Gum, chocolates and peanuts... or the rumors of something that did not exist

Abstract

On February 1973, the gallery José María Velasco, located in Peralvillo, a popular neighborhood in Mexico City, showed the exhibition “Bubblegum, chocolates and peanuts… Felipe Ehrenberg, works and atitudes.” The Mexican artist was temporarily coming back to his country afer a stay of almost four years in the UK. The show was received with some strangeness and lack of understanding by the critics due to its proposal of new models of artistic production that were announced as Conceptual Art, in a moment were the oficial and private art circuit was still ruled by traditional media. In spite of its failed reception, the exhibition achieved from an institutional space, to generate a break through in the oficial art speeches in order to insert new experimental manifestations. Peralvillo´s gallery was redefined as a space of possibilities that outlined the tension between the institution and its boundaries, in the context of a political culture fighting to seek for a conciliation afer the breakdown, result of the 1968 student repression, but being at the same time part of a government that carried on exercising violent acts and political persecution. This article analyses the critical discourses elaborated by Carla Stellweg, Raquel Tibol and Juan Acha, together with texts by Felipe Ehrenberg, which became essential for the account of an exhibition that up to now, has been considered as the beginning of conceptual art in Mexico.