AMERICA: A pluri-vocal geographic denomination of a continent, in honor of the navigator Amerigo Vespucci, who was from Italy, a country which has not been involved with colonization. In the United States, the term has a double meaning: for the nation it stands for their own country (i.e., the United States of America). However, this has the pragmatic meaning of the Western continent, when, under the Monroe Doctrine [SEE DOCUMENT III.1.1], the U.S. came to use the Big Stick of interventionism. In Latin America it is a univocal term meaning the New World, whereas the Monroe Doctrine was usually a unilateral application. To leave this clear some call Latin America “Nuestra America” [Our America]. [See LATIN AMERICA below] . . .
ARGENTINIDAD: “It is a mistake,” says Jorge Luis Borges in referring to the nationalistic demand of local color in poetry. To deal problematically with the subject, he brings the example of the Koran where in spite of the absence of camels, one would not claim it as not being Arab: “I believe that we, the Argentineans, could resemble Mahomet, we could believe in the possibility of being Argentineans without abounding in local colour. . . . The nationalists propose to venerate the capacity of the Argentinean spirit, but they intend to limit the poetical exercise of this spirit to some poor local themes, as if the Argentineans could speak only about villages and “estancias” and not about the universe. [See EVERYTHING and RHETORIC] The Venezuelan critic Rina Carvajal mentions that the Argentinean painter Guiliermo Kuitca is not inspired “from an autochthonous tradition, but comes within the context of an urban environment that seeks an international aesthetic and a contemporary visual language,” Kuitca, dealing with Western culture and history, shares Borges’s concept of problematic Argentinidad beyond the nationalistic fatality and the national mask. . . .
BANANA: Plant originally from Asia, from the family of the Musaceæ. It was introduced in America in the sixteenth century. In popular culture it has a very broad set of meanings (erotic, depreciative, etc.). Brazilian Modernism was very dependent on bananas, while nineteenth-century Academicism (Agostino José da Motta and Estevão Silva) preferred watermelons. [See WATERMELON] In one of the very few important paintings that she made in Brazil after returning from New York, Anita Malfatti presents, in her canvas Tropical (c.1917), a basket of fruits from bananas to pineapple. “It is certainly the first time that the national theme is focused within modern art in Brazil,” says Malfatti’s biographer Marta Rossetti Batista. Right after his definitive immigration to Brazil (1923), [Lithuanian-born] Lasar Segall introduced a joyful expressionistic landscape of a banana plantation with a certain post-cubist spatial character. In the late-1920s antropofagia [see CANNIBALISM,] large banana-tree leaves with vegetal bodies dwell in the cannibal native landscape of Tarsila do Amaral (since A Negra, 1923). These same leaves will appear in Livio Abramo’s early anthropophagus period woodblock prints. In the late 1960s, Brazilian Antonio Henrique Amaral, after his Pop departure, slowly moved to a hyper realistic amplification of bananas which are being submitted to painful operations—like being tied up or hung with string, or cut with forks and knives—as a metaphor for the dark political times of the prevailing dictatorship of torture and murder. The negative symbolism of Latin American countries as “Banana Republics” (as a post-Colonial alliance of local corrupt oligarchies, either civilian or military, with foreign interests and presently with United Slates interventionism) finally finds a morbid yet truthful portrait, in spite of some efforts of modernization in certain societies of the continent.
CANNIBALISM: The indigenous cultural pattern of cannibalism has provided Brazilian artists and writers of the twentieth century with a source for a modem theory of cultural absorption: antropofagia = cannibalism. The 1928 “Manifesto Antropófago” [SEE DOCUMENT I.5.7] by poet Oswald de Andrade—taken from the painting Abaporu (1928) by Tarsila do Amaral—states that only cannibalism unites Brazilians socially, economically, and philosophically. The law of the man-eater indicates an interest in Otherness, unlike the importation of canned consciousness. In this stage of Brazilian modernism, it was no longer enough to update art with the international scene. A national culture would be open to devour any influence, to digest it for new meanings and possibilities. The primitivist model is transformed into a barbarian pattern against the oppressive censorship of civilization. Andrade advocates “the permanent transformation of taboo into totem.” References to Sigmund Freud and Surrealism indicate the precedent he finds in Francis Picabia’s cannibalism. In Brazil, the “antropofagia project” has both historical and contemporary validity. It is a dialectic method that is far deeper than the superficial postmodern principle of image quotations. . . .
