In this 1993 text, Nelly Richard analyzes the problematic process through which the international art circuit brings to the fore an often sterotypical and market-driven version of Latin American art. The French-born, Chile-based critic takes a sociological approach to cultural studies, and, echoing Mari Carmen Ramírez [SEE DOCUMENT V.2.6], she denounces the minimal consideration given to the works’ background and context. In the wake of a number of Latin American art exhibitions challenging the monocultural discourse in the Western Hemisphere [SEE SECTION V.1], she cites Les magiciens de la terre—an exhibition organized by Belgian curator Catherine de Zeghers at the Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris, 1989)—as an interactive proposal. In her view, the exhibition situated the presented works within their appropriate socio-political contexts and acknolwedged both tensions and contradictions inherent to museums’ role and influence. Richard presented the essay at a colloquium addressing comparative perspectives on identity in the Americas that was organized by UNAM’s Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas in Zacatecas, Mexico, September 22–27, 1993. This translation is based on the version of the text published in the event’s proceedings [Nelly Richard, “La puesta en escena internacional del arte latinoamericano: montaje, representación,” XVII coloquio internacional de historia del arte: Arte, Historia e Identidad en América Latina, vol. III (La presencia de la modernidad artística europea en América), eds. Gustavo Curiel, Renato González Mello and Juana Gutiérrez Haces (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México/Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas, 1994), 1011–16].
LATIN AMERICAN WORKS OF ART that achieve recognition in international art circles are the ones that are exhibited in museums, which contribute their established platform for artistic promotion and cultural validation. We know that museums, in their modernist incarnation, have been “catalysts for the articulation of tradition, heritage, and the canon.” They have also “contributed to the development of cultural legitimacy”1 by assembling symbolic repertoires—the collections—that both archive and validate historical references which provide a community with a basis for self-definition. We also know that the symbolic cultural paradigm contributed by museums has helped to “define the identity of Western civilization, drawing external and internal boundaries that are influenced by exclusion and marginalization as well as by positive codification.”2 Definitions of the heritage archived by museums affect the criteria used in the selection and organization of cultural assets based on established values that sketch the outline of our symbolic identity. These boundaries define the content of that identity, setting the property limits that separate “us” from others.
The modernist concept of the museum has undoubtedly undergone many changes in terms of form and content as a result of the different scenarios to be found in postmodern culture. Postmodernism’s renewed appreciation for “the other” (for what is different, marginal, or peripheral) has obliged museums to broaden and diversify the definition of their limits, and to include images and representations that had, until now, been censured or dismissed by the hegemony of the mono-cultural ideal imposed by the dominant Western tradition. We have certainly seen some “gradual but significant progress during the past decade with regard to references to hidden or repressed aspects of the past and a greater interest in under-represented or falsely represented traditions”3 that are newly visible thanks to the trend of redrawing the museum’s boundaries, influenced no doubt by the modern debate on Multiculturalism.4
But we must not forget that this “progress” is, first of all, very fragile (it is constantly at risk of being reversed by neo-conservative attacks) and, secondly, it is very doubtful because it is under siege by the misunderstandings, ambiguities, and contradictions prompted by the deceptive postmodernist rhetoric concerning “the other.”
I would just like to clarify some of those misunderstandings, ambiguities, and contradictions arising from problems facing Latin American art that have been created by the international environment.
The hierarchical imbalances created by international art networks mean that the identification and selection of Latin American works of art that are promoted internationally depend—almost exclusively—on the people responsible for managing metropolitan centers of artistic interchange and transaction. Exhibitions are scheduled and produced by museum directors and international curators who are generally—as pointed out by Mari Carmen Ramírez [SEE DOCUMENT V.2.6]—not well informed on “the language, history, or traditions of many Latin American countries.” That factor, “together with the relatively small quantity of art historical material available in English, and the comparatively poor network of visual-arts information” in Latin American countries will tend “to entrench an easily stereotyped and marketable image of Latin American/Latino art”5 in international circles.
