VI.2.7 DIGITAL ARCHIVE 1065622
In this essay from 2003, Gerardo Mosquera considers the uselessness of overarching concepts such as “Latin American art” that, in his view, do not adequately reflect how contemporary artists from the Americas make and exhibit their work. He urges his readers to consider the term “Latin American” as an externally imposed, colonial, and imperialist invention. Despite Latin America’s entry into what he terms the “global mall,” Mosquera warns of the traps into which the art of the region is apt to fall with the globalization of art and culture. In this context, Latin American art that insists on being branded as such risks being reduced to a postmodern cliché: being seen as derivative of the art of Western center or engaging in “self-exoticism” (“‘otherizing’ themselves”). Instead, the Cuban critic proposes that artists from Latin America should be understood as part of what he calls a “third scene,” where difference and displacement are accepted as fundamental aspects intrinsic to globalization. “Del arte latinoamericano al arte desde América Latina” is notable because it demonstrates Mosquera’s interest in aligning Latin American art with other post-colonial discourses and their engagements with Marxism and Post-structuralism. He uses V. Y. Mudimbe’s question “What is Africa?” as a point of departure and asks “What is Latin America?” [ALSO SEE EDMUNDO O’GORMAN’S THE INVENTION OF AMERICA (1961), DOCUMENT I.1.7, WHICH PREDATES MUNDIMBE’S THE INVENTION OF AFRICA (1988)]. Adopting French structuralist terms to consider Latin American art as a problem, Mosquera urges his readers to think about systems of production and reception, and, especially, about the emphasis on what is “signified.” This translation is based on the essay’s original publication [Gerardo Mosquera, “Del arte latinoamericano al arte desde América Latina,” Art Nexus (Bogotá/Miami), no. 48 (April 2003), 70–74].
CULTURE IN LATIN AMERICA HAS SUFFERED from a neurosis of identity that is not completely cured and of which this text forms a part [albeit] in opposition. I could attest to it when (in 1996) I published an article entitled: “El arte Latinoamericano deja de serlo”1 [Latin American Art is no longer as such], which provoked strong reactions. Nevertheless, by the end of the 1970s, [Brazilian art critic] Frederico Morais had linked our identity obsession with colonialism and proposed a “plural, diverse, and multifaceted idea of the continent,”2 a product of its multiplicity of origin. Yet the very notions of Latin America and Iberoamerica have always been very problematic. Do they include the Dutch and Anglo Caribbean? Chicanos? Do they embrace indigenous peoples who often do not even speak European languages? If we recognize the latter as Latin Americans, why do we not do so with indigenous peoples north of the Rio Grande? Is what we call Latin America part of the West or the non-West? [IN THIS REGARD, SEE DOCUMENT I.2.11] Does this contradict both, emphasizing the schematization of such notions? In any case, today the United States, with more than thirty million inhabitants of “Hispanic” origin, is without doubt one of the most actively Latin American countries. Given the migratory boom and the growth rate of the “Hispanic” population (migration without movement), in a not so distant future, the U.S. may come to have the third largest Spanish-speaking population, after Mexico and Spain. In some stores in Miami there are signs that say “English Spoken.”
Nevertheless, just as the idea of Africa is considered by some African intellectuals to be a colonial invention, the idea of Latin America has not yet been discarded.3 The self-consciousness of belonging to a historical-cultural entity misnamed Latin America is maintained, but problematical. [V.Y.] Mudimbe’s question, “What is Africa?”4, is increasingly valid if we transfer it to our region. What is Latin America? It is, among other things, an invention that we can reinvent.5
The generalized continuance of this recognition may appear strange since we, as Latin Americans have always reflected on who we really are. It is difficult to know, given the multiplicity of components in our ethno-genesis, the complex processes of creole-ization and hybridization and the presence of large groups of indigenous peoples who are excluded or only partially integrated into postcolonial nationalities. We have to add the impact of vast immigrations of Europeans and Asians throughout the twentieth century and the strong emigrations within the continent and toward the United States and Europe, principally in the final part of that century and until today. Such an intricate plot is further complicated by a very early colonial history, somewhere between the medieval and Renaissance eras, with, from the outset, a permanent and massive settlement of Iberians and Africans. At the same time and as a result of the pressure to enhance or to build identities of resistance in the face of Europe and United States, we have been inclined to define a Latin American self by means of all-encompassing generalizations, which have coexisted with the fragmentation imposed by nationalisms.
