On Art, Artists, Latin America, and Other Utopias

On Art, Artists, Latin America, and Other Utopias

Joe R. and Teresa Lozano Long Series in Latin American and Latino Art and Culture

On Art, Artists, Latin America, and Other Utopias Luis Camnitzer Edited by Rachel Weiss

University of Texas Press Austin

© 2009 by the University of Texas Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America First edition, 2009 Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to: Permissions University of Texas Press P.O. Box 7819 Austin, TX 78713-7819 www.utexas.edu/utpress/about/bpermission.html ♾ The paper used in this book meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (R1997) (Permanence of Paper). L i b r a ry o f Co n g r e s s Catalo g i n g - i n - Pu b l i c at i o n Data [To Come]

To Selby Hickey, who besides being herself is also my wife and the second half of my brain.

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Contents

Foreword by Rachel Weiss

xi

Part I: On and Against Translation Introduction

1



Chapter 1

Contemporary Colonial Art (1969)

Chapter 2

The Sixties (1998)

22

Chapter 4

Political Pop (1998)

Chapter 5



Access to the Mainstream (1987)



Chapter 6



Wonder Bread and Spanglish Art (1989)



Chapter 7

Cultural Identities Before and After the Exit of Bureau-Communism (1991)

16

Chapter 3

Exile (1983)

8

30

37

43

54

Chapter 8

Art and Politics: The Aesthetics of Resistance (1994)

63

vii



Chapter 9

The Artist’s Role and Image in Latin America (2004)

Chapter 10



Out of Geography and Into the Moiré Pattern (1996 )



Chapter 11

The Reconstruction of Salami (2003)

76

93

97

Chapter 12

Printmaking: A Colony of the Arts (1999)

104

Chapter 13

My Museums (1995)

112

Chapter 14

The Forgotten Individual (1996 )

117

Chapter 15

Free-trade Diaspora (2003)

120

Part II: Other Histories Introduction

125



Chapter 16

Pedro Figari (1991)

131

Chapter 17

Resoftenings and Softenings in Uruguayan Art (1991)

Chapter 18



An Ode to Aquatint (2003)



Chapter 19

Revisiting Tautology (2006 )

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Contents

150

155

159



Chapter 20

The Museo Latinoamericano and MICLA (1992)

Chapter 21

Flying in Weightlessness (2004)

199

Chapter 25

The Biennial of Utopias (1999)

191

Chapter 24

The Two Versions of Santa Anna’s Leg and the Ethics of Public Art (1995)

184

Chapter 23

The Keeper of the Lens (2005)

175

Chapter 22

Brazil in New York (2001)

164

208

Chapter 26

Introduction to the Symposium “Art as Education/Education as Art” (2007)

230

Index

239

Contents

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Foreword

Luis Camnitzer has been writing for about forty years—the same period of time that he has lived in the United States, having left Uruguay on a fellowship in 1964. Writing has been a way to, among other things, think through the sense of alienness with which he has lived for these decades. Writing “texts” has also been a natural parallel to his studio practice, which, during the same period, has often resorted to the use of words. While the basic condition of estrangement has probably been a difficult experience for Camnitzer, it has also had the salutary effect of making everything open to question. The dual processes of composing words and thinking through artworks, meanwhile, has lent to both forms of production a characteristic epigrammatic quality—dense, suggestive, spare, and often packing a wry punch. Camnitzer started out sending dispatches back to Montevideo (a city that has never stopped being home, at least in principle) every month or two, reporting on the scene he landed in in New York. The early pieces were interviews of figures he had previously admired from afar—Salvador Dalí, Claes Oldenburg, José Luis Cuevas, David Alfaro Siqueiros— and things he was puzzled by—Pop Art in particular, a phenomenon that “should have been invented on the periphery,” in Camnitzer’s view. His perspective is distinctly located in both time and place—formed in an urbane South American metropolis with close historical and cultural ties to Europe and to the Jewish Diaspora, and coming of age just as the modern period of brutal U.S. intervention into Latin American politics hit its stride with the 1954 CIA-orchestrated coup against Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala. The interviews have the spontaneous feeling of a conversation between artists, and the early pieces overall convey the sense of a young artist (and one from the boondocks) developing the idiosyncratic art history through which he is working out his own place in the picture. Writing for Marcha (then listed as one of the ten best periodicals in the world along

xi

with Le Monde and the New York Times) was also a way to stay connected to the environment that he identified with, and that set the terms for his evolving views of the metropolis. Camnitzer the foreign correspondent kept up a steady stream of reports on things like black art in New York, hippie social theater, and the Living Theater. There was also an emerging set of more theoretical texts exploring how Latin America appeared in and from the “center” (“Contemporary Colonial Art,” “Latin American Art in NY,” “Torres García in NY”), opening a line of thought that has persisted in the decades since. All this continued until 1973, not coincidentally the year that Uruguay suddenly stopped being the paragon of South American stability, democracy, and prosperity and entered a brutal eleven-year period under military dictatorship.1 Camnitzer, who had gone to New York for his career, suddenly found himself in the ambiguous position of being in exile without having left for political reasons. This theme, too, recurs in many subsequent texts, in an ongoing rumination about identity, otherness, belonging, and resistance. In 1979, Camnitzer began writing for the Bogotá-based magazine Arte en Colombia (now Art Nexus), the first serious periodical covering Latin American art since the 1950s.2 In that magazine he continued to report from afar, and his articles increasingly became a primary source of information and reflection about the “center” for a younger generation of artists on that particular “periphery”—to use the language of the day. What is noteworthy about both sets of articles is the intense, selfconscious, and perpetual sense of translation: Camnitzer translating New York into Uruguayan terms for himself; Camnitzer translating the systems and power structures of the “art world” into the political struggles against imperialism in Latin America; and, increasingly, Camnitzer translating canonical art history in order to turn the tables and affect how it is written. Probably because of the combination of personal and continental situations, Camnitzer’s writings have always insisted on a political frame, which informs his approach to the questions that appear persistently in his work—art world systems versus an art of commitment; artistic genealogies and how they are consecrated; and, most insistently, the possibilities for artistic agency. He has developed his thinking on these, and other, themes in dozens of articles, essays, exhibition reviews, lectures, conference papers, and a couple of books, published or delivered in as many locations around the world.

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Foreword

Of course Camnitzer is not the only Latin American critic to take up such themes, and he is part of a long tradition.3 The interconnectedness of the regional with the international versus the strong impetus to resist the influence of the North, of Europe, and of capitalism; the tension between the desire for international recognition and reticence to accept, much less seek, the patronage of the hegemon; an analysis of modernism and its discourses as they might pertain to the Latin American context and its economic underdevelopment and colonial legacy; the continual annoyance at the U.S. inclination to read Latin American culture through folkloric and primitivist tropes; arguments about abstraction, muralism, and political currency; how to construct a continental history through the episodes of nationalism; the impact and example of the Cuban Revolution and of the cold war; the wave of military dictatorships; the debt crises and remedies of neoliberalism; regional and transregional trade pacts—these are the questions that have animated Latin American criticism for the better part of a century. Meanwhile, a conscious social commitment and traditional allegiance among intellectuals to the Left, an increasing radicalization through the 1960s and 1970s, an emergent adaptation of postmodern discourse to inscribe the difference of the Latin American context, and a persistent attachment to the project of utopia, especially through the alignment of avant-garde art and revolutionary politics, comprise some crucial elements of a shared regional legacy. Throughout all this, the Latin American critical project has had a double task, namely, to narrate from its own perspectives, and to write against the stereotypes and reductions of mainstream accounts—to theorize positions from which art might be both autonomous from the formalisms of the “center” and integral to local needs and development. All of these are projects that Camnitzer shares with his predecessors and moves forward according to his own unique perspective from, we could say, both sides of the fence. The trope of “translation” forms the first section of this volume, encompassing questions he asks while looking from “here” to “there,” and “there” to “here,” such as: What is Latin America, and who is asking the question? Who is the artist, there and here? The second section contains a selection of texts more historically than geographically organized that explore little-known moments, works, and events that make up the legacy that Camnitzer draws on and offers to his readers. For readers already familiar with Camnitzer’s artwork, there may be a sense of familiarity in the tone of these texts. His approach is often epi-

Foreword

xiii

grammatic rather than essayistic: arguments are not elaborated in cumulative fashion, but visited and revisited prismatically, working a lot like clues—precise and dense fragments that feed a process of speculation. In this, humor and surprise are crucial elements. The unexpected turn of an argument short-circuits habitual readings. One of the great strengths of the writing is its consistent willingness to operate against even the most influential of common assumptions. And Camnitzer’s playful and ironic approach to the expository and didactic modes effectively inverts the terms of the fight over, for example, who wields what power or control over whom. There is one other general point worth making here, and that has to do with the purposefulness that underlies all of this writing. Early on, Camnitzer was preoccupied with ideas of “building a new culture,” and writing has been a principal way to accomplish that. Whether to advocate for a position at the table or for approaches that stake their own claims, these are texts written to make something happen. Insofar as this is a pedagogical project, it would also be worth noting, then, that Camnitzer has been a dedicated teacher since the 1960s, working with young artists in a variety of contexts including the university classroom and studio, Camnitzer’s own studio in Italy, the Viewing Program of the Drawing Center in New York, or, most recently, as curator of education for the Mercosur Bienal. Increasingly over the years, he has identified three interconnected elements of his cultural project: the pedagogical heart of his own career; conceptualism as a way of proposing problems to be solved; and art as a way of moving society forward in a process toward independence and justice. Luis Camnitzer is now, ironically, a bona fide “international artist” after all those years of attacking from the margins. His inclusion in major exhibitions such as the Whitney Biennial and Documenta both signals changing fashions in what the art world is looking for and reflects the slow, steady recognition of a large body of significant work. With this volume, his accomplishments as critic, theoretician, and polemicist can come, equally, to the fore. But more, even, than its relationship to his artistic practice, we should probably place his writing in proximity to his decades of teaching. In this way we can get a sense of the generosity of his project overall, and of his commitment to working things out within, and on behalf of, a collective spirit. Rachel Weiss

xiv

Foreword

Notes 1. Marcha was closed by the military soon thereafter. 2. I am referring here to Damián Carlos Bayón and Jorge Romero Brest’s Ver y Estimar, produced along with Marta Traba, Mário Pedrosa, Fernando García Esteban, Mathias Goeritz, and others in Buenos Aires, between 1948 and 1955. 3. As Camnitzer sees this, he is a link between the first politicized generation of art critics (Mário Pedrosa, Frederico Morais, and Marta Traba), which departed from the “poetic” model of art criticism, and the newer generation (Ticio Escobar, Gerardo Mosquera), which approaches art history from the point of view of intellectual history. Within this configuration, he is the only one who is a practicing artist and who lives in the middle of hegemonic culture.

Foreword

xv

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On Art, Artists, Latin America, and Other Utopias

Part I

On and Against Translation

Introduction

The essays in this section are organized around a general theme of translation. This stems, on the most literal level, from the experience of exile but also informs or underlies many of the processes by which art and culture are created and validated, and through which they circulate in the world. In each act of reception there is a kind of translation, and Camnitzer’s attentiveness to the many dimensions of that interaction form a through-line in these texts. “Contemporary Colonial Art” (1969) opens many of the themes that will preoccupy Camnitzer for the next four decades. These include the fundamental problem of how local histories are written according to the criteria and measures of the center, in the process naturalizing those measures and criteria as universal. Closely related to that syndrome is the problem of self-colonization, through which the colonized mind carries with it the imagined metropolis and superimposes its plenty onto the local deficits—living according to “somebody else’s truths,” experiencing, even if vicariously, “experiences [he] never had.” This process of transculturation creates artificial needs and, as Camnitzer emphasizes, leaves authentic needs—such as a functioning culture—unmet. This idea of building a new culture, unburdened by the many distortions of colonialism and imperialism, is an urgent motivating force and ideal that drives much of Camnitzer’s writing. In this vein, while much postcolonial cultural theory in the 1980s tended to emphasize ideas like mestizaje, anthropophagy, and “hybridity,” valorizing the ways in which subaltern cultures might take on the attributes of dominant culture in order to rework them for their own, often subversive, purpose, Camnitzer’s perhaps more candid appraisal of the dynamic looks first at how class tends to correlate to the autoingestion of the “international” and at some of the psychological dynamics involved. Camnitzer’s intense discomfort with the commodity role of art, and with the absurdities of replicating it in contexts that do not even have a functioning commodities market, leads him to speculate about possible 

remedies in Latin America. Here, citing the Uruguayan urban guerrilla group Tupamaros as a model, he identifies a general, cultural-literacy approach that he refers to as “perceptual alphabetization,” along with a more directly politicized idea of culture’s role in society. It is worth noting that in June 1968, the Uruguayan president, Jorge Pacheco, declared a state of emergency and repealed all constitutional safeguards. By the time that Camnitzer wrote “Contemporary Colonial Art,” then, the stakes for a radical idea of art or politics in Uruguay were already very high.1 Camnitzer has continued to work with the model that the Tupamaros presented of an aesthetics with a surplus of politics, or a politics with a surplus of aesthetics, in the decades since. This has been closely tied to his developing ideas about why and how Conceptualism has developed in Latin America: as art shifts emphasis “from the object to the situation,” it is able to generate a sense of political potential, “on the way toward creating a new culture instead of simply providing old perceptions with a new political form.” “The Sixties” is a much more recent piece, dating from 2003. Between this essay and “Contemporary Colonial Art” we get a book-end reading of Camnitzer’s principal themes, and of how he himself is situated within those questions and histories. While much of the early writing has an almost manifesto-like tone, this text is much more personal, reminiscing about the South American Left of the 1950s. This return is occasioned by the more literal return to Montevideo to present this paper at a conference at the Museo Blanes, so that here Camnitzer is bringing a piece of Uruguayan history back to its home site.2 The 1977 essay “Exile” is an important articulation of Camnitzer’s autobiographical way of narrating history. Focusing on his own training as an artist, and then on his displacement to New York, he problematizes bilingualism—the constant process of not only translating but also of performing dual identities—and his continuous sense of displacement. First as a German-born Latin American intellectual studying in Germany and feeling more Latin American than ever before, and then forging an identity as Uruguayan that depended, to a large extent, on the experience of being Uruguayan in New York, Camnitzer’s sense of apartness has been formative to his ideas about art, even to the point that he has speculated that perhaps even the decision to study art was “another form of exile,” keeping him separate. The remove from Uruguay, he realizes, is in part the effect of his training, which formed him all along to leave Uruguay and be an artist in the Empire. Meanwhile, his thirteen years in New York are 

On and Against Translation

the same years during which the vast majority of intellectuals in Uruguay were sent to prison or exiled. It is this particular displacement that moves Camnitzer in the next few years to make the “Uruguayan Torture” series of works as a kind of mea culpa for his absence from and irrelevance to Uruguay’s catastrophe and trauma. Being in New York meant proximity to the artistic currents that had been read, from Montevideo, as somewhat mysterious or bizarre. Probably foremost in this category was Pop Art, and the 1998 essay “Political Pop” is Camnitzer’s attempt to synthesize his thoughts on Pop’s paradoxically alien and kindred ideas. Noting that Pop was a case of “the imperialism of the consumer object being attacked by the society that produced it rather than by its ultimate victims,” Camnitzer has a complex identification with its project while also keeping himself apart from it. As an imported style, Pop on the periphery opened a Pandora’s box of questions about “fetishism, the status of the ‘imported,’ the class implications of the different levels of consumption, and thus the multiplicity of real and possible interactions between consumer and commodity.” To deal with the conundrum of Pop’s status, then, Camnitzer begins to rewrite art history, testing versions able to accommodate figures such as Cildo Meireles, Antonio Caro, and Hélio Oiticica alongside Warhol and Oldenburg; this is a strategy that he expands on in many subsequent texts. Pop, for him, becomes a “broader movement that also addresses the web of relations between consumer and object and consequently operates in a political context,” and so becomes the occasion for a meditation on the varying situations in North and South, and the implications for art of that difference. Pop Art was a useful lens for looking at the strange entity of a thriving art market. Understanding that market, and the implications it might have for a more idealistic approach to artistic production, has been an ongoing project for Camnitzer. “Access to the Mainstream,” from 1987, is his most sustained inquiry into how that access—the primary dream of every artist—raises questions about development, ethnicity, internationalism, commodity status, and democracy, along with the outsider’s inevitable ambivalence about the desire to both gain acceptance by, and stand independent of, such mechanisms and systems. Camnitzer identifies a postmodernism of the Right and of the Left, with the former corresponding to the introduction of stylistic innovations that refreshed the marketplace, and the latter representing the introduction of previously disallowed voices and subjectivities. The failure of this reformist project leads Camnitzer to propose, instead, a process that might expose Introduction



the structural problems of the market to a more meaningful opening and democratization. Far from a utopian platform, however, the essay dwells at length on the complicated situation of artists from the periphery. Here again is the sense of estrangement, of identities that are mutually conflicting, of the double and triple bind of the artist under the benevolent gaze of multiculturalism. The essay is a classic formulation of Camnitzer’s position about art, ethics, and politics: “We live the alienation myth of primarily being artists. We are not. We are primarily ethical beings sifting right from wrong and just from unjust, not only in the realm of the individual but in communal and regional contexts. In order to survive ethically, we need a political awareness that helps us to understand our environment and develop strategies for our actions. Art becomes the instrument of our choice to implement these strategies. Our choice to become artists is a political decision, independent of the content of our work.” “Wonder Bread and Spanglish Art” (1989) comes from the same period and shares many concerns, extending Camnitzer’s critique of commoditized subalterity and superficial multiculturalism. A third essay, “Cultural Identities Before and After the Exit of Bureau-Communism” (1991), fills out this set of debates characteristic of the 1980s concerning multiculturalism, postmodernism, and, at the very end of the decade, postcommunism. Again, translation figures importantly, in this case, looking at the demise of state socialism to see what its implications might be for traditional Latin American utopianism and, along the way, finding an exacerbated class conflict in the social and cultural problems of the continent. As Camnitzer suggests, with the collapse of the capitalist-communist binary, many of the certainties that had stabilized arguments about identity and purpose in Latin America were also lost. Identity became increasingly slippery, and the reassuring architecture of translation—namely, that it is always based on there being two distinct languages, which do not merge— is perhaps no longer very useful as a model. “Art and Politics: The Aesthetics of Resistance” was written for the leftist journal Report on the Americas in 1994. The essay is Camnitzer’s fullest attempt to relate artistic activity to the leftist tradition in Latin American politics. It offers an extended reading of “Tucumán Arde,” the Tupamaros, the New Cuban Art, the Mexican activist/performer Superbarrio, and other examples from Camnitzer’s history of art and activism.3 It is worth noting that here he is translating what is, in the Latin American context, a much more integrated idea of the relationship between art and politics for a North American, leftist readership—a group probably 

On and Against Translation

more acclimated to agitprop than to Conceptualism in the context of “political art.” Here, an “expanded idea of art” is developed, not in order to accommodate an indistinct vanguardism, but much more pointedly in the name of art making a meaningful contribution to the continent’s political struggles. “The Artist’s Role and Image in Latin America” (2004), written for a panel convened at the ARCO art fair in Madrid, is a kind of counterpart to the “Art and Politics” paper, addressed as it is to the commercial sector and to making a case for the artist’s agency that is primarily organized around a contestation of the market rather than being an argument against agitprop. The formulations in the text also seem very related to the post-9/11, rather than the more activist early 1990s, historical moment. The question of how artists may be subject to, or active within, history is pursued further in “Out of Geography and Into the Moiré Pattern” (1996), written for the catalogue of the exhibition “Face a l’histoire” organized by the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris. Camnitzer questions the assumptions that underlie the idea of artists “facing history,” that is, separate from rather than as a part of it. As he puts it: “In the case of Latin America, this polarity of ‘art’ and ‘history’ is risky, for it tends to obscure one of the most distinctive aspects of Latin American art: the intricate interweaving of art activity and social life, of art making and history making, of formalism and art-as-politics.” Camnitzer admits that, in his usage, “Latin America” is mostly a utopian concept—a way of thinking that was shaped by the geographic specificity of the continent and the locatedness of its struggles against external enemies. With much of the world’s population in diaspora, and with the shape of the world redefined after 1989, Camnitzer debunks underlying assumptions of identity politics and instead proposes the interference patterns of the moiré effect as a more useful descriptor for the situation of Latin America and Latin American identity in the contemporary world. The construction of history, and the assignment of universality or consignment to local value, is again the topic in “The Reconstruction of Salami” (2003). Again, Camnitzer turns his attention to the complicated process by which ideas travel between center and periphery, how they are transformed in the process, where attribution is designated, and what historical, economic, and cultural currents facilitate and add force to these processes. He returns to the idea of “resistance” and does further work on it, sketching an alternate genealogy that opposes the formalist view of artistic progress and agency. Drawing connections between the dominance of a formalist mode of critique in art and the ways it has typiIntroduction



cally disallowed critical practices, Camnitzer searches for a model more suitable to the Latin American context. Making a careful argument about art’s extreme sensitivity to local history and conditions, he notes, memorably, that “depending on the region and its needs, a work can be monumental or delirious, derivative or recycled, explicit or mysterious. Therefore, it matters to know what questions are being answered, who posed them, and what their motives were.” The first half of this volume ends with a suite of more intimately scaled pieces. These texts take the themes and positions I have already outlined and place them within small or personal narrative settings. “Printmaking: A Colony of the Arts” (1999) extends Camnitzer’s thinking about the colonial mentality, removing the syndrome from its usual geographic and historical coordinates and approaching it as a psychological space characterized by a failure to struggle for independence. Using the traditional designation of printmaking as craft, as opposed to the artistic status of painting, he works through issues of craft, identity, and autonomy in an often-humorous argument. “My Museums,” from 1998, gives us, again with gentle sarcasm and ample irony, a microstaging of the larger issue of artistic agency in the face of the institutional, hegemonic nature of the international art system. “The Forgotten Individual,” from 1996, strikes a much more melancholy note. Written for the catalogue of the Sixth Havana Biennial, the short essay attempts to, however gently, counter the defeatism of that project and insert a more active subjectivity into the biennial’s postulation of the individual and memory that had been emptied of its agency. Against the “loss of we” suggested in the Biennial’s theme of “The Individual and Memory,” Camnitzer insists on the importance of memory in the fight against privatizing isolation, and especially on the vivid memory of the utopian impulse that was the Havana Biennial’s point of origin. Finally, in “Free Trade Diaspora” (2003), we encounter a more chastened view of these dilemmas: belonging, selfhood, agency, all are cast within a fundamental estrangement, which can never be fully translated. The intrinsic incompleteness of the diasporic citizen is Camnitzer’s subject here, the one who records from a distance, who somehow holds an originary identity closer, and who, more tightly, and more fictively, fights the sensation of not being anywhere and of not quite touching anything. The multiple consciousnesses of exile, this state of constant yearning and incompletion, of being neither here nor there, is the ground on which so many people now live, and from which so much art now inevitably proceeds. 

On and Against Translation

Notes 1. Significantly, although this was a text written for the Latin American Studies Association conference in Washington, DC, it was also reprinted in Marcha in mid-1970, still well in advance of the start of the military dictatorship in 1973. 2. Blanes Museum director, Gabriel Peluffo, organized the panel discussion for which this paper was written in conjunction with “Dibujando los Sesenta,” a show of artists of the sixties, particularly those who were part of El Dibujazo (a movement that refreshed drawing in Uruguay in a neo-Expressionist vein, and for which Camnitzer’s illustrations in Marcha had been an important precedent). “Dibujazo” refers both to hitting with a drawing and to a big drawing. 3. Interestingly, the article appeared in the same year as the January 1 uprising of the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional/Zapatista movement in southern Mexico.

Introduction



Chapter 1

Contemporary Colonial Art (1969)

I was about eighteen years old when I read the three volumes of The Culture of the Cities by Lewis Mumford. Of the whole work only one idea remained stuck in my mind, a description with which I identified immediately: “The bathroom is the only place of privacy we have left.” It took me about five years to realize that this statement was somebody else’s truth. It is true in what Mumford himself calls a “megalopolis,” an overgrown monster city, but it definitely was not true in my city, Montevideo, with fewer than a million people—and widely spaced, at least in that time and in my background. A symptom of metropolitan culture had managed to evoke in me, an inhabitant of the colonies—through apparently intellectual means—an experience I had never had. One day I left my country. At the time of my leaving, people used to whistle when they wanted to show public disapproval. Five years later I returned and discovered that whistling was being used for approval, the same as in the United States of America. A gentleman in a developed country invents the “potato chip.” In his own living context, he manages to enrich, qualitatively, the cocktail hour and, quantitatively, himself. However, in the colonial context, he introduces a new habit, a notion of status, a point of identification through which the colony can relate to the metropolis and believe itself to feel and act the same. We can say that what has happened is cultural rape by means of a potato. These examples show only fragments of a process of transculturation, a part of a vicious circle of economic dependence, monoproduction, the creation of artificial needs, and the substitution of cultural values. It is a process that achieved the ideal situation of nearly everybody actually wanting to participate in it. It created the need of listening to the latest record, reading the latest book, chewing the latest chewing gum, and fitting all the metro­politan molds. There is no need for this process to be accomplished in all social segments. From the Empire’s point of view, the



need decreases in proportion to the amount of power held by each social segment, provided the total mechanism is well oiled. Most of the social classes fit between the Cadillac and the Coke, although some remain beneath the latter. United Press International provides total, instantaneous, and universal information to all. But in the same act, namely, the provision of filtered information, it also leaves total, instantaneous, and universal ignorance. The artist is an integral part of these informed and isolated social segments. In the colo­nial areas, in a role which is not very defined—somewhere between a buffoon and a spokes­man—he is one of the leaks through which the informative pressure of the Empire keeps filtering. It is strange that the phrase “colonial art” is filled with only positive connotations and that it refers only to the past. In reality it happens in the present, and with benevo­lence it is called “International Style.” With less courtesy, it tends to be epigonous, derivative, and sometimes even opportunistic. There are a rhetoric and a mental process of the Empire which are very particular and which are not new. As president of the U.S.A., John Quincy Adams said in 1842: “The moral obligation to proceed to commercial exchanges between nations is solely based on the Christian premise that obliges us to love our neighbor.” At the time, the conclusion of this concept was that, since China was not Christian, it was bellicose and antisocial and that, therefore, “the fundamental principle of the Chinese Empire is anti-commercial.” In this way, the moral justification was established for what were called the “Opium Wars,” two wars mainly between Britain and China, but with strong profits for the Western and Christian civilization. Commodore Perry went with four battleships to isolationist Japan to offer a commercial treaty. Seven months later, in February 1854, he returned with a larger squadron to look for the answer. As with commerce, art is above stingy political games: it “helps the communication among and understanding of the people”; it is “a common denominator for understanding.” “The world is smaller every day,” and under the rug of this phrase one sweeps the moment-by-moment growing difference between the cultural needs of economically developed countries and those of the underdeveloped or developing. The achievements of the metropolis have international validity automatically. To speak in the U.S.A. of a Jasper Johns or of a Rauschenberg as a good local artist, with all the implica­tions of provincialism, sounds offensive and insulting. Both are universal luminaries, and “art does not

Contemporary Colonial Art



have frontiers.” The size of the transculturation problem may be indicated by the fact that “art does not have frontiers” is no longer a figure of speech, a saying, but, rather, a commonplace. The distortion is even deeper. The United States of America, with 6 percent of the world’s population, consumes 50 percent of the world’s consumer goods. In addition to the necessary military consequences of maintaining that situation, this rather monstrous proportion allows the United States of America also to fix the conditions of the market for those goods. The art consumer goods do not escape the rule. An empire has a culture to disseminate, even when this culture is only a collection of habits. In the metropolis, art consumer goods are created which originate from an “existing culture.” The creation of these goods, which we can call “cultural products,” and their consumption determine a series of rules that are both rigid and functional. Their results remain accumu­lated in what we call “the history of art.” This “history” is metropolitan in nature, and when local histories appear in other places, they are compiled with the same measuring sticks. Who determines what is universal, is also who determines how that universality is to be achieved. The question for the colonial artist is this: By participating in the metropolitan art game, is he really only postponing the liberation of the colony to which he belongs? There is an absurdity in creating cultural products when there is no culture to justify them. Latin America has five centuries of being a colony, without any breathing space to assume itself. The task is still there—to build its own culture, to find a cultural identity. The artist, instead of working on this problem, holds the same attitude which Chinese restaurants have in Western countries, submitting willingly to the image the metropolitan culture has of it. It announces its name with Chinese-style letters, advertises “exotic food,” and has, just in case, a page of metropolitan food listed on the menu. Without too much scientific care, I will borrow some terms from information theory—originality, redundancy, and banality—in order to better place the artist who works outside the mainstream. Traditionally, in art there is a careful balance of the three elements. The originality is the contribution of the artwork. The redundancy, technically a waste of repetitive information, ensures the intelligent reception of the message by the public. The banality is the frame of reference or the collection of known elements which the originality needs as a vehicle in order not to die in hermeticism and incommunicability. One of the decisions that locates the artist, politically, is the banality system, or the system he will use as a reference. The colonial artist be10

On and Against Translation

lieves that he makes this choice in total freedom. Generally speaking, however, he chooses from only three possibilities, and the three of them are based on manufacturing cultural products. That is how the paradox comes about that politically aware artists keep working for the metropolitan culture. The three options are the International Style, regional and picturesque “folklorism,” and subordination to political-literary content. All of them feed distortions back into their own original culture. The contribution or originality of a cultural product functions only as a refinement of the culture from which it comes (for the culture itself and also for its expansion or proselytizing). It achieves a sophistication of the consuming process. The creation of cultural products in the colonial area then becomes a tool for the enrichment and sophistication of the metropolitan culture. With the growing strength of the International Style, the result becomes obvious in the outlook of Latin America’s production. The aesthetic trends used are permanently lagging behind those promulgated in the imperial centers, without the corresponding evolutions which take place in those centers. It happens that in this way we have the individual development of artists with artificial breaks, which can be explained only by the date the “art magazine” arrived, or the date the “exhibition” was held with the updating information. The increase of the infor­mation stream only increases the speed of the changes. Alan Solomon, who was in charge of the American exhibit at the Biennial of Venice (where Rauschenberg won the Big Prize: the work was flown over in military aircraft), commended a group of artists in Rosario, Argentina, because “they worked according to New York standards with only some weeks of delay.” The New York painter Frank Stella said: “If we are the best, it is only fair that they imitate us.” At the same time, colonial artists complained about the expenses of chroming and plastics in general—a fact that, according to them, put them out of the international market. And EAT (Experiments in Art and Technology) is opening branches in different underdeveloped countries, usually at the artists’ own request.1 The result of this franchising obviously will be a perfecting of the metropolitan imagery. Willful ignorance as one of the reactions to the International Style leads to folklorism. This option, instead of basing itself on the activities of the impe­rial cultural centers, is based on local traditions, and especially on the formal symptoms of the local traditions. There are two problems with this option. The first is that these traditions are usually not sensitive to the immediate and present reality, opening a way to escapism. Second, with few exceptions, these traditions are dead. There have been too many Contemporary Colonial Art

11

colonizations to allow a continuity between the traditions and the artist. Usually the artist comes from the middle class, thus consuming those traditions rather than living them. The folklorist option, then, becomes as derivative as the option that follows the International Style. The third option is the subordination of the work as “art” to politicalliterary content. This option comes from a political commitment that exists prior to a creative decision. This in itself would be a normal process. The limitations appear when the creative process is dedicated only to the pro­duction of illustrations, didactically worried, and simultaneously follows the rules of the game indicated by the history of art. The didactic function requires a high percentage of redundancy, leaving little room for originality. The options as described above are in their purest form. In the international market, the winners coming from the colonies appear always to refer to more than one option at the same time. In this way they probably achieve a higher degree of contribution and of communicability. But all the artists who follow these rules of the game, whatever the refer­ence system they use, are bound by a broader system regardless of their aesthetics or their politics. It is the system of the object. A painting is a painting and recognizable as such, whatever its form or its content. The same happens with any art object, even if it doesn’t follow the traditional formal lines. There is a publicity machine strong enough to transmit the norms of recognition which in every moment is called “avant-garde.” The label “avant-garde” is one of these norms. The relationship between the object and the consuming of that object (which summarizes the relationship between art and society) serves as a thermometer for the functionality of art. In the capitalist, economically developed society, the art object is subject to the laws of supply and demand. The artist is placed in the production of objects with his creation, or with the production of creators with his teaching. He is paid for both with very little or no philanthropy, since the power structure accepts him as important, or at least as usable. The situation is also reflected in the economic investment that the artist, or his patron, makes in the actual work production. In 1968, in the Whitney Sculpture Annual, the average invest­ment in materials alone, per sculpture, must have been about $200. This amount is more than the annual income of the majority of the inhabitants in underdeveloped countries. Meanwhile, the concessions the artist has to make in the colonies are

12

On and Against Translation

more obvious and more painful. Under normal circumstances, the artist cannot live by his skills. He has one or more jobs unrelated to his art. He sells to small national elites or to tourists. He depends on the government’s philanthropy through its politically corrupt exhibitions. He always has that permanent option between his principles and the corruption of aims. I believe the possibilities for change are twofold. The first one, moderate, is to continue to use the system of reference pertaining to certain forms capable of being related to art, not to produce cultural products, but, rather, to inform about data toward a culture. This means to inform about situations that are not necessarily aesthetic, but to be able to affect the mechanisms that eventually will produce or define a culture. To isolate, stress, and bring an awareness of transculturating elements, and to give a notion of essences that will allow the creation of new platforms, is what I feel is needed. It is what we can call a “perceptual alphabetization.” It implies the assumption of economic underdevelopment as a cultural stimulus, without relative value judgments. What may be negative in economic terms is only factual in cultural terms. In this moment, a huge percentage of inhabitants of the underdeveloped areas are starving to death. But artists continue to produce art that corresponds to a fullbelly society. The second possibility is to affect cultural structures through social and political ones, applying the same creativity usually used for art. If we analyze the activities of certain guerrilla groups, especially the Tupamaros and some other urban groups, we can see that something like this is already happening. The system of reference is decidedly alien to the traditional art systems. However, it is functional for expressions that, at the same time that they contribute to a total structural change they also have a high density of aesthetic content. For the first time the aesthetic message is understandable as such, without the help of the “art context” given by the museum, the gallery, etc. The urban guerrilla functions in conditions very similar to those with which the tradi­tional artist is confronted when he is about to produce a work. There is a common goal: to communicate a message and at the same time to change with the process the conditions in which the public finds itself. There is a similar search to find the exact amount of originality that, using the known as a background, allows him to stress the message to the point of notoriety, sometimes signaling toward the unknown. But by going from the object to the situation, from the elitist legality to subver-

Contemporary Colonial Art

13

sion, new elements appear. The public, a passive consumer, suddenly has to participate actively to be part of the situation. Passing from legality to subversion, the need to find a minimum stimulus with a maximum effect appears—an effect that, through its impact, justifies the risk taken and pays for it. During certain historical periods, at the level of the object, this has meant dealing with and creating mysteries. At the level of situations, and in this case, it means the change of the social structure. These coincidences are not enough to make an artist out of the urban guerrilla fighter, the same way that the activity of painting is not enough to make an artist out of a painter. But there are definite cases where the urban guerrilla achieves aesthetic levels, widely transcending the movement’s pure political function. It is when the movement reaches this stage that it really is on the way toward creating a new culture instead of simply providing old perceptions with a new political form. The options of traditional art fulfill socially the same function of other institutions used by the power structure to ensure stability. That is why they lead to an aesthetic of balance. In a Machiavellian way, within these coordinates, a revolutionary message can be reduced to a stabilizing function. Art then becomes a safety valve for the expression of individual and collective neuroses originating in the inability to cope with the environment. Its products serve as a retarded correction of a perception braked by the system of conventions and stereotypes that stabilize society. They create a slightly updated system which, eventually assimilated by history, will require a new system, and so on without end. Art objects, eliciting more sympathy than empathy, serve as points of identification alienated from the consumer. The consumer, for instance, is able to identify with the moral message of a film. He applauds it, feeling that in this way he pays his quota of personal commitment without having to change the course of his life in a significant way. It is the same cathartic action offered by religion. Instead, the aesthetics of imbalance, the one that affects structures, that demands full participation or full rejection, does not allow for the comfort of alienation. It leads to the confrontation that will bring about change. It leads to the integration of aesthetic creativity with all the systems of reference used in everyday life. It leads the individual to be a permanent creator, to be in a state of constant perception. It leads him to determine his environment according to his needs and to fight in order to achieve the changes.

14

On and Against Translation

Note 1. Experiments in Art and Technology was a not-for-profit organization that during the late 1960s pooled artists and scientists with the purpose of creating interdisciplinary work. It primarily introduced artists into higher realms of technology and assisted them in its use.

Contemporary Colonial Art

15

Chapter 2

The Sixties (1998)

Classification into periods is always problematic. Used as an excuse to facilitate the understanding of history, it is an instrument that perhaps facilitates the work of historians but does not necessarily clarify actual events. Added to this is the fact that many of the events and values used in the classification are determined by the structure of the prevailing powers, and more precisely those prevailing in the power centers. The most accurate periodic organizations are biographies, with precise beginnings and endings, and with an intimate and isolated context. The problem with biographies is that they create finite periods and lack the ability to generate general consequences. They inform, but do not take the place of, historical narrative. Luckily, I am not a historian and I don’t have to worry about these contradictions. I do, however, believe that it is dangerous to utilize a universal clock in the narration of things, and that the determination of local clocks to place events helps to give them the proper weight and importance, and to understand historical sequences. In this sense, the period of the sixties is particularly complex. There is an international paradigm symbolized by the 1968 student movement. It is understood that all the world’s students agreed to protest against the war in Vietnam, to fight the centralization of power in universities, to smoke pot, and to throw rocks. It is true that these symptoms spread throughout large parts of the world, that they seemed to be part of the same design, and that they surely were fed by the same flux of information. Actual events, however, responded to and complied with different local histories and traditions. At the time I was already living in the U.S.A. and I remember that, with regard to university matters, during those moments I thought that the North American students were waking up half a century late. However, I also thought: better late than never. Then, and even today, I make an effort to point out that I am not a leftist of the sixties, but one of the fifties. There is a sensibility different for the generations that were shaped 16

by the bombings of Guatemala from that of those that saw the light in the bombs that fell over Vietnam. The first set of bombs, with its undeniable shyness, prefigured the second and established a not-yet-recognized continuity. The importance of this is that, once the North American events of the sixties started connecting from the invasion of the Dominican Republic onward, my reaction was not one corresponding to a set of new conditions. It was the continuation of positions I already had taken and that had defined me as an intellectual a whole decade earlier. This definition had been the product of two fundamental factors in my biography. One was the regular reading of the weekly Marcha.1 The other was the Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes [National School of Fine Arts]. I believe that there were many 1968s in the world, that they were quite different, and that they did not always happen in the same year.2 It is even possible that there are different 1968s for every individual. I believe that the 1968 for Uruguay took place in 1957, and took the form of the fight for a new ley orgánica (organic law) in the university.3 This fight was able to extract the School of Fine Arts from the cobwebs of the Ministry of Public Education and put it in the university. And this step toward autonomy was not something abrupt and out of context, but the product of a long, previous, collective militancy. When many years earlier I entered art school as an adolescent, I encountered a group of students who were the leaders in that militancy and who educated me much more than a majority of my teachers did. People like Ruben Prieto, Edda Ferreira, “Slim” Tavella, and “Uca” Carvalho helped me to keep good apart from evil, to understand that teaching is a form of militancy, that militancy is a form of implementing ethics, and that, lacking ethics, one doesn’t sleep well. The student meetings in art school were a classroom so devoid of dogma and extremism that it took me years to realize that they were important in my education. It was that group that set down the principles for a pedagogical reform of the school that educated my generation and left a legacy for the next one. They generated both generations that, in turn, implemented the changes that made it a memorable place for a few years at the beginning of the sixties. What was memorable in those years was not the aesthetic production. It is true that we had print and ceramic fairs and that, starting in 1959, we upset the visual ecology right and left by painting well-intentioned murals of debatable quality. But it is also true that none of that deserves to remain registered by the history of art. What really mattered during that decade from 1955 to 1965, thanks to that initial generation, was the underThe Sixties

17

standing of three things: (1) that to achieve a pedagogical reform initiated by students, those students had to know more about pedagogy than the teachers they were challenging; (2) that the appointment of teachers had to be subject to student mandate (those of us who eventually received our posts in the new searches accepted, with the condition specified by the Student Assembly, that we would resign after a maximum of five years); and (3) that making art was a right to be exercised only once all of society had the opportunity to make art. History proved that all this was unrealizable idealism. What matters, however, is that those were the ideals that illustrated our 1968. Thus, we managed to reach a level of pedagogical-aesthetic schizophrenia. Our ideals could not yet be implemented. We didn’t know how to give them form, since social realism and Mexican murals did not seem viable solutions. We didn’t like them in their place of origin, and even less so when applied to our own environment. Many of the results we achieved as an alternative were simplistic, decorative, and infantile. This is something I had already analyzed some years earlier in an article in Brecha, for which I was nearly lynched.4 The truth was that pedagogical and social processes seemed more important than little paintings. Education is to form people, complete individuals, not to manufacture artists who make works for exhibition. Among our positions, it was more important to have the Municipal Salon cancelled and to have a sit-in in the Subterráneo Municipal—a strategic move planned by delegates from the School of Art—than to have an exhibition juried by Belloni and Garino.5 What was intended to be a symbolic, short takeover of the public space lasted three months and achieved the creation of an artists’ union, a writers’ union, and the election by vote of the artists (instead of a commissioner) to represent Uruguay in the Biennial of Chile. All of these things created a state of epiphany that the creation of a masterpiece for the best museum in the world would not have matched. Personally, I found myself imprisoned in something akin to Expressionism. I was making linocuts that a gentleman who turned out to be Américo Spósito had (unaware that the artist was present) screamingly declared to be “Aztec playing cards.”6 That the gallery at the time was devoid of any public did not hamper the communication. And my drawings (my “little monsters”) were functional because I had decided to promote my infinite clumsiness as a virtue. However, what interested me most when I taught art was the proposal of problems, the ability to verbalize

18

On and Against Translation

what had to be done, and Conceptualism as it was sketched out in 1931 by Giovanni Papini in his Gog. Papini’s book was fashionable reading during the fifties and gave a sarcastic critique of the excesses of avant-garde art during the first decades of the century. It talked about poets who used only one word, of musicians of silence, and of sculptors of smoke. In spite of the negative intention, the examples opened my eyes and inspired my pedagogy. I proposed those things to my students, but it took me years to listen to myself. And being honest, I often ask myself if I would have listened to myself had I stayed in Montevideo. Maybe not. It is very possible that I would have continued with my Aztec playing cards and my little monsters, and that I might never have confessed to myself that I was imprisoned in a style. Once I resigned from teaching, I probably would have finished my studies in architecture to become one more unemployed architect. Later, Conceptualism would have officially arrived in Montevideo as an approved style, and it might or might not have caught my attention. Who knows? However, foreign loneliness, the lucidity of distance, and personal crisis all came together in New York. I was able to focus on the content of things and on the economy of presentation, as homage to my past and to my education. It was an act of resistance to the corporative and industrial aesthetic that in those moments was called Minimalism, and it was a way to give shape to my beliefs. It was also a way to try to get everybody to make art. But it also allowed me to communicate through my art without the sacrifice of the renunciation we had proclaimed earlier. In a general history, this phase of my production started in 1966. In local history, it was really part of the package of the end of the fifties. In terms of my personal biography, it is my way of being, freed from any dates. And in terms of the fields of discourse yet to be explored, it is something out of fashion and that holds only anecdotal interest. Maybe. The danger of historical analysis is precisely that it can cement the fact of “being out of fashion.” I am not bothered by formal solutions losing their currency. Different artists, bearing varied perceptions, find diverse solutions for similar problems, and different epochs are distinguished by corresponding formal affectations. Every work of art thus has a congenital obsolescence. Art can be dated. If the work was made before its date, it is premonitory. If it was made after its date, it is late or derivative, depending on judgment. But all this applies only to the packaging. What is in the package does not necessarily go out of fashion or lose its importance.

