Cogs and Clogs
Sabotage as Noise in Post-1960s Chilean and Argentine Art and Art History
In December 1970, shortly after Salvador Allende assumed presidential office in Chile, the conservative association El Poder Feminino [Feminine Power] organized its first grand-scale protest on the streets of Santiago. Voicing concerns about the daily problem of food shortages affecting the country, the association’s women members banged kitchen pots as they walked through the city, filling the air with a metallic din. Although rarely acknowledged as such, this ‘March of the Empty Pots and Pans’ marked the birth of the cacerolazo (‘casseroling’), a prominent form of popular protest that, now stripped of its rightist genesis, regularly resounds on the streets of Latin American metropolises.1 Through its auditory properties, the cacerolazo also shares an unexpected kinship with one early acceptation of the French verb saboter which used to refer to the way factory workers manifested their discontent, interrupting their patrons’ speeches by stomping on the floor with their wooden shoes – or sabots (Huysecom n.d., 1).2 In the public realm of the street, the cacerolazo performs a similar gesture: assaulting dominant discourses via the production of noise, it both performs and symbolizes the interruption of dialogue.
Communication theory traditionally understands noise as an undesired signal whose interference disrupts the faithful reception of a message, thus proving counter-productive to the outcome of constructive exchange.3 Noise, however has also been defended as a valid political posture of resistance against the dominance of certain discourses, ‘an encounter with the chaotic that loosens the lug-nuts of routine’ (Schwartz 2011, 858). However, even among its advocates, two lines of argument oppose a conception of noise as pure interrupter: its status as a meta-operation, whose sole purpose is to make the audience aware of the manipulative nature of communicative strategies, and a conception of this interruptive property as preliminary to the reinstatement of exchange (Hainge 2013). These contrasting readings of the disruptive potential of noise help us foresee the various – and, at times, opposite – understandings of its etymologic heir, sabotage itself, as an operation that can similarly be understood as the anarchist interruption of discourse or the re-routing of the latter toward dialogical forms of exchange.
Building upon these tensions, this chapter examines Chilean and Argentine post-1960s neo-avant-garde art – both in its contemporary production and subsequent historicization – as performing gestures of sabotage. For artists active during the 1960s–1980s, a novel strategy of political involvement in the public sphere – especially in view of the rise of repressive military regimes in the region – entailed the creation of disruptive noises in order both to take over and manipulate the dominant channels of communication represented by the press and the street, two historical loci of public debate. Similarly, the subsequent efforts made by scholars and curators from the 1990s onward to disseminate this production outside Latin America was also conceived as the insertion of a discordant voice interfering with the narratives established by the art historical canon. Examining the writings of two authors – Luis Camnitzer and Mari Carmen Ramírez – as those of saboteurs will thus shed light on their articulation and defence of a specifically Latin American form of Conceptualism and how it fared among the North American-European art history corpus. Ultimately, however, the subversive strategies conceived in both artistic productions and their historicized utterance have come under critical revision, leading one to question sabotage as the most suitable term to account for post-1960s Latin American art and its ambition to become a recognized advocate of cultural specificities in the face of an increasingly global art history.
Interrupted Flows: Neo-Avant-Garde Art in Chile and Argentina
Political Orthodoxy and Committed Artists
In urban Argentina and Chile, cultural involvement in political matters was mediated by political parties, trade unions and neighbourhood life for most of the 1950s. As suggested by the Argentine cultural theorist Néstor García Canclini, in these years, ‘[r]eading and sports, militancy and neighbourhood sociability all blended in an utopian continuity with national political movements’ (2001, 262).4 While García Canclini claims that this model came to an end in the 1960s with the interconnected rise of state bureaucracy and the mass media, specific forms of artistic activity remained closely associated with party allegiances. In Argentina, the Communist Party’s ‘artistic arm’, the Sociedad Argentina de Artistas Plásticos [The Argentine Society of Visual Artists] (SAAP) called for the adoption of figurative realism while the charismatic figure of Ricardo Carpani was, along with his Grupo Espartaco [Spartacus Group], actively involved in the creation of murals and graphic art for the party and trade unions (Longoni and Mestman 2000, 65–69). Similarly, in Chile, the works of the muralist collective Brigada Ramona Parra supported Allende’s 1970 presidential campaign. Defending a subordination of visual art to leftist ideals, the Chilean brigadista was described by the art critic Nelly Richard as a ‘functionary [working] within a strictly prescribed programme of oppositional politics still held by the more “orthodox” exponents of “militant” culture’ (1987, 20). Although in both countries, collaborations occurred between this branch of engagé artists and the emerging avant-gardes, the ‘old school’ continued to harbour suspicion towards what they perceived as the latter’s overdependence on foreign trends.5 More crucially, this divide reflected different conceptions of the political role and social responsibility of artists. As Ana Longoni and Mariano Mestman argue, the differences between the older generation of committed artists and the younger avant-gardes reflected ‘two aspects of the relation between culture and politics […]: if, in the first instance, politics is part of the artists’ identity, in the second, it belongs to the works’ (2000, 72). In moving away from political parties, avant-garde artists grew increasingly convinced that their task lay in a different form of social critique.
