V.2.4 DIGITAL ARCHIVE 1065368
Shifra M. Goldman explores the “extra artistic” agendas behind the so-called Latin American art “boom” of the late 1980s in her critical essay from 1989. As she demonstrates, electoral politics, foreign policy, and even international and domestic market forces yielded considerable influence in rekindling an interest for Latin American and Latino art in the U.S. during the decade. Moreover, the essay urges readers to question how exhibitions on Latino and Latin American were organized and structured and draws attention to the underlying influences at play. Echoing Felipe Ehrenberg [SEE DOCUMENT V.2.3], Goldman concludes by demanding that Latin American art be valued on its own terms. The author first published the essay as “Latin American Art’s U.S. Explosion: Looking at a Gift Horse in the Mouth” in 1989 [New Examiner 17, no. 4 (December 1989), 25–29] and it was subsequently included in Dimensions of the Americas: Art and Social Change in Latin American and the United States, an anthology of her texts [“Looking at a Gift Horse in the Mouth,” (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 317–325], from which this transcription is made.
THE DECADE OF THE 1980s has ushered in an amazing proliferation of Latin American art shows at major U.S. art museums and numerous galleries, a phenomenon unknown since before World War II and, indeed, unknown since the cross-fertilization between Mexico and the United States during the 1930s and 1940s. At that time, U.S. exhibitions of Mexican art were common practice and North Americans learned about murals from the Mexicans. Historically, blockbuster shows of Latin American art have appeared at politically strategic moments. Such was the case with the 1930 Mexican Arts show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art during the Depression years, when Diego Rivera and José Clemente Orozco were becoming known in the United States. Scheduled ten years after the end of the Mexican Revolution, it was one of the earliest events triggered by U.S. needs for Mexican petroleum, an issue that remained a vital plank of U.S. foreign policy from 1919 until the 1970s oil crisis.1
Twenty Centuries of Mexican Art at New York’s Museum of Modern Art was mounted in 1940 (a year before the United States entered World War II), when it sought support and allies among Latin American countries that were also being wooed by the Nazis. The traveling exhibition Masterworks of Mexican Art took place in the 1960s, when the cold war was in full swing. It was followed fifteen years later by the yearlong “Mexico Today” Symposium in 1978, when U.S. petroleum and natural gas negotiations were again at stake. As the closest nation and the most important Latin American trade partner (to say nothing of the fact that Mexico has been a major artistic force throughout all the Americas during the twentieth century), it is not surprising that the U.S. has directed great attention toward Mexican art. But this is now changing. Though Mexico still has primacy, the art of other Latin American nations is becoming increasingly visible. Not . . . free [enough] from distorted museum presentations, not sufficiently [visible] to have any kind of parity with the Euro-American axis, but, nevertheless, no longer invisible. Recent traveling blockbusters begin and end with Mexico. Diego Rivera: A Retrospective opened at the Detroit Institute of Arts in 1986; Hispanic Art in the United States: 30 Contemporary Painters and Sculptors [SEE DOCUMENTS V.1.3–V.1.7] started its odyssey at Houston’s Museum of Fine Arts in 1987; Art of the Fantastic: Latin America, 1920–1987 [SEE DOCUMENT V.1.9] was organized by the Indianapolis Museum of Art in 1987; the Bronx Museum of the Arts opened The Latin American Spirit: Art and Artists in the United States, 1920–1970 [SEE DOCUMENT V.1.8] in 1988; the same year, the Dallas Museum of Art received Images of Mexico from the Schirn Kunsthalle of Frankfurt. UCLA’s Wight Gallery is organizing Chicano Art: Resistance and Affirmation for 1990, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art is scheduled for the largest Mexican art show ever (so rumor has it), also in 1990.2 All, of course, are or will be accompanied by luxurious, well-illustrated catalogues which help to fill the lacuna created when the last survey of modern Latin American art in English went out of print in the United States.3 (How accurate and balanced a view is presented by the catalogues is, of course, another matter. The best of the catalogues, obviously, will be those whose editors turned to essayists conversant with the field.) Thus far, the exhibitions have been handsomely mounted in their home institutions—though some have suffered on the road—and many were complemented by programs of various kinds, from concerts and films to symposia.