The Sixties

19

The ethical and political problems that moved the expressions of my generation were barely touched and definitely not solved. It would be incredibly presumptuous if my generation were to take responsibility for this. The economic polarization and the growing social exploitation we are suffering now are not a consequence of our having made bad or ineffective art, or of erring in how we visually packaged our concerns. That would be attributing an absurdly excessive power to art. But we can say that the fact that society has not improved is a sign that we did not achieve the levels of subversion we had dreamed of. And it is here that the difference between artist and nonartist ceases to exist. In the guidelines I received for this panel there was one paragraph referring to art during the early 1960s. “During this period, like none other, the limits of art become obvious, while the territory is moved to the limits of the institutions and of language: art happens on the borderline between legitimacy and transgression, between institutionalization and violence, between stoic imagery and massive public, between objectuality and conceptualism.”7 This paragraph should not be applied to a period of the past, to a formal style already absorbed and discarded by fashion. This paragraph describes active art. If it cannot be applied to the art being made today, it does not mean that we are in a different historical period and that the description’s mandate has expired. It only means that we are not doing our job, not only as artists, but as active and creative members of a community.

Notes 1. Marcha was a Center-Left intellectual weekly published in Uruguay and rated among the ten best newspapers in the world, together with Le Monde and the New York Times. It was closed by the dictatorship in 1973. 2. The first time I saw the use of a flexible concept of 1968 was in an essay by Jane Farver, written for the exhibition of Korean art in the Queens Museum (Jane Farver, “Introduction,” in Across the Pacific: Contemporary Korean and KoreanAmerican Art. Essays by Lee Young Chul, Elaine Kim, Minne Hong, Sae June Kim. Translated by Su G. Kim, Myung Y. Kang [New York: Queens Museum of Art, 1993], p. 7). 3. At the time, Uruguay had only one university, which was public and autonomous. The organic law was the equivalent of a constitution. In this particular struggle, and among other issues, the autonomy of the institution was further reaffirmed, and the students’ power in governance was expanded. 4. “Reblandecimientos y blandecimientos en el arte uruguayo,” Brecha, October 1, 1992.

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On and Against Translation

5. The Subterráneo Municipal is a city gallery placed underground at the crossing of the two main avenues in Montevideo. The Municipal Salon was a yearly juried competition. José Belloni, a sculptor, and Raúl Garino, a watercolorist, were to be the jurors that year. Both were appointed by the mayor’s office and represented what a majority of artists considered to be the most academic and retrograde aesthetics in the country. 6. Américo Spósito (1924–2004) was one of the most prominent Uruguayan painters at the time. 7. Gabriel Peluffo, memorandum to panelists.

The Sixties

21

Chapter 3

Exile (1983)

By leaving Germany at the age of one, by definition I started to grow up as an exile. To leave a country under the threat of a death penalty, even at such an early age, must have some influence on any further development. However, lacking any memory in this regard and having been raised at the very beginnings of consciousness in another country to which I never questioned my belonging, I felt like an Uruguayan. There were some issues that separated me from the median Uruguayan during the process of becoming an Uruguayan adult. To start, there was bilingualism. At home we spoke German “so that the kid knows another language,” but on the street and in school it was Spanish. If surrounded by my friends, any immigrant friends of my parents seen on the street were avoided by crossing to the other side. Were I alone, I would not only greet them but also converse in German, so that I could show off my wisdom in both languages. My parents’ friends, however, would answer in Spanish, never mind how limited, since they wanted to show that they were assimilating. Meanwhile, with my own friends, we would criticize the gallego waiter in the bar or the Italian in the vegetable store because they couldn’t overcome their accents. We felt united in the critique and the taunting. The unity broke down when I would be fit into the unfair category of Pole or Russian, or in an improper tone, under the fair epithet “Jew.” “Where were you born?” “I am a German German.” “Why do you say it that way?” “Because they always call me a shitty German.” Bilingualism became a cultural process. Once, in primary school, the moment arrived in which homework required the help of parents. “Give the name of five writers who have an international reputation.” “Goethe, Heine, Schiller, Thomas Mann, and Shakespeare” (the last was smuggled in, since he wasn’t a complete disgrace to literature). Somewhat later I discovered that Schnitzler’s La Ronde was in my parents’ library. So, German became an interesting language. The next step was Hermann Hesse and Thomas Mann, the first, fascinating (“You are too young to read 22

that”), the second, a bore (“You were born three blocks away from his home”). The cultural process became generational. The children of the friends of my parents were the same age as me and—something I hadn’t realized before—they were also sort of bilingual and bicultural. But, more than that, we were aware of our uniqueness: we were something that neither existed before us nor would it exist after us. Yet, that generation is not limited to us; it expands. There were other people in it who were not bilingual, who read Hesse and Mann, even if they did so in Spanish. Assimilation continued, but not in the direction of the “Uruguayan adult.” It deviated toward the “Uruguayan intellectual.” Some serious obstacles for integration remained. People older than myself but younger than my parents started marrying “locals.” Also, there was the advice: “Don’t speak your mind in public; it is dangerous.” It was assumed that my path to becoming a Uruguayan intellectual (at home the words were “a professional”) would go through architecture. To stop by at art school was nothing more than a good cultural complement for a future architect. “The architect is the only professional whom you cannot place in a normal conversation; he only appears to be a very educated person. Instead, after the second word you already would know if he was a lawyer or a doctor.” To live off art was impossible; there was no competition between art and a real profession. Uruguay never had, in any given moment, more than three artists able to live off their art production without needing a “normal” job. Therefore I could study art while in high school because it was healthy, it beautified the spirit, and it cultivated personality. Personally, I did it because it was fun to be “exotic,” to be with the strange ones. Deep down it may have been just another form of exile. It kept me separate from my generation and, also, it made me professional. Never mind that art as a profession is a myth, I had nevertheless embarked on a career while my classmates in high school were only in high school. Once I started to study architecture, I was following two careers. Now I was not only strange, but also a heretic. The artist’s point of view is different from the architect’s point of view; both professions distrust each other, are conscious of their personality and of my presence in each one. My way toward pure Uruguayan intellectuality advanced with giant steps. I started dating “local” girls and speaking my mind in public. The opening of my mouth tried, among other things, to achieve the goal of making the artist’s profession not be mythical or a useless luxury. I wanted the Uruguayan artist (in this case, me) to achieve a Uruguayan culture Exile

23

(my culture) rather than fabricate postcultural objects (like the three artists do who can live off their work in any given moment). I wanted the artist to disappear, to have all the people make their own art, and to depose those who held the monopoly on art production. Now there was panic in the family. I was a “militant,” doing all those things a good young German Jew immigrated to Uruguay should not be doing. But I was also learning how to make all those postcultural objects I was attacking. I swallowed books and magazines with the latest news of what was being produced “outside.” The modern-modern often disconcerted and repulsed me, but it was fascinating. Then, for the first time, I went “outside.” I was big now, eighteen years old, and it was time to see the world. Ironically, the grant I received was to go to Germany; there were two applicants for two grants, and I was one of them. I would rather have gone to Japan, to the village of the seven samurai, but it worked out differently. Instead, it was a Uruguayan in Germany asking Uruguayan questions in German with an accent from Lübeck and a 1930s vocabulary projecting a very stupid image. It irritated me that my classmates in the Academy addressed each other formally, that women didn’t shave their legs, that gentlemen urinated against the walls on the street, that in my class nobody knew about the Bauhaus and they didn’t believe me, that Mendelsohn didn’t exist. The German experience definitely made Uruguay the cradle of culture. Maybe sometimes one peed against the walls there too, but only in the dark. In Uruguay nobody made calculations when hearing that I left Germany at the age of one, nor did I to figure out what my interlocutor was doing during the war. I returned happily to continue my career toward Uruguayan intellectuality. The trip contributed something: I found a more or less personal way of expression; I made prints that in the Academy were complimented by classmates and professors as “very South American.” Upon my return I was immediately classified as a German Expressionist. Over a year of longing made that irrelevant. The language was mine and labels didn’t grow. However, that language of mine didn’t have anything to do with what I thought and believed. I thought in modern-social terms to the point of advocating the disappearance of art or—a little closer to current language—art as a tool for social change. I continued speaking my mind in art school, we all did, and finally we

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On and Against Translation

changed the school. We abolished the diplomas that declared us a “national artist” (a painter or a sculptor) upon graduation; we organized art fairs for the people in poor worker neighborhoods; we put art where it should be. The art school became a quasi-community, and the courses went way beyond any dreams of the Bauhaus, of Montessori, and of all our references. Some of us applied to the searches for new teachers, got the jobs, and thus were able to teach in pedagogical paradise. At the same time I continued with architecture, definitely as a semiexile in both fields. I continued with my anachronistic art, accumulated work to exhibit, exhibited. I exhibited again and again. The only buyer was a cousin of my father’s who lived in South Africa and of whom I never wanted to know what he was doing there. Decidedly and luckily, I was not going to be one of the three artists who live off their work in a given moment. I had good reviews, made drawings for newspapers, participated in biennials, received prizes, and my name—however unpronounceable—generally appeared with few spelling mistakes. I had managed to become a Uruguayan intellectual. And now? Now, a small elite had accepted me. Even if I didn’t sell much, I was grantable, really grantable. And I was told so. Teaching had become a fundamental and satisfying activity, but I had set myself an impossible aim. I didn’t ever want to repeat an assignment I gave; I wanted each class to be like a new work of art, original and perfect. This, taken to twenty hours a week and added to a daily drawing for a newspaper plus some weekly drawings for a weekly, while I was trying to graduate as an architect to save the honor of the family, became too much. I couldn’t juggle and endure it for more than a year at a time. This was also a time in which Montevideo was infected by fascist gangs which were getting ready to later man a dictatorship. The gangs killed time by kidnapping leftists, preferably Jewish leftists, and tattooing swastikas on them with razor blades. Well-meaning friends supplied me with firearms so that I could defend myself. In my briefcase, besides some book, at some point I was carrying a Beretta, a Colt .38, and a nonmemorable .22caliber thing. I couldn’t refuse the offerings because it would have been irresponsible. I couldn’t leave them at home thanks to my parents’ Nazi memories. I couldn’t use them because I didn’t know how, nor was it easy to get them out of the briefcase in time. I could only carry them around, their weight increased by ridicule. New York was a fascinating image: the center of the empire that was screwing us. They said that it was like walking on an enormous ant nest,

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although not to dissuade me. It was the place where I could learn more techniques, get updated; understand the world and Uruguay as a subpart of the world. A critic sent me to the cultural attaché, the attaché sent me to the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Guggenheim sent me to New York. I arrived in New York. From the outside, the U.S. was a big soft mass lying over Uruguay. Solid and flexible, it fit over us nearly without leaving any spaces and infected our ideas, habits, and ideals. I suppose that is the way efficient empires function when dealing with their colonies. The definition of status ends up being the achievement of the imperial level. The tools to measure success are manufactured in the Empire, not in the colony, and both rebellion and refusal are determined and calibrated in the central office. Once I arrived in New York, the soft mass didn’t seem that solid anymore. It was more like a sponge, with holes and crevices in which one could continue staying in Uruguay. There were people who thought the same way I did, and people with whom I could argue because they didn’t think like I did. And there was room to hate reboiled coffee, plastic bread, and mid-afternoon dinner. The theory about Uruguay being the cradle of culture was politely listened to, any skepticism kept hidden. The task of eliminating imperialism seemed reduced to convincing 200 million Yankees of both their own provincialism and their exaggerated level of consumption. It seemed a task difficult for its quantity, but not really for its quality. Even the student body seemed to be evolving at the time. Fifty years later they were discovering the guidelines of the university reform that had taken place in 1918 in Córdoba, Argentina. I could help them. I ended up in a university in New Jersey. There were sixteen hundred students, seven of whom were black. A federally funded program introduced fifty “minority” students and destroyed the racial balance. White students rebelled. They refused to sit on chairs contaminated by black students during the preceding class. Confronted with the situation, the professors of the university took polarized positions. Three of us sided with the black students; the others abstained or were against them. The U.S. was not a sponge, it was a soft mass, but yes, it was solid. Distance helped me to see Uruguay in perspective. It seemed a clear place, easy to handle, confused only because of the inability to see itself from the outside. Especially the situation of art seemed very clear. Uruguayan art was structured according to international guidelines. Interna-

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tional meant imperial. It was obvious that the need for Winsor and Newton materials—England had also been an empire—prevented understanding the essence of “painting.” Any other brand couldn’t be as successful. By not understanding where the need for painting came from, one couldn’t understand “market” either, since painting, or “success,” was something that could take place only in the market of Paris or in the market of New York. The international market ruled. Without any awareness of it, we were working following these lines of reasoning. We created artifacts for this market; the Uruguayan market was no more than a second- or thirdhand echo. We didn’t move a finger to find our own canon, something to help create our own lively and useful culture. All our rhetoric when we had spoken our minds as militants became palpably true, revealed, and filled with content—ironically, in the example of us. I had been educated to work within that system. Since only three artists were able to live off their work at any given moment, it became clear that I had not been educated to work in Uruguay. I had been educated to receive a grant that would take me to the Empire so that I would work for it, and not for the Uruguay that had invested in my education. In this panorama, the highly aesthetified operations engaged in by the Tupamaro guerrilla movement seemed like the only valid and authentic artistic strategy for a cultural change. With them we could be the super avant-garde, outdo at once happenings, hippies, and Conceptualism. In Uruguay this was the new and original way to use local resources to create a new culture. The foundations of the history of art written by the Empire were being seriously shaken. For the first time there was a possibility of getting out from under contemporary colonial art. And no artist in Uruguay was realizing this, at least not to the point of radically changing his or her production to follow this example. After five years I returned to Uruguay for a visit, carrying with me this insight and all this clarity and wisdom. Unfortunately, my friends had lived their own five years while I had lived mine. We were united by the things we had lived through together but separated by the rest. It seemed that my acquisition of clarity and perspective had provoked the loss of my right to share them. Without completely understanding it, I had passed from the possibility of communication to pedantry, from artist to art critic. All this was made worse by the fact that I was overlaying reality with my reminiscences. By losing communicability, what was true and what was lies became irrelevant. The clarity and perspective I thought

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I had might as well have been darkness and blindness; I never will know what they were, and it doesn’t matter. My art had changed in a radical way. I had left Expressionism and had arrived at a pedagogical expression, a mixture of images and language that later would be included in the category of conceptual art. It had displeased me to see the plastic and chrome that prevailed in the U.S. during Minimalism, not to mention that (or because) it was outside my economic reach. I thought that a verbal description of a visual situation could generate more creativity in the viewer than did a real visual situation. This also had the advantage of being cheaper and less totalitarian. I was again thinking in Uruguayan terms, of an aesthetic of poverty, trying to affect the context in which people live. While I was thinking all this, hundreds of artists all over the world, except in Uruguay, were starting to work on the same premise. This, added to the fact that in Uruguay nobody identified with what I was doing, was food for thought. There was the megalomaniac and optimistic version: I am working for Uruguay way ahead of my time, and I will achieve a change in the perceptual ways of my country, regardless of the fact that I am living somewhere else. There was the negative and depressing version: I have assimilated the aesthetics surrounding me without even noticing it; I am working in the middle of the U.S. and for that environment even if I don’t identify with it. I had lost Uruguay. By working with words, the problem became even more acute. In what language do I write, English or Spanish? Do I work for the people I want to work for, but who don’t see my work? Do I work for the people I don’t want to work for, but who see my work? Do I make two versions of each piece? And while I was writing all this I realized I was writing in Spanish and maybe someday I would have to translate this into English. What is happening with my language? When I write in English now I can think in English, without having to think first in Spanish and then translate. I notice that there are Spanish words I don’t remember anymore, that I hesitate when spelling, that turns of phrase I use sound funny to my ear and are Anglicisms—that they are translations from English that degenerate the language I want to speak and write without contamination. I see that the Italian who sold vegetables and the gallego in the bar had their reasons not to tame their accents, to remain Italian and gallego. I see that I am left floating between two cultures—one that is becoming alien even if I don’t want it to, another that is alien because I want it to be,

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and I don’t conceive of it in any other way. It is now thirteen years that I am passing through here, in a provisional state. These are thirteen years that took the rest of the Uruguayan intellectuality to jail or into exile, which, except for the guilt complex or alibis, is the same thing. My country doesn’t exist anymore anywhere, except in my memory. I am a citizen of my memory, which doesn’t have laws, passports, or inhabitants. It only has distortions.

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Chapter 4

Political Pop (1998)

In 1961, with my own mind still submerged in some form of Expressionism, I saw the “New Realists” exhibition in the Sydney Janis Gallery in New York. It was my first trip to New York and my first encounter with “Pop Art.” I did not connect too strongly with the work at the time and dismissed it as a belated copy of Dada. However, my next encounter with Pop, on a second trip two years later, forced me to go through the first of several revisions of my opinion. This time I was intrigued by the feeling that nothing could contaminate a Pop work. In return, any Pop Art element would contaminate anything produced in another mode. A Cubist fragment included in any painting or object by a Pop Artist was fated to become absorbed and digested into a Pop aesthetic, while the reverse was not true. In part, of course, this was due to the fact that Pop was still alive and the other movements were dead. It was true that Cubism, in its generative period, had effortlessly appropriated printed matter. However, that had been more of a “poor man’s” trompe l’oeil and an expansion of the painter’s repertoire than a pointed iconic device to organize the whole of reality. Only Dada had developed a power similar to that of Pop Art, and, both movements being focused on objects and their connections, they seemed quite related. In that sense, my initial dismissive reaction had been both understandable and unoriginal. The second realization at that time was that Pop Artists were not operating on the basis of emotional impulses, but were using their heads. In other words, art for them became a way of posing problems with a clarity that had not been seen since early Constructivism (or, possibly, Social Realism). The third realization was that painterly atmosphere had been practically abolished, putting the depicted object (and to a great extent the art object itself ) into that same hedonistic void in which everyday consumer objects seemed to exist. It was clear by 1964, and after these realizations,

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that Pop Art was definitely an art movement on a level with the past major movements of the avant-garde. However, a mistake I had made was to see Pop Art as the first real synthetic movement of the century in the context of all the others having been analytical. Art movements had mostly underlined and chosen some particular aspect of art making and allowed that morsel to serve as a vantage point for an analysis of art as whole. I thought that Pop Art, in its apparent inclusiveness and its bent for problematization, had managed to avoid this fragmentary approach. Rather than attempting to unify a field, Pop Art had approached reality as a field already unified. There were two consequences to this perception. One was that I read Pop Art as a perceptual revolt within a consumer society. Most artists involved in the movement came from small-town or rural environments, and it was only natural to attribute to them the same feeling of being overwhelmed that I had had upon arriving in New York. I projected into Pop Art my own political reactions to a world that otherwise seemed unmanageable. I used the image of being in the frying pan and deciding—as an attempt at survival—to take over the handle. Second, my understanding of Pop Art produced frustration. I felt that it was a movement that should have sprung up on the periphery and not in the center. Here was the imperialism of the consumer object being attacked by the society that produced it rather than by its ultimate victims—victims who were, of course, my fellow Latin Americans and I. I decided that, once again, the chance to be at the aesthetic forefront of the world was stolen from us by the artists in the center, and, even worse, this time we were the only ones to be blamed. I was totally baffled when I found out that there was no overt political stance in the production of the pieces labeled as Pop. In an interview I conducted then with Oldenburg,1 he described Pop as a direct heir of Abstract Expressionism and Informalism. The flow of materials (and I guess emotions and gestures) now had become a flow of objects, and the attitude had not changed much. Politics were rejected, according to him, because they, sociology, economics, etc., were disciplines too complex to engage in once one was already in art, and the issue was ultimately to survive.2 During a casual exchange with Robert Rauschenberg at an opening, he denied any political implications in his work and, instead, stressed a direct and valueless reaction to the object. I had asked him if his “Oracle” exhibition was an acceptance of Dada, and he responded: “No, Dada has

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a political attitude and I don’t. I only do this and use these things because I like to for love of the object itself.”3 Only Öyvind Fahlström, in an equally casual exchange, showed an interest in the political interpretations of his work, which he partially explained by having been born and brought up in Brazil. Indignant about the U.S. invasion of the Dominican Republic, he was bitter about the political conformism of many artists. But then, it is interesting that Fahlstrom did not see himself, nor was he seen, as an equal member of the Pop movement.4 Given all this, it was also surprising that, at least in Latin America, Pop Art had no echo of consequence. At the time (meaning a couple of years after New York), attempts to produce vernacular Pop Art in Argentina, Brazil, and Colombia brought only facile and folklorized versions of the formal solutions developed in New York. When politics appeared in these works, they were an issue of obvious content—the form remained imported. It was an issue which I then shrugged off as symptomatic of an incomplete derivation. From outside of American consumer society, Pop’s most evident and understandable contribution was the change of the rules of composition. The work of art now was “laid out” like a piece of advertising instead of having the traditional “composition” expected in art. This was a visual break that had an effect that went beyond Pop Art and even affected painters like Francis Bacon (dulling his intended violence to the point of harmlessness). Further, the visual language strove for the “manufactured” look in its fully oxymoronic signification. As the word “manufactured” states, the art object was still mostly handmade, but, as the word implies, it tried to achieve an industrial finish that denied the presence of any trace of that hand. Only Warhol was willing to go to the extreme of not only using the aesthetics of the commodity, but also commodifying the mistakes in the production. Thus, bad focus in his photographic applications and misprinting in his silkscreen work became part of his aesthetic. Eventually, in a perverse and planned twist, even his painterly handwriting achieved the status of commodification over an ability to express. In the 1960s, the more complex issue of the relationship between the U.S. consumer and the available commodities seemed out of reach of the outsider’s comprehension. It was inconceivable that anybody could be interested in the creation of an icon based on those same objects that were already dehumanizing people. It seemed equivalent to making an icon out of Hitler’s face. When Warhol used Mao along these lines in 1972, Mao

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still was in a different category, not officially classed as a mass murderer, admired by the Left, and respected by Nixon. Pop Art, so much based on this very particular U.S. interaction, was, in fact, much easier to understand as a form of a very provincial aesthetic. The international power of the U.S. managed to distribute the formal tricks of the aesthetic but not the essence, which remained local. Therefore Pop proper remained à la manière du Pop in other countries without ever achieving full appropriation. It was this view of Pop Art—as being a U.S. provincial aesthetic—that cast a new light on the whole movement. From a visual standpoint, a correct understanding of U.S. Pop on the periphery would have been reflected much more faithfully in a handcrafted quality of objects. From a deeper cultural point of view, more than an appropriation of rules for design, the issue was one of assessing the role of the consumer object in the peripheral society. While often the objects used as iconography in peripheral Pop were vernacular, the approach to the objects was unexamined, preventing a true political interpretation and expression of the problem. Issues like pantheism, fetishism, the status of the “imported,” the class implications of the different levels of consumption, and thus the multiplicity of real and possible interactions between consumer and commodity, all were left unaddressed. In that sense, while Pop Art in the U.S. seemed a simple and fairly broad-based aesthetic (when not applauded as highbrow, at least it was accepted as lowbrow instead of being completely dismissed), on the periphery Pop Art opened a Pandora’s box which no artist was willing to take on fully. On a simpler level, there was a resistance to the acceptance of the internationalization of something that was a U.S. vernacular production, at least in regard to its acceptance as a canon or a style to be followed outside of its borders. It was all right to be consumed only as long as it had the label “imported” attached. The rise of prices for U.S. Pop Art was therefore accepted, but local artists tended to avoid Pop as a model, unlike the case of Abstract Expressionism and other movements. In Latin America, the expression of resistance toward the commodity came to the fore through processes of insertion and reinsertion, the latter term used by Brazilian artist Cildo Meireles in his 1969–1970 pieces. Meireles would take products aimed at the consumer (unopened CocaCola bottles, paper money) out of circulation, print political messages on them, and return them—that is, “reinsert” them—to the circuit of normal consumption. Compared to U.S. Pop, the flow between everyday consumption and art consumption was thus reversed.

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Within more traditional work, a direct link often has been drawn between the work of Cuban artist Raúl Martínez (1927–1995) and U.S. Pop Art. Martínez studied in Chicago in 1952 and worked in advertising in both the U.S. and Cuba, so that the connection seems an obvious one. However, it is the work of Martínez that shows clearly the possibilities of appropriating an aesthetic rather than simple derivation. The Pop devices were applied not to bring the consumer icon into the museum, but to bring—to insert—the heroic icon into the realm of popular consumption. As Rauschenberg would designate consumer objects as “an American landscape,”5 Martínez would refer to “the heroes of the Revolution, the people,” as the Cuban landscape. Inasmuch as there was an influence of U.S. Pop in his art, it was appropriated through political digestion—and only partially so; his paintings remained both atmospheric and painterly. Only the iconic quality and the serial arrangements were used.6 It took a conceptual stance to bring about work of an iconic value parallel to that of Pop in the U.S. It was this conceptual stance that helped— as Pop had in the U.S.—to formulate art in terms of problems. While the reinsertions by Meireles avoid visual iconic features, the work of Antonio Caro exploits them. His “Colombia,” the word written in Coca-Cola script, and his use of popular bullfight poster type for political slogans during the mid-1970s are examples of this process. Hélio Oiticica’s jump from Constructivism to work with the samba schools in the late 1960s is another one. “Tucumán Arde,” an exhibition created by a collective of Argentine artists in 1968 to fight against the economic and social repression of the dictatorship in the province of Tucumán, in fact was a metaexhibition serving these same purposes. Display techniques and the act of exhibition were recontextualized and made into a new icon. In the U.S., that same conceptual stance helped to finally politicize Pop, generating that late conceptualist activity known as neo-Conceptualism, which in reality should be classed as a post-Pop aesthetic. It was a process made stunningly visible by the artist Sturtevant in her exhibit in the Bianchini Gallery in New York. It consisted of furniture assembled with pieces very believably painted in the manner of the main players in the Pop scene. An armoire would appear to be a collaboration among Lichtenstein, Oldenburg, Johns, and Warhol, which elicited admiration for her ability to coordinate luminaries as laborers for her own purposes. Using art in this case as a “faux-ready-made,” she effectively “Pop-Arted” the new art icons and opened the way to what later became known as Appropriationism.7 She also effectively debunked the preciousness of the

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art work from within, a transgression certainly more subversive and dangerous than the parallel activities of dematerialization in U.S. Conceptualism, which may partially account for her having been “disappeared” from the history of the 1960s.8 A decade later, Jenny Holzer used the reinsertion process, adopting “commonplace” media and language for the circulation of her aphorisms. In turn, Barbara Kruger appropriated commercial layout techniques to an extreme to convey her own one-liners. Ultimately, Pop Art can be seen in light of two paradigms: one is the nineteenth-century work of Harnett, Peto, Haberle, and their kin; the other is that of John Heartfield. A proper history would begin with the British exhibition “This Is Tomorrow” (1956) and, following Richard Hamilton’s work there, would link the movement with Heartfield.9 The icon-oriented group of the first U.S. Pop Artists, after taking their cues, established the connection with the nineteenth-century painters. Pop Art is to be seen as using not only everyday commodities as art icons, but also as a broader movement that also addresses the web of relations between consumer and object and consequently operates in a political context. There are two streams of subaesthetics in the U.S. to be included. One is exemplified by the work of Luis Jiménez. His rainbowglittered polyester monuments rescue and reinsert issues of taste and heroism in ways that introduce identity, class, and ethnicity issues into high culture. The second current is illustrated by the work of photo-documentarians like Allan Sekula, Martha Rosler, and Louise Lawler. In fact, they connect with Richard Hamilton’s initial collage, “Just What Is It That Makes Today’s Homes So Different, So Appealing” (1956), which served as the catalogue cover of the “This Is Tomorrow” exhibit. Via the 1968 paintings of Icelandic painter Erro (Vietnam War scenes in middle-class kitchens) to Martha Rosler’s “Bringing the War Home: Home Beautiful” (1969– 1972), we arrive at the work of these artists and their focus on the interaction with commodities. They use photography to validate the truth of their own critical analysis of these relations. They provide a contextual documentation of the consumer icon, present it in an unimpeachable form, and return it to the unified field of consumer reality (at least unified in the gallery context). The field may not be subverted with their work, but at least the viewers can be subjected to some ideological conversion before the work is co-opted. Maybe the Brillo box is a good prop here, since it serves as a common denominator for both the political and the nonpolitical streams of Pop

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Art. For the icon-oriented artists, the box is just that, with an accent on the brand. For the relational artists, it becomes, beyond an object for consumption, also a soapbox from which to emit messages.

Notes 1. Marcha (Montevideo), May 19, 1965, p. 21. 2. This position should not be confused with Oldenburg’s ethical position in regard to political issues. When it became fashionable to profit from the artifical art market the shah and his wife created in Iran in the 1970s, Oldenburg was one of the first to prohibit his gallery from sending his work. 3. “La simpatía de los objetos,” Marcha (Montevideo), August 13, 1965, p. 21. 4. Ibid. 5. Ibid. 6. Shifra Goldman, “Painters into Poster Makers,” Studies in Latin American Popular Culture 3 (1984), pp. 162–173. 7. Well before Sherrie Levine and as early as 1968, Venezuelan artist José Guillermo Castillo cut out reproductions of paintings from Art News and signed them with his name without further alteration. Italian artist Giulio Paolini also appropriated reproductions of paintings by masters as early as 1963, but in a less radical way, and resignified them with his own titles, a procedure he continued for a decade. 8. Thomas Crow should receive credit for mentioning Sturtevant in The Rise of the Sixties (New York: Harry W. Abrams, 1996), p. 159. 9. Hamilton’s position and that of his associates in the exhibit was less politically virulent and committed than that of Heartfield, but there was a shared aesthetic and sense of satire about commodities and middle-class values.

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Access to the Mainstream (1987)

Chapter 5

To address “access to the mainstream” in the arts is to address the topic of success in the market. For this reason the subject has always elicited contradictory emotions—primarily desire and resentment—and these emotions have been particularly strong among those artists who do not belong to the social group that produces and supports what is considered “mainstream” art. Although the term “mainstream” carries democratic reverberations, suggesting an open and majority-supported institution, it is in fact rather elitist, reflecting a specific social and economic class. In reality, “mainstream” presumes a reduced group of cultural gatekeepers and represents a select nucleus of nations. It is a name for a power structure that promotes a self-appointed hegemonic culture. For this reason the wish to belong to the mainstream and the wish to destroy it often arise simultaneously in the individuals who are, or feel, marginal to it. Depending on origin and background, individual access is more difficult for some than for others. Discussion of the plight of different ethnic or national groups, or anecdotes illustrating their failures and successes in their attempts to gain access, do not illuminate the topic; they distract from it. What does deserve attention are the elements common to the experience of all, for example, colonialism as a force affecting both internal and external colonies, values instilled by educational institutions that separate peoples from their identities, and the market’s fetishization of the success of the individual over the building of culture. These are the substantive issues. It is through these elements that the market becomes a tool for homogeneity, and mainstream turns out to be a euphemism for its actions. This century has seen the introduction of some productive new methods for analyzing art processes and art problems. Some of the previous irrationality and obscurantism has been moved aside, and we can now see art more as a mode of cognition and a way of formulating and solving problems within that mode. This has brought some welcome clarity to the 37

art field. It has also had less positive consequences when these analytical premises have been taken to their extreme; the conclusion has been drawn that art should be perceived in formalistic terms, and that these terms— not unlike those of mathematics—should be homogenized into an “international” style. In fact, the concept of an international style is one that can be seen as useful for political hegemony and cultural expansionism. The modernist movements developed in Western cultural centers during this century—particularly the myth of Abstractionism—have always been associated with the promotion of an international style, and this style was eventually used as a cultural answer to “totalitarianism,” itself a cold war term created to denigrate Soviet autocracy by classifying it with the Nazi regime. Concurrent with these developments, “nationalism” became a word symbolizing cultural regression, thus minimizing the concept’s use as an anticolonial instrument. Since this cultural expansionism included growth of the market, it was easy for these conditions to be accepted as guidelines by the market. As a consequence, ethnic and national artists belonging to subordinate cultures could only be successful in this market if they worked within an acceptable formal repertoire, while the expression of ethnicity and/or nationality had to remain confined to content. This residual ethnicity allowed their projects to be perceived as slightly exotic, enough to maintain a satisfying self-image of openness and pluralism on the part of the market. The same residual ethnicity signalled the “roots” of the artist in his or her community of origin. Yet the community’s pride turned on the fact that their artist had “made it in the art world” rather than on the artist’s cultural contribution to his or her community. Artists like Romare Bearden or Fernando Botero, for example, are more respected in their communities for the prices they command in the market than for any possible changes in vision they may have introduced to their national or ethnic constituents. A clear symptom of colonization is the tendency to see the shift from subordinate to hegemonic culture as a sign of progress and success. In recent years, the eclecticism in vogue in the market—the postmodernist “pastiche”—has allowed for the introduction of some short-lived cracks into this picture. German and Italian national identities, as projected by the neo-Expressionists and the trans-avant-gardists, have been allowed a place, in spite of the fact that they do not totally conform to the notion of international homogeneity. Through feminist and graffiti art, the affirmation of distinctive group identity has achieved exhibition status, and kitsch has been allowed to challenge formalist purism. While 38

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the parties involved in this diversification of the mainstream have not fully assumed responsibility for the implied political ideologies of their work, clearly, their contributions have tended to fit into two categories of postmodernism: right-wing and left-wing. In right-wing postmodernism—David Salle could be an example— we find past market products reintroduced, even regurgitated, with revitalized selling power. In left-wing postmodernism—Kenny Scharf as an example for expression of identity, Hans Haacke for politics—some hitherto unacceptable elements were introduced into the market and, as a result of their success, encouraged the hope that the very definition of mainstream might be changed. That hope has been followed by disappointment. A multinational gallery structure has reinternationalized these offerings. Until multinational galleries and prices caught up, Germany and Italy were the artistic counterparts of what Taiwan and Korea are for industry. The edge of left-wing postmodernism was dulled by chicness, the better to fit the galleries. Diversity was fused into the market’s expanded repertoire, and what could have been a cultural breakthrough was blunted into no more than an increase of merchandise supply. To malign the market as an evil is very easy. Its distorting incentive, its self-congratulatory righteousness, its bulldozing cultural flattening, and its deep-seated racism all make it a target. But most of this maligning assumes that under certain conditions the market can be corrected. If only there were minority curators or critics. If only there were easier access for minority artists. If only there were more galleries for minorities, or more room for minority artists in the mainstream galleries. When criticism of the market follows this tack, we lose sight of the fact that the market primarily serves itself and a specific socioeconomic system and will continue to do so regardless of any change in the race, gender, or nationality of those who play roles in it. Broadening the grip of active players will certainly help individuals to survive while they work. But this achievement should not be confused with a revolution against the market. Subordinate and peripheral cultures will continue to maintain their underprivileged status as long as their own and specific markets remain underprivileged. They will continue to suffer erosion as long as obsequious internationalization is perceived as a status symbol. Access to the mainstream really means a mainstreaming of the artist. In the late 1960s, there was a push for something called “black capitalism,” which was clearly more a promotion of capitalism than of blackness. The unexamined assumption was that capitalism was the best—if not the Access to the Mainstream

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only—way of life, and that by granting an invitation and some aid to participate in it, critical problems would disappear. It was not, as was claimed, a matter of “integration,” with the problems of two parties to be analyzed in the hope of creating a third alternative. It was a matter of tolerating the access of one of the parties to a mainstream controlled by the other party. Capitalism was not meant to change; it was to be expanded. The time may now have arrived to focus our critical efforts on the colonial artist rather than on the market. Colonial artists are a schizoid and insecure group. On the one hand, we are dying to exhibit in a museum or in the best gallery. If we don’t make it, we see ourselves as failures. On the other hand, if somebody else makes it, we smell co-optation. If a white Anglo commentator makes comments about “minority issues,” we perceive those comments as ignorant or patronizing, no matter how well informed or well intended. If the comments are made by a minority member within the context of the market, we discount it as the calculated latitude permitted someone who is fulfilling a quota; we don’t completely accept the statement as evidence that the mainstream has truly been redefined. The cause for this ambivalent reaction is not based on the content of the remarks but on the context in which they are made, signalling a distrust which could be healthful if used well. It is our obsessive focusing on the market, colored by the frustration of accessibility in theory and factual inaccessibility in practice, which hinders us in the correct use of our instinct. Only when resigned to failure do we look away and criticize. While there is a chance for success, we may criticize some, but our actions will contradict our words. While criticism gives us a feeling of connectedness with our original community, our goal remains access to the mainstream in any way possible. Art is whatever fits into the market, and what does not is treated as foreign to the field. This simplistic division overlooks the processes we have to undergo in our attempt to enter the market and the powerful distortions to which we are subjected. Coming from subordinate or peripheral cultures, the minority artist’s drive to become a participant in the marketplace, to find a place in the center of the hegemonic culture, is the product of colonization. In order to successfully acquire membership, we have to undergo a thorough process of assimilation. When we don’t fully succeed in our mimesis, we are left in a very visible and pathetic state of affectation. In all the cases of the mainstreamed minority—the foreign artist, the black capitalist who applies to the mainstream—the colonizing process 40

On and Against Translation

leads to the internalization of the wish to assimilate. When colonization is successful, assimilation becomes something “natural” and unavoidable. We are then allowed to enter the field of competition and free enterprise so that everyone becomes the happy and credulous owner of an equal opportunity. But on the way to this plateau, certain changes occur in the expression of the individual. Some of these changes become believable, others less so. If believable, assimilation has been completed successfully. If not, the only thing achieved is affectation. What is expressed is perceived as a sign of kitsch, nouveau-richeness, or “arrivism.” A culture to be forgotten is partially covered up with a culture incompletely acquired, or a culture badly remembered is falsely reinterpreted for the eyes of a culture badly understood. A recent review of a concert by the Peruvian singer Yma Sumac states that “her stage show was a campy, sexy, ‘south of the border’ stylization of grand opera, in which she portrayed a primitive diva mystically in tune with the forces of nature.” And further on: “Positioned on either side of the stage were Styrofoam replicas of Incan deities, and the singer, costumed in a filmy purple gown, comported herself with theatrical hauteur.” While it is unlikely that the viewer expected Ms. Sumac to borrow original Incan statues from the Metropolitan Museum, nevertheless, the account is a good inventory of the many ways she transgressed the good manners of hegemonic high culture. Even the possible originality of her transgressions is second-rated by a later comparison with “the showmanship of Liberace.” Totally absent from the review is an account of Ms. Sumac’s transgressions against her own culture, the violations performed to fit Liberace’s market, and the feedback of this market into Peru. Colonization, assimilation, and affectation are all steps belonging to the same staircase, only at different distances from what is considered the top. Most of us who have come from different cultures have stepped on all three, partly because of personal decisions, but mostly because of unperceived social and cultural pressures. All three steps signify a substitution of cultural values, a loss of what we had. More important, we impair our ability to sift through our own reality and find the building blocks for our independence. We who are artists who have come from other countries were subject to art schools belatedly and incompletely patterned after those in the cultural centers. We who lived in the cultural centers were directly processed toward melting into the pot. In both cases, a set of artificial needs was created in us, leading us to the belief that the cultural centers and their values do indeed define the top of the staircase and that our original cultures, the subaltern cultures, are invalid. Yet, somewhere, Access to the Mainstream

41

a link remains alive, pulling us back to those cultures and defining an antimainstream seed. We have been taught to view art as an apolitical act, devoid of political consequences, operating in a nonpolitical space. When politics do seep into our work, they are confined to a level of residual content, somewhat placating our conscience, but not forcing us to review our strategies. We fail to see that politics are not just reduced to content, in a simplistic fashion. We live the alienation myth of primarily being artists. We are not. We are primarily ethical beings sifting right from wrong and just from unjust, not only in the realm of the individual but in communal and regional contexts. In order to survive ethically, we need a political awareness that helps us to understand our environment and develop strategies for our actions. Art becomes the instrument of our choice to implement these strategies. Our choice to become artists is a political decision, independent of the content of our work. Our definition of art, of what culture we are serving, of what audiences we are addressing, of what our work is to achieve, are all political decisions. Thus the issue is not our access to the mainstream, but the mainstream’s access to us. Only put this way can the mainstream act as a resonance box for our activities without eviscerating us. Whether the mainstream comes to us or bypasses us is of secondary importance. Of primary concern is that we remain in the trade of building a culture and know as precisely as possible what and whose culture we are building. Equally important is that we reduce our ego. The idea of our building a culture may leave the impression that we may do so single-handedly. In fact, our role is equivalent to that of one more brick during the construction of a building. Under certain circumstances, this attitude may sound like a separatist stance, but it is not. It does not imply a reversion to provincial nationalism or to parochialism. It is a position that stresses that what has selling power is not necessarily in our best interest, but stopping colonialism is. There is an important difference between cultural autonomy and chauvinism. Cultural autonomy is conducive to generating independent individuals. Chauvinism is conducive only to racism and, given the power, to imperialism. Imperialism is no more than provincialism with bullying power. What the position stated here implies is in fact no more than a reordering of priorities at a moment when a much-needed radical change of society still seems out of reach.