Argentine Mass Media Art and (Anti-)Happenings
In 1960s Buenos Aires, the cultural centre Instituto Torcuato di Tella brought together avant-garde interest in installations, performances and happenings via the regular organization of lectures, exhibitions and prizes. It is in this context that the psychoanalyst and writer Oscar Masotta, a scrupulous reader of Marshall McLuhan, announced that the 1960s heralded a new ideological paradigm as ‘machinism’ was replaced by mass media technologies. Masotta saw a meaningful correlation between this new means of communication and the artistic developments brought about by Pop Art. After Pop, Masotta argued, the art object was no longer solely conceived as the aesthetic vehicle of a message but, rather, it came to constitute a gesture that ‘permit[ted] the inspection of the conditions that dictate the constitution of any message’ (2004, 221; original emphasis). One of the key concepts Masotta used to characterize this artistic shift was ‘dematerialization’, a notion he borrowed from the writings of the Russian constructivist El Lissitzky. As artists started moving away from pure reliance on the physical existence – and visual experience – of the artwork, Masotta also encouraged an opening of their scope of intervention beyond the restrictive realm of the art institution.6 This was especially relevant because, for him, the radical novelty of the mass media lay in its ability to operate on the ‘collective unconscious’ of a society (2004, 222).
Closely associated with Masotta, the artists Roberto Jacoby, Eduardo Costa and Raúl Escari created in 1966 El grupo de las artes de los medios de comunicación de masa [The Mass Media Art Group] that aimed to intervene on and in mass media’s ability to ‘generate events, determine people’s behavior, and shape reality’ (quoted in Longoni and Mestman 2004, 168). In May 1966, they began plotting their Participación total happening (also called Happening para un jabalí difunto [Happening for a Dead Boar]), contacting journalists from different national newspapers about a happening, which, they claimed, had recently taken place (see Figure 25). As several newspapers, starting with the widely read El Mundo, relayed the news, printing photographs sent in by the artists and publishing interviews with self-proclaimed participants, the fictitious nature of the event was revealed by its ‘organizers’. This admission forced the misled press to publish an erratum, which, in turn, set into motion a debate among readers. This entire process – the printing of false information, the press retraction and the public discussion that ensued – was part of the group’s ploy to perturb the media’s claim to objectivity and factual accuracy. Moreover, in these politically tense days – the coup d’état that brought to power military dictator Juan Carlos Onganía would take place just one month later7 – the work also provided an ominous warning about the poisonous role that the mass media would play once it fell under authoritarian control. In this sense, Jacoby’s non-happening, as Masotta qualified it, functioned as a trigger. By endorsing the misleading costume of ‘event’, the intervention inserted itself into dominant discursive channels and sought to sabotage them from within, revealing the mass media’s power of mystification.
CADA and the Chilean Escena de Avanzada
In 1979, the Chilean collective CADA performed its first public art action.8 Entitled Para no morir de hambre en el arte [In Order Not to Starve to Death in Art] (also commonly referred to as Inversión de Escena: Acción de arte [Scene Reversal: Art Action]), it spanned multiple locations and performances. One episode involved the driving of ten dairy trucks through the streets of Santiago. Upon entering the city centre, the trucks crossed the Alameda, Santiago’s main artery, bringing chaos to the already dense traffic. In the video footage of the action, captured from a nearby car, the wide boulevard appears perpendicularly cut off by the trucks, while the Diego Portales building, the official seat of Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorial government, towers in the background (see Figure 26). As the trucks’ crossing obstructs both the perspectival logic of Santiago’s urban plan and the vertical elevation of military surveillance, the image from the video accurately captures CADA’s visual strategy as a gesture of intervention, blockage and disruption of official flows, be they physical or symbolic. The trucks’ final destination was the Museum of Fine Arts where the artists unrolled a large white sheet that temporarily blocked the institution’s entrance (see Figure 27).
