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14/3/2000

Erogena

Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil, Mexico City

Sexuality - with the multiplication of its public icons and the open debate of its private practices has inundated almost all areas of our vision and shaded almost all of our social behavior. Some, proud of their generation, will defend that they were the ones to have brought about this openness in the sixties. In today's world, soap operas, the world of commercial advertising, the glamour of the stars, the most serious literature, the most pleasing music and even magazines for fine ladies have incorporated sexual desire and erotic energy as a dynamic of relationships. This dynamic reflects the social body together and is a first order indication of (self) esteem. The debates on the identity and fragility of sexual roles imposed by society along with the polemics and campaigns regarding AIDS and its prevention have ended up deactivating those cultural taboos which impeded us from seeing the importance of sex not only for the individual, but also for an emotionally mature and politically democratic society.

Many museums of modern art, in their inherited elitism, maintain themselves aloof from a phenomenon so obvious not only in cultural life of several recent generations, but also in the repetoirs of modern art itself. Expositions like Masculin Feminin, French Kiss, Amours, or Skin..., realized by museums of the size of the Centre Pompidou or the Cartier Foundation have have given the theme distinct perspectives but the same relevance.. In Mexico, even when some expositions have been dedicated to the body, an elusive attitude has always prevailed toward the sexual energy that moves it and, above all, a conservative attitude toward the mental phantasms with which sex questions our our modes of conduct. (With the exception the participative examples from the Lesbian-Gay Week organized by the Chopo Museum). Contrary to this museological practice, a good number of prestigious Mexican artists - even some who are not young - have worked on sexuality, desire and its representation without any self censure. The youngest artists, perhaps because of their youth, circulate without any problem in a social venue where the erotic and even the pornographic are present.

This exposition, entitled Erógena, proposes to provide a place for these works and to the most scabrous preoccupations that they incarnate. We have departed from the artistic quality of the work and of its inscription in the post vanguard and not from a thematic principle or the exercise of a minority representation. The show - explicit in its radicalism - is directed toward adults who are disposed to be confronted by its theme, the modernity of its images and, above all, the critical discourse that these images encourage.

Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil Mexico City, MX Mexico

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