COLONIALISM: “Art is no longer an instrument of intellectual domination,” said Hélio Oiticica (1967). It is up to the artist to overcome post-colonialist aesthetics, in spite of the remnants of colonialism in the international circulation of art. Both the exclusion from history and an interpretation that includes references only to European sources are forms of colonialist censorship. . . .
CRISIS: 1492 sets a dual crisis. A multi-level crisis—from religion to knowledge— reaches Europe. A Portuguese Map (1519) by Lopo Hornen creates a southern territorial link between America and Africa, as a last effort to revalidate the Ptolemaic geographic notions. A permanent crisis was set for the natives of the Americas, from cultural survival to life itself. After independence, Paraguay underwent genocide and strangulation from its neighbors. Brazilian critic Mário Pedrosa discussed the “Crisis of the Artistic Conditioning” (1966) due to the use of alien cultural roots. Pedrosa added that this crisis of modern art was due to the crisis in the levels, of social function and communication (1972). Argentinean critic Jorge Romero Brest wrote La Crisis del Arte en Latinoamérica y en el Mundo [The Crisis in the Art of Latin America and that of the World] (1974). He discussed the notions of crisis and development in art and stressed a dialectic contradiction between the order of human needs and the order of artistic demands. Besides, the many specific crises Latin American artists are dealing with, like perception (Waltércio Caldas and Alfred Wenemoser), the critic Nelly Richard [SEE DOCUMENT VI.2.5] points to a fundamental contemporary crisis [between imitation and difference]. The Chilean group CADA [Colectivo de Acciones de Arte/Collective for Art Actions] (Raul Zurita, Diamela Eltit, Juan Castillo, Lotty Rosenfeld, and Fernando Balcells) in the claiming of a “discourse of the crisis,” [they] “had learned to mistrust any new illusion regarding ‘totalitarian totality’: may we call it either revolutionary utopia, myth, or ideology.” (Nelly Richard) [See UTOPIA]. . .
DEPARTMENT OF STATE: The United States government organ for foreign affairs. According to Aracy Amaral: “It was not by chance that abstract expressionism had a world repercussion after the Second World War. During this period, in the midst of the Cold War, that tendency was exalted by the painters of the Museum of Modern Art of New York, the traditional right arm of the Department of State in the cultural area.”
DICTATORSHIP: Art dictatorships established aesthetic models as mandatory sources or monopolistic presences following the very pattern of governmental dictatorships. Most of the time they produced an alliance between the Stalinist aesthetics and right wing governments. They end up as the biggest market phenomena in their countries. Art critic Marta Traba mentions that Joaquín Torres-García has put Uruguayan modern art in the prison of this cold and desiccated idealism, with his ferocious civilist discipline. She also says that Oswaldo Guayasamín does to modern painting in Ecuador what The Three Great muralists did to modern Mexican painting: “He imposes terror and establishes an aesthetical dictatorship, outside of which it seemed impossible to survive.” For Shifra M. Goldman, in the fifties the dense intimate graphic work of Jose Luis Cuevas represented a reaction against the public aesthetics of the muralists. . . .
DUALITY: Where does the Third World end and the First World begin in this world? (Or vice versa). [See THIRD-WORLDLINESS] Is Latin American art in alignment with European and North American art? Or is it the setting of a local tradition? The Shakespearean dilemma evolves to “Tupi or not Tupi, that is the question” (pronounce “to pee”), where the name of this Native people gives Brazilian poet Oswald de Andrade the possibility of condensing in a synthesis the fundamental doubt of national identity at the crossroad of cultures and historical times. [See CANNIBALISM] Tunga’s installation Palindrome Incest (1991) claims to have the structure of the human mind. “I’m trying to annul the terms of exterior and interior, of inconsequential and consequential,” the artist states. . . .