All of these shows have been (or will be) surrounded by a flurry of reviews in each of the locations they visit. But judging by what has already appeared there is little analysis and even less critical evaluation. Critics—to say nothing of art historians—know very little about Latin American art. Therefore the reviews, with important exceptions, have generally ranged from gushing to stereotype. This essay undertakes to explore an aspect of the “boom” in Latin American art that has not been previously considered: the extra-artistic agendas behind the scenes.
Recent art criticism has tended to scrap older notions about art such as its “transcendentalism” or its universal aesthetic appeal, and focus on social forces and the art/investment market which frame the presentation of art today. (Art in America even published an extraordinary issue in July 1988 on “art and money.”) Some historians and critics (including this one) are faced with the uncomfortable realization that everything they write is, willy-nilly, grist for the art market mill. Nor is this a new phenomenon; the workings of the art market have been traced back to the whole concept of the modernist avant-garde in a provocative article revising our views of cubism.4 What is new, in the United States, is its application to Latin American and Latino art suddenly become “fashionable.”
It is probably more comfortable (and not necessarily contradictory) to be an idealist, with faith in the ultimate capabilities of the human race to create social structures in which art is not simply a commodity but has a communicative and emotional function not tied to its exchange value for a tiny elite group of international collectors. Nevertheless, facing the conflictive and manipulative world in which we presently live, the tendency (and the responsibility) is to continue to deconstruct the surface appearance of things, looking for the reasoning behind the many dense ideological smokescreens that mask our apparent realities. Thus, while one celebrates the fact that U.S. mainstream art institutions have opted, throughout this decade, to seek funds for, to research, and to mount an unprecedented number of exhibitions featuring the art of Latin Americans—whether they reside in their native countries, in Europe, or in the United States—it is necessary to take a closer look at the projects and intentions of the presenters. There is also the need, in my opinion, to cast a critical eye at the actual configuration of these exhibits: their inclusions and exclusions of artists and movements, their museography, their publicity, their catalogue essays, their surrounding events, and their funding sources. Last, but not least, is the need to consider the social, political, and economic relationships that provide the framework and ambience for exhibitions that in a sense violate “the usual course of things.” Why these exhibitions, why at this moment in time?
“The use of artworks as symbolic carriers, as mediators of politics and as propaganda for secular and religious ideologies . . . is an old phenomenon.”5 The imperial Greeks and Romans were the first to recognize that the aesthetic power of artworks transcends their creators by enhancing the identification of the audience with that power. So, too, the status of the artworks’ sponsor, in a halo effect, is enhanced in the eyes of that audience. If the artworks are of universal significance, speaking across cultural boundaries so is their discerning patron or owner. However, the presentation of the artwork must be carefully orchestrated if the patron is to reap the benefits of the desired “halo.” Patrons today range from national to local governments, from giant corporations to smaller businesses, from oil companies to banks, from private foundations to private collectors.
Such orchestration has become more complicated and more necessary in recent years, as the world’s great artworks have been increasingly used in the competition between various national powers and are assigned various roles in international propaganda.6 What is presented here is a suggested outline for considering the relationship between the phenomenal increase in the number of Latin American art shows and the electoral politics, foreign policy, and international economics of the United States during this period.
Mexicans in the U.S. have traditionally been Democrats, and Mexicans represent the largest Spanish-speaking voting bloc in the country. It was already clear during the 1988 elections to what lengths the Republicans would go to capture what might be a swing vote in the Southwest. Candidates for the presidency and for local offices in the Southwest, New York, and Miami are forced by sheer demographic considerations to appeal to the Latino vote. Supporting and promoting the arts and culture has been one of the methods used. Three bits of news spanning two Republican administrations point to those connections:
(1) The appointment by Ronald Reagan of Texan Lauro F. Cabazos, president of Texas Tech University in Lubbock, to be Secretary of Education and the first “Hispanic” (for which we can read “Mexican”) in a U.S. Cabinet post. In the words of Time magazine, Cabazos was proposed “as a lure to draw Hispanic votes from the Democrats in November [1988].” The irony of this appointment is that it occurred during the waning months of the Reagan administration, which had not been known during its eight years for its interest in Latino politicians or in the mass of impoverished Mexicans living in the U.S., or, for that matter, in the problems of Mexico itself. George Bush (so proud of his command of Spanish on the campaign trail) was similarly careful to appoint Manuel Luján to his cabinet as Secretary of the Interior.
