IV.4.10 DIGITAL ARCHIVE 815687
I WILL BEGIN WITH A CLARIFICATION. The title—“Alternatives for Today’s Latin American Painting”—involves the problem of orientation of this continent’s painting. I do not intend to dictate a solution to this matter or to offer any conjecture whatsoever. I have never believed in the ability to tell the future, whether it was the innocent kind peddled by gypsies and clairvoyants or the pedantic kind practiced by scientists or learned university scholars. The alternatives that I will set forth exist in immediate reality. Latin American painting has been held up through them [and] with them.
[Moreover, let me say] one more word with regard to the risks of being a critic. A meeting like the one that brings us together would have been unimaginable in an earlier era. Art historian conventions have taken place many times. But the meetings of critics who assume the authority to debate the foundations and pathways of aesthetic creation are a dangerous innovation of our times. It may be said that the errors of our forebearers have taught us nothing. On the contrary, it would seem they enable and confirm our present authority. Nevertheless, the History of Art Criticism is a tragicomedy of errors played out with impunity before the opposition of a lucid minority. From its beginnings, in the eighteenth century, [Denis] Diderot, whom none could call ignorant, dedicated himself to glorifying the lachrymose oil paintings of [Jean-Baptist] Greuze beyond all proportion. The absurdities of criticism grew during the last century with the development of the press. The names of [Louis] Leroy, [Louis] Vauxcelles and [Albert] Wolff, along with their preferences, have become anecdotes in the History of Art while the art works these critics condemned now hang reverently in museums. Only after the end of the First World War, when the avant-garde ceased to be such, when it became official and was consequently castrated, when it became museum-worthy—as happened more precisely after the Second World War—only then did art criticism get things right. At least this is what we believe today. Our era has achieved the miracle of converting avant-garde painting into the preferred art of official critics. For this reason we should doubt our own authority and suspect that perhaps we know less than we presume. The words to follow should thus be understood as an investigation into the creative process of today’s Latin American painting. It is a sort of prediction as to which direction [painting] will take on our continent. [It should] not be taken as an exhortation to create or carry it out according to preestablished approaches.
The existence of alternatives highlights the problems of Latin American art. We have become so accustomed, especially in the last few years, to the notion of alternatives for our pictorial task that we have forgotten that the mere idea of it can only exist once we have accepted the possibility of an alternative to our experience of being. Because if art reveals anything—that something, [Martin] Heidegger says—is being. The work of each artist is the manner in which being is interpreted through a personal, individual vision. To suppose that we have alternatives beside our own disposition from which we can choose is equivalent to believing that we possess that magical gift of creating works that belong to many views of the world. Of course there exists an ample repertory of prefabricated proposals with which the international market tempts artists. And we are acquainted with the motives that might lead an artist to choose a model from within this repertory. This type of transaction has been perfected with great frequency in our times. I would also like to note that there are many who copy (rarely innocently) native models. But let’s not kid ourselves. [The method] chosen in this manner by these so-called artists is not a profound formulation of truth, but simply a method of execution—not of creation—invented by others. It is an accepted formula, a commercially fruitful fabrication of those objects that [Charles] Baudelaire defines as “aesthetic abominations.” The profit will undoubtedly be immediate. But the truth will surely later be restored. This is why Marcel Proust says that an artist’s work is his real and Final Judgment.
The truth cannot be chosen. In the realm of authentic creation, alternatives necessarily do not exist. Only over the course of a slow and very difficult process of investigation—I should say excavation—does the premonition, the glimmer, the difficult encounter with reality that each person must discover on his own, occur. In this trance, the artist finds himself obliged to create a language that is inseparable from the truth he has discovered. The aesthetic language is both instrument and material. I repeat that, on this path, choice does not exist. An artist must always obey truth. To do so he will break every rule that inhibits his expression and will freely use every one that serves his task, his duty: to intensify his knowledge of being, to deepen his experience. Hamlet’s alternative, quoted so terribly often, does not mean there are two possibilities, but rather one. “To be or not to be,” says the Prince of Denmark. The [choice] is clear: to be or nothingness. His words also suit painting.
