IV.3.4 DIGITAL ARCHIVE 833707
In Arte Latino Americano Actual, Marta Traba examines how the growing influence of U.S. art shaped the art of Latin America during two cornerstone decades, the 1950s and 1960s. She also weighs in on how Latin American artists both succumbed to and resisted the impact of this influence. Here, we include an excerpt from part one—“Las artes plásticas en la sociedad de consumo”—in which the influential Argentinean critic stresses that movements such as Abstract Expressionism, Pop, Op, and the idea of “happenings” were developed in the context of highly industrialized urban centers in the U.S. There, according to her, the reified individual transformed art into mere “things” or objects of consumption. Indeed, her book marks a shift in Traba’s point of view [SEE DOCUMENTS IV.2.1, IV.2.2, AND IV.3.1 FOR EARLIER EXAMPLES OF HER WORK]; with this text, she launches “closed” or “open” critiques on the consumerism of U.S. art and culture and vividly calls for a cultural and political defense to retain the social and critical value of the art produced in the continent. This translation is made from the original publication [Marta Traba, Arte Latino Americano Actual, (Caracas: Universidad Central de Venezuela, Ediciones de la Biblioteca, 1972), 7–22].
FROM THE END OF WORLD WAR II to the present, the visual arts in the highly industrialized consumer society of the United States have been confined within a strict sociological framework. It is a framework that is delineated categorically, with no chance of misunderstanding or ambiguous interpretation. What is ambiguous, not to mention distressing, is the way art activities serve consumer society. Paradoxically, the more [art] proclaims its freedom and makes a huge display of its licentiousness, the more evident is the alienation caused by this role. What is not ambiguous is that art is in the service of technology, which is also an ideology capable of devising vigorous controls. These controls could lead to a totalitarianism that defeats any attempt to speak in an autonomous language.
[Herbert] Marcuse’s indictment of technology seems consistent with his overall system. Only a technology that is not neutral, one that is clearly tinged with totalitarian ideological content, could produce this [modern] robotic individual. Imitative and docile, the individual complies with the controls and renounces his “interior dimension.” The interior dimension lost by man in the consumer society cannot exist outside what [Henri] Lefebvre calls “a general code.” This is an overall system that emanates from the society to establish signs and meanings that are also general. An understanding of the system strengthens the harmony between man and his community. But, what is the language in the consumer society? We may call it, as Marcuse does, “ritual-authoritarian language” or categorize it, as [Roland] Barthes does, as “the language of all authoritarian regimes.” Or, we may follow Lefebvre in his pessimism about a consumer society’s capacity to grant any specific meaning to the image, accepting that all it can do is create some kind of road sign. The common denominator of all these interpretations is that technology, easily converted into an ideology, has penetrated the cultural unity of the consumer society and fragmented it. Upon disappearance of a general code that allows us to have common signs and meanings, [society] has created watertight compartments. As Lefebvre points out, these compartments act in accordance with operationalism, functionalism, structuralism, and, more and more, they tend to render a general code impossible.
It makes sense that these partial operating fields would inevitably lead to multiple meanings, to an infinite range of semiologies, to the arbitrariness of personal interpretations and speeches. Standards disappear, and there is a feeling of total freedom that Marcuse denounces as the greatest alienation of all.1 Given this linguistic chaos, we might expect an ever increasing divergence between the artist and the public. At some point, “participation” is no longer the initial game of turning the spectator into an accomplice; rather it becomes the only option, and a dramatic one [at that]. The most visible influence of this “ideological technology” on the visual arts is the replacement of what we could call traditional aesthetics by the aesthetics of decay. The highest value of traditional aesthetics was achieving the permanence of the artwork, going beyond the contingencies of a period and fashion to settle into a style. But the aesthetics of decay rules out and openly challenges these concepts. The most recent period in U.S. art, which has undoubtedly laid down aesthetic guidelines, began by supporting mobility and change. But in the past three years, an artwork is no sooner improvised than it is immediately destroyed, and the destruction is not even completed by the artist himself, but by a stranger: the public. This does not mean a negation of the artwork; rather it confers on it a very high value—one opposed to the traditional. This value is that of the perishable, which is also corrupting the other products of the consumer society.
