V.2.7 DIGITAL ARCHIVE 732082
Nelly Richard, the French-born cultural theorist and art critic based in Santiago, wrote this text for the catalogue of the 5th Biennale of Sydney in 1984. Richard had moved to Chile in 1970, the same year of the democratic election of the socialist president Salvador Allende. Following the violent coup d’état and subsequent death of Allende on September 11, 1973, in a C.I.A. supported military coup, Richard mobilized and led a network of cutting-edge artists and intellectuals who protested the dictatoriship of General Augusto Pinochet. The members of this Escena de Avanzada—a name that Richard herself devised for the Chilean avant-garde of the 1970s and 1980s—radicalized their aesthetic and literary pronouncements just as the de facto regime thwarted opposition and dissent through both torture and targeted repression. Her essay “Culturas latinoamericanas: ¿Culturas de la repetición o culturas de la diferencia?” draws attention to the need for the cultural counter-establishment to develop a cryptic language through which to denounce—and escape—censure and persecution. Deliberately taking a sometimes obscure, theoretical approach, Richard brings to the fore the peripheral practice of mimicry that appropriates international referents as well as aspects of its own supposedly primitive difference to produce work that is relevant and meaningful. The essay was first published in English in the catalogue for the 5th Biennale of Sydney [Nelly Richard, “Cultures of Repetition or Cultures of Difference,” in curator Leon Paroissien’s 5th Biennale of Sydney (Sydney: Art Gallery of NSW, 1985)]. Santiago’s Galería Sur also published a version in Spanish as part of a catalogue sent to Australia [Nelly Richard, “Culturas latinoamericanas: ¿Culturas de la repetición o culturas de la diferencia?,” arte & textos 11 (Santiago: Galería Sur, December 1983), 1–3]. This translation is made from the Spanish text that Richard wrote in August of 1983.
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2. For those of us from Latin American countries, simply showing up in the international arena is challenging; it involves the historical struggle for our own legitimacy within a framework that tends to subordinate any sort of ancillary [marginal or peripheral] activity to the [artistic] forms promoted as paradigms by the international hegemony of the center. Fatally, the products of our cultures seem to be doomed to the role of mere duplications; any one of our forms then appears as dependent on other forms, internationalized by metropolitan cultures—as plain repetition or copy, imitation, dependent on the original registered by the international trademark. The totalitarian imprint of that international reading pattern leads to an interpretation of the whole set of phenomena within a unified recording of the historical sequence—even if it comes from disagreement between accounts or contradictions. A pattern, as such, does not take into account the different processes specifying every history as the history of a minority—even as a form of dissidence with regard to the international dogma of Modernism.
Our forms, then, are “deprived” of recognition within their own fields of national and historical sanctioning; the order in which their circumstances are deployed is obliterated. The specificity of the sociocultural web determining the here and now of its emergence is thus deleted.
3. Peripheral cultures have great difficulty reversing the process that mutilates their ability to engage in dialogue; so they are doomed to being merely the recipients of impositions, just approving the messages of others. Deprived of the capacity of exchange, these cultures of ours are defined by “what is purely passive”; [this is] an attitude that, by and large, ratifies what has already been expressed. Therefore, the one-sidedness of international communication imposes upon [peripheral cultures] the condition of being mere subscribers to prevailing forms.
Incomplete elements in our cultures stem not only from the limited amount of information (quantity), but also from a deficit in our access to that information; a link [nevertheless] that the dominant cultures force us to keep with their monopoly of information (quality).
4. In forming themselves, our cultures have lagged behind historically and geographically, and such a delay is thus identified not by the production of forms but by their reproduction. Historically it has always been their fate to have belated contact with international models through copies. Therefore, for us, a work is nothing but the remains of itself: a delayed signal of something that has already happened, and whose value as an event has been canceled through repetition.
The art world excludes us as actors and even as witnesses, always presenting us after the fact—in a moment that is no longer there—and through several sorts of translations through which we become dubbed cultures.
Ours are also the cut-out cultures: they are shattered by the photographic device selecting images that are presented to us as excerpts and thus severed from their original contexts.
5. Every country that has been involved in the process of colonization can be defined by its own patchwork clothing; [in other words,] by the remnant character of its tradition. The recollection of its past is comprised of pieces of “alien” histories, shaped according to hybrid traces, several strata, and by the residue of petrified forms of language.
The international mechanism of imposing signs does not take into account the national specificity of productive complexes into which those signs will be inserted. Hence, our production appears uneven, and its series of references heterogeneous. So our histories feign a linear succession, a false continuity. Crowded by additions and adjustments, they imitate social correlation. As the clones of something else, they are alienated and relate to culture through mere substitution.
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2. Even though we have to struggle against international mechanisms of empowerment operating over a consciousness whose evolution has been denied and to oppose the hegemonic pressures of Europe and the USA against our cultures, we cannot stop the fighting. We need to take advantage of every bit of information originated in those countries that we can gather, as well as to reprocess this information for our own purposes.