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On and Against Translation

Wonder Bread and Spanglish Art (1989)

Chapter 6

In its comparatively short life, the U.S.A. has both adapted and developed a great variety of cultural paradigms and myths that give cohesion to its national identity. These constructs, by no means always a product of a conscious strategy, overshadow and help to reduce the diversities in population identity, a diversity that would normally tend to undermine a sense of unity. Some of the ideas are notorious and past their prime, like the “American dream” and the “melting pot.” Some take their place in economics, like the “trickle-down” theory. Sometimes a little military action furthers the cause of unity, like the invasion of Grenada, which was approved by 63 percent of the polled population. Wonder Bread is one of these paradigms that operates on a cultural level. It is a product sold and consumed as bread. Additives and advertising provide its nutritional value without affecting any of the product’s inherent qualities. Over the years, the confluence of economic dynamics and culturally conditioned taste buds has led to the establishment of Wonder Bread as a benchmark for other products. Any effort by these other products to resemble real bread is seen not so much as closing a gap as an act of refinement and sophistication. The products become variations of what can be called “gourmet Wonder Bread.” Given the fact that even cultures that have perfected real bread over millennia are slowly adopting the same range of products, what normally would be no more than an anthropological curiosity also becomes a paradigm for intercultural relations. As an example of how values are shifted, the use of Wonder Bread as a reference illustrates the flow of pressure between the hegemonic center and the periphery. The increasing pervasiveness of Wonder Bread outside the U.S.A. is directly explained by its satisfying expediency and economy and, less directly, by the aura of status possessed by those things imported from the hegemonic culture. While direct pressure allows for a conscious decision about why one should sacrifice one’s taste buds, it is the indirect pressure that subverts and eventually substitutes for taste, creating a new canon. 43

Wonder Bread has become a symbol of modernity. Modernity has traditionally been associated with progress and, therefore, was seen as a necessary tool for decolonization and independence. It is ironic that, in this particular process, values are subverted to a point at which, in fact, a new colonization has taken place. The reason to expand on this here is that, even if fraught with more complex issues, the same process applies to art. The pressure to shift values in art is buttressed by the still-commonplace underlying assumption that art’s historical processes are linear and develop progressively in the search for quality. It follows that the art that provides the media with the latest news and gains acceptance becomes ipso facto the canon. The desirability of the canon is internalized and, following the canon, comes to appear as a spontaneous, instinctive, indigenous, and authentic activity when in fact it is the product of an artificially created need. Taste acts as an acquired instinct. As an instinct, it bypasses rational thought. As an acquisition, it is controlled like any other merchandise by, among other things, values related to class status and property desires. In an economically dependent situation, the controls operate from the cultural and economic center and shape these artificially created needs. As with any colonizing process, the cultural pressure from the hegemonic center creates problems for those living and working on the periphery. A process of slow and organic development of cultural identities has been interrupted by the adoption of imports well beyond what would be a normal product of international contact and exchange.1 It is estimated that, in Brazil, U.S. companies and their affiliates spend on advertising the equivalent of one-third of the government’s budget for education.2 UNESCO estimates that between 50 percent and 70 percent of what is considered basic culture in the West comes from radio, television, and film; in Latin America, the U.S. controls 75 percent of the TV programs, 65 percent of advertising, 55 percent of cinemas, 60 percent of records and cassettes, 65 percent of the news, and 35 percent of publishing.3 One of the consequences is that a focus on art making for one’s community has given way to the notion of art making for the international market. In the process, a new and alien concept of quality has had to be adopted. Quality is not defined anymore by the degrees of revelation and mastery of communication for and with one’s people, but by how much leverage the products achieve in the context of an external, often unknown, public. Thus, the heroic scale and the aesthetics of spectacular superproduction developed in societies of wealth become the stan44

On and Against Translation

dard against which the artist of poverty is measured. Handicrafts connected with nonindustrial or obsolete industrial traditions become a tool with which to stereotype this artist in his or her separation from the mainstream. Western art since the Renaissance has developed an increasingly accelerated dynamic of establishing “colonial techniques” or “minor art forms” within the media covered by art history. Printmaking, for example, has become a colony of painting. Instead of contributing original imagery, printmaking primarily serves to translate and rehash imagery developed in painting. The division between “superspectacle” art and “modestly handcrafted” art seems to be a political refinement of this dynamic, since it helps to secure the place of the rich hegemonic centers by slowly restricting the definition of art to those products generated by them. This restricted definition eliminates any possibility of qualitative comparison between art from the center and art from the periphery. Whatever doesn’t reflect a minimum investment of money won’t qualify as serious art. It also ignores the ethical and political substrata that often inform art on the periphery as a consequence of the struggle for decolonization. From a hegemonic and formalist point of view, much of art on the periphery will be perceived as a form of low-budget craft.4 It could be argued that successful penetration by the hegemonic concepts of quality can occur only if the values displaced are weak or obsolete. While many traditional values might indeed be obsolete (in Latin America they tend to have originated under previous colonizations and have often outlived their usefulness), the argument neglects a simple fact: New York values, or international art market values, are derived from an infrastructure that can afford them; or, when they are derived, it is assumed that this infrastructure can afford them. This assumption is one more paradigm used in the attempt to achieve cultural unity. As a consequence of the mythical assumption of this paradigm there is also a “periphery” within the “center,” sometimes referred to as the Third World within the First World. It encompasses internal colonies, dependent cultures, and émigrés from the geographical periphery. The adoption of these values by a region lacking this infrastructure (that is, lacking a market coordinated with local needs, a market for the acquisition of the produced work, the possibility of survival through art-related jobs, or jobs in general for survival) creates problems and absurdities that cannot be easily ignored. Professionalism in art, increasingly measured by expenditure, relegates artists on the periphery to the category of “Sunday painters.” Participation in international events becomes an impossiWonder Bread and Spanglish Art

45

bility because of the lack of money, not only for shipping work, but often even for preparing slides and mailing documentation. In the absence of an infrastructure, art schools are created primarily for reasons of international status—a country is not considered “cultured” without them—and the students are educated to become recipients of foreign grants. If successful, they emigrate and work in the hegemonic centers. The periphery invests in education, and the hegemonic center receives the benefits. Those artists not emigrating are subject to the influx of secondary information that, often, inhibits or masks the creation of local primary information and thus postpones culture instead of generating it. Art on the periphery stemming from these dynamics is more a postcultural phenomenon; it is primarily the product of an adopted or an imposed culture rather than a contributor to a culture in action. As a consequence, the periphery develops what could be called an “eclecticism of despair,” in which elements are merged through appropriation. Subservient and fragmentary mimesis blends with a defensive syncretic use of resources and with recontextualization. The result is an aesthetic that long predates postmodernism, but often matches it in visual terms.5 Postmodernism, however, is considered to be a postindustrial aesthetic, an aesthetic that responds to the instantly available and omnipresent information distributed by super-technology, able to cancel out the possibility of distinct styles. The use of eclecticism on the periphery is, at least partially, a way of attempting to define an identity. Hegemonic postmodernism, on the other hand, absorbs all identities into an amorphous conglomerate. The misperception by the mainstream of the postcultural eclecticism of the periphery as a rehashed product of postmodernism is a poor and self-serving simplification of a much more dramatic process. A struggle for cultural survival is dismissed by means of a dishonest construction of history. The periphery, when not resorting to an isolationist use of tradition, produces hybrid art, the product of being in one place and looking toward another. Manfred Schneckenburger, organizer of the latest Documenta exhibition, sums up the consequences of this state of affairs in an unfriendly but cogent way. In an effort to justify the fact that only one Latin American artist (Alfredo Jaar, from Chile) was included in what purported to be an overview of the best art in the market of the past five years, he declares: “It is not possible to show the situation of countries where art is always trapped between a great tradition lost and a wish for contact with the modern world.”6 Given the different pressures, the artist on the periphery is faced with 46

On and Against Translation

several choices. The artist can actively disregard the colonizing values and focus on the local audience, produce for the international market in spite of the handicap, or immigrate to the cultural center. In the first case, even when focusing on the local audience, the artist will tend to produce in reaction to colonization. A direct link to the past is broken, interrupted, or deflected by the presence of a filter that becomes a factor in the values promoted by imperial culture. As Albert Memmi observes in his Portrait of the Colonized, a loss of history takes place, with the effect that “the colonized are kept out of the objective conditions of contemporary nationality.” Gramsci was reflecting on the same condition when he noted that “remembering takes the place of thinking” in the production of culture. Identity, under these conditions, easily becomes confused with an artificial folklore. Fossil memories, bleached and dry, usurp reality. It is in the third case, in which the artist migrates to the cultural center, that there is, in theory, the greatest chance for success in the mainstream. Until the mid-1950s that cultural center was provided by Europe, but then it slowly shifted to the U.S.A. It is estimated that from 1945 to 1965 alone, at least 17,000 researchers and high-level technicians emigrated from Latin America to the U.S.A. During 1986, 24 percent of PhDs awarded in the sciences went to non-U.S. citizens, and, according to a report published by the National Research Council in January 1988, in engineering PhDs, the figure reached 60 percent; in turn, 60 percent of this figure did not return to their countries of origin. Out of the 500,000 people who left Puerto Rico during the 1980–1985 period, 14 percent were professionals. Unfortunately, there are no figures specific to this brain drain in art. Enormous amounts of money invested in the education of highly qualified personnel in Latin America have thus ended up, in effect, donated to the U.S.A., where migration on those levels was motivated primarily by economic considerations.7 Political exile is the other major reason for resettlement during recent decades. A high percentage of these exiles, intellectuals fleeing right-wing dictatorships, have gone to Europe and Australia, which provide a friendlier atmosphere for their dissenting ideologies than the U.S.A. For the migrants themselves, however, the common unifying experience is that of uprootedness, an experience also familiar to secondgeneration artists who underwent a nonassimilationist education. While uprootedness may have little direct effect on the professional output of intellectuals in the sciences, it becomes a major factor in the work of intellectuals engaged in the communicative arts. The artist is faced, conWonder Bread and Spanglish Art

47

sciously or unconsciously, with questions and choices: How much of the original background should be sacrificed for the sake of assimilation into the new context and acceptance into the hegemonic cultures? How much change will be produced by osmosis, and, therefore, how much of the original background should be consciously protected? Some artists will attempt to erase their roots entirely, with the objective of blending completely into the new environment. This is an enterprise comparable to that of trying to speak a new language like a native. While not an impossible goal, it is clearly more difficult than for the aborigines with whom one is trying to merge. Other artists, shocked by the new environment, will retreat toward their original culture with redoubled efforts, seeking protection. They will share the plight of those who remained at home addressing the local audience. But their problems will be even more severe; in their case, the audience addressed is absent, and feedback from them is nonexistent or, at best, sporadic. The audience becomes an abstraction, frozen in a past that is fogged by nostalgia and wishful mystification. The artist becomes doubly alienated, trapped in a fiction that looks real.8 Both attitudes thus produce a semblance of reality that hides the conflictual situation in which they are immersed. While generating aesthetically viable products, they are haunted by a core of inauthenticity. But some artists may try to strike a balance between the cultures of the center and the periphery and confront their reality without recourse to escape. Avoiding denial of either the present or the past, they will attempt to produce a synthesis of experiences. They will produce what might be called “Spanglish” art. Used in relation to speech, the term has negative connotations, implying the absence of a functional tool and its substitution by a nonworking hybrid of two languages. It is the confluence of a language incompletely remembered with a language incompletely acquired, forced to make do in their new integration. The negative interpretation obscures the origin and the need that it fulfils. Used in relation to art, Spanglish represents the merging of a deteriorating memory with the acquisition of a new reality distanced by foreignness. Spanglish art is probably the most authentic alternative for the uprooted Latin American artist. It is a natural and unaffected expression representing with fairness the fact that one has come from one place and to another, and it functionally bridges the abyss left by that journey. It is an individualistic solution that allows for release of the tension caused by the clash of two cultures, and it permits the integration of both ex-

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periences into one iconography. Inspired by the immediacy of individual experience, this art will tend to distinguish itself from art that either reflects a programmatic attitude or evinces political awareness. The cultural significance inheres in the witnessing of a shared destiny rather than in the activity of a shared aesthetic search, and quality is dependent on individual effort rather than on group support or a community of interests. It is difficult to find paradigmatic examples of Spanglish art. Since Spanglish does not constitute a consciously adopted platform created by programs, in most cases, it remains as a component mixed with other artmaking elements. When I first used the word in relation to art I had the work of Ana Mendieta in mind. Artistically educated in the U.S.A. and interested in breaking into the mainstream, her memories and nostalgia prevented her successful assimilation. It was a fact that she at first resented but then, toward the end of her life, accepted. Pressed for further examples, I would cite the work of Juan Sánchez and of Alfredo Jaar. Sánchez is probably the clearest example of sophisticated New York/Puerto Rican expression. He tries to get to his roots, but finds them layered under neighborhood experiences and interpretations. The independence of Puerto Rico becomes a solution for all the levels of discrimination and humiliation, a way of leaving rather than staying. Jaar is, among these artists, the one who visually fits best into the mainstream. He shares the impeccability and the immaculateness of hegemonic presentations. In part this is the product of his own education and taste, but for him it also becomes a manipulatory device to get his points across and understood within the mainstream. So the notion of Spanglish art is more of a tool for understanding than a neat form of classifying. It provides a helpful vantage point from which to reconsider art that has been lumped together simplistically under the ethnic label “Hispanic.”9 That label puts the people so classified in a dilemma, even when they are unrelated to art. In my own college I am faced with the choice of being undeservedly classed as part of a “protected segment of the population” (the college’s language) and therefore used to pad some quota, or of reneging on my culture and background in order to free a slot for other people in need of protection.10 Lately, the designation “Hispanic artists” has been used to classify and neatly group together artists who have some connection with Latin America. It is a classification spun off by the mainstream culture that, in effect, posits a distance between these artists and the mainstream.11 At

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best, this ascribed distance reflects their poor fit within the parameters of the mainstream, their deviation from the hegemonic norm—“at best” because, while distance may mean economic disaster for the artist, it can also mean that at least some room is reserved for the development of an authentic and powerful identity. At worst, the ascribed distance serves to promote the devastating condescension of “Look, they too can make good art.” In economic terms this may create an opportunity for survival, but it can also lead to a precipitous assimilation into the mainstream in which a freedom not yet fully achieved is lost. In both cases, the label provides no unifying idea beyond that of vague ethnicity or vague geography; the artist remains separate, on his or her own, distracted from fully exploring the construction of a larger cultural community. Meanwhile, the viewer, influenced by mainstream values, will observe this art with interest. To the degree that viewers’ values are shared by the artist, the presentation will be understood as belonging to some form of art, but at the same time, the distance ascribed to the artist will suggest the possibility of finding something “exotic,” something belonging to the unshared culture that will explain and justify the ascription of distance. If, by mainstream standards, there is anything intriguingly exotic, it will be applauded as a contribution to the mainstream audience and co-opted. If, on the other hand, the artist has found something interesting in mainstream art and has adopted it for use in personal art, the results will run the risk of being condemned as derivative. It is interesting to see how the work of Wifredo Lam suffered from both pressures at the same time. He is accepted for both bringing mysterious rituals into Western art and being derivative of Picasso. As the Cuban critic Gerardo Mosquera points out, the result of this ambiguity is that his “Jungle” decorates the coatroom in the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Therefore, when coming from the periphery, success has a frontier. The artist can be only moderately successful by the standards of mainstream art. Moderate acceptance means that the artist is seen as competent, as one who has developed some individuality in his or her work without seriously revolutionizing or shaking the parameters within which international art operates. This perception allows the peaceful use of the work whenever the “Hispanic” quota has to be satisfied. If there is some ethnicity present, even better. In a twisted way, the Hispanic artist is then perceived as producing a form of artistic gourmet Wonder Bread, a bland category that exempts the viewer from having to deal with the artist’s 50

On and Against Translation

individual drama of surviving the pressure of two clashing benchmarks by trying to create a third one. From the point of view of the artist, Spanglish art as a category preserves and expresses this drama. The uprooted artist lacks the possibility of a powerful dialogue with a correspondingly uprooted public. Any sympathetic public that he or she may have is too small or too distant to provide effective feedback. Therefore, it is the gourmet Wonder Bread way of reading works of art that generates most of the pressure. The artist classified as “other” is, because of this pressure, led to abandon any effort to find an authentic integrative iconography for the sake of opportunistic blandness or, instead, one of two opposite modes. He or she tries to produce totally exotic work, that is, work conforming to the stereotype prevailing in the mainstream of what the original culture of the artist is supposed to be. Or the artist tries to totally eradicate any evocation of difference with an effort to camouflage the work as an act of homage to the current canon of the hegemonic culture. The feedback from the mainstream audience thus serves, unintentionally, to complicate and retard the task of cultural synthesis and to exacerbate the tensions that vex, and sometimes torment, the uprooted artist. The gourmet Wonder Bread appreciation of art therefore serves as a long-range tool with which to achieve assimilation into the hegemonic culture. Not only is the artist sidetracked from the pursuit of a new integrative authenticity, the creation of an audience receptive to this work is also hindered. The artist is led to address the wrong audience, while the intended audience cannot develop to become a proper interlocutor. It is clearly a natural dynamic of any hegemonic culture to attempt to reduce phenomena such as Spanglish art to an expression of one first and passing generation. However, it is less clear whether, given the conditions generating immigration toward the center, this reduction serves the interests of Spanglish artists and their real and potential audiences.

Notes 1. The New York Times of October 25, 1987, under the title “Furor in Calcutta over Dress Code,” published a news item that began: “A prominent musician has been ousted from an exclusive club in Calcutta after he insisted on wearing Indian-style clothes and refused to follow the club’s dress code which favors casual or formal Western attire.” 2. L. S. Stavrianos, Global Rift: The Third World Comes of Age (New York: William Morrow, 1981). Wonder Bread and Spanglish Art

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3. Miguel Barnet, “Identidad cultural y liberación nacional,” paper presented at the First Meeting of Intellectuals for the Sovereignty of Our America (Havana, 1981). 4. Geeta Kapur points out that, “in societies like India, modernization in the capitalist style has produced the commercialization of not only the traditions themselves, but also of the traditional forms and artifacts, to serve both the state and the market” (“Tradition and Contemporaneity in the Fine Arts of the Third World,” paper presented at the Third Havana Biennial, November 1989). 5. The Brazilian poet Oswald de Andrade, for example, published the Anthropophagite Manifesto in 1928, in which he writes of the “absorption of the sacred enemy.” 6. Le Monde (Paris), January 27, 1987, quoted by Álvaro Medina in “Las nuevas y viejas estrategias,” Arte en Colombia, no. 34. Schneckenburger is referring to the lack of the funds needed to present reasonably the context and the particular conditions he describes. 7. Even when generous grants are given, they provide only a minuscule fraction of the cost of the total education of a qualified individual. While needed and welcomed by the recipient for his or her individual development, a grant acts primarily as a talent-tagging device. It is interesting to note that a prestigious institution like the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, using the alumni psychology, has lately resorted to asking its fellows for donations in order to ensure the preservation of regional programs. The example given of a threat of possible cuts is the Latin American program. The Guggenheim has also accepted $100,000 from the Lampadia Foundation in Buenos Aires in support of fellows from Argentina and Chile (to be chosen by the Guggenheim). Money is exported from the periphery to the U.S.A. and then reimported to the periphery under the aegis of a U.S. foundation. The U.S. foundation appears as having an increased philanthropic scope, while the Argentine money presumably reenters with its prestige enhanced. But with this move the talent-tagging process—usually coveted because of its broad regional competition—is debased to become more provincial in character and with “second-class” fellows. 8. Remembering the feelings I had in 1965–1966 about myself and my work, in 1977 (in a piece that was later published, in 1983, as “Exile”—included in this volume), I wrote: I thought that the verbal description of a visual situation could elicit the creativity of the spectator in a better way than the visual situation itself. A text also had the advantage of being cheaper and less totalitarian. Again I thought in Uruguayan terms, about an aesthetic of poverty which could affect the contexts in which people live. At the same time that I was doing this, hundreds of artists all over the world, except (to my knowledge) in Uruguay, were working on the same basis. That, and the fact that in Uruguay nobody identified with my work, gave food for thought. . . . There was the megalomaniac and optimist version: I

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was working for Uruguay, in advance of my own time, someday I will achieve the changes in the perceptual mechanisms of my country; the fact that I live outside the country does not matter. There was the negative and depressing version: I had assimilated the aesthetic that surrounded me, without even being aware of it; I am working in the U.S.A. and for that environment, even if I don’t like it and I don’t identify with it; Uruguay is lost for me. Working with words made the problem more acute: In what language do I write, Spanish or English? Am I working for the people I want to work for, but who cannot see my work? Am I working for the people I do not care to work for, but who do see my work? Should I make two versions of my work? And while I write this I realize that, without giving it a thought, I wrote everything in Spanish and that, maybe, I will have to translate the whole thing into English. . . . I perceived that I remained floating between two cultures: one that is alien although I don’t want it to be; the other that is alien because I want it to be, and because I do not conceive of it not being alien; I am an alien resident. . . . My country does not exist anymore, except in my memory. I am a citizen of my memory, which does not have laws, passports, or inhabitants; it only has distortions.

9. In “Homogenizing Hispanic Art in Houston,” The New Art Examiner (September 1987), Shifra M. Goldman cites Rodolfo Acuña, who attributes to the Nixon administration the initiation of the practice of “consolidating Latin Americans into a national minority called ‘Hispanic’ in order to manage them easily” (Rodolfo Acuña, A Community under Siege [Los Angeles: UCLA Chicano Research Center, 1984]). 10. For a detailed discussion of the topic, see Martha E. Giménez, “Latino/ ‘Hispanic’—Who Needs a Name? The Case against a Standardized Terminology,” International Journal of Health Services 19, no. 3 (1989). 11. It is not just a distance in the realms of art. Pat Robertson’s call for increasing procreation in the U.S.A. (during his 1988 presidential campaign) was implicitly a call for Anglo middle-class procreation and explicitly one to ensure the survival of U.S. mainstream values.

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Chapter 7

Cultural Identities Before and After the Exit of BureauCommunism (1991)

There are two unrelated recent developments that have generated much brooding, at least in my own head. One is the sudden collapse of the European socialist bloc. The other, much slower, development is the process of class polarization produced by the impoverishment of the middle class, particularly in the countries on the periphery. The demise of bureau-communism has generated much rethinking among the Left, most of it attempting to get rid of fossilized dogmas that had been carried around for years. But it has also put some of us in the paradoxical position of starting to empathize with some ideas that we previously had dismissed as empty Communist Party rhetoric. What seemed to be a ritualistic litany unrelated to everyday reality today acquires a somewhat baffling aura of insight as problems that previously seemed to belong to nationality are now, unexpectedly, revealed as class issues. It is as if our minds have been forced to restart a cycle from which a new Marx may emerge someday to attempt a better try at the same social problems that seem to survive unchallenged. This change in frame of mind makes it difficult to be certain whether social change has actually occurred or whether the same old reality is simply leaving a different impression on the eye because the lens has been changed. It probably is no more than a change of lens, but either way it would be ironic if the consequence of the death of communism is the perception of the rele­vance of class analysis. Before the change of lens, those of us who belonged to the middle class of countries on the periphery and who had been working on issues pertaining to culture fit into what used to be a Center-Left ideology. The reason for this placement in the ideological range was because much of that work related to problems of cultural identity, and these were phrased in terms of a fight for cultural autonomy from hegemonic centers. Most of the “progressive” rationalizations about the need for a cultural identity were generated within the middle class. Espousing a form of nationalism, they invariably included a longing for site-specific roots. 54

This philosophizing about a national cultural identity was particularly popular on the periphery; it was a way by which our middle classes could assert some independence in the international arena. Part of what made this fight for autonomy political and interesting was the lack of knowledge about what precisely that identity was supposed to be. This shifted the focus of the fight into one against evil enemies, the kind of battle that is always easier and more fun than one that constructs something. Words like “independence,” “imperialism,” and “colonialism” helped to give a delusion of clarity and the feeling of taking aim at an opponent. Probably, they also kept us away from the things we should have been doing, like putting more effort into researching the feasibility and forms of the identity we were longing for. But the existence of a “socialist bloc” at the time gave us a resonating box which made us feel we were not completely alone. If a “third position,” between capitalism and communism (a truly nonaligned path) could emerge, it wouldn’t be crushed; the other two positions would keep each other in check, and the socialist bloc would at least support our rhetoric. We used cultural identity and national identity as if they were quasisynonymous and interchangeable. The contradiction between utopian internationalist dreams—a world lacking frontiers and exploitation—and nationalist limitations created by focusing on the vernacular issues that separated us from that totality was solved by a fantasy. Cultural identity someday would enrich a common pool once national identity could be dispensed with. These thoughts profoundly marked my generation and conditioned our perception of world and national politics. It was a perception based on an ethical platform in which pragmatism was considered a dangerous path of compromise that would soil our principles and ideals. The luxurious feeling of moral cleanliness was possible only from a situation of critical equidistance between Washington and Moscow. The sudden disappearance of that equidistance is bound to have ideological repercussions and produce profound revisions, much beyond any personal brooding.1 The exit of bureau-communism provided unexpected insights. One is that, in spite of great efforts, bureau-communism was unable to develop a true cultural identity and succeeded only in the temporary suppression or inhibition of European socialist-bloc racism, cryptocapitalism, and the belief in magic and/or UFOs. All of these aspects have now come out of the closet and configure a truer cultural profile. Another revelation was that the passage from a socialist economy into a capitalist one is as traumatic as the one from capitalism to socialism is reputed to be. The Exit of Bureau-Communism

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Coincidentally, it also was shown that developed countries can undevelop more rapidly than they once developed. As a consequence, underdeveloped countries have to atrophy at a coordinated speed in order to keep the international pecking order unchanged. This pecking order, however, may be obsolete, since the international drive toward underdevelopment has intensified the spread of the pockets of poverty all over the world, and foreign debt is no longer a poor country’s privilege, since the U.S. is now surpassing everybody else. Concurrent with this dynamic, a process of polarization of classes with a shrinking of the middle class is taking place. The shrinkage is particularly strong on the periphery, where the polarization due to impoverishment, fraudulent profiteering, and flight of capital seems to accelerate even more than in the U.S. These changes are forcing middle-class awareness of class issues among artists in counterpoint with issues of nation—an awareness hitherto muddled in both the writings about and the making of art. The concept of nation, despite the Eastern drive toward scattered and dwarfed homelands, appears to be losing its relevance in the understanding of art. I feel, therefore, that it is becoming more and more important to understand the systems by which art products relate to class structure, that is, how art circulates vertically between classes and horizontally within one class. The change of the lens makes me realize that my peers and I have been committing (unconsciously) a fraud. As members of the enlightened segments of the middle class, we portrayed ourselves as the spokespeople for all the social classes and ethnic groups in our countries. We acted as if we were the only class. We also used a nationalist rhetoric as belonging to a leftist ideology, unaware that we were essentially serving right-wing class interests. Since we were the only ones focusing on the subject matter in a “scholarly” and philosophical manner (and were the only ones with the possibility of publicizing our opinions), the absence of representation of the other classes never became apparent. But most of any cultural identity is the product of doing rather than philosophizing, and that is why the so-called low culture is much more representative of a people’s cultural identity than high culture. It presents, in addition to its own contributions, the digested sediments of high culture, internalized in the form of commonplaces. While going over these ideas I encountered some old Soviet writings about aesthetics by one author, A. G. Egorov, a little-known and seldomquoted conservative Soviet aesthetician from the heyday of bureau56

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communism. The aim of his writings, many decades ago, was to extol the “democratic and socialist” art which would inevitably arise from the working classes (first in the U.S.S.R. and then in the rest of the world), and which, according to Lenin, would someday become an international class expression. At the time, his statements were easily lumped together as the sloganeering typical of Communist thought in the fifties. Today, surprisingly, they seem to be on target with regard to issues of class and nation. Egorov did not totally eliminate the appearance of some national traits in art. He pointed out that the conflicting classes which lived in the same land with the same language, economy, and ambience might have some unity of expression. Within that, he made some good points about how a class in power works. “The ideologues of the reactionary bourgeoisie try to attenuate the classist character of art [by] present­ing the development of artistic creativity as a ‘one and only stream’ separated and alien from any class struggle. The bourgeois nationalists usually oppose the totality of art produced in one nation against all of the art from other nations as if they were hostile elements.” And further: “The apologists of imperialism usually present the interests of the reactionary bourgeoisie as if they were the interests of the people as a whole, of the nation; but where the imperialist bourgeoisie prevails there can’t be a community of interests of all the classes of the bourgeois nation, and therefore there can’t be—given the class foundations—a one and only national art.” The nationalist approach, at the expense of class analysis, was not only useful for the middle class on the periphery, but also for the intellectuals individually. It guaranteed equidistance, keeping sympathy with and from the Left, while not overly antagonizing the anti-Communist mainstream, thus ensuring an overall political correctness. This approach also catered to a certain longing for exoticism in the mainstream, ensuring an access which, although limited, a total assimilation of values could not guarantee. The ultimate issue is not excluding one or the other in matters of nation and class, but, rather, a shift of emphasis. The reviewing of our work within the parameters of class structure invites speculations which, even if they prove to be wrong, should enrich our perspectives. Western art is probably the only activity which can be claimed as a symbol of suc­cess by the trickle-down theorists. The present distribution system has carefully eliminated any transference of true art within the nonruling classes. The bourgeoisie has defined what true art is, eliminating other possible definitions. It not only rules and controls the market, but it co-opts any interesting expressive manifes­tation from the The Exit of Bureau-Communism

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other classes for that definition. As a consequence, the deprived classes are limited in their expression to the use of so-called folk art, crafts, and some debased interpretations of the high art that comes down as little drips. The better examples of high art produced in the ruling classes, not unlike science, have the merit not only of being an expression, but also of serving as tools to expand knowledge. It is this quality that gives high art more than a commercial justification. However, I have a hunch that this process of “expansion of knowledge” can only occur within the confines of a coherent community (e.g., one social class.) The only things that can transcend the confines of that coherent community are the products of the process, not its dynamics. Thus, information about knowledge is transmitted somewhat, but not the tools to develop it. This limited communication stratifies art and reduces the communities/classes on the receiving end to attempting to overcome derivativeness, kitsch, and craftiness before finding their own way of expanding knowledge through art. Under the circumstances, from the moment we choose to be artists, we also choose to be part of this structure. Our success, no matter what our origin is or what our opinion of the structure may be, is measured by the degree of acceptance the market allocates to our work. Never mind that the market is confined to one layer of society. To be co-opted by it (if we dare to feel co-opted) is, in our self-serving interpretation, not a sign of corruption, but an indication of our power in influencing culture. We become part and accomplices of Egorov’s “one and only stream,” oblivious to any class tension. Thus, our political rhetoric may be at complete odds with our real politics. The foregrounding of the issues of class makes me feel that it is possible that the artist as a cultural identity-maker may increasingly feel a pressure to denationalize and to assume his or her class representation. The artist belonging to a class left out from a market by stratification, if successful in the mainstream, automatically (and regardless of beliefs) is perceived as a class traitor, as somebody who invested talent in some­body else’s cause. The process is essentially the same as when the artist represented is part of a national or an ethnic group. However, those groups generally perceive success in the mainstream as an excuse for national or ethnic pride. Perceived as a class representative, it is unlikely that the coherent community of the artist, bonded by poverty and exploitation, will have any pride about one in their midst making it in the art market. As, of course, it is unlikely that the rich will congratulate themselves about one 58

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of their own making art that goes over big in the slum (leaving aside some recent missionary experiences in the South Bronx). Thus, if the artist is perceived as a class representative, class demands will become more stringent, and elitist art will return to some rigor and graffiti will return to the wall. It is within this class awareness that national and racial diversity can help to articulate a complexity neglected by old-fashioned and formulaic class descriptions. The possibility of an interclass art seems a remote utopian concept. By the time something “truly” artistic trickles down to an underprivileged segment of the population, it is generally passé for the market and useless for the class in power. Thus, art ultimately seems to survive only within one class at a time. The International Style pushed earlier in this century was reasonably successful because it tried to unite all the middle-class art buffs of the world, regardless of national borders. The aim wasn’t really an international art style, it was a worldwide middle-class style. The one problem was that middle classes on the periphery started to disintegrate earlier and more quickly than those in the center and thus ceased to be part of an international brotherhood. An international art had a chance of success because it willfully sought communication within a reasonably coherent community: art circulated horizontally. An interclass art, on the other hand, has no chance because it would require vertical cir­culation. Coherence would be transgressed, and, besides, there are no conduits to implement this flow. So, the only answer to the problem would be provided by a classless society, which puts us back, if not at the beginning of thinking about social change, at least somewhere in the nineteenth century. This time it would be with the knowl­edge that one of the strategies has been tried and failed. This time, also, there probably wouldn’t be seventy years available to try a new scheme. Meanwhile, many of us—members of the diminishing middle classes on the periph­ery—will continue complaining about the exclusion of our art from art history. The complaint is based on both our acceptance of the parameters that determine art history and our trust that we are part of the hegemonic horizontal-circulation mechanism. Our real support group, the one that nourished our art, the site-specific middle class, is ceasing to exist, and so are we as its expressive tool. The traditional path to success was to make it big within the local middle class, to then be catapulted into the international market. It was a process hampered by the dynamics of imperialism and chauvinism, but success was not completely out of the The Exit of Bureau-Communism

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question. If, however, our home class disappears, things are bound to be even worse. Salvation, or cultural survival, can only come by reassessing who our audience is and by creating our own horizontal-distribution systems, which, as long as we have social classes, will be primarily class bound and only secondarily nationality oriented. “Otherness” or “Third World” (the phrase “Third World within the First World” already shows the breakdown of the concept of nationality) are increasingly race- and classdirected terms. Nations here become incidental or a euphemism.2 In many half-baked ways, experiments to organize circulation within coherent communities marginal to the mainstream are already starting to appear. The Biennial of Havana is an international clearinghouse for Third World art and may be the only forum where classes intermingle, even if the class issue has not yet been addressed directly—or maybe because it hasn’t. Paradoxically, it is the recognition of the main­stream which eventually may deteriorate the Biennial’s health. In the U.S. there is an array of eth­nic and racial institutions that are working on an alternative network, although one aim always seems to be a share of the mainstream’s credibility. The underlying and weakening function, clearly trying to establish a vertical path, becomes to publicize and prove to the mainstream that we also can and do produce art. The confusion of these well-meaning institutions stems from not clearly identifying their audience. On one hand, the increasing verticality of funding allocations obscures perceptions or forces ambiguity. Corporations are taking over funding activities previously administered by government agencies, attaching new kinds of strings to monies and changing some values.3 On the other hand, the institutions are going through a period of transitional insecurity produced by maintaining a respect for mainstream values while not being able to exactly pinpoint the values to promote in the community where they are operating (for instance, a stronger focus on the devel­opment of the coherence of that community). As often happens, commerce seems to have a clearer picture of reality than cultural institutions have. Both Sotheby’s and Christie’s have yearly auctions of Latin American art. They classify all the products as part of the mainstream definition of art. Still, in this case, they disregard the traditional categories provided by identifying centuries or by the term “contemporary.” By isolating Latin American art from the rest, they give cultural identity a chance, something safe, since most of the buyers at the auction are remnants of the old Latin American middle class. All cir60

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culation systems, even if not carefully respected, are at least granted an existence. Meanwhile, if all of this is true—that the perception of class is taking primacy over the perception of nation—then those of us artists belonging to the middle class on the periphery may slowly be condemned to extinction within traditional art markets. Many of us may soon be working in an even more marginal context than before and be forced to revise our strategies. Seen from our present stance, we may be the makers of the low culture of the future. We may not immediately become bona fide members of the proletariat (internal­ized ideologies and class habits are too strong for that), but this may be our future audience. To be functional, our trade has to be demystified and our task considered one of visual literacy, one of helping the members of our audience to express themselves. This will require new art definitions and new vehicles to disseminate that art among our audience and ensure feedback. We will have to bring with us and share not the aesthetic that has allowed us to babble to the mainstream, but the tools to expand knowledge which until now has been the purview of one privileged class. Thus, our painfully developed individual styles, those that brought us some acceptance in traditional art circles, may have to be reassessed and possibly suspended for a while. Instead, we may have to give more time to a clear articulation of the methodology we use in our creative endeavors and make that, rather than our precious products, available. Our monopoly in matters of art, always morally questionable, is now also becoming obsolete. Until now we were shrouding ourselves in layers of obscurantist mystification tailored for an audience in the process of disappearance. This revision, of course, will not cure all ills, but may restore our functionality. And while the world revolution may be postponed for a good while, at least we might, someday, have the nostalgic satisfaction of auction houses dedicated to lumpen proletariat art, with the work of some chosen few included and co-opted, while we wait for the next cycle.

Notes 1. The process of ideological revision seems to permeate more than just political and political-cultural issues and covers a broad spectrum. In an article about children’s footwear, the director of orthopedics in a children’s hospital is quoted as saying: “The myth of the good, solid shoe is like the fallacy of communism. The Exit of Bureau-Communism

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. . . People do better when they’re free, and the foot does better when it’s free” (Natalie Angier, “Which Shoes Are Best for Children? Maybe None,” New York Times [August 14, 1991, p. Cl]). What a few years ago would have been understood as a rabid and anachronistic cold war metaphor has moved into the realm of objectivity (as presumably embodied by the medical profession) and into a report about a nonpolitical issue in a self-proclaimed liberal paper. 2. The scandal around BCCI, a bank which sold its image as belonging to the Third World, showed fraud operating across traditional First/Third World boundaries, uniting individuals from Pakistan, Peru, Argentina, the U.S.A., Great Britain, etc., into a homogeneous conspiracy and confirming itself as a class tool. 3. As I am writing this, Mobil Corporation is receiving an Emmy award for financing “Masterpiece Theatre.” It is doubtful that the NEA or—if it existed in the U.S.—a Ministry of Culture, would ever have been nominated for a similar award.