The first question in these circumstances is therefore: How to articulate the value assessment of the peripheral (Latin American) work of art arrived at by an international circuit artistic director who is unaware of the context of references and meanings that define and classify the particular work?
The most conservative answer to that question is expressed by those who adopt an aesthetic perspective to defend the value of “quality” with regard to a work conceived as a “visual and sensory experience” or as “originality and invention,” as happened at the Paris exhibition Les magiciens de la terre6 [Magicians of the Earth]. [Benjamin] Buchloh reminded us, when he interviewed J.H. Martin, that “the main tool used by the hegemonic (white, male, Western) culture to exclude or marginalize is the concept of ‘quality’.”7 And we have, in fact, learned (most especially from feminist theory) that culture is not at odds with metaphysical idealism—the pure, superior (unselfish) language of universal transcendence. The traits of “transcendence” and “universality” have been given a rhetorical spin by the dominant male-Western culture in order to submit them as arguments in support of their self-mastery in the field of representation. These are the traits that this culture interprets as privileges—self-awarded privileges—inspired by a sense of superiority that prompts it to identify itself as the subject of “identity” on the (upper) abstract–general level, while the other subject, the “difference,” is brought down to the (lower) specific–particular level. It is not true that culture communicates in a transparent, neutral language (that is, indifferent to differences). Its images and expressions of fantasy symbolize the way in which differences are regulated by the hierarchical systems of the cultural power that establishes the dominant and subordinate levels of representation. The violence of the struggles to possess–appropriate the power of identity symbols is hidden behind a fetishist image of art and culture as dematerialized products that, in the idealist–bourgeois tradition, express an interior and superior subjectivity. The “quality” formalist category belongs to the idealist–bourgeois tradition of art that seeks to exclude from its field of appreciation the full range of socio-contextual interplay of variables of meanings that historicize (condition and revitalize) opinions and values. To say that the “quality” of a work of art—as a value in and of itself—transcends any variable (of race, class, sex, and genre) is to introduce a double negation on the material and ideological levels. It negates the work’s production context, stripping it of its right to claim a particular specificity of operations; and it negates the context of whoever denies that right, disguising a centrist strategy that is based on a tradition that—through fundamental abuse—believes itself to be “the measure of all things.”8
But if we renounce that value of “quality”—because we do not trust its agenda of disguising and justifying the “interests, privileges, control, and exclusion”9 of Eurocentric dominance—what other category should we use instead to evaluate the works? When Buchloh asked Catherine de Zegher (curator of the America: Bride of the Sun exhibition presented in Belgium) this question, she answered as follows: “If a concept of quality could be created or defined in terms of dissuasive radicalism, negativity and irony; or if ‘quality’ could imply the development of new strategies and resources for the articulation of new voices and audiences, then that would be the concept that would guide me.”10
As distinct from the idea advocated by the metaphysical aesthetic of the Paris exhibition (Les magiciens de la terre), de Zegher’s answer suggests that any consideration of the work should take into account its role and performance (the position it adopts) as an expression inserted into a sociocultural milieu. This is a departure from the concept of objectification—a simplification of the work as a product to be contemplated—in order to analyze the art itself as a signifying process that mobilizes language resources on behalf of a particular model of critical functionality applied to a situation. That model, whose purpose is to interact within a particular context of discourses, works with random codes and meanings that vary according to where its expository and communicative site fits in the cultural organization system. It would seem, then, that the (inte)lligibility of the model of artistic meaning orchestrated by the work requires the [dialectical] recreation of dialogue, replica, and confrontation. This situates the work in terms of the discourses that surround it, whose presumption of meaning is already present and involved in the work, which responds tacitly to external demands. Therefore, it appears that there is a lack of situational knowledge concerning the code interventions that assemble and disassemble the work because they are all local interventions that create a combined meaning of affirmation–negation–interrogation vis-à-vis certain force lines in art and cultural circles. With no knowledge of those force lines (from complicated intersections—on the periphery—with multiple powers and resistances), it is impossible to measure the “arsenal of counteroffensive tactics”11 engaged by Latin American works of art to mock the cultural hegemony.