(2) The presentation, by former President Reagan, of the prestigious Hispanic Heritage Award for a visual artist, to an almost unknown Colombian artist from Laguna Beach, California, whose fifteen years in the United States passed with no ties to the large Latino arts population of nearby Los Angeles. This truncated Latino, calling himself Orlando A.B. (his surnames “Agudelo-Botero” apparently being too much for non-Spanish speaking patrons to master), seems to have had as his major virtues the fact that he enjoyed apparent commercial success, that he publicly supported Nancy Reagan’s pet anti-drug project, and that he painted a picture described as one containing a dancer, the American flag, the words of the Bill of Rights, and the words of the Battle Hymn of the Republic. The award was considered an insult by Representative Albert G. Bustamante of Texas, chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, because longtime resident Latino artists who participated with and contributed to the community were ignored. No one seems to have mentioned or considered the quality or importance of the artist’s work.
(3) The appearance of a special July 11, 1988, issue of Time magazine titled “Hispanic Culture Breaks Out of the Barrio,” and subtitled “A Latin Wave Hits the Mainstream.” Featured on the cover was a hastily painted mural portrait of Chicano actor Edward James Olmos. Apparently Mexican, Cuban, and Puerto Rican visual and performance artists of the United States, the primary (though not the only) ones featured, have “arrived” when they are not only noticed but given major space in Time. The magazine presented a mélange of visual and performing arts, literature, food, fashion, and design. Ostensibly, the coverage in Time was to advise readers that the U.S. was ever ready to borrow the best from other cultures and that a new chic wave of Hispanic influence was exploding into the American cultural mainstream. Tucked away in one of the Time articles, however, was a more mundane consideration. According to this source, the past ten years have seen an explosive increase in U.S. immigration from Latin American countries and, consequently, “major advertisers are eager to tap the estimated $134 billion in spending power wielded by Spanish-speaking Americans.”
The proliferation of modern Latin American art shows in the U.S. seems to begin in the early 1980s. The Reagan administration came aboard in 1981 with an ideological commitment to upset the Sandinista government in Nicaragua and to quell whatever revolutionary aspirations the peoples of El Salvador and Guatemala entertained toward ridding themselves of military dictatorships and oppressive living conditions. No easy solutions were forthcoming with military intervention via the “Contra” forces in Nicaragua, nor through the militarization of Honduras, nor through massive military assistance to El Salvador and Guatemala. These were (and still are) unpopular wars for a majority of North Americans, who want no repeat of Vietnam. By 1982–83, opposition to Central American policies arose among major Latin American countries as well. Mexico, Venezuela, Colombia, and Panama formed the first Contadora Group suing for political rather than military solutions in Central America. By 1986, they were joined by Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil, and Peru. These eight countries contain more than 80 percent of the total population of Latin America, and, it might be mentioned, they also include countries with the greatest names in modern art. Their political weight and influence on world opinion were not to be taken lightly. It is hardly surprising, therefore, to discover that it was indeed in January 1986 that Frank Hodsoll, chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and a firm Reagan supporter, made a special appearance at the meeting of the American Association of Art Museum Directors held in Puerto Rico to offer funds for cultural exchange between the United States and Latin America. NEA funds in sizable amounts have been channeled into exhibits already mentioned, and more exhibits are on the drawing board.
The reasons why artworks are considered politically useful vary depending on the speaker. According to Norton Simon, Los Angeles industrialist and Medici-like art collector: “Art can take a person and open him up in a way you couldn’t any other way.” Peter Solmssen, Advisor on the Arts for the U.S. State Department in 1976, was more explicit: “A visitor who has spent some hours admiring masterworks from a foreign collection is unlikely to have his political views significantly altered . . . [but] if the visitor acquires in the process a better understanding of the culture which produces the art, and of the people who now treasure it, that has political value for the U.S. [emphasis mine].” Others continue to insist on the traditional notion that art is above politics: “At its highest,” said New York Times editor Walter Goodman in 1977, “art has an integrity that sets it apart from the unending give and take of politics.”9 While this may be so for the artist— though the production of art that is directly political in its content might gainsay even that idea—it certainly has not been the case for extra-artistic organizers of art events. The ultimate irony is that nonpolitical works of art, and works of art in opposition to the ideology of the users, can just as readily be pressed into service.
