DATING FROM THE MID-1950S THROUGH THE LATE 1970S, the documents gathered in this chapter re-frame the discussion of the nature and features of the “new” Latin American art laid out in Chapter II from the perspective of the post-1945 generation of artists, critics, and art historians from Latin America and the United States. As in the case of World War I, Latin American countries benefited economically from the Second World War—a fact that stimulated a more systematic push for modernization, this time directed by social scientists under such banners as Third World developmentalism, industrialization, economic integration, dependency theory, and social change. These conditions further stimulated the emergence of a more sustained and diversified economy that led to key advances such as: the consolidation and expansion of a middle class, the growth of cities and urban centers, the introduction of new technologies (i.e., television), and much more accessible education for all. Such gains, however, were not enough to erase the endemic conditions of poverty, unequal wealth distribution, and relative illiteracy that characterized Latin America as a whole. Hence, in tandem with these developments, the period also saw the emergence of radical political movements animated by a so-called Third World perspective. In this context, the ideal of an egalitarian and progressive society successfully set in motion by the Cuban Revolution (1953–1959) galvanized a new generation of artists and intellectuals at the continental level. Contributing to their political radicalization was the surge of authoritarianism embodied by several de facto governments throughout the region. Between 1963 and 1982, a number of South American countries—including Brazil, Argentina, Peru, Uruguay, Paraguay, and Chile—fell into the hands of military regimes that suppressed individual liberties.
Meanwhile, in the United States, political and social unrest also accompanied the post-war economic prosperity that saw the birth of the baby boomer generation, a housing and urban development explosion, and the landing of the first man on the moon. In such a context, the U.S. Civil Rights movement strove to give voice to racial and ethnic minorities who until then had been marginalized deliberately from the national scene. In addition to African Americans, these minorities included U.S. Latinos, an extremely heterogeneous group that featured, among others, Mexican Americans or Chicanos, Puerto Ricans, and Cuban Americans. Spurred by these developments as well as by a reappraisal of the legacy of the indigenous civilizations of the Americas, a new breed of U.S. Latino political leaders and intellectuals raised the stakes in the continental debate, claiming their rightful share of both Americas. Their position added an even more complex dimension to the quest for a “Latin American identity”: specifically, Latin America’s raison d’être could be located between the republics of the continent and their reluctant neighbor the United States. It should be noted that during the period under consideration, Latin American and Latino intellectuals pursued the dream of an integrated “America” along separate paths that did not immediately recognize each other. These tracks would only intersect in the last two decades of the twentieth century when both globalization and Multiculturalism pushed these agents into the same arena.
Paradoxically, this expansive yet volatile period proved highly beneficial for Latin American artists and their production. Stimulated by a worldwide trend toward “internationalism,” Latin American art indeed emerged in the cultural scene of the 1950s and 60s as “a body and a force to be reckoned with” [SEE DOCUMENT IV.2.6]. The newly acquired status was accompanied by unprecedented exhibition and market activity that included the organization of international biennials in major countries of the region. These conditions, on one hand, activated—if only briefly—a visual arts circuit that facilitated the exchange of artists and works with Europe and the United States; on the other hand, they led to the increased professionalization of the institutions and agents that constituted this emergent field. Foremost among these was the appearance on the scene of two key professionals that, until then, were practically nonexistent in most countries of the Americas: namely, the modern-day art critic and the art historian. The first was paradigmatically personified by Jorge Romero Brest and his outstanding disciples Marta Traba and Damián Bayón; the second was represented by Jorge Alberto Manrique, Aracy Amaral, and Rita Eder. Simultaneously seeking to meet both the demands of their newly acquired professional field and the tradition of the pensadores1 and animated by a desire to contribute to the social transformation of the region, these agents made “Latin American art” their field of action. Their position found a counterpart in a new generation of North American art historians that included Stanton Catlin, Guggenheim director Thomas Messer, Shifra M. Goldman, Jacqueline Barnitz, and Jacinto Quirarte. Unlike the war-driven generation of Alfred H. Barr Jr. and Grace Morley, the new crew of U.S. Latin American scholars was driven not by U.S. policy interests or jingoism, but by intellectual curiosity, political solidarity, and an unwavering commitment to portraying “the other side” on its own terms.