Nevertheless, the History of Latin American Painting seems, from the outside, to be a rolling movement, a pendular movement, an alternative movement. This movement is a result of a fracture in our original coherence in pre-Columbian times due to the Spanish conquest. Beginning in the sixteenth century, we became part of a value system that we did not create and within which we have been second-class members: Western culture. We use the same clock as the Europeans, but with a different time. The conditions of this pendular movement were given in that moment by the historical process: to go from what we were to what we are not, from our own to that which is foreign. In painting, this pendular movement has been visible since Independence, when our republic substituted the Baroque-mestizo universe of colonial art for the academic individualism of Europe. The first expressions of this alternative movement are, on one extreme, Costumbrist painting and, on the other, the painting of the academy. Since then, the pendulum has continued swinging, each time at a faster rhythm. One part of our art has consequently consisted of recreating the proposed model. But the pendulum also has a return movement. It returns to its source, to us, to our essence. Seen from the outside, the described movement appears as a confirmation of the theory of the alternative, which essentially consists of moving from alienation to an absentminded absorption and vice versa. Still, for the real artist, as I have said, no real alternative exists. What happens is that the cultural spectrum of the Latin American man, a living spectrum within his own self, does not respond in any way to this simplistic model—the native and the foreign—of the exterior movement previously described.
Instead of choosing between an alternative with two faces, the artist listens to his own complex spiritual experience, composed of the sum of the contrary [proposals], the symbiosis of native and foreign elements, nourished from the time in which we entered orbit around Western culture, through aesthetic approaches, techniques, and theoretical tools that have been wrought by [this same culture] and that are inseparable from our own expressive process. This is the attitude of those who have revealed the depth and universality of this continent through their works, beyond whatever difference in language and perhaps precisely by means of their dialect. Such is the case of [Rufino] Tamayo, [Wifredo] Lam, [Roberto] Matta, [Alejandro] Obregón, [Jesús] Soto, [Fernando] de Szyszlo, Negret, to cite only a few names. There are more. In the work of each of these artists, the complexity of the broadest worldview has been taken on and transfigured into aesthetic forms. Given the power of conviction that emanates from these works, all research into the origin of their elements—native or imported—is surely useful from the point of view of Art History; nevertheless, it could be irrelevant and worthless from the view of criticism. The act of creation fuses the Manichean polarity of historic alternatives and forms the work of art.
This alternative movement is, nevertheless, inseparable from the existence of Latin America. Prompted successively by a centripetal energy and another centrifuge, our continent opens and gathers itself in an incessant diastolic and systolic [motion] of primal necessity. It focuses (to affirm itself) and expands (to renew itself). When we contract, we consolidate ourselves; when we stretch ourselves, we confirm our universal vocation. In the first case we become more authentic; in the second, more complex and richer. To eliminate either of these two instants would be the equivalent of decreeing paralysis and consequently death for Latin America. This is also, finally, the process by which we construct our personality, which cannot be limited to only one of our components. It is evident, for example, that we cannot identify ourselves exclusively with our older and deeper roots, the pre-Columbian past, and it is also evident that we do not belong to the culture of Europe. Nonetheless, each one of us could say just as Truman Capote did upon his return from Europe: “I know now that I do not belong to that world, but I also know that world belongs to me.” Open, desirous, incredibly sensitive and barbaric, free of burdens, foreign to every style, our appetite for universality fortunately has no limit. We thought ourselves located outside of Western culture and now we know that it has been given to us—a marvelous feast—as an ingredient of our destiny. We are cultural Mestizos; but we know that all culture is mestizo, and ours cannot consist of a limiting identification with what is typical. Our mestizaje means that we are new and that we consequently enjoy a fountain of power and liberty that is our very selves. We are people open to all the possibilities of man.
The artists of this continent thus have at their disposal—not to lose their identity but rather to build it—all the systems and instruments of creation that exist in contemporary culture: all these are reflected in their worldview. The role of art criticism is not to discriminate against those [tools] used by an artist, confirming some and disqualifying others. The role of art criticism is to elucidate, if possible, the authenticity with which each work has been created and, as such, its worth. The alternatives for creation in Latin America cannot be defined with sociological arguments, political convictions, or historical approaches. The alternatives of creation are the deep and latent possibilities that each artist tests in his own spiritual context that, like a concentric mirror, reflects the cultural spectrum of contemporary man.