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Art and Politics: The Aesthetics of Resistance (1994)

Chapter 8

When discussing visual arts in the underdeveloped world, two extreme approaches are possible. One consists of declaring art a universal set of skills and values within which everybody has freedom of expression. The other is to consider that, no matter how one paints, from the moment a brush is lifted, even before it reaches the canvas, the result is already destined to be a product and example of colonization. Although I recognize the caricature of the polarization, I confess that I am temperamentally closer to the second position. The creation of an artist is so much the product of a forced interplay of values and internalized taste that the idea of freedom seems somewhat misplaced. Art as a willful attempt at resistance may thus be a more useful concept. While this approach may go against what the mainstream has determined to be “good” art in Latin America, it allows us to identify issues that make some art “important.” Furthermore, it forces us to expand the limits of what is considered art. If we conceive of art as a cultural phenomenon in Latin America, we must explore the borderlines between art and politics. Two concepts emerge from this interplay: politicized aesthetics, and aesthetified politics. I will illustrate the first concept with the example of “Tucumán Arde” [Tucumán burns], a political exhibition which was the product of the radicalization of a group of Argentine artists. I will illustrate the second with the body of operations of the Uruguayan National Liberation Movement (MLN), better known as the Tupamaros. Both examples are from the 1960s, the period in recent history when the blurring between art and politics peaked. In August 1968, artists from Rosario and Buenos Aires organized the First National Meeting of Avant-Garde Art to plot the development of a form of art which was totally new ethically, aesthetically, and ideologically.1 Concerned with the traditional co-optation of any form of art capable of disturbing society, the group agreed that the development of art could no longer consist of the creation of an avant-garde movement, that the showplace for art could no longer be a gallery or a museum, and 63

that art could no longer restrict itself to addressing only an elite public. Art had to perturb society, the group argued, and achieve results similar to those of political action. But distinct from political action, they asserted, art should shape culture on a deeper level and have a more longlasting impact. Engaging the help of sociologists, economists, journalists, and photographers, the group decided to launch a “counterinformation” operation. It chose the province of Tucumán in northwestern Argentina as the subject for an exhibit. Its aim was to counter the government’s publicity, which presented Tucumán in paradisiacal terms, and to reveal the real socioeconomic conditions of the province. The group claimed that it wanted “to become publicizers and activists in the social struggle in Tucumán” and “to create a parallel subversive culture which wears out the official culture machinery.”2 Rubén Naranjo, one of the participants, explained in a recent interview that the group aspired to create “a space opened up by art, in which social reality is offered over and above denunciation of the kind that usual social or political chronicles provide.”3 The group began by gathering, with official help, information about living conditions in Tucumán. Describing their project simply as leading to a cultural profile of the province, the artists held press conferences to publicize their activities. The ploy worked; the group even received flattering coverage in the mainstream media. The official help disappeared, however, once the exhibit opened. The artists put up installations using the entire building of the General Workers’ Union (CGT) in Rosario and Buenos Aires. They assembled interviews, mural photographs, and research about the accumulation of wealth by the richer families. They served visitors Tucumán coffee—without sugar—and darkened the rooms every ten minutes to indicate the frequency of child mortality (explained each time the lights went out by a voice over the loudspeakers). The manifesto distributed at the opening of the show in Rosario called for a revolutionary art: a total art—which modifies the totality of the social structure; a transformative art—which destroys the idealist separation between the artwork and reality; a social art—which merges with the revolutionary fight against economic dependency and class oppression. After a couple of days, police pressure on the unions forced the CGT to cancel the exhibits. Police and army threats as well as the general climate of repression at the time led to the dispersion of the artists. Most of them stopped producing any kind of art for several years. Some went underground and joined 64

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the guerrilla movement, some were “disappeared,” and at least one of them—Eduardo Favario—died in action after joining the Revolutionary Army of the People.4 A kind of de facto art strike spontaneously ensued for a prolonged period of time. Art galleries mostly limited themselves to exhibiting harmless traditional paintings. These years would eventually become known as the “Silence of Tucumán Arde.” In 1962, a guerrilla group in Uruguay—which would come to call itself the Tupamaros—undertook the first of a series of actions.5 Organized by dissidents from several political groups—in particular, the Socialist Party and the Anarchist Federation—and from the student population (including art students), the Tupamaros did not have artistic ambitions. They saw themselves as the “people’s prosecutors,” uncovering corruption in government, banking, and industry. The general theory which guided the group was that “revolutionary actions lead to revolutionary situations.”6 Analyzing the Tupamaros in relation to other Latin American guerrilla movements, political analyst Régis Debray points out the group’s lack of prejudgments. “There is no traveling dogma,” he writes, as if describing the creation of a work of art, “no revolutionary strategy independent of the conditions determined by the place and time. Everything is to be reinvented every time on location.”7 Given that the group chose to operate in an urban environment—a situation without successful precedents—the Tupamaros were careful to devise guerrilla operations which would not alienate the public, but, rather, would garner its support.8 The group’s primary goal became publicity and communication, not military victories. In one of their strategy papers, the Tupamaros discuss “armed propaganda”: “Armed propaganda becomes particularly important under certain conditions, as when a guerrilla movement is becoming known at the beginning of its development. It is also important when a group needs to clarify its positions toward the people during those periods in which drastic measures have to be taken which do not clearly illustrate the guerrilla’s aims and which might be difficult for the popular mind to comprehend.”9 The Uruguayan Armed Forces evaluated this strategy in 1977 with surprising objectivity: “Surrounded by great publicity, these actions try to present the methods of the police and the government as clumsy and inefficient, so that the organization may appear, in ridiculing them, to be on the cusp of imagination and ingenuity.”10 The Tupamaros’ strategy papers are rather dry and boring, as if the group reserved all its creative energy for its operations. Those operations approached a level of aesthetics which led observers like Debray to refer to Art and Politics

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the Tupamaros as a “cultural phenomenon” in which time and timing were used in ways more often applied to filmmaking.11 The whole approach flew in the face of both the Cuban and the Vietnamese experiences, which were the standard models for guerrilla warfare. Fidel Castro himself proclaimed the city “a cemetery of revolutionaries and resources,” thereby supporting the case against any urban-based guerrilla movement.12 Yet the strategy worked: the Tupamaros’ activities evoked a sympathetic response from the public and had an effect far beyond the immediate functional results of any given operation. The group engineered its first major food-distribution plot in 1963. Posing as members of a neighborhood political club, the guerrillas ordered a truckload of goods from a major food supplier, including—given the proximity of Christmas—a large supply of sweets. They told the truck to deliver the goods to an address close to a shantytown, at which point the group seized the vehicle and gave the food away to the shantytown residents.13 During the Book and Print Fair of 1968, the group left a box on the ground which gently exploded and spread propaganda leaflets into the crowd. The contraption had the characteristics of a Tinguely sculpture.14 On January 1, 1969, Tupamaros stormed the district court where proceedings against some of their members were being conducted and took back forty-one weapons that the police had found earlier in a hideout. On February 7, the group left a package with 220 pounds of explosive gelignite in front of the house of an army official who was a known bomb expert. After initially taking it from an army deposit, the group had decided that the explosive was too dangerous for their purposes. So, in a gesture with great panache, they returned it to the official with a detailed note explaining the reasons for their change of mind. On February 19, dressed as policemen, Tupamaros took $220,000 from the plush San Rafael gambling casino in Punta del Este, but then offered to return the percentage of the money due for employee tips. On May 15, they took over a major radio station during the broadcast of an international soccer game, and played a political message six times during the next half hour. On July 16, the guerrillas stole the flag used by a group of thirty-three patriots who had entered Uruguay in 1825 to fight for the country’s independence. Considered the second national emblem after the Uruguayan national flag, the 1825 flag carries the phrase “Freedom or Death.” The group promised to return the flag to the museum once the situation merited it (at the time of this writing, it has still not been re-

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turned).15 On several occasions, the group took over the projection booth of a movie theater and projected guerrilla propaganda on the screen. The most elaborate and spectacular of their maneuvers was “Operation Pando,” which involved about one hundred guerrilla members. Claiming the need to rebury a relative who had died in Argentina several years earlier, a funeral cortège was hired which comprised five cars and a van. The reburial was to take place in Pando, a city of twenty thousand inhabitants about twenty-five miles from Montevideo. The procession—replete with weeping family members—stopped at several points along the route to pick up “relatives.” Once the group was assembled in Pando, the guerrillas overpowered the hired drivers. Using arms stashed in the coffin, the group took over police headquarters, the fire station, the telephone building, and, finally, the four banks in town. From a short-term, practical point of view, Operation Pando failed, since a confrontation with police during the group’s return to Montevideo resulted in the death of three guerrillas and the arrest of eighteen.16 From a long-term and aesthetic point of view, however, the operation was a remarkable success. In the narrative sequence of events, the takeover of each building constituted a complex subplot, a little screenplay of its own. Pando set the tone for the theatrical staging in which Montevideo and its inhabitants played the script written by the guerrilla “actors.” While the Tupamaros did not consciously have aesthetic aims, they were eager to establish an efficient system of communication. To achieve this, they needed some kind of iconography. These icons were not literal illustrative images of the movement or their cause, but, rather, the general image that the movement projected.17 This projection required the use of the mass media. In this regard, it is useful to contrast the Tupamaros and the U.S. warresistance movement of the 1960s. U.S. yippie events, with the advantage of a less-repressive environment, were designed to be viewed on the television screen. In the March against Death to Arlington National Cemetery on November 13, 1969, the demonstrators held black balloons to symbolize the casualties of war. This created a spectacle that could be appreciated only from outside the rally, not by the participants themselves. The audience was not intended to be on-site—where all were marchers—but would, hopefully, be watching the demonstration on the news at home.18 While the U.S. activists catered to the media format, the Tupamaros were relatively independent. With their own mobile radio station, leaf-

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let production, and occasional takeover of public airwaves, the guerrillas were less in danger of having their image manipulated. Rather than being beholden to the unfriendly “mediation” of the mass media, the Tupamaros made use of a very direct and sympathetic rumor mill, exploiting the mechanisms of folklore more than those of advertising. Their operations were a cross between events and mass-media art. Both the immediately perceivable activity and its “memory”—as recorded by the media or by popular word of mouth—led ultimately to a revolutionary folklore. The goal was the development of political awareness. Within the Latin American context, “Tucumán Arde” and the Tupamaro operations can be seen as the climax of a tradition of politicized aesthetics and aestheticized politics which included Mexican muralism, the different Latin American schools of popular graphics and poster art, and the interdisciplinary art movement in Cuba during the 1960s.19 That tradition, even if it did not consistently lead toward the disappearance of art as a commodity, at least tried to subvert the lore of art as property and to insist on the class issues related to art. It was a tradition which Social Realism had tried to overtake, but failed to do because of its own rigidity and aspirations of institutionalization. Although a clear solution to the question of how to erase the borderline between art and politics was not found, the terms of the contradictions were clearly established. By the 1970s, art had returned to its original confines, although not necessarily reconnecting with old artistic traditions. A new format of presentation had been introduced in the cultural centers during the 1960s: the “environment” or “installation.” This format seemed to fit the needs of Latin America much better than those of hegemonic cultures. First practiced by Latin American artists living in Paris and New York, installation art exploded during the mid-1970s and early 1980s, particularly in Mexico, Cuba, and Chile. In all cases, a hegemonic flow of information from the north and a seamless appropriation of means were at the root of the development. In some cases, installation artists tried to reintegrate politics into their work. Mexican artists stood out in this development, not so much for their formal innovations as for the fact that they organized in groups—called “Los Grupos”—which stressed collective authorship.20 Coming from different specializations (among them, philosophy, poetry, photography, mural painting, and architecture), the group members executed their visions in different media such as print, street theater, film, installations, and combinations of these. Four groups—Taller de Arte e Ideología (TAI),

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Proceso Pentágono, Suma, and Tetraedro—represented Mexico in the Tenth Biennial of Paris in 1977, thus returning to a more orthodox artistic arena.21 The TAI group designed an export-import walk-in crate for the occasion.22 A room built of waste materials to evoke a shantytown construction, the crate contained popular religious, sports, and mortuary symbols. In their catalogue text, the TAI group declares that its goal is to achieve “the increase of the possibilities of rupture with those ideas, feelings, and perceptions ruled by the ideology of the dominant class.” In 1978, the various groups tried to unify themselves, creating the Mexican Front of Cultural Workers’ Groups with the stated—though ultimately unsuccessful—goal of “joining proletarian and peasant struggles, and gaining control of the means of production and circulation of work.”23 In Chile the most interesting art appeared, paradoxically, during the Pinochet dictatorship (1974–1990). Confronted with a censorship that was harsher on the publicity around events than on the events themselves and that was unpredictable in its aesthetic judgment, the artists had to negotiate their language. They found the solution by using internationally validated avant-garde forms, which appealed to the snobbery of the more intellectual wing of the military regime, while developing a codified ambiguity in the content.24 Thus the work became officially acceptable, since it deviated from the “art-for-the-masses” movement which prevailed in Chile under the socialist government of Salvador Allende, but remained “clandestine” in its reading. One joint effort, the Collective for Art Actions (CADA)—which, ambiguously, means “each” in Spanish—did try to operate outside art institutions and to appeal to the public at large, though it did not completely dispense with exhibition spaces. In a typical work in 1980 called “Not to Die of Hunger in Art,” the artists distributed powdered milk in a shantytown, secured a blank page in the magazine Hoy with captions which suggested the idea of milk and shortage, read a text in front of the United Nations building in Santiago, exhibited some milk bags (and a text) in a gallery, had ten milk trucks parade from the factory to the Fine Arts Museum, and “closed” the entrance of the museum with a white sheet.25 Several artists embraced installation as the appropriate medium for more individualist art as well, with different degrees of allegiance to and deviation from the international formal code. Some sought to ease the communication of their messages by adhering to the international formal repertoire: glossy photographs, fluorescent lights, and a certain design quality. Others tried to convey a sense of material poverty by using per-

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ishable, nonarchival materials. The choice of options was a matter of strategy; both were politically valid, although on the whole confined within the parameters offered by the traditional art audience.26 Meanwhile, in Cuba, installations came to exemplify a culturaleconomic trend. Rather than blurring politics and art as a form of resistance, installations dealt with the limits of art and everyday life. Until 1981, Cuban art was primarily two-dimensional. The National Museum in Havana has room after room filled with paintings. Only in a couple of connecting passageways does one come across some sculptures. Within that relatively staid tradition, the installation format provided three important openings: it introduced a viable use of three dimensions; it gave an opening to a repertoire of an infinite amount of “things” to be used artistically; and it allowed for the development of an alternative to representational realism and refined abstraction. Realism was not any longer about things; it could be things. While in North America and Europe the installation mode was the product of formalistic speculation connected with the spirit of “performances” developed during the 1960s, in Cuba it became a form of “bricolage,” or assemblage. One could resort to anything usable within the context of relative material poverty. It was a poverty that, without a positive attitude, could seriously hamper creativity. The bricolage aesthetic freed artists from problems posed by imports and scarcity. It gave them a medium that encouraged appropriation, not only on a material level, but also on a theoretical one. Artists started to borrow, digest, and reassemble the solutions of other artists, putting these solutions to local use. They created an eclecticism of survival and an eclecticism of despair. These terms—which I came up with some years ago in a search for precision—have the advantage of eliminating the moral judgment built into accusations of derivation, which the mainstream so often happily attaches to anything that is done in the south. In Cuba the bricolage aesthetic also followed the example of the National Association of Innovators and Rationalizers (ANIR). This institution, which has existed in Cuba in its present form since 1976, is based on cannibalizing parts, recycling them, and using a redesign philosophy instituted by Che Guevara in the Sierra Maestra.27 It groups together scientists and technicians who are called upon to solve with ingenuity instead of parts any technical problem that arises during production. For instance, plywood has been created from bagasse (a residue of sugarcane), and hinges have been “mass-produced” from aluminum scraps using nails as an axle. While the ANIR’s ability to overcome today’s complex prob70

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lems may be somewhat in doubt, the institution is still a metaphor for the use of ingenuity on the periphery and for a true aesthetic of poverty. The use of installations in Cuba became a trademark of the artists belonging to the “Volumen I” generation. “Volumen I,” a 1981 exhibit of eleven artists in Havana, became a historic landmark for the change in Cuban art after the more dogmatic 1970s.28 The artists in that show worked with the premise that cubanía (Cuban identity) was not contingent on insularity and could be enriched by the digestion of artistic contributions from all over the world. The most “radical” work in “Volumen I” was probably Gustavo Pérez Monzón’s installation, which was made up of a web of strings connected with stones. The controversy that the exhibition raised, the myth it created, and the openings it provided for the artists themselves had repercussions which are still being felt in the production of Cuba’s youngest artists today. The installation mode, while not precluding tradi­tional painting and other media, has been internalized by Latin American artists. Today, interdimensional explorations are conducted as a natural component of art-making endeavors. Installation became an artistic form of mestizaje and of nationalizing devices. It represents a strategy of accommodation and appropriation. In that sense, in Cuba, installation art is akin to the African-based religion of Santería, which synthesizes and adapts the symbols and artifacts of Catholicism. Thus, it comes as no surprise that Santería has influenced much of the Cuban art of this century, and that some of the most accomplished installation artists of the 1980s generation—among them, José Bedia and Ricardo Rodríguez Brey—are also involved in the rituals. Not all countries are equipped like Cuba to “nationalize” foreign traditions, and the steadily increasing globalization of information is not always enriching. Cultural critic Guy Debord expressed this point clearly when he claimed that it was not only economic hegemony, but also the hegemony of the “spectacle” which defined the domination of underdeveloped regions.29 The spectacle, however, can also generate its own antibodies. Superbarrio is the name of a Mexican social activist who fights to save impoverished tenants from eviction. His aesthetics are connected with the local wrestling scene and the comic book culture that surrounds it. The story goes that in 1987 a street vendor—who had once been a wrestler— overheard a housewife in the process of being evicted from her home exclaim: “We need Superman to save us from these evil people.” The man got a costume and a mask, embroidered an “SB” on his chest, and Art and Politics

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started to show up at evictions. In court he presented legal objections that were strong enough to prevent more than fifteen hundred evictions in five years. Since eviction notices are publicized in advance, Superbarrio is able to arrange to be present during critical moments. Today, a team of Superbarrios—at least three individuals and maybe more—operates under the name. “What we do is transform protest into a festive party,” Superbarrio explained in an interview. “We have to open the faucets of creativity, of popular ingenuity, of collective memory. We have to rescue our traditions and our cultural forms for the battle. We have to reinvent those forms of action where people are not spectators, but protagonists.”30 While this article certainly doesn’t constitute a history of recent Latin American art, it may at least point in directions that traditional histories tend to overlook. Aesthetified politics are left out of art history. The use of aesthetics in politics may enter into cultural and anthropological analysis, but only when it takes the form of official and ritual pomp, not when it is a means of resistance. Politicized aesthetics, on the other hand, are discussed mostly as styles associated with political leaders who exercise rigorous control—such as Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini. An examination of these issues from the point of view of resistance may help us redefine the purpose of art-making and popularize strategies that have been carefully excluded from the creative process. For those in the underdeveloped world, it is essential to distinguish between art as a tool to create culture and achieve independence, and art as a globalizing commercial enterprise.

Notes 1. Andrea Sueldo, Silvia Andino, and Graciela Sacco, Acción de la vanguardia contra acción de la política (Rosario, Arg.: Kraft, 1987), p. 57. 2. Ibid., p. 60. 3. Carlos Basualdo, interview with Ruben Naranjo, Rosario, February 21, 1992. 4. “Tucumán Arde” was a collective and partly anonymous operation. The following artists were among those involved in the implementation of the project: Beatriz Balbé, Roberto Jacoby, and León Ferrari, from Buenos Aires; Graciela Borthwick, Jorge Cohén, and Jorge Conti, from Santa Fe; and Eduardo Favario, Osvaldo Boglione, Aldo Bortolotti, Nora de Schork, Graciela Carnevale, Noemí Escandell, Rodolfo Elizalde, Emilio Ghilioni, Marta Greiner, Rubén Naranjo, Roberto Puzzolo, Juan Pablo Renzi, María Teresa Gramuglio, María de Arechavala, Estela Pomerantz, Nicolás Rosa, José Lavarello, Edmundo Giura, Carlos Schork, David de Nully Braun, Roberto Zara, Óscar Bidustwa, Raúl Pérez Cantón,

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Sara López Dupuy, and Jaime Rippa, from Rosario (Sueldo, Andino, and Sacco, Acción de la vanguardia). See also Fernando Fariña and Hernando Ameijeiras, “La muestra ‘Tucumán arde’ fue un hecho inédito en el país,” La Maga (Buenos Aires), February 24, 1993, pp. 28–29. 5. The name Tupamaros had a triple reference: to Tupac Amarú, the rebellious Inca leader executed by the Spaniards in 1782 in Cuzco; to independentista Uruguayan gauchos of the early nineteenth century who, while fighting against Spanish rule, identified themselves as Tupamaros in honor of Tupac Amarú; and to a related song by the Olimareños, a group of folksingers who were extremely popular at the time of the development of the movement. The name first appeared in a leaflet put out by the MLN entitled “T.N.T., Tupamaros No Transamos” (We Tupamaros do not compromise). 6. “30 preguntas a un Tupamaro,” Revolución y Cultura (Havana), no. 21 (December 1970), p. 22. 7. Régis Debray, La lezione dei Tupamaros (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1972), p. 6. Debray’s admiration is particularly remarkable because the Tupamaros acted against his wisdom. In Revolution in the Revolution? (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1967, p. 56), Debray proclaims that “armed propaganda follows military action, but does not precede it. Armed propa­ganda has more to do with the internal than with the external guerrilla front. The main point is that under present conditions, the most important form of propaganda is successful military actions.” 8. MLN, Actas tupamaras (Buenos Aires: Schapire, 1971). The axiomatic quality of these ideas for the movement separates the Tupamaros from most of the other Latin American guerrilla movements. 9. Debray, Lezione, p. 19. 10. Uruguayan Armed Forces, Subversión: Las fuerzas armadas al pueblo oriental (Montevideo, 1976), p. 360. 11. Debray, Lezione, pp. 13, 38–39. The Tupamaro leadership was not conscious of this aspect of their work. Discussing this issue recently, former Tupamaros speculated that two factors affected their creativity. First, the members of the movement distrusted any kind of stereotype, a distrust which made them dissidents from traditional political groups. Second, most of the movement’s leaders had been in jail before the major operations. During their imprisonment, they had contact with common prisoners; this enabled them to develop an unusual mode of thinking, which they were able to translate into political action after their escape (conversation with the author, September 6, 1993). 12. Debray, Revolution in the Revolution?, p. 69. Several assumptions are implicit in this position which did not apply in Uruguay. First, the guerrilla leadership was assumed to be operating outside the city and therefore to be out of contact. Second, the position assumed that an urban leadership must necessarily be bourgeois, alienated, and inefficient. Still other arguments against an urban-based movement were based on the difficulty of leading “double” lives, the difficulty of being totally underground, and the lack of control over activities. The main difference, how-

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ever, between the Tupamaros and other guerrilla movements was that the former were not interested in seizing power. Instead, they were working to set the stage for a popular takeover. The Tupamaros did not achieve their goal, but the failure is not explained by Debray’s or Castro’s arguments. One of the more immediate reasons for the group’s demise was the rapid growth in its membership in a very short time without appropriate screening systems to safeguard against enemy infiltration of the higher ranks. 13. This kind of operation was abandoned in later years because the Tupamaros came to believe that the investment of time and risk in such operations was not balanced by the actual help provided to the people. 14. Jean Tinguely, a Swiss artist, was famous for his mostly nonsensical and satirical moving sculptures. In the early 1960s, he created “Homage to New York,” a contraption that self-destructed in the garden of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. 15. Subversión, see chronology, pp. 603–766, a factual and quasi day-by-day description of Uruguay between 1960 and 1973 which focuses on events considered to be connected with what the army perceived as the subversive Left. 16. MLN, Actas tupamaras, pp. 137–178. 17. Unlike the publications of many other guerrilla movements, those of the Tupamaros were mostly without pictures. 18. In The Whole World Is Watching (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), Todd Gitlin traces this aesthetification for media consumption to Jerry Rubin’s appearance in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1966. Rubin was advised by R. G. Davis, then director of the San Francisco Mime Troupe, to wear an American Revolution costume. The theory was that the image would not be corrupted by the media, while any declaration would be relayed in a distorted form (p. 171). Abbie Hoffman staged an equally theatrical event for television viewers. At the New York Stock Exchange on August 24, 1968, Hoffman created havoc by throwing 300 one-dollar bills among the stock runners. With respect to a later television appearance, he reports that “I waited until the camera was on me while I was talking and near the end of my rap I mouthed some words soundlessly, putting in the word ‘fuck’ for those who were up to a little lip reading.” See Abbie Hoffman, “America Has More Televisions Than Toilets,” in Douglas Kahn and Diane Neumaier, eds., Cultures in Contention (Seattle: Real Comet Press, 1985), p. 141. Gitlin equates the production of meanings in commercial mass culture to the production of value through labor (with the same lack of con­trol by the people). He sees this relationship with media as contributing to the demise of the New Left: “The media spotlight brought the incandescent light of social attention and then converted it to the heat of reification and judgment” (p. 246). 19. By the interdisciplinary art movement in Cuba, I am referring to projects like the Cuban Pavilion at the Montreal World’s Fair of 1968 and other architectural/visual/musical enterprises which the Cubans undertook during the 1960s.

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20. For an overview, see Artes Visuales (Mexico City), no. 23 (January 1980), which contains statements by the groups and an essay by Rita Eder. 21. The catalogue published for the occasion includes an introduction by Gabriel García Márquez, who defends Los Grupos with the old argument that not to participate in the exhibition would have left the space open for their reactionary adversaries. 22. The TAI group was composed of Luis Acevedo, Alberto Hijar, Andrés de Lun, Felipe Leal, Morris Savariego, and Afilio Tuis. 23. Rita Eder, “El arte público en México: Los grupos,” Artes Visuales (Mexico City), no. 23 ( January 1980), p. v. 24. Nelly Richard refers to this as a “buoyancy of meaning” in “Margins and Institutions: Art in Chile since 1973,” Art & Text (Melbourne), no. 21, 1986, p. 31. 25. See ibid., pp. 54–55. The members of CADA were Lotty Rosenfeld and Juan Castillo (artists), Fernando Balcells (sociologist), Raúl Zurita (poet), and Diamela Eltit (novelist). 26. Artists like Alfredo Jaar and others believe that not to follow the hegemonic “look” in art impedes communication. With that position, they run the danger, however, of becoming “mainstream” artists. On the other hand, artists like Catalina Parra and Eugenio Dittborn, who favor more casual finishes and the use of perishable materials in their work for the sake of developing a more local identity, are liable to become the targets of the mainstream’s paternalism. The problem for political artists is that, once their work is produced in isolation from the original political context and seen within the lens of the mainstream’s internationalism, the formal devices they use end up being interpreted as individual trademarks rather than as expressions of a collective culture. 27. Che carefully organized a shoe factory and a weapons factory for the guerrillas in the hills. These factories operated by assembling new units out of fragments of discarded pieces. In 1959, a workers’ initiative based on that experience created the Parts Committee in different factories in revolutionary Cuba. In 1960, consulting committees were formed to focus on the production of parts. In 1961, Che himself promoted the slogan “Worker, Build Your Own Machinery.” In 1965, the Convention of Innovators and Inventors was created, and, finally, in 1976, the ANIR came into being, dedicated to Che’s memory. 28. The eleven artists of “Volumen I” were José Bedia, Juan Francisco Elso Padilla, José Manuel Fors, Flavio Garciandía, Israel León, Rogelio López Marín (Gory), Gustavo Pérez Monzón, Ricardo Rodríguez Brey, Tomás Sánchez, Leandro Soto, and Rubén Torres Llorca. 29. Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle (Detroit: Black and Red, 1983), p. 55. 30. Mario Kaplán, “Superbarrio contra los desalojos,” Brecha (Montevideo), March 5, 1993, pp. 10–11.

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Chapter 9

The Artist ’ s Role and Image in Latin America (2004)

1 It is difficult to see a new profile for the artist after spending most of one’s life in a twentieth century impregnated by polarized ideologies that supposedly lost their validity because of a presumed phase of globalization. Conditions have changed radically with regard to how information circulates, and it is difficult to make optimistic prophecies about the new century. The twentieth century was the most genocidal in history, and the new one doesn’t show much improvement. We are starting with ultraregressive fundamentalist tendencies closer to medieval crusades and chauvinist affirmations of the nineteenth century than to the enlightened generosity that we are told to associate with the “global village.” When in this configuration one tries to specify a role for the artist—or, more modestly, what is my role as an artist—one tends to think that the artist has certain power that, well administered, may have social impact. If we think of the artist as an active factor in the shaping of culture, in these moments that possibility appears to be slim. I am skeptical of what is called “globalization.” Even worse, being an artist I tend more toward the subjective reorganization of information than to documentation. And, not having lived in Latin America for many years, I may be describing things that are going through my mind rather than those in reality. With these warnings given, I also believe that distance and maintaining my cultural connections may have some advantages and contribute useful points of view. The question is how usefulness is interpreted. All these disquisitions are directly related to a process of selfinterrogation and therefore extremely personal. However, sometimes this self-questioning may save the time of others in the same process. The answers may be personal, and the behavior that follows, even more so. And sometimes one may reach conclusions that one is not ready to follow, but 76

wishes that others would. As artists we have what, theoretically, is considered to be an unlimited freedom of action, and yet we suffer serious inertias that rule out our dreamt-of flexibility.

2 During a large part of the twentieth century, things seemed to be much clearer than they are now: there was the good and the evil and there was a third position said to be the bearer of authentic goodness, while both capitalism and communism had the monopoly on evil. Today, with one of the evils gone and the other razing the planet and procreating other evils, that third position seems to have been not so much prophetic as correct. It is not totally clear, however, if “being right” leads to victory and is of any use. Meanwhile, the intersections of religious, economic, and military fundamentalisms managed to stop ethical values from being easily distinguishable. One has to dig as if they were raisins in a pie. The problem of the previous Manichean perception of the world is no longer that it eliminates any subtleties, but, rather, that, given the mixture of contradicting ideologies within groups of people, it hampers any understanding of reality.

3 The weight of many words was different when, forty years ago, I left Uruguay with a grant to the U.S. The concept of voyage, for example, was very clear. “Voyage” meant that one went from one place to another place in the sense that one cleanly left one cultural complex to enter another one. The implications of that traveled distance decidedly went beyond what is assumed for a geographical distance measured on a map. It was because of that change in cultural complexes that I could then be classified as part of a brain drain or brain theft. Today, thanks to the Internet, what is being stolen can be reduced to the capability of the brain, but at the time it was a physical theft. The brain was an object; it was something concrete and portable. I was raised in a society where education was an innate right, and I was trained as an artist without paying a penny. Unfortunately, however, the artist profession was something that the national market couldn’t sustain. Because of this national indigence, it was much easier to accept subventions from a rich country. The Artist’s Role and Image in Latin America

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The advantage worked both ways: the new studies were useful for the artist, and the granting hegemonic center could, at minimal cost, keep an already trained professional. In my time, the cost of the education of an artist in the U.S. was about $20,000. The grant I received was $4,000. The immediate net profit made with my transference, and before counting a life of paying taxes, was $16,000. By attracting foreign artists and intellectuals, that hegemonic center was refreshing its cultural holdings at a very low cost.

4 Ironically, in a typically colonial and masochistic fashion, any triumph the artist achieved or seemed to achieve in the cultural center was not translated into a local loss but into a national victory. To triumph outside meant to be a hero inside. A friend of mine kept a little house in the U.S. until he died. The North American market was of minimal importance for his work, but as he told me: “It is a good investment; it allows me to raise my prices in my country.” During that same period, the artist who remained in Latin America had a different life. From the point of view of dominant cultural centers, the artist was a “Sunday painter,” somebody surviving with two jobs during the week and producing art in the little time left over. To be a Sunday painter was symptomatic of many interesting things. One is the ideology that the concept represents. Accordingly, the artist is a producer of commercial objects. If most of his or her time is not invested in this production, the artist cannot be considered a professional. Partial use of time downgrades the activity to superficial amateurism. Art then becomes a hobby or a pastime. Brain drain was based on this ideology. After an education geared toward professionalism, there was a reasonable expectation to be able to support a family. The failure of the enterprise, as in other activities, generated the wish to emigrate. However, with emigration the situation didn’t necessarily improve. A majority of the natives in the cultural centers also lacked the luxury of subsistence from sale of their artworks. The difference in this shared misery is that the artists who belong to the center do not dream of emigration. The envy of the native artist rarely is directed at another country, as happens on the periphery. With a shorter gaze, envy focuses only on those fortunate artists showing in the gallery next door. Competition takes place in a reduced geography. 78

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Another interesting aspect is that the artist who remained on the periphery, even when producing during stolen time, still was not perceived as usurping the word. “Artist” and “Sunday painter” were synonyms. The only requirement was to show work periodically. If the artist in the center stopped exhibiting regularly, he disappeared from the market the same as a company that goes bankrupt. On the periphery, there was enough confidence in both the activity and the person to wait. This represents a different type of ideology. The artist is a member of society and not necessarily of the market economy, and therefore is a contributor to a collective cultural project that transcends the commercial exchange.

5 It is remarkable that this ideological disparity was never fully registered or analyzed in Latin American art schools. Possibly, as a product of long processes of colonization, it was always a given that art education was quantitatively incremental, the same as with any other discipline. The student accumulates a given quantity of knowledge and then ends with some profession like engineering or law. Once the required amount is accumulated, one is let loose in the market. With some amount of knowledge one also can become an artist to then also be let loose in the market. Sometimes the educational process is a little more progressive and goes beyond seeing the student as a vessel to be filled with information. Then one can assume that the professional will become an active member of society and will try to improve it. But that assumption continues the idea that a profession is an accumulation of discrete units of knowledge. It leaves no room for a revision of the meaning of professionalism, or of what is really implied in the concept of discipline.

6 During the twentieth century, the general educational system in Latin America differed sensibly from the hegemonic system. Art schools, however, remained traditional and academic for much longer than in the cultural centers. Still, the subterranean flux of the Reform of Córdoba, which took place in 1918 and ran through the continent, was felt in them as well. These reforms affected pedagogical strategies, but also the distribution of power in the university system and tried to address the same problem among social classes. The new aim of education was to correct the social imbalances and to achieve a collective consciousness of liberation. The Artist’s Role and Image in Latin America

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The goals created a difference between educational progressiveness in Latin America and the later progressive views in developed capitalist systems. Pedagogical innovations in the latter tended to be defined as a personalized therapeutic relationship. Progressive education there identified with the individual within a capitalist structure. Ultimately, the theory was that a freed individual was better equipped to compete. The possibility that liberation of the individual from capitalism might lead to a free society was also there, but on a second level. Beyond these different directions taken in Latin America and the centers, there was also a simultaneous and parallel ideological development in art. The Latin American position seems to have been synthesized in a phrase by Paulo Freire. In his Pedagogy of the Oppressed, addressing the situation of the impoverished Brazilian Northeast and, by extension, the whole of the periphery, Freire writes: “The reading of the world precedes the reading of the word.” With precision, his statement defines the needed relationship between form and content that exists on the periphery. The hegemonic dynamic, on the other hand, stimulates formal changes so that the artist can be individualized and recognized as an author encapsulated in a trademark. The Latin American artist, while not refusing that kind of recognition, rarely speculates about form outside of a context. From the socially explicit Mexican muralism, to the more abstract but philosophical work by Torres García, to the Argentine and Venezuelan kinetic artists, to the politicized Conceptualism of the decades of the sixties and the seventies, there was always a need for explanation somewhere. The atmosphere created by the explanation had such importance that in its absence the work was in danger of being understood as an empty shell. There were formalist attitudes in Latin American art as well, but more often than not, they were used programmatically and accompanied by manifestos. This brings us to formalism. There obviously are formalist ways of reading or seeing art that may have other contents. There are also nonformalist readings that produce empty shells, as is the case with works politically and purely centered on a narrative message. Generally speaking, however, we come from a century that has been hegemonized and homogenized in its history of art by a formalist attitude. This formalism taught us to look at art from the surface inward, and to favor looks over communication. The reductionist genealogy “Abstraction–Minimalism–Conceptual Art” is a typical example of that formalist historical narrative. It was the

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evolutionist paradigm in the centers and particularly in the U.S. Meanwhile, on the periphery the process may be summed up in the complicated but more accurate “politics-poetry-economy-pedagogy-Conceptualism,” though sometimes muddled by the pressure of formalist history. In any case, the hegemonic genealogy still used artistic self-reference, while the periphery was already setting the foundations for the resistance typical of cultural regionalism. When on the periphery we arrive at the politically rooted Conceptualist strategies of the 1960s (which often preceded hegemonic Conceptual Art), that work was partly the product of a need to eliminate or minimize the production costs associated with the making of traditional art. More important, however, it served as a tool for consciousness raising. This vantage point was much more literary in its approach and often led to the use of poetry as a reference for artistic quality. Poetry not only emphasized the poetic, but also was an example of a nonmaterial support. Within these conditions, the Latin American artist, like artists in the rest of the world, continued to think about things that were unthinkable and inaccessible with the use of nonartistic tools. But it was the poetic certitude that seemed more appropriate for quality control, not the brushstroke, even while painting.

7 I remember when I was twenty-two and an old a friend of my father’s, a psychiatrist and art collector, offered to psychoanalyze me. I politely refused with the argument that my neuroses were useful (although another influential factor was that he had never bought a piece of mine). Nevertheless, I confessed one fear. I believed that making art at my age was a natural activity. I was tormented by the possibility that this activity might cease once I became a mature adult. I had a real panic that, after few years I might end up with a trivial and boring job, having lost the perceptions that gave me the feeling of being alive. His answer took me by surprise. He told me (as was to be expected) that to give me a correct answer he would have to psychoanalyze me. But then he added that to be responsible in his assessments he would also have to find out many things about my person and habits. How and how much did I sleep, what diet did I have, what was my physical health and condition, what ability and level of concentration did I have, what was my energy level, and many other things. The list seemed fit to evaluate an

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Olympic runner. At the time, although I said that I believed in the normality of art making, I was still among those who believed in inspiration and that when one works it is because one feels inspired. And if inspiration is not there, one has to wait until it shows up. The description I was given instead was shocking but useful. It made me understand that, even if it was a natural activity, art needed dedication and rational decisions as fertilizers. The shock helped me get rid of a good deal of obscurantism. What took me more time was to understand the ideological significance of the description. The core idea here was not the getting rid of obscurantism, but of competition. He who trains better, and the most, wins. And he who wins is the best. This has a corollary: one doesn’t have to be the best; it suffices to make believe that one is the best. To reach this consensus it is not enough to make work. The artist has to promote himself or be promoted. An artificial need has to be created so that the work is considered indispensable. The task then shifts away from the will to affect culture as it was assumed in the self-definition of artists during the 1960s, when the term “cultural worker” was used. It was a self-definition in Latin America during the late fifties, and it became fashionable in the cultural centers after the traumas of 1968. In the context of the mainstream, “cultural worker” reduced the role and importance of the individual, but did not erase it. As an artist, one still has as a first task the affirmation of individuality for profit, fame, and historical marking. It is only as a second task that the megalomaniac and delirious possibility of being omnipotent comes to mind to effectively achieve a cultural change. Accordingly, that cultural change would come about thanks to individual contribution without considering any collective action.

8 It would be schematic and superficial to polarize commercial art and noncommercial art. Equally simplistic would be to attribute a cultural purity to one in detriment of the other, or to identify art for commerce with the hegemonic market and art that is not commercial with the periphery. Unfortunately, categories don’t line up neatly into a binary diagram. We should not fall into the temptation of simplifying the function of art as it has developed historically in Latin America and in the hegemonic centers.

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These are all warnings I give myself because that schematic approach is something that always has tempted me and still does. But from its beginnings, the colonizing process was too powerful to allow for a radical and clean differentiation. Today, that same process, under the guise of globalization, continues to impose values the way it did with the cruder imperialist processes. However, even applying a more subtle range of judgment that allows for middle tones, it cannot be denied that the power of the market and the possibilities for profit are sensibly smaller on an indigent periphery. One can at least say that on the periphery there is a bigger margin to maintain some noncommercial aspects that identify the artist and his or her role in society as an agent for cultural change. That identification of functions defines the artist in relation to the collective.

9 I will use a polarized model that I know doesn’t happen in reality. In the extreme case of a culture shaped by a cultural market as opposed to a culture shaped by social noncommercial interaction, there is a stress not only on the fetishism of the object, but on the fetishism of individuality. Under the aegis of individualist freedom of expression, narcissism and the marketing of its products is stimulated more than freedom. As an artist not only do I have to use myself as a subject matter of primary and transcendental importance to leave a mark, but I also have the right to “autobiograph” the world. By this I mean that I may appropriate my environment and declare it part of my personal life. It is this social permission in the context of the market that ultimately concentrates the produced value in the artist’s signature. The signature is, in effect, the concentration of autobiography in its maximum density. Once the data is processed by others, an autobiography that achieves commercial success becomes biography. The artworks are accepted as part of that biography, enriched by their own sub-biographies, which are the pedigree or history of provenance. The biographies are then organized and form the chronological structure that establishes the narrative weaving of the history of art. The belief that the transition of autobiography into biography and then into history (or placement in history) happens in this order and is a continuous and natural process is an ideological fabrication alien to any scientific reality. At the time, the idea that anything I may do—any trace I may leave— will leave a mark in history and will be rewarded with admiration is obvi-

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ously stimulating and attractive. It generates a greediness that can be satisfied only by constant production. It prompts the wish to compete, since the real estate of history is limited, and the space I may occupy can be taken by somebody else. The irony is that this leads to being more concerned with grabbing a place than with creating work. The public we address ceases to be our community and is reduced to a limited group of buyers and to posterity. The work of art has to comply with the twofold function of being desirable for acquisition and also serving as a monument to the artist who made it. In a noncommercial situation taken to its utopian extreme, that monument to me would lose any significance. Art would be an act of communication only in the collective arena. As an individual artist I become a lens that helps understand the kaleidoscope that makes the community. This doesn’t mean that biography ceases to exist. But when it appears and is used, it is as a sign of respect by the community toward an individual and not a publicity tool to fix an image or a value. Although there are economic successes (sometimes very disproportionate) on the periphery, other forms of profit may have a greater cultural base than that provided by a simple offer-and-demand interaction. There is, for example, what we could call “bureaucratic profit” as opposed to “mercantile profit.” It can range from a semidiplomatic passport to carry out research in other countries, to prizes in a competition, to those longed-for pensions for life. At least this bureaucratic profit tries to represent some collective interests, even if these only represent a class in power, which usually is alien to the real collectivity. The uses of biography, then, serve on one side as a symbol of collective respect and as a historical marking, and as a metaphor that uses personal information to create a historical narration, on the other. These uses are symptoms for an artificial opposition created between identity (the collective) and originality (the individual). Identity and originality therefore represent two opposed ideologies. The path drawn by the sequence autobiography-biography-history is consistent within the commercial capitalist environment in which most of us are living today. It is a confused ideology because its rhetoric mixes idealistic concepts that seem to be antithetical to a strategy of unscrupulous competition, such as freedom of individual expression, nonconformism, and antiauthoritarianism. The reverse path, of history-biographyautobiography, where the work is contextualized in its collective cultural

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effect, isn’t totally clean either. Often it implies the need for servility, for an acceptance of dogma, and for unhealthy renunciations of self, all of which are not very helpful for artistic expression.

10 The fact that autobiography-biography-history may be an instrument of mercantilism doesn’t mean that products created within that system lack validity. Although we may differ with the values of our socioeconomic environment, the environment is consistent and shared by a majority of the population. Art production therefore is bound to reflect its society the same as any collection of archaeological artifacts does in a given moment. Also, regardless of what Communist ideologues said during the last century, capitalist art is not necessarily a production consistent with petit bourgeois values. The free-enterprise environment has some margin for diversity. But what is paradoxical about a production that mostly addresses personal achievements is that, with this stress on individuality and autobiography as components intrinsically connected with an ideology that promises individual triumph, the final result still is a reflection of a collective culture. There is an unexpected parallel in this with the “reflection” the traditional Communist Party demanded from its own artists, even when this reflection was idealized, preestablished, and dictated. The act of reflection is the same; what is reflected is different, though no less collective. Seen anthropologically, the ideology of individualist triumph is consistent with and probably part of the ideology that articulated social Darwinism. It is the ideology that first led to speculations about elitism to then proclaim the superiority of some people over others. This differentiation continued with the eugenic movements of early-twentieth-century England and the U.S. They espoused the sterilization of individuals classed as “inferior” because of congenital flaws, poverty being one of them. Not surprisingly, the ideology made Hitler very happy and culminated in Nazi genocide. To have a rational varnish, this ideology invoked economic efficiency. Sterilization and the elimination of defective people would save state funds by reducing the need for social services for the handicapped. Also, it would seem that the competitive individualism so described would lead to the elimination of noncompetitive communities. Those communities

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self-defined as superior thus derived the benefit of survival or total rule because of their competitive nature. The irony is that both types of communities ultimately produced a culture of anonymity.

11 Even from an individualist point of view, the autobiography-biographyhistory trajectory has a dynamic of contradictions, and things may go awry. During the mid-nineties the then-director of MoMA, Richard Oldenburg, resigned his post. Four months later he became the director of the North American section of Sotheby’s. Oldenburg saw this as a logical move. He expressed to the press his admiration for Sotheby’s experts (“They have as great a knowledge as museum curators have”). In regard to the continuity of his career, he said: “It is the same art world, only from a different point of view.” The news appeared in the New York Times of March 17, 1995, a clipping I had kept but couldn’t find when I needed it. I checked the index of the paper and discovered that Oldenburg’s resignation was listed under his name. However, the article referring to his new job, dedicated to him and his background and containing his personal statements, was listed under Sotheby’s name. With his transference from museum to auctions, Oldenburg lost his name and public individuality. He went from the socalled culture attributed to individualized power to another culture that probably is the truer one. It is interesting that this culture, no less elitist and equally competitive, is anonymous. As director of MoMA, Oldenburg had individualized press. Now he may aspire only to space in social gossip columns or in news about financial scandals. One possible explanation is that real culture identifies the place where power really lies, without the need for individual names. One might ask if real cultures have an anthropological self-perception, and if the culture attributed to individualized power is no more than a hypocritical construct.

12 Although I would like to, it is obvious that I cannot completely ignore the center-periphery relationship and its parallel denominations, empirecolony, North-South, developed-underdeveloped, or whatever, and their

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satellite concepts like multiculturalism and otherness. I know that these are concepts that by tradition have been linked with a geographical body that today seems to have lost its rigidity. However, the generic validity unfortunately has not been lost, and it still shows up in the definition of an artist and his role. From a general cultural point of view, the precise definition of what an artist is doesn’t seem too important. It matters more what impact the artistic production has. Therefore, it doesn’t seem to matter what importance traditional geography has in all of this. However, seen from the point of view of the artist, these changes do have importance. The reason is that to some extent the artist does identify with and is identified according to certain denominations—nationality is a powerful example—and they define the public addressed by the artist. They are the conditions that affect the questions “With whom am I talking?” and “To whom am I selling?” or the combination of both. When the artist is identified with the country of origin in terms of roots, traditions, passport, or any concept glued to the chauvinist nation-state construct, the real public is only a fragment of the population that inhabits those ideas. Be it as a platform of affirmation or as a target for challenge, the understandings and conventions on which a work of art is based belong to a segment of population much reduced from those covered by borderlines. It is a segment greatly conditioned by definitions of social class, since the concepts operating in art that were used during modernism and are still operating today belong mostly to the middle class. Openings to more popular manifestations are attempts at appropriation by the middle class. With some conditions, it is a move by the national center to cover the national periphery, understood as being homogeneous. “Multiculturalism” is a similar gambit, but with an understanding that the periphery is heterogeneous. In spite of multiculturalism’s initial wellmeaning attempts to recognize nonhegemonic cultural identities, a deterioration took place once it was applied to art. Multiculturalism became a tool for a partial hegemonic appropriation of those peripheral manifestations considered useful. Multicultural policies always operated under the assumption that the national environment had to be conserved. This determined the wish to define dissimilar cultural expressions as forms of national subcultures. This view then expanded to embrace the nonnational periphery. However, by maintaining the nationalist point of view, the expectation was directed to find exoticism. Thus, the correct appreciation of local

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expressions on the periphery became impossible. And so did a differentiation of the social classes that dictated those expressions. In both cases, national and international, the reading of art is based on the consumption of the artwork. These are not readings that try to identify the coordinates for the creation of the works; they are performed as an appropriation. The symptomatic appearances are classified by their usefulness or uselessness in revitalizing the forms of expression for those who appropriate them.

13 It is difficult to criticize this appropriation, because it originates in the same idea that sustains syncretism in oppressed cultures. In that sense, multiculturalism is both a respectful process of assimilation of otherness and an inverse process of colonization performed by otherness. It may be a useful process if one accepts the notion of cultural coexistence within a system of borderlines. The accent here is not on coexistence but on borderlines. It is if geographic borderlines are not recognized as definitive that the construction becomes problematic. As a tool for hegemonic cultures, multiculturalism tries to impose some order on a potentially chaotic ensemble of subcultures with the purpose of keeping a national identity and possibly also an imperial one.1 Dominant culture sacrifices part of its parochial essentialism with the purpose of achieving unity among all its “citizens” by opening up to subcultures organized in other languages and ethnicities.2 Taken to a global scale, that same multiculturalism reflects an expansion of frontiers, the enlarging of the province more than its elimination. An example of globalization as a form of provincial expansion is that only 3 percent of the books published in the U.S. are translations of books written in languages other than U.S. English. Meanwhile, the book market in other countries doesn’t encourage translations of intellectual books written in the U.S. because it is assumed that intellectuals from other countries read English, thus opening space for the expansion. Chauvinism within the U.S. continues in spite of globalization rhetoric, as demonstrated by the recent prohibition of any translation or correction of spelling and grammar in any text originating in a pariah country. The example in this moment applies to Iran. Any improvement introduced into an Iranian text is considered collaboration with the enemy.3

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14 Depending on the dynamics under which one operates, the abolition of borderlines may be either attractive or repulsive. The Roman Empire gave a debatable version of abolition of frontiers, and the same may be said about nineteenth-century European colonialism and twentieth-century and current U.S. expansionism. These are globalizations, but in the sense of a country self-defining as an expanding globe. It keeps inflating to occupy all the space available. “Available space” is relative because it refers only to areas that merit an economic interest. The spaces that don’t are dispensable or, following Manuel Castells, “Fourth World,” black holes in the universe of commerce.4 In a system where culture is a reflection of economy, that is, where individualism, competence, triumph, and the direction given by autobiography-biography-history are stressed, expansion includes a very particular interpretation of cultural values. The presumption is that those black holes that lack economic interest are also devoid of cultural interest. Never mind that the local culture may be functional by having its own coherence and by serving the people in it. What is irritating in this is not the lack of access to the mainstream but the erection of a lack of access to the periphery. More important, it is the lack of respect and the ability to allow a society on the periphery to live in peace.

15 It is inevitable that the role and image of the artist of the twenty-first century be defined by the position taken by the artist toward these complex issues and by how he or she self-describes in terms of social function. At least in utopian terms, it would seem that the division between being a producer of merchandise and a cultural worker still seems valid. But the consequences and strategies have changed, because the situation is less clear. In fact, the division is less radical, since one doesn’t cleanly navigate in one of the extremes, but, rather, operates in a field of tension created by both. Often, it is not a personal decision, but one determined by the environment. Meanwhile, it is evident that some of the choices—the easiest and simplest—consist of limiting the commercial production, endorsing present dynamics, or declaring impotence. It is clear that the “nationalist and antiimperialist” art of the twentieth century, which already was of dubious The Artist’s Role and Image in Latin America

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effectiveness but served as a platform for resistance, doesn’t help much today, since the ideas of nation and of empire don’t define our communities anymore. The conscious decision to function as a cultural worker as defined by the militancy of the last century today seems even more difficult, at least until one defines what a community is today. Maybe it is a false division. It may be easier to define all artists as cultural workers and more useful to discuss different communities as different publics we can address and that, in turn, define us. This may range, ordered by scale, from the neighborhood in which we live, to a community we organize, to a part of the art market that appreciates us or that we want to be appreciated by, to a social class, a sociocultural region, the hegemonic center, to the periphery as a complex whole.

16 For personal political reasons, I elect to see things from the periphery. The concept and self-awareness of “periphery,” even if incomplete, is a globalizing dynamic. Though not obvious, the periphery also is a cultural society where the common language is not a spoken language, but a shared process of victimization and resentment. The periphery groups a majority of the people of the world and infiltrates the geography identified with the hegemonic powers. It therefore threatens some of the factors solidifying hegemony, such as chauvinist symbols and hermetic borderlines. This was articulated some decades ago as the “Third World within the First World.” The phrase identified the declassed minorities in the big urban centers. This is a reality that disqualifies the traditional nationalist art tied to geography, which ultimately satisfies only the needs for identification of a small local and oligarchic middle class that never represented the full population of a country. We are witnessing a new geography. It is not a geography that ignores local communities in a neighborhood or a village. It is an information system that allows that neighborhood or village to connect, share, and expand with those who have similar interests. More than a geography it is an “infography,” a world no longer organized by one’s travels, but by how one informs and is informed. Even if power is still represented by its presence in situ, it also is defined by the control of the flux of information. The relationship center/periphery is reflected in the relationship of who emits information and who receives it, who controls the circuits and distribution of information. Probably the biggest change today is that the artist’s public is not a 90

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static and localized mass anymore, a group of people with their feet buried in a precise location. Today, the artist has nearly infinite ways of defining a public. It doesn’t matter anymore if the public is physically or virtually present. No matter where the public is physically, communication can be kept as intimate as it used to be with a painting in a gallery. To an extent, contact is based on the content of the work, and it is also based partly on the increasing precision of the definition of who the proper public for the work is. The “art for the people” that was a symbol for twentieth-century activism consisted of works that not only had messages often designed for indoctrination, but that also were intelligible to the broadest common denominator possible. The binary option was elite or people. And when one spoke of “people,” art was “for” the people. Art for the people was the product of a paternalistic attitude into which the middle class tried to fit its values pertaining to art for the needs it attributed to the proletariat. That is how the painting on canvas became a mural and a militant print, and how the image was made obvious. The people had no right to mystery or to the expansion of knowledge; the people were left only with permutations of the already known. That is why it remained art “for” the people and never could develop into art “by” the people. The other exploration was in media. As an extension of the greater public addressed by murals and prints, artists played with nonart spaces and with all the means of dissemination possible, greatly enhanced by electronic media. However, more than the art of the media, it was the craft of the media that got improved. Each technical innovation generated enormous numbers of works that showed what could be done technically. Very few managed to give a new experience that would make contributions to the culture with which we identify. Politically, the work often addressed a consciousness conditioned by logic and information. The same means the oppressor used were used to fight him. But this is why there was a continuation in the permutation of known things. They were important steps toward opening new media and transgressing the accepted ones and, in that sense, achieved a radical opening. But the decisive step, to deal with distribution and democratization of artistic power, was not taken. The reason for this lack of concretion was not due to an absence of political lucidity, but to its narrow application. None of the political programs used acknowledged the possibility that the unknown could be part of a political platform. Media served to communicate predetermined messages instead of allowing for poetic evocations that might generate The Artist’s Role and Image in Latin America

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new creations. The same as artists in other times, artists today are in danger of being seduced by the exploration of media and allowing them to define their work. It is easy to confuse new art with new crafts, since the invention or experimentation often is mistaken for originality. While these enrich the possibilities of creation, they don’t enrich creation. If creation is accepted as the primary function of the artist, that is, not re-creation or re-production, but making or facilitating something unprecedented, we are defining art as a way of expanding knowledge. The question is whether this expansion should be bound by any ethical constraints. It would seem that the real role of the artist has not changed in this regard. Because of the exploration of the unknown, art in our cultures always has had a subversive quality. Today, when one of the urgencies is to combat fundamentalism and obscurantism, this quality of subversion may have to come further to the fore. This may be the grounds for, if not a redefinition of the role of the artist, at least a readjustment for our times.

Notes 1. Will Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 76. 2. In the U.S., this policy has been and is very clear. Puerto Rico is an associated state due to the primacy of the Spanish language. Florida and Hawaii were given statehood only once English became the primary language (ibid., pp. 28– 29). The integration of ethnic groups does not mean that power is shared. In 1995, the Afro-American population made up 12.4 percent of the total population, but it had only 1.4 percent representation in government. “Hispanics” were 8 percent of the population, with 0.8 percent in government (ibid., p. 132). 3. Adam Liptak, “The Crime of Editing: U.S. Tells Publishers Not to Touch a Comma in Manuscripts from Iran,” New York Times, February 28, 2004, p. A8. 4. See Manuel Castells, The Power of Identity (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 1997).

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Out of Geography and Into the Moiré Pattern (1996 )

Chapter 10

To speak of artists as “facing history” suggests that art and history are normally separate, occupying mutually exclusive arenas. By implication, the artist does not participate in the struggles for power that make history, but plays a passive role as witness, recorder, or moralist. Thus, a work of art is not perceived as a historical act but only as container of historical information. In the case of Latin America, this polarity of “art” and “history” is risky, for it tends to obscure one of the most distinctive aspects of Latin American art: the intricate interweaving of art activity and social life, of art making and history making, of formalism and art-as-politics. Thus, while European modernist thought can be identified in the poetry of Mallarmé, for example, to find a Latin American model one would go to the work of Simón Rodríguez. Both authors share the formal break of the linearity of writing. Mallarmé was interested in the possible musical structure of words and their relationship to space. He tried to capture the intangibility reserved for artistic endeavors and its aspirations to sublimity. Simón Rodríguez,1 instead, was uninterested in art but obsessed with the clear transmission of his thought. He broke the linearity of text seventy years before Mallarmé, but to better represent his flow of ideas, in which pedagogy and politics were his ultimate concerns. In his view, art was a design method for rendering ideas more precisely, thus making them accessible for use in the real world, where problems had to be solved. “Without painting,” he once wrote, “there is no memory, just dispersed or piled-up ideas.”2 Thanks to the processes of colonization and the widespread belief among emerging nations that modernity was a condition for independence, Mallarmé’s name is better known in Latin America than that of Rodríguez. However, Rodríguez represents an attitudinal foundation that, even when not explicit, is latent in most Latin American cultural expressions. This is in part due to the social role of the artist. Economic conditions in Latin America promote crossover between art 93

and other activities. Since local markets have traditionally been economically unviable, art making has tended to be a part-time activity, directed more toward conversing with the broader public than to producing work destined for sale to the elite consumers, who tend to favor more formalist products. Someone once observed that, while in Latin America artists absenting themselves from the exhibition circuit for five years are seen as taking a rest, in New York such an absence would be considered permanent. Conversing can be interrupted and resumed; in a commercial environment it constitutes a withdrawal from the market, and the void is quickly filled by somebody else. But it is the conversing role of Latin American artists that gives the work a higher degree of porosity in relation to everyday life. During the sixties and early seventies, two forces converged to intensify the interpenetration of art and politics. On the one hand, dematerialization in the arts opened wide the door to politicization of art beyond the traditional use of content. At the same time, a proliferation of guerrilla movements in the political arena created new opportunities for forms of political action not strictly confined to military strategy or political violence. It can be said that the emblematic role of the artist in Latin America is not so much that of the recorder, the designer, or the shaman as that of the preacher/provocateur. This has been especially true at those times when the revolutionary quest for a distinctive Latin American identity reached a peak. At the same time, it must be recognized that “Latin America” is not a homogeneous entity but a utopian concept. The real Latin America is a multiplicity of forces, values, and directions in which there is room for NAFTA and mainstreaming as well as for “independence” and revolution. Furthermore, the mirage of homogeneity can be and often has been punctured by the projects of diverse nation-states (or cultural subgroupings) pursuing separate interests and claiming distinctive identities. Accordingly, the topics of the preaching and the aims of the provocation have been subject to shifts calibrated for each political situation. Political confrontation and revolutionary defiance diminished during the 1970s, while art started to rematerialize. Looking back, 1970 was a symbolic year. On the political end, Francisco Julião, the revered leader of the Brazilian Northeast Peasant Leagues, rejected the strategy of insurrection and criticized the student movements of 1968, advocating instead for the creation of a broad political front among progressive parties using strategies focused on reentering the electoral process.3 On the artistic end, the “Information” exhibition in the Museum of 94

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Modern Art validated subversive Latin American art as acceptable within the mainstream. The terrain was being prepared for a focus on more local identities and a search for roots, both of which, toward the 1980s, took the form of regional crafts. Meanwhile, some examples of an art of resistance sprang up in pockets— both in elite and popular sectors—in Mexico, Chile, and Argentina. Known as “Los Grupos” in Mexico, several collectives appeared during the 1970s, which in 1978 tried to combine into the Mexican Front of Cultural Workers. In Chile during the late 1970s and early 1980s, the Grupo CADA tried to use art as a tool against the economic and social inequities created by Pinochet’s regime, while the arpilleras crafts collectives sought to give expression and financial support to the families of political prisoners.4 In 1983, three Argentine artists ( Julio Flores, Guillermo Kexel, and Rodolfo Agueberry) filled the streets of Buenos Aires with silhouettes of people bearing the names of “disappeared” relatives of the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo. Known as el siluetazo, this activity spurred further events during subsequent years. Aestheticized political action was exemplified in the late 1980s in Mexico with the appearance of Superbarrio, a former wrestler and street vendor. During the 1980s, Cuba seemed to be the place where art became most closely integrated with society. A new breed of artists, educated entirely under the Revolution, professionally subsidized, and with relatively few restrictions, embarked on developing a new art that was independent of the didacticism of the 1970s, sensitive to formalist issues, and open to the appropriation of elements of the international repertoire for adaptation to Cuban reality. The result was a mixture of formalism with vernacular, poetry and humor, politics and identity, in which traditional disciplines in the arts were superseded and the installation format was embraced. The third wave of this group, toward the end of the 1980s, sought to revitalize revolutionary tenets, provoking (ironically) a new round of censorship. The Cuban case is interesting because it is the only example in Latin America of politicized art activity in which the intent was to improve and refine the political structure rather than to destroy and replace it. Until the 1980s, definitions of “Latin America” always presumed a precise territorial referent. This no longer works today, for migrations of many kinds and in many directions have by now created a diaspora encompassing not only Chicanos and Nuyoricans in the U.S.A., but Latin American “pockets” on every continent. As a consequence, the Latin American utopia, like much of the rest of the periphery, has taken the shape of a web. It overlays the other web, the one created by the meOut of Geography and Into the Moiré Pattern

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tastasized center. The significance of geographically defined boundaries has diminished, and a regionalist attitude now hovers over or under the expanding veneer of internationalism. The overlay creates new cultural systems that, like moiré patterns, are virtual sets of points readable from any position on either level. This shift, from a geographic to a moiré pattern, makes the traditional tenets of identity more brittle than ever and raises new questions about the directions to be taken in the political engagement of art. Until now the various expressions of politicized art in Latin America have all presumed and depended on geographically based concepts. With the increasing loss of geographic jurisdictions, the observation and confrontation of power runs the danger of losing focus. New tools and concepts will be needed, not to keep a supply of political content, but to sharpen the ability to maintain a truly political reading of the work of art and its role for both producers and consumers, so that we can stay in history rather than having to face it.

Notes 1. Simón Rodríguez (1771–1854), a Venezuelan teacher and thinker, is best known for having been the tutor of Simón Bolívar. 2. Tratado sobre las luces y las virtudes sociales (1840) (Caracas: Ediciones del Congreso de la República, 1988), vol. 2, p. 155. 3. “Carta abierta a los jóvenes revolucionarios brasileños,” June 15, 1970, Marcha (Montevideo) July 17, 1970, pp. 16–17. 4. The arpilleras, “burlap” in English, were pieces of fabric taken from flour sacks on which different everyday scenes where depicted through applications and embroidering. The work, which flourished as a movement between 1973 and 1984, was distributed internationally by church organizations.

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The Reconstruction of Salami (2003)

Chapter 11

Edited by Selby Hickey

The twentieth century ensured that when we discuss the history of art we think in terms of “isms.” A mass of information is organized into accessible slices that lead us to access it with ease and efficiency thanks to a process we could appropriately call “subdivisionism.” The most precise analogy I can think of here is that of a salami sausage. In its slices one can see flat configurations of white spots caused by the distribution of fat. The pattern of the slice is so convincing that one forgets it is caused by the chaotic distribution of granules that define a completely different whole. And hiding behind the consumable collection of slices is a mercantile ideology that led to the invention of the deli slicer. The reality of the whole has been tampered with, but the slices are real and visible; they comply with the requirements of objectivity. Ideology becomes invisible. When in art we refer to “Minimalism” or “Conceptualism,” or any other art style, for that matter, we are confining ourselves to slices. There is a degree of objectivity—configurations in both are identifiable—but the ideology that determined and generated the slicing remains hidden. The situation of the art historical slice is a little more complex than that of cold cuts, since there are more conflicting dynamics at play. For example, with respect to cultural transformation, art is presented generally out of phase with its commercial success. The process of cultural transformation that supports an incipient ism usually starts in a small local context. Only if it becomes accessible to a larger audience and embraced by a broader market for art does it become recognized as part of the cultural patrimony of all humanity, named and anointed with the status of “ism.” But the processes by which art is accepted as part of humanity’s cultural patrimony are anthropological and political rather than artistic and, for that reason, tend to be ignored when discussing art. “Subdivisionism” not only hides the processes by which an ism goes from one stage to the other, it also blocks any chance for questioning. Ignoring the forces that bring about the shift of a regional and ver97

nacular expression (evolved according to the internal dynamics of a community) into international and canonical prominence does not make them any less consequential. Art that is honored as having transformed culture often has achieved those effects through social forces rather than artistic ones. But because the role of nonartistic factors is ignored, what passes for the Story of Art is really the story of power relations within the international contest. As a consequence, events are underlined or ignored for the sake of power rather than aesthetics. For example, in the early 1980s, Anselm Kiefer (Germany) and Julian Schnabel (U.S.), among others, were hailed as neo-Expressionists in an international context. Twenty years earlier, Luis Felipe Noé (Argentina), Antonia Eiriz (Cuba), and many others in Latin America were denied the use of an internationally valid neoExpressionist label though their aesthetic was comparable. While Kiefer and Schnabel were placed in the pantheon of international artists, Noé and Eiriz were relegated to the status of “local” producers. During the fifties in Japan and France (followed by Latin America a decade later) artists started to produce Conceptualist works. In the chronology of art history, however, the emergence of “Conceptual Art” is attributed to the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s, for that is when the style appeared in the U.S. Anything before 1960 is classed as “proto-Conceptual.” It would appear, then, that one of the conditions for graduating from regional to international importance is possession of hegemonic power. Regionalist expressions of hegemonic centers are by definition above “region” and “international” by their very locus, whereas on the periphery, regional expression must deregionalize in order to get access to the international arena. Even then, they participate in internationalization under dosed and controlled conditions provided by hegemonic filters such as “multiculturalism.” Integration is never complete or acritical. Only those formal elements considered useful for the revitalization of hegemonic art are accepted, and inevitably the connection to an original context is blanked out. It is a process that could be seen as the hegemonic version of syncretism. Instead of new meanings becoming added to old images, in the hegemonic version of syncretism, the meaning is removed. The images are expropriated and emptied. The process of internationalization contains inconsistencies and contradictions that should be examined. For instance, there is the contradiction that the expansion of a hegemonic regionalism in art is defined as a cultural act, whereas the expansion of a regionalism from the political periphery is treated as a commercial act. The first is viewed as part of 98

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the story of art, the second, as part of cultural assimilation. Both have important political implications, yet in neither case are politics seen as relevant. In the first case, there is a taste of old colonialisms designed to cement hegemony. In the second, the international market supersedes the local one. The rhetoric that accompanies hegemonic globalization tries to dismiss such speculations as anachronistic. It is assumed that there is an economy in the process of globalization, an information system in the process of steadily unifying human experiences, and a metapolicy for humanity in which values and beliefs should be homogenized. Given such assumptions, defense of the vernacular is clearly quixotic at best and, at worst, retrogressive. But what if the assumptions are changed? What if it is assumed that the economy of the planet is in a long-term process of collapse, that the system of information is vulnerable to counterinformation, and that a uniform global society is neither possible nor desirable? If these are our assumptions and the globe is conceived as a polycultural system, then defense of the vernacular is an act of resistance that is neither naïve nor regressive. Even if one is inclined to embrace “globalism” and “globalization,” the vitality of regionalist expression is palpable; its presence cannot be denied or ignored. Sheer practicality requires that it be acknowledged. Very recently, the viceroy of the U.S. in Iraq, referring to attacks and acts of sabotage against the troops of occupation, commented with unexpected lucidity: “These are people who don’t want the coalition to succeed.”1 So far in this text there hasn’t been a need to differentiate concretely between “nation” and “region.” Both, and “community” as well, are terms that have connected geographically. The term “nation,” though it has traditionally emphasized social identity, nevertheless has always also connoted a geographical area. “Region,” though it has always emphasized a geographical area, has nevertheless always connoted a common social patrimony of some kind or to some degree. Of the two terms, however, “region” is by far the most promising concept for discussions about art. “Nation,” promoting and mystifying binary opposites such as inside/outside, citizen/foreigner, and patriotism/ treason, carries too much ideological baggage to be useful. “Region,” on the other hand, because it avoids the rigidity of political boundaries, is porous and expandable as a concept that gives context primacy over law, empirical values over normative ones. Using the lens of “region,” many more factors relevant to the process of making and expanding culture The Reconstruction of Salami

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come into view as disparities in wealth and power, and as flows of information, capital, and labor. Originating in topographical reference, “region” takes on social meaning, providing a way of organizing information about the human experience that transcends political jurisdictions, but at the same time calls attention to the organic and particular. Furthermore, both diaspora and the Web have contributed to a shift and an enriched redefinition of region and regionalism and increasingly transformed them into cultural entities.2 “Globalization” is really an ideology, not a description.3 It makes elective processes sound inevitable and somehow historically progressive. Homogeneity, the core value of globalization, can be implemented only through imperialism. In the old days, imperialism referred to geographic expansion, and resistance to imperial expansion was geographically concrete and specific. Anticolonial nationalism in the twentieth century was codified as a demand for territorial independence. The resistance to imperialism, however, is no longer limited to geographically punctual actions. Cultural regionalism, instead, conducts its actions of resistance by using information circuits. Unhampered by geographic constraints, they are open to a broader ideological range.4 It is undeniable that, with the speed and intensity of today’s flux of information, formal symptoms of art styles become instantly ubiquitous. The impression is given that we have arrived at one predominant art form. Stylistically, the perception may be correct. On a deeper level, however, and leaving aside issues of style, a radical diversity of ideas appears beneath the surface. When ideas and copyrights became merchandise, the physical presence of art lost some of its function. When the “installation” as place or creative vessel became an a priori format—similar to what the frame of the canvas used to be—the technical repertoire was hugely expanded. As art was increasingly embraced as a tool to solve problems, emotionalist and hedonist premises lost their importance. In this context, Conceptualist strategies flourished around the world. From Duchamp to the present, a common attitude toward art has appeared in the most diverse settings across the globe. The creation of “site-specific” works has added further weight to the appearance of homogeneity, for no longer is it merely the art object that is exported; now the whole factory travels. These are momentous developments in art, but it would be a mistake to view them as marking the disappearance of regionalism, or the demise of the vernacular. A century characterized and ruled by formalist attitudes has just 100

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closed, one that taught us to read works of art from the surface inward, from package design to content, from facial makeup to soul. The reductionist genealogy “realism–Abstraction–Minimalism–Conceptual Art,” a typical example of a formalist historical narrative, was an evolutionist paradigm created in the cultural centers, with the last steps particularly strong in the U.S. The export of this schematic point of view obscured another, different and more complex, genealogy that was shaping up on the periphery and that can be synthesized, somewhat awkwardly, as “politics-poetry-economics-pedagogy-Conceptualism.” While the hegemonic genealogy tended to artistic self-reference, the periphery was already laying down the coordinates for the resistance noted in cultural regionalism. The Conceptualist strategy on the periphery had political roots, was the product of a need to cut down or minimize the production costs of traditional works of art, served as a tool to raise consciousness, and used poetry both as a reference to immateriality and to substantiate artistic quality. Within this setting, the artist was able and encouraged to think those things unthinkable through nonartistic means. Poetic certitude and resonance seemed more appropriate than a brush stroke. The different genealogies of Conceptualism in the hegemonic centers and on the periphery help explain why in the U.S. both Robert Morris and Sol Lewitt, with work focused on the rules of the art game, were simultaneously Minimalists and Conceptualists. In the same years, in Argentina, Alberto Greco, minding his poetics and maintaining his distance in regard to means of production, had no scruples about being both a Conceptualist and a neo-Expressionist. Productions may look surprisingly similar today throughout the world. This does not signify, however, a homogenization of art. More precisely, we might draw from this commonality of appearances the conclusion that a formalist reading is no longer fitting as a decoding tool, that a text without context produces a message that is, at the very least, deceptive and, at worst, unintelligible. Today’s installation format is usually classified as post-Minimalist or as neo-Conceptualist, treated as an heir to these two hegemonic isms. Not only does this perception risk promoting a hegemonist story of art, but it also blinds us to accurate and deeper readings of art from the nonhegemonic regions. It casts the story there as one of deregionalization, wherein the hegemonic discourse expands and permeates, moving from the outside in. The power of the formalist critique of the last century made didacThe Reconstruction of Salami

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ticism, poetry, and political messages anathema in the art world. With the exception of Socialist Realism, which for political reasons because of its associations with despised policies, was always identified by name and singled out, the dismissive stroke required no concretization. Blacklisting, so to speak, was triggered spontaneously and thoroughly whenever and wherever art deviated from a mystical search for an absolute essence. In a healthy reaction to this dogma, rules were abolished in today’s art discourse. While one consequence of “anything goes” is that in the end everything seems to look alike, in fact what has happened is a marked shift in the way we read art. What used to be the finishing point for the consideration of a work of art has become the beginning of an inquiry, in which we consider the conditions that generated what we are looking at. A blacklist thus becomes moot, for the very features formerly banished are now the ones that make a sophisticated appreciation of art. Depending on the region and its needs, a work can be monumental or delirious, derivative or recycled, explicit or mysterious. Therefore, it matters to know what questions are being answered, who posed them, and what their motives were. The questions may belong to the public of the region of origin or to the public of a different region where one is exhibiting. From this perspective, what is seen as deregionalization may be the consequence of an effort to communicate, or of an intent to achieve commercial success. In either case, the public remains part of the piece, part of the context that needs to be read. A global presence of artwork thus requires, more than ever, not a global style, but that the viewer deal with the conditions of creation as much as with the product. A purely formalist reading obscures this connection, restricting both access and understanding.

Notes 1. Amy Waldman, “Bremer Says More Attacks Won’t Deter the Allies,” New York Times, June 10, 2003, p. 10. 2. This is reflected also within the institutions of the hegemonic art market. The relatively high prices (when compared to its local markets) achieved by Latin American art in auctions held by Christie’s and Sotheby’s are mostly driven up by Latin American rather than international or national collectors. 3. I thank my wife, Selby Hickey, for this statement. 4. Globalization, as promoted by the dominant powers, seeks the creation of economic regions that not only are exploitable, but that avoid any contention with the impediments generated by national pride. As much in economy as in art, the aim is not exactly to achieve an equitable distribution of power. In this context,

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Michael Hardt divides the movements opposing the dominant powers into two groups. One promotes national sovereignty as a form of stopping the control exercised by foreign capital; the other is based on nonnational alternatives opposed to capitalism itself, with the purpose of achieving a democratic globalization (“Today’s Bandung?” New Left Review, no. 14 [March–April 2002], p. 114).

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Chapter 12

Printmaking: A Colony of the Arts (1999)

When I refer to “colony,” I mean it quite literally: as a territory taken over by another power, where identity is maimed and slowly forgotten, values are shifted, and the will for independence becomes ritualized into an increasingly empty and hopeless vow. When I arrived in New York in 1964, I shared a studio with a painter who would not miss any opportunity to let me know that he considered printmaking a minor and second-rate form of art making. Although we were close friends, the comments managed to upset me. I seriously considered myself a printmaker, and I didn’t believe that there were major and minor forms of art making. For me there was art, period. I was essentially right and his reasoning was faulty—among other things, for his being a painting imperialist—but deep beneath his needling, there was a point. I was using a technical discipline to define myself, and this was conceptually wrong. Somehow I had forgotten that at that stage of my life I was supposed to be searching for myself and to be using printmaking as one of the tools in that search. Instead, I was limiting my own definition to and within printmaking. I make prints, therefore, I am. And meanwhile, my friend was having a grand time exploring bad painting and chaos, breaking all the rules he could find. He had that kind of self-assurance that is possible only with metropolitan arrogance. Since that time I have been groping with this aspect of my life, and I frequently ask myself what a nice guy like me is doing involved with this messy set of techniques. I am still addicted to the aromatic melodies that emanate from solvents and inks; I consider the indelible stains around my nails to be cherished status symbols; I cringe with pain when somebody holds a sheet of paper without allowing it to find its catenary weightcurve; and I believe that printers who don’t clean the edges of their plates before printing are eventually duly punished in hell. This, of course, signifies my recognition of the beauty of craft, its soothing qualities, and the occasional possibility of transmitting this sense of making to somebody else as a form of insight. But it also means that I am trapped in that tech104

nical fundamentalism so typical of printmakers. A great mixture, this, a colonial mentality laced with fundamentalism. Printmaking is probably the best example of the conquest of technical fundamentalism over the creative freedom of art making. We have been imbued with so much dogma that we are unable to see the hypocrisy and the fuzzy and sometimes unwittingly funny reasoning we are subject to. One makes prints; however, monoprints are controversial. So one makes many equal prints, but then hand coloring on the plate is permissible. Which means that the intention of making equal prints is what counts, regardless of the result. And then there should be many of them, but not too many. Also, it is preferable that the hand of the artist touch everything from preparation of the plates to the final signature. In fact, that touching ceremony is so important that, denying all preceding principles, if a printed sheet is hand colored and jumps out of the edition, it is worth much more than the rest of its interchangeable siblings. Which proves that there is a strong painting envy operating in the market. In spite of this, the market for the true original—the plate—is a minor one, and, instead, all the fifty, one hundred, or five hundred prints are declared “originals.” This part I actually don’t object to, since it probably represents the only aspect of the printmaker’s essence which deserves respect. It may be the only pocket of resistance, the area and ideology from which independence can be fought for with some hope of success. I have no problem with the economic and technical conditions that went into defining printmaking, since they bear some clarity. I have always been seduced by the theory that the print industry as we know it has evolved as a consequence of the big medieval plague. According to that theory, the reduction in population led to a higher standard of living for the survivors, who therefore were suddenly able to afford to use underwear. Consequently, a sizeable stock of rags was created, which, recycled, in turn generated a paper industry, spurring larger quantities of prints, which led to higher printing speeds. Paradoxically and amazingly, the entire process, which was always about packaging and circulating information, landed in a path leading to “paperless” printing, a world informed by compact disks and the Web. Even the notion of ownership was challenged once Bill Gates shifted possession away from the actual works of art to the copyright, as he did in the case of Ansel Adams. Meanwhile, we printmakers use Rembrandt’s hardground and quibble about the percentage of rag content in handmade paper. We have chosen to stop our evolution in the seventeenth century. The clear and focused wish to package and circulate information, added Printmaking

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to a detachment from art, gave industrial printing its apparent freedom of action. The actual printing part has only been a temporary and eventually dispensable solution to the problems posed by the circulation of information, nearly a technical accident. Printmakers, however, seduced and attached to this accident while pursuing artistic ambitions, tend to work under the presumption that they have to print in order to produce art. Once they print, or know how to, the hope arises that something with artistic merit will automatically follow. Making prints is the task. Art seems to be a miraculous by-product. I think that this accounts for the fact that there are so few good printmakers’ prints. By good, I don’t mean technically stunning or visually stimulating. By good I mean prints that seriously affect the way we see things or the way we think about them. While in painting we may evaluate Rembrandt, Goya, Picasso, Matisse, or Duchamp and many others as creators of visions, in printmaking we have trouble finding heroes. Most of the big names in painting also made prints. In fact, many of them helped define the history of printmaking—I picked the preceding names on purpose—but their imagery, or their approach to imaging, was generated from their other experience. Printmaking became the playground for inhabitants of other disciplines. Like going for sex tourism to Southeast Asia or to a Native American reservation for gambling, some revenue and maybe prestige are brought to the place, but the activities don’t leave the visitors any more Asian or Native American than they were before leaving their original countries. Among what we can call the “strong natives” we may find people like Seghers, Piranesi, or Posada, and maybe some with dual citizenship like Dürer or Goya, but not too many more. And, in any case, not one of those we find is as much of a household name as are famous painters. If, to use a metaphor, we were to think globally instead of being hooked onto the idea of technical nation-states, this issue would be completely irrelevant. The primary mission of artists is to help organize signification with appropriate symbols and fight visual fatigue. Nobody should really care how the job is done as long it is done well. But most of us do not think globally. When asked what we do, most of us wrongly answer with how we do it. I am a painter, I am a sculptor, I am a printmaker, fragmented by skills instead of purpose. In printmaking the pigeonholing is exquisite and goes into precious detail: “I am an etcher, I am a lithographer, etc.” In Argentina the question is posed as if an allegiance to a soccer team: “Are you wood or metal?” During my first visit to New York, back in 1962, I went to the then106

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famous Pratt Graphic Arts Center. The director introduced me to the faculty teaching there, one by one, by describing their technique: this one prints on extra-thick handmade paper with a self-made hydraulic press; that one engraves on Plexiglas with a roto-tool; that other one burns into polyvinylic-chloride sheets; so-and-so does lithographic processes on zinc plates, etc. I left baffled. I hadn’t found out what those artists were actually doing, how their work looked, or what it was about. I only knew how they did whatever they did. According to the introduction (and maybe that was the image they had of themselves), the purpose of their work seemed to be the technical breakthrough. However, at the same time, the institution was proud of having artists like Archipenko and Richard Lindner making lithographs in the studio. So it could be that there was an affirmation of identity through technical strength: those sculptors and painters needed the help of a printmaker technician to execute their work. Or there was the hope that their prestige would rub off, in another form of painting envy. Whichever the case, the printmaker technician was limited to providing technical excellence. The aesthetic quality-control was referred to the painterly or sculptural imaging process, the ones that produce “real art.” It is interesting that at the time I did not interpret this incident as being symptomatic of a colonial mentality. I, rather, saw it as a sign of holding a deformed image of an industrialized culture. It seemed that industrial production was used as a reference and standard for technology, in a manner possible only in an affluent and developed economy. Practitioners of an old retrograde craft suddenly opened their eyes, and what they saw forced them to give priority to the updating of skills, without time for anything else. They wanted to absorb industrial achievements into their technique and have “progress” aerate the mold marks out of the trade. It was not unlike what Minimalist artists underwent in the late 1960s, trying to abstract and capture the industrial look and finish in their aesthetic. Deep down, however, it was more like those so-called developing countries, which, to catch up with the pace of the developed ones, try to quickly and artificially create heavy industry. It reminds me of Mao’s China, when each village tried to build a steel furnace, and every villager melted perfectly usable tools to create new steel. This interpretation did not mean that I was oblivious to technical problems; working in Uruguay, I faced the task of printing etchings on a hundred-year-old lithopress without felts. It also didn’t mean that technique would not affect the process of my creative work. Pondering Picasso’s multicolor linoleum prints made from one ever-diminishing Printmaking

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plate, I became interested in salami as the ultimate embodiment of edition making. Each slice is a part of the edition, with enough randomness in the image to qualify as truly original rather than a product of reproduction, and with enough constancy to belong to one and only one sausage. And the act of editioning completely and forever obliterates the matrix. This followed the visit to the Pratt Graphics Center and some subsequent work there, and I would say that it belonged to my neofundamentalist period. Today, however, I am persuaded that the scene I encountered at the Pratt Graphics Center, and which I would have encountered anywhere else, was primarily due to the colonial thinking of printmakers. The truly colonized doesn’t dare to think independently and, simultaneously, works only timidly within the master’s thought. In this case, there were two masters’ thoughts—the painter’s image, and the industrial standard—and both were not promoted at all by printmakers, but by the masters themselves. Early in the 1960s, Leo Castelli had the gall of having some of his artists sign and number offset prints and sell them for five and ten dollars. It was not clear if that was a challenge to traditional printmaking or, with the reduced price, a nod to real “fine printmaking.” Today, of course, the prices of those pseudo-proletarian collector items, signed by Warhol and Lichtenstein, surpass the quotes for any of our own distinguished specimens. The technological push early in the 1960s was only a shy beginning. In the U.S., with Gemini and Tyler as studios, and Alecto and Multiples as distributors, by the end of the decade the opening to techniques had become rampant and, temporarily, quite fertile. A vague feeling of independence was in the air. There was a fleeting fusion of both a conceptual and a commercial clarity with three closely intermeshed consequences. First, the act of making a print became less important than the act of editioning it. Second, a new market was defined. With the increase in size and spectacularity that made original art works inaccessible, the oxymoronic concept of “original reproduction” became the brilliant solution. Thus, third, the “multiple” was born, extending the series of six bronze sculptures cast from the same mold, which until then had qualified as originals, to tens or hundreds of smaller and cheaper replicas. Both the words “edition” and “market” acquired new meaning. With hindsight, it is clear that this was not a technical opening by or for printmakers, but an application of industrial production to art. It wasn’t that the craft got enriched, it was that industry diversified its own output. Now, one of the big questions arising from this development is whether this concept of editioning constituted a form of democratization 108

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of art. Or, in the language we are talking here, was the colony being used effectively to achieve a form of globalization of the values of the Empire? Well, the answer is yes in the sense that the lowering of the price of caviar makes it accessible to more people. Or, more appropriately, that lowering stock prices may increase the base of shareholders. They are led to think that they co-own the corporation, but their share in the decision making really is kept rather slim. Clearly, the means of production continued to remain with those who originally owned those means. And, of course, the control of the image continued to be in the hands of painters and sculptors. But, continuing with the means of production, neither their ownership nor their control were passed along to the artists or were shared with them in order to truly achieve a fairer distribution of art. So, it cannot be said that contemporary printmaking, even in its extended notion of multiples, is part of a democratization process of the arts. In any place where prints could imaginably serve the purpose of a broad and economical access, it actually is much cheaper to produce a painting than a print. The few examples of so-called fine art accessible to the masses by use of semi-industrial or industrial technology—after Daumier’s “Carivari” lithographs and Posada’s lead-cuts—in both rich and poor countries were nonsystematic and connected with printmaking only on the basis of their dissemination. To my mind come the Colombian Álvaro Barrios, who convinced the publisher of a newspaper in Bogotá to reproduce his work full-page as part of a mega-edition during the 1970s, and pieces by Dan Graham and Joseph Kosuth, which lived mostly in the pages of art magazines in the late 1960s. Unlike Daumier or Posada, none of these artists intervened in the process of making the print. The focus was on infinite distribution, not on craftsmanship. That quest for infinity, rather than the lack of craftsmanship, probably ensured that not many of those pages were kept by collectors in the hope of increasing the value of their assets. We thus reached one of the many fuzzy areas with which we are plagued: where “print” refers more to a form of dissemination of information than to the product of a craft; and where printmaking is just one form of doing, while the resulting print is a proof of that doing, without any concern about dissemination. I recognize that in all of this I keep oscillating between wanting to remain within the craft of printmaking and opposing those who focus on the craft. This may have something to do with my own extra-artistic muddled Printmaking

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politics. For example, I am opposed to nationalism, but I draw my sense of identity—not without dogmatism—from the country in which I grew up and not the one in which I live—the former being on the neocolonial periphery, the latter making sure it remains there. The solutions for my own life should be simple: I should become a citizen here and I should become a painter. But I think there is more to my ambivalence, something like a fear to betray, even if the solidarity one wants to honor stands on flimsy foundations. Printmakers’ fundamentalism gives us a somewhat ill-placed sense of identity, one based solely on the physical geography of the kitchen in which we operate. This leads to the formation of a secret society of sorts. It is one which has its own directories, exchange of alchemies, separatist exhibits, and private scale of values. As with any other good set of colonial procedures, these tools serve both to assert an identity before it is totally lost and as an act of self-defense. Satisfied with the fact that an aquatint was done without any visible undercutting, we feel released from the need to deal with the problems posed by the painter, sculptor, installationist, or multimedia artist next door. Becoming a painter wouldn’t really change anything except the label. Dealing with the problems I have described, however, might. The printmaker’s fundamentalism puts us in a different and impoverished situation compared to other art makers. No painter is fundamentally remembered for technical innovations. Primarily, a good painter is celebrated for the ability to appropriate an old medium to the point that it “seems” to have been inescapably invented for “that” particular image. When there is a deviation from the norm, like Pollock dripping all over, or Tàpies stretching walls on canvas, it is not the deviation that makes it, but the occasional success in giving the sense of unique inevitability. It is that feeling that makes one of Morandi’s dumb crosshatchings applied to his equally dumb bottles and pots more memorable than all of Hayter’s viscosity prints put together. Morandi created a credible perceptual continuum; Hayter celebrated and illustrated a technical trick. Art history, as we study it, is characterized by products which arrived at a careful equilibrium between technique and vision. Printmaking was remiss in finding this balance, focusing too heavily on technique, and allowing, like most crafts, for the aesthetics to be dictated by the way things are done. We are, today, about to cross over a new divide, one which will push not only the traditional ideologies governing printmaking even further into the past, but also art in general as we know it. With the onset of digital imaging, the arts, as we have been defining them, may become reduced 110

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to no more than esoteric crafts: folkcrafts among those without access to technology, hobbycrafts among those having the equipment available. Digital imaging, while coming with new technology, brings not so much a technical change as a mental change with it. In the more affluent segments of the population, individualization—if at all feasible—will rely on the manipulation of pure image, held on tightly tensed—and, hopefully, dust-free—computer plasma screens of any conceivable size. With imagery unmediated and totally accurate, the margins given for appropriation, reinvention, and individual technical breakthrough will be practically gone. In the appreciation of its products, technique is to be taken for granted. The focus of the artist will have to be set on the pure creation of images, and that is what the public will get, with more or less resolution, with a higher or lesser density of pixels per inch. Art will be vision, unhampered by the clumsiness of material crafts. The notion of originals and editions thus will lose any meaning, since dissemination is congenital to the work. Painting, sculpture, and printmaking, if at all, will be taught in Homemaking II classes. Art departments will be abolished, and the new Photoshop majors will graduate after four upgrades. In other words, our history of art will become obsolete and inappropriate and will have to be studied differently, maybe in the context of a universal history of fetishism.

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Chapter 13

My Museums (1995)

In the hall of my grade school there was an armoire with glass doors. It contained stuffed birds, crystals, and many other intriguing objects that presumably served as doors to enter science through the appeal to taste rather than reason. Standing out in this bazaar atmosphere was a collection of little glass vials that contained sand from the different deserts of the world. Beyond their different colors and the authority of the school itself, there was nothing to add credibility to the claims of origin expressed by the labels. I remember the collection as extraordinarily mysterious, evocative, valuable, and desirable, so much so that I went back forty-five years later to refresh my experience. The armoire wasn’t there, and nobody remembered ever having seen it. It made me consider the possibility that I had moved it, molecule by molecule, into the reality of an altered memory. Looking back, it is clear now that the armoire experience led me into art. More than that, beyond defining my career, it also laid the foundation for a perversion I developed somewhat later, during my early twenties. I collect museums. I have been single-mindedly collecting museums for over thirty years. So much so that I must also confess that I clearly give priority to quantity over quality. I claim twenty-six museums to date. I also have some libraries, but, although I list them on my vitae, I don’t rank them as high. A bad museum is much more desirable than a good library, and the nomenclature is crucial. I resent those collections like the Archer M. Huntington Gallery in Austin, or the Wadsworth Athenaeum in Hartford (not in my collection), museums in fact, but too affected to assume the name. My first museum was the Museum of Modern Art in Buenos Aires. I had an exhibit in a gallery, and the director came to the opening, where he personally chose one of my works. I don’t recall ever being paid, but I never will forget the sense of elation. I felt I wasn’t a fake; I was a real artist—a museum-quality artist. Several years later, I met a new director

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of the museum. He told me that, while they had me in the inventory of the collection, they couldn’t find the actual piece. Would I give them a replacement? The informal conversation was never followed up, but it posed an ethical question. If a museum loses my work, am I supposed to drop the museum from my collection? What happens if, God forbid, a piece of mine is deaccessioned? I don’t even know who rules on these protocols or where to address my question. In this case, I have chosen to keep the museum listed. While, ultimately, my decision to do so is motivated by greed, it is undeniable that my relationship with the museum was based on the acquisition of my work, not on the care or neglect it would provide for it. The problem of a possible divergence between acts of acquisition and physical presence became acute in two other instances some time later. Both museums in these cases remained on my list. One of them was the Museum of Prints, also in Buenos Aires. It no longer exists, and I have no idea what happened to its holdings.1 The other one was the National Museum of Modern Art in Baghdad. It was bombed during the 1991 Gulf War, and I never found out if my work was among the casualties. The circumstances of my acquisition of these museums were different in each case. The Argentine museum had requested a donation. In fact, the museum had started as an open-ended, noncurated private collection. The owners were able to continually augment it with the argument that they were building a museum. For me, the donation wasn’t a gift but a long-term investment that eventually paid off. The Iraqi story was more institutional, though not less arbitrary. The huge Third World Biennial had opened a few days before the Iraq-Iran war began. The ceremony for the awarding of prizes coincided with some of the bombing. The guests were driven by bus through some desert to some borderline not shared with Iran. Because of the reigning tension, the museum authorities decided to forgo any purchase selections and bought the entire exhibition for the collection. Thus my piece was also included. Chronologically speaking, MoMA in New York became the second museum on my list. In 1962, a friend of mine who had some importance in the art scene introduced me and my work to one of the curators.2 The curator picked two of my prints for which I asked fifty dollars apiece. After the proper acquisitions committee procedures, I was offered twenty-five for each, with the poverty of the museum being used as an explanation. It was

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after this particular experience that I realized that my life would be dedicated to philanthropy. Later some other pieces went to MoMA by straight donation. The structure of the MoMA collection is a mystery to me. I have been told that actually there are three collections. One houses what the museum considers the collection proper. Then there is one of art as documentary reference. And finally, there is one of pure documentation, which, undoubtedly, holds some art mislabeled as information about art, given that the differences between art and information about art are very subtle. Since my own notions of collection are very simpleminded, I have never inquired about where my works are kept. The few times I have gone to the museum I have noticed that they are not on display. The most successful artwork produced during my pursuit to access museums is one called “The Perfect Etching.” It isn’t really an artwork, but a mail-order piece. And it isn’t just mine, but devised together with a friend. His name is Stephen Klein. We had created a company under the registered name of C.L.I.P., an acronym which stood for “controlled life in packages.” The company’s slogan was “We take randomness out of life,” and we designed many useful objects, among them a “sideburnbalancer” that ensured even shaving, and a “kitty auto-caresser,” a woolen tunnel which took care of cats during the owner’s absence. We advertised our products in the New York Times with different rates of success.3 “The Perfect Etching” (1970) was presented as an objective piece to serve as a reference for quality to be used by serious print collectors. It was to be to other prints what the platinum meter in Paris used to be to other meters. Our product had failed commercially; there were very few inquiries and no follow-ups. We were forced, once more, into philanthropy. That is why “The Perfect Etching” was offered free of charge to the major museums in town and, also, to the National Bureau of Standards. The Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum, and the Whitney Museum all accepted the gift, and I still conserve the letters of gratitude. The Bureau of Standards politely declined, indicating that their standards were of a different nature and that our device didn’t fit their interests. The acceptance by the Whitney Museum was a political coup with enormous theoretical implications. Nobody in the United States and not even the museum itself took notice of what had happened. The piece, which should have been inventoried with C.L.I.P. as the author, was catalogued under the names of the owners of the company instead. Then, due to alphabetical laziness, they used only my name. I thus became the first 114

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and, for a very long time, the only non–North American American artist listed in the collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art, thus redressing the museum’s original misappropriation of the word “American.” That is how the Whitney, which I had believed eternally inaccessible, became one of my favorite possessions. I have never had scruples about listing the Whitney as part of my collection, but I do hesitate to list the Royal Museum of Antwerp. This museum has not been overly friendly toward contemporary art. During the early nineties, the director prided herself on modernizing the collection by including Permeke’s work. In 1992, she saw an ant crawl out from an installation by Ana Mendieta. The piece, a silhouette made with sod, was thrown into the garbage. In the same exhibit, one of my own installations was placed near a wall soiled with rust marks caused by a leaky window. The stains did not directly affect my work, but they gave a vague feeling of untidiness to the room. It bothered me enough to request a touchup. Unfortunately, that particular wall was not included in the painter’s contract. I tried to do it myself, but was prevented from doing it, since I wasn’t a union member. My solution then was to appropriate the markings by outlining them with a pencil and thus reclassifying them as art. It was a subtle job, which, according to recent reports, is still in place, and I am confident that it will never be removed. As has so often happened in the history of art, the piece may end up veiled and protected by whitewash. Thus, and maybe forever, it will not be a part of the collection, but more permanently a structural component of the museum. It is ironic that a connection this intimate and far transcending the frivolity of collections cannot be used in my public listing. There seems to be a symbiotic relationship between collections whereby, not unlike credit cards, one breeds others. In my case, where the primary aim is a gathering of abstractions, it is paradoxical that to achieve them I am forced to produce concrete objects capable of being owned. The more museums I have, the more collectible my objects become, and the easier it is to increase my own collection. The moral of this strange circle escapes me somewhat, but it seems to be important either for some study in biology about how symbiosis can alter the drives that ensure the survival of the species, or to be used as an opaque metaphor for capitalism. More to the point, however, is the question of how long symbiosis based on ownership can last. What did the German “degenerate” artists do in their résumés after they were banned from German museums? Did they keep the museums in their listings of collections on their CVs, or did they take them off? What My Museums

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will happen to not-anymore-contemporary art in so-called contemporary art museums? The fragility of the ownership link can become very threatening, especially when the flimsy nature of the institutions and their assumptions on the subject matter become clear. In that sense, the narrowly topical museums seem much more stable and desirable, although they are more inaccessible. My favorite, but one I will never be able to claim, is the Museo della Specola in Florence. It was named that way by the people in town because of an observatory built on its roof (from specula in Latin). The name seems like a trove of echoes about art (observe, speculate in a theoretical and economical sense, mirror) and accounts for part of my interest. The museum opened in 1775 and, since then, has housed a collection of wax sculptures specifically made for the medical study of anatomy. The holdings kept growing until the end of the nineteenth century. The figures, sometimes presented in Michelangelo-like poses, others peacefully taking a nap, have big areas with the skin lifted that allow for the detailed inspection of the organs. In some cases, like the one of a young woman sculpted by Clemente Susini and Giuseppe Ferrini in 1782, the parts are removable and provide multiple readings of the anatomical inner depths. The Madonna-like face of the woman leans slightly to one side and gazes absentmindedly into infinity, unfazed by the intense voyeurism she elicits or by the potential manipulation of her entrails. The perfection of all the references is one of the aspects that make it a particularly desirable institution. The other is, of course, the impossibility of having it.

Notes 1. Since this was written, the museum has reopened under government auspices, making this an irrelevant example, at least historically. However, the museum’s being created after the collection raises other issues. The Wagstaff Collection, in which I had a piece, was acquired by the Getty Museum. The museum bought the collection because of Wagstaff, not because of my work. Still, I list that institution in my collection, since it would seem unwise to leave it out. 2. The friend was Antonio Frasconi, an Uruguayan artist who had become one of the foremost graphic artists in the U.S. We had met in Uruguay shortly before my trip, and when I arrived in New York, in a show of extreme generosity, he introduced me into his circles. 3. We also were subject to censorship by the New York Times. “Kitty Autocaresser” was the compromise name we were forced to use at their suggestion after they refused publication of our first version of the ad.

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The Forgotten Individual (1996 )

Chapter 14

Many years ago I wrote a short autobiographical piece that ended with “My country doesn’t exist anymore except for in my memory. I am a citizen of my memory, which lacks laws, passports and inhabitants, and only houses distortions.”1 The essay, somewhat whiny, was a tool that helped me clarify the problems caused by the incremental dissolution of roots, by the fog that was covering and obscuring the regional community in and for which I had been educated, and by the clumsiness that was invading my use of my first language. Uruguayan psychoanalyst Marcelo Viñar quotes somebody who, lamenting his exile and otherness sums it up by saying: “Here nobody knows that I have been a child.”2 The theme of an unshared memory worsens with the corollary that, after some time, “there [the place of origin], although they know it, they don’t care anymore that I have been a child.” One is left robbed of childhood, alive only in that memory/country in which, by default, one is the only citizen. Way before the computer age, virtual reality was already revealed by exile, though not specified by a name. Maybe better so, because in exile one creates it, while the other one is imposed. The traditional idea of exile is based on leaving a real physical place, one that becomes an internalized exteriority. To leave it is akin to abandoning a factory of memories and having to be content with only a few of its products. One takes the internalization, but it is naked of any origin or reference. Memories generate a new geography but not a physical destination, and thus one ends in simulacra. The subterfuge’s dramatic aspect comes from the fact that one’s individuality—its defining essence—exists only in relation to those cohabitants who have internalized that same external reality. Individuality is possible because it leans on a collective geography. Without that, it seems to lose its meaning. The new geography of the exile, the one rendered by memory, is intimate. The definition of individuality is also intimate, separate in leak117

proof compartments that are mutually unrecognized, not communicating, incapable of generating culture due to silence and lack of feedback. Paradoxically, it is so individualized an individuality that it is inoperative—a kind of fantasy. One perceives the individuality, but the individual has been forgotten. Postmodern technological advances have introduced an unexpected efficiency into this process. Migration currents have multiplied frenetically and forced walls of documentation and barbed wire to protect the ethnic purity of rich peoples. But new forms of exile have sprung up as well. They are for those who don’t travel. They are immobile because they persecute instead of being persecuted, because they are not hungry, or because they starve too much. Exile, today, does not demand abandoning the comfort of the home. The unemployed, the repressed, the recycled, the undernourished, the tortured, the classless, the misfits, they are all “in situ” exiles. They were robbed of their context and their external geography. They survive because they inhabit their memories. Nobody knows that they once were children, and nobody cares if they really had a childhood. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization, the undernourished population in underdeveloped countries grew by 35 percent between the 1960s and the beginning of the 1990s.3 Countries that were improving have lost their gains, and those that were deteriorating worsened at even greater speeds. Memory—pure fantasy or embellished fragments of filtered reality—is restricted to the feeding of hope. However, those escaping statistics also live in exile: present forms of administration of technology not only underdevelop underdevelopment, but exaggerate the passivity of consumption. Acquisition substitutes for experience. The exile in virtual reality is created in a dictated memory that is no longer his own. It is the reality lived by individuals emptied of individuality. It creates an inner rather than a geographic exile. To a certain degree, traditional exile reinforced the idea of geography. One would physically leave one place to go to another to then seek refuge in a third one. Geography had three poles, often resolved in a NorthSouth-I, with the “I” being sacrificed. Today, with home-delivered exile, this geography has lost its meaning. The image is not a map anymore, but a mayonnaise. North and South have been transnationally emulsified. The FAO still bases its statistics on traditional borderlines, but the lack of nutrition can’t be fit into flat drawings.4 We are witnessing a global movement toward disarticulation and destabilization of communal structures that aims at the inoperativeness and 118

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destruction of the notion of “we.” It is the “we” that served as the basis for class awareness, for labor conquests, for student militancy, for searches for cultural identity, for a fight to achieve a better society. With the disappearance of that collective “I,” the individual is being privatized, isolated, reified, and emptied. Effective resistance is eliminated and fundamentalist chauvinisms act as shells to cover up anonymity. To maintain memory, to remember “we,” is one of the weapons that slows down the process. Constant demystification of virtual realities is another one. Without them we become flooded with prefabricated memories or imprisoned by the distortions of romantic nostalgias. Resistance, however, remains possible only if we keep the awareness of utopia alive— the utopia of survival, starvation as a transitory period, the impossibility of defeat, the usefulness of art, and not utopia as a perfect, final, and frozen product. It is utopia as flux, as an endless process and a precise direction. It is the utopia of the shared “we,” an uncompromised “I,” our possession of memories, the maintaining of an ethic, the disappearance of exile. It is the utopia of the individual assumed, proud, and unforgotten.

Notes 1. Written in June 1977; appears in Luis Camnitzer, catalogue for the retrospective exhibition at Casa de las Américas, Havana, March 1983. 2. Maren Viñar and Marcelo Viñar, Fracturas de memoria (Montevideo: Trilce, 1993), p. 100. 3. The comparison is between statistics taken in 1969–1971 and in 1990–1992. 4. Neither can Coca-Cola. On February 1, 1996, the company abolished the separation between its domestic and international activities. According to the CEO: “The labels international and domestic that in the past accurately described our commercial structure, aren’t applicable anymore” (New York Times, January 13, 1996, p. 35).

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Chapter 15

Free-trade Diaspora (2003)

A couple of weeks ago I passed through airport customs with a friend who inadvertently had left an apple in her suitcase. The officer was very upset and threatened to impose a $100 fine for bringing undeclared fresh food into the country. My friend explained that the apple actually had departed from New York four days earlier going to England and that now it was only coming back. “Never mind,” the officer retorted angrily. “Once it leaves the country it loses its identity.” Apples actually don’t have to struggle with identity, but we do, and not just with identity but also with assimilation, which strongly relates to it. And here we find a pretty difficult job. Assimilation isn’t easy, not just for technical reasons, since it is something akin to speaking a foreign language like a native, but also because we encounter two types of resistance—individual and social. Our own resistance to assimilation is the one that reflects our original identity, nostalgia, and our wish or need to keep it alive. Society’s resistance to assimilation is also called racism or xenophobia. Surely, these two forms of resistance have different origins, but they often feed off each other. My being in the U.S. is the result of a process that—gorily, but precisely—used to be called “brain drain.” I now call it “free-trade diaspora,” as opposed to the bloodier “forced diaspora.” In either, one is placed in a limbo that takes generations to overcome. This rather banal idea fully hit me during a trip with one of my sons, then twelve years old. I took him to Uruguay on the occasion of an exhibition of my work appropriately titled “The Laments of Exile.” It took place in the manor of an arboretum outside of Montevideo. I should note first that, in our home in Long Island, it is my wife who is the explorer. I have the reputation of being alien to nature and only interacting with the things that are in my office and my studio. Hiking, climbing, and landscape gazing are experiences my children learned from their mother. However, in order to pursue my parental duties during my installation

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time in Uruguay, I regularly interrupted my work and strolled with Miguel around the gardens of the place. I would pick up nearly invisible scraps of nature and share their smell, turn tops with some acorns, watch how seeds with wings rotated during their fall, show him flowers one could breathe into to have them silkily wrap around one’s face, and taught him how to walk in muddy patches without getting his shoes dirty. There it struck me—and probably him too—this guy is suddenly a nature guide? I realized that my detachment from Long Island’s surroundings was not a product of rabid antinaturalism but of misplacement. I didn’t know those trees, bushes, and weeds, and, obviously, I didn’t care to know them; they were not mine. I have been living in the U.S. since 1964. After forty years I am still not letting go of Uruguay. In 1966, as a fledgling Conceptualist, I started to work with language. Which language? Who was my alleged public? Just in case, I made two versions of each work, one in Spanish and one in English. Marrying a North American eventually tipped it. She became my primary audience and, luckily, also thinks with me and edits my texts. In 1983, I decided to work on a series of pieces addressing the torture that the Uruguayan dictatorship was using against the population. The project was unforgivably late in time—over a decade, to be precise—geographically safe, since I was comfortably living in New York, and, probably, mostly served to allay my guilty feelings about not being there with my friends. I was trying to relive—one could say fake—an experience some of my closest friends were suffering in its most direct unpleasantness. I was making pictures about true pain in a way that could be interpreted as being exploitative. What I could justify as an attempt to raise consciousness could also be seen as the misuse of a situation for personal gain. The series was intended to raise the consciousness of the U.S. public. However, by 1986 and after the dictatorship had retreated, a curator included it in a retrospective exhibition in Montevideo. At the opening I noted that a close friend who had been victimized refused to look at them. Her two daughters, however, studied them very intently. During a big ensuing public discussion I was asked the question I most feared: Why did I make that series? Apologetically, I raised all my doubts and hesitations in what probably came the closest ever to my performing a public striptease. Then a voice from the back of the auditorium yelled: “If you think that you did anything wrong, you are full of shit! We need people to turn these events into icons and preserve our memories. We are

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lucky you were away and thus able to do it.” The shouter, a former classmate of mine who belonged to the upper ranks of the guerrilla movement, had been recently released after twelve years in jail. This comment, for me, was an absolution, a fleeting one and, for me personally, on a shallow level. What kept it shallow was that he had been a classmate of mine in art school but that only I had become an artist. But more important and on a nonpersonal level, the statement clearly also defined a function for those living in diaspora. Being neither here nor there has concerned me for a very long time. We are many inhabiting this strange in-between place, and we are developing an appropriate visual language for it. I once called it “Spanglish art” and described it as “the merging of a deteriorating memory with the acquisition of a new reality distanced by foreignness,” and as representing the fact that “one has come from one place to another, and [Spanglish art] functionally bridges the abyss left by that journey.”1 Now, in revising my thoughts I realize that, at least in my case, the origin, the locality of departure (the “over there”), conditions the content and ideology of my work. Meanwhile, the locality of destination, particularly in places like the U.S., where formalism and packaging are such a big deal, may have more influence on the form. Maybe this is an example of “syncretism abroad.” As a way of resistance, in syncretism the shells made by others are filled with our meanings. Here, abroad, it is a way of continuing to fight a colonization process that takes the shape of assimilation. And to touch more closely on the topic of this panel, maybe, also, that resistance to assimilation is what accounts for the lack of resounding market success for those artists who embrace their “diasporic” state. Diaspora generates a culture of the in-between, one where nostalgia takes the place of the original community bonds and hampers the creation of new ones. Nostalgia becomes a way of maintaining a feeling of sanity and of building a community around a new and shared destiny in a somewhat fictional geography. However, because nostalgia is seated in past memories it has other effects as well. It makes us ignore and distort the present and forces our respect and faithfulness toward issues mostly related to content. The effect in art is that nostalgia often puts our production out of synch with local concerns, here mostly focused on formalist originality and stylistic separation. Even when an overt narrative may be absent from our work, nothing can be devoid of meaning. Every step is loaded, defying fads and oblivious to accusations of obnoxiousness. 122

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Oddly enough, I see that with all of this I also may be describing old age. Is getting older a form of growing into a diaspora and its alienation? Is living in diaspora a form of premature aging? But these questions don’t belong here. More to the point, however, is that “out of synch” may be as good a description for living in diaspora as many others. Synchronization here can only be effected among those who are locked into the same place. Diaspora therefore has its own synchronization, one poorly understood by those who are foreign to it, however well intentioned. The trip on which the apple story took place was a return flight from Liverpool. While there, I visited the Transatlantic Slavery Gallery of the Merseyside Maritime Museum. Two things stood out in what actually was a very excellent and terrifying exhibition. One was a framed document announcing that the Transatlantic Slavery Gallery had been awarded, in 1995, the Tourism Project of the Year award. The other, from my point of view contradicting the first one, was a sign stating: “No entry. Walk through Transatlantic Slavery for entrance to Emigrants to a New World.” Sometimes one is tempted to break down some of these borders between locals and aliens. After all, “aliens” explore, criticize, admire, despise, adopt, reject, and assimilate into groups they perceive as aliens. “Otherness,” after all, is always mutual. Breaking down these borderlines does not necessarily denote a wish to assimilate; that takes too much time, compromise, and effort. But sometimes one just wants to reach out a little, to soften things, to put involuntary humor in its correct place, and to lightheartedly make some oddities visible. So, a few years ago I needed a police document that required that I fill out a form stating my race. After some thought, I wrote “human” and returned the paper. The officer looked at the form, then looked at me, and said: “Sorry, Sir: that is not an acceptable option.”

Note

1. See Chap. 6 here.

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Part II

Other Histories

introduction

The following essays bring to light various figures and bodies of work that have been neglected over the years by more traditional (art) historical accounts. These range from the Uruguayan painter, legislator, and pedagogue Pedro Figari to the community of exiled South American artists in New York during the 1970s, Trinidadian carnivalist Peter Minshall, and the development of the Havana Biennial during the 1980s and 1990s. But Camnitzer’s version of history is not simply chauvinistic or idiosyncratic—it is purposeful in advancing a reading of art in terms of its intersections with social movements and its impacts on or potential contributions to them. In his historicizing, Camnitzer works from a few central principles. The first of these, which could be called “local clocks,” counters the habitual art historical mode of looking for patterns of “origination” and “influence” in the way that artistic innovations arise and looks instead to local conditions and legacies for the primary ground on which artists invent. From a political perspective, this approach denies the second-class status that art making on the “periphery” is generally accorded and often even finds precedents in Latin American work for movements eventually consecrated as northern breakthroughs. A related principle, again looking to a more contextual way of understanding and decoding these objects, has to do with resisting formalism as the primary means of classifying and entering into artworks. A note about genealogy is pertinent here. Camnitzer has a recurrent fascination with genealogies in art, which seems to express the contradictory instincts to counter the canon and unseat its primacy and to make a legitimate place for himself and Latin America in it. But genealogy is also a question about information and how it travels along established circuits. Many of Camnitzer’s artworks (and especially the “Uruguayan Torture” series) are not so much about dictatorships and political violence as about how news of them traveled—or not—about the secondhandedness that is the customary form of their reception as news or art. This same attention to the enfoldedness of information-about-facts 125

with facts repeats in the form of his exhibition reviews, which are more about how the works are received—first by curators and then by audiences—than about the exhibited works themselves. In both cases, Camnitzer is, we could say, watching himself watching and, by extension, watching the watching of Latin Americanness. Camnitzer’s essay on Pedro Figari (1991) tells an unusual story of Uruguay through the lens of Figari’s life and work—at once exotic, European and Latin American, typical and unique. In the process, Camnitzer suggests multiple layers of nuance and contradiction as inherent in any definition of the continent and its culture. Figari was an unexceptional painter and exceptional pedagogue. For the stereotypically heroic, revolutionary, archetypal, and symbolic Latin Americanism of the muralists he substituted happy quotidian scenes. Camnitzer is attracted to him for several reasons. First, as long as he was in Uruguay he could not see beyond the bland stereotypes about where Figari’s importance lay. As with Torres García—another misunderstood figure—Camnitzer reads Figari’s project as nothing less than creating a culture for Latin America. Figari’s integration of pedagogy with art; his peripatetic professional identity moving between lawyer, legislator, activist, and social reformer; his key role in the development of Uruguay’s liberal laws and institutions; all combine to make Figari into an exemplary figure. Camnitzer is also intrigued by the paradoxical coexistence in Figari of a localist subject matter—presumably, an anticolonialist choice—with a stylistic approach characterized by “post-Impressionist and derivative, but with the same tender blurriness.” Camnitzer gives us a sympathetic portrait of the contradictions of the colonized mentality: “In short, Figari is a very good painter only when he painted French paintings with Uruguayan subject matter.” Camnitzer’s Uruguayan art history continues in “Resoftenings and Softenings in Uruguayan Art” (1991). Here, he puts forward a theory about how the congenital misunderstanding of Torres García’s work— as a visual rather than an ideological system—and, later, the rise of the military dictatorship both reflect and further the infantilization of Uruguayan art. The essay reveals some of the complicated and contradictory nature of programs aimed at negating colonial legacies and effacing colonial intrusions into culture. And, in identifying the failure of one artistic generation to depose its predecessors, it opens considerations beyond colonialism to speculate about how Uruguay’s art history has been traced against and within the dynamics of enclosure, mimetism, and slippage. 126

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Written for Brecha,1 some six years after the dictatorship had ended, the piece can be read as something between a bitter appraisal of the country’s traumatized culture and an angry call for an end to its lassitude. “An Ode to Aquatint” (2002) rescues the history of the Otra Figuración movement, which stretched from Buenos Aires to Mexico, Venezuela, and Havana, from its nowhere status as a blip that occurred somewhere between Expressionism and neo-Expressionism. In particular, Camnitzer identifies the movement’s importance for the development of a more politicized artistic practice by subsequent generations of Latin American artists. Again, we have a highly personalized recounting of history, in this case organized around Camnitzer’s experiences in 1964 with Luis Felipe Noé and Jorge de la Vega in New York—a time that was to radically affect the younger artist’s approach to art. That history is a way of returning again to an exploration of the linked conditions of formalism, craft orientation in art, and a colonial mentality, issues that were central to Camnitzer’s development as an artist and to the move toward a more conceptual approach that was so definitive for the continent’s art during the second half of the twentieth century. “Revisiting Tautology” (2006) takes up the work of León Ferrari and Óscar Bony, continuing the project of writing a history of twentiethcentury Latin American art. Again, there is special focus on the importance of Conceptualism in the ongoing project of forming an active, viable, and ethical agency for art in response to the urgent political and economic situation of the continent during that period. “The Museo Latinoamericano and MICLA” (1992) recounts the controversial events that led to the establishment of these two short-lived institutions by a group of Latin American artists living in New York during the 1970s. The essay traces debates from that time as artists struggled to define themselves and their aspirations within and disagreements with the cultural establishment of the metropolitan center. The essay provides a fascinating glimpse into the intense polemics about the role of the United States in Latin America—debates that were central to the time and to the development of a position by artists for whom criticism of U.S. interventionism was a fundamental generational marker. The Museo Latinoamericano and its subsequent splinter group, Movimiento por la Independencia Cultural Latino Americana (MICLA), were organized as a counter to the representation of Latin American art by the Center for Inter-American Relations (CIAR, currently, the Americas Society). Camnitzer draws out both the political framework of that Latin Introduction

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American representation (Dean Rusk, Lincoln Gordon, and Thomas Mann were on the CIAR board, “a group that signaled the extent to which the CIAR’s institutional aims went far beyond culture and the fact that they were not necessarily in line with Latin American interests”) and the disagreements among artists about how best to respond to a situation in which they still had very active ambitions for recognition. The essay then situates the debates about Latin American identity, art, and politics in the diasporic setting and looks for ways in which that displacement becomes constitutive. Camnitzer wrote “Flying in Weightlessness” (2004), ostensibly a history of excrement in art (with the additional goal of adding to the canonical list of examples), on the occasion of Nicolás Guagnini’s exhibition “Seven Reviews of Monkeys and Shit.” The essay traces a history of artistic scatology, including early Latin American precedents as well as the widely known works of Duchamp and Manzoni, paying close attention to the “political strategy” that scatology has often embodied in the south. With excrement as the through line, Camnitzer discusses works by Nicanor Parra, Cildo Meireles, Ricardo Lanzarini, and others. His musings about the possibility of achieving a “good artistic insult” lead to an analysis of Guagnini’s project, a subtle assault on art criticism, and commodification. In “Brazil in New York” (2001), Camnitzer turns his attention to how Latin America is represented in the United States through an analysis of the major 2000 exhibition “Brazil: Body and Soul” at the Guggenheim Museum. The exhibition was organized by the museum, together with the Brazilian corporation BrasilConnects (a “non-governmental organization focusing on international art exhibitions and ecological projects in Brazil . . . established with the mission to promote and protect the cultural and natural heritage of Brazil”),2 and he reads the project against both the exoticizing tradition that envelops such cross-cultural displays and the increasing corporatization of culture and of international cultural relations. Camnitzer also considers the exhibition in light of the long debate in Brazil surrounding the exportation of national culture and reads the New York exhibition closely for its particular version of Brazilian culture and the possible reasons for the shape of its (highly ahistorical) narrative. “The Keeper of the Lens” (2005) is a short essay written for the exhibition of Peter Minshall’s work that Camnitzer organized for the Drawing Center in 2005. Camnitzer had become fascinated with the Trinidadian carnival form of mas, possibly the most striking contemporary example of a popular cultural phenomenon, of which Minshall is the central figure. 128

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The ways that mas engages with local and current issues, along with its visual potency and exuberance, lead Camnitzer once more to consider the ways in which art can aspire to life and development beyond “art.” Camnitzer’s discussion of the status of the work of art ranges through commodity to fetish status, the latter exemplified not via Freud but in the amputated leg of the nineteenth-century Mexican general Santa Anna. In “The Two Versions of Santa Anna’s Leg and the Ethics of Public Art” (1995), he compares the general’s lost leg to an artwork in that it was the vehicle through which Santa Anna tried to connect to the public. After its loss, Santa Anna had the leg buried and a monument raised in its honor. Noting that the gambit failed on Santa Anna’s terms, since the public rejected the leg’s monumental status and instead dragged it through the streets, Camnitzer nonetheless declares it a successful work of public art, since the leg did, in fact, occasion a massive public response: the public, “by using [the leg] in its own way, managed to fully express itself. It fully appropriated both form and symbolism to give them (and the leg) a totally different destiny, to integrate them into another reality and other more urgent needs, organized within their own coherence.” Pursuing the analogy, Camnitzer then traces the bizarre history of the general’s prosthetic limb, which, given the multiple U.S. cities which claim to own it, then becomes the avatar for a Duchampian line of speculation about authenticity, object status, and fetishism. Through all of this, Camnitzer finds in the incident a rationale to declare that “postmodernism was either born in Veracruz on December 5 of 1838—the day of the surgical cannonball—or in 1843, when the memorial monument was inaugurated.” Modernism, meanwhile, “followed in 1848, when the prosthesis was stolen.” The humor of the argument makes Camnitzer’s assault on an art history—which always originates in a few, limited, locations, which denotes value as a subset of commodity status, and which assumes that art’s public will always be void of meaningful agency—even more acute. The penultimate text here, “The Biennial of Utopias” (1999), traces the history, and disappointments, of revolutionary Cuban cultural policy. For Camnitzer, as for much of his generation across Latin America, the Cuban Revolution was a moment of exquisite importance. The triumph of the Revolution not only validated the ideas of radical, progressive change that were fomenting across the continent, it stood as an example, proving that revolution was indeed possible. During the 1980s, Camnitzer became increasingly involved with cultural debates in Cuba, and with a group of young artists and critics in Introduction

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Havana who were the subject of his 1994 book New Art of Cuba. Camnitzer was also deeply involved in the Havana Bienal, seeing in it a possible model for an alternative to market-dominated cultural industries in the developed world. In this essay he carefully traces the political, institutional, and regional roots of the bienal and charts its course over the years since its inception in 1984. What becomes clear is that the trajectory of the bienal, with its eventual contradictions and disappointments, stands as metonym for the difficult path of Latin American idealism in the same period. As he has done before, in this essay Camnitzer grapples with this double legacy of hope and disillusionment. It is a project that he continues still, and the final word in this compilation goes to his introduction written for the symposium “Art as Education/Education as Art” in Porto Alegre, Brazil (2007). That occasion marked the launch of the program that Camnitzer organized in his role as pedagogical curator for the Mercosur Biennial, and his opening comments trace the process of developing the program through a wide-ranging and close collaboration that included not only the participating teachers, but the children themselves. Camnitzer’s long practice as educator here found an almost amazing reception as he realized that utopian dream of—at least for a moment—truly engaging a huge and nonspecialist public in the ethico-intellectual-aesthetic intricacies of the art-making process.

Notes 1. Brecha is the successor to Marcha and began publication after the reestablishment of civilian rule in Uruguay. 2. The web site accessed for this quote was http://www2.weforum.org/site/ homepublic.nsf/content/BrasilConnects.html (no longer available).

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Pedro Figari (1991)

Chapter 16

The Kristallnacht took place a couple of days after my first birthday, helping my parents focus more intently on the need to change countries. A social encounter with the consul and the elicitation of sympathy on the part of his wife because I did, or did not, wet her lap, made Uruguay the homeland of my family and my consciousness. With a German version of jungle exoticism in his mind, my father bought knee-high rubber boots to keep mud and snakes away and packed as if bound for a long siege. What we found on arrival, instead, as I realized twenty years later when able to compare, was a city somewhat like Brussels. Montevideo was placed at the edge of the country, a big farm owned by very few people—something that would become a problem some decades later. There was no jungle in sight, there were no Indians, there was nothing that could be called exotic except the lack of exoticism. The original population, mainly Charrúas, had been miscegenated or pushed into Brazil a long time ago. It had seemingly been a Neolithic survival culture without aesthetic or any other by-products on which to base a tradition. Unlike the case of most of the other Latin American countries, culture in Uruguay both as concept and fact had been imported and adapted. While the income of the country came from land exploitation, half of the population lived (and still lives) in Montevideo. Montevideo is a city that someone once described as “having its back against the country” and, by implication, its face toward Europe. Both the middle class (the largest segment of the population) and the upper class fit this description in terms of the direction of their interests and their acceptance of inspiration and influences. Most dealings with so-called autochthonous elements are distorted through a distance created by urban perceptions. Culture continues to be imported and adapted. My parents’ generation of immigrants was faced with the choice to assimilate, or not, into this society. There was no social pressure to do so, but most people did it gladly out of resentment toward the Nazi regime. 131

Hitler changed from being our heer fuehrer, the leader of our army, to our her fuehrer, the one who brought us here. Primarily, assimilation consisted in learning the language, which was Spanish interlaced with some Italian, a fact particularly obvious in slang. Things I took to be signs of rich poetry, like referring to vomiting as “largar el chivo” (to let the goat loose), lost its magic when I discovered that “cibo” means “food” in Italian and is pronounced like “chivo.” While the acquisition of grammatical correctness was not hard for my parents, getting rid of the accent proved to be impossible. Thus, a dividing line was created between my generation and the previous one. We integrated and assumed things. They, meanwhile, kept a certain distance (the idea of “locals” took a generation to disappear) and kept up their Kaffeeklatches, and socializing beyond their own circles was limited. The undeclared notion of European superiority governed many of their actions, a fact that became apparent, involuntarily, on the occasion of praising a good concert, painting, or book “made in Uruguay.” Yet, there was a great happiness in being there, an acknowledgment that this was their new country, and not just a temporary refuge. The sense of foreignness was mild and not unpleasant. Helped by schooling, mostly public and secular, my generation blended in. We wore white tunics and a blue bow and became temporarily classless. Classmates of mine became senators and prostitutes, and families probably were divided along the same diverse lines, though not necessarily in correspondence. Grade school was wonderful. Once a week we would be gathered in the main hall, all grades together, to sing as a huge, discordant choir. Two of the songs we learned, with lyrics by the teacher, were Monti’s “Czardas” and Chopin’s “Polonaise Militaire.” A cabinet in the hall held samples of sand from the different deserts of the world, condensing mysteries beyond belief. Jules Verne and Alexandre Dumas became our staple reading. While we shared myths about Uruguay’s greatness, its social progressiveness, its democracy, its soccer, and its literacy rate, we also somehow were prepared to leave it, at least in cultural terms. We did, of course, learn a lot about Uruguay and its heroes: Artigas as the involuntary builder of the nation (he was a federalist, not a nationalist); Varela, the man who gave us our public, egalitarian school system back in the 1870s; Rodó, a classicist writer and essayist whom we found boring and unreadable but accepted as a hero because a wonderful park was named after him; and Figari, considered rather modern but definitely national in his painting. Torres-García was still alive, so he didn’t yet 132

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qualify as a hero. As with most things in grade school, we accepted value judgments as truth, the same way we accepted the sands from the desert. While I’ll never know if those samples were real or fake, there is enough data about the heroes to make an educated judgment, to measure their impact and draw conclusions. But the stick against which these heroes were measured for the purpose of our education was European and North American and left unanalyzed. Rodó was the Emerson of Latin America (according to Rubén Darío), and Figari, the Bonnard (his work had been complimented by Bonnard himself ). They were heroes primarily because their actions were comparable to other people’s actions, and only secondarily for the consequences they had for the country. Their stature helped the country to grow up from the vantage point of external perception more than it helped it to assume its own internal maturation. The differences between my parents’ generation and my own thus became smaller than was apparent. They kept their Europe while they adapted to the new situation. We acquired our Europe while we integrated. By the time I was in high school, integration was fairly complete. The main sign of incompleteness was the bilingualism which had been fostered at home, more for the sake of bilingualism than to preserve the past, and the consequent access to some—for me—exotic writing in the home library. A year after entering high school I also started to go to the School of Fine Arts. I learned to copy Roman busts with the reassurance that this was the way it was done in Paris. Our daily art inspiration was provided by about twenty equestrian monuments scattered around town and, notably in my memory, a bronze of a nude woman inspired by the Venus de Milo. Without arms, and her head tilted to look sadly at the cube which imprisoned and hid her feet, she reminded us that amputation in classic sculpture was a given and a sign of beauty to be cherished and by which enlightenment occurred. A sculpture portraying Artigas in his old age would bear a validating, explanatory plaque indicating that it was made during the author’s stay in Paris and that the model who posed for it was the same who posed for Rodin’s John the Baptist. The art history course stopped abruptly somewhere in the Renaissance. The history of art in Uruguay was acquired through osmosis. The twentieth century of the West was accessed through old magazines. A few years later, Jacobo Arbenz was deposed in Guatemala with the help of the U.S. and, with him, my idea of the world. Artigas turned out to be a kind of anarchist idealist. Varela’s push for egalitarianism, adult education, and secularization acquired a quite progressive bent in my eyes, Pedro Figari

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considering the time he did it. Rodó actually had written against Teddy Roosevelt’s policies. It seemed that all three, were they alive, would share my indignation about Guatemala. Of the four grade-school examples, only Figari remained a cipher. He was not only a painter, he had been a lawyer as well and, as I was told, had written the law creating the School of Fine Arts, which further confirmed that he was a painter. My generation’s political awakening had some impact on the art school. Tensions built and the director, a bearer of the French Legion of Honour, retired. A former student of André Lhote, still faithfully following him in the fifties, took over.1 We felt that the curriculum design of the school was anachronistic, derivative, and elitist in its ideology. We decided to change it. We studied other models: Montessori as a general pedagogical approach; the Bauhaus as an institutional example. We read Kandinsky, Klee, Moholy-Nagy, and Kepes to create a new school, free of influences and which we could call ours. We were, unknowingly, following a tradition.2 Our militancy in art school became quite strong and successful. We took over the school, forced the resignation of the faculty, and instituted a new curriculum. We wanted art to be a weapon for social change, for creativity to be spread among the people, and for visual illiteracy to be eradicated. We wanted art to be connected with our culture, whatever that might be, and not to be dependent on an elitist market. The market was unable to support us anyway. Most of the Uruguayan professional artists were Sunday painters by any other standard, unless they were independently wealthy. In fact, the art school functioned to a certain extent as a finishing school for its students and as a status symbol for the country. A country could not call itself “cultured” without one. But there was no market to back up and absorb the professionals formed by the institution. This was a problem we had not completely thought through, and did not solve either. The art school continued, in spite of the new curriculum, to prepare amateurs and people who could apply for foreign grants and travel to the cultural centers. Those who traveled would have a chance to be absorbed by a wealthier market or imbibe some truths about art to bring back to Uruguay. True success could be achieved only outside of our borders. We had actually been educated to function outside. The process had been quite insidious. We had our rhetoric fairly clear. We kept denouncing colonialism, the IMF, and every erosion of our sovereignty. We had a chuckle when Eisenhower popped up through the roof 134

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of his limousine and waved at us, thinking we were cheering him, only to be teargassed by the wind which had joined us in the heckling. We lived assuming that most of the people in government, from the chief of police to the president, were on the CIA’s payroll, although it should be noted that we were surprised as well when we found out that this was a fact. But when it came to art, our lucidity collapsed. A painting was only worth the name if it was done with Winsor and Newton, not when we mixed our own pigments. The international success of a colleague either validated or forced a revision of our opinions. Somebody exhibiting in Paris or New York was necessarily doing well and raising our country’s reputation to an international and desirable level. Even worse, we were in a mess with the concept of what was progressive and what was reactionary. To a certain extent, we reacted to what we saw as oligarchic taste. Since the oligarchy tended to be conservative in taste, we looked timidly at the avant-garde for models, taking for granted that the “International Style” was something progressive. Since the more right-wing groups were nationalist and folklorist oriented, those values automatically became reactionary. Like the oligarchy, we never identified our contradictions. We accepted “progress” to be a good word, without checking out what it meant and whom it served. We were against old-fashioned conservative traditionalism in aesthetics. Meanwhile, in our search for a national identity, we kept looking back to the true values of our heroes in order to conserve our valuable traditions against the new fashions imported by imperialism. Most of us abhorred social realism and picturesque imagery, but were unable, too lazy, or too colonized to be original. So, our only alternative became an opening to the “new.” Our national Olympus of modern art was occupied by three painters: Barradas, Figari, and Torres-García. Barradas, born in 1890, left Uruguay at the age of twenty-one to go to Europe and join the European avantgarde. He met Marinetti and then settled in Spain, starting his own “Vibrationist” movement. He returned to Uruguay in 1928 and died some months later. Figari was born in 1861. When he was sixty years old he decided to become a painter. In 1921, he went to Buenos Aires and then to Paris. He returned to Uruguay in 1933, stopped painting shortly after, and died in 1938. Torres-García was born in 1874. He went to Spain at age seventeen. After working with Gaudí and under the influence of Barradas, he joined the avant-garde and developed his own brand of Constructivism. In 1934, Pedro Figari

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he returned to Uruguay, dying there in 1949 and becoming a hero shortly after. Of the three, only Torres-García was able to exert some influence extending beyond his own art. A year after his arrival in Uruguay he started his own school. With a powerful charisma and dogmatic certainty he shaped the minds of mostly minor followers, who religiously re-created his work. My generation in art school respected his work but loathed his pedagogy and his circle. His achievements had been banalized into the decoration of souvenir ashtrays, and his preaching had terrorized several generations of architects, who therefore avoided any deviation from his earth-colored palette in their buildings. We looked at his paintings, deservedly, as possessing international museum quality and missed the fact that he was seriously trying to build a Latin American visual vocabulary. Barradas had some of that museum presence as well, but seemed more remote. His work was not that readily available for observation, and it may have been too excessively European for us to connect with it. Figari, on the other hand, was easy, maybe too easy. He had the charm of a naïf painter, a happy range of colors, and accessible popular subjects. So, in truth, the Olympus was occupied only by Figari and TorresGarcía—Torres-García, the rigorous painter but turgid theoretician; Figari, the happy and somewhat superficial hedonist who recorded scenes of Uruguayan life. Both artists were promoted by the government after their deaths. Torres-García was our own slice of Western art history, while Figari, for many, represented the true Uruguayan spirit. Figari’s work also had a political use. Although generally unknown to the rest of the world, Figari is rated as one of the most important masters in Latin American art. He is therefore a symbol for Latin American identity, helping to establish a claim to distinctness and separateness. At the time, Mexican muralism was strong and spreading its influence all over the continent. Figari was used as an alternative definition of Latin American art, in order to bypass radical politics. Classified as separate from abstraction and internationalism, his work was and is taken as a distinguished example of representational localism. Like most recipients of fellowships, I intended to leave Uruguay for only a short while. But, typically, that short while is now perilously close to being longer than the time I spent in Uruguay. At that time, much of the above image of the two artists was branded in my mind. Both of them, like all of the other heroes in one’s education, were really too close for

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objectivity. They were like relatives during childhood, when criticism is blunted by love and duty while family myths remain unchallenged. I pursued my life unwittingly reliving many of other people’s experiences—the emigration process of my parents and the dilemmas posed by assimilation, the making of art in a foreign country, and the separateness of a previous audience that knew me and a new audience that didn’t. Every step taken acquired some meaning only in the context of creating a myth in Uruguay. In the same way as currency exchange, success in New York multiplied its value to a fictional hundredfold in Uruguay. Latin Americans had a haven in New York that helped to exploit that situation. A Chilean, who was once a war correspondent for the UPI, owned a gallery where we could all exhibit. With his contacts, we were assured that newspapers in our countries would receive a UPI telex announcing: “So-and-so triumphs in New York. His/her work is presently exhibited in a one-person show, etc., etc.” The Chilean’s name was Armando Zegrí, and he was one of the most wonderful and memorable people I have ever met. Uruguay was soon to be hit by a horrible dictatorship, with one of every fifty citizens jailed for political reasons. Distance gave me the gift of perspective, the fish’s insight into wetness. The nature of our colonial status became clearer and clearer: not only was the marginal Uruguayan art market a colonial institution, but the definition of quality was a colonial construct unrelated to our needs. The act of painting itself (or the act of using any traditional art medium) was preconditioning this colonial status. We were not making contemporary art, we were making contemporary colonial art. Meanwhile, access to the work of both Torres-García and Figari became rare for me. The Guggenheim Museum held a small retrospective (two circles out of seven) of Torres-García in 1970, which was blasted by a former gardener in the New York Times as follows: “This highly respected artist was not that good.” For me the show was a revelation, not only because I saw how the cultural center treated our hero, but because I was forced to revise many of my views about him. It was then that I understood his Latin American ambitions, and how the act of painting had become an obstacle to his implementing them. With Figari it took longer. It was in 1986, forty years after a previous exhibition at the Knoedler Gallery, when about seventy-five pieces were shown at the Center for Interamerican Relations. Figari had produced over two thousand pieces during the relatively short period he worked as a

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painter. But he was so consistent, not to say monotonous, in his work that the small exhibit did a good job of representing him. The work recalled my previous pleasures and skepticism, but the recollections were now enriched by a better knowledge of his life, and of some aspects of his thought with which I could identify. He had given much thought to teaching and to colonialism, to the point that it seemed absurd and incomprehensible that my generation in art school had ignored his writings. During his life, Figari had a reasonable amount of acclaim in international circles: three exhibits in the Galerie Druet in Paris (1923, 1925, and 1927); one each in the Claridge Gallery in London and the Galerie Manteau in Brussels (both in 1926); plus several others, particularly in Argentina, before his death in 1938. His success helped to place Uruguay on the international art map, which was at the time surrounded by European borders. Only Torres-García accomplished a similar feat. Barradas was mainly listed as a Spanish artist; and while the Count of Lautréamont had far more influence than either Figari or Torres-García on Western art, his connection with Uruguay was more tenuous and rarely acknowledged. Of all of them, he had the least feedback into Uruguay. Figari was a much more complex figure than his well-known image as a painter. His first sixty years, before he took up painting, were not spent in idleness; in fact, he was a multitalented character who excelled in virtually everything he undertook. He was really one of those archetypal forefathers who help shape nations and who are normally commemorated in public sculpture and flashed as exemplars to unprepared schoolchildren. It is odd that, even in Uruguay, he is chiefly known as a “painter,” and peddled as such, so that his other activities are practically pushed into oblivion. Figari was born in Montevideo in 1861. At the age of twenty-five he received his degree in law, started to receive painting lessons (from an Italian academic painter, Godoffredo Sommavilla), married, and went to Europe on a trip that lasted a year and a half. As a lawyer he was assigned to “the poor in civil and criminal matters.” In 1893, he codirected the newspaper El Deber. In 1895, he defended a second lieutenant by the name of Almeida, unjustly accused of murder, and won his acquittal. The case was compared to the Dreyfuss affair (without the racist overtones) and made legal history in Uruguay.3 During the lulls in the trial, which continued until 1899, Figari would doodle. The drawings were consistent with those he would make decades later for his paintings. In 1896, he was elected to Congress. In 1897, he started work on a reform of the penal system. In 1899, he was elected vice president of the 138

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House of Representatives. In 1900, he introduced a proposal for a law to establish a School of Fine Arts, followed by a nearly obsessive outpouring of writings on art and education. In 1903, he started to campaign against capital punishment (he corresponded with Lombroso on the topic).4 In 1909 he became a member of the board of directors of the School of Arts and Crafts, and was then its director from 1915 to 1917. In 1913, he made a second trip to Europe, Paris being his main focus. From 1921 on, he devoted himself totally to painting and moved to Buenos Aires. In 1925 he moved to Paris, from where he returned to Uruguay in 1933. During that time he also wrote short stories about life in the interior of Uruguay and continued his other writings. In 1934, according to some sources, he stopped painting. He died in Montevideo in 1938. In a superficial way, Figari’s image was projected backwards. His image was that of a painter, therefore his previous sixty years were supposed to have funneled directly into his paintings. He had written about art, legislated about art, and directed an arts and crafts school before he made art, all of which were interpreted as making him a consistent art personality. Yet, on closer scrutiny, his writings and thoughts diverge from his paintings, creating two distinctly different positions. In his writing he often refers to the need to break away from Europe and to seek independence, and these ideas fuel his conception of educational reforms. Yet, his paintings relate only tangentially to these issues and, save for their content, merge into the European tradition. It is this inconsistency between the two sets of activities that makes him an interesting case study. His present importance is, ironically, not so much a symbol of Latin American identity as a paradigm of the colonized artist who produces colonized work in spite of his own insights. My empathy was elicited by this partial blindness, the opaqueness of which seems to separate intent from act, where self-perception may become self-deception. Figari’s work was produced at a time when most of the crucial modernist avant-garde movements had peaked and had radically broken with the same academicism he himself had attacked in depth in his writing as early as 1910. Yet, he chose to insert himself into a mild and comfortable post-Impressionist aesthetic, itself dangerously close to being academic, rather than to try to find a way to more radical ruptures with the past. His typical work was done from memory and in most cases executed outside of Uruguay, thus doubling the distance from his subjects. The images are tender and blurred, as memory likes to depict things. His painterly handwriting, post-Impressionist and derivative, but with the same tender blurriness, makes the result an indivisible visual package of some perfection. Pedro Figari

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This explains the respect his paintings command upon personal contact. Bonnard is quoted as having said: “He is one of us.”5 With that statement, Bonnard synthesizes both the strength and the weakness of Figari’s work and symbolizes the ambiguity of international acclaim. Figari regarded painting as an expression of his “free will,” a notion that frequently appears in his writings. In thought he was able to construct an educational structure that tried to merge the individual into a decolonized, national context, even if accepting that free will was subjected to external conditions. In painting, though, he accepted the notion as a given. Instead of using the act of painting as a tool to research and possibly to expand the limits of the concept of free will, he indulged in what he saw as his freedom without realizing that he was not as free as he believed. Free will, like free market and free press, can also be seen as a euphemism for oppression. The terms can be used to define the omnipotence of those in power, and their ability to hide that oppression from the oppressed by attempting to convince them that the omnipotence is shared. He was not aware of the contradictions within which he was delving, partly because he felt (like many colonial artists today) that the narrative content of his paintings and his ideas were enough to save him. He was trapped in his generation. The generation was defined not only by age, but also by belonging to a marginal country and to a social class with particular tastes about art. Those were highly internalized conditions, especially because Uruguay had no precolonial tradition to use as a reference in opposition to Europe. Living in this context, Figari was, and acted like, an urban upper-class intellectual. With a shared belief that exercising one’s good taste was a sign of free will, he failed to see that his taste was shaped by values in contradiction to his own ideas. Taste acts as an acquired instinct. As an instinct, it bypasses rational thought. As an acquisition, it is controlled, like any other merchandise, by, among others, values related to class status and property desires. In a colonially dependent situation, the controls operate from the cultural and economic centers and shape the artificial creation of needs. Thus, by relying on taste alone, again like many colonial art-makers today, Figari locked himself into that bastion where colonialism is internalized the most and can be fought the least. Figari’s full dedication to painting came after a serious disillusionment as the director of the School of Arts and Crafts, where he was at odds with an advisory board which opposed his ideas. This may partially explain why his painting activity seems to have been reduced to a personal hedonist act, as if he had taken a leave from intellectual commitments. The great 140

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pleasure he derived from it is communicated to the viewers and shared with them. He was extremely modest about his paintings: “I am not a painter. My intention is to stir certain memories, call to mind some episodes that genuinely reflect our social life so that artists see the area that they can embellish upon in those memories.”6 This approach, consistent with his short stories describing prevailing customs in the interior, focuses on a literary perspective. But his statement is also a defensive one. His painting, according to him, should be seen as a by-product of these concerns, as a subordinated means toward the end described by him and thus not judged harshly. The problem with Figari’s good paintings (in regard to his own statement) is that they are indivisible and show his commitment to painting as much as to content— except that his commitment to the narrative aspect is thoughtful, while his commitment to painting is sensorial. The problem with Figari’s position about his own art is that it helped him evade analysis of the colonization of taste, of which he was a victim. Granted that he broke with nineteenth-century academicism, in fashion in Uruguay at the time, nonetheless, he still failed to challenge the roots of aesthetic dependency. He had access to enough information, which could have allowed him to incorporate into his work the subversive ingredients underlying modernism, something that would have been much more in line with his own beliefs. In that sense, Figari is a sort of “naïf” painter, although on a more sophisticated level than the customary use of the word implies. The narrative content he used served as a vehicle through which to import, even if in a personalized fashion, French painting into Uruguay. Yet, he himself had warned in 1917 about the European centers that sold “leftovers, tinsel and tawdry objects to Latin America like when they brought marbles to the Indians.” He had in fact stressed the importance of “initiating multiple, completely nonexistent forms of production, so to prepare our own evolution” because “we have the treasure of the freedom to determine our actions in all the amplitude conceivable.”7 There appears to be a gap between the level of his general ideas and the level of detailed execution, a gap that also showed in his activities in the School of Arts and Crafts. It is very difficult to organize an exhibit of Figari’s work other than grouping it by subject matter, and this is what is usually done. He rarely dated his paintings, and his style is so consistent over the years that it is nearly impossible to establish a chronological order. Subject groups in an exhibition are related to folklorist dances, historical themes, black people, landscapes, Creole scenes, bullfights, and, oddly enough, troglodytes. But Pedro Figari

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the groupings don’t really matter much. Mainly, Figari painted. The insistence on using moons, ombus (huge, nearly trunkless amorphous trees typical in Uruguay and Argentina), and backgrounds like theatrical drops is linked more to what the brush can do than to what would be required by documentation.8 The content serves mainly to get Figari into a nostalgic mood conducive, in his case, to making paintings. Borges has been described as writing only one story over and over again, so Figari essentially painted one painting, regardless of the subject. But, like Borges, he didn’t really repeat himself. He endlessly researched within the limitations of his own language. Throughout his work, Figari emphasizes his delectation in painting, but, nevertheless, he remains observant, and his subjects do touch him. He picks up on little details like the fact that in folklorist dances women wear their scarves over their pigtails, and not under. He also adapts the painting to his subject. The background of “Colonial Soiree” is theatrically symmetrical, while street scenes with black people are constructed rhythmically through the whole surface following the action. Sometimes a sky is treated as a calm surface and the texture is concentrated on a single wall, as in “Creole Dance” (a painting which is part of the New York MoMA’s collection of works on paper, not of painting, since Figari generally painted on cardboard). Or, the sky follows the chaos of violence, as in “The Assassination of Quiroga.” In “Pampa,” the richness of the sky blends with animals and plants, ornamenting the whole surface. In “The Arrival,” people, animals, and carts create a clustered mêlée against an otherwise serene area. But characters remain fairly constant; people, dogs, horses, trees, and houses travel from painting to painting, only to be recomposed in new settings. The difference between a sun and a moon is only perceivable by the particular hue of blue that surrounds it, mostly remaining ambiguous. Many of Figari’s paintings deal with the life of black people in Uruguay, their music and dances, particularly the candombe (as typical for Uruguay as the tango, but, unlike the latter, it is not shared with Argentina). He also used black people to depict funerals in a series connected with the death in 1927 of his favorite son, Juan Carlos. This interest has often been taken as a sign of Figari’s racially egalitarian attitudes.9 Figari’s interest in this case was not so much a symptom of militant integrationism as a classconditioned perception of those traditions as being, although “local,” essentially exotic. He painted black subjects lovingly, as distant events recorded in his memory. They are events which sometimes serve as a metaphor for per142

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sonal experiences, and they do not affect the formal aspects of painting. All his paintings are painted in the same way, and black subjects are not treated differently by introducing the so-called primitive formal elements of Eurocentric appropriations of the primitive during modernism of the early century. Neither do they share anything with the “informed primitivism” affectations perpetrated today. This was more to do with a Rousseauian philosophical frame of mind that Figari shared, together with positivism, with many Latin American intellectuals of the late nineteenth century. However, with a mediating distance, he stereotyped black culture through a paternalistic caricature of innocence, vitality, and happiness. In his time, Figari’s class did have a dose of inbuilt racism, and he himself expressed it in a very unfortunate statement. In 1910, admiring the high degree of literacy in the U.S., he wrote: “This country, that has only 6% illiterates in its white population (the figure of 13% seems to be due to immigration and inferior ethnics).”10 Figari, presumably unaware of his racism, was conscious of his distance from the subject matter and of the usefulness of this distance for his work. Directly addressing his paintings about black people, he said: “I want to refer to man and in order better to do so, I take the Negro as my example, bearing in mind that we white men carry a black man, a very black man, within us—the same one who frequently suggests things that otherwise could not be suggested to a white man without incurring irreverence.”11 As Marianne Manley points out in the catalogue for the exhibit at the Center for Interamerican Relations, this connects the paintings with another series, the “Troglodytes.” In this series, Figari pursues the idyllic view of an unspoiled beginning of humanity, a topic he also explored in writing (“Historia Kiria,” 1930). It is interesting that the least successful paintings by Figari are those unrelated to his Uruguayan memories. The “Bullfight” series and paintings about Venice look as if their subject matter wasn’t strong enough to motivate him pictorially. Bullfighting existed in Uruguay for a very short time and was then declared illegal, never becoming a tradition; and Figari’s own experience of it was presumably limited. The same can be said about his experience of Venice. The paintings about bullfights and Venice show how Figari relied on a narrative which he developed in relation to “Latin America.” When this narrative is missing, when the subject matter is not directly connected to some of his inner chords or memories, the paintings become dull, as if executed under a moral imperative (how could he see Venice and not paint it?). They lack the stimulus of that Pedro Figari

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particular nostalgia that Figari needed for his better work. They are also devoid of his specific identity and could hang anonymously in any Parisian frame shop. In short, Figari is a very good painter only when he painted French paintings with Uruguayan subject matter. In Uruguay, Figari remained an isolated and idiosyncratic figure, without followers. His success outside the country gave Uruguay the feeling of belonging to a hypothetical mainstream in the international arts, and that fact became more important than the pursuit of cultural independence. It gave credence to the belief, fortunately without much consequence, that a kind of Impressionism was the right aesthetic for Uruguay in the twenties and thirties. The fact is that Figari’s paintings were not a viable alternative for Latin American art, and the fiction of his being a true Latin American artist was allowed to gloss over Figari’s more controversial and important contributions. As an intellectual, Figari was a cornerstone of the Latin American thought process that liberalized and socialized governmental and educational institutions at the turn of the century. He was concerned with illiteracy and promoted open admissions in education as one of the historically necessary solutions: “The pride of a nation, if ever justifiable, will take place when it lacks illiterates and ignorants, and to reduce their number the opposite of what usually is done has to take place: the doors of every school have to be completely opened to them. . . . To instruct a majority of persons without any kind of distinction, offering special courses for the workers during the days and hours most convenient for them.”12 Figari was not in a total vacuum regarding his radical thinking. In many ways, his ideas constitute an unacknowledged precedent for the university reform movement of Córdoba in 1918, the movement that predated the Paris student upheaval by half a century. The reform of Córdoba, which shaped contemporary thinking in Latin American universities, established that education was to be free, nonclerical, and egalitarian. Education was to be a right and not a commodity, and universities were to be autonomous (the model of a state within the state), with governance participation by students, faculty, and alumni. The relatively late foundation of Montevideo had saved Uruguay from the grip that the Jesuits had over Latin American education during their most conservative period. The university was organized in 1849 and immediately aligned itself with rationalism. José Pedro Varela started his campaign for free and obligatory elementary schooling in 1865 (the same year the first union was created, the Typographers’ Union), implemented it in 1877, and organized the School of Arts and Crafts, all two years be144

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fore his death at the age of thirty-four. By 1895, the Mason and Marble Workers’ Union had achieved the eight-hour working day. A general law proposing the eight-hour working day for all was written in 1906 and approved in 1911, although by then it was already standard practice. By 1910, a law provided the right for students to sit on the governing board of the university schools. French Romanticism had been followed by French positivism and, following the evolution of Francmasonry—a crucial component of Latin American culture and politics—deism was followed by agnosticism. While the reform of Córdoba was more concerned with the distribution of power than with actual pedagogical issues and reflected the interests of an emerging industrial bourgeoisie, Figari was more interested in pedagogical issues within a humanist frame of reference, sometimes clashing with the interests of that class. His preoccupation with the “industrial arts” led to his appointment as the director of the School of Arts and Crafts, where he tried to implement his ideas. The school had, until then, the function of a reformatory. Originally, all the students lived in the institution as part of a “socialization” process. By 1915, when Figari took over the directorship, the system was mixed. He not only proceeded to eliminate the reformatory component and the “inmate” category, but he also instituted a monthly stipend for all students to finance the expenses associated with their studies.13 His vision of independent craftsmen entering society as creative individuals was not well received by the board of directors of the school. The board had a majority of members belonging to the Chamber of Industry, a kind of specialized chamber of commerce, and their main interest lay in creating qualified workers who could be used in factories. Figari lasted only two years, before he resigned in bitterness.14 Thus his paintings became an escape from his disappointment but, unfortunately, not a testing ground for his ideas. The more interesting part of Figari’s thought lies in his lucidity about Uruguay and Latin America. He was more of a regionalist than a nationalist. In 1916, he circulated a letter to several Latin American governments asking for local materials: “This institution [the School of Art and Crafts] is dedicated to display and making known American raw materials as much as possible, in the belief that this is the only way that we can raise the concept of our continental culture and that it will some day lead us to produce a superior art bearing regional characteristics.” At the same time, it was clear to him that the solution was not isolation and ignorance, but “understanding our own environment with autonomous criteria . . . since Pedro Figari

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anything else would be pure affectation.”15 His more general ideas about art and education spring from this platform. As early as 1900 he asked: “Why should art be excluded from our social action? That would ratify a thesis satisfactory for a colonial policy, but never for the legitimate ambitions of a free and advanced nation.”16 He tried to erase the borderlines between art and industry: “Art incorporated into every object . . . , into every utensil . . . , into every person.”17 His notion of art was, to a certain extent, interchangeable with ingenuity, and, as he put it, “ingenuity is not just a special individual attribute, it is individuality applied to the realization of an aim.”18 He believed that “the teaching of art is not a subject or series of subjects, but a point of view”; and for the School of Arts and Crafts he intended to “mold, even more than the skills, the judgment and the ingenuity of the student; to opt for a general education rather than for specialization” in the context of national resources.19 He saw the lack of manual skills in Latin America as being more dangerous than illiteracy. Yet, he didn’t propose that those skills be taught in a vacuum. They had to be taught in the context of critical thinking, because “pure technical preparation would leave us in the poor condition of imitators. . . . If drawing, the same as writing, would be approached as a means of expression” rather than as a tool for rendering plaster casts, “it would not be an exceptional skill, but something common like language.”20 While wishful thinking may propose Figari as having premonitions of the Bauhaus, and some of his more general ideas could be actually linked to it,21 it would be better to define him as an aftermath of John Ruskin and William Morris. This is illustrated by what was actually produced in the School of Art and Crafts under his directorship. In some cases, the products were based on his own designs and those of his son, Juan Carlos. What was produced actually represents the bourgeois taste of the period translated into indigenous materials. They remind us of the Vienna school in the beginning of the century. However, it must be said that Figari was in a difficult political position, and that he had to produce an image of the school palatable to his enemies. The aim was to produce much and well, and to get good press to cement the structural changes he had introduced. Figari’s ideas about education were either very general, or very particular about structure. A middle level of thought, dealing with design itself as a language, was missing. Under the circumstances, the use of design formats already approved by consumers seemed to be an efficient policy more than a contradictory one.

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It is difficult to say whether a longer tenure in his position would have led to a more profound aesthetic challenge. However, there is enough information to see him in relation to art education in a parallel role to what Varela signified for Uruguayan elementary education. Varela got his monument on this account. Figari didn’t. Maybe, more than anything else, Figari was a politician with the surprising qualities of being neither corrupt nor power driven and who maintained his ideals. This did not make him as successful as he might have been without these qualities, but they allowed him to leave a body of ideas of great importance, many of which are still to be implemented. The School of Arts and Crafts now bears his name, but, against his beliefs, it has become the repository for those students who are not deemed good enough for academic life. “We often ask foreigners to build for us palaces and monuments in the European mode, to direct our schools and to install our generators, and shortly after we have the illusion that all is ours though it is no more than an exotic event in our midst; as if we would wear a borrowed academic uniform to augment our cultural volume.”22 At the time, in half a decade, U.S. investments in Uruguay had jumped from $1.6 million to $2.4 million. This statement is a truth that many people are still reluctant to accept. Figari was a utopian and naïve in much of his thinking, and the same nostalgia that elicited his paintings often colored his own philosophy. Some of his suggestions were not rigorous enough, and some have aged badly. Others, profound and politically sophisticated, were too radical for his time and place. That these have been waiting too long to be carried out is possibly due to the way he entered Latin American history: as no more than a painter.

Notes 1. André Lhote (1885–1962), a post-Cubist painter, had a teaching studio in Paris that was extremely popular among Latin American painters. 2. Montevideo, founded around 1726 as a military post, had been one of the last Spanish settlements in Latin America. Spain had had no interest in catering to any cultural needs there, so cultural development happened through spontaneous generation and without institutional support. By the time things got more organized, the fights for independence were already taking place. Military fights against Spain were accompanied by an opposition to Spanish culture. By the 1840s, when things started to settle down, French Romanticism became the lighthouse to illuminate independence. Uruguayanism was defined by thinking French.

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3. During the trial, Figari commented on the irony that the Dreyfuss affair received more press coverage in Uruguay than the Almeida case. To Figari’s indignation, Almeida was granted freedom for “lack of evidence” instead of being declared innocent. Eventually, many years later, the real murderer confessed. Figari achieved the declaration of innocence in 1922 (Luis Anastasia, Ángel Kalemberg, Julio María Sanguinetti, “Figari, crónica y dibujos, del caso Almeida,” Alcali Editorial [Montevideo], 1976). 4. Cesare Lombroso (1835–1909) was an Italian criminologist who believed that criminality was inherited and could be predicted through physical attributes. 5. Quoted by Marianne Manley in the catalogue for the CIAR. 6. Jorge Romero Brest, “Pedro Figari, pintor americano,” Cuadernos Americanos (September–October 1945), p. 251. 7. Pedro Figari, “General Organizational Plan for Industrial Education,” March 8, 1917, republished in Educación y Arte (Montevideo: Biblioteca Artigas, 1964). 8. Actually, in technical terms, the ombu is a three-story-high weed. 9. The black population in Uruguay was, and is, comparatively small. Black people participated actively in the war for independence and have since then lived relatively integrated into the rest of the population. It cannot be said that there is color-blindness in Uruguay, but there is no overt racism or discrimination. The one scandalous incident occurred during the fifties, when the Victoria Plaza Hotel, then administered by a North American corporation, refused to accommodate Marian Anderson when she came on tour to Montevideo. The event was properly perceived as being literally outlandish and produced outrage. However, the black population never became part of the ruling class; it has also kept alive its own African traditions. 10. Pedro Figari, “Reorganization of the National School of Arts and Crafts,” July 20, 1910, republished in Educación y Arte. Uruguay eventually reduced the illiteracy rate to 7 percent. 11. Quoted and translated by Marianne Manley, in the catalogue for the CIAR exhibit, from a letter to Joaquín de Salterain, May 28, 1932. 12. Figari, “Reorganization.” 13. Gabriel Peluffo, “Figari, arte e industria en el novecientos,” unpublished manuscript, Montevideo, 1985. 14. Strangely enough, while Figari passionately defended his ideas and thoughts, he did not publicly attack his opponents. While it is not known if Figari was a Mason, his behavior could be a consequence of having the discrepancies aired in the Masonic arena. 15. Figari, “General Organizational Plan.” 16. Peluffo, “Figari.” 17. Ibid. 18. Figari, “Reorganization.”

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19. Ibid. 20. Ibid. 21. The president of Uruguay, Julio María Sanguinetti, proposes this link in a message published in the catalogue for the Center for Interamerican Relations (1986). 22. Pedro Figari and Juan Carlos Figari, “Integral Education,” August 29, 1918, reprinted in Educación y Arte.

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Chapter 17

Resoftenings and Softenings in Uruguayan Art (1991)

When I left Uruguay in 1964, I did so with a heavy burden of tastes and myths regarding the art of the country. Part of that load was never revised due to a lack of both need and opportunity. However, some of the myths—only functional while one doesn’t know they are myths—had their shells crumble at the first confrontation. Artists are unhooked from memory to be substituted by others, and personal perceptions of the culture are continually being honed. The process that leads to all this is generally considered an “acquisition of perspective.” However, it is a double-edged sword. The perspective allows for a certain clarity, but it falsely dignifies distance. Ultimately, one never knows which of the edges is operating. Because I didn’t forget either of the edges, I was affected when again viewing the work of Manolo Espínola after nearly three decades.1 Espínola has been surrounded by myth since I was a young art student. Since then I have shared that belief without feeling any need to reevaluate or challenge it. However, seeing the work again during a recent trip confronted me with an unexpected dissonance. It wasn’t that myth and reality stopped coinciding. It was that my appreciation for his work had nothing to do with my taste and continued in spite of taste and in spite of the myth. I don’t want to discuss Manolo’s work here. But, because of the things it forced me to think about, I want to mention at least one of them here. A big reason for my appreciation is that his work impresses me as “adult.” Generally, it is presumed that the quality of adulthood in a work of art is not really a merit but an intrinsic condition, something to be expected. If work is shown, there should be a maturity in the discourse. Nevertheless, in Espínola’s case, it became a quality that forced my respect. To qualify as adult and make that a remarkable feature, the work of Espínola has to be considered within a very particular context, and it was that context that suddenly became clear. It is a context that contains a great amount of infantilized work or work that is infantile. This is the

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reason why I stopped thinking about Manolo and started to ponder what surrounds him. I am using both terms—infantilized and infantile—to, somewhat crudely, differentiate between a position of active affectation (infantilized art) and a passive situation in which the conditions are imposed (infantile art). Both of them, with often blurry borderlines, seem to be characteristic of most of the Uruguayan art of the second half of the twentieth century. I include in this much of what I and we are doing as Uruguayan art while living in other countries. Infantilization is an affectation because it is an inauthentic attitude at the time of its adoption. It is a form of kitsch. It is baby talk adopted by a grown-up. And, as a counterpart to infantile, it is the product of a personal decision, not a forced one. Infantilism, on the other hand, is the product of the imposition of authoritarian conditions and the amputation of the possibilities of decision. It is the product of the theft of maturation. In our case in Uruguay, these conditions include, or included, a bad education in art, a misguided art criticism, a colonially dependent cultural situation, a socioeconomic attitude that ignores art, and a dictatorship. The ground for Uruguayan infantilization in art was richly fertilized by the misunderstanding of the Constructivist paintings by Torres-García. The graphic symbols he developed were the product of a complex process of synthesis that was firmly grounded in a personal cosmogony, often hermetic, but certainly profound. While it is true that the formal accumulation of his symbols produced a visually pleasing package, the hedonist reaction to his work is of secondary importance. However, it was the pleasing packaging that had inauspicious consequences. It was not the painter’s fault, but that of the way that the work was consumed by the public. The lazy observer faced works that were easy to read if viewed as decoration. One could then enjoy them without having to deal with the involved process that generated them. Torres-García’s work coincided with the post-Bauhaus fashion to blur the differences between art and crafts. In Uruguay this was to be done in the most comfortable manner possible, using symbols from painting to decorate useful objects. The missionary strategies of the Taller TorresGarcía exploited this rhetoric and used it to circulate and popularize the master’s aesthetic.2 They disseminated a way of looking at the work that didn’t require much thinking. In effect, one could call this a process of spreading visual illiteracy. This led to long-lasting artistic mannerisms. Because they deviated

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from the more traditional reactionary academic ways, they were accepted not only as progressive, but also as a marker of Uruguayan visual identity from the 1950s onward. During the Uruguayan 1950s, it was customary to applaud the European 1920s so that one could escape the 1850s from wherever. The theory was that the newest academy was the best, as long it was academic and called itself antiacademic. When interesting revisions managed to take place, they were quickly aborted because of the legacy of this formalist superficiality. La Comunidad del Sur and the Imprenta AS were two landmark events. They focused on the change in the typographic and graphic layout tradition.3 Both groups were an example of the fusion of art and craft, and they tried to introduce graphic signs into everyday aesthetics. However, although their theoretical grounding was solid, their formal solutions became formulaic. Both the Comunidad and, later, the School of Fine Arts repeated the design process in pottery with some degree of commercial success. So did many of the disciples of the Taller TorresGarcía. The pretty and trivial scribble, with a touch of stylistic information so as to place its provenance, usurped the borrowed symbols. The combination of simplified reading, the opening of graphic design, and the imprecision of technical limits allowed for unexpected influences. One of them was Oski, the famous Argentine cartoonist.4 Oski’s style became a way of representation and affected arcane things like the little figures used in the School of Architecture to suggest scale in buildings, which introduced playfulness into otherwise serious technical drawings. Until then, the same figures had been based on fashion sketches or on the images used by LeCorbusier. In turn, some of the architecture students then invaded newspaper cartooning. The use of facile and endearing graphic devices continued to expand. The style was further validated on the highbrow side by the works of Klee, and on the mass-culture side by the United Productions of America cartoons. The groundwork for infantilization was set so that it could go from a temporal stage of fashion to a permanent stage of tradition. Not all the post–Torres García artists fell into this (Espínola didn’t). But many did, including me. My drawings of the very early 1960s satisfied a tenuous agoraphobia with insipid ornaments unnecessarily populating backgrounds and façades. I believe that was the period’s artistic pest. By means of dead ornamentation, we faked virtuoso drawings. We created a distance from things and events by giving them a bath of cheap humor while trying to denote a critical wisdom. 152

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Other works from the period, formally more serious, represented the fever without the sickness. My colleagues covered everything with whites, blacks, and some earth colors. They tried to simulate a drama that was absent and probably inaccessible. Infantilism came about a decade later. The dictatorship neutralized the generation that should have challenged and deposed us, the one that should have unraveled our tricks and invented new rules of the game. What had been our fashion should not have been allowed to become a tradition. But repression killed dialogue and speculation, the questioning of values, and the rupture of limits, all of which help maturation. Thanks to this, my generation now occupies not one but two slots in history: our own, and that belonging to the neutralized generation. In the absence of the deserved challenges in the right moment, the infantilized art of my generation became the standard. It continued to be internalized by newer artists, who condemned themselves to infantilism so as to evade rebellion. Today the easy scribble is art; it is not seen as the affectation it initially was. The superficial reading, as much of our art traditions as of those from outside of the country, became the only way of reading. Art produced under these coordinates, a comfortable task for our most ignorant national critics, is applauded as something exceptional and thus has increased the burden of the new tradition. Playfulness and endearment, originally a measure of hypocrisy, today measure art’s retardation and removal from adulthood. There are no young people. It is us and the children. And thanks to the dictatorship, we have convinced the majority not to grow up. That is the only way one can explain the fact that, without any protest, President Lacalle could appoint a commission of septuagenarians to set the parameters of today’s art.5 However, it is less understandable that he could do so by uttering declarations about the elimination of elitism from the arts. The members of that gerontocracy are precisely the foundation of those elites. It is the void between the children and us that allows for that cynicism to flourish together with an authority emanating from unlikely nooks. One could suspect there is a pact. We shall applaud childishness with epithets like “inspired,” and in exchange we will be allowed to keep our power. And to feign that we aren’t aging either—a way of hiding the void—we continue with our affectations. In Parliament we act and talk as we used to during recess in grade school: “If you are with them, you are a homo.”6 Senators and congressmen with a mental age of an eight-yearResoftenings and Softenings in Uruguayan Art

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old. With that and the premature status of genius, we convince ourselves that time has stopped. We have managed to create Peter Pan in the shape of a country, and while we try to make believe that, with these stratagems we stimulate art, we are actually annihilating true freedom of expression—the freedom that makes people grow. In these moments, then, adult art stands out so much and deserves such an unexpected respect, not because of its quality, but because it refers us to all these problems. It uncovers things and doesn’t attempt to freeze time.

Notes 1. Manuel Espínola Gómez (1921–2003) was an unpredictable, eccentric, and powerful painter who stood out from his generation of Uruguayan painters. Manolo is the nickname for Manuel, and that is how he was known among his friends. 2. The Taller, the studio run by Torres-García, was extremely influential in Uruguayan art during several decades and formed some of the more outstanding artists in the country, among them Gonzalo Fonseca, one of the foremost sculptors of the continent. However, it had a cultist quality that manifested itself in the unconditional adoration of Torres-García, the acceptance of his statements and visual solutions as dogma, and the exclusion of any other way of making art. 3. Comunidad del Sur was an anarchist collective mostly formed by students who had graduated from the Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes (National School of Fine Arts). They became a self-supporting community using the income from their commercial print shop and the sale of ceramics. Imprenta AS was a shortlived, but influential, commercial printing outfit. 4. Oski (1914–1979) was the pseudonym of Óscar Conti, an Argentine cartoonist who was very popular during the 1940s and 1950s and who developed a simple and crude way of drawing characters that humorously revisited history. His work can be considered a precedent for the slicker characters of Asterix. 5. Luis Alberto Lacalle was the president of Uruguay from 1990 to 1995. 6. The homophobic exchange (“Si estás con ellos sos un maricón”) took place during a parliamentary session in 1991.

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An Ode to Aquatint (2003)

Chapter 18

When seen in the context of world art history, the Otra Figuración (Other Figuration) movement in Argentina was simply the victim of bad luck. The vested interests from the great metropolises decided that these works, falling between two hegemonic movements—Expressionism and neo-Expressionism—were derivative in nature rather than premonitory. Today, this dated prejudice still persists, and is largely responsible for the ambivalent evaluation of the works of four Argentines (Ernesto Deira, Jorge de la Vega, Rómulo Macció, and Luis Felipe Noé), a Mexican (José Luis Cuevas), a Venezuelan (Jacobo Borges), and a Cuban (Antonia Eiriz), among many other Latin American artists who are subject to this same vacillation. These artists are either seen in a positive light as talented individuals or, disparagingly, as part of a local, almost folk, movement that confirms the emotional excess stereotypically relegated to our continent. Fortunately, these prejudices do not alter the great cultural impact that this school of painting had locally. It is entirely possible that the four Argentines borrowed elements from the old Expressionism as well as from the works of artists who were part of Cobra [Copenhagen, Brussels, Amsterdam, a group of artists], but what does it matter? It is difficult to grasp why such levels of virginity and immunity are demanded when it comes to information in the visual arts. In other areas, such as science or technology, the process of evolution is assumed to be continuous and collective, not something that progresses in obligatory abrupt leaps forward, far removed from the work of other colleagues. What really matters is that this group articulated the iconography of its moment in history, with all its violence, chaos, and everyday reality, in forms that were hitherto unknown to continental culture. Their works awakened artistic and political consciousness in upcoming artists in a way that would only have been delayed by subscribing to the waves of Pop Art and Minimalism that were taking place in North America. In this sense, Otra Figuración is not only proto-neo-Expressionist, if one insists 155

on following the New York calendar, but also, more significant, protoConceptualist and proto–political art. As a movement, it forms a part of a much larger configuration that includes widely diverse strains, such as the Argentine Destructionists, the Grupo Espartaco, and the work of Alberto Greco. Clearly, this is a debatable, pedantic analysis, assisted by historical hindsight. Leaving all this aside, there is another, more tangible, and more autobiographical reality. Seen in their heyday, from the shores of Uruguay, these four artists were audacious superstars. They forced me, recently graduated from the School of Fine Arts, to reconsider all the academic alignments that had come along with an education that, without openly admitting it, was basically craft oriented. The group was so precisely focused on generating images in a way that was free from the rules established by the métier that they made the academy’s practice of good pictorial behavior appear utterly ridiculous. As a self-defined printmaker, and with this background baggage, the opportunity that arose in 1964 to share an apartment and studio with one of the members of the group, Noé, was an intellectual luxury. During the year that followed, Noé presented the rest of his colleagues to me, but more important, by way of conversations that were interrupted only by meals and sleep, he proceeded to bombard my identity as a craftsman, to the point of making me consider myself as an artist instead of as an artisan. It wasn’t a matter of abandoning my craftsmanship, but, rather, of putting it squarely in its place. I suddenly understood that techniques were not an end in themselves, but at the service of the artist’s vision. I only mention the fact here because it led to the prints that De la Vega would later produce. Notwithstanding, Noé did learn printmaking as a result of our exchange.1 It was a small gesture of revenge that didn’t turn out completely as planned: Noé wound up winning a prize at the Print Biennial of Tokyo with his prints. Another positive outcome was that, on one of his trips to New York, De la Vega settled in at our apartment. Describing how someone goes about making prints does not make for interesting reading. The artist’s personality generally makes no difference: genius and cretin are brought to the same level, following steps within the limits imposed by a quite tedious craft. This does not mean that printmaking aspirants cannot be divided into two categories: those who believe that printmakers belong to a secret sect whose members exchange mysterious recipes; and those who perceive the adept practitioners of the craft as a herd of incorrigible nerds incapable of understanding 156

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what making art is all about. In general, the former eagerly seek initiation, while the latter are certain that they will be able to discover things that printmakers—precisely because they are such nerds—were never able to perceive. Technical ignorance does offer the advantage of leaving routes of investigation open that tradition has declared invalid or officially closed, and thus the position does enjoy a certain merit. While I can confirm that Noé can be placed more or less in the second category, De la Vega’s attitude was not that clear. Melancholic by nature, De la Vega neither set forth to attain membership in the secret society, nor to discover a new world with any excess of energy. Though he did display a certain curiosity, he was basically interested in the opportunity to make editions of images that he had already resolved through painting. De la Vega’s “leaps into the void” happened on canvas. In this sense, De la Vega explored images on the printing plate as if it were a sheet of paper, and the technical process neither interfered with his creative process, nor enriched it in any fundamental way. This was the attitude most commonly adopted by painters who engaged in the technique. This attitude has implications regarding the function of the “printmaking consultant” (myself, in this instance), who then goes about looking for the most appropriate way to translate these images into the new medium. De la Vega showed curiosity for the new materials and enjoyed himself with the unfamiliar instruments and the tricks of the trade, but he remained open to technical suggestions without being tempted to rebel in the least. At the time, De la Vega was in the midst of a series of topological distortions. He transformed people’s faces, stretching them in every direction until they seemed to be made of chewing gum, while retaining every bit of their identity. Aesthetically, the works could have been considered post-Pop. They employed an iconography that was based on the banality of consumption. At a time when photo etching had not yet been accepted by the printmaking brotherhood, there were two techniques that were well suited to reproducing this type of imagery. One consisted of using liquid asphalt, a material that protects the plate from the acid’s action, to paint the image on the plate. After the plate is etched, the upper surface is inked with a roller, using the same method as in a woodblock print. This procedure enables a positive version of the image to be printed, since it would be the negative that would result from inking and printing the etched portions, as is done with an aquatint or other intaglio techniques. The second option, which complies with traditional etching technique,2 invokes the An Ode to Aquatint

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magic of what is referred to as “sugar-lift” aquatint. The image is painted on the plate using a mixture of India ink and sugar, which is later covered with a thin coating of liquid asphalt. Once dry, the plate is submerged in a hot-water bath. With luck, the asphalt lifts off the plate in those areas that were painted. These open areas are then covered with rosin dust that is melted to the plate, and the acid thus bites the painted areas, permitting the positive image to be etched. Both techniques were useful, as much for their results as for their compatibility with the artist’s temperament. De la Vega’s task was to slowly trace his images using a small paintbrush. Seeing him on the far side of the studio, comfortably settled in and somewhat lost in thought, one might think that he was knitting a sweater. With both of us sitting there, each one mechanically absorbed in his task, conversations would arise. “How do you manage to visualize such complex distortions?” “I don’t visualize anything; I start with one part of one eye and from there, the rest takes off by itself.” Quite impressive, considering that the computer was unheard of at the time. De la Vega worked as if set on automatic pilot, headed toward some unknown landing strip. I didn’t think that the technique was of any interest to him at all until, one day, while the two of us were each silently engrossed in our own activity, I heard De la Vega begin to sing. Softly, but clearly. A nice, catchy tune, entirely unpretentious. Suddenly, I noticed familiar words among the lyrics: “Hey, what the fuck is that, what you’re singing?” It’s “An Ode to Aquatint,” and he went back to painting his plate. I could have recorded it, but it didn’t occur to me at the time.3

Notes 1. From 1965 onward, along with Liliana Porter and José Guillermo Castillo, I ran the New York Graphic Workshop, where we produced prints and taught printmaking. Both Liliana and I worked with Noé. 2. In traditional etching, the etched portions of the plate are filled with ink, the upper surface is wiped clean, and the plate is printed with considerable pressure, so that the dampened paper conforms to the plate’s depressions, picking up the ink that will make up the image. 3. In Spanish, to record is “grabar,” the same word used for “to incise” and generally extended to indicate the making of prints.

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Revisiting Tautology (2006 )

Chapter 19

León Ferrari (1920– ) and Óscar Bony (1941–2002) are two iconic figures in the art of Latin America and in the international conceptual movement. The conceptual works of Ferrari and Bony illustrate the marked differences between the Conceptualism of South America—responsive to urgent local concerns on the continent and politically activist—and mainstream Conceptualism, which was strongly informed by formalist speculations and for the most part fit into a post-Minimalist aesthetics. As early as 1964, Ferrari produced a landmark conceptual piece— “Cuadro Escrito” (Written Painting)—which was a detailed description of how and what Ferrari would paint if he were to use painting as a medium. The decision-making process he describes refers to an extremely baroque and symbolic style of painting, and is written in a calligraphic scribble that would seem to resemble “outsider” art. In this piece Ferrari not only dispenses with the rigor of Kosuth’s format of dictionary definitions, but also confronts and refutes any possible expectations one might have of the role of image and text in a work of art. Ferrari’s piece addresses and manipulates the expectations of the viewer and, more important, makes the imagination of the viewer/reader into the canvas of the work. Thus, the “Cuadro Escrito,” in describing itself, is at the same time acting like a pantograph, inscribing the image in the viewer.1 Four years later, in 1968, Bony presented his signature conceptual work—“Familia Obrera” (Worker’s Family). In the work, an actual family was placed on a platform in the gallery, with the intention of shocking the public into an awareness of how profoundly the “high art” of the elite was disconnected from the social reality of the larger society. To achieve this end, Bony placed a worker, representative of the dispossessed and repressed majority (it was a time of military dictatorship) on a pedestal in an arena where he would be seen, noticed, and registered by those in power. Other members of the worker’s family were included as well, further dramatizing the effect. By taking people from “outside” the realm of wealth and prestige and bringing them into the heart of the gallery system 159

to serve as a subject for the aesthetic enjoyment of the “in” classes, Bony hoped to force the power elite in art to engage in a reexamination of the purpose of art, and of its circuits of distribution. Bony was very deadpan about this. He denied that he set the family up as a work of art. He argued that he was doing nothing more than offering the head of the family a job that paid twice what he had been earning in his regular job as a die-cutter. Nevertheless, Bony’s piece was art, and his achievement was to merge into one example the model for the work, the work itself and its (fundamentally important) title, the gaze of the viewer, and the scrutiny of the viewer by the artwork. In tautological terms, the piece is exactly what it is; yet, the content is precisely what is registered, explosively, in the mind of the viewers.2 Ferrari’s “Cuadro Escrito” and Bony’s “Familia Obrera” entered Latin America’s art history. Though neither piece happens to be included in the present exhibition, they provide a context for approaching the work that is being shown by Pan American Art Projects. In formal terms, Ferrari and Bony are strikingly different. Ferrari tends to drawing, even when he does sculpture; Bony’s work has a certain quality of performance, even when he uses photography. And yet there is a similarity: both establish a particular relationship between content and form, in which form is confirmed by content in a tautological fashion, underscoring the difference between Latin American and mainstream Conceptualism. The dictionary definition of “tautology” is hardly flattering: “the needless repetition of an idea.” In art, however, tautology can be a powerful tool, sharpening, aiding concentration, revealing essence. In the mainstream, tautology has been used to eliminate nonartistic references with the purpose of letting the work be itself and only itself. But there are also negative aspects to the use of tautology. It can produce works that are aesthetically narcissistic, even autistic. Tautological art made during the 1960s and 1970s strongly affirmed its art identity, but also, in claiming self-sufficiency, it tended to isolate art from any other context. Hidden within the deceptive simplicity was an arrogant declaration of independence from the viewing public. Thus, in concrete art or self-referential abstraction, we have the example of a painted square that signifies only a square and nothing else. In Conceptual art, there is Kosuth’s “One and Three Photographs” or “One and Five Clocks” (1965), works that show not much more than the circle of an equation matching the result and the result solving the equation. Remarkably, in Ferrari’s work, in some instances preceding Kosuth, and 160

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in Bony’s work as well, the use of tautology is directed to the content. Strictly speaking, it may not qualify anymore as a tautology, but instead of the viewer’s being closed out, the audience is drawn into the narrative of the work; while traveling in the seemingly tautological circle, the viewer ends up incorporating his or her own reactions as part of the piece. Ferrari has always been a multifaceted explorer, with no compunctions about eclecticism or the exploration of form. Bony, with a darker sensibility, permitted himself less latitude. As one can see in this exhibition, much of Ferrari’s work deals with scribbles. To some extent, his work is similar to Henri Michaux’s calligraphic exercises. However, while Ferrari undeniably enjoys the formal exercise, he always finds a transcendental twist. His “writings” may become actual words (as they do in “Cuadro Escrito” and in many of his transcriptions of news items in the early sixties), or they may appear until a title directly links them to politics—as in his “Carta a un General” (Letter to a General) in 1962. They may become spidery sculptures in some cases prefiguring the work of Gego, or musical notations that invite the visitor to extract sound. They may even become three-dimensional scribbles, sometimes absurdly and accusatorily made with birds and airplanes. Ferrari likes to play, but his play is not about playing for its own sake. Like Bony, Ferrari is seeking to embody his ethical positions without being programmatic. But he is never tempted to deny experimentation, or eschew fun. His “Bombardero con Plumas” (Bomber with Feathers) from 2004 is both a charming toy and a rallying cry for resistance to militarism. His “Blindados 1” (Armored Cars 1) of 2006 uses the closed circuit of tautology as a symbol of futility. That he uses it to express an ethics of pacifism perhaps signals that he’s found a new mode of resistance. Bony’s work originates in the same post-Minimalist tautology, but enriches and defeats it at the same time. “Sesenta Metros Cuadrados de Alambre Tejido y Su Información” (Sixty Square Meters of Wire Fence and Its Information), an early piece from 1967, marks his entrance into a conceptual mode. It follows the mainstream model of the tautological superposition of objects with their redundant reference. Very soon, however, he introduces ethical concerns as well. It’s important to stress here that Bony and Ferrari are both more interested in ethics than in politics. Their work acquires a political edge insofar as it provides an alternative to the reigning discourses of power. In 1994, Bony started the series “Fusilamientos y Suicidios” (Executions and suicides). In these works, the tautological circle is formed by the artist’s conflation of form and content. Drawing on newspaper reports Revisiting Tautology

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about killings and suicides, Bony uses the same weapons with the same caliber bullets to shoot at photographs. One uncomfortably prophetic piece is a work from 1996. Bony took a photograph of the Twin Towers and shot bullet holes into the photograph. After 9/11 he incorporated that piece into a diptych, adding a second TV image of a plane hitting one of the towers. His own photograph is labeled “Oscar Bony, 1996,” the other, “Bin Laden, 2001.” The title of the complete diptych—“Fair Is Foul and Foul Is Fair”—is taken from Macbeth. It was the last piece Bony did before he died.3 Bony did not commit suicide, but, rather, died of a not fully diagnosed intestinal disease. His artwork is imbued with ethical frustration and despair, and it seems quite possible he used his artwork to sublimate depression and pain. The series of suicide images are among the strongest he ever made. Seen together, these photographs give the impression of a bizarre dance in which the throes of agony are aesthetified into an elegant choreography, the undeniable power of which lies in a terrifying tautological construct: the work of art describes the destruction of the artist by means of a (ritualized) act of destruction by the artist on the work describing his destruction. Surprisingly, there is something constructive in this, albeit cynical. The work exists as—and because—the artist is obliterated. Here, in the destruction of the one lies the existence of the other. Both strategies—Ferrari’s playful critique and Bony’s self-enclosed documentation—achieve an unexpected, and seemingly impossible, result: futility denouncing itself and rescuing an existence from a circle of obliteration. Their achievements exemplify the versatility of tautological devices, especially their implications for art that is politically engaged. In a historical moment when bearing critical witness seems to be the only effective tool for maintaining sanity, we can see their contribution as no small achievement.

Notes 1. Later, the piece took the form of a book, and the first page actually became the reproduction of the dictionary entries for the words “painting” and “written,” in an amusing reference to Kosuth dictionary pieces. The work was published in 1984 in booklet form in an edition of two hundred by Edições Licopódio, São Paulo/Buenos Aires. 2. All of this was explained on the label for the piece written for the exhibition and posted on the wall. According to Patricia Rizzo, curator of a re-creation of “Familia Obrera” thirty years later, Bony considered that the family “was in lieu

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of the work of art and not the art.” The exhibit, “Institute Di Tella, Experiencias ’68,” a re-creation of a landmark exhibition with that name in 1968, took place in the Fundación Proa, Buenos Aires, in 1998. The foundation published a book with the same title. Rizzo’s quotation is on p. 53. 3. The photograph with the bullet holes in the precise placement of the impact of the planes is a later remake. The first version of 1996 is nearly destroyed and has the bullets randomly distributed. Bony matched the impact holes in his remake. According to Carola Bony, Bony’s daughter, he shot into the photograph with a Walther P. 88, 9mm.

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Chapter 20

The Museo Latinoamericano and MICLA (1992)

Latin American artists in New York have never been known as a particularly radical group. Mostly apolitical, they have kept their ideas to themselves, perhaps influenced by U.S. visa-granting processes and their wish to succeed commercially.1 This lack of interest in political militancy has prevented them from organizing into pressure groups that could lobby for their interests and putting their representation in the hands of institutions with more complex agendas—among them the Organization of American States (OAS). In early 1971, however, the Museo Latinoamericano and its subsequent splinter group, Movimiento por la Independencia Cultural de Latino América (MICLA), demonstrated a rare shift in attitudes. The organization of the Museo was a response to the ways in which one institution was assuming representation of Latin American art at that time: the Center for Inter-American Relations (CIAR), presently functioning as the Americas Society. CIAR was the enhanced version of an organization previously known as the Inter-American Foundation for the Arts (IAFA). During the 1960s, IAFA organized prestigious symposia that brought together Latin and North American intellectuals and produced one major exhibition of work by New York–based Latin American artists at the Bonino Gallery (Magnet, 1964). IAFA had some intellectual credibility thanks to a distinguished board of directors, which included Ernesto Sábato, Leopoldo Torre Nil­ sson, Edward Albee, Lillian Hellman, and Gore Vidal, among others. Its four symposia, however, had proven problematic because of their systematic exclusion of Cuban intellectuals. This absence prompted a written protest by the guests of the fourth symposium (1967, Puerto Azul, Venezuela),2 but the document was honed down to extreme blandness and became so innocuous that even Robert Wool, the symposium organizer and the foundation’s president, signed it. In a climate marked by the recent assassination of Che Guevara, Robert Lowell shared his eulogy-poem in an attempt to unify the divided meeting, but Frank Stella 164

further increased the divide with his remark that it was only natural that Latin American artists would copy the better North American ones.3 The fourth symposium proved to be IAFA’s last activity. In 1966, the Center for Inter-American Relations took IAFA’s place as well as much of its personnel. CIAR opened, in 1967, with “Artists of the Western Hemisphere: Precursors of Modernism, 1870–1930,” an exhibition of Latin and North American art that enraged Latin American artists in New York. They thought that the chosen Latin American works were either uncharacteristically low quality pieces or works that stressed aesthetic dependence over original contribution, and considered the exhibition a demeaning action against Latin American art. The angered artists included some participants in IAFA’s symposia; sensitized by the precedent of IAFA’s anti-Cuban stand, this show seemed to them like the continuation of a dubious policy. Surprisingly, about twenty-five artists managed to organize themselves and sent a letter of protest to the New York Times. The letter was published and had enough of an impact to prompt a meeting organized by CIAR in which the artists could air their grievances. Their grievances, it turned out, were not just focused on the exhibition. The artists also objected to the board of directors. Unlike the board of IAFA, CIAR’s board members not only lacked intellectual credibility, they also had objectionable biographies. The directors included Dean Rusk, Lincoln Gordon, and Thomas Mann, a group that signaled the extent to which CIAR’s institutional aims went far beyond culture and the fact that they were not necessarily in line with Latin American interests. Many artists, even apolitical ones, found it inappropriate to work under the auspices of individuals who were responsible for the expulsion of Cuba from the OAS, for the military coups in Brazil and the Dominican Republic, and for the development of an aggressive interventionist policy in Latin America.4 The gathering at CIAR was followed by more meetings in private studios. After some discussion, the artists decided to boycott the institution in an attempt to fill the board with a more credible group of figureheads. They were aware that it was a losing battle, one that focused on symbols, and that it effectively meant they were giving up on the institution. In spite of the energy and passion displayed in these meetings, the artists did not organize as a group and eventually returned to their individual activities. Nevertheless, the boycott had more of an impact than they had expected. It was honored by a majority of the artists in New York, and word quickly spread all over Latin America. The Museo Latinoamericano and MICLA

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Thus, although CIAR later called on able technocrats and sometimes even friends of the boycotting artists to direct the gallery, a coherent program of exhibitions became nearly impossible. In 1971, the boycott’s effects were strong enough to prompt Hans van Weeren-Griek, the new director of the CIAR gallery, to call a meeting with the artists. Van Weeren-Griek, who had directed the Jewish Museum and briefly headed IAFA’s art program, was hired to replace Stanton Catlin, the CIAR gallery’s first director and the one responsible for the ill-fated exhibition in 1966. Van Weeren-Griek soon realized that he could not have a functional gallery without the artists’ help. The meeting took place on January 19, 1971, and, once again, more grievances surfaced than were originally expected—so many, in fact, that the artists asked for more time to prepare an organized analysis. They held new meetings in private studios and finally presented a document to van Weeren-Griek. The board was still a significant problem for the artists. Although only Lincoln Gordon was left from the original board, the new members were no less controversial. They included George Meany, head of the AFLCIO and sponsor of strike-breaking in Latin America; Sol Linowitz, U.S. representative to the OAS; and John White, vice president and director of Standard Oil Company. The document asked that they be removed, along with “any other member who symbolizes U.S. imperialist activity in our hemisphere.”5 The document also demanded that the board include prominent personalities in Latin American culture; that CIAR abstain from any relations with state or private organizations involved in repressing activities conducive to the liberation of Latin American countries; that it publicize study group meetings—held secretly until then— dealing with topics like U.S. military assistance, relations with Cuba, and private investments in Latin America; that CIAR acknowledge that putting an end to U.S. dominance in Latin America would be the most prominent sign of Latin American culture; and, finally, that CIAR include Chicano and Puerto Rican activities in its cultural programming. The political tenor of the letter to the center probably surprised the signatory artists as much as it did van Weeren-Griek. Most of the artists who attended the January 19 meeting expected the discussion to focus on art issues, but during that and subsequent meetings, the conversation’s dynamics led to a discussion of the politics underlying the conflict. With thirty-four signatures, the document showed an unprecedented level of collective consciousness in the Latin American art community. Van Weeren-Griek listened carefully to the arguments and was persuaded by them. He brought the letter to the board and, realizing that the CIAR was 166

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not willing to consider any of the requests, he eventually resigned his post. The artists, encouraged by their unexpected degree of unanimity and skeptical from the outset about the possible success of their demands, used the meetings to organize into what they called the Museo Latinoamericano. The idea for the Museo was initially brought up by Arnold Belkin, Leonel Góngora, and others, toward the end of 1970, before the document to van Weeren-Griek was written—a fact that made the artists’ letter sound as if one institution were addressing another. The document, dated February 3, 1971, was published two weeks later in Frente, the group’s newsletter, which circulated locally, nationally, and internationally, reaching a broad continental audience and a large group of Latin American artists in Europe. The publication also printed an editorial entitled “Letter to Latin America” explaining and justifying each of the points contained in the document to CIAR, as well as the Museo’s “platform,” which appealed to visual artists, musicians, actors, and writers. It vowed that, by working together on a larger scale, the group would be able to operate outside the control of “foundations, corporations, or other organizations which arbitrarily codify cultural hierarchies.”6 While CIAR did not accept the changes to its board of directors, it offered the Museo a series of projects on February 28, 1971 (probably proposed by van Weeren-Griek), that included annual collective exhibitions in CIAR, national exhibitions organized by specialists, film and video screenings, a review of Latin American architecture, and a series of historical exhibitions to explore the genesis of Latin American thought. The CIAR also promised to open a series of archives, to circulate the exhibitions, to help promote art and manuscripts, and to establish a purchase fund for art. Emboldened by their unity and the sense of power that the response gave them, the artists held out and kept up their demand for changes in the board. While this was going on, CIAR was planning to engage fifteen to twenty important New York galleries to exhibit Latin American artists in what would be a “Latin American Week.” While the idea sounded interesting, the Museo had its misgivings—the galleries had a long tradition of ignoring Latin Americans artists, and the “week” might make them feel like they could dispense with the issue. Those rare galleries with a Latin American in their stable would probably use that artist instead of exploring new work. Furthermore, the artists feared being patronized because of their national origin instead of being promoted because of the quality of their art. The Museo decided against the project and sent a letter to The Museo Latinoamericano and MICLA

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the chosen galleries expressing these concerns and explaining that “most of the Latin American artists in New York originally came to participate in the U.S. market. Whatever the reasons, only a few of us have managed to open the doors of local galleries. If, in an outburst of philanthropy, the galleries suddenly opened during one week and accepted art to which they were closed for decades, this could only be interpreted as a humiliating act of tokenism.” As a counteroffer, the Museo proposed an exhibition called “Contrainf.” Twenty silk-screened quotations and statistics pertinent to U.S. policy in Latin America would be simultaneously shown in every participating gallery. The quotations included Nelson Rockefeller’s “I have the impression that anyone who opposes the government in Brazil does not know Arthur de Costa e Silva,” referring to the Brazilian dictator in June of 1969; Al Capone’s “We must keep America whole and safe and unspoiled. We must keep the worker away from red literature and red ruses; we must see that his mind remains healthy”; and Jefferson’s statement to Monroe on October 24, 1823: “I candidly confess that I have ever looked on Cuba as the most interesting addition which could ever be made to our system of States.” The members of the Museo felt that the proposal had a chance of being accepted—most of the galleries approached by CIAR had participated in the Vietnam Moratorium and were presumed to possess some political enlightenment. However, only the Paula Cooper Gallery expressed interest; the rest of the galleries did not bother to respond. The project, however, was cancelled shortly afterward, and it is possible that some of the galleries had withdrawn their offer to CIAR. Unfortunately, the discussions surrounding the project also seeded the demise of the Museo. Some members who supported the boycott of CIAR resented the anonymity and collective presentation of “Contrainf.” They had envisioned the Museo as a tool to promote their art and were not interested in it as a political tool at the expense of their individuality. The original unanimity broke down and camps formed along the lines of individual art versus political action. For one faction, the Museo’s ultimate aim was to replace other clearly corrupt and ineffectual institutions and to take over their function as promoters of Latin American artists. The other faction believed that anonymous and collective political action directed at cultural issues should have priority over individual art; for this group the word “museum” served as a satirical device. The issue was not resolved, and it eventually led to the radicals’ secession. They formed their own group, MICLA (Movimiento por la Independencia Cultural de Latino América, or Movement for Latin American Cultural Indepen168

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dence), though the division was not abrupt. It took some time for them to formalize MICLA, and in the interim the Museo kept up its activities as a whole: members made inventories of their books and identified those that might be of common interest to create an exchange library; those with access to universities organized lectures and exhibitions for the members; and those who gave lectures donated a small percentage of their honoraria to a Museo fund. The Museo continued with militant and missionary zeal. During those days, Octavio Paz arrived in New York to give a lecture at CIAR. Paz was still basking in the aura of his resignation of the ambassadorship in India. It had been a courageous act of protest of the massacre of Tlatelolco,7 and it prompted the Museo to try to persuade him (unsuccessfully) to cancel his speech and join the boycott. Shortly afterward, the Museo members attended the closing event of a symposium on Latin American culture held at Columbia University. The date for this event fell on April 14, the Day of the Americas, anniversary of the Pan-American Union, established in 1890 and transformed into the OAS in 1948. A delegate from the Museo asked to use the microphone, read a short statement, and then asked the audience to rise and observe a minute of silence in honor of all those killed during the United States’ interventions in Latin America. With the exception of Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa, everybody rose and kept the minute of silence. The evening culminated in a “countersymposium” hosted at a private studio where the group held discussions addressing colonization and cultural identity in exile.8 At that point, the Museo established more formal contact with a parallel organization in Paris, the Provisional Committee for a General Assembly of Latin American Artists (PCGALA), which was also interested in targeting the São Paulo Biennial. Repression and torture were at their peak at that time in Brazil, and both groups felt that participating in the Biennial would validate Brazil’s military regime and give it cultural prestige.9 PCGALA managed to stop France from participating. With centers of operation in both Paris and New York, and helped by international awareness of the situation in Brazil, the boycott spread to various countries.10 As a way of expanding the boycott, the Museo decided to publish Contrabienal. It invited a number of Latin American artists to contribute to this “printed biennial” and asked them to boycott the São Paulo Biennial. The Museo also made a general call for submissions of art or statements related to the Biennial or to repression in Brazil. A raffle was organized to buy a small offset press that would save them production The Museo Latinoamericano and MICLA

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expenses; shortly after that raffle, the split between the Museo and MICLA was formalized. After the formal split between the Museo and MICLA, both groups decided to continue preparing the publication, but published two separate introductions. The Museo’s introduction stated that, “although disseminating his or her work is one of the artist’s main tasks, refusing to participate in some biennials and official exhibitions is necessary when, to our understanding, they don’t meet our social and ethical principles.” Its refusal to participate in the Biennial became more powerful in light of its belief that art should be made known as much as possible. MICLA, on the other hand, saw the publication as a way of outlining actions against cultural imperialism. One artist, justifying his refusal to participate in “Contrabienal,” had written that “the lack of telephones here in Mexico is more important than tortures happening 10,000 kilometers away.” MICLA used the quotation and expressed its desire to abolish this distance: Brazil is just a “vanguard” of what could await all of us; São Paulo’s Biennial could one day become our Biennial. . . . Contrabienal hopes to open another breach, documenting the refusal to comply and valuing moral positions over sales or conspiracy. . . . Latin America has thousands of artists. That only a small number of them appear in this publication demonstrates the importance and urgency of this effort. If all of its artists were present, this document would not be necessary. São Paulo’s Biennial and its relatives would have long ago ceased to exist.

Contrabienal grouped 61 individual artists, among them Matías Goeritz, José Luis Cuevas, and Rufino Tamayo from Mexico; Leonel Góngora from Colombia; Lorenzo Homar from Puerto Rico; León Ferrari, Luis Felipe Noé, and Julio Le Parc from Argentina; Clemente Padín and Antonio Frasconi from Uruguay; and Oswaldo Viteri from Ecuador; and included collective letters of support signed by another 112 artists. The publication also included letters by Gordon Matta-Clark and Jorge Glusberg, who were engaged in an odd but relevant polemic. Glusberg, an Argentine lamp manufacturer and art critic, had traveled to New York in order to invite both Latin and North American artists to participate in the Biennial. He was trying to assemble a supranational exhibition under the name of “Art Systems” that would also be shown in Buenos Aires. Glusberg approached some members of the Museo enticing them to participate in the exhibition with “big stars” like Christo, Oldenburg, and others, including Matta-Clark. Although he did not state it directly, his

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argument suggested that profiting from rubbed-off fame should override political considerations. The artists informed Glusberg of their decision to boycott the Biennial and their plans to publish Contrabienal and tried to explain that the military regime in Argentina was no better than the Brazilian one. They also commented on the inappropriateness of Glusberg’s arguments with regards to piggybacking on hegemonic fame, which seemed to them like a “colonized” attitude. Gordon Matta-Clark, who shared the Museo’s position toward the Biennial, had also rejected Glusberg’s invitation and had started his own parallel campaign to have U.S. artists turn down Glusberg’s invitation and withdraw their participation. Matta-Clark feared that, even if artists expressed their willingness to participate only in the Argentine venue, Glusberg might ignore the artists’ wishes and send the whole show to Brazil. Matta-Clark then suggested that an alternative exhibition be sent to Chile. Given the content of Matta-Clark’s letter and the contact he had with Contrabienal, the letter was included in the publication. Glusberg answered Matta-Clark’s letter: “Since nobody who knows me can have the slightest doubt about my agreement with the ideology stated by Gordon-Matta, and although I still sustain that it would be convenient to go to Brazil so as to have a dialogue with artists repressed by the dictatorship, I still cannot ignore the reasons behind the Brazilians’, the Chileans’, and the North Americans’ boycott.” He announced that he would no longer be organizing “Art Systems” in São Paulo and expressed resentment at Matta-Clark’s fears, which he considered insulting. Glusberg’s letter was published as a companion to Matta-Clark’s.11 Brazilian artists were not included in Contrabienal in order to save them from reprisals, but Brazil was represented by detailed descriptions of police methods of torture and case studies of particular victims. The publication of Contrabienal drained the energy (and the funds) of both the Museo and MICLA. The Museo was unable to merge the ideology of individual success with social and political commitment and eventually disbanded. MICLA, a much smaller group, carried out two more activities before it died from attrition after most of its members returned to their home countries. One of these events, concurrent with Contrabienal, was a letter to the New York Review of Books in response to an article by writer José Yglesias on the jailing of Cuban poet Heberto Padilla. In MICLA’s view, the article paid excessive attention to the erosion of a single poet’s rights and betrayed an elitist view of the intellectual’s function, making no attempt to understand the contradictions present in both capitalist and

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Cuban societies.12 The letter, which was published, also warned intellectuals about the dangers of allowing their opinions to be distorted by their fear of threats to their privileged and precious status. The second and last action occurred almost a year later. Under the auspices of the Embassy of Brazil, the Bonino Gallery in New York presented an exhibition of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Brazilian ex-votos. In collaboration with the Committee for Justice for Latin American Prisoners, MICLA organized a little rally on opening night. While members of the committee distributed literature to the visitors, members of MICLA gave out “contra ex-votos”: bandaged fragments of dolls. After that act of protest, everyone slowly returned to his or her individual life. Over time, many of the participants decided that the boycott had lost its meaning and they forgot or ignored it. While the subsequent loss of idealism is always sad, it does not make this short history less distinguished. In retrospect, it is ironic that, without the existence of CIAR, the artists might never have coalesced into a group or taken a collective stance that gave them the courage to speak out. CIAR did have a cultural impact after all, though not exactly the one its board had intended. Whether it was because of callousness or arrogance, CIAR managed at the time to present itself as a perfect target for the pervasive dissatisfaction with U.S. policy in Latin America. Like no other institution, it was able to unite a remarkably diverse and talented group of individualist artists, to galvanize their collective consciousness, and to incite them to relative militancy during one of the darkest ages of Latin America. I should note here that I was a participant in the Puerto Azul gathering, that I participated in the first boycott against CIAR, and that I was a member of both the Museo Latinoamericano and MICLA. I am probably the only Latin American artist still continuing the boycott against the Americas Society. Nevertheless, I was asked to allow the publication of the above history in the volume that the Americas Society published on the occasion of its fortieth anniversary. I decided to allow it, figuring that it might counteract hagiographic tendencies (which the volume managed to avoid anyway). I refused the offered honorarium.

Notes 1. I am referring here to politics in the range from Center-Left to Left. With the exception of Cuban artists, most artists are prudent about expressing Leftleaning political opinions for fear of deportation. Those seeking exile from Cuba

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are in a different category, since, by definition, they are acceptable to the United States and receive preferential immigration treatment, in addition to the fact that they tend to lean politically toward the Right. 2. The document included, among many others, signatures by U.S. delegates Harold Rosenberg, Alfred Kazin, Lillian Hellman, Frank Stella, and Robert Lowell, and by Latin Americans Nicanor Parra, Mario Pedrosa, Ivan Illich, Julio Le Parc, and Luis Felipe Noé. 3. The poem, entitled “Che Guevara’s Death,” can be found, in its entirety, in Andrew Sinclair, Viva Che!: The Strange Death and Life of Che Guevara (Gloucestershire, U.K.: Sutton Publishing, 1968), p. 85. 4. Dean Rusk represented the United States in the OAS meeting that expelled Cuba; Lincoln Gordon was U.S. ambassador to Brazil and recommended sending U.S. weapons via submarine to secure the success of Castello Branco’s military coup; and Thomas Mann was undersecretary of state for economic affairs and presidential advisor on Latin America to Pres. Lyndon B. Johnson during the invasion of the Dominican Republic in 1965. 5. Other board members seen as symbols of Latin American oppression were David Rockefeller, chairman of Chase Manhattan; Andrew Heiskell, chairman of Time Inc.; George Moore, chairman of First National City Bank; and Rawleigh Warner, president of Mobil Oil Corp. Heiskell had also been on the board of the Inter-American Foundation. 6. The “platform” was prepared a day before the letter to CIAR was drafted and is dated February 2, 1971. 7. Around four hundred students had been killed in a rally on the Plaza Tlatelolco in Mexico City in 1968 by armed police forces. 8. The symposium included Brazilian filmmaker Glauber Rocha, Chilean poet Nicanor Parra, Chilean filmmaker Miguel Littin, Uruguayan printmaker Antonio Frasconi, Cuban painter Julio Girona, and Chilean writer Fernando Alegría. 9. During twenty-one years of military dictatorship (1964–1985), Brazil set the pace in torture techniques for the other countries included in Plan Condor, a consortium of dictatorships (Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay, and Uruguay, with assistance to Colombia, Honduras, and Panama under U.S. supervision) that had abolished borders in order to carry out police actions against anybody suspected of leftist ideas. 10. Holland, Sweden, the United States, Spain, Norway, and Chile, among other countries, also refused to participate in the Biennial. Spain finally sent an exhibition organized by an ambassador to make up for the void left by the original curated show, cancelled by art scholars. British sculptor Anthony Caro participated and published a statement declaring that art had nothing to do with politics. 11. Glusberg did subsequently go to São Paulo. It is not clear if he spoke with artists repressed by the government, but he participated under the auspices of the

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Biennial in a panel discussion about ways of updating and modernizing biennials (September 5, 1971). He used the opportunity to criticize all the jurors of the Biennial by name, attacked Renee Berger, the president of the panel, for presiding over an event contested “because of its ideology and structure,” as well as the age of the panelists, which averaged fifty-eight years, and the panel discussion itself (“the nonsense of the panel discussion meeting here”). He denounced “the apartheid implemented here against the young and fundamentally the Latin Americans” and stressed the need to listen to young artists and critics if the Biennial was to survive. 12. The Padilla case had polarized leftist intellectuals, many of whom, initially friendly to the Cuban Revolution, then turned against it. Articles quoted by Yglesias implied, wrongly, that Padilla had been physically tortured to make him write a confession in a Stalinist fashion. The confession document is indeed a puzzling piece of literature, and some interpret it as an attempt by Padilla to leave precisely that impression.

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Flying in Weightlessness (2004) Edited by Selby Hickey

Chapter 21

On October 16, Nicolás Guagnini, Argentine artist and critic residing in New York, presented his publication The Seven Reviews of Monkeys and Shit in the Gallery of Printed Matter in New York. The publication is part of a larger piece that places Guagnini in the scatological tradition in Western art. The tradition is long, though spotty. Simón Rodríguez (1769–1854), the tutor of Simón Bolívar and later his appointee to reform the educational system in Bolivia, was rumored to have presented a dinner for General Sucre in hospital bedpans in the early nineteenth century. The rumor was spread by the Bolivian oligarchy, which was resentful of Rodríguez’s progressive pedagogical reforms. When Rodríguez, whose views Sucre opposed, heard it, he liked it so much he continued spreading it himself. This probably was the first appearance of urinals in the Western art tradition. A half century later (1917), most likely uninformed of the distinguished work of his predecessor, Duchamp exhibited a urinal in a Salon in Paris. He accomplished two feats in one blow: introducing the “ready-made” as an art statement; and shocking the members of the Salon to which he submitted his piece. Less well known is the “Manifeste pour la plastique physiologique” of Isidore Isou, who, with his exhibition of a chamber pot containing feces (1962), unknowingly echoed Rodríguez. Isou, the founder of Lettrism, wrote for the occasion: “In a certain phase of the evolution of art, the artist seeks the most personal and individual form.” While Isou’s bedpan has remained in the shadows, Manzoni’s “Artist’s Shit” (1961) almost immediately achieved renown. Thanks to Conceptualism, post-Conceptualism, and neo-Conceptualism, Manzoni’s shit has continued to grow in prominence until today, to the point where it was available to serve Guagnini when he needed it (see below). Manzoni carefully canned his excretion for posterity and set its value at that of the

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equivalent weight in gold before it entered the secondary market, where its value soon rose exponentially. Three years later, a U.S. artist by the name of Sam Goodman, nearly forgotten today, exhibited replicas of droppings of different species as a comment on the infatuation of Pop Art with consumer society. Under the title of “No-art,” he filled New York’s Gertrude Stein Gallery with representations of a diverse array of shit, including that of humans. Each sample was delicately reproduced in polyester resin, with such care to fine detail that the viewer could easily imagine smelling something in the air. The press release, astonishingly poorly informed about the scatological tradition in art, mistakenly promoted the event as “a first” in the history of art, describing it as “part of a new wave of artistic expression concerned with Social Realism; social comment and expression of a personal nature in its extreme.” Contrary to his intent to critique Pop Art, Goodman’s piece in hindsight can easily be seen as very much part of Pop Art and post–Pop hyperrealism. In fact, it is easy to visualize Goodman’s work alongside that of the sculptures of Duane Hanson, whose production entered the market some years later. In 2001, Belgian artist Wim Delvoye started his “Cloaca” project, which underwent a process of improