001), and her MA in art history, criticism and theory from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago with a concentration in experimental cinema (2003) supported by Fulbright-García Robles and Fundación Jumex grants. From 2003 to 2009 she realized her doctorate at the art department of the University of Toronto where she focused on the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, with the support of the prestigious Connaught grant. Since fall of 2012 she teaches critical theory at the Escuela Nacional de Escultura, Pintura y Grabado La Esmeralda and since 2014 she teaches documentary cinema in CENTRO. She has published Alotropías en la trinchera evanescente: estética y geopolítica en la era de la guerra total (BUAP 2012), La tiranía del sentido común: la reconversión neoliberal de México (Paradiso, 2016), El cielo está incompleto, cuadernos de viaje en Palestina (Taurus, 2017) y Jean-Luc Godard’s Political Filmmaking (Palgrave-Macmillan 2019).

José Luis Barrios Master in Philosophy and PhD in Art History from UNAM. His areas of research and teaching are aesthetics, art theory and contemporary art. He is a full-time research professor in the Department of Philosophy of the UIA and a professor in Faculty of Philosophy and Letters, UNAM. He has published nine books and more than fifty articles in specialist art and cultural criticism journals. He was curator of Welcome to Paradise. Oswaldo Ruíz, Centro de la Imagen, México y del Pabellón de México at the 54th Venice Biennial.

Néstor García Canclini is Distingueshed Professor at the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana in Mexico and emeritus researcher with the Sistema Nacional de Investigadores. He has been visiting professor in Austin, Duke, New York, Stanford, Barcelona, Buenos Aires, and Sao Paolo universities. He has received the Guggenheim Fellowship and other international awards, among them the Book Award from the Latin American Studies Association for Hybrid Cultures. His main publications have been translated to English, French, Italian, Portuguese, and Korean. In 2014 he was awarded the National Prize for Arts and Sciences in Mexico. Currently he studies the relationship between anthropology, aesthetics, reading, creative strategies, and cultural networks of the young generation. His most recent publication is a fiction, Pistas falsas (False clues) de Sexto Piso.