Javier Aranda Luna: The inclusive perspective of Claudia Gómez Haro

S

and art is a tool Playful, a stimulus for critical thinking, a liberator of emotions, and one that strengthens the community and encourages dialogue. Why is it considered something accessory, something elitist for the consumption of a few? Public institutions, with increasingly reduced budgets, ignore it and, in the last two administrations, have also persistently and resentfully stigmatized it as a posh activity.

John Berger, one of the greatest contemporary art critics, said that he could not say what art does or how it does it, “but I know that art has often judged the judges, exhorted the innocent to revenge, and shown the future the suffering of the past so that it would not be forgotten.”

Claudia Gómez Haro valued art, as John Berger intended, not only for its simple aesthetic merits, but for its ability to make viewers see themselves in it and recognize its “collective power.”

The story is well-known: in 1990, she learned that a beautiful mansion located at 99 Álvaro Obregón Street was going to be sold for office space. She, her sisters Cecilia and Germaine, Elena Lamm, and Elín Luque spoke with the owner, presented a project, and formed a board of trustees chaired by Alejandro Burillo. Three years later, they launched one of the most ambitious cultural projects of recent decades: Casa Lamm.

This small, culturally inspired troupe was determined to change the art history field, "which at the time was thought to be primarily about glamour." Not only that, they knew that graduates of that field, upon completing their studies, had very few job options, limited to research and academia.

Based on her personal experience and that of her fellow travelers, they conducted a market study and discovered that "many positions that art historians should fill were, at best, held by communications specialists, administrators, or sociologists, but the majority were self-taught."

An important element of what became Casa Lamm was knowing that "we don't make money from culture, nor do we intend to; we are a non-profit, but self-financing civil association."

This allowed them to avoid inserting themselves as just another link in the market and build bridges freely, as they did with the El Faro de Oriente collectives, to give visibility to their production; to turn their gallery into a promotional and exhibition space where work can be sold, but without the commissions charged by many gallery owners, which range from 40 to 50 percent; to digitize Manuel Álvarez Bravo's photographs; or to hold on loan the most important art library in the country, which formed the now-defunct Televisa Museum of Contemporary Art.

Claudia Gómez Haro's work was both unique and necessary: an academic driving new areas such as modern and contemporary art curation and museum management, two essential specialties for museums and galleries that currently rely primarily on self-taught professionals; a journalist specializing in the visual arts who contributed to La Jornada Semanal ; and a lecturer at universities.

The last time I saw her was at a discussion about Juan José Arreola at the UAM Iztapalapa, in which we both participated. She had published Arreola and His World , an interesting look at the life and poetry of the writer influenced by the films of Marcel Carné, Baudelaire, Louis Jouvet, and the great Pablo Neruda, who tried to make him his secretary.

Claudia enjoyed interacting with young people, "you always learn." And she certainly had contact with them. Her recent contributions to La Jornada Semanal reflect this and show us that, unlike cultural institutions, she constantly built bridges with young creators who were developing beyond the institutional scholarships and venues and the gallery circuit.

In his penultimate and posthumous article for La Jornada Semanal , he covers two alternative spaces: Galería Tianguis Neza in La Lagunilla and Casa Eter in the heart of Nezahualcóyotl City. Two examples "of the fortunate alliance between creators and private nonprofit institutions while official support for culture in Nezahualcóyotl City is conspicuous by its absence."

One of Claudia's struggles was to repeatedly overcome the prejudice that art and culture are elitist. She knew that art is not the artist with a canvas; she knew that cultural assets are the gaze of others that allows us to recognize ourselves. She knew, like Berger, that "we never look at just one thing: we always look at the relationship between things and ourselves. Our vision is in constant activity, in constant movement, continually learning about the things that are found in a circle whose center is itself." We will miss her.