IV.2.2 DIGITAL ARCHIVE 1061697
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Nationalism, in its great determination to “construct the country,” went about distributing responsibilities. Just as it urged the farmer to increase the yield on the area cultivated with sugar cane, Nationalism confronted the painter’s blank canvas, looking it over with profound distrust in order to detect and discredit any deviations. It unrolled before the artist a huge map that showed nature as it had never been seen, apocalyptic, with astral rivers and jungles thrown like floods of green ink on a map. It also showed him the countless injustices that were turning apparently innocent areas into a living hell. Trapped between geography and the demand for social justice, many artists agreed to bear their easels like backpacks and threw themselves into the difficult task of describing and denouncing as enjoined by Nationalism.
It was this distribution of responsibilities to which we can attribute the expression “Latin Americanist art” that has been applied to the visual arts. No one knows what it consists of, what its aims are, what areas of the spirit it codifies, or how it would perform this task. One more disadvantage we have as countries without culture is that we do not require words to have a defined ideological content. Instead, we allow them to wander freely through the stratosphere of “set terms” that weigh on us, refusing to make any commitment whatsoever; [despite the fluidity of our terms], we never release [or lose sight] of our prey [Latin Americanist art].
Faced with the puzzle of giving a form to “Latin Americanism,” the solution the Mexican muralists chose as their narrative was not a history mediated by the artificial eloquence of the epic. Instead, they chose the gaunt, tragic, sensationalistic journalism of the revolution. Thus Latin Americanism came to have an explicit meaning: the obligation of denouncing the misery of the unfortunate peoples of Latin America. Unfortunately, the unionized policing accorded to painting by the Mexican mural arose at the wrong time in terms of aesthetics. This was when European artists were making every effort to break loose from a conventional system of representation. Thus they were doing battle—one that was perhaps unprecedented—to establish the value of the language of art above every other historical, social, or simply descriptive language.
It was a time when the talent and vocation of the European combatants were winning the game for the language of art and getting the public accustomed to painting that could not be “read” as a costumbrista lesson. So it was an unfortunate anachronism that Latin Americanism climbed up on a platform of painting that was not just historical, but demagogic. Modern art was having its greatest triumph, stating its case on the freedom from any commitment other than to art itself. Meanwhile, Latin Americanism was binding itself to a multiple commitment of teaching, correcting, and prophesying on social events from the public square.
. . . With these opportunities spread before it, Latin Americanism contributed absolutely nothing to the development of the new models. On the contrary, it framed its spirit of regression and obstinate immobility with worn-out conventions. In the best of cases, it made extensive use of the language of images established by modern European art, putting them into the service of the artists’ assumed social obligations. In other words, it forced a language that had arisen from the will to abolish the myth of representation, to represent, first and foremost, things, things, and more things. This incongruity leads to the flagrant artificiality of a work as noteworthy as El camino del llanto [Trail of Tears] by [Oswaldo] Guayasamín.
The greatest weakness of many works of modern art resides in the lack of internal coherence that should inform all artwork. Every day we see countless paintings that we feel and understand as fragments of a puzzle created to organize a harmony completely alien to the artist’s feelings. All that such work achieves, then, is a decorative effect. But with a few exceptions, it is Latin American art en bloc that suffers most from this defect. Situated in the domain of the universe, this art has ceased to represent and has deliberately disrupted the conventional space in order to distance itself from the scenario. That is why, in Latin America, art must live out its existence as an actor. Since the performance of this actor is based on a system of signs that undermine any will to act and persuade, its action falls straight into the void.
Both the solutions given to contemporary painting by Latin Americanism are equally bankrupt. On the one hand, in a school headed up by [Diego] Rivera, we have the painted chronicle that deems aesthetic meditation to be seriously deviant. On the other, there is the ambiguous navigation between the waters of social activism and the waters siphoned off from the great [Pablo] Picasso reservoir. Here we find Guayasamín—a captain capable of colossal journeys—shipwrecked.
This is the disastrous result of assigning to the Latin American painter the responsibilities of social reformer and political defender of the people.
Nationalism made these assignments in the merciless spirit with which cultural matters are tackled. And in so doing, it forgot that the Latin American painter’s greatest responsibility is to develop a culture in harmony with universal culture. To that end, it is necessary not only to leave him in complete freedom, but to cut the barbed wire fencing off each country from the next.
