As an event—an action in time and space—the Cartographies exhibition has two objectives: first, to present a sample of the production of contemporary Latin American art and participate in the current debate about this alleged category of art; second, to propose a curatorial methodology capable of approaching the production of contemporary art, critically standing up to institutionalized tradition and preserving the specificity of the plastic discourses. Cartographies intends to examine whether what we have come to call “Latin American” in the visual arts is capable of describing and interpreting (in a holistic and productive manner) the art produced in the corresponding continent. The project also debates the role of the curator of contemporary art in face of her institutionalization as a mark of knowledge and power in the contemporary visual arts circuit.
Although the exhibition’s title suggests maps, it does not refer to the making of maps for crossing the geographical home territories of its artists. Nor does it propose to exhibit maps made by artists. It refers, in fact, to imaginary maps, based on the relationships and circuits that were established so that Cartographies might take place and that, in many ways, broke with the limits imposed by geopolitics and institutionalized relationships. As of 1989, when this project began, my successive travels through the Americas; the communications networks (fax, telephones, mail, couriers); the network of collaborators set up for support and dissemination (the Winnipeg Art Gallery, curators, artists, sponsors, collectors, services, other venues); all the documentation and registers compiled during the journey and the show itself—all these describe real and mental trajectories that constitute a territory different from that of real physical space. They are virtual maps. Together with these imaginary maps, and on the other side, Cartographies also refers to maps of the imaginary, for it sees the artists’ works as projections of their minds, concretizations of desire—a drive that is primal and previous to any form. The mind, in this case, is conceived as a vast prairie, from which the works emerge as landmarks of a territory under constant transformation.
The exhibition therefore requires of the visitor the traveler’s disposition: a being with history and identity, guided by the senses through the territories he traverses and discovers. It proposes that each visitor transform himself into a cartographer and invent his own territory. For, by extension, it also intends to make explicit an attitude toward life: to be a traveler means to seek an almost permanent existence in the present, in constant displacement and in the condition of the eternal foreigner, with roots not in nationality but in those territories under the rule of desire, sensibility and knowledge. After all, it is of life we speak when we think about art.
. . .
In the space of Western civilization, Latin America appears as the result of the expansion undertaken by the Discoveries and as an image of the bankruptcy of the European project of colonization that wound up relegating it to the condition of “the other” at the periphery. Although this process is not confined to Latin America (for the discourses of the hegemonic centers have distributed generalizations of every sort worldwide), there are certain particularities and distortions that Western History has attributed to this part of the world: on one hand, the notion of a territory of the eternal primitive, the exotic, of the folkloric and innocent; on the other hand, the notion of a space of endless revolutions and social uprising, of the lack of political will and the democratic exercise of citizenship, that disqualifies these societies from conceiving of a Utopia. But despite the political instability, the striking economic contrasts, the diversity of coexisting cultural identities, or even the urgency of social problems and the waves of fashion that present Latin America as yet another consumer product in the order of the day, each Latin American country continues to think about its Utopias as societies constituted from the heritage and traditions of the West, seeking to become visible and clamoring for their place in History. The presence of Latin America on today’s political and cultural scene is therefore always marked by the urgency of its political, social and economic situations, and by some stereotypes regarding its strong and varied cultural tradition.1
Latin American does not exist under a single identity. . . . “Latin American” as a concept, however, presupposes an integration of the continent that frequently does not exist in the countries themselves, whether because of social and economic or racial and cultural differences. The efforts of political and cultural institutions to promote continental integration are restricted to formal agreements, sealed by diplomacy; they never convert themselves into an effective relationship in the development of common projects seeking the interchange of experiences and knowledge. For example, there is, within the frame of post colonialism, much more cooperation within each country than among the separate countries. Thus, “Latin American” becomes one more operational category of postmodern anthropology, not unlike the ample notions of center and periphery, First and Third World, and so on. As has been previously observed, there are many centers and peripheries with distinct and complex relationships among themselves, just as there is a Third World within every First, and a First World within every Third.2
In the territory of the visual arts, Latin America has been registered and qualified by historiography and art criticism since the advent of modernism as a generator of two segments of the visual imaginary:
1) On one hand, its artistic production is approached through an interpretative posture that delimits a group of works inspired by popular tradition and seeking to recover oppressed nationality. Latent in this production is the idea of the recovery of the popular as a restorative of nature (pure) forgotten by Western civilization (impure). It supports itself on figurative images that refer to the continental mythologies (pre-Columbian, Afro-American, Amerindian), to religious and mythic iconography, and to well-known images from the Surrealist repertoire. . . . This production works with a dilution of Surrealism, but is recognized regionally and internationally as “Magic Realism” or “Art of the Fantastic”; it creates images that reinforce the myth of the continent as a land of the noble savage, of an El Dorado forever lost by civilization.3
2) On the other hand, its artistic production is recognized as a space of political militancy, creating an art engaged in the service of education and consciousness-raising of the masses and the transformation of society. Associating itself with the tradition founded by Mexican Muralism, the only Latin American artistic movement recognized by the compendia of Western art history, this production seeks more to answer the demands of political and social emergencies than to debate issues intrinsic to the production of language and knowledge.