IV. 1 Within this framework, the first section of this chapter—“Straddling an Aesthetic Doctrine”—gathers key texts by leading Chicano or North American intellectuals that clearly lay out the “Americanist” claims of a marginalized group of the U.S. population: the mestizo-based Mexican Americans broadly known as Chicanos. By 1960, the Chicano population—concentrated primarily in Texas, California, and the Southwest (though later expanding to the Midwest and to the Eastern states)—had increased significantly, establishing a pattern of steady growth that would continue over the next few decades. Traditionally exploited and ghettoized in the barrios, Mexican Americans found a powerful vehicle in the 1960s U.S. Civil Rights Movement, a conduit that helped them stake out a radical position in the national political landscape of that decade and the next. In this context, the word “Chicano,” as Goldman observed, became the foundation of a new racial and ethnic-based cultural identity that called into question the very notion of what it meant to be “American” [SEE DOCUMENT IV.1.4]. Luis Valdez’s “Introduction: ‘La Plebe’” (1972) exemplifies the confrontational tone of the Chicano insurgency while brilliantly articulating the arguments set forth by Chicano intellectuals. In his view, it was presumptuous for anyone to pretend that Chicanos and Mexican Americans were “one more in the long line of hyphenated immigrants to the New World.” Instead, Valdéz proclaimed: “We are the New World” [SEE DOCUMENT IV.1.1].
This powerful claim was grounded in the fact that Chicanos saw themselves as the descendants of both the indigenous mestizo populations whose presence on the continent preceded for centuries that of white men as well as of the Mexicans who inhabited Texas and the Southwest—well before Mexico lost this territory to the United States in 1848. In this view, the real outsiders were the white Anglo-Saxons who were nothing but “transplanted Europeans” [SEE DOCUMENT IV.1.1]. In staking out this racially-based position, the Chicano intelligentsia was acknowledging its debt to the Latin American pensadores of the early part of the twentieth century for whom the Mestizo—who embodied everything that was original and authentic about the New World civilizations—served as the foundation for the new Latin American culture. Particularly influential in this regard was the Mexican intellectual and politician José Vasconcelos’s notion of “la raza cósmica” (the cosmic race) [SEE DOCUMENT IV.1.2], an all-embracing intermingling or mestizaje in which most existing races are included. Aesthetically sensitive and animated by Christian faith, the Mestizo was charged with “discovering new regions of the spirit” so that humanity could redeem itself. The key element of this encompassing race would manifest itself not through violence but through art [SEE DOCUMENT IV.1.2]. From here emerged the significance ascribed by U.S. Latino intellectuals and art historians to the new form of expression embodied by Chicano and Latino art. Mexican-born, California-based anthropologist Octavio Ignacio Romano, for example, argues that Latinos were not just receptacles of culture but were also active agents of social change. Indeed, they not only succeeded in re-inventing themselves, but were constantly generating new forms of culture as well.
Both the historic legacy of the Mestizo and its live presence in the barrios of major U.S. cities (Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Chicago) set Chicanos apart from other racial and ethnic minorities such as African Americans or Asian Americans. From this point of view, the Chicano exaltation of the Mestizo was also a powerful indictment of the “melting pot” and its failure to serve as the model for a coherent, modern United States. As Goldman wrote in answer to the question “What is Chicano art?”: “It is the final realization, in graphic form, that the human ingredients in the famous ‘melting pot’ of the U.S. have failed to melt; that the total homogenization foreseen in the early twentieth century has not taken place” [SEE DOCUMENT IV.1.4]. In her view, what actually occurred might be called “syncretization”—defined by Webster’s Dictionary as “‘the reconciliation of conflicting beliefs; the process of growth through coalescence of different forms,’—with its implicit proposition that conflicting contraries are held in a state of suspension which may, under certain circumstances, dissolve and fly apart.” Clearly, for Goldman and others, only this type of syncretic model could represent the type of diversity and heterogeneity embodied by the U.S. Latino community. As will become evident in Chapter VI of this anthology, this notion would hold the key for 1990s Multiculturalism.