ESPEJISMO: Spanish term [for mirage] (derived from “espejo” = mirror) to describe that tendency in Latin American culture of reflecting foreign dependency or influence, usually from the hegemonic Northern Hemisphere countries. Borges speaks of the “passive aesthetics” of the mirrors and the active aesthetics of the prism. [For a theory of cultural absorption, see CANNIBALISM] The trend of “quotations” in art in the eighties distorts the “reflecting” character of many artists.
EVERYTHING: “Everything human is ours,” said the Peruvian [José Carlos] Mariátegui (1926). In the prologue of The Book of Imaginary Beings, Borges writes: “the name of this book would justify the inclusion of Prince Hamlet, the point, the line, the surface, the hyper cube, all generic words and maybe each one of us and the divinity. On the whole, almost all of the universe.” Elsewhere Borges says that “We may touch all European themes, and to touch them without superstitions. . . . I repeat that we should not fear; we should think that the universe is our patrimony and try all themes.” For Borges, Xul Solar lived recreating the Universe [with his “Pan-lingua” (world language)]. One may now conclude that everything could be a genuine source for art in Latin America, because it has the right to the universe, plus it holds a secret. [See SECRET] Borges offers the broadest challenges to the imagination of many artists, be they Argentineans (Kuitca, Liliana Porter or Jacques Bedel) or non-Latin-American (Joseph Kosuth). In his Biblioteca de Babel, Borges deals with a library where we may find that everything expressible in any language has been printed. One generation after the other has gone through the library in search of The Book. Some called this library: Universe.
EXCLUSION: The writing of art history is an exercise in power of exclusion as well as inclusion. Someday, like the history of the defeated proposed by Walter Benjamin, one should write the history of those excluded from the dominant art history. This would include such artists as Gego in Venezuela, Oiticica, Lygia Clark, Lygia Pape and Amilcar de Castro in Brazil, or some from the Madi group in Argentina. . . .
GHETTO: Beyond the historical ground and identity [see LATIN AMERICA], the setting of specific space as an authorized territory for the expression and self-representation of ethnic groups and minorities may end. Exhibitions could become a geopolitical strategy, resulting in prison camps for art. Patronizing appreciation then ascribes intellectual quality to the confines of an artistic ghetto with a calculated ethnic apportionment. Brazilian artist Tunga declared: “Geographically I am a Latin American and professionally I am an artist. Because all art belongs to mankind, the attempt to organize thinking about art in geographic or geopolitical terms is, at best, a crude approximation of what art really represents to the human spirit.” Artists like Cildo Meireles, Alfredo Jaar or Juan Dávila are engaged in revitalizing and giving voice to the ghetto. . . .
HISTORY OF LATIN AMERICAN ART: In spite of previous denials [see SECRET], from the continent or abroad, the art of Latin America also substantially nourishes itself from the History of Latin America which is a tradition in its own right and can be observed in constructive art. The work of the atelier of Torres-García in Montevideo, Asociación de Arte Constructivo (1934–40) was key to the formation (as voluntary identification) of the Buenos Aires groups and Madi in the 1940s, whose artists exhibited in Rio de Janeiro (1953) and influenced the Brazilian [Neo-] Concretist artists. The Neo-Concrete group (Amilcar de Castro, Clark, Pape, Oiticica, Weissmann) is a reference for the artists of the 1970s Brazil (Cildo Meireles, Antonio Manuel, Ivens Machado, Waltércio Caldas, Tunga, Fajardo, José Carvalho, Iole de Freitas) on many levels, such as phenomenology, poetics, aesthetics, philosophy and ethics (and less in formal aspects). Younger artists (Jac Leirner, Fernanda Gomes, Ernesto Neto, Waleska Soares, Frida Baromek) refer to both previous generations as well as to other international art movements. In Brazil, this is a cultural dynamic of transformation of ideas rather than a series of aggressive ruptures. . . .