There are many answers to the question, perhaps not yet well outlined, of whether we are Western or not, African or not. Our labyrinths have confused or intoxicated us. We are now beginning to situate ourselves more within the fragment, juxtaposition, and collage, accepting our diversity at the same time as our contradictions. The danger is that of coining—against modernist totalizations—a postmodern cliché of Latin America as a realm of [outright] heterogeneity.6 On the other hand, pluralism can become a prison without walls. [Jorge Luis] Borges told the story of the best labyrinth: the immensurable amplitude of the desert from which it is difficult to escape. Pluralism in the abstract or controlled by the self-decentralized centers may weave a labyrinth of indetermination that limits the possibilities of a socially and culturally active diversification. Borges can perhaps offer us another key: upon conclusion of the obligation of drawing each and every one of our [identities and/or] diversities, perhaps only a portrait of each draftsman will appear.
Another trap is the assumption that Latin American art is simply derivative of the Western centers without considering its complicated relationship in the more and more problematic notion of West. Frequently the works are not even looked at: passports are requested beforehand, and baggage is checked under the suspicion of contraband from New York, London, or Berlin. Often the passports are not in order since they respond to processes of hybridization and appropriation, the result of a long and multifaceted postcolonial situation. Their pages appear full of the re-significations, reinventions, “contaminations”7 and “mis-understandings8 that have been in evidence from the times of baroque art—yet more so in our own epoch, which is marked by so much cultural transformation and hybridization in which complex re-adaptations of identities occur while borders mutate and become porous.
The new fascination for alteration is specific to the “global” fad and has permitted greater circulation and legitimization of art from the peripheries. But all too often only those works that explicitly manifest difference or satisfy expectations of exoticism are legitimated. As a result, some artists are inclined toward “other-izing” themselves in a paradox of self-exoticism that becomes increasingly indirect and sophisticated. The paradox is still more apparent if we ask ourselves why the “Other” is always ourselves, never them. Self-exoticism reveals a hegemonic structure, but also the passivity of the artist, of being complacent at all costs, or at most indicates a scant initiative. Moreover, this has been perpetrated by local positions that confront foreign intrusion. I refer to nationalist mythologies where a traditionalist cult of the “roots” is expressed, supposedly protecting against foreign interferences, and the romantic idealization of conventions about history and the values of the nation. Frequently nationalistic folklorism is to a large extent used or manipulated by power to rhetoricize a so-called integrated, participative nation. In this way the real exclusion of popular strata, especially that of indigenous peoples, is disguised. This situation thus circumscribes art within ghettoized parameters of circulation, publication, and consumption that immediately limit its possibilities of diffusion and legitimacy and reduce it to predetermined fields.
When I said that Latin American art was ceasing to be Latin American art, I was referring to two processes that I observe on the continent. One is located in the sphere of artistic production, and the other in that of circulation and reception. On the one hand, there is the internal process of overcoming the neurosis of identity among artists, critics, and curators. This brings with it a tranquility that permits greater internalization in artistic discourse. On the other hand, Latin American art is beginning to be valued as an art without surnames. Instead of demanding that it declare its identity, art from Latin America is now being recognized more and more as a participant in a general practice that does not by necessity show its context and that on occasion refers to art itself. This corresponds to the increase of new international circuits that are slowly overcoming the pseudo-internationalism of the mainstream. The consolidation of this “third” scene is part and parcel of the processes of globalization. In this way, artists from Latin America, like those of Africa or Southeast Asia, have begun, slowly and yet increasingly, to exhibit, publish, and exercise influence outside of ghettoized circuits. As a result of this, many prejudices are confronted and everybody wins, not only those circles with less access to international networks.
However, new problems have emerged, characteristic of a period of transition. If the danger of self-exoticism in response to the expectation of “primitivism”” and difference exists, its opposites also exist: abstract cosmopolitanism that flattens out differences and the mimetic “internationalism” that forces the appropriation of a type of international postmodern language, much like an “English of art” that functions like the lingua franca of the increasingly numerous biennales and international exhibitions.9 The fact that artists from all corners of the globe now exhibit internationally only signifies a quantitative internationalization. The question remains: to what extent are the artists contributing to transformation of the hegemonic and restrictive status quo in favor of true diversification instead of being managed by it? They are reduced to well-stocked suppliers of the “global mall.” The Brazilian modernists used the metaphor of antropofagia [as cultural cannibalism]10 in order to legitimize their critical appropriation of European artistic tendencies, a procedure characteristic of postcolonial art. But we must qualify this process to break with connotations that make the battle that this relationship implicitly carries—of who swallows whom—transparent.