The first measures taken by the Chilean military following the 1973 coup had been to obliterate leftist visual production from the early 1970s. In a large operation that historian Luis Hernán Errázuriz described as Operación limpieza [Cleaning Operation] (2012), the murals were destroyed, political posters removed and houses whose colour suggested leftist leanings were re-painted. This operation represented the symbolic underside of a much more concrete violence: the arrest, torture, disappearance or (self-) exile of thousands of leftist militants and intellectuals. In this context, the art scene that emerged towards the end of the 1970s worked like a delayed reaction to the collective shock provoked by the coup. Art critic Nelly Richard interpreted CADA’s interventions as belonging to this neo-avant-garde that she baptized Escena de Avanzada and which, she claimed, sought to transform ‘the mechanics of production and subverted the codes of cultural communication’, particularly in their adoption of new genres like performance, body art and happenings (quoted in Ivelic and Galaz 1988, 19). For the Avanzada, a salient gesture of resistance lay in imploding the repressive order and parodying the government’s rhetoric of power, especially in its spatial conception of the street as a space of fear and control.9 The caravan of trucks in Para no morir was constitutive of this strategy. Mimicking the shock gesture of the military coup, it aimed to unsettle the pretence of normality engendered by the cars’ daily commute while obscuring the panoramic order of governmental surveillance. Covering the façade of the art museum with a white sheet could also be read as an ironic nod towards the ‘operación limpieza’ deployed by the junta a few years earlier.
Beside their critique of the junta’s symbolization of power in public space, CADA also devised strategies of insertion into mass media, which at the time remained the prerogative of a bourgeoisie largely complicit to the military order.10 In an action entitled Viuda [Widow] (1985), two CADA members, Diamela Eltit and Lotty Rosenfeld, collaborated with the photographer Paz Errázuriz in the purchase of an advertising space in different national magazines in which they published the black-and-white picture of a working class woman whose husband had been killed by a blind bullet during the military repression of a riot (see Figure 28). The confrontational pose of the woman staring defiantly at the camera was further heightened by the insertion in capital letters of the word ‘viuda’ [widow] at the bottom of the picture. For Eltit, this action followed a strategy of infiltration that bore similarities to that pursued by Jacoby’s group a few years earlier:
The idea was precisely to insert ourselves into a means of communication whose purpose is not to broadcast an artwork but a multiplicity of information: economy, politics, sports. In this specific case, we include an artistic object that puts in crisis the other sections of the magazine: they get tainted with the artistic and somehow become traversed by this artistic object. (Quoted in Saul 1985, 30)
As insertion turned into contamination, the work contributed to interrupt the monotonous narrative of the printed press with a direct interpellation of the reader. Moreover, there was an ironic undertone to this action, whose appearance in the magazine was only due to its ‘passing’ as advertisement, a field understood in the neoliberal mind of the Chilean censor as void of subversive content. Thus camouflaged, the irruption of the image in the newspaper did not only reveal the discrepancy between the free circulation of mercantile discourses and the gagging of editorial content, it also contributed to rendering the border between the two fields dangerously porous, inserting into the tightly controlled narrative of daily facts a repressed fragment of the country’s political reality: the harsh repression of the lower classes and their economic annihilation by the junta’s free-market agenda.
