Art, memory and history in the work of Jorge Marín

Abstract

By the 1990s, the archive paradigm linked the problems of seriality and everyday life with memory. Art then began to be related to constructions about the past, emerging against amnesia, oblivion and the growing depoliticization of society. This implies that viewers of these works of art move critically, appropriate plastic constructions about what has happened to us and question traditional history. Some of Jorge Marín's works are found in this logic, of which his series Sobre héroes y monumentos (2019) stands out. In this work, the artist resorts to the national visual memory to question and update the image of our great men, and he subverts the nineteenth-century and hegemonic vision of our past. The objective of this text is to provide tools to understand how, from art, the liberating epic is called into question as the founding myth of the current Nation-State through the disturbance of the Colombian iconographic heritage.

What is relevant in this case is that Marín creates meaning when he resorts to the use of the archive in order to manipulate and simulate images of national history and, therefore, a reflection that starts from the theory and philosophy of history is necessary, with authors such as Danto and Marchán Fiz, to build significant ideas around art that uses the archive paradigm (Guasch) and positions itself as a political and critical commitment (Vilar, Rancière, Mouffe).