V.1.9 DIGITAL ARCHIVE 1065311 AND 1065330
As with the exhibition The United States Collects Pan American Art which was organized by Joseph Randall Shapiro at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1959 [SEE DOCUMENT III.4.10] in celebration of the Third Pan American Games, Art of the Fantastic (June 28 to September 13, 1987) coincided with the tenth edition of the games held in Indianapolis in August 1987. Hollister Sturges—a curator of European art at the Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha, Nebraska, who went on to organize the exhibition New Art from Puerto Rico for the Springfield City Library and Museum in Massachusetts (1990)—and the well-known scholar of American art, Holliday T. Day, champion their version of intercontinental relations through an exhibition based on the construct of “the fantastic.” As stated in their “Prologue,” responding to a suggestion of the Argentinean critic and art historian Damián Carlos Bayón, the curators investigated the use of fantastic imagery across the region, focusing on the six key forces at play: Catholicism; the colonial past; the influence of pre-Columbian cultures; political and military oppression; the role of the “fantastic” within Western culture; and a recurring sense of isolation. Day and Sturges apply what they describe as a “North American” curatorial approach guided by the factual, as opposed to the supposedly more “poetic readings” of the matter by their South American counterparts. Strongly criticized by key Latin American intellectuals, including Aracy Amaral and Mari Carmen Ramírez, [SEE DOCUMENTS V.2.5 AND V.2.6, RESPECTIVELY], the exhibition took on a life of its own as a benchmark and a tour de force of exoticism. Undoubtedly, it led to the publication of Beyond the Fantastic: Contemporary Art Criticism from Latin America, the influential volume edited by Gerardo Mosquera (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press/Institute of International Visual Arts, 1996). These excerpts are from the source [Holliday T. Day and Hollister Sturges, Art of the Fantastic: Latin America, 1920–1987 (Indianapolis: Indianapolis Museum of Art, 10–11, 38–40].
Art of the Fantastic: Latin America, 1920–1987, organized by the Indianapolis Museum of Art in celebration of the Tenth Pan American Games, explores one of the most powerful modes of expression in Latin American culture: the fantastic. Twentieth-century Latin American artists use fantastic imagery as a vehicle to define their special cultural identity that developed over a period of 400 years. While the different regions and nations represented have distinct characteristics, they share a common history: their Catholic faith; their colonial past; their pre-Columbian and African heritage; their constantly changing political institutions; their struggle for political, economic, and cultural independence from Europe and the United States; and finally, their isolation from the centers of Western culture.
Our arrival at the thesis for this exhibition depended on many sources. Initial research for the exhibition revealed several startling facts: (1) A preliminary search of the literature showed that no major museum in the United States had mounted a large Latin American group exhibition for twenty years; (2) Except for the work of three or four artists who had spent extensive time in the United States, Latin American art was virtually unknown here other than by specialists in the field; (3) United States art libraries with a few exceptions had almost no literature on the subject after 1965; (4) While there were experts on the art of individual countries or time periods, there were few scholars widely versed in Latin American art.
Nevertheless, we resolved to proceed. We began to assemble a group of museum officials, scholars, and critics as advisors to the project. After a series of trips to Latin America, extensive conversations with the advisors, and a thorough study of the existing literature, we selected a time period for the exhibition extending from the introduction of European Modernism to Latin America until the present, covering three generations. Argentine art historian Damián Bayón suggested that the exhibition focus on the art of the fantastic and we identified the six themes or cultural forces that this work addressed. We would limit the size of the exhibition to a few artists explored in depth rather than attempt to represent every country in a cursory fashion. Entire selection of the works was ours, and Edward Lucie-Smith would provide a general background essay on the Latin American art of the past to present the Latin American viewpoint, Damián Bayón would also contribute a general essay, while a Latin American critic or scholar would write a separate article on each artist represented.
By this approach, we hoped to address in depth one aspect of the enormous richness and diversity of Latin American art. Many vital elements, however, we could not explore: the rich history of abstract or concrete art, the enormously varied and fascinating folk traditions, or the mural movement initiated in Mexico. Another factor in our selection of artists was to prefer those working in Latin America while recognizing that exile (both voluntary and involuntary) was also a strong tradition. Several other upcoming exhibitions in this country will include the work of Latino artists in the United States. The nationality of an artist in the larger sense is not always a clear-cut issue: We found that birthplace and current passports were not always the best indicator of artistic nationality.
