Saúl Yurkievich (1931–2005), the Argentinean poet and critic, taught Latin American literature at the Université de Paris-Vincennes and was also visiting professor at Harvard University, University of Chicago, Columbia University, and UCLA. “La especificidad del arte latinoamericano” is the second part of Yurkievich’s essay “El Arte de una sociedad en transformación”; it addresses some specific aspects of Latin American art in the mid-1970s. Writing at the onset of a rekindled regional interest on this matter, he argues that the specificity of Latin American art is marginal at best and that it is impossible to circumscribe its art to a set of common values. Yurkievich does, however, note commonalities in the social context, including the fact that the vast majority of Latin Americans experience the dramatic contradiction inherent in living in a pre-modern society threatened by mass media images of modernity. His text first appeared in America Latina en sus artes [“El arte de una sociedad en transformación,” (Mexico City: Siglo XXI Editores, 1974), 175–79]. [SEE DOCUMENT IV.3.6 FOR ANOTHER ESSAY FROM THE SAME ANTHOLOGY].
THERE CERTAINLY ARE GROUNDS FOR SPECULATION concerning the specific nature of current Latin American art; beyond the fact that it is produced by Latin Americans who do not always live in Latin America. What, exactly, does it tell us? What characteristics does it reveal or connote? If we take specific nature to mean the desire to provide a clear representation or expression of Latin American reality, then a more thoroughly Latin American art would be the kind that chooses a figurative portrayal of distinctly local themes, and paints scenes from the local geography, or sculpts Criollo types; in other words, the sort of work produced by the Mexican mural painters, the indigenists, and the social realists. Aside from this standardized figuration—this depiction of aboriginal or native subjects—there are other painters who sometimes use non-figurative media to allude to their Latin American origins and roots; for example, Rufino Tamayo, Wifredo Lam, Nemesio Antúnez, María Luisa Pacheco, Fernando de Szyszlo, or Armando Morales. The essentially Latin American quality, then, would consist of an explicit or implicit geographical or cultural reference to the Latin American continent. But there is also another very important group of artists who work with plastic languages that are not limited by any ethnic or geographical parameters; that is, those who express themselves with pure plastic media, devoid of any literary, social, or political connotation, [this group includes] Julio Le Parc, Jesús Soto, Luis Tomasello, Alejandro Otero, Carlos Cruz-Diez, Sérgio Camargo, and many others.
In short, Latin American art cannot be defined solely as work produced by artists who seek to present themselves expressly or allusively as Latin Americans. Neither can it be defined as work created exclusively in Latin America. The most popular criteria—though controversial and not universally acknowledged—defines Latin American art as work produced by Latin American artists, regardless of their aesthetic or where they live.
On a worldwide scale, in spite of varying levels of development and inequalities in technological progress and the accumulation and use of wealth, the consensus is that our Latin American society is in an accelerated state of mutation and that we live in a world of spiraling changes wrought mainly by mankind’s increasing ability to transform raw materials into products. This process creates fundamental changes in the way we live and affects us in terms of perception, conception, operation, and our way of representing the world. The art of our time is an art of rupture, defined by a permanent desire for innovation and by a growing instability and mutability that form the underlying narrative of our historic acceleration, of mankind’s eternal attempt to adapt to the dynamics of a controversial universe in perpetual motion.
In spite of its social and economic backwardness, its frequently obsolete structures, its abysmal internal differences, and its fundamental insufficiencies, Latin America cannot avoid the repercussions of the times. The explosive situations created by its mushrooming population; its rapid, disorganized urban development; the pressure-cooker conditions of its subdued masses clamoring for a decent standard of living and true political representation; and the violence of its social confrontations have intensified its crises, ruptures, contrasts, instability, mobility, highs and lows, and antagonisms.