Perhaps that explains the demands that “an exposure to the art of ‘the periphery’ should include the broadest possible contextual information (political, socioeconomic, ideological, and so on).”12 The introduction of context—the additional information that the museum should provide to document the work’s situation—would compensate for the loss of meaning suffered by the work when the transfer of contexts disconnects forms from functions and distorts signs when they are interpreted according to the central culture’s conventions and stereotypes. But to what extent can that additional documentation recreate the material density of the articulations of feeling that animate the works in their respective contexts? And, taking it a step further, how to reconcile the “critical regionalism” that represents micro readings of the work, whose validity is above all context, with “the impossibility of totally renouncing trans-cultural opinions” that guarantee the “common horizon of our interchange with others” referred to by [Tzvetan] Todorov?”13
Those questions lead to the process of translation (a mediation and communication) between cultures, with all the risks of interference and linguistic short-circuits that are inherent to the process. There’s no reason to think that those translation flaws could or should be eliminated.
The myth that those flaws are obstacles (barriers) to any harmonious transparency of intercultural communication is based on a nostalgic concept of meaning—like purity and origin, like the purity of origin that finds any translation guilty of treason. When “translation experiments” multiply, these flaws appear as a red flag to the problematic issue of the meaning. According to James Clifford, the “imperfect translations” between cultures are what keep the viewer of the artworks in a permanent state of alertness and tension. “Imperfect translations” activate the viewer’s critical tension, provoking confrontations between points of view during every distortion of meaning and intersection of perspectives. Clifford believes we should then demand “exhibitions that position themselves in specific intercultural articulations” and that are prepared to specify the risk of using those unstable articulations to refute the absolutism of universal opinions; exhibitions “whose selection principles are open to criticism” as far as exhibiting “the discrepancies” of values and meanings produced by the collision and strained readings of “the objects displaced” by contexts.14 These “discrepancies” energize the viewer’s gaze by questioning the enunciative and communicative conditions that set the rule—according to the pragmatism of the cultural authority concerning “who talks to whom, why, where and when, and under what conditions.”15
The dominant Western modernity designed “the great notice board of clear and distinct identities” that—according to [Michel] Foucault—“was established against the unsettled, undefined, faceless, and somewhat indifferent background of differences.”16 This notice board of historical and philosophical modernity separates the same (the self-centered mind of transcendental rationality) from the other (the negative, clandestine heterogeneity of its opposites—madness, death, sexuality, and so on—that are censured by universal logos.) A chain of connections based on similarities and analogies weaves relationships of inclusion (the same) and exclusion (the other) that divide subjects into representatives of the light—human, Christian, European, civilized, male—and representatives of the sinister: animal, pagan, Indian, savage, female. The antinomian polarization of the identity–difference axis resets the division between culture and nature that separates the structured (the discursive) from the unstructured (the pre-symbolic).
The most typical representation of Latin American art is entirely conditioned by that dualism—nature (body)–culture (mind)—that expresses a primary, virgin identity that has not yet been influenced (not been contaminated) by the conspiracy of symbols. Magical, surreal, and fantastic are the internationally successful artistic categories17 responsible for associating Latin American work with a candid image of total fusion with the world; a fusion that preceded the trafficking in codes that left it adulterated and de-naturalized. Magical, surreal, and fantastic are the categories of Latin American art that sublimate the image of a lost paradise (nature in its virgin condition) in a state of naked innocence to which the First World must return in order to redeem itself of the consumer sins of a society that has become degraded by an overabundance of postindustrial icons. That sublimated, ghost-like return to its primitive roots represents—by transference and regression—the mass-influenced subject’s return to a state of grace in a time before the codes. Many images of Latin American art are a result of that magical–religious synthesis that seeks to capture Latin America in a state of pre-rationality/irrationality and keep it like that in the face of discourse or historicity. That capture of an identity–origin frozen in a mythical time subtracts the Latin American subject from the live temporality—in progress—that constructs social and historical narratives and positions (freezes) the subject in a non-evolutionary, a-historical space. A space devoted to “the authentic” that is nostalgically reduced to the traditional, and from the traditional it is reduced to the pre-modern; Latin American art is denied access to the modernity of change and transformation and is kept chained to the essentialist ritual of its origins.
