VI.2.4 DIGITAL ARCHIVE 1065604
Australian-based art historian and writer on contemporary art Charles Merewether argues against the overwhelmingly homogenizing concept of “Latin American culture” leveraged by states and corporations in order to promote the illusion of cultural unity and political and economic stability in the region. In his view, the result of Latin America’s ceaseless “exchange and consumption” of mass culture is a “double movement” in which its culture has become globalized while its “crisis of underdevelopment” remains unaddressed. Merewether—who has worked across the Americas, Australia, the Middle East, and, more recently, Singapore—puts forth the notion of “the border” as a potentially productive focus for imagining how differences, exchange, and translations could be “negotiated.” The author first presented the essay at the symposium “Arte e identidade na América Latina” held in 1991 at São Paulo’s Memorial da América Latina in conjunction with the opening of the 21st São Paulo Biennial. As with the other scholars at the conference [SEE MARI CARMEN RAMÍREZ’S CONTRIBUTION TO THE SYMPOSIUM, DOCUMENT VI.1.4], Merewether was highly critical of fixed notions of Latin American identity and art promoted by a number of U.S. and European survey exhibitions of Latin American art during the late 1980s and early 1990s, including Mexico: Splendors of Thirty Centuries, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (1990). This excerpt from “Signs of a Transnational Fable” is taken from its 1994 publication [American Visions/Visiones de las Américas: Artistic and Cultural Identity in the Western Hemisphere, eds. Noreen Tomassi, et al. (New York: Arts International/Institute of International Education, 1994), 47–50].
WHICH LATIN AMERICA? Who is it who asks this question and to whom is it directed?
I believe the question “Which Latin America?” provokes several answers, all of which have their place, their destination, but which are faced always already with institutional frames and structures which not only return us to their form of correspondence, but which address their movement of translation, transmission and transference. Or as [Chilean artist] Eugenio Dittborn has recently suggested in relation to his airmail paintings: “The traveling is, thus, the political element of my paintings.”
We have to recognize how the fragmentation, non-synchronous development and heterogeneity of cultures within Latin America are re-figured or re-functioned in such a way that their historical specificity and local struggles toward self-representation are subsumed into the vertiginous circuits of exchange and consumption, and spectacle of a transnational and mass visual culture. It is a double movement; the cultural condition of Latin America is globalized while the very real crisis of underdevelopment is left intact.
Modernizations and the reproduction of Latin America are about a politics of disappearance and culture of primitivism. It is about the “de-territorialization” and the attempted homogenization of a nation space under military or authoritarian rule and local economies of internationalism, trans-nationalism, multi-nationalism, etc., disarticulating gender, racial and ethnic differences and rights to participate in processes of social democracy.
As with the conception of “Pan America” there exists within the continuing use of the term “Latin America” a flashpoint of intersecting connections, a horizon of hope. This horizon has been reached most recently in the questions raised around the subject of and in the context of the border, of border crossings, a practice, such as explored along the Mexican/US border, which recognizes the breakdown of first, second, third, and fourth world categories, and notions of mono-cultural authenticity and origin in the constitution of identity. It challenges the search for the native, the native informant as the representative of the purity of race, the figure who speaks the truth and therefore obviates the relational production of knowledge and meaning. The kind of critical perspective that has emerged as a consequence of the border issue can, I believe, serve as a useful point of reference in articulating the politics of multiculturalism and trans-nationalism, or in distinguishing different ways the border is crossed. The historical formation and contemporary crisis of the modern State in Latin America (with the exception of Brazil) demonstrates both a common point of reference, i.e., Latin America and the need to draw out the distinct cultural formations and ongoing strategies of incorporation and underdevelopment and resistance occurring across different sites within Latin America.
In this I mean that the question of border, in the marking of differences, in the demand for an exchange, of simultaneity in translation makes it not only once, but three times a subject of address:
First, in the moment of colonization; second, at the time of independence; and third: in the period of the trans-nationalism and the “new world order.” Within this trajectory lie modernity and the nation, emergent formations across Latin America within the same historical space of the second half of the nineteenth century. At this moment, modernity becomes, as [Walter] Benjamin writes [with regard to future], “a homogeneous empty-time,”1 to be organized and filled by the State.
Cultural myths of national integrity and organicism are built, repressing the uneven development of capitalism and the conflictual character that represents the condition of the nation. Such a condition is repressed by the construction of the nation–state. In the narration of the nation, museums, archives, anniversaries, festivities, monuments, sanctuaries become important sites for the triumph of nation and history. A new iconography of the past is created to forge a national identity and legitimate those in power. As in Africa, the processes of colonization, the construction of nation states and the post-colonial period cannot be looked at in terms of a Manichean opposition of the West and its other, of within and outside, but as alliance that worked laterally across these distinctions.
