Sistema Regional de Información
en línea para Revistas Científicas de América Latina,
el Caribe, España y Portugal

This paper aims to point out some of the fundamental categories of Octavio Paz's art criticism between 1950 and 1967 such as significance, appearance and poetry, to show that the notion of "rupture", which the poet described in 1950 and his retake in the sixties make a profound questioning of Mexican modernity, suggesting a theory of postmodernity and the local neo-avantgarde. In addition to the text called Tamayo in Mexican painting (1950), reference will be made to four other essays: From criticism to the offering (1960); Presentation of Pedro Coronel (1961); The price and significance (1963); Presence and present: Baudelaire art critic (1967). From my perspective, it is in these five essays that a program and conceptualization of his criticism can be found, based on readings he makes of Kant, Heidegger and structuralism among others, whose influence is evident but never cited. Furthermore, it will be noted that Paz's art criticism is constitutive of his general thought and not just a mere contingency of his work.

The work seeks to observe, through photography, the way in which Chilean society sees the Mapuche-Williche. According to this research, the Mapuche-Williche managed to adapt to the new reality of being a colonized people by cleverly using the ways they were seen by Chilean society. The methodology applied to observe the sources and to understand this phenomenon of visuality was an adaptation of Walter Benjamin's "Dialectics of Seeing", analysed, and interpreted by Buck-Morss. For this work, the dialectical centre will not be on the concept of "Commodity", but will focus on the concept of "Otherness", which will allow a better analysis of how each of these societies is viewed when one of them seeks to become dominant and the other, in a process of subalternisation, learns to use the codes of the other to maintain and resist, establishing power relations that are more favourable to it. The sources for this research were photographs and studio photographs, regional newspapers of the time, and memorials and letters constructed by the Mapuche-Williche.

  This article proposes an amplified interpretation of the series untitled The Plague in Ceppaloni (1977-1997) by the Italian-Argentine artist-architect Clorindo Testa. This series contains a set of maps, drawings and murals that works around the incidence of ecological problems in the human condition and habitat. The text raises in its development a triple approach to the work: the visual narrative, the archaeological and the anthropological. We decode the drawn myth structure that develops in the Middle Ages of the Italian city of Ceppaloni where the Testa comes from, and the role of its protagonists: rodents, “spreaders”, the architect himself, the medieval town, and its castle, as well as the itinerary of the Black Death during the 14th century. This author recovers the artistic idea of figuration in his work, and the idea of humanism too. In his creative manifesto, art, architecture, and ecology coexist. In this series, Testa combines the popular and the erudite with multiple techniques. The resulting synthesis is part of the imaginary of society. The two versions of the work —the plague and the ecological deterioration— coexist currently, and for this reason, its revision is a suggestive kind of exaltation of the present.

Abstract This article studies the use of archival documents in contemporary Chilean art, in a context of social demands for access to the files of the dictatorship in that country. Starting with the book of documental poetry Chile Project: [Re-classified] (2013) where Carlos Soto Román intervenes CIA declassified files, and in relation to the works of Voluspa Jarpa and Francisco Tapia Salinas, the article reflects on the meaning of recent artistic and social calls for a collectivization and declassification of archives. It argues that these initiatives that access the documents "from below", against the decree that classifies them until 2054, and together with social proposals for a decentralized collective archive, challenge the state monopoly over public information and illuminate the construction of an “archival truth”, thus constituting a new critical power for arts and literature.

Jorge Oteiza (1908-2003) provided very little information about his years in Argentina, Chile, and Colombia, from 1935 to 1948. This paper analyzes the development of his aesthetic ideas from a close reading of his publications during the nineteen fourties, fifties and sixties and the documents preserved at the archive and library at Fundación Museo Jorge Oteiza (Alzuza, Navarra). Special emphasis is laid on Oteiza’s relationship with several American artists and Spanish refugees, in a fabric where the poet Viente Huidobro would stand as its core. His friendship with poets such as Pablo de Rokha, Pablo Neruda, and Juan Larrea is analyzed, as well as his research on pre-Columbian art and his attitude towards Mexican muralism and Torres García’s constructivism. As a result, on his return to the Basque Country he would build a new cultural paradigm that is highly indebted to his experiences in America, namely his acquaintance with nativism and a postcolonial perspective.

  In 2002, the Foguangshan Buddhist Temple was inaugurated in the Talagante precinct, Santiago. With the aim of teaching and introducing the Dharma taught by Xingyun, the founder of Humanist Buddhism in Taiwan, the nuns in charge of the temple carry out a series of Buddhist and cultural activities. The adaptability of a Buddhism that defines itself as a globalizer will be a fundamental factor for its insertion in Chilean society. However, other social factors, such as the general conception of Buddhism in Chilean people and the rejection of religious institutions, influence the commitment Foguangshan requires for his stay in the country.

El artículo busca demostrar que el Budismo Zen conlleva una relación entre espiritualidad y corporalidad que Žižek no considera en su crítica del mismo como un instrumento más de adaptación al capitalismo. En respuesta a esta crítica, argumentaré que el criterio para entender apropiadamente el budismo está en la propia tradición, particularmente en la disciplina de la práctica. En el Zen, la doctrina se realiza a través de la práctica disciplinada y metódica, la cual se arraiga en el cuerpo. En rigor, la crítica de Žižek es válida solo para aquel budismo que carece de disciplina y se preocupa únicamente por obtener resultados inmediatos, reforzando así el individualismo y haciendo de la e

This article examines the historical and geographical discourses about the Americas transmitted to China by Jesuit missionaries during the 16th-18th centuries. It seeks to demonstrate how missionaries and their Chinese collaborators carefully and strategically created their information about America to support their political and missionary agenda. In the first section, the article provides a general introduction to the mission’s strategies and its relation with the Sino-Jesuit geographic production. In the following sections, the article exemplifies the connection between the Sino-Jesuit production about the Americas and the mission’s agenda through an analysis of its information about the geography, ethnography and the “discovery” of the continent The article argues that the representations about the geography, peoples, and history of the continent reflect three interrelated interests: capturing the attention of Chinese literati; emphasizing the high development of European civilization; and communicating religious messages.

This essay suggests an alternative reading of the “Cook Ding” story in the Zhuangzi as a critique of political ritual in early China and of the violent domestication regime it represents. The story satirically reverses the ritual invisibilization of a slaughter of humans and beasts. It parodies a murderous “royal way of life” by having a butcher perform a ritual slaughter in front of a ruler.

Reseña de  Póquer  de Ases. VICENT, M. (2009). Madrid: Alfaguara.