In a continent where the vast majority of the peasant population is doubly marginalized—marginalized from rural society and from global society, and where almost a third of the total population lives on an income of sixty to seventy dollars a year, virtually excluded from the financial economy and the consumer society, fifty million radios and ten million television sets extol the virtues of modern life.1 People can hear and see a contemporary reality that they cannot enjoy. In Latin America these days, the mass media are the main vehicle for the popular arts. For now at least, the visual arts are doomed to exist for the enjoyment of the privileged minorities, although in more urbanized countries they are reproduced in magazines with enormous print runs that are sold in sidewalk kiosks.
In Latin American art, as in other areas, there are two contrasting movements: one is marginal, folding in on itself, centripetal, driven by a local focus; the other is expansive, centrifugal in an international sense. The former promotes and venerates values that do not transcend national borders and commands disproportionate prices in local markets. It tends to consist of soothing, reassuring, predictable works that are in step with prevailing social tastes, are easily “legible” by the majority and, from an aesthetic perspective, are more or less anachronistic.
As distinct from such artists, whose acclaim is entirely local, there are others who manage to access the international circuit via metropolitan cultural centers and, very occasionally, directly from their country of origin. Sometimes, sophisticated artists who are sufficiently au courant with trends produce advanced works that are rejected by their milieu due to a lack of permeability and cosmopolitanism at the local level. Also, as has occurred in Buenos Aires on several occasions, there frequently can be a lack of exposure to the artist’s work in the international circuit, in which case exile is the only solution.
This basic, simplified differentiation provides insight into how art was promoted in Latin America at that time. The region’s marginal position vis-à-vis world decision-making centers in economic, political, and cultural matters, its dependence on major cities overseas, and the nature of the prevailing neo-colonialism also led to forms of aesthetic subordination. Our countries export raw materials and import manufactured products; similarly with cultural products—we export artists and import aesthetics. Our economic systems, like our educational systems, were imposed from abroad; or rather, they were transplanted by cosmopolitan minorities and inadequately adapted to local conditions.
There have been many socio-economic studies that proposed reformist or revolutionary theories and practices designed to deprive us of our independence and subjugate the free will of our people. But economic sovereignty does not mean isolation; it means stepping onto the world stage as an equal. Such is the imperative of the technological era that no modern country can avoid. Once we have achieved economic de-colonization, how can we achieve cultural de-colonization? By pursuing native themes and regional expressions of limited diffusion, or by searching for widely understandable languages that are in synch with modern people in a modern world? By tirelessly seeking approval through neo-folkloric forms, or by allowing the free expansion of a culture with no local strings attached? And furthermore, should nationalism and internationalism be seen as mutually exclusive opposites? [Undoubtedly,] socio-economic liberating practices tend to be more univocal, effective, and satisfactory than cultural and artistic ones.
Almost without exception, producers and exporters of cultural and artistic trends tend to be more prosperous. The gestation, diffusion, and international imposition of schools or aesthetics all begin in the power centers. There is an undeniable relationship between political–economic power and artistic–cultural power, though they do not automatically go hand-in-hand. France has less economic power than Western Germany, but it has more cultural clout. Since the dawn of our political independence, France was the source of most cultural imports to Latin America, in spite of the fact that the economy in many countries, especially those in the southern cone, was under British control, and the United States exerted considerable influence over countries in the northern part of the continent. After the Second World War the situation changed, both economically and culturally. The United States monopolized politics and economics in Latin America and developed substantial influence in artistic fields as well as a result of the boom in the visual arts that originated with the brilliant New York school, and was followed by Pop art, Op art, Minimalism, and Conceptual art. This coincided with a decline in creative output in France. We should not attempt to oversimplify the reasons for these changes or to attribute the artistic boom in the United States purely to economic influences. That would suggest that Latin American artists are robots, with no discernment of their own, who submissively accept their aesthetic from the metropolis du jour. It is undeniable, however, that economic factors do play a part in cultural situations.2
Paris played a decisive role in the evolution of the visual arts between the mid-nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth century as the unavoidable crossroads, the heart of production, concentration, meeting, and propagation of artistic trends. Her aesthetic sway in Latin America was combined with the even lengthier ideological influence of the encyclopedists whose ideas had been circulating throughout the continent ever since the end of the eighteenth century. Paris was the source of the earliest ruptures that rocked the academic conventionalism of capital cities in Latin America, which were little more than villages at the time. It was, on the whole, the Italian masters who trained our painters and sculptors in Pompier realism and mimetic art, the stereotypical reproduction of traditional genres that at times dared to sponsor pathetic forays into the dramas of social naturalism.