But that same Latin American art takes pleasure in the transcendentalist search for an ontological reservoir of “being.” The international art world just uses the images in which Latin American substantiation of its origins has become the basis for its metaphysical demand for identity. The purity stereotype stresses a very archaic dimension of the “search for Latin American identity” (sources, roots) that was conceived as an essentialist repository of permanent, definitive values that guarantee the continuity of “the appropriate” and defend that continuity against threats of intervention by the improper. However, the same features of Latin American modernity which make it seem un-centered, fragmentary, and residual, make it clear that “appropriate” does not mean a pre-set content, but rather the intercultural tension that derives from heterogeneous forms of appropriation, dis-appropriation, and counter-appropriation. This tension exacerbates the meaning of the mixture,18 and energetically denies the vision of Latin American identity as a homogenous substance. If hybrids and Mestizos have forever caused Latin American production to be lumped together under the sign of impurity, why seek the key to its identity in a romanticized version of the purity of origin as an indigenous guarantee of unalterable values?
Looking beyond suspicions concerning the widespread and confusing term “postmodernity,” the postmodernist re-emphasis on certain issues, such as modernity and Latin American cultural identities, will help us—at least— to critically strengthen its hybrid nature. This hybrid quality portrays Latin American modernity as an unstable product with a variety of sedimentations that combine dissimilar formations. We could use a certain deconstruction of metaphysical thought about identity—another postmodern subject—to provide a critical response to the Latin American myth of “authenticity” that is the basis of identity as a presence. We could also use it to propose this identity as construction and relation, “inventive and mobile”19 across a range of registers of symbolic and cultural definitions. The best way to portray metaphysical construction—and essentially—“the other” (Latin American) as the remote, the primitive, therefore the exotic, might be to use the series of substitutions and appropriations, loans and reconversions, and conflicts and negotiations that weave Latin American identity and culture into tapestries of local and foreign symbols. These new constructions claim that “cultural difference is no longer a stable otherness”20 but a collection of local tactics critically designed to set the range of difference between the borders and the middle ground of cultures. These new constructions of cultural identity tell us that otherness is “a question of power and rhetoric rather than of essence.”21 That is because otherness is, above all, a question of representation.
The economy of colonial discourse reveals that the initial violence directed at the “other” is the violence of representation exerted by the symbolic power: “the act or process of representing implies control, it implies accumulation, it implies confinement, it implies a certain kind of distance,” as noted by [Edward W.] Said.22 The act of representing—of staging discourses to outline the “other”—means exercising cultural power that derives its legitimacy from occupying a higher position. This higher position—which consists of managing the discursive device—generates an imbalance of power between the subject of identity and the subject of difference. It portrays the former as a subject that writes/ describes; while “the second one is described” as a category (with a set name and image) and assumes the “passive role” of being the object of knowledge.23 That role makes the representative a “non-active, non-autonomous, and non-sovereign subject”; that is, a “possessed, understood, and defined non-subject that is treated” by those who administer the means of cultural representation in a non-participatory manner.24
When applied to the postmodernist scenario of difference, the power of cultural representation is still an issue in terms of who controls the means of staging the discourse that will address the meaning of difference. What we should ask ourselves, among other things, is whether international Postmodernism’s discourse on the pluralism of multicultural differences is sufficient to prompt a multiplication of discursive mechanisms that articulate and represent those differences.