The question in its entirety is more complex. Take the case of a good part of Brazilian art. One could describe the principal tendency in its practice to be the development of a neo-concrete, post-minimal inclination, directed toward a mainstream without a local base or an interest in popular culture. But, as the [film] critic Paulo Emilio Sales Gomes caricatured it, the good fortune of Brazilians is that they copied badly,11 creating a particular way of speaking the “international language.” However polemic it may be, Sales Gomes’s schematization is rich in meanings. If Brazilian art, like the mistaken dove of [Spanish poet] Rafael Alberti, desired to go north but went south, in the end it is less about disorientation than de-orientation. Such a dynamic has allowed Brazilian artists a highly original participation within an “international” post-minimal, conceptual tendency. They have charged it with an expressivity that is almost existential, shattering a prevailing, tedious coldness, and have introduced sophistication into the material itself and at the same time a human proximity towards it. They have diversified, made more complex, and yet subverted the practice of this “international language.” The personality of this anti-samba aesthetic is not produced as frequently occurs with Caribbean and Andino people—through representations or important activation of vernacular culture, but rather through a specific manner of making contemporary art. It is an identity disinterested in “identity,” an identity through action, not through representation.
By virtue of the characteristics of an early colonization that Europeanized this vast area, the culture of Latin America, and especially that of the visual arts, has frequently played on the rebound. That is to say, artists have returned the balls that arrived from the North, appropriating hegemonic tendencies and thus turning them into their own individual creativities within the complexity of their context. Critical discourses have emphasized such strategies of re-signification, transformation, and syncretism in order to confront the constant accusation of being copycats and derivatives that, not without reason, we have suffered from—in fact, only the Japanese surpass us in the art of copying. Post-modernity, with its discrediting of originality and its validation of the copy has been of great help to us. But equally plausible would be the displacements of focus that would recognize how Latin American art has enriched the framework of the “international” from within. For example, José Clemente Orozco is always analyzed within the context of Mexican muralism. It would be much more productive to see him as one of the key figures of Expressionism, as he is without doubt. Although Wifredo Lam is considered to have introduced specific elements of African origin to Surrealism, only recently has he been recognized for having used modernism as a space for the expression of African-Caribbean content, thus affirming an anti-hegemonic position.
It is problematic that dominant centers always get the kick-off. One cannot continually move in the same North–South direction according to the dominant power structure. No matter how valid a different and opposing trans-cultural strategy might be within the dominant structure, it implicates a perennial condition of response that reproduces this hegemony. . . . It is equally necessary to invert the direction of the current, not by reversing a binary scheme of transference but rather by contributing to pluralization in order to enrich and transform the existing situation. A horizontal, South–South volley would also be welcome, tending toward the development of a truly global network of interactions on all sides. Cultural exchanges within globalization still appear to be laid out from the centers in a radial schema, with insufficient connections. A structure of axial globalization with its zones of silence designs economic, political, and cultural circuits that macro-conform the entire planet. Globalization has speeded up and pluralized cultural circulation, but has done so following the structure of the economy, reproducing in a certain measure its structures of power. Hence the difficulty of achieving the modifications in the flows to which I have referred, since the currents usually move according to where the money is. Fortunately, the processes of internationalization that globalization has triggered appear to lead us gradually toward a more fluid cultural interaction. We are living through a slippery moment of transition, a post-utopian epoch that seeks changes within existing structures rather than changing the structures themselves.
When I stated that the best thing that was happening to Latin American art was that it was ceasing to be Latin American art, I was also referring to the problematic totalization that the term carries. Some writers prefer to speak of “art in Latin America” instead of “Latin American art,” as a de-emphasizing convention that tries to underline, on the very level of language, its rejection of the suspicious construction of an integral, emblematic Latin America, and beyond this, of any globalizing generalization. To stop being “Latin American art” means to distance oneself from a simplified notion of art in Latin America and to highlight the extraordinary variety of symbolic production on the continent. Art in Latin America has been intermittently displacing the paradigms that had guided its practice and valuation. These paradigms were related to certain generalizations that are still recognized as depictions of a slippery Latin American cultural identity or of some regions in particular: magic realism, the marvelous (both related to the surrealist proclamation about Latin America made by André Breton in Mexico), mestizaje [intermingling], the baroque, the constructive impulse, revolutionary discourse, etc. These categories, however justified, served the efforts of “resistance” against “imperialist” cultural penetration. They had a notable rise in the 1960s within a militant Latin Americanism that was characteristic of the historical period marked by the Cuban Revolution and guerrilla movements. However, those ideologies came to over-construct the categories with a totalizing effect, so that they became stereotypes for the outside gaze. To speak of magic realism or miscegenation as global etiquettes today sounds almost like an El Zorro movie.
Latin America has participated in the global development of what we could schematize as a minimal and conceptual “international, postmodern language.” But to a considerable extent it has done so in its own manner, and by introducing differences. Many artists work as much “toward the inside” as “toward the outside” of the art, using post-conceptual resources in order to integrate the aesthetic, the social, the cultural, the historic, and the religious without sacrificing specific artistic research. We might say that in reality they are empowering artistic discourse by taking it into new territories and expanding its capacity for dense and refined meaning. These artists are strengthening the analytic and linguistic tools of post conceptualism in order to struggle with the complexity of society and culture in Latin America, where multiplicity, hybridization, and contrasts have introduced contradictions as well as subtleties.
