Intermediate
Art
By José Luis Soto González
Translated from Spanish
by Louise Miles
 In Mexico, native cultures coexist with hybrid
expressions of a changing social reality. Local, traditional forms of
organization such as the tianguis (informal street market) and tequio
(collective labor project) now coexist with the maquiladora
(factory assembling goods for tax-free export).
And the country’s official modernity, including its
democratic institutions, often lives symbiotically with archaic and
authoritarian power structures.
In this stormy cultural and political context, we
have developed principles that counteract Manichean divisions of art
into “high” and popular compartments, separating modern from
traditional, and dominant from subordinate. We’ve learned from
experience that these categories leave no room for true community
creativity. Such artistic hierarchies promote individualism and the
concentration of power. Collective art allows creativity to seek
political and cultural democratization.
Since forming in 1976, the TIP has created what I
call intermediate art. The work detects where the popular intersects
with the “cultured,” where the traditional meets novel art forms and
technologies. Our research for a project starts with local experiences.
The artwork encourages participating communities to invent their own
ways of confronting injustice.
Our projects serve communities trying to recapture
their historical memory or safeguard their territories and dignity.
Processes of cultural self-affirmation arise necessarily within social
movements to reclaim land, water and commercial space and to establish
human rights, justice and equality. Art under such conditions helps
transform power relations.
This art differs from work exhibited in museums or
auctioned in galleries. It overturns 19th century concepts of art; it
turns art into a political act. It heightens noncommercial
sensibilities, fostering a lived and liberating aesthetic that
transforms the reality of participants. This art production can lead to
a collective catharsis, releasing imagination and creativity toward a
more egalitarian culture.
For the producers and participating publics, an
intermediate art aims to recover the capacity and skills for
transformation, enjoyment, use and consumption of all the sensory
relationships that we characterize as aesthetic. An intermediate art is
a response to the individualistic fragmentation of art-for-art’s-sake
and to the expanding world art market; it’s a response to nationalisms
and the cultural and economic homogenization of the global village.
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Community Murals
By Isa Estela Campos Castañeda
Translated from Spanish
by Octavio Ruiz
 For me, muralism makes sense only when fused with the
community, arising as a display of ordinary people’s creativity. This,
by the way, is how the mural resolves the core problem of contemporary
culture: that absurd division between “high” and “low” art that
results from cultural domination in a class-based society.
Governments don’t provide adequate funding for
community murals because it’s easier to promote prefabricated events,
spectacles, exhibits and so on. At the same time, recent advances in
communications technologies such as the Internet serve mostly those who
govern the world. The transnational companies that control these
resources will use them to subject the masses to their will, programming
consumers in both morality and vulgarity, in hypocrisy and the fraud
that covers it up. The system foments uncertainty of community identity,
and it promotes negative cultural models such as drug trafficking and
corruption, domesticating popular consciousness and hard-wiring a
high-tech exploitation of human being by human being.
In economically peripheral countries such as Mexico,
especially in a time of accelerated change, it’s important to liberate
cultural sensibilities of the local community. Beginning with ourselves,
we must struggle to combat prejudice and reductive and conservative
ideas. We must remember that technology and machinery should be at the
service of positive changes in attitude, based firmly on the idea of
improving human relations.
Community muralism, in this context, is an ideal
strategy for provoking critical thinking and civility, for confronting
the most urgent collective needs, for identifying problems and their
solutions. It instigates permanent dialogue and alters consciousness,
transforming reality.
The community mural is a free forum of imaginative
possibilities that can materialize in the factory, union, indigenous
community, city or countryside. It also is an encounter with our
artistic inheritance—the living history of the present—and with our
possible future. It’s action and knowledge of oneself and others. It’s
theater and fiction, celebration and ritual. It’s the recuperation of
human community and freedom.
Ideally, the community mural is a form of
experimental and creative play based on local cultural traditions. The
participants—women, men and children—discover themselves as ends,
not as objects to be manipulated.
It’s an alternative to mass culture that helps
create a sense of community that looks both inward and outward.
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