IV.2.8 DIGITAL ARCHIVE 1061762
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UNLESS WE REFUSE TO GO BEYOND SURFACE APPEARANCES, we must make that effort; it will show us how great a lack of inner freedom there is beneath the apparent freedom of action we see on the surface. Likewise, if Latin American artists, like other groups, are now resorting to demonstrating their resistance to political regimes, it is precisely because of the restraints those regimes impose on inner freedom. Thus, Umberto Eco may be seen to have made a banal observation, since one must be familiar with the causes of dependence and the reasons for the scornful attitude towards “using foreign products” in order to deal with the political question that is referred to only indirectly.
No Latin American artist or any artist anywhere, at any time, can do his work “just as he himself decides to do it,” not only because such an absolutely personal decision is unthinkable (freedom does not mean doing just what one pleases) but also because he is responding, whether badly or well, in that work to a concept of the absolute that society develops in each succeeding age. Unless it is decided that it is the implicit mandate of that society, legitimate so long as it places no unacceptable curbs on the use of one’s imagination, that is to be followed.
Bayón [SEE DOCUMENT IV.2.7] recognizes this principle in his text, when he demands that the artist “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.” Except that it has never been just “some aspect” that has had to with that concept; furthermore, the concept itself—as [Wilhelm] Dilthey would have said—is not an insight of the world, but of the absolute, as is shown by the use of the word “original,” since accepting the origin implies overcoming all that is merely relative, including the world.
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There lies the fundamental question, which I have already set forth in my Política artístico-visual en Latinoamérica [Artistic and Visual Politics in Latin America] (Buenos Aires: Editorial Crisis, 1974), and which there is no room to include, even in summarized form, in this article. I can only list the basic points on which I differ with Bayón’s text in answer to the four questions I have been sent.
1. A distinction should be made between the aesthetic, which has to do with the way in which men in general make use of their creative imagination, and the artistic, which is the particular way in which some men express the former in specific works. And yet another distinction must be made between the work of art itself and the art of which it forms part, for the work of art is a unique and not-to-be-repeated situation that is produced like a spark between the creator and the viewer. Therefore, to ask about Latin American aesthetics is to ask about a whole complex of intransitive or transitive attitudes that are contagious to everyone in the area, and not about the deliberately and objectively transitive forms that are created by the artists. This is a mistake that can lead to serious results, since people frequently attempt to characterize the aesthetic nature of a period by analyzing works of art, as if it were something that flowered from them, when it really lies at their very roots, and the works should be characterized by analyzing the aesthetic factors that jointly account for their existence.
2. In speaking of aesthetics, I prefer to use the neuter article [“lo” in Spanish]. The determinant is all very well if we are speaking of the philosophical discipline itself, but not if we are dealing with the ways in which men reveal those attitudes in all their day-to-day acts. Artists interpret such manifestations as a unit that proceeds not from the forms but from the metaphysical attitude men adopt in common, which is the basis of the strange correlations that enter into their symbols and, from the formal point of view, their styles. Here we come to the crux of the problem: the lack of unity in Latin America—which is not so much the artists’ fault as it is that of the tremendous cultural diversity, and is owed less to the number of races inhabiting those countries and to class differences than it is to the metaphysical poverty of the most developed sectors of the population. How can one speak of the aesthetic in similar terms when some countries have large native or black populations and others have populations that are preponderantly mestizo and white? How can one do so even for a single country, when that country has the same mixture of human elements? Above all, how does one coordinate those who look backward towards the past and those whose view is fixed firmly on the present? That is why I maintained, in the above-mentioned work, that in order to obtain a Latin American art we must act on what is aesthetic to perfect and unify our ways of life.
3. It is understandable that I am asked to provide more precise information on the body of theory underlying the thesis I have briefly outlined here. Well, it doesn’t exist, and it will not exist until there has been a thorough investigation of aesthetic habits: gestures, body movements, ways of dressing and adorning oneself, slang and voice inflections, etcetera; ideas, intuitions, feelings, and mandates, in relation to environmental characteristics determined by race, the dogma and cult of religion, the political system moral conduct, etcetera; everything that has to do with the imaginary, and the absolute as an intentional horizon—God or the concepts that have been replacing Him since the beginning of the Middle Ages (the universe, the individual, society, energy, and so forth) as transplanted to Latin America, though in less and less absolute form. I have undertaken this task on my own since, with the exception of [Georg] Lukács (and he only in part), no one seems to have thought or to think as I do. I have been busy for several years on a book to be titled Tránsitos de la conciencia artística [Transitory Aspects of the Artistic Conscience] that will present my ideas on this subject.
4. Obviously, I cannot say in what precise moment Latin American art began. But as I understand it, the question refers not to the remote or even to the fairly recent past, but to the moment in which we began to have an original art of our own. My position is as follows: If manifestations of popular art are original today in some countries, it is due to the powerful sense of the aesthetic retained by the Indians and mestizos or the blacks, groups known for their racial unity and socio-cultural organization. And if other present-day expressions in the form of songs, dances, cinema, TV, videotapes, and posters are beginning to show originality, it is because of the emerging socio-cultural unity of youth. Works of cultured art, on the other hand, show no originality. Is this because of the dependence and inferiority complex alluded to by Eco?
That is part of it, although from whom were we Latin Americans to learn, if not from the Europeans and U.S. artists? But is more largely due to the lack of aesthetic unity, which is disorienting to creative artists.
That stage in art has run its course and, in spite of what recalcitrant may think, may be considered over. We are now about to enter a new and far more difficult stage, in which there is full awareness of the aesthetic factor and of artists’ capacity to create the kind of art that it demands—a stage, in other words, in which we will truly understand what Latin America is. Because this task will not be limited to the artists alone, but must be undertaken by everyone, to the measure in which the economic and sociopolitical order permits them to achieve an identity by developing powers that have been numbed, not by the capitalist system, but by the post-industrial society. All this shows how difficult it is to say that Latin American artists have any real freedom of action. Can one be free who does no more than follow political or cultural watchwords?
I proposed to demonstrate this crucial situation in Latin America in the course of a series of ten lectures on easel painting that I gave at the Museo de Arte Moderno in Mexico City in 1974. My intention was to convince my hearers indirectly that the easel painting, like the statue and the limited-edition print, are anachronistic and ineffective whenever they fail to strengthen our sense of the aesthetic, and in such cases actually impoverish creative activity. . . .