This plan contradicts a certain “militant” tradition of Latin American art, in favor of another very different tradition of fluidity and complexity in the manner in which the culture of the continent has actively dealt with the social problem. The former operates with greater clarity on the plane of the signified than on that of its signifiers and is in keeping with contemporary practices in other peripheral areas. Moreover, it has to do with a projection that is more individual and derivative of the artist himself, than with any partisanship or militant sense that places art in a position subordinate to political and social discourses that tend to endow art with a merely illustrative function.
This difference in terms of meaning is one of the changes enacted with respect to the totalizing paradigms to which I have referred; such paradigms procured a characteristically Latin American language right from the start. These new artists seem less interested in showing their passport. Cultural components act more within the context of discourse than visually, even in cases in which these were based upon the vernacular. This does not mean that there is no a Latin American look in the work of numerous artists, or even that one cannot point to certain identifying traits of some countries or areas. What is crucial is the fact that these identities begin to manifest themselves more by their features as an artistic practice than by their use of identifying elements taken from folklore, religion, the physical environment, or history. This development implies the presence of the context and of culture understood in its broadest sense, and internalized in the very manner of constructing works or discourses. But it also implies praxis of art itself, insofar as art establishes identifiable constants by delineating cultural typologies in the very process of making art, rather than merely accentuating cultural factors interjected into it. Thus, much Brazilian art is identifiable more by the manner in which it refers to ways of making art than just projecting contexts.
To emphasize the practice of art as the creator of cultural difference confronts the orientation of modernist discourses in Latin America. These tended to accentuate a contrary direction, that is to say, the manner in which art corresponded to an already given national culture. Artists worked, to a certain extent, to legitimize themselves within the framework of a prevailing nationalism to which they contributed. Beyond this confrontation, context is a basic factor in the works of the artists who have established a new perspective that, more than representing contexts constructs works from them. Physical and cultural identities and social environments are performed more than being merely represented. They are in fact identities and contexts concurrent in the “international” metalanguage of the arts and in the discussion of contemporary global themes.
In a departure from the previous discussion, one could outline a historical perspective that runs perhaps from “provincial European art” to “derivative art” to “Latin American art” to “art in Latin America” to “art from Latin America.” I do not refer to the character of this production in different historical moments, but to the prevalent epistemologies. The last of these terms emphasizes the active participation of art in “international” circuits and languages.12 It refers to an intervention that brings with it anti-homogenizing differences and its legitimization within the international arena. That is to say, it identifies the construction of the global from the position of difference, underlining the appearance of new cultural subjects in an international arena that until recently was under lock and chain. We cannot say that this arena is now open, but that it does have more doors, and that these can be opened with different kinds of keys.
1
Gerardo Mosquera, “El arte latinoamericano deja de serlo,” ARCO Latino (Madrid: ARCO, 1996), 7–10.
2
Frederico Morais, Las Artes Plásticas en la América Latina: del Trance a lo Transitorio, (Havana: Casa de las Américas, 1990), 4-5. Artes plásticas na América Latina: do transe ao transitório (Rio de Janeiro: Editora Civilização Brasileira, 1979).
3
Olu Oguibe, “In the Heart of Darkness,” Third Text no. 23 (Summer 1993): 3–8.
4
Y. Mudimbe, The Invention of Africa (Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 1988).
5
Edmundo O’Gorman’s La invención de América (1958). See English version included in this volume, [SEE DOCUMENT I.1.7].—Ed.
6
Mónica Amor, “Cartographies: Exploring the Limitations of a Curatorial Paradigm,” Beyond the Fantastic. Contemporary Art Criticism from Latin America, ed. Gerardo Mosquera (London and Cambridge, Mass: Institute of International Visual Arts/ MIT Press, 1995).
7
Jean Fisher “Editorial: Some Thoughts on ‘Contaminations,’” Third Text no. 32 (Autumn 1995): 3–7.
8
Boris Bernstein, “Algunas consideraciones en relación con el problema ‘arte y etnos’,” Criterios, nos. 5–12 (January 1983–December 1984): 267.
9
Mosquera, “¿Lenguaje internacional?” Lápiz, Madrid, no. 121 (April 1996): 12-15.
10
See Oswald de Andrade’s 1928 manifesto, included in this volume [SEE DOCUMENT I.5.7].—Ed.
11
Ana Maria de Moraes Belluzzo in conversation with the author.
12
Thus the subtitle of my anthology from 1995.