INDO-IBERIAN AMERICA: A term proposed for Latin America in an editorial of the Mexican magazine America Indígena (vol. XIX; no. 2, April 1959): “The name Latin America can suggest that those who inhabit this great territorial extension are individuals who descend only from the so-called Latin European peoples. . . . We believe in the name Indo-Iberian America, since its inhabitants are descendants both of Indians and of ancestors from the Iberian Peninsula, or rather Spanish and Portuguese.” . . .
INSULARIZATION: Cities and continents can be insularized in the international art system. “I play chess alone right now,” wrote Marcel Duchamp to the Arensbergs during his sojourn in Buenos Aires (1918–19) as if he were sitting on the desert, Andean landscape. The geographic isolation of Manaus in the jungle and La Paz in the Andes, the boycott of Cuba, the long political, economic and cultural process of suffocation of Paraguay with its neighbors, in the 1870s after the war are denotative of the circumstance of exiled societies and groups. However, the island of Cuba has transformed its insularity into a cosmogonic character, like in Brazil where cannibalistic modernism gave a character to cultural exchange. In his painting Visión de La Isla desde lejos [View of the Island From Afar] (1991), painted abroad, José Bedia depicts the image of an island–man. Cuba is now embodied in a mythical mountain–individual: nature flourishes from his body, labor energy flows in boats, trains, airplanes; life abounds from the archetype. Two Cuban artists, Ibrahim Miranda Ramos and K’cho present the problems of the historical and contemporary environment. The latter makes maps of Cuba in the form of kites and baskets, and there is an Aristotelian character in this transportable space. K’cho’s Cuba is seen as transparent structures and devices for the movements of the imaginary. Miranda Ramos’ metamorphoses turns maps of Cuba into archetypal lizards [alligators]. For him, Cuba has a long history of dictatorship, bribery and lies. The reinforcement of this unstable quality and the spread of incredulity in history have enabled the Lizard [Alligator]–Island to survive as an identity and to dwell in the poet José Lezama Lima’s “invisible gardens” of the “insular night.” . . .
LABYRINTH: From the North to the extreme South, a continent wanders between the Labyrinth of Solitude and the Labyrinth itself, as if a totality of diverse fragments were a continuum from Octavio Paz to Borges. In turn, Hélio Oiticica situates himself in a flow of desire: “I aspire to the great labyrinth.”. . .
LATIN AMERICA: A continent of moving boundaries. Some are under dispute (Malvinas versus Falklands). Argentinean Kuitca has interpreted the individual distress and abandonment, the pain and silence that originated in the Malvinas conflict. Other limits are shrinking, especially in the jungle. This results from the Yanomani territories, recently established in areas of what are still “Brazil” and “Venezuela.” The tension regarding the present territorial rights of Natives has raised the solidarity through art works by artists such as Brazilians Cildo Meirelles, Bene Fonteles and German Lothar Baumgarten. Cláudia Andujar has chosen to live among the Yanomanis, to turn her photography into a weapon for their benefit. Other frontiers are expanding to the North: they already comprise 25% of the population of Texas, as territory gained by the means of an “illegal” act (now migration instead of war, as dealt with by Chilean Alfredo Jaar and Uruguayan Luis Camnitzer, respectively). Frida Kahlo, with Self-Portrait on the Border between Mexico and the United States, is a master geographer defining the limits and differences between two cultural universes, from history to nature, economy and ideology. . . .
