Dis-Cursis

The weekly Colombian television show Correo Especial on June 7, 1978, begins by showing a woman walking through a narrow, busy, and cluttered flea market.1 She wears a traditional ruana, Colombia’s peasant wool poncho, with a short skirt. Massive demographic changes in the midtwentieth century engendered this type of hybrid fashion, an attempt to resolve the local and traditional with the modern and international. This was a time rife with cultural tensions wrought by what the modernization theorist Walt Whitman Rostow called the transitional stage of development in a society ready for “takeoff ” toward modernity.2 The camera suddenly shifts to a pile of furniture for sale: a wicker crib, a metal bedframe, and a collapsible cot. The reporter Gloria Valencia de Castaño, barely visible through breaks in the crowd, announces that the Pasaje Rivas, this vibrant flea market in which she is standing, has “entered into history . . . thanks to the use and misuse [of its wares] by the artist Beatriz González.” As two men carrying furniture pass through the narrow market alley, we notice that the artist has been standing next to the reporter all along. A spectator familiar with González’s artistic production would immediately connect the wicker cribs to Baby Johnson in situ (1971; figure I.1), in which the artist assembled her painting of a Johnson and Johnson baby advertisement into a wicker carriage.3 The bedframes remind the viewer of Camafeo (Cameo [1971]; figure I.2), in which González inserted a medallion portrait of Beethoven into a pink metal bedframe decorated with stenciled flowers that the art critic Marta Traba called “repulsive open corollas.”4 The title Camafeo carries the double meaning of “cameo” and “ugly bed,” connecting a musical icon of legitimate culture in no uncertain terms with bad taste. Likewise, in Mutis por el foro (Exit Stage Rear [1973]; figure I.3) González placed her commercial enamel version of Pedro Alcántara Quijano’s El Libertador Muerto (ca. 1930) — a “representation of a representation” — in the place of a mattress on a red metal bedframe that she purchased at the Pasaje Rivas.5 The modest bed reminded the artist of Bolívar’s desolate passing in Santa Marta in 1830. Reflecting on Exit Stage Rear González dryly wondered, “Dead Bolívar, isn’t it best for him to rest on a bed?”6 All three works reproduce immediately recognizable images taken from the mass media or, in the case of Alcántara Quijano’s iconic patrimonial painting, repro-