There exists an importance in developing a critique of structures from within rather than to imagine the possibility of working outside. There is no outside, but rather invisible frames, limits, borders to the text. The question becomes not one of artistic authorship—i.e., intentionality and individual identity—as much as exploring the relations of filiations and affiliation and institutional circuits of circulation, the reception and consumption.
This issue of filiations and affiliations involves not only considering the production of exchange value and the commodity through the relationship of gallery to the market system, but the constructing of filial identities and re-functioning of signs, i.e., popular cultures and art, through the orbit of museum exhibitions. Museum exhibitions and preservation of objects are linked in this movement. They destroy the social life; sacralize it as objects of abstract contemplation, as frozen archives. Latin America then is conceived and viewed in the context and terms of the Center, in terms of origin, rather than in reverse where the Center is conceived and viewed as subject to or within Latin America and therefore in terms of destination. These exhibitions obscure and re-present what they appropriate, assimilate. They empty out the specificity of knowledge and meaning in these works in the process of constructing their object of study or display. Equally, such terms as syncretism and hybridity, which have become strategically important in opposing notions of purity, origin and authenticity, nonetheless can also become fixed signs of otherness, congealing the transaction, tensions and contradiction that constitute their existence, their filiations and affiliations.
Signs of primitivism confirm the modern conception of “the other” in terms of origin and the experience of death. Producing the other, whether it be “primitive” or of the past, is to speak of it as something already dead and buried. Memory and popular consciousness are erased for a narrative of historical progress. James Clifford says ethnography is like sacrifice; bringing culture into a book, one simultaneously destroys oral life. Ethnography consumes cultures, turning them into nature or natural. Indigenous cultures are aligned to nature and therefore viewed as outside of the movement of humanity that is characterized by death in the West. Non-Western cultures are brought to stand outside of history as a kind of mythological dream world whose disappearance makes possible civilization.
The fascination of the primitive and folk is nostalgia for the recently outmoded. As Renato Rosaldo has noted, there is in this a kind of nostalgia, often found under imperialism, where people mourn the passing of what they themselves have transformed. The outmoded serves as the limit-text of Western culture.
Those who have become increasingly involved in the circuits of circulation represent class forms of accumulation increasingly dependent on the global economic system. This is nowhere better illustrated than by the recent México/ Splendors of Thirty Centuries exhibition held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, primarily funded by Televisa, the largest media conglomerate in Mexico with substantial interests and therefore audience in the United States, and supported by the Mexican government.
What has been first of all excluded from, and now increasingly appropriated into this circuitry, that is in the reconstruction of the State, have been popular cultures. In questions of both modernity and the nation-state, popular cultures have provoked a crisis. And within the configuration of a “new world order,” the alliances between the private sector and the State serve to violently deny the recognition and social development of popular cultures, placing them as before, as a kind of substratum, the original ground, the material, the productive power of labor, the earth beneath our feet. Latin America is again defined by way of cross-sections that serve bilateral and trans-national agreements.
The repression of popular culture takes different forms. Cultural nationalism of the State and the bourgeoisie put into circulation popular culture under the aegis of folklore and primitivism. They represent a kind of speech chosen by history, but one that conceals the voice that speaks, passing off as a “natural” statement that which is both historical and cultural. This is a politics of conformity, a redemption that aestheticizes difference and naturalizes memory.
The functioning of the mass media and communication networks—their steady growth and the importance played in national politics—represents perhaps the key instance by which the historical heterogeneity of popular cultures throughout Latin America is being socially reproduced as a mass culture through the process of consumption. This mass culture is organized around the relations between the exigencies and needs of everyday life for the majority of people and the ability of the private sector to answer those needs. This is the figure of under-development and impoverishment. The concept of Latin America provides a common ground upon which transnational corporations can collaborate in the social reproduction of these people. The term Latin America in the hands of this sector allows for the erasure of popular memory, the politics of everyday life and difference in a fundamental and large-scale way. It serializes the population, symbolically we might say, through processes of identification with the “telenovela,” but more drastically in the rationale of capital which at once makes everyone subject to the processes of modernization and therefore filled with the illusion of social change yet leaves them always, already the disenfranchised and dependent subjects of the State.
Latin America is re-articulated within the transnational institutions and circuits of exchange, on the one hand in the circuits of the market, galleries, museums, magazines, catalogues, etc., and on the other land, through television, video and networks of global electronic transmission. Both sectors find themselves disempowered, de-territorialized, transformed into signs of the other and therefore the subject and object of transnational exchange.
1
Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History” XVIII-B, Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 264.—Ed.