Man alone, with no one by his side to harass him, is capable of seeing. Thus, a free view of things may wake up the artist’s power of meditation; thus, he may transform what he sees into an art object. But a man who is bewildered by slogans and walled in by limited patriotic notions [is a man encumbered.] If he is not driven by the unbiased pleasure of creating but rather by the aberrant idea of suitability, this man can be no more than a tourist or a radical. As a tourist, he may crisscross Latin America, treating it like a bazaar of traditional objects; as a radical, he may study the continent to detect injustice. From both perspectives, Latin America is not simply a continent experienced: it is a continent sacked by the very people who believe they are constructing it.
Alongside those clinging to the nationalist directives in a docile way are the “depraved,” whose work reveals an undeniable affiliation with the European models on which contemporary art is being built. Generally speaking, such works are not marked by the contradiction between the commitment to narrate and the freedom or arbitrary nature of the language of modern visual art. Unbound as they are from supposed obligations to chronicle the medium in which they live, these works are expressed in a way that depends on the motifs they develop—in the case of a painting or a sculpture. Alternatively, if they are nonfigurative works, they may lack any recognizable motif. In these approaches, it is impossible for any work not to introduce, as additions, the geographic, social, or historic data that situates a man in a determined location on earth. I have said and emphasize that these are additions, since they are art elements freely organized on the surface of a painting or determined independently of a sculpture’s raison d’être. They serve as the visible data that surround the artist. Not the other way around. I refer to the suns of [Emilio] Pettoruti, suns that originate in an explicit, gloomy, pampa. Suns that proclaim their Argentine identity in their imperious heat, slipping through the half-closed blinds of summer in Buenos Aires. Subsidiary and humble, these suns bend to the strictly geometric laws that underlie the painting, giving it meaning and necessity.
In other specific cases, such as that of [Joaquín] Torres-García in Uruguay, there was a will to interpret a Latin American reality, in the sense of creating a new form as heir to the great group art movements. This was form based on eminently logical and harmonious concepts of art with a desire to stay apart from its modern, eminently personal trend. Torres-García thought that this experience of returning to group decisions might work much better in Latin America than in Europe. On the one hand, this was a new, unprejudiced society, [with people living their lives] in boundless natural surroundings that they also instinctively had to measure, confine, and geometrize (at all costs) in order to encompass them.
The Latin America that we discover in [the works of] any of the continent’s few important painters is not a demagogic or political imposition. It is rather the land where a certain visual art experience happened to occur. And nothing can show the existence of Latin America as well as the moderately original way these painters resolve and finally define these art experiences. At least the errors of Nationalism have shown that if Latin American painting appears in the orbit of contemporary art, it is not through the demagogic labor of the Mexican muralists. Instead, it is through the structures of the Uruguayan master Torres-García, or through the precise color ensembles of the Argentine Pettoruti, or through the surreal, feathered, and frenetic fantasies of the Cuban Wifredo Lam.
There’s no use fooling ourselves about the origin of these carefully imagined forms. They all originate in Europe, where artists are taught a clear awareness of what painting is and learn the process of developing ideas and yielding to emotions that precede an artwork. There too, they feel the weight of the timeless power of the culture. They also understand the impossibility of fostering culture with decrees to stimulate national art or hurried incursions through lands completely fenced in by localism. But the chimera of “national culture” completely disappears when we acknowledge the formal link that binds our worthy artwork to modern European art models. From there, we must proceed to faithfully establish the dependence of the numerous painters whose work has some merit on those European models.
. . . A good student always admits the governance, attraction, and superiority of his master; the best student comes to dress up this adherence in his own ideas. In the end, based on the continuous modification of the concepts learned, the student, in turn, reaches the point of expressing himself as a master. Latin Americans must acknowledge that the true emancipation from all prejudice and our secret inferiority complex is in knowing how to be the best student. When we learn this, we will have won the battle of discipline versus improvisation. In general, artists working under the third alternative accept the instructions of discipline, which is certainly not determined by a labor union, rather by aesthetics alone. They understand that the discovery of the chords, coincidences, and harmonies that replace the natural order abolished in the early twentieth century along with the Renaissance tradition is a work of aesthetic discipline. . . .
. . . Southern countries dispossessed of the Native past by the simple reason of extermination have limited alternatives for dealing with that history. One solution is to place on a pedestal of provincial fame the second-rate followers of historical realism and impressionism who began to mix colors in the mid-nineteenth century. But where there is a record of Native art, the problem is more difficult. Here, what is required is to reconcile with modern painting, after a centuries-long hiatus, art forms that pertain to a Native mentality that is unknown and vanished.
