FROM A 17-YEAR PERSPECTIVE, it seems very audacious to me now to have attempted to define what “Latin American” art is—or was in the 1960s. As is glaringly evident today, the 1967 article [SEE DOCUMENT IV.2.5] was based on the opinions of Argentinean [painters]—[Ernesto] Deira, [Marcelo] Bonevardi and [Luis Felipe] Noé—who were living in New York at the time, besides [the art historians and museum directors] Thomas Messer and Stanton L. Catlin. The fact that the direction and nature of Latin American art differ from one country to another and from one decade to another is reason enough to shrink from such definitions. As the continuing number of essays and symposia addressing the question of artistic identity has demonstrated, no unanimous conclusions have been reached. The 1975 symposium at the University of Texas in Austin was a flagrant example of polarized views, and there have been many more since then in Latin America. Yet, the fact that symposia continue to take place and articles to be written indicates that the issue is real and begging for better understanding. It is this issue rather than the nature of Latin American art itself that is at stake. The question is why. Given the fact that there is more than one vantage point from which to view the question, either as an outsider or an insider, against my wishes I must classify myself as an outsider.
Art in the Western world since after World War II has come away from localisms, making specific Latin American characteristics increasingly difficult to detect. If any exist, they must be sought in the forms in which artists choose to work as well as in why they reject others. The surfacing of Latin American art on the international scene in the late 1950s and 1960s as a body and a force to be reckoned with, has contributed to creating questions of identity as well as vulnerability to foreign critical evaluations. The reason is obvious. Unlike the 1920s and 1930s, artists are no longer producing the kind of folkloric or indigenous themes that so delighted foreigners for their “typical” appeal. Now, Latin American art must be looked at like the art of other Western countries. This shift from local to universal status was of course linked to the emergence in 1951 of the São Paulo Biennials, the existence of financial support for other biennials such as the Kaiser Industries in Córdoba, Argentina (1962–66), the Coltejer Biennial in Medellin, Colombia (1968–72; 1981) and the national and international award exhibitions organized in the 1960s by Jorge Romero Brest as director of the department of visual arts of the Instituto Torcuato di Tella in Buenos Aires (1963–70), the latter partially financed by Rockefeller funds. Of course the 1960s campaign in the United States to promote close relations between the United States and Latin America through the Inter-American Foundation for the Arts (later absorbed by the Center for Inter-American Relations) in New York, and the visual arts department of the Pan American Union in Washington [D.C.] under the direction of José Gómez-Sicre (active since 1948) contributed enormously to this new surge of interest.
Given this situation, it is hardly surprising that “identity” problems arose and that Argentinean [artists]—who held center stage at the time—were the least affected. The increase of interest and patronage in the United States pleased some artists while it angered others because of the obvious predatory implications. Nonetheless, the effects of these conditions had long-range repercussions and very much affected the art forms that developed. As a result of internationalization, Latin American art has been pitted by critics against the art of developed Western nations—those of Western Europe and the United States who saw this art as “derivative” versions of established forms.1 A retrospective view of the art of the 1960s on however, soon reveals that much of it is in fact very original. One of the problems has been the absence of adequate critical tools among Latin Americans and the all too frequent reliance on foreign critics for evaluations.
In the United States, until the appearance of abstract expressionism, there was no “national” movement on a grand scale (precisionism and regionalism in the 1930s and 1940s were short-lived and local schools). But with its emergence, critics also evolved a “method” of evaluation that culminated in the apotheosizing of abstract expressionism as the ultimate national monument which in turn furnished the measuring stick for art the world over during its heyday. Even the “Paris School” was rejected by U.S. critics in the 1950s and early 1960s. But unlike Latin America, Paris didn’t care.
Not only did the U.S. produce its own criteria for dealing with its art (Clement Greenberg and formalist criticism), it also began imposing it on the art of other cultures. An example of this attitude can be found in Thomas Messer’s comments [SEE DOCUMENT IV.2.3] when—as director of the Guggenheim Museum in New York—he offered some rather condescending evaluations of Latin American art in 1964 when he traveled to several countries to select work for The Emergent Decade exhibition of 1966.2 Lawrence Alloway, as curator of the Guggenheim in the 1960s and a regular participant in Latin American biennial juries, stated in 1965 that “At present, Latin American artists are receiving increased attention (and painting better than at any previous time, fortunately). . . .”3 This was a time when Latin Americans were painting more like other U.S. and French artists.
