IV.2.7 DIGITAL ARCHIVE 1061734
I think the art of Latin America will become Latin American art when an artist appears whose sensibility, imagination, and will to synthesize make him capable of achieving an expression that could not have appeared at any other point in time or space. There can be no doubt that a moment arrives in every area of thought—in poetry, in the novel, in music, or in plastic arts—when the attentive and unprejudiced reader or observer says to himself: “This is different!” And I am not speaking here of injecting a few cheap touches of folklore, but rather of acquiring the knack—either purposely or in a sublimely unconscious way—of capturing a vital moment in the process of our evolution and giving it a form. . . . a form that sooner or later will become an essential element of the cultural life of a community, and, later, of the whole world.
Any numbers of examples occur to me. I am honest enough, however, to declare at the outset that by this I do not mean resorting to facile “native” touches, as was the case, I feel, with [José] Sabogal in Peru—an academic painter who went to Spain and on returning to his own country set himself, in all good faith, to “translating” Galician farmers and Basque fishermen into Indians of the highlands, without ever having acquired the assurance of the mediocre Spanish painters he imitated. No, I am referring here to what I consider truly authentic Latin America ways of being. Whatever his importance, the Indian will never be a fully representative image of our identity. What is important is not the “figure” that is presented, but what we can say, or want to say, by using that figure—in the broadest sense of the term, since the figure can be an abstract one as in the case of [Fernando de] Szyszlo’s work, [also] in Peru.
To begin with, and not just because I am writing for a Mexican journal, the name of José Guadalupe Posada seems to me to be one of the most obvious examples to be found in the past century. He has the advantage of having been a naïf even before that approach became fashionable. Naïf, but at the same time wise in his art, there can be no doubt that Posada’s truculence was pure Mexican, and the essence of his times. That is to say, there is nothing more representative of that society and that moment in time than one of his famous skeletons. That is what I call true expression of one’s cultural identity, and it seems to me a profoundly Latin American symbol, transcendental rather than superficial. Later came more cultured movements. Mexican muralism was one of them, in spite of its ups and downs. Not because it was headed by a Jupiter (in this case, José Vasconcelos), but rather because of the efforts to convince, to adapt, and to create that were made by men like [Diego] Rivera, [José Clemente] Orozco, and also perhaps, in his own way, by [David Alfaro] Siqueiros himself in his most inventive moments (his use of exaggerated perspectives and foreshortening, paint sprayers, and new materials).
. . .
The examples I have mentioned are “weighty ones” because they are so obvious and indisputable. No less persuasive in the long run, however, are those provided by the isolated efforts of Tarsila do Amaral in Brazil and [Joaquín] Torres-García, [Pedro] Figari, and [Emilio] Pettoruti in Uruguay and Argentina. They all “raised welts” in their own time: irritating, promoting, stimulating, opening up new roads, forming disciples. And don’t come to me with any of that stale gibberish about Tarsila, Torres-García, and Pettoruti having received their formative training in Europe (as by the way did Rivera); Orozco and Figari, on the other hand, only went there after becoming fully developed painters.
Personally, it makes no difference to me that Torres-García and Pettoruti had links with international movements like Cubism, Futurism, and Constructivism. The truth is that they lived them from within and as protagonists. Why should that be cause today for suspecting artists who, on returning to their respective countries, were to have a lasting influence on the generations that followed them? . . . Where Europeans are concerned, we find no cause for reproaching what we reproach in ourselves, as though we were always obliged to give some special accounting. Why, and to whom? And what is even worse, it isn’t outsiders who reproach us, but ourselves, in a pathetic show of cultural masochism. Forgive me, but to me the whole thing smells of reactionary nationalism, of historical revisionism whose goal is to discover whether we are sufficiently Latin American or not.
After a look at other outstanding examples like [Rufino] Tamayo, [Wifredo] Lam, or [Roberto] Matta, we come to things that happened only a short while ago: Neo-geometricism and Kinetic art are extreme stands that were quickly adopted by Argentine and Venezuelan artist when—is any reminder needed?—those trends gained scant popularity in Europe and even less in the United States. The South American artists we speak of assimilated what they found in museums, artistic currents, critiques, lectures, and persons—as all young people do everywhere and always—and made use of what they found in manufacturing their own product.
The same—or almost the same—thing happened a few years later with the “nueva figuración” [New Figuration] that undoubtedly originated with [Jean] Dubuffet, [Willem] de Kooning, and [Francis] Bacon, but equally undoubtedly only became part of a generalized “wave” in South America. And I am not referring only to the generation of Jacobo Borges in Venezuela, or that of [Rómulo] Macció, [Ernesto] Deira, and [Antonio] Seguí in Argentina. In the latter country, an older artist like Antonio Berni has created original works based on his longstanding “politicized” figuration that he combines for his own purposes with Pop Art. He uses colossal collages to achieve a niggardly humoristic effect.