Willem de Kooning may be the last individualist who actually has—perhaps through his European roots—a prodigious, “internal dimension.” Although his hand to hand battle to practice an art that resists the aesthetics of decay leads him to defeat, such a failure also allows him to grow as an artist. At the same time, this process precludes him from being involved in the serial production carried out by U.S. art from that period forward. Over the next few years, specifically while he wrestled with the amazing figure of the woman with her back to the window, de Kooning would reject the proposal that subsequent U.S. art would fully accept. That proposal was to turn art into a fragment of the technological plan that dominates consumer society, letting art be governed by the laws of technology and setting limits on its freedom. It would be left to art to determine a facile, collective happiness and help people overcome their inhibitions (to thus discharge aggressiveness). Consequently, individuals would be rendered less dangerous. In short, this would turn art into a perfectly prefabricated component of catharsis. As such, art would only be allowed to do these three things: entertain, liberate, and destroy. From then on, this would be carried out with incredible and terrible regularity.
In the work of some of the contemporary geniuses of U.S. art, we can easily follow this process. I am thinking of [Robert] Rauschenberg, undoubtedly one of the most surprising personalities given his capacity for invention. There is a penetrating poetic will in his first collage works, where the imprint of Action Painting persisted, though with a trace of something diffuse and melancholy. Compare these with the later works that incorporate objects and begin to take on an arbitrary, laughable, even phony meaning. (All these works are inferior to the marvelous surrealist associations created thirty years earlier by [Marcel] Duchamp and Man Ray.) Next, compare the early works with his current erotic light boxes, which show the failure of eroticism to create new myths in order to replace the meaningless void. In these comparisons, Rauschenberg’s work entertains, liberates and destroys to the extent that ideological technology imposes this requirement on contemporary art.
The usual justification of Pop art, which is clearly a specifically U.S. product—in spite of the efforts of the European critics—is the almost obvious correspondence of Pop forms with the new American way-of-life. In the same way, we may recognize a basic parallel between that way of life and the Happening or “anti-museum” art. Thomas M. Messer has just classified this as the maximum fusion between art and nature; between art and the thing that exists; between art and nothing, which is all that has been achieved to date. But it would be a mistake to consider these coincidences as data on style and therefore legally transmissible, in other words, to treat them as if they constituted a language. What they are is rather precisely the negation of language, considering the dual meaning offered by Lefebvre: [language is] a set of signs used by a society, and in turn, a code that allows us to decipher those signs, thus uniting meaning with meaningfulness, with no further ado.
We have seen that the consumer society lacks general signs and codes, just as technology generates controls and issues them in an authoritarian way. The control that requires art to entertain, liberate, and destroy its own image has been faithfully followed by the artists who contribute to the romantic, idealistic, and loose efforts of the Pacific art [school] and of Action Painting. Hardedge [abstraction], Pop art, Minimalism, the “Mad” trend as well as the “anti-museum” artists and Happenings, [along with the 1965 MoMA exhibition] The Responsive Eye are creating an aesthetic sphere. Governed by decay and predetermined by the ideological laws and the economics of the consumer society, this aesthetic relegates art to a watertight compartment. It is forcing art to be marginal, a fraction, an operation, forcing it to be parceled. It is demanding that art display, as was so intelligently stated by Lefebvre, “a group strategy.”
There is no doubt about it; modern U.S. art has agreed to be one sphere in the world of technology. Starting with that agreement, it lost any opportunity to render an overall interpretation of a society that it is [now] unable to see, except from the corner it was conceded. This is why the artists who constitute the pleiad of Pop art—even those who have created passionate artwork—insist on their absolute neutrality regarding criticism. Moreover, they discredit any art historian who sees them as subtle, caustic judges of the consumer society. In fact, they [argue that they] do nothing more than proclaim a truth that seems unsustainable from the point of view of traditional aesthetics, in which an art with no intention of interpretation or durability is inconceivable. The fact is that the energy displayed by the new U.S. artists is typically a production-based energy that extends to the paroxysm of the Happening. That is, to that point at which the incitement of the ideological technology becomes an irritant since it demands collective abandonment of inhibitions, playful pleasures that offer tranquility, that conform. . . . The difference between language—a general code—and adherence to the orders of the consumer society goes beyond defining U.S. art today. It does indeed help us understand the continuous changes and fragmentation of interests, motifs, and solutions of U.S. art. But the distinction between code and orders is also important for establishing the relationship of that art with artists in Latin America.