The continuity between one period and the other—with the Spanish in the middle importing the worst conventional academic methods and teaching “good painting” using primary-school rules—could not be more arbitrary. There is not the slightest emotional relationship between Chibcha art and twentieth-century Colombian art, or between Aleijadinho and [Candido] Portinari, or between the Aztecs and Rivera. The majority of Colombians are unaware of the Museo del Oro; therefore, it would be completely untrue to contend that they see in these exquisite pieces early evidence of a great art tradition, which continues to this day, rather than archaeological curiosities. On the other hand, when a Frenchman enters a Romanesque chapel and stops under the portal of Chartres, he finds his inalienable spiritual ancestors in these perished forms. He knows that he comes from that family and feels that the culture has risen naturally, like well-kneaded bread, taking whatever time it needed. There is no void whatsoever behind his work. Not only is he sustained by a portico of statues and columns, but there is also a secular habit of meditation and an inclination toward the creative act. The clear knowledge of what comprises the highest rank of human dignity and the certainty of being the legitimate heir of this excellence flow into the artist to strengthen that true original spirit. Especially when he is prepared to exercise his heart, his brain, and his hand in the drawing, the coloring, or the sculptural form. But if a Latin American chooses the geometric patterns from an Aztec fence to create the motif of his painting, his choice is purely picturesque. . . .
Apart from the pre-Columbian art whose voice was silenced many centuries ago, the greatest effort of Nationalism is to create a national pantheon as quickly as possible. This is the same rush with which a dispossessed person tries to invent on paper a genealogical tree that would give him distinguished grandparents and great-grandparents. When all is said and done, this is a falsification of ancestors. As such, it must always be opposed by the frank, true acknowledgement that we come from barely two or three generations of adventurers and peasants. Suppose we accept our lack of an art history and valiantly step forth from the void. We could start by imitating whatever has a universal value and whatever constitutes, in our contemporary world, art language that may give a new man a precise awareness of his artistic mission. Or suppose instead that we erect cardboard pantheons behind the artist, assuring him they are made of marble—with illustrious ancestors who cannot stand up to the least analysis, thus introducing a golden era of mediocrity. This would sap artistic honesty and the zeal of this new man, crushing him beneath the taboos of a false past.
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Thus a small, shrunken tradition, sprinkled with gold paper, replaces the great universal tradition of art. But we keep on hearing: we are in Latin America; we have a debt to Latin America; we must stimulate Latin America; we must deceive Latin America. And this is where Nationalism turns to the critic for help and support.
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It is amazing, in the great, immense space occupied by Latin America, that among the small groups of honorable people no one has organized a league against benevolence. Neither is there any pact against conformity or a denunciation of critical leniency as one of the most effective ways to destroy any vigor in the artistic forms that may arise on this continent. A fear of upsetting the happy chorus of conformity and a secret panic about opposing the Nationalist harangue paralyzes [even] the most intelligent minds. What they do then is to close down in silent condemnation. . . . But the art critic is resourceful enough to show the other side of the coin. That resource is to open up to the public eye more and more, in all the media available, the universe of the visible, so that it may receive and revere the endless parade of images—just as if it were a victorious army spreading strategic flanks before the amazed, dazzled spectator. Confuse the public; intoxicate it with images that come from all parts of the world, from societies that have vanished and geographies that have changed. Nonetheless, all these images have come forth from the same heart of man and have traveled the same trembling path from the inventor’s brain to his diligent hand. The laws, obligations, salvation, power, and the reasons for the perpetuity of the artwork will come later. What is important is to take the public back into the universe to which nationalisms have [previously] denied access. . . .
I don’t think the axiom that refers to governments can be applied to culture: the people do not have the culture they deserve. My hopes for a reform of the narrow conceptions that determine the lack of Latin American culture are too vehement for me to resign myself to that fate. When it comes to the matter of art, the colonial period in Latin America seems to be interminable. But, will the fanatic shadow of Nationalism be cast over us indefinitely? This depends on the courage with which people—released from their family commitments more and more every day—are capable of analyzing events and situations and exposing these analyses to the public. Basically, the capacity for culture is a capacity for analysis: the ability to think without pressure and to carry out one’s reasoning freely. Our young countries move among worthless relics like fussy old people. Meanwhile, the tired old European countries are boldly transforming their authentic relics, yet never becoming immobilized by them. While the lesson of our tragicomedy is full of scholarly solutions, it is as valid as any other lesson: Know how to listen; know how to see; know how to read; learn to be a disciple; evict nationalism and the paralysis it perpetrates.