If the Mass Media Art Group and CADA were successful in fomenting a sustained critique of the dominant channels of power, it was primarily due to the ambiguity they maintained as to the actual nature of their messages. Rather than adopting the frontal opposition of their militant counterparts, the artists proceeded by exploiting the ‘flaws’ in the dominant system. In the case of Mass Media Art, this flaw, it would seem, lay in the media’s excessive confidence in their authorial claim over reality. Meanwhile, CADA’s subversive method relied on the dictatorship’s inability to identify critique when conveyed in parodic actions or inserted via the inconspicuous medium of advertising.11 Although this calculated opacity raises questions as to the groups’ ability to actively comment on the political and economic regimes in place (conveying messages which, some might argue, were so successfully opaque they left their intended audience as puzzled as the censors), it also outlines another form of artistic intervention. Where the artists associated with political militancy mentioned at the start of this text would conceive of resistance in terms of acoustic deafness, orchestrating loud interventions to cover the lies of the establishment, the avant-garde came closer to sabotage as a form of interference, whereby the production of ‘white noise’ would ultimately reveal official discourses as rhetorical constructs aimed at justifying the repressive order of the junta. The legacy and place that these avant-gardes came to occupy in the Latin American canon of the following decades would, themselves, be the product of another type of ‘sabotage’, aimed this time at undoing a historiographical corpus perceived as hegemonically dominated by European and North American production.
Latin American Conceptualism: Sabotaging Art History?
Beginning in the 1990s, the Argentine and Chilean avant-gardes were subject to renewed interest from scholars eager to account for post-1960s Latin American art. Making a link between artists’ decreased interest in object-based art and the polarization of ideological tensions in the region, curator Mari Carmen Ramírez argued that this search for renewed forms reflected a politicization of Latin American artistic activity. As artists became first-hand witnesses of their countries’ experience of social inequality, economic hardship and political authoritarianism, they increasingly adopted the role of ‘active intervener in political and ideological structures’ (1993, 158). This shift entailed a radically different approach, which consisted in ‘transferring artistic practice from aesthetics to the more elastic realm of linguistics’ (Ramírez 2004, 425). New-York based Uruguayan artist and critic Luis Camnitzer also reflected on his own artistic training in Montevideo in the early 1960s as a time when artistic activity could not be conceived autonomously from politics, leading artists toward works that broke ‘decisively from the historical dependence of art on physical form and its visual apperception’ (Camnitzer et al. 2004, viii). Striving to provide a new interpretative framework that included a variety of epochs and national stages, ranging from 1950s Brazilian Neo-Concretism to the collective experiments of Los Grupos in 1970s–80s Mexico, these authors defended the importance of a culturally specific context of political engagement for understanding the conceptual turn in Latin America. In the course of this process of re-interpretation, both the 1960s Argentine scene, with its devising of strategies of intervention in the mass media, and CADA’s attempts to disrupt the syntax of power became incorporated into a conceptualist framework.
Although Ramírez and Camnitzer defined post-1960s Latin American art in terms of linguistic intervention and dematerialization, their insistence on talking about Conceptualism, rather than adopting the common denomination ‘conceptual art’, reflects an ambition to differentiate this production from the works produced in North America and Europe by artists like Joseph Kosuth and the Art & Language group. As Camnitzer would provocatively write:
The center […] created the term ‘conceptual art’ to group manifestations that gave primacy to ideas and language, making it an art style, historically speaking. The periphery, however, couldn’t have cared less about style and produced conceptualist strategies instead. (2007, 1–2)
With ‘Conceptualism’ both authors targeted what they perceived as the ‘crass reductionism of metropolitan accounts’ (Ramírez 2004, 425). While these arguments have often been considered ‘revisionist’ – a term Camnitzer wears like a badge of honour (2007, 5) – their most subversive aspect lies in a strategy of insertion into the canon, which may also be equated with a gesture of sabotage. Indeed, Conceptualism did not only plan to shed light on Latin American art as an ‘underestimated project’ (Ramírez 2004, 425). More crucially, it aimed to infiltrate the metropolitan art corpus with arguments subversive enough to unsettle the very convictions constituting the foundations of established art history.