It seems to be a platitude to say that our continent has not gone beyond its colonial status. It is also obvious to recall that from Spanish domination, we went on to fall under French and European cultural domination. Then, immediately after the center of the visual arts moved from Paris to New York around 1948, Latin America began to receive signals from the [new] transmission hub. To the extent that the dissemination of art news was speeding up, the regularity and velocity of these signals increased as well.
The signal that replaced the relationships of sign and meaning in a global language was picked up instantaneously by the Latin American receivers. The age-old custom of a culture of adjustments and accommodations allowed the receivers to act in all confidence. Thus they turned directly to generate the same cultural products almost simultaneously. This was especially true in the open countries—Argentina, for example—where stage and audiovisual studies at the Instituto [Torcuato] Di Tella coincided with similar experiments in New York. Today, an exhibition of new Latin American artists is absolutely unidentifiable; their solutions, their forms of expression, and even their materials are identical to those of the artists of a highly industrialized consumer society.
This simultaneous presentation of parallel art events could be taken as a valid form of the “coalition of cultures” referred to by [Claude] Lévi-Strauss. At first sight, it might seem favorable in order to enrich the cultures that he himself calls “savage,” to differentiate them from “domesticated” thinking, with the greater contributions from the latter.2 The thesis of a coalition of cultures as an effective system of cultural progress has been defended by all the Latin American critics whose opinion weighs on and legitimates artists’ attitudes. The attitude of mistrust toward this coalition is considered somewhat provincial and “bitter.” In fact, the defense of the supposedly regional cultures almost always comes from heated nationalists. Since they are the ones who would defend the most indefensible positions of any “Nativism,” this has contributed to the confusion of positions.
For the artists on the South American continent, to defend a coalition of cultures and thus legitimate any product backed by the U.S. transmission hub, lets them make up for lost time. It allows them to enter into orbit and express themselves without regionalist complexes, within a universal concept of art.
But the coalition is disadvantageous; the universalism is false, and the forms created are exactly the same as those generated in the consumer society. So this leads to an inexcusable abdication of intent—never mind whether or not it fails—to formulate its own language. Lévi-Strauss himself sees the disadvantage of the coalition, as do his critics, when they maintain that alliances of this kind inevitably lead to a similarity between the resulting cultural products.
. . .
They are not just responding to the orders of technological society when U.S. artists maintain before the critics: “What you see is what you get”; “we are only aiming at the retina”; “we are not passing subliminal messages”; “we have no interest in saying anything”; “we only want to create,” etc. Rather, they are automatically reconnecting with a community in which art faced its worst crisis of misunderstanding vis-à-vis society—from the end of the Impressionism through the Bauhaus. This crisis basically arose in Europe when the artist, seduced by the desire to experiment with new forms of expression, had to face the conservative and reactionary standards of the new bourgeoisie. Working under the mistaken belief that technology was their ally, the artists turned to the new forms of which we are all well aware. The new artwork ranged from the destruction wrought by analytical Cubism to the idealistic, spiritual evasions of abstract art. The Bauhaus was the only movement that understood the inevitable triumph of the technologies and tried to use them, prophetically foreseeing that art would be enslaved by them. But even the Bauhaus was strongly tinged by idealisms (Paul Klee) and metaphysical yearnings (Josef Albers). When these were transplanted into the American field, they would be torn up by the roots.
Given the nature of our times, art was going to end up dominated by technology. This could only have happened in the United States, where rationality and the desire for meaning were notably weaker than in Europe. The model for contemporary American art provides a thrilling simplicity. Forty years of transcriptional, pedestrian art, measured with the yardstick of daily life, transformed the artist into an efficient “Kodak.” During ten years of radical escape toward the Orient, the United States turned its back on Europe, working with Zen in a complete void and without interference. At the same time, it adopted the irrational value of the matter in Action Painting, and in the last two decades, it formulated the aesthetics of decay. Hence, art became a limited area within a technological society and the rejection of significant values. This is why the greatest disadvantage of a coalition between contemporary U.S. visual arts and ours is that we are allying ourselves with a cultural field that has no transmissible language. We are taking up with a biased player, closed into the strict area of its own reference. We are neither entering a school nor a university where we would be taught a certain type of knowledge that we could make “our own” with adjustments. This is what happened with the Spanish and then French colonization of times gone by. What we are doing now is moving into the household of a very strange, self-contained family, one that lives behind closed doors, with great internal consistency. There is no knowledge forthcoming; we are taking home a way of life that is not ours, and when we imitate it, we are [mere] apes. There is no coalition at all between one culture and the other; there is simply imitation. From all that is stated above, we can detect the false premise of the supposed universalism of U.S. art; its specific nature is precisely its regionalism. U.S. art is regional, local, and moreover, specifically urban. All its references are linked to the mass communications media and consumer goods. Therefore, it suffers from its own variations.