Relations between the center and the periphery that promote a certain fantasy about cultural dependency (which was of particular significance during the Latin American anti-imperialism of the sixties) have experienced many changes and redefinitions during the postmodern period. Globalization of our economy and culture, and the current proliferation of markets and information all conspire to make it seem as though distances have evaporated and a powerful explosion has obliterated lineal opposites such as the center–periphery. At the very least it seems as though they have been affected by a multi-polarity of antagonisms and resistances that go beyond the parameters of North–South or First World–Third World. And it is true that we inhabit a communicative landscape of multiple transfers and interchanges, in which identities and cultures are crisscrossed by messages in circulation and in transit. That dislocation of the lines that underpinned dominance–subordination relationships based on the center–periphery polarity, suggests that we should replace this lineal counterpoint design with “an alternative cartography of social space, based mainly on notions of ‘circuit’ and ‘frontier’”25 that are more compatible with the circulatory fluidity of symbols on the postmodern map. That fluidity has also influenced images produced in the center. On the one hand, margins abound in the interior under the transversal pressure of minorities who “Third-World-ize the metropolis.” On the other, its image as the symbol of power centered in a particular place that was once considered the unquestionable point of reference has become tarnished as a result of the postmodernist critique of the totality and centrality of universal hierarchies. All this twisting of axes has exacerbated a structural dispersion effect that changes the centers and the peripheries; they are no longer fixed locations but multi-positioned functions that move and are reconstituted as multiple, crisscrossed relationship systems. But, though we witness a loss of territorial significance among symbols of power, this does not mean that they have ceased to function as indicators of dominance. It means that the logic that guides them is far more segmented and complex than it used to be.
This logic has also become more complex as a result of a certain “‘center–marginality’ aesthetic influence,” to quote [George] Yudice who spoke thus about the postmodernist re-assessment of the margins (the frontiers, the borders, and the peripheries) which was stimulated by critiques of the superiority of the culture of the center. This postmodernist re-assessment of the margins is ambiguous because its essential gesture still derives from the network that holds a symbolic–discursive monopoly. We know that the center’s privileged position is not based solely on its role as holder and distributor of financial wealth. It is also based on the authority vested in it that makes it a central point for accumulating information and transmuting meaning, according to unilaterally agreed parameters. The postmodernist debate over “the other” is facilitated by the circulation of the prevailing Euro-North American theory that carries a great deal of weight in the field of international discourse. The power endowed by that weight provides legitimacy for the function that is performed/occupied by cultural discourse institutions of Postmodernism’s “American International” ([Andreas] Huyssens). In that sense, the discursive hegemony of the postmodernist theme is set by a paradigm of authority that is articulated through reflection and discussion “centers” that decide validity issues, sanction uses, distribute distinctions, and so on. The “center” is then re-created as a function–center in any of the situations that produce knowledge–acknowledgment according to parameters that have been legitimized by a predominance of authority.
The defense of Multiculturalism by many institutions in the center and the circulation of the postmodernist theme of difference has re-arranged the center–periphery issue in the center (decentralizations, re-centralizations)–margins. In spite of the fact that the center currently lives and presents itself under the image of decentralization, that center (its universities, publications, and museums) re-codify—re-territorialize—the margins by managing them rhetorically under the banner of international Postmodernism. That is why the problems associated with the exaltation and celebration of differences are ultimately related to the function of the center in its role as interlocutor and grantor of legitimacy vis-à-vis the difference defined by marginality. That is, this dynamic can only function if there is a separate “other” that will authorize and acknowledge that difference, a situation that perpetuates the division between “us” and “the others” and the unequal position that guarantees that the latter’s difference can never function autonomously.26
This approach, however, is not hermetically sealed. There are several theoretical and discursive loopholes which allow us to take advantage of and benefit from the ambivalences and paradoxes of the conduct of “punishment, opening, and celebration”27 practiced by the un-centered center in terms of the margins. These loopholes can be accessed by taking advantage of the most porous aspects, the most flexible articulations, and the most tortured directions of the postmodernist debate. That is how we can establish dynamic interactions between the critical potential of certain operations carried out by institutions in the center and the forces of resistance and opposition that are massed along the borders of the cultural organization system by certain peripheral or semi-peripheral practices.