In the case of Ramírez, this posture was first adopted with the publication of her ‘Blueprints Circuits’ article as part of the catalogue of Latin American Artists of the Twentieth Century, an ambitious exhibition organized at MoMA in 1993, in which Camnitzer participated as an artist. Although the show claimed to ‘[reveal] the complexities and variety of expression that have characterized the art of Latin America throughout the century’ (Museum of Modern Art 1993, 1), its inclusion of just about every genre and trend from early Modernism, Muralism, Surrealism and Geometric Abstraction to Pop Art, assemblage and recent painting and sculpture left many dubious as to the exhibition’s ability to address such complexities. Moreover, the show’s historical justification, the ‘celebration’ of the fifth centenary of the Spanish Conquest, felt rather unsavoury to Latin American artists and commentators. While the participation of Ramírez and Camnitzer in such a conservative enterprise seems surprising at first, it actually reveals their ambition to devise ‘theoretical stratagem[s]’ (Ramírez 2004, 426). Indeed, the critical posture endorsed consisted in exploiting the growing interest in Latin American culture in the USA (an interest which, some have suggested, might have been economically motivated)12 to enter the institution and inject into the tedious generalizations circulating about Latin American art arguments corrosive enough to disrupt both the metropolitan view of this production and the definition of conceptual art as it was conceived within the centre.
Moreover, defending Latin American conceptualism in its cultural and political specificities ran much farther than initially suspected as it also inscribed itself within a post-colonial logic, which entailed putting in crisis the binary model of ‘centre-periphery’ upon which art history had built itself. ‘[S]tepping beyond the (synchronic) naïve claims for truth of historicist accounts’, Ramírez called for a reconsideration of the resistant aspect of Latin American culture as a project ‘“not subordinated” to central, metropolitan canons’ (2004, 425–426). In this sense, Latin American art contained a subversive potential, to the extent that its inclusion in established art history would ultimately lead to the undoing of the canon. Conceptualism turned into a gesture bearing troubling similarity to the avant-garde exercises it defended.
These expectations, however, did not take into account the historical limitations of the avant-garde projects themselves, nor – in a model quite similar to the one examined by Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello with regard to late capitalism (2005) – the canon’s ability to co-opt antagonist discourses.
The Saboteur Saboté or the Limits of Art as Subversive Practice
The End of Mass Media Art and Tucumán Arde
In Argentina, the establishment of a military regime in 1966 and its crackdown on intellectuals and trade unions led to political radicalization within the avant-garde. As civil violence and economic hardship further escalated, many artists up to then associated with the Di Tella, rejected institutionality altogether.13 At the time, the Mass Media Art Group was also becoming aware of the limitations entailed by forging a critical message from within mass media art. As Jacoby later recalled, ‘at that time, I started realising that media art did not work, […] it did not have agency; you could not act; you could not enter; you just stayed there’ (quoted in Longoni and Mestman 2000, 295). In 1968, Jacoby participated along with artists from the cities of Buenos Aires and Rosario in the collective project Tucumán Arde (see Figure 29). Although the exhibition (started in support of and in collaboration with sugar factory workers from the northern province of Tucumán) was conceived as an ‘advertising campaign’ (Longoni and Mestman 2000, 297), its implementation reflects a return to the frontal involvement of art in politics. As artists gathered information about the situation in Tucumán, then exhibited in a large show held at the Rosario headquarters of the CGT (Confederación General del Trabajo [General Confederation of Labour]) trade union, they sought to counteract the government and media’s lies and omissions with an overwhelming number of irrefutable and documented facts. In other words, it was the content itself and no longer the channels conveying the content that became the action’s main stake. This shift did not escape the notice of the artists involved, who described Tucumán Arde as the first step toward ‘a truly revolutionary art’ (Gramuglio and Rosa 2004, 319). On the back of these events, and faced with the police closing down the sequel to the exhibition in Buenos Aires, many artists, including Jacoby, temporarily abandoned art in order to embrace political activism.
Should the aftermath of Tucumán Arde lead one to conclude that the strategies devised by the Mass Media Art Group had reached a point of exhaustion?14 Political engagement had revealed itself to be a praxis that overrode analytical methods of investigation, requiring instead a much more radical stance as to what the artist was ready to give up in order to embrace the utopian horizon outlined by his/her political beliefs. If Argentine artists managed to move beyond the self-referential trap that mass media art had become by partially acknowledging the failure of their project, in Chile, it was perhaps an excess of success that led CADA to its own end.
Despite Nelly Richard’s efforts to incorporate CADA into a narrative that positioned the Avanzada in contradistinction to previous politically engaged art – insisting on its symbolic and ‘interstitial’ nature rather than the material effects of its practice – for the collective, such rupture was far from evident. As Diamela Eltit notes, CADA’s goal was to ‘operate on the real’, to create works with political agency (quoted in Neustadt 2001, 95). CADA’s best-known intervention NO + (1983) might, in this sense, be their most successful realization. Starting in 1983, the group invited artists to make inscriptions that read ‘NO +’ (No más [No More]) on the city walls, followed by images like that of a pointed gun (referring to violence and police repression) or written messages (‘No +’ hunger, Pinochet, disappearance) (see Figure 30). As the operation gained visibility, passers-by added their own ‘NO +’ on the walls and on banners which appeared at anti-Pinochet demonstrations (see Figure 31). Moreover, the slogan also became a powerful communicative vehicle during the 1988 plebiscite campaign as the coalition that called the country to say ‘no’ to Pinochet’s bid to renew his presidential mandate for another eight years found in NO + a precious visual aid (see Figure 32).15
This last action represented a departure from CADA’s usual patterns. While Para no morir functioned as a subversive strategy set upon destroying the petrified discourses of the hegemonic status quo, NO + went beyond this initial gesture. By fissuring the rigid propagandist channels of the junta, it operated a redistribution of speech: a first step toward democratic transition. Raúl Zurita, another CADA member defined NO + as the collective’s ultimate success: ‘[t]he dissolution of art in a subversive political action was exactly what we had dreamed about’ (quoted in Neustadt 2001, 81). Nevertheless, while this outcome might help to explain the group’s subsequent dissolution, the authorial rejection it entailed, paired with its popular success also contributed to the slogan’s recuperation, starting with Patricio Aylwin’s presidential government in 1990. While NO + unarguably constituted an iconic example of successful avant-garde participation in political action, the détournement of the slogan to new partisan ends also raises questions as to whether the subversive potential of this latter ultimately dissolved and, consequently, whether the avant-garde was able to devise aesthetic strategies immune to cooption.
If Ramírez and Camnitzer conceived of Latin American Conceptualism as a strategy set upon perturbing the art historiographic status quo, its efficiency should be assessed by its impact on Euro-American scholarship and curatorial practices. Examining recent writings on the topic, two main tendencies emerge. Some art historians have expressed frustration at the way Latin American Conceptualism resembles an upfront attack on ‘mainstream’ art more than the defence of a neglected scene. Art historian Terry Smith verbalized this unease when he accused Camnitzer of ‘reverse reductivism’. Puzzled by Camnitzer’s belligerent tone toward North American conceptual art, Smith pondered:
Given that Conceptual art was the most radical, avant-garde, innovative, and consequential-seeming art of the time and has retained much of that aura since, they [Latin American artists and art historians] wanted to expand its definition to include themselves. On the most obvious level of simple fairness, they want to be seen to have been contemporary. (2011a)
While this perspective episodically verges on the sententious, it also raises a valid question regarding the limitations of Conceptualism’s capacity to function as a historiographic form of sabotage. As we saw previously, the subversive strength of the Argentine and Chilean avant-gardes – in contrast to their militant counterparts – lay in their articulation of a political critique that relied not on ideology but on using mechanisms of mass diffusion (mass media, the street) against dominant discourses, in order to reveal the bias underlying their so-called ‘objectivity’. To an extent, by brandishing Conceptualism as the anti-conceptual, its advocates returned to a form of ideological confrontation that risked antagonizing rather than convincing its audience, thus limiting Conceptualism’s agency within art history.
A second – and apparently opposite – tendency related to the mainstream reception of Latin American art has been one of enthusiastic inclusion over the past few years. Following a path frayed by iconic initiatives such as Camnitzer’s co-organization of Global Conceptualism: Points of Origins 1950s–1980s at the Queens Museum of Art (1999), exhibitions like Argentine curator Carlos Basualdo’s The Structure of Survival at the Venice Biennale in 2003 surveyed Latin American art from the past decades through a thoroughly conceptualist framework which emphasized the correlation of aesthetics and politics on local scenes. However, while providing art works with unprecedented visibility abroad – a visibility also fed by collectors’ eagerness to tap into ‘new markets’ – these shows also contributed to reactivate the stereotype of a region riddled by systemic violence, pairing Latin America with ideas of ‘precariousness’ or ‘crisis’. This phenomenon not only led to a kind of ‘neoprimitivism’ (Gilbert 2009, 14), it also shaped a distorted account of Latin American art, compartmentalizing avant-garde scenes into easily digestible vignettes for a foreign audience and advancing narratives from which any critical tensions had been evacuated. Assessing the success of Latin American art through its late reception by the mainstream, one would therefore be tempted to conclude that if Latin American art finally reached international recognition, it was in the form of an exotic product, a tamed and indexed clog displayed in the name of cultural diversity. Moreover, by becoming the keyword that justified the re-deployment of Latin American art in these terms, Conceptualism seemed to have fallen victim to its over-ambition to speak on behalf of a whole region, thus turning into what Gabriel Peluffo called a ‘meta-style’, oblivious to the ‘variety of language operations, aesthetic formulations, and information strategies’ that characterized each national scene (2011).
Global Art and Local Re-Readings
This chapter has attempted to question the extent to which the works produced by Latin American avant-gardes from the 1960s-1980s might be understood as gestures of sabotage set upon infiltrating dominant discourses. This trajectory has also led us to examine how Conceptualism, a historiographic term advanced both to promote Latin American art abroad and to defend it from misunderstanding and cooption, might be conceived as its own form of subversion specifically targeting Eurocentric art history. As we have seen, while sabotage has helped decipher the complexities inherent to the making of these avant-garde art scenes, it has also revealed the limitations of their subversive potential, which are rendered all the more salient by the increasing ‘globalization’ of art circuits. Indeed, while sabotage functions best when it operates against a centralized form of discourse, the multiplication of narratives that has accompanied the internationalization of art history puts in crisis the contemporary relevance of the term, its polemical valence drowning under a plethora of voices. This conclusion would appear to corroborate the theses advanced by the tenants of a new ‘global art history’, who describe our epoch as one of ‘highly differentiated, multidirectional, and, at times, seemingly incommensurable contemporaneity’ (Smith 2011b, 12). Although this account might seem to inaugurate parameters beneficial to art from ‘peripheral’ art scenes, Hans Belting is right to underline how global art history does not necessarily engender more equal visibility. Rather, ‘[W]estern culture, which once felt up to the task of representing all ethnic cultures via exploration and exploitation as collection, is now proclaiming the future of a world culture in which it again claims the leading position’ (Belting 2003, 70), leading one to suspect that the change produced by global art might be cosmetic at best. While Belting’s account reveals an awareness of the necessity to structurally rethink the bases of art history, he subsequently argues that, in reaction to global art, ‘[n]on-Western cultures, on the other hand, are retreating in a kind of countermovement in their own histories in order to rescue a part of their identity’ (70). This posture is highly problematic for this so-called “non-Western art”, re-iterating an image of cultures whose fear over the loss of structure heralded by post-modernity leads them to retreat into pre-modern shells, re-territorializing art against the increasing erasure of borders and national identities. By contrast, what this chapter would like to suggest by means of conclusion is that the recent attitude hailing from Latin America, especially in regard to retrospective accounts of the 1960s–1980s avant-gardes, has been one of critical re-reading. Weary of the age-old debate defining Latin American art as either merely derivative of mainstream models or absolutely unadulterated by foreign influences, the research carried out by the curatorial collective Red Conceptualismos del Sur [Conceptualisms of the South Network], for example, has attempted to articulate an alternative view: one which grants pre-eminence to the processes of discussion and transformation of foreign models within the local Latin American context. The risk of examining Latin American conceptualism separately from foreign experiments is not only that it produces a historically incorrect vision of the former, but that it also undermines the ability of artists to account for such influences. Instead, the strategy of returning to the archive deployed by Conceptualismos del Sur attempts to restore a voice to artistic discussions that were taking place at the time, thus reintroducing discordant – and, at times, within themselves contradictory – noises which react against the regional and temporal harmony artificially shaped by the defendants of a pure Conceptualism. As Miguel López, a member of Conceptualismos del Sur puts it, ‘[w]e do not recover the past in order to make it exist as a bundle of skeletons, but to disturb the orders and assurances of the present’ (2010). Ultimately, examining the successes and failures of ‘sabotage’ as a term with which to assess post-1960s Latin American art and art history also represents a crucial endeavour for Latin American artists active today, allowing them to see how the narratives in which they inscribe themselves constitute discursive categories that can be infiltrated and, at times, split open.
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