MANIFESTO: Latin America adopted the European modernist strategy of writing manifestos as tactical declarations of principles against conservative force or opponents, or as an effective social means of circulating ideas. Some hundreds of manifestos in all fields from art to music were written on the continent. Manifestos were intended to give “visibility” to ideas. When art historians take exhibitions and manifestos as the sole or main historical process, they are distorting the cultural dynamics. This unconsciously reflects the Latin American literary tradition in dealing with art. Manifestos are not the absolute source of art and this produces a shadow over isolated artists like the Brazilian Oswald Goeldi, certainly the most rigorous Brazilian spirit in modern art from the 1910s until his death in 1962. That distortion by national historians leads to a second wave of opacity with foreign authors quoting the former. They have fallen into the trap of “manifestoism,” a new manifest destiny, now in art. . . .
MARVELOUS: For Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier: “lo extraordinario no es bello ni hermoso por fuerza. Ni es bello ni feo, es más que nada asombroso por lo insólito. Todo lo insólito, lo asombroso, todo lo que sale de las normas establecidas es maravilloso” [“Extraordinary things are not necessarily pretty or beautiful. They are neither beautiful nor ugly; they are, more than anything, astonishing for their unusualness. [Thus] everything that is unusual, awesome, everything that escapes established norms, is marvelous”]. (1975). Iraset Paes Urdanela wrote that “the essence of Hispanic American marvelous realism is its obsession to name and to find America in its natural objects and its historical facts,” through the means of a dialectical and baroque discourse which attempts the interpretation of a society of solitude and violence. Many artists attempt to transpose from literature to art such non-rationalist patterns as the “marvelous real,” “fantastic realism,” “fantastic fundamentalism,” etc. As a result of constructing Latin America as a pre-logic continent [see LATINO AMERICANIDAD], foreign bias defines that idealized essence, where knowledge, science or philosophy would find neither a place nor a social meaning. Crisis and critical consciousness would travel only under non-disruptive authorization in this marvelous territory, a Western reserve of romantic difference. . . .
NATIVE: The indigenous presence in Latin American art varied thematically in the early European representations from the idea as a source and contribution to the national identity, to primitivist references, to subjectivity of Native self-representation and individual self-expression. Cuba has very little native heritage, since the indigenous population was exterminated in the first decades of colonization. Also the mestizaje [intermingling] process rendered different approaches to self-identification regarding the ethnic origin. The native gaze has been absorbed throughout Latin America, as in the Andean paintings of the Cuzco, Potosi and Quito schools or in the baroque of the Jesuit Missions in Paraguay. Some groups have also shown their distaste for the colonization of their people, like [Peru’s] Felipe Guamán Poma de Ayala [author of Nueva Crónica y Buen Gobierno or The First New Chronicle and Good Government, completed around 1615]. The long history of indigenous art has many chapters. In the nineteenth-century Brazilian academy, as commonly as elsewhere, Indians did not correspond to their ethnic group. This anthropological falsehood was reinforced with Catholic morality. Native nudity would appear only in dying Indians and corpses (like in Victor Meireles’s Moema of 1866), or in a Christian situation, like The Last of the Tamoios (1883) by Rodolfo Amoedo. What was indigenous gained strength in Andean countries and Mexico in the last century. As early as 1855 Peruvian Francisco Laso painted The Indian Potter, an individual full of dignity and an inheritor of history. In Mexico, the indigenous was symbolic in nationalism and modernization. Under the pressures of foreign oppression and exploitation national identity appeared in the last quarter of the nineteenth century in the paintings of José María Obregón, Félix Parra and Leandro Izaguirre (Torture of Cuauhtémoc, 1893). The muralist movement brought the indigenous to public spaces, building for Mexico the broadest set of symbolic images, with artists such as Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, David Alfaro Siqueiros, Fernando Leal, Jean Charlot, Francisco Goitia, among others. In European primitivism there was a relatively smaller reference to the indigenous heritage of Latin America, as with Henry Moore. Returning from his long European stay, Torres-García came back to Uruguay in 1934 for his final search for universal symbolism in native culture. Also Modernism in the region faced the apparent contradiction of looking to the past. This movement sought to regain the identity that had been lost, distorted or constructed in the colonial past. From the Peruvian magazine Amauta (1926) by José Carlos Mariátegui . . . to the painting Abaporu by Tarsila do Amaral and to “The Anthropophagous Manifesto” (1928) of Oswald de Andrade this modernist attitude was widespread in the continent. Some contemporary artists are absorbed by the vast and silent Andean landscape as marked by the pre-Columbian cultures, others with the grief of the Conquest. The aesthetic, which searches for an indigenous metaphysical space is evidenced in the work of Peruvian Fernando de Szyszlo, Colombians Carlos Rojas, Edgard Negret and Ramirez Villamizar, Uruguayan Nelson Ramos, in the books of Argentinean Jacques Bedel, and in the photography of Brazilian Sebastião Salgado. More recently some artists such as Cildo Meireles, Cláudia Andujar and Bene Fonteles in Brazil and Uruguayan José Gamarra, with his literary historical landscapes aligned their work against the genocide of Indians. In spite of the richness of this theme, historical domination remains as a constraint to the self-expression of Native groups in Latin America. This appears also in the work of Chileans Gonzalo Diaz and Eugenio Dittborn. On the other hand, “art” as a Western category is foreign to indigenous cultures. Can we call the symbolic artifacts of the ceremonial life of such cultures “art”? As the German artist Lothar Baumgarten has dealt with in his work, this can touch, as an act of linguistic appropriation, the very first movements of the Conquest: the giving of European names to the geography of the New World. . . .
OTHER: 1492 was “an astonishing revelation of Otherness (people, lands, cultures) beyond the confines of the Old World,” wrote Mari Carmen Ramírez [SEE DOCUMENT VI.1.5]. Contemporarily, Martin Heidegger’s influence has been the awareness of an “existence among Others” within the irremediable separation between the I and the Other. Since the early 1960s, Brazilian artists developed—as a strategy for dealing with a period of social and political crisis and psychological distress—an art that was an alliance with the Other. For such artists as Clark, Oiticica and Meireles, among others, art would perfect its existence and realize its full potential as a significant period and an irreplaceable experience only through the action of the Other. At the same time, in Buenos Aires, Luis Felipe Noé published his Antiestética (1965). He discusses the making of art in a chaotic reality; then, art becomes an adventure, involving oneself and the Other. [See SOCIAL COMMITMENT]. In the present system of hegemonies, the truth is that the “Other” is always us, never they, observes Cuban art critic Gerardo Mosquera [SEE DOCUMENT VI.2.1]. . . .
PAN AMERICANISM: The exacerbation of the Cold War in the 1950s and the Cuban Revolution (1959) led to the ideological confrontation. Latino-Americanidad was substituted for Pan Americanism as a way of excluding and isolating the United States. Latin American solidarity was claimed against continental integration, which would incorporate the expansion of American capital and military intervention in the Southern Hemisphere. . . .
PRIMITIVISM: The impact of futurism in Latin America in the first decades of the century was gradually replaced by Primitivism as a general trend. Primitivism was closer to the reality of Latin America, more coherent to the impact of the social Darwinism of Herbert Spencer than the futurist ideas of social progress and technology. This modernity offered a possibility of a connection with the past and cultural reality of Latin America. Thus, Primitivism was not now an approach to the Other but rather a search for oneself through the national identity. Furthermore, Primitivism was a filter between Latin America and some tribal societies. Tarsila do Amaral’s painting A Negra (1923) is the major modernist work dealing with Brazilian African heritage. However she found her sources of primitivism in [Constantin] Brancusi’s sculpture and [Swiss poet] Blaise Cendrars’ ideas of “Negritude” in a sojourn in Paris that year. . . .