Finally it can be said, and documented, that when a group of high quality artworks are too embarrassingly political in their open opposition to the ideology of the presenters, they can be eliminated. It is difficult for an art critic to complain about exclusions in any art show unless such exclusions can convincingly be shown to be ideological in nature. Such was the case with a collection of exhibitions of modern Mexican art that circulated throughout the United States for an entire year as part of the “Mexico Today” program in 1978, which was conspicuous (with a few exceptions) for the absence of any artists connected with the Mexican School—including Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, and David Alfaro Siqueiros—and of any younger artists with socially critical artworks. By Mexico Today’s focus on three artists (of great merit) who comprise the “aesthetic” or “contemplative” wings of contemporary Mexican art, the public’s view of Mexican art in general was distorted.
To pursue the relationship between art and economics demonstrated in the “Mexico Today” year, it would be interesting to consider the implications of Central America and the Contadora nations once more, this time economically. It is hard to believe that economics doesn’t enter into consideration when one recalls that U.S. intervention today is occurring within a region whose countries were long known as “the banana republics” and dominated by the United Fruit Company. Company names change; Coca-Cola and other industries have entered the arena, but the dynamics remain similar. For the Contadora countries, there is the question of the foreign debts, great portions of which are owed to U.S. banks. When such countries talk about, and even implement, cessation of interest payments or renegotiation of interest rates, the discussion must turn to political economy. It must be recalled that Mexico and Venezuela, both of whom are major oil producers and major debtors, were the original organizers of the Contadora peace activities. If Latin American art exhibits can demonstrate U.S. goodwill, in spite of these formidable problems, their use becomes warranted.
Touching on domestic economics, it is only needful to recall the interesting statement called from Time magazine about the potential $134 billion of possible sales to the Spanish-speaking community. This community is largely working class, but it also boasts a growing and prosperous middle class, increased by the Chicanos and Puerto Ricans who fought for higher educational opportunities in the 1960s and 1970s. Slick magazines now represent this upwardly mobile group and advertisers fill the pages of the magazines and local newspapers. Hard- and soft-drink manufacturers have been in the forefront of solicitation for goodwill, and the polishing of their images, within these communities. Among them are: Miller, Budweiser, and Canadian Club whiskey, which have made considerable outlays for Latino art shows across the country. Canadian Club, with its three years of circulating the Mira! Hispanic art show is a case in point. The Colorado-based Coors Beer Company opened its Expresiones Hispanos touring art show in 1988, aiming to rectify (without a great degree of success) years of union busting, racism, and other ultra right activity. Big contributors to art shows have been the Rockefeller Foundation and the ARCO Corporation who underwrote the expensive traveling exhibit Hispanic Art in the United States: Thirty Contemporary Painters and Sculptors.
On a purely local level in Los Angeles (and surely there are similar stories in other cities), the large supermarket chain Vons opened a Mexican-style bilingually labeled supermarket called “Tianguis” in East Los Angeles. In addition, a well-known gourmet restaurant, Spago’s, collaborating with TELACU, which is a huge nonprofit group geared to supporting Mexican small businesses, opened the Tamayo Restaurant (supported by the artist in person), which plans for crossover business by luring non-Mexican clientele to a normally avoided Chicano neighborhood where they will dine in luxury along with the Chicano middle class.
The biggest and most direct economic impact on Latin American art and artists, however, is found within the confines of the art market. This began on an international scale in 1977, almost concurrent with the “Mexico Today” program, when Sotheby Parke Bernet of New York opened its first auction of modern Mexican art. So successful was it that Sotheby’s has continued with modern Latin American art auctions every six months since. As the market for Old and Young European “Masters” soared, investors and speculators (including many Latin Americans) looking for high returns in a crisis market turned to Latin America, where prices were—and still are—relatively low on the international art market. Since the “boom,” prices for Latin American works have been raising, though not nearly as fast or as high as the works of Europeans and North Americans.