The post-war commercialization of Western art which affected artists everywhere, only helped to exacerbate identity problems in many Latin American artists who were caught between two worlds: the dying one of Indigenism (particularly in the Andean countries) which by its very nature had provided them with an identity in art up to then, along with a sense of didactic effectiveness, and the world of abstraction which confronted artists everywhere from São Paulo Biennials to Paris, New York and Venice. The late 1950s and early 1960s were especially traumatic when dozens of artists saw little choice but to take up these forms in order to qualify for international exhibitions whose criteria for acceptability were dictated primarily from Paris and New York. At first many did not find ways to make abstraction relevant to their own needs, which left them floundering in a cultural vacuum. Needless to say, artists like [Fernando de] Szyszlo, [Máximo] Pacheco, [Alejandro] Obregón and several others, found solutions through references to ancient Andean or Caribbean themes. [Fernando] Botero tried abstraction for a short time in the late 1950s but soon rejected it as unsuitable at the cost of isolation from mainstream art at the time. Needless to say, he has since been avenged. One should remember, however that initially U.S. abstract expressionists, like the Latin Americans, were also seeking links to a primordial past and to Northwest Coast Indian cultures, especially [Jackson] Pollock, at a time when ideological art was discouraged. But unlike Szyszlo, for example, North Americans focused on the individual Jungian aspects of a distant past as compared to the more poetic and less personally charged expression of the Latin Americans. (Argentineans did not experience these conflicts to the same degree since there had been previous avant-garde movements in Argentina in the 1940s that established their artistic identity in this context.)
Today, artists everywhere in Latin American seem less concerned with specific local traditions than in creating an art that is relevant to their contemporary society—a very different problem from Indigenism. Some seek to remove art from its “aristocratic” context to make it accessible to everyone, as did several Brazilians and Argentineans in the 1960s and early 1970s, in the United States for example. Pop Art represented a rejection of the concept of art as a unique object for the delectation of a privileged class, in favor of mass-produced banal images addressed to the common man. But U.S. Pop with its focus on consumer products and attendant cultivated bad taste, could not serve in Latin America as a means of mass communication in its original form, which is why its exportation there (along with the products it celebrated) either proved meaningless in the long run, since there is a difference between the common man and the poor masses, or contributed to feelings of hostility towards the United States expressed sometimes by Latin American artists in parodic versions of Pop. Themes of mass communication must of course be sought locally. Although Marta Traba noted that there was no “central bank of diffusion” in Latin America, there are local stocks of images from the media if not ancient or colonial themes, which have served such purposes. In Brazil for example, Rubens Gerchman and Carlos Vergara among others, used themes derived from popular television programs, photos of Amazonian Indians, Carnival, in Salvador, Bahia. In the mid-1970s, a group known as Etsedrón (“Nordeste” [Northeast] spelled backwards) that comprised doctors, social workers as well as artists used locally available “poor” materials to create environments suggesting ways of utilizing these materials for the specific benefit of the underprivileged local populations.
Artists in Latin America do not want to live as alienated intellectuals carrying out vast and useless projects, like say Christo or Michael Heizer, nor would they be able to get the funds for such projects. Rather they care about creating an art that can in some way modify and improve society either through its message or in actuality, like Etsedrón.4 Other ways in which artists seek to make art meaningful is by creating workshops in urban and rural areas to encourage the local community and its children to participate. This is far from a new idea in Latin America. Pedro Figari had attempted to launch such a project in Montevideo during the First World War, and in Mexico, Adolfo Best Maugard attempted something similar a little later. More recently, Omar Rayo’s Museum in Roldanillo, Colombia, besides providing space for graphics exhibitions, offers workshops for the development of local art. In Chile, between 1969 and 1973, the mural brigades made an aborted attempt to establish rural puppet shows, poster workshops and encourage the local and rural populations to participate in a consciousness-raising program of local art projects. In Rio the Museum of Modern Art held Domingos da Criação in its gardens during the 1970s. On those occasions, materials were distributed to those who attended, who were encouraged to discover their untutored creative abilities. There has been any number of these programs in the visual arts as well as in theater largely unknown abroad, designed to encourage self-awareness among the local populations.
It is of course doubtful that the art produced in these centers and under these circumstances would be of universal interest at least initially. Therefore, for artists interested in international recognition, there continues to exist a disjunction between what they are doing and what they desire to do. That is, bring art closer to what it was in the ancient Indian social system as a functional part of daily life and not as unique socially disconnected objects whose worth is determined by its stock market value. This is why Bauhaus principles, for example, were popular in Latin America and why Torres-García established an arts and crafts workshop in the 1940s. On the other hand, artists who are currently creating art forms that require a sophisticated art public and private patronage—and these still constitute the majority—must of course continue to work within the capitalist structure since there are no governments who are currently supporting major art programs and projects as there were in the 1920s and 1930s. Julio Le Parc’s longtime conflicts with these issues are well known. He once signed himself off at a symposium as “un artista experimentador consciente de sus contradicciones en una sociedad capitalista” [An experimental artist conscious of his own contradictions in a capitalist society] [SEE DOCUMENT IV.4.11].
