Following the success of the 1975 Austin Symposium [SEE DOCUMENTS IV.4.1, IV.4.2, AND IV.4.3], international gatherings such as the Primer Encuentro Iberoamericano de Críticos de Arte y Artistas Plásticos—under the aegis of Museo de Bellas Artes in Caracas, June 18–27, 1978—became fertile ground for the consolidation of continental art criticism and scholarship in Latin America. Organized by the short-lived Centro de Investigación, Documentación y Difusión de las Artes Plásticas de América Latina (CIDAPAL), the Encuentro’s main aims were to foster the establishment of a critical framework for Latin American art praxis as well as the research-based means to set it on equal footing with international practice. As in Texas, a parallel show, the group exhibition Arte iberoamericano hoy, was also organized by the museum in Caracas.
Included in this section are transcriptions of the papers delivered by the Peruvian art critic and professor at the Universidad de San Marcos in Lima Carlos Rodríguez Saavedra and by the Paris-based Argentinean avant-garde experimental artist Julio Le Parc (born 1928). Rodríguez Saavedra simultaneously positions Latin American art as either following the unsteady path of intermittent acceptance or rebuttal of the mainstream. For his part, Le Parc—who in 1960 helped establish the influential GRAV (Groupe de Recherche d’Art Visuel), a visual arts and conceptual collective in Paris (active until 1968)—presents an open-ended text that asks key questions and warns against aestheticism, arguing in favor of intensive research to investigate the link between art and society. Beyond questioning the roles of artists within a capitalist society, he denounces the opposition of many Latin American dictatorial regimes of his day to creativity because of its subversive implications. The translations of both texts are made from the original typescripts in the archives of the Venezuelan museum [Carlos Rodríguez Saavedra, “Alternativas de la pintura latinoamericana actual,” Lima, June, 1978 and Julio Le Parc, “Interrogantes,” Caracas, June, 1978, Primer encuentro iberoamericano de críticos de arte y artistas plásticos, (Caracas: Museo de Bellas Artes, 1978)].