1
Andreas Huyssen, “From Accumulation to Mise-en-scène: The Museum as Mass Medium” (lecture presented at the First International Meeting on the Theory of Visual Arts, Caracas, March, 1992, organized by the Armando Reverón Institute).
2
Huyssen, “From Accumulation,” (1992).
3
Ibid.
4
“Multiculturalism should be understood here as the process of demographic reconfiguration that North American society has been experiencing since the sixties as a result of migrations from the Third World, the subsequent struggles of ethnic groups to defend their right to cultural and political equality, and the discourse in favor of racial diversity generated within this context to legitimize the demands of old and new groups.” Mari Carmen Ramírez, “Con un pie entre dos aguas: imagen e identidad del arte latinoamericano desde los márgenes del centro,” presented at the Simpósio Identidade Artística e Cultural na América Latina, Memorial de América Latina, São Paulo, September 1991. [SEE DOCUMENT VI.1.4]
5
Mari Carmen Ramírez, “Beyond ‘the Fantastic’; Framing Identity in U.S. Exhibitions of Latin American Art,” Art Journal no. 51 (Winter 1992). [SEE DOCUMENT V.2.6]
6
These quotes are taken from the preface to the exhibition catalogue Les magiciens de la terre, (organized by the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris), Les cahiers du Musée national d’art modern (1989), no. 28..
7
Benjamin Buchloh, “Entretien avec Jean-Hubert Martin,” Les magiciens de la terre.
8
Guy Brett, Border Crossings (London: Transcontinental–Verso, 1990).
9
Catherine de Zegher, cf. “America: A Written Exchange,” America: Bride of the Sun (Antwerp: Royal Museum of Fine Arts, 1992).
10
De Zegher, “America” (1992).
11
Eugenio Dittborn, “Una blanca palidez; entrevista con Adriana Valdês,” (London: Mapa–ICA, 1993).
12
De Zegher, “America” (1992).
13
Tzvetan Todorov, “Nous et les autres,” interviewed by François Poiré, Art Press no. 136, Paris, (May 1989).
14
James Clifford, “The Global Issue: A Symposium,” Art in America (July 1989).
15
Bruce Ferguson, “Dialogues in the Western Hemisphere: Language, Discourse, and Culture,” a lecture presented at the Simpósio Identidade Artística e Cultural na América Latina, São Paulo (September 1991).
16
Michel Foucault, Las palabras y las cosas (México City: Siglo XXI, 1976). English translation The Order of Things (1970).
17
For a discussion on these categories, see the (1992) article by Mari Carmen Ramírez quoted above.
18
See the theses by José Joaquín Brunner, Un espejo trizado (Santiago, Chile: FLACSO, 1988) ;and Néstor García Canclini in Culturas híbridas: estrategias para entrar y salir de la modernidad (México City, Grijaibo, 1989).
19
Clifford, The Predicament of Culture (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1988).
20
Clifford, The Predicament of Culture (1988).
21
Ibid.
22
Edward Said, “In the Shadow of the West,” Discourses: Conversations in Postmodern Art and Culture (New York, NY: The New Museum, 1990).
23
Abdel Malek quoted by Edward W. Said Orientalism (Madrid: Libertarias, 1990), 127.
24
Ibid.
25
Rouse quoted by García Canclini, Culturas híbridas (1989), 292.
26
Paper presented by Mari Carmen Ramírez at the College Art Association Annual Meeting of 1991.
27
Ibid.