The catalogue of the First Annual Exhibition of the School of Fine Arts as document and historical index

Abstract

The catalogue of the Annual Exhibition of the School of Fine Arts —Bogotá, 1886— is read as a historical index of the field of art in Colombia in the late nineteenth century under the assumption that this catalog contains a tacit discourse on this field. While the catalog apparently seems a written production neutral in ideological terms, considering it as a discourse —operating from and to a context and specifically performing a sociocultural function— ceases to become something deliberative and purposeful. In the first instance,

it ponders on two assumptions about the nature of the document: the first, which is not, by itself, the historical source as this is an epistemological and discursive construction of the historian, and the second, that it is not possible to hold the respective positivist presuppositions that ending in the reification of it. And secondly, that the theoretical assumptions that underlay in the catalogue as historical index are revealed, thus making the reading of the historical specificity of it, that is to say, establishing the meaning and

value of a particular fact —the social circulation of catalogue— in a definite context. Consequently, the discourse is seen not only as a set of knowledge, ideas, beliefs, assumptions, prejudices, notions, concepts and values that underlay in any document, but also as a formulation of reasonable opinions, analysis and value judgments on a concrete fact in a specific cultural context.