RHETORIC: “I accuse my generation of continuing the same methods of plagiarism and rhetoric as the former generation,” said Peruvian poet César Vallejo (1927), while Borges saw the mandatory reference to tradition as rhetorical. His skepticism was not based upon the difficulty in solving the problem, but upon its very existence. [See ARGENTINIDAD] In art, formalist quotations by artists superimpose the elaborate visual baroque rhetoric on religious rhetoric, thus hiding the political aims in Counter Reform. Quite often the visual art falls within the verbal rhetoric. Some argue that the visual rhetoric of most prints by the [late-1930s] Mexican Taller de Grafica Popular is propaganda, pure “ideological vassalage.”. . .
SECRET: Since Latin American art has been widely discriminated against in art history (books and exhibitions) it remains widely unknown. Therefore it is a secret, known only to the artists of the region. Therefore these artists have more sources than the artists from elsewhere, since they have any source [see EVERYTHING] plus this SECRET one, so far, for their exclusive use. . . .
SOCIAL COMMITMENT: It is quite common for the individuality of a Latin American artist to be denied or required to represent some aspect of the region. This happens both in regard to foreign expectations and local demands, to which he/ she might be aligned in a “South-American sensibility” (Chantal Pontbriand). Living amidst a hard social reality, and yet in a less individualistic society, Latin American artists in general never believed in the absolute autonomy of art. Historically this belief in the social character of the cultural project has led artists to search for a national identity and to engage social change. Ida Rodríguez Prampolini reached the conclusion that “since Mexico obtained its independence from Spain in 1821, if any quality has remained around the trajectory of critical and artistic production up to 1950s it is the entailment of art, politics and society.” The historical process altered such a commitment. Says Argentinean artist Luis Felipe Noé: “As a change we are now in a society in which the artist lives with the consciousness of the ‘I and the Other,’ ‘I and the world in front,’ ‘I and the Others,’ ‘I and world around mine’.” This way he finds himself in adventure, not implicitly in a collective adventure but in wonder. He has the tendency to meet society, however without halting his own mission, his own “sense of being.” Brazilian sculptor Carlos Fajardo—with his investigation and invention of the poetic possibilities of materiality—offers a level of sociability that is pertinent to contemporary times. Working within a tradition, the rigorousness of his project and the transparency of his method, Fajardo opens new approaches to knowledge as an experience of clarity. This is the commitment to the Other in a contemporary social dimension.
SURREALISM: Since Les Chants de Maldoror (1868) of Lautréamont . . . by the Uruguayan Isidore-Lucien Ducasse (1846–1870), the Surrealist process of dissociation was created by “the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissection table.” Quite often Latin America is given as a surrealist continent, as Mexico has been a haven for the surrealist exiles [especially in the 1930s and 40s], “everyday life in Latin America proves that reality is full of the most extraordinary things,” remarked Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez. Surrealism and other affinities [see MARVELOUS] reinforce the idea of unconsciousness and irrationality, sometimes assigned to Latin American culture. When a Brazilian poet declares that “we had already the surrealist language”—in his “Manifesto Antropófago” (1928) [see CANNIBALISM,]—there is an indisputable historical dimension. He was in the process of establishing a national project of culture; therefore, the past and native origin (i.e., the language) had a contemporary meaning (i.e., it was surrealist, that is to say, it had the character of the then predominant international cultural movement). Such is [Oswald de] Andrade’s dialectical perspective of culture. . . .