In many cases we were faced with difficult choices, particularly when several artists from the same generation explored similar themes in a similar style. We felt we could only include one. Even so, our original goal of twenty artists expanded to twenty-nine. In some instances, we found the logistics and expense of bringing the art to Indianapolis were prohibitive factors, especially given our limited time of eighteen months in which to assemble the exhibition.
Throughout the planning stage of the project, the development of the idea of the fantastic was important because of its defining role in establishing Latin American art within the framework of twentieth-century Western culture. Since the fantastic often represents the collision of several cultures whose values are in conflict, Latin American art has sometimes been misinterpreted as an aberration or less powerful derivation of an existing mode of art. It is indeed these variations, however, and the continued use of seemingly outmoded styles that give Latin American art its vitality and extend the idiom in a meaningful way. Moreover, it must be remembered that the aesthetic values of the Latin American public are not the same as those of European or North American audiences. Poetry, mystery, dramatic impact, metaphor, and spiritual ambiance are valued in particular over the empirical or literal, or what sculptor and critic Donald Judd has called “thereness.”
Critical and art historical writing likewise reflects this difference in attitudes. In Northern writing, interpretation depends on the organization of factual information about the art and artist. lf we can demonstrate that an artist’s ideas derive from the experience of another work of art, we do so. The Latin American critic, on the other hand, puts value on his or her feelings while viewing the work and on the imagination and poetry that the artist is able to inspire in the viewer. He or she does not feel it necessary always to be as scientific as the North American critic in drawing conclusions about the art, because in some sense the assumption is made that the facts are obvious and to repeat them would insult the intelligent reader. This was brought home to us once when we expressed to a Latin American curator our admiration for an essay written by a North American on a Latin American artist. The factual nature of the writing made the intent of the artist clear to us, but to this curator the essay “lacked insight and consisted only of facts.”
In our writing we have necessarily taken the North American approach and allowed the Southern viewpoint to be expressed in the section titled “Another View.” Whether it is Carlos Fuentes’s soaring poetic response to Jacobo Borges or our own efforts to understand the culture that conditioned Borges’s work, the reality of his extraordinary painting remains a gripping and powerful experience. Thus we hope that the presentation of both the Latin and Anglo viewpoints will promote a greater understanding of the works in this exhibition, as well as an appreciation of the many different and valid ways of writing about art.
The important contributions of Latin America to Western art and literature in the twentieth century are only beginning to be known to Europe and North America. Exploited as colonies of Spain and Portugal for 300 years, racked by almost constant warfare throughout the nineteenth century, and catapulted into the industrial age in the twentieth, Latin American countries have received short shrift in the cultural scheme of things. The growth of modern communications, however, from the trickle of transatlantic ocean liners in the early twentieth century to the flood of jet flights today, has transformed Latin America’s artistic energies into a dynamic force. Aviation has not only linked South America with Europe and the United States but has also connected the major cities within each country. And with industrialization and rapid transportation has come an increasing realization by each country of its own unique identity.
Art and literature reflect that quest for identity. While Latin American writers have been acknowledged internationally since the literary “boom” of the sixties, only a few visual artists have achieved comparable reputations, although many of their themes are the same. Both writers and artists have drawn on fantastic imagery to express the cultural forces that shaped their land. Fantasy in art has appeared throughout the twentieth century, most notably in Surrealism, but Latin American artists and writers have employed it with particular genius. Whereas Surrealism was a consciously intellectual movement first articulated in the [1924] manifesto by André Breton, the fantastic imagery of Latin Americans has not been rooted in doctrine. Surrealism and the fantastic in Latin America share in the primacy they give to imagination and intuition, but they evolved historically from different sources. Inspired by French symbolist literature and Freudian psychoanalysis, Breton reacted against the limits of Western rationalism; artists in Latin America drew from their own cultural history, including pre-Columbian religious myths and practices.
As Rogelio Novey, one of the advisors to this exhibition, has written, “Latin American ‘reality’ contains many distinct cultural elements which give the art produced there a fantastic effect.” Stemming from something fundamentally Latin American rather than from an intellectual theory, the fantastic is more spontaneous and direct than programmatically surrealist. When Miguel Angel Asturias and Gabriel García Marquez, for example, create stories like Mr. President or One Hundred Years of Solitude, their concerns are not so much the liberation of the unconscious as the exploration of the cultural and the sociopolitical systems in which they live.1
Fantastic art is characterized by the juxtaposition, distortion, or amalgamation of images and/or materials that extend experience by contradicting our normal expectations formally or ichnographically. Devices such as metamorphoses, incongruous hybrids, dislocations in time and space, and shifts in scale and materials create fantastic images that break the rules of the natural world. Although all of these elements may be present in Surrealism, Magic Realism, or Expressionism, fantasy itself is not an “-ism.” Nor is it what is merely exotic to North American eyes, a toucan, for instance, or a folk mask. A far broader concept, the fantastic may be an ingredient in almost any style, including geometric art. As a means of explaining the inexplicable in the external world, it may be perceived as a utopian element well, in the sense that a mythic account, such as a creation story, can contain essential universal truths independent of actual historical events. By transcending the norms of perceived reality, the fantastic transports the viewer into a world where the implausible becomes plausible.