It is not that these productions do not exist or are not constituent of a certain “Latin America.” They exist and are part of the artistic activity in the continent. In the meantime, as a group representative of artistic production in Latin America, they can only fail in their intent to demarcate a territory for the Latin American, for they affirm the existence today of an autochthonous culture, of an identity that expresses the authenticity of a pure and revolutionary culture. They incorporate the discourse of the other about “us” and create systems of representation that are rapidly crystallized in icons of identity, emptied by the violent dynamics of reality in which they are inscribed: an intermediate territory between the cultures of the pre-Columbian past and the unrealized Utopia proposed by the despotism of the colonizers. [As Ricardo Forster states]: “Latin America may perhaps be this space ‘in the middle,’ a territory without fixed margins where plurality is at once hope and failure, opportunity and difficulty, utopia and catastrophe. . . . We are the space of the crossing cultures, the meeting of travelers, of prophecies and chimera. . . . Restless figure, simultaneously ancient and youthful, it seems to regiment all the epochs in order to dream of a Latin American identity, a species of archetype that would unite all inhabitants south of the Rio Grande. However, in breaking the mirror, we are confronted by the fact that our reality has always been constituted among fragments, looking almost in the same act, inwards and outside and discovering the labyrinthine and Babel nature of our identity.”4
In a more recent past, under the aegis of postmodernism and the ideology of the politically correct, a series of artistic productions collaborated in the conquest of important spaces for crucial issues: minority identities—political, ethnic, sexual; the environment—both natural and social; social and cultural relations; miscegenation, multiculturalism, and so forth. In this way, new categories have emerged in the cultural debate purporting the specificity of new productions: the work of feminists, gays, lesbians, greens, African-Americans, Natives, Hispanics, Chicanos, etc. These new categories, however, eventually create ghettos where these productions should exist. In their wake, the concept of “Latin American art” was repotentialized and won greater validity, without engendering significant change in the understanding of the artistic productions and the countries on the continent. There was no productive and critical displacement of traditional concepts.5 On the contrary, this process has proven surprisingly reiterative of the already institutionalized, and has to some extent blocked the emergence of other signs of differences, of singular practices which might stress in a positive way the relations between art production and the circuits in which it is inscribed.6
To consider art in Latin America is to propose a confrontation between the strategies of artistic production and the policies of cultural institutions. “Latin American” plasticity is a definition whose conditions for manifestation currently depend on the degree of articulation of those institutions whose needs it produces. The only way to define a position that would account for the peculiarities of this plasticity is to strengthen transverse institutional tactics among the many organizations that are at work on the dissolution of the new forms of “modern primitivism.”7 If the Western world has sought this artistic production—and this is no place to discuss its interest in such action—it is up to us, Latin Americans, to make ourselves visible according to the pluralistic qualities of our culture. If the native past, Catholic and syncretistic religions, Latin languages, and ethnic mixtures are a common background, artistic practices point toward the territory of difference, of singularity. The fact that we live on the periphery obliges us to become cosmopolitan as the sole means of escape from the asphyxiation imposed by geopolitics and the confinement of desire. Without a fixed place—and it is this which makes us so interesting—we reside in mobility and live in a constant state of redefinition, where the question of cultural identity is permanently open. [I agree with Forster’s argument:] “In the midst of fractures and decadences, perplexed by our history and our present, devoid of a self-sufficient identity, we Latin Americans, especially artists and intellectuals, find ourselves faced with an unprecedented opportunity: to consider our time starting from the ecumenical, carving the cultural provincialisms, recovering the legacy of an illustrious and cosmopolitan West, but definitely entrenched in the knowledge which emanates from our own faults, from our suspect skepticism of those dreams we were promised by the American utopia.”8
Thus, to propose another cartography for the contemporary art produced in Latin America is to investigate possibilities for transformation. In particular, it is an attempt to change the comprehension of this production through a deterritorialization of the rigidly held positions of twentieth-century art history. What is important is to promote the possibility that the art which is produced there ceases to be the other which is spoken of in order to guarantee it the full exercise of languages, preserving the specificity and autonomy of the poetics. So the curator/cartographer goes off on expedition seeking to describe strategies in the production of Art, so as to reveal the collision of these productions with the issues that make up contemporariness. What truly matters is to perceive the firepower of the artistic production in Latin America, to constitute strategies enabling the emergence of an intelligent and original form of contemporary art in Latin America.