In the wake of their devastating wars, the Latin American republics, stagnant and out of touch with the rest of the world, began a period of internal organization. The machine age transformed the dominant countries into industrial powers that now came seeking raw materials and food in their colonies, trading posts, and dependent nations. Latin America was soon engaged in trade, though doomed to be nothing but a provider of basic commodities. The local elites, who had made their fortunes in the agricultural and livestock business and the exploitation of minerals in response to ravenous world demand, began to lose their national identity and their local nature. They became partners in international financial ventures, they traveled, they became cosmopolitan, and they spent time in Europe, buying European works of art. They thus brought to Latin America important collections of Impressionist paintings, sculptures by [Auguste] Rodin and [Antoine] Bourdelle—both of whom produced monuments for Buenos Aires—, and the latest fashions in ornamental objects. They copied the habitat and the architecture of the fin-de-siècle Paris haute bourgeoisie. . . .
Half a century late, Latin American Impressionism offered a timid version of the original and, as befits its adaptation to a semi-rural environment in the very early stages of industrial development, it was a stripped-down version sans the scientific theory—the psycho-physiology of vision, theory of color, focus on capturing the movement of real life, supremacy of luminous energy over physical immobility, and so on—that complemented the original experimentation of French Impressionism.
The same truncated process of adaptation would be repeated in the transplanting of a whole range of schools that were prematurely transferred with no thought to the level of development in the Latin American context. Cultural transplants functioned in an imitative fashion that had no connection to local socioeconomic conditions. Cosmopolitan minorities grafted aesthetics onto a local environment, limiting them to a narrow range of consumption with none of the structural relationships that existed in their place of origin, in the area that originally gave rise to those movements. To wit: Cubism and Futurism represented the enthusiasm and admiration felt by the early avant-garde for the physical and mental transformations prompted by the first machines; Surrealism was a rebellion against the alienation of the technological era; the Concrete movement emerged together with the functional architecture and industrial design that was intended to create a new, programmed, comprehensive human habitat; Informalism was another reaction against rationalism, asceticism, and the mass production of the functional era; it was a response to the profound crisis of values and the existential void caused by the Second World War, the most savage slaughter ever perpetrated in all human history.
We [Latin Americans] have been involved in all those trends in the same sequence in which they appeared in Europe, but we have barely experienced the “mechanical realm” of the Futurists; we have had no major industrial era; we have not been fully immersed in the consumer society; we have not been swamped by mass production or limited by an excess of functionalism. Though we have experienced existential angst, [we did it] without Warsaw or Hiroshima.
Around 1920, Latin Americans decided to catch up quickly and began skipping stages. Artists settled in manufacturing centers and began to participate in avant-garde movements. Post-Impressionism, Expressionism, Fauvism, Cubism, and Futurism all appeared and were re-expressed by our artists in a frequently timid, impoverished synthesis. From the very beginning, the avant-garde artists considered themselves to be an international movement; they developed a network of affiliates around the world that lent itself to a maximum circulation of works and ideas. Several Latin Americans—who were quick to settle in France and Italy—joined the new schools just as they were at their most expansive and effervescent. This was the first true rupture with the nineteenth-century tradition; it was also a break with a delayed and purely imitative epigonism.
1
Cf. Jean Huteau, “La transformación de América Latina,” Tiempo Nuevo (Caracas: 1970).
2
Yurkievich’s thinking in this regard is extremely close to Marta Traba’s interpretation of the totalitarian ideological content imbued in the contemporary robotic individual described in “The Visual Arts in a Consumer Society” [SEE DOCUMENT IV.3.4].—Ed.