Does present-day Latin American art exist as a distinct expression? If it does, on what terms? Can an artist produce work independent from foreign interests? To what extent do Latin American artists respond to their immediate circumstances: community, visual arts resources, and so on? What operational models can the Latin American artist employ?
These pivotal questions were posed by the important symposium that accompanied the exhibition 12 Latin American Artists Today/12 artistas latino americanos de hoy at The University of Texas at Austin, Archer M. Huntington Art Museum (September 28–November 2, 1975). Indeed, the event’s proposal was to continue a dialogue on the notion of a Latin American aesthetic, an issue repeatedly addressed by artists and critics since the previous decade [SEE DOCUMENTS IN SECTION IV.2]. Here, we include the papers presented by Mexico City-based, Peruvian critic Juan Acha, the São Paulo-based curator and art historian Aracy Amaral (born 1930); and Argentinean art critic Marta Traba (1923–1983).
Acha asserts that, just as there is not a single type of Latin American, there cannot be a homogeneous artistic production. Instead, he proposes a sort of productive permeability, a somewhat essentialist solution that calls for approaching art as a socio-cultural phenomenon.
Amaral agrees with what she refers to as the “geo-sensitive” tenet in Acha’s argument and with the notion that there is no unifying artistic expression in Latin America. Amaral expresses an interest in art that responds to a societal context and reflects the violence of existing domestic contradictions in national terms. She also ponders the obvious reluctance of the art centers of the metropolis to accept peripheral artistic outcomes from northeastern Brazil which use an aesthetic language steeped in the country’s precarious social conditions.
The last of the group of texts from the UT Austin symposium is Marta Traba’s polemical “¿Existe el arte latinoamericano como una expresión artística distinta?” Here, she expands her opinions on the deceptively homogeneous cultures of technological and highly industrialized societies, which she previously condemned in Arte Latino Americano Actual [SEE DOCUMENT IV.3.4]. In her view, the driving force of these societies is the creation of commodity art produced to feed an expanding global market; a process that robs art of its representative character and disqualifies art produced in the margins. Presented one year after Traba published her groundbreaking book Dos décadas vulnerables and her essay “La cultura de la resistencia” (1973) [Fernando Alegría, ed., Literatura y praxis en América Latina (Caracas: Monte Ávila, 1974), 49–80], the present essay revisits the modus operandi of a “culture of resistance,” a term she often stressed in light of the growing debates on Latin American art.
All three texts appeared with minimal variations in the proceedings for the symposium, El artista latinoamericano y su identidad [(Caracas: Monte Ávila, 1977)], edited by Damián Bayón, also the curator for the exhibition. The present excerpts by Acha and Traba are reprints of the translated manuscript versions at the Benson Latin American Collection/University of Texas, Austin [Speak out! Charla! Bate-Papo!: Contemporary Art and Literature in Latin America, Symposium organized by Damián Bayón, University of Texas at Austin, October, 1975]. Amaral’s text is drawn from a 1983 anthology [Aracy Amaral, Arte e meio artístico: entre feijoada e o x-burguer (1961–1981), (São Paulo: Nobel, 1983), 226–331]. Traba’s paper also appeared as “Somos latinoamericanos” in a posthumous anthology of her writings [Emma Araújo de Vallejo, ed., Marta Traba, (Bogota: Planeta Colombiana Editorial S.A., 1984), 331–333].