If colonization is alienating, equally alienating (in the sense of myth-making) is the longing to sanction the authentic “Latin American-ness” that only exists in the remains of the pre-colonial past.
The mythologizing of Latin American identity (based on “what is primitive”) in art aspires to [form] aboriginal caricatures of that identity. The exotic— the myth of the savage as a return to nature, the myth of native culture as a legendary spring, as folkloric memory—as well as the picturesque, lead Latin American culture into a regression of identity. The origins (indeed, what is the pre-cultural) may be the only legitimate skeleton key for unlocking a history abbreviated to the memory of its past and thus unable to participate in the real dynamics of the present.
Myth in our continent is a substratum nurturing its own forms of culture to yearn for the virginal, purely indigenous forms of culture free from all foreign interference means to subtract Latin American culture from the whole process of a dialectical reading of history. In erasing the traces of conflict among different cultural backgrounds that have clashed during the diverse processes of colonialism, the possibility of a Latin American consciousness that is wide-open to a process of self criticism regarding its own contradictory condition—pierced by histories in disarray—is denied.
3. The gap between international and Latin American forms; the lack of synchronicity in the key movements; the backwardness of practices in relation to current international standards; and moreover, the difficulty, for example, of making sense of the “trans avant-garde’s” aesthetics in regions as marginal as ours imply failure. The wretched consciousness is severed [in two]: [on one side there is] the incomplete and failed consciousness that we have of our history, and on the other side is the satisfied consciousness of Europeans who relate to the past in terms of a history full of references. Such a historical overabundance leads European countries to art that gives way under the weight of their own display of references. In the case of Europe, any innovation is about to become a quote. Why? Because every form has necessarily been anticipated by a predecessor, and the new form [is simply absorbed] into [historical] continuity. The accumulation of references and proliferation of quotations, then, leads European cultures to constitute themselves in a web of both presuppositions and reminiscences.
In the case of Latin American practices, the movement is double-sided: born of deprivation (from not belonging) and stemming from residues (i.e., the remains of satiated cultures). [In Latin America,] tradition can hardly be considered as a heritage simply because it is based on a series of acts of dispossession. The game of quoting would only be a parody of history, a history into which a consciousness has been disinherited by limitless resources [dedicated to] expropriating life.
4. Refusing annexation by becoming the cultural territory [of someone else] does not mean shutting ourselves off from foreign contributions on behalf of so-called authentic, local consciousness. It means working on adequate forms of critical consciousness that allow evaluating such contributions in accordance with our own historical interests and pondering data and information received in relation to our own standards of value. Indeed, it means designing tactics with which we struggle to permit ourselves to take advantage of what is imposed on us by distorting the original frame of reference.
The very same heterogeneity of references that formed our own “cut-out” identity; this historical shattering and disparity of our productive web; [and] this lack of continuity of our processes of cultural reference, [all] lead to a call for our [art] practices to become conceptual. This statement is made in a way that stresses marginalization—to the point of becoming productive. That is, shifting the whole process off-center.
For instance, our practices try to render through their own material processes the technological inequality between imposing signs and the local structures receiving those signals. [In doing so,] our practices reveal the social stratification that results from the incompatibility of different modes of working that are anachronistic.
More recently, Latin American [art] practices take as their theme (and even dramatize) their conditions of production. They generate a dynamic of signification capable of assimilating the charges addressed by the work insofar as it is divided among cultural processes antagonistic to each other.
5. In an ongoing rebellion against their origins, the Latin American “signs” [in the semiotic sense] struggle within the innermost spaces of our own discourse, so that they are transferred from one zone to another, conveying their respective [semantic] charges in a state of conflict. Imbedded in [our speech] are different levels of the process of developing culture—to which our histories have been submitted—that clash with each other. At the core of every “sign,” different levels of social historicity vie for position. A pair of opposing forces representing each of our histories struggle: one “from the outside” imposing meaning as if it were an international norm, the other, “from the inside,” assuming its own defense— which is not Native—in overt opposition to the external frame of reference.
The regime of censorship that reigns throughout Latin American countries impacting our cultures takes a double form. It stems from the imperialism of international cultural forces that make marginal our production with respect to the metropolitan webs of artistic signification. It is also due to the authoritarianism of de facto regimes under whose official modes of repression our countries are politically entrapped. [It implies] a double silencing, a double law of censorship that we have the responsibility to fight with all modes of discourse to create a maneuvering field. In fact, that is the only place within reach where we can imprint the gesture of our disobedience. The discourse in our [art] practices becomes, in itself, such a battlefield, such an emergency exit for a meaning that subverts all kinds of totalitarian regimes.
The underlying tactics of resistance and of combat against “what is proscribed” is being developed to perfection as a subculture occupying the hidden face of the codes. [It involves] the sort of activity working through clandestine references; the one that disguises itself by means of techniques akin to asserting a transvestite meaning, where order is a parody in which the register of the law becomes a metaphor.
[In sum,] only by archaeologically [examining] our discourses will we be able to unearth the strata which lie beneath domination itself; [in other words,] in all that has been exhumed from so many graves.