By employing fantastic imagery, Latin American artists of the twentieth century confront six major cultural forces, which are common to all these former colonies of Spain and Portugal. From the time of the conquistadors to the present, the Catholic Church has played a significant role in Latin American culture. For some a source of stability, continuity, and spiritual nourishment, for others a source of reaction and oppression, the Church has represented a potent force open to various interpretations. Not unexpectedly, the artists in this exhibition approach the Church with widely varying attitudes, emphasizing different aspects of their Catholic heritage.
Similarly, many Latin Americans perceive the period of conquest and colonial history with deep ambiguity. In Mexico, where the Mestizo population overwhelmingly prevails, the race of the conquerors has, through centuries of miscegenation, become the race of the conquered. The so-called rape of the country by the Spanish invaders and subsequent economic exploitation of a subjugated population by the colonial ruling classes have shaped the social structure of modern Latin America. Today, the most potent images of the Spanish colonial tradition—aristocratic portraits, old master paintings, and icons of the Virgin— offer a rich source of material to be reworked in a contemporary idiom.
The influence of pre-Columbian Indians and imported African slaves on Latin-American life has been continuous and profound. In many countries they created Mestizo and Mulatto populations that strongly affected the Iberian culture of the colonizers. Since the European Avant-Garde acknowledged the power and beauty of the art of Third World cultures at the beginning of this century, so-called primitive art has had a great impact on modern artists. For Latin Americans, especially in modern Mexico, Guatemala, and the Andean regions where advanced Indian civilizations once thrived, the pre-Columbian heritage has become a source of pride, affording contact with ancestral roots in the distant past. Pre-Columbian forms and motifs thus offer significant sources for twentieth-century artists seeking to assert their cultural identity. The wealth of animal imagery used by modern Latin American artists, for example, is an explicit affirmation of the way of life of Indian civilizations, with their special, even sacred, bond with nature. Pre-Columbian cultures saw religious value in images combining human and animal forms (e.g., jaguars, eagles, and serpents); modern artists also invest animal motifs with spiritual power.
The absolute monarchies of Spain and Portugal and the armies of conquistadors left an enduring legacy of periodic tyranny in Latin America. While the artists in this exhibition refrain from attacking specific leaders, they do investigate themes of political and military oppression. They also explore Latin America’s contribution within the broader context of Western culture. Traditionally, Latin American artists have often spent long periods abroad; this interaction with Europe and the United States extends beyond the stylistic influences of an avant-garde center on a peripheral region. A dialogue ensues between Old World and New, and traditional images of power, eroticism, or the grotesque are transformed to illuminate modern situations. The interaction between Latin America and the United States, most evident in the youngest generation of artists discussed here, often concerns the impact of the United States’ material culture. Latin Americans have assimilated and adapted elements of the United States’ popular culture, often juxtaposing cherished traditional images (the Madonna, a revered ancestor) with the consumer goods that dominate our domestic and public environment today.
The last common theme in Latin American art of the twentieth century is a recurring sense of isolation, both psychological and geographic. In the earliest days of colonization, when Spain established Peru as the seat of the viceroy-alty, Argentina had to import all its European goods through Peru—that is, across the Atlantic, into the Pacific and then back over the Andes Mountains. Distances remain great even today, with modern air transportation, and flights are often infrequent between Latin countries. Moreover, wars between adjacent countries have hampered communication among neighbors. Brazil’s huge size and Portuguese language have isolated it from the Andean nations and at various times, for political reasons, from Argentina. Beyond its physical isolation Latin America shares with the world the psychological alienation typically suffered by men and women everywhere in the twentieth century. As elsewhere, ordinary life has been depersonalized and has lost its roots through urbanization and industrialization.
The six themes enumerated here—the Catholic Church, colonial past, pre-Columbian and African influence, political oppression, Latin America’s role in Western culture, and its isolation—are generally explored by artists of all three generations, but in different styles and with different aims in mind. Each generation responds to its particular age as well as to its national identity.
1
Rogelio Novey to Hollister Sturges, November 15, 1985.