. . .
But even more serious than this trap, which is fairly obvious, is the absurd concept that confuses language with “road” signs. The specific nature of our societies, the cultural chaos, or plain and simple “acculturation” unfortunately turns us into receivers of “mother” cultures. But let us not forget the splendid cases of hybridization and artistic crossbreeding we find in the history of Latin American art. I believe we may even go so far as to state that the European influence (whether transmitted by the Baroque or Romantic period, or Modernismo) represented authentic instances of “coalition.” The art was received as coded signs and was inventoried. The work of the true creators could even end up back in the field where it originated. I am thinking of the entire Mexican Baroque period, of Aleijadinho [in Brazil], of the early republicans deriding Romanticism and Neoclassicism, of a genius such as [Armando] Reverón [in Venezuela] dismantling the influence of Impressionism until he reached absolute zero.
Thus, it is not dangerous to receive a language insofar as this language assumes a set of signs which may be used for different purposes as well as its own. What is ridiculous is to accept a traffic sign in a place where there is no traffic. To say this in terms that are less “metaphor-based pop art variations,” it is nonsense to assume that the signs of a highly industrialized consumer society could ever apply within societies that were branded by sociologists as “archaic,” “feudal,” semi-colonial or just plain colonial, living in pre-capitalist situations. [Other descriptions have pointed out] their meager domestic markets, oligarchies turned into pressure groups, development based on external pressure, marginalization of entire populations, parochialism, paternalism, and so on. Emphasizing the enormity of the cultural transplant—since today’s U.S. art refers to urban circumstances, objects, and imagery—it must also be introduced in urban areas. And if we wish to do that, we must remember that in our cities, almost one third of the population originates from peasant and other migrations. In other words, this [segment] lives in specific conditions determined by unemployment, social instability, and a failure to adapt that excludes any possible participation in a cultural life.
Once a system of references has disappeared, the art generated by said system will disappear. However, that has yet to happen. The entire Latin American avant-garde is working on visual arts in accordance with the signals emitted from the United States. It is true that their conduct is not identical; we can point out some variations and types of resistance that—in spite of the interest they stirred up—have been abandoned over time. The current panorama of the continental visual arts is unequivocally what we would see in a colony. The seriousness of this statement is based on the absolution we have gradually been granting ourselves. Perhaps a frank acceptance of this fact has already taken place; perhaps the colonized population wishes to be so and enjoys this status. If so, then any review of the growing U.S. colonization of Latin American “audiovisual” world may be in vain. But beyond this clearly pessimistic possibility, there is a sentence written by [Jean-Paul] Sartre that should be kept alive: “When the only recourse left to a people is to choose what type of death they will have, when all they have received from their oppressors is the single gift of desperation, what is left to lose? Their misfortune will be turned into their courage; they will turn this eternal rejection that opposes colonization into the absolute rejection of colonization.” However, in order for this to take place, first, it would have to be agreed that being an art “colony” is a misfortune. (And I do not say cultural colony, because literature seems to have done better at escaping this problem.) About this, the whole world is not in agreement, and neither is it easy to perceive the nuance of misfortune, since the signals are emitted and received under the most attractive and innocent of circumstances. In this case, the Trojan horse is the innocence of the art plan emitted by the technological society; the signals function with the competitive wisdom of all successful products. . . .
1
The author is referring to Herbert Marcuse’s book, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society (1964).—Ed.
2
This is a reference to the vertebral thinking of the Belgian ethnologist and related to his book, La pensée sauvage (1962), or The Savage Mind, (translated and published in English in 1966).—Ed.