It should be noted that when the Mexican muralists took on their task, it had been many years—at least since the times of [the French nineteenth-century artist Pierre] Puvis de Chavannes—since any painter of importance had used walls as a medium for developing his art, engaged or otherwise. Those northern Latin Americans revived the concept and techniques and gave them new and noble tones. The same thing was true of Kinetic art, and to an even greater extent: Cinetismo almost did not exist at all, except in the experiments of [Lázló] Moholy-Nagy, [Victor] Vasarely, and [Nicolas] Schöffer (all three of them Hungarians, incidentally, for those who are interested in cultural enigmas). In their desire to carry the work of those pioneers to its ultimate consequences, [Julio] Le Parc, [Jesús Rafael] Soto, [Carlos] Cruz-Diez, [Gregorio] Vardanega, and Marta Boto (to name only a few) were to join other Latin Americans in Paris, Caracas or Buenos Aires in inventing something totally new that was later copied by the rest of the world. I once heard—from a distinguished colleague—the absurd theory that all of this occurred as a result of the workings of the North American mechanisms of art. This crassly mistaken idea could only have resulted from a lack of familiarity with the characteristics of art in both the northern and the southern portions of our American continent. The type of expression I refer to never gained any real acceptance in the United States: a few years ago some artists there were pleased to experiment with the vogue of Op Art, but they soon returned to their private obsessions. Cinetismo is not a copy of anyone’s work, because it is a pure invention. And that invention—except for a few French examples by artists who were “carried away” by the current of adventure—may be said for the most part to be the work of Latin American artists, who are responsible for a truly overwhelming majority of the works involved.
Soon, Africans will be called upon to demonstrate their African-ness, and those blacks who speak French, English, Portuguese, or Arabic will be faced with the same problem that we have been faced with for the last century and a half: how to reply to what is intrinsically a trick question.
With sympathy and understanding, Umberto Eco has said of us that what is most characteristic of our culture is a kind of dependence on other cultures that makes us continually doubtful of producing anything original while despising ourselves for using the products of foreign cultures.1 And this, he adds, is responsible for the fact that we Latin Americans never realize how many original contributions we are making and are capable of making in many areas. Finally, Eco declared: “The essential nature of provincialism, therefore, does not lie in its maintaining a dependent relationship with other cultures, but in its invariable development of a neurotic awareness of that dependence.”2 In quoting Eco’s words at the Austin Symposium (Contemporary Latin American Art, University of Texas, October 1975) I aroused the wrath of certain of the participants in that meeting. I am still asking myself why, since the words I quoted expressed the positive stand taken by a European intellectual whose probity is beyond suspicion. In other words, if I repeat that statement here it is not with the intention wounding anyone’s feelings, but because I intend to take it seriously and use it as a basis for developing what I propose as a plan of action. It is an important opinion, for it shows us how our image is reflected in a mirror that is not our own, unstained by any misunderstood nationalism.
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To me, that is what should be happening in art. Instead of weeping crocodile tears over our hopeless dependence on others and drawing a certain pleasure from the masochism with which we accept our incapability of acting, I think that our first and foremost duty is now, once and for all, to affirm our own personality and take a stand.
The artist—who after all is free to search either within himself or without for inspiration—will produce his works as he sees fit. It makes no difference whether they are figurative, neo-figurative, abstract, kinetic, surrealistic, or even conceptual or ecological, or whether they are intended to modify the earth or one’s body through the effects of certain techniques involving public videotaped performances. What is essential is that any such manifestation must reveal the imagination and indispensable creativity that enable the artist to produce a specific work that demonstrates some heretofore-unknown aspect of his original insight of the world.
I dislike mentioning names [because] I might forget one, and that always brings problems. I will not mention Mexicans—the reader can make up his own list—but there can be no doubt that [Armando] Morales, in Nicaragua; Soto, Cruz-Diez, and [Alejandro] Otero, in Venezuela; and [Edgar] Negret and [Fernando] Botero, in Colombia, are all well-known figures today, just as Tamayo, Matta, and Lam were in the preceding generation. The renown each has won is well deserved, and corresponds—more or less—to that won by the best of the men of letters who are their contemporaries. The time has come, then, to write about them—the visual artists—without falling back on the native touches, folklore, or local color that so often totally absorb North Americans and Europeans. To us, these artists are not exotic: they are our compatriots, friends or not, but always members of the same spiritual “blood group.”
Always supposing, for sure, that the museums and galleries recognize that all of us—both artists and critics—are acting in good faith, and begin organizing the kind of individual and collective expositions that I have never ceased to demand.
. . . Let us begin to produce those works, to be ourselves, once and for all. And let us have no more of such complaints as “we just don’t exist,” “they pay no attention to us,” that sound as if they came from crybabies, beaten before they begin.
No, we are no better than anyone else. But neither are we worse. And it may be that we who are the last called—or perhaps the next-to-the-last, since there are always the Africans—will be the first in the heavens of present-day or future art. I have great faith not only in the talent, but also in the enthusiasm, fertility, and obstinacy of our best artist and their indispensable interpreters, the critics.
1
See Damián Bayón, Aventura plástica de Hispanoamérica, (Mexico City, 1974), 279.
2
Bayón, (1974), 279.