As has been noted, symposia usually reveal many more differences than they resolve. Besides self-image differences between one Latin American country and another, they reveal the abyss that exists between what North and Latin Americans believe the function of art should be. Latin Americans reject a purely formalist view of art since it proved invalid for their needs as it precludes sociopolitical evaluations, and North Americans cannot understand why Latin Americans are concerned with the relevance of their art to their society because the urban-versus-regional social contrasts in Latin America are too remote from North American concerns. Except for short-lived periods of politicization among North Americans, the majority generally tends to see art as separate from immediate social issues, or at least has been conditioned to do so. (If one looks closely enough, art is never divorced from social-political issues, but critics can make it seem so.) The concern for artistic identity among Latin Americans must then be seen as directly linked to the relative position of Latin America vis-à-vis the United States and the all too frequent need at least until the mid-1970s to rely on North American and European patronage. More than wanting to identify with specific nationalities, artists want to identify with a culture that is different from the North American one, that is sui generis and in no way an extension of the latter. Since there can be no doubt about the existence of these differences, the issue of identity appears to be a reflection of a relationship (to the United States) and not of a geographic or cultural condition.
Not only is Latin American art a reality as a whole, it obviously comprises many different realities as well. Although distinctions between one region and another are not always immediately apparent in the art, one can find today perhaps more than in the 1960s, certain tendencies and ways in which artists absorb foreign art forms as in Brazil, Peru, Colombia and Argentina, that confirm that there already existed a local language that modified the manner in which these influences are understood in each place. This aspect can neither be dismissed nor taken lightly. It is impossible for any country to have been in existence for two, four or ten centuries and not have developed certain specific local frames of reference. This fact is being demonstrated constantly in its negative aspects in political conflicts throughout the world. But in this sense, yes, of course Latin American art exists. Today, artists can more easily find relevant models for their art in their own countries than they could twenty or thirty years ago when [Joaquín] Torres-Garcia, [José Clemente] Orozco, [Rufino] Tamayo and [David Alfaro] Siqueiros seemed to be the main choices, other than foreign models; [Roberto] Matta and [Wifredo] Lam were back in Europe after the war and [Diego] Rivera had largely been discarded in the 1950s, although there has been a Rivera revival among later artists.
There are few artists today whose work does not have a distinctive personal quality. Although these are individual rather than of a national or collective nature, one can detect certain common tendencies in given places brought about by interchange. It is significant that younger Latin American artists have looked to seventeenth-century Spanish models, [Diego] Velázquez, Cotán, [Francisco de] Zurbarán, but also Caravaggio and [Hieronymus] Bosch for subject, lighting and compositional devices. [José Luis] Cuevas, who had already appropriated some Spanish precedents along with [Francisco] Goya, but also Rembrandt, set an example especially in Andean countries. Many artists for some years also looked to Italian Renaissance models for structure and distribution of color, indicating some interest in bypassing more recent western confections in favor of past sources of Western modern art, which they view justifiably as an equally important part of their heritage. Some artists add to that an overlay of contemporary allusions to film and photography. [René] Magritte has also proven to be a favorite model particularly in Colombia and Chile, because of his taste for paradox.
After 1975, when the international art market shifted from its treadmill sequence of art fashions to a less restrictive acceptance of stylistic diversity, the pressure to conform to one style or another lessened for artists everywhere. As a result, the choice of what kind of art to make became less traumatic. But there remains a need in individual countries to establish critical art criteria that will permit the identification and classification of existing patterns in art. Only then will it be possible to understand this art on its own terms and not on those of France or the United States. (Rita Eder [SEE DOCUMENT IV.2.9] proposed as a system “sociology of art”.)5 On the other hand, foreign critics need to broaden their views to accommodate cultural factors and tastes different from their own. Problems of “identity” will continue to exist among Latin Americans, as long as their critical tools are not firmly established and universally recognized on their own terms along with their art. These problems have long ceased to exist for Latin American literature, which as we know has won worldwide acclaim. Perhaps in the visual arts this is developing now. But artists cannot work in isolation nor without a public, whether they address themselves to social issues at home or to foreign patrons.
1
Rita Eder, “Why a Latin American Art?,” Journal Southern California Art Magazine no. 25 (November–December 1979), 62–65.
2
The Emergent Decade, exh. cat. (New York: The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1965–66).
3
Lawrence Alloway, “Latin America and International Art,” Art in America (June 1965), 65.
4
Eder (1979), 64.
5
Ibid.