THIRD-WORLDLINESS: An unhappy and self-indulgent attitude pervades the work of many artists and photographers as the only possibility for images of Latin America, distorting its totality. The fear and refusal of this “Third-worldliness” is however another veiling of reality, hiding hegemonic interests. The cultural differences and economic degrees of regional development are another level of reality that leads to economic, political and cultural colonialism, which is now internal colonialism and discrimination (a regionalist racism). What is the role of cities like São Paulo, Mexico City, Buenos Aires or Caracas in their respective countries today? [See UNDERDEVELOPMENT] The prevailing standards of the Third World in Latin America led to phenomena such as mass communication in a society with high illiteracy rates and dictatorial regimes and Pop Art in societies with large groups of marginal consumers. Artists like Antonio Dias and Rubens Gerchman [in Brazil], conveyed highly violent image of politics, sex, consumption, labor, and cultural industry to deal with the structural tensions. This peculiarity is the major contribution of Latin America to Pop Art. In Argentina, Antonio Berni was still imbued with his classic Marxism, when he proceeded with a radical formal change to convey a new social perspective in his work. Earlier in the 1930s he was under the impact of the Mexican muralists, organizing his work through the classical view of oppression in class society. In his Juanito Laguna series (1960s) the inclusion of objets trouvés had a pictorial value, as in the work of Robert Rauschenberg, but it made a diverse presentation of a consumer society: the lumped child is at the very border of the border. The allegory of exclusion from consumption is a melancholic denial of the capitalist heaven. In Pop Art, the work of Brazilian-born Oyvind Fahlström (São Paulo, 1928) shows a deep political commitment. He included economic differences, imperialism, militarism, and underdevelopment in his art, reflecting his qualities as a “citizen of the world,” as Pontus Hultén named him. More than twenty years later Chilean artist Juan Dávila returned to Juanito Laguna in the series Wuthering Heights (1990), as if showing how historical perversion had fulfilled all promises to the body.
TRANSLINGUISTIC DETERRITORIALIZATION: This glossary has been originally written in English, Portuguese being the mater-language of the author. This deterritorialization is meant to compare to the answer given by the Argentinean artist Miguel Uriburu, when asked by the British customs to spell his last name: “You are I, be you, are you?” In such Babel of otherness and identity, U-r-i-b-u-r-u developed his artistic project of dumping green color in the water of important geographic points (the Hudson River in New York, the Grand Canale in Venice, etc.). Color was the unifying element derived from visual language in a world of growing internationalism and disrupted by de-territorializations. . . .
UNDERDEVELOPMENT: During the 1960s the concept of underdevelopment was dominant in political and economic debates in Latin America. Aware of the national particularities of each country (developed, capitalist, socialist, under-developed, colony), Brazilian critic Ferreira Gullar proposed a dialectical vision of the international character of culture in Vanguarda e Subdesenvolvimento [Avant-garde and Underdevelopment, 1969]. Underdeveloped countries would adopt a truly internationalist attitude only when developing the knowledge of their own reality. This true internationalism would be achieved as the countries become conscientious about their own specificities and identities. Such conscientiousness would lead them jointly to mutual identification with art, to having more power over changing international global-ism. Since underdeveloped countries are consumers of the art of the developed ones, Ferreira Gullar affirms: “The definition of avant-garde art in an underdeveloped country should appear from the examination of the social and cultural characteristics appropriate to this country and never from the acceptance and mechanical transference of a concept of avant-garde that is valid in developed countries.”
UTOPIA: According to Sir Thomas More [SEE DOCUMENT I.1.2], Utopia was very close to South America, just some fifteen miles from its coast. Maybe that is why the Americas have been a fertile field for the projection of utopias. Since 1492, like utopia under a nightmare, “the beau sauvage” has continuously been faced with and resisted genocide. Since the 1960s, Cuba represented a real and possible social utopia for a continent of great inequalities. Living in Belgium, the Cuban artist Ricardo Brey has written about present times: “I was born in Cuba. That was Utopia. The cathedral, too. Now we need to reconsider things. Maybe there’s no longer a place for cathedrals.” . . .
WATERMELON: The heraldic fruit for Mexico is the watermelon [due to the colors of its flag]. Quite often it appears as color intensity, as in the painting of Frida Kahlo and Rufino Tamayo. The painting of Dulce María Nuñez takes the fruits of the fertility of the land as symbols of a historicity derived from artistic tradition. There are watermelons and pineapples in Mermaid (1990), bananas in Dutch Huitzilo-pochtli or corn, deified by the ancient Natives. The Brazilian poet Mutilo Mendes called the open watermelon “the red bread suspended in front of the mouth of the poor, a spectacle to the stomach, on view.” [See BANANA]. . . .