1
If we consider that the pre-Columbian past is composed of more than the Inca, Maya, and Aztec cultures—that the people who lived here during that period developed different degrees of civilization, that not all countries had slavery, that the migratory fluxes of Europe and of the Orient were directed, at different times, to different regions of the continent—we see that there were added to the colonial heritage of Latin and Catholic tradition so many diversifying factors that it becomes extremely reductive to invoke a common background in the formation and development of these societies. The “Great America” (of which Brazil is no part by virtue of its colonization by the Portuguese) dreamt of by the Hispanic liberators, for example, fragmented into many countries, and in each one of them lives a multiplicity of identities and cultures. In all the countries to a greater or lesser degree, white people, blacks, natives and an enormously varied mestizagem [intermingling] of all of them coexist. Nevertheless, it is profitable to observe that this racial plurality is not a privilege of Latin America, but of America, the New World, as a whole.
2
On this subject, see among others, Russell Ferguson, Martha Gever, Trinh T. Minh-Ha and Cornel West, eds., Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Cultures (New York /Cambridge: New Museum of Contemporary Arts/ MIT Press, 1990); Lucy R. Lippard, Mixed Blessings (New York: Pantheon Books, 1990); Jean Hubert Martin, Les magiciens de la terre (exh. cat.) (Paris: Centre National d’Art Moderne Georges Pompidou, 1989); Gerard Mosquera, “Presentación,” Ante América (exh. cat.) (Bogotá: Banco de la República/Biblioteca Luis-Ángel Arango, 1992); Nelly Richard, La Estratificación de los Márgenes, (Santiago de Chile: Francisco Zegers Editor, 1989); Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1979).
3
These figurations are perceived from the standpoint of the Surrealist experience. It is necessary to remember the importance of André Breton in the revelation of a significant number of original and important artists of Latin American origin. However, these productions are now supported by the “belief in the persistence of the international Surrealist movement, as emulating a universal and timeless Surrealist approach. Although the survival of a “surrealistic mentality” is justified by the theoretical refusal to consider Surrealism as a style (and thereby explaining its historical permanency), all productions connected in one way or another to this belief betray their own anachronism, as evidenced by the fact that they end up by converting into a matter of style the most original and transgressive formal devices of Surrealism. It is not by mere chance that a major part of this production has been dedicated to representations of oneiric evocations, especially in the trend set by [Salvador] Dalí.
4
Ricardo Forster, “Latinoamérica: el diálogo desde los márgenes,” (symposium paper), Identidade Artística e Cultural na America Latina (São Paulo: Memorial da América Latina/Arts International, 1991).
5
It is curious to perceive that the categories created by political correctness seek to map, on this side of the world, the differences and singularities that would put together an American picture, that is, of the three Americas. . . . However, this procedure reveals itself to be as arbitrary and merely operational as all the categories previously mentioned: center and periphery, First and Third World, etc. If this were not so, then why is Québec not included when we speak of “Latin America”? Are not the “Québécois” a Latin, Catholic culture produced in America? Would there not be similarities or affinities between their political, social and cultural claims and those of the peoples below the Rio Grande?
6
In the great majority of recent exhibitions of art from Latin America—The Art of the Fantastic in Latin America, Indianapolis, 1988; The Latin American Spirits, New York, 1988; Latin American Art, London, 1989; Twentieth Century Artists from Latin America, New York, 1992–93, among others for example—it is always presented as a “survey” with a univocal point of view, homogenizing all the peculiarities of its visual production. The concept of a hegemonic thought supported by geopolitics and incapable of revealing the struggles in the constitution of a modern and contemporary visuality is what prevails in these exhibitions.
7
Justo Pastor Mellado refers to the interest in the search for a new primitivism that exists today in the dominant centers for Third World art. See Justo Pastor Mellado, “Un caso de producción de identidad artística,” Identidade Artística e Cultural na America Latina (São Paulo: FMAL/AI, 1991).
8
Forster, “Latinoamérica: el diálogo desde los márgenes,” (1991).