As a result, galleries throughout the country that previously had no interest whatsoever in Latino or Latin American art are rushing to find artists, and new galleries open continuously. The “instant success” of a small number of U.S. artists (just like “instant success” for many present day international “stars”) has not always been salutary. “From murals to mainstream,” “from rags to riches,” “from politics to personalities” might be the slogans. Nevertheless, this exposure is to be welcomed when it brings into public view artists and original art forms that were held in scorn just a few short years ago. It is hoped that this is not just a fashion, or a passing fad.
Raised here briefly, and perhaps in an oversimplified manner, are some of the cogent points about extra-artistic considerations in the national phenomenon being experienced vis-à-vis Latin American art. These remarks are meant to offset the overly easy reaction heard repeatedly from Latin American artists and their supporters: “Oh,” they say, “finally we are being recognized; finally people are having a change of heart about our cultures.” It is more accurate to suggest that the change of heart is not based wholly on aesthetic considerations. But beyond that, Latin American art should be presented and valued in the international arena on its own terms. Young artists should not be swayed to tailor their work to what sells, or to what is acceptable to the art establishment. This is the ultimate consideration if Latin American art is to maintain the power and originality, the sense of fantasy as well as the sense of social purpose, the irony, wit, and sardonic criticism, the quality of the regional in fusion with the international that have inspired admiration even when this art was not “fashionable.” That is why it is necessary to look this gift horse in the mouth: to see if it really is a gift.
1
In 1927, Dwight Morrow of J.P. Morgan and Company, an astute and diplomatic man who had similarly intervened in Cuba during its 1921 sugar crisis, was appointed U.S. Ambassador to Mexico. His agenda was to persuade the [Plutarco Elías] Calles government not to enforce Article 27 of the revolutionary Mexican Constitution, which mandated that Mexican resources not remain in the hands of foreign interests. In the course of his activities, Morrow commissioned Diego Rivera to paint a fresco in the Cuernavaca town hall, thereby appealing to Mexican national pride. Between 1927 and 1930 (when the Metropolitan exhibition opened), Morrow convinced Calles to safeguard the interests of foreign capitalists who invested in Mexico. The principal holders of petroleum interests at the time were Great Britain and the United States. In 1932, two years before his political attack on Rivera (who had received mural commissions in the 1930s from Edsel Ford in Detroit and Nelson Rockefeller in New York), David Alfaro Siqueiros painted a mural in Los Angeles in which a portrait of the traitorous Calles was juxtaposed with one of J. P. Morgan.
2
The Diego Rivera retrospective featured 248 paintings, drawings, and mural studies; Hispanic Art includes thirty artists (five works each) from six countries, including the U.S.; Art of the Fantastic had twenty-nine artists from eleven countries with 125 works; over 230 works were chosen for the Latin American Spirit from 160 artist and fourteen countries, including the U.S.; Images of Mexico had over 350 works. (All figures are based on catalogues, checklists, or publicity of the original shows.) In 1990, the Metropolitan Museum of Art opened the blockbuster exhibit Mexico: Splendors of Thirty Centuries.
3
Gilbert Chase’s Contemporary Art in Latin America (New York, NY: The Free Press, 1970).
4
See Robert Jensen, “The Avant-Garde and the Trade in Art,” Art Journal 47, no. 4 (Winter 1988): 360–67. An earlier consideration of the ideology of vanguardism and its market relationship is Nicos Hadjinicolaou’s “On the Ideology of Avant-Gardism,” Praxis, no. 6 (1982; originally 1978): 39–70.
5
Judith Huggins Balfe, “Artworks as Symbols in International Politics,” International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society 1, no. 2 (Winter 1987): 5 (195).
6
Balfe, “Artworks as Symbols in International Politics,” 5 (195).
7
“Milestones,” Time, August 22, 1988: 69.
8
Betty Cuniberti, “An Artist’s White House Award Draws a Puzzled Look from Latinos,” Los Angeles Times, Orange County edition, September 16. 1988, Part V: 1.
9
Cited in Balfe, “Artworks as Symbols in International Politics,” 6 (196).