IV.4.7 DIGITAL ARCHIVE 1065156
AT THE LAST [THIRTEENTH] SÃO PAULO BIENNIAL a group of Brazilian artists presented a work [Etsedrón III] that embodied the quest for new forms, based on expressions drawn from the popular art and traditions of certain areas of the country. Once again, inspiration has been sought in the familiar popular folklore that is so beloved, and so protected, by our governments.
What is Latin American art?
• The art produced by the pre-Hispanic civilizations?
• The art produced during the three hundred years of the colonial period?
• The art our peoples produced after winning their independence?
• The popular art that is a product of the backwardness and poverty of large sectors of our population?
• The cultured academic art of the nineteenth century?
• Could our culture exist at all without the contributions of Greece and Rome?
• How many of the peoples in question can deny that Christian art is our own?
• Have not the black people of this continent also contributed their sensibility?
• Has not the cultural imperialism of this century altered our traditions?
• And have there not been Oriental influences on our culture since its very beginnings?
All of this only goes to prove that we are peoples with a broad cultural heritage and that in view of the impossibility of achieving any one product that embodies the entire range of that heritage, we must accept the fact that our art will inevitably be a plural and highly differentiated expression. From tradition, our rich and varied tradition, each would-be artist must select and extract those rhetorical elements he feels will make his work a new link in the uninterrupted chain of art. The result of an artist’s work will depend on the manner in which he combines those elements and the times he lives in.
Consciously or not, the tone of the artist’s work is influenced by the society that surrounds him and draws its significance from it. For an object to be art, it is essential that it communicate a highly informative message that shows us a new aspect of reality. What is generally called artistic tradition does not refer to paintings or sculptures made just anyhow by anyone, since the result of that action would simply be an object that did not exist before and now does. The object in question must necessarily be an object different from any other that has ever existed, but in addition it should reveal to us a new aspect of reality with which we were previously unacquainted; one that is sufficiently powerful to transform the viewer’s whole ideology by the mere fact of his seeing it.
Latin American art can differ from North American and European art only to the same exact degree in which our culture differs from theirs. This is not something we can direct; we can only accept it. If we analyze the complex of traditions that nurture our art and that of the United States we will find that they are very similar, but our cultural differences are even more obvious. To cite the example I know best: Mexico, owing to its geographic situation, is the country that has most suffered the influence of the United States, but in spite of that fact it has not accepted in its artistic production the visual arts movements that have succeeded one another in recent decades in the North. First there was action painting, then Pop art, Op art, Supra-realism, Conceptual art, Video art, and so on. And in Mexico not a single artist of any significance has followed those trends. This is not to say that we lacked information on them or that they did not affect our sensibility to some extent, but they never dominated it. The experiences of American and European artists have been assimilated but the resulting artistic product has been different, and the same thing has occurred in the rest of Latin America.
The artist’s participation in his society is both dialectic and diachronic. By becoming subjective an object he makes, it speak for him and bears witness to his existence, and the everyday existence of a cultured artist is very much the same in any part of the world. Art is international in nature, and the differences that develop in the art of different countries do not depend on its rhetorical source, since anyone who refuses to accept universal art as his own heritage can never achieve true fulfillment as an artist. Latin Americans are not a race; they are the product of a mixture of races. Our culture cannot depend on a single race and ignore the rest of what we are. Any individual whose sensibility and intelligence differs from that of his fellow men will inevitably produce an art object that is different. Art is not an individual but a collective phenomenon. For some reason, the mental structures of a given generation will lead a series of individuals to search for the same thing, to try to express the same thing, and this leads to the birth of characteristic styles. Among the many who are looking for the same thing within a given tendency, there are certain artists whose genius enables them to communicate more fully, to show a new aspect of reality more clearly, and these artists, by the very clarity of their work, oblige society to change its ideology and thereby to seek new aesthetic routes. As a social phenomenon, art is a matter of quantity in its origins and quality in its results.
The São Paulo Biennial is thus an event that demonstrates the truth of the foregoing, that provides an opportunity of seeing how Latin American art—which in general may be said to participate in the same plurality of trends as the rest of the world—nonetheless produces different results. When in this Biennial we see a work [like Etsedrón] inspired by Brazilian folklore, we obviously recognize its origins. But the path of art does not lie in expressing the obvious. Art is creation; it discovers new aspects of reality. It is not its function therefore to show what we were or what we are, but rather to reveal to us something we did not know before, something we could never become aware of if art did not exist.