IV.2 Whereas in the 1920s and 30s the crux of the debate concerning the “new” art was the urgent call-to-arms for an avant-garde art of continental scale, by the 1950s the focus of the discussion shifted to the question: “Does Latin American art really exist?” A tone of outright skepticism laced the appreciation of this matter by progressive intellectuals trained in disciplines as varied as art history, aesthetics, and sociology as well as in the leading critical currents of the period: Marxism, Existentialism, and Structuralism. This section, “A Dose of Skepticism,” engages the degree of uncertainty that took hold of this debate through a series of texts that challenged the very notion of this art. Leading the charge with her trademark polemical savvy was, again, the Argentinean art critic Marta Traba, who overtly deplores the persistent notion of “American” or “Latin American art” as nothing but “a kind of vague, common desire of artists and critics” [SEE DOCUMENT IV.2.1] which, despite several decades of insistence, had not yielded anything concrete. Convinced that it was impossible for artists to produce works that would express a national or local ethos without reverting to folklore, Traba went as far as suggesting that the whole issue was nothing but another expression of provincialism born out of the Latin American cultural inferiority complex [SEE DOCUMENTS IV.2.1 AND IV.2.2]. Traba’s position plainly illustrates the growing distrust on the part of intellectuals of the time for ideologies like Nationalism and Indigenism. By the 1950s, what had emerged in the post-World War I period as progressive movements to counter the persistence of colonialism was now seen by many thinkers as traps that not only posed dangers to democracy, but also threatened to kill genuine artistic expression. Traba thus warned: “Latin America will not be well named, judged, or shown if it constructs its future culture and art based on a misguided continental nationalism, just as dangerous and disastrous as regional nationalisms” [SEE DOCUMENTS IV.2.1 AND IV.2.2].
Like Traba, the authors represented in this section believe that Latin America had to find a way to clearly communicate its difference to the world; however, they disagree with each other on both the terms that defined that dissimilarity as well as on the means to convey it to others. Hence, where their predecessors focused on the similarities between the diverse modes of expression of the region in order to make a case for an art of continental projection, Traba, Bayón, Catlin and Grieder, Messer, Romero Brest, Barnitz, and Eder underscore instead the differences that separated artistic manifestations in the area. Their arguments hinge on one basic fact until then downplayed by proponents of the “Americanist” position: Latin America’s vast racial and ethnic heterogeneity and lack of unity—both within individual countries and between the countries of the region—made it impossible to articulate an encompassing notion of Latin America art. Complicating this issue was the fact that even the work of those artists who, in the view of these authors, had come close to defining the Latin American ethos—Candido Portinari (Brazil), Emilio Pettorutti (Argentina); Pedro Figari and Joaquín Torres-García (Uruguay), Oswaldo Guayasamín (Ecuador), Wifredo Lam (Cuba)—was so heterogeneous that it could not be reduced to an artificial or, least of all, to an all-encompassing definition.
For many authors, the concern with Latin American “identity” was directly linked to the ancillary position of the continent vis-à-vis the United States as well as to the need to distinguish itself from the powerful giant of the North. Of particular interest in this regard are the texts by the North Americans Thomas Messer, Stanton Catlin and Terence Grieder, and Jacqueline Barnitz. Confronted with the heated debate concerning the existence (or not) of Latin American art, they all admitted the relevance of the question while at the same time acknowledging the impossibility of finding a simple answer. More important, however, were the contributions of these authors to the issue of both the representation and the broader projection of Latin American art in the international scene. Messer, as well as Catlin and Grieder, organized two of the first large-scale exhibitions of Latin American art presented in the United States in the post-war period. Particularly revealing is the way in which the discussion about Latin American identity informed the choice of artists and works for these exhibitions, thereby setting the stage for the debates about the representation of this art inside and outside the United States in the following decades. In outlining the criteria used to select the artists for The Emergent Decade (1966), Messer, for example, observed: “we deliberately sacrificed even texture (which would have been attainable had we adjusted the selection to an international norm) and emphasized rather than minimized the diversity of art in each country” [SEE DOCUMENT IV.2.3]. Additionally, they all acknowledged the limitations imposed by such a complex area of study.
The organization of exhibitions of Latin American art in the United States further confirmed the increased internationalization of this art as well as the beginnings of its sanctioning outside the region. This phenomenon also brought to light once again the need to develop methodological frameworks and critical standards for Latin American art pointed out by Barr, Morley, and their contemporaries during the war years [SEE DOCUMENTS III.4.6, III.4.7, III.4.8]. In three separate texts, art historians Rita Eder and Jacqueline Barnitz pick up the question of “Why Latin American art?” from the point of view of what these trends mean for the study and interpretation of artistic practices in the continent. The ascent of such avant-garde movements as Kinetic and Op Art, Minimalism, Conceptual Art, and other manifestations of non-object and process-based art, only served to exacerbate the identity problem confronted by Latin American artists. The fact that a number of them had emerged as key exponents of the above-mentioned trends complicated the matter further since it suggested that Latin American art was now more than ever in a position to compete on equal footing or even to resemble the art of other Western countries. However, for both Eder and Barnitz, navigating the “internationalist” waters involved considerable challenges. The first of these, in Eder’s view, was “the constant reference to and comparison with European styles,” a tendency that inevitably led to considering Latin American art as “lesser, provincial, pseudo, etc.” [SEE DOCUMENT IV.2.9] Barnitz—in revisiting in 1984 the question she first addressed in 1966–67 [SEE DOCUMENTS IV.2.6 AND IV.2.5, RESPECTIVELY]—and Eder underscored the need to develop critical tools and frameworks that would allow for the interpretation of Latin American art outside the prevailing Eurocentric canons. Eder called for developing a sociology of Latin American art capable of accompanying the transformations it had experienced since 1945, while Barnitz pointed out the need to develop methodological criteria to identify and classify existing patterns in the arts of the different countries. Only then, in the latter’s view, “will it be possible to understand this art on its own terms and not on those of France or of the United States” [SEE DOCUMENT IV.2.6]. Their perspectives illustrate the dilemma confronting professional critics and art historians during this period: While seeking to open the discussion of this issue beyond simple Manichaeism, their positions ended up implicitly affirming the unique character of Latin American artistic manifestations and the “effective” differences that separated them from those of Europe and the United States.
IV.3 At the core of the problems confronting Latin American art from the 1950s through the 1980s was the opposition between identity—in the sense of loyalty to the local culture—and modernity—the need to embrace the most up-to-date artistic currents. Within this framework, “Our Janus-faced Dilemma” delves deeper into both the negative and positive aspects of this paradox from diverse theoretical and methodological perspectives that strive to go beyond the merely diagnostic in order to propose innovative frameworks for the interpretation of the old issues and problems. As early as 1956, Traba had anticipated the mire that would result from this doomed opposition when—seriously doubting the existence of a “Latin American” artist—she raised the question: Should Latin American artists resolve their aesthetic problems by committing and chaining themselves to their continental Fatherland or should they be free to search their form of expression as artists anywhere else do [SEE DOCUMENT IV.3.1]? Her answer, of course was emphatically negative.
In “Identity or Modernity?” Jorge Alberto Manrique equated the dilemma confronting Latin American artists to that of a “two-headed Janus, looking simultaneously beyond and on this side of the Atlantic” [SEE DOCUMENT IV.3.2]. In this classic text—that brilliantly merges the intellectual tradition of the pensador with that of the art historian—Manrique engages this problematic opposition as the dialectical expression of an ontological dilemma confronting the Latin American artist in his search to define himself against “the Other.” This dilemma is summarized by the persistent question of whether or not Latin America really exists as a unit or whether it is a fictional construct [see Chapter I in this volume]. Rather than opting for one answer or the other, the author concludes that it is precisely this dialectical interplay—and the multiplicity of answers and positions that it has generated across time—that should be considered the core identity of Latin American art. Rejecting any possible suggestion of essentialism, Manrique stresses that, far from constituting a finished product, Latin America has to be considered an entity “in the process of making or inventing itself.” In a follow-up essay titled “The Invention of Latin American Art” (1978) [SEE DOCUMENT IV.3.3], he continues to develop this idea—directly inspired by Edmundo O’Gorman’s The Invention of America (1961) [SEE DOCUMENT I.1.7]—of Latin America and Latin American art as productive fictions or constructs. In his view, these constructs carried a positive—if not strategic—value since they had already proven their broad capacity to generate an autonomous way of thinking as well as a genuine culture and art that set Latin America apart from the Eurocentric or North American focus. O’Gorman’s notion of “invention” also inspired Argentinean artist Luis Felipe Noé who defended the importance of painting within the strict parameters of young countries like those represented by Latin America. Noé argues that because painting had the capacity to “imagine”—in the double sense of both inventing and making images—it could transform itself into a historical discipline whose function would be to endow the Latin American man with a self-image. By contrast, this process was absent in “post-historic” societies like the United States where global symbolic images had been replaced by fragmented “image-stimuli” or “image-signs” [SEE DOCUMENT IV.3.7] such as those embodied by Pop art. Worth noting is the fact that Noé’s statement echoes the line of argument wielded by Traba in a 1972 text discussed below.
Manrique’s ontological approach was only one of the many methodological tools employed by critics and essayists to engage the problematic question of whether or not Latin American art existed as a distinct entity. The rapidly shifting political and cultural context for this art in the 1960s and 70s as well as the complexity of artistic practices in the region demanded radical frameworks of analysis. Concerned with the broader, all-encompassing issues of cultural and economic dependency, a number of authors turned to the social sciences—particularly economics and sociology—for the level of precision and the innovative perspectives that they could contribute to the analysis of culture. In their respective texts, Marta Traba (1972), Juan Acha (1973), and Saúl Yurkievich (1974) employ insights from sociology and economics in order to tackle the problem of Latin American art’s dependence on European or North American aesthetics and its seeming inability to generate parallel frameworks of its own. In her text, Traba’s focus is the intensifying influence that North American consumer culture-based art had been exerting on Latin American artists since 1948, when the center of the art world shifted from Paris to New York. In her view, as expressions of a highly industrialized consumer society, the values conveyed by U.S. artistic movements such as Pop art, Minimalism, Op art, and such radical trends as happenings and anti-art were fundamentally at odds with those of Latin American societies. The latter were struggling for survival in conditions of underdevelopment and poverty and grappling with the lingering remnants of feudalism and colonialism. In this context, attempts to mimic U.S. trends were not only doomed to fail, but could only be considered updated manifestations of colonialism. Acha, in many respects, endorses this position when he calls for “questions that would lead to the formulation of a new or (and this is essentially the same thing) a different, realistic way of conceiving art that would help to channel our (Third World) mutation into a sensitive form of expression and halt the excesses and defects of development.” He concludes that “the only thing that can accomplish that goal is a uniquely Third World, sociological perspective” applied to the visual arts [SEE DOCUMENT IV.3.5]. Yurkievich’s text explores the specificity of Latin American art in light of the economic changes undergone by the region as a whole since the early twentieth century. In his view, the direct correlation between Latin America’s economic dependency and its aesthetic subordination to the hegemonic centers was not arbitrary but part of the persistence of a colonial dynamic still in place despite the political independence of the countries of the region. Just as Latin American countries exported raw materials and imported manufactured products, so too were they called upon to export artists and import aesthetic systems. The key question, then, was: “Once we have achieved economic de-colonization, how can we achieve cultural de-colonization?” [SEE DOCUMENT IV.3.6]
IV.4 The arguments outlined so far only underscore the intrinsically political and ideological nature of the issues surrounding the questions “Does Latin American Art Exist?” and, if so, “What does it look like?” Contributing to the identity mania was the unprecedented explosion in the number of symposia and public debates on this topic organized between 1975 and 1980 in cities like Buenos Aires, Mexico City, São Paulo, Caracas, and Austin, Texas. The proliferation and increased accessibility of air travel can be credited for this phenomenon in that it facilitated a very agile transportation of arts professionals across the region, including the United States. The result was the beginnings of a dynamic scholarly network supported by intellectual debate and specialized exchange at the continental level. In line with these developments, this section includes selections from four influential symposia carried out in Austin, São Paulo, Mexico City, and Caracas that exemplify this trend. While the positions articulated in these papers are not necessarily new, they highlight the degree of political radicalization undergone by the intellectual and artistic milieu during the late 1960s and 70s. By then, terms such as “cultural imperialism,” “resistance,” and “dependency” had become staples of the discourse on Latin American and Latino U.S. art and culture. Traba’s contribution to the “Speak out! Charla! Bate-Papo!: Contemporary Art and Literature in Latin America,”—organized by Damián Bayón at the University of Texas, Austin, in October 1975—offers a case in point. Twenty years after the 1956 seminal text [SEE DOCUMENT IV.3.1] where she seriously questioned the very notion of a “Latin American” art, Traba veers to the left in order to articulate a passionate defense of Latin American art in its position of “resistance” to the highly commodified values of the art produced by the developed, industrialized, and technological societies of the First World. Traba’s ideological transformation took place after her visit to Cuba in the early-1960s, a pivotal trip that led her to actively embrace the goals of the ongoing revolution.
In such a context, of particular interest for the overall discussion on Latin American art is the controversy concerning an installation work by the Brazilian group Etsedrón (Nordeste or Northeast spelled in reverse)—an artistic collective from Salvador, Bahia, a major city of the impoverished and off-center Brazilian Northeast—presented at the 13th São Paulo Biennial in 1975. Intended as a visceral critique of Brazilian environmental policies, the work featured a rustic corral with ugly religious effigies—part human, part flora, part fauna—made from dirt, bones, and other materials related to the region. Although the work itself did not generate any controversy at the time of its presentation, it became the focus of an animated exchange of views when Brazilian art historian and curator Aracy Amaral raised the question: “Could it be that Etsedrón represents ... one of the paths that Brazilian art might follow if we were not so submerged in the internationalist wave of art?” [SEE DOCUMENT IV.4.4] In other words, in the midst of the active debate regarding the authenticity of Latin American art, here was, at last, an example of a form of art that in its eccentricity and marginalization appeared to tap the core elements of Brazilian society without visibly referencing the type of internationalist-based European or North American art favored by the art centers of Brazil. In Amaral’s view, judging this kind of work would require “a Latin American, rather than European–North American critical viewpoint.” But was that at all possible? The Peruvian critic Juan Acha, the Uruguayan critic María Luisa Torrens, and Mexican sculptor Manuel Felguérez all weighed in on the pros and cons of the Etsedrón phenomenon, and their analyses are also presented in this section.
Commenting on the surge of symposia focusing on the identity/identities of Latin American art, a number of authors noted how these events raised more questions and suppositions and offered few answers. Hence, it is not surprising that for his intervention at the Primer encuentro iberoamericano de críticos de arte y artistas plásticos (First Ibero-American Encounter of Art Critics and Visual Artists) held in Caracas in 1978, Paris-based Argentinean artist Julio Le Parc chose to read a long string of questions that called attention to various artistic myths, including the existence or lack thereof of Latin American art. Speaking from the artist’s point of view, Le Parc concluded that only artistic creation, which offers the “potential for a different future,” can shed light on the questions at stake [SEE DOCUMENT IV.4.11]. His clever strategy of paralleling the debate’s question-asking approach, which had at this point become a familiar trope, with his own series of questions further emphasizes both the ideological nature and, ultimately, the futility of this seemingly endless argument. Indeed, as will become evident in Chapters V and VI of this anthology, despite the diversity of methods or perspectives involved in attempts to resolve the dilemma once and for all, questioning the Latin-ness of art in the Americas continues to preoccupy profoundly and even confound artists, art historians, and critics.
1
Norman P. Sacks explains that pensadores were “men of ideas, though professionally they may be poets, novelists, artists, critics, historians, political scientists, sociologists, moralists, essayists, etc. If they are ‘philosophers,’ they generally are more akin to the French eighteenth-century philosophe than to the nineteenth-century German Philosoph. With very few exceptions, they are not system-builders, though they may, in some instances, have been influenced by such thinkers. The performance of the pensador is often that of the generalist rather than the specialist.” For more on the pensadores, see Sacks, “Latin American Intellectual History,” Latin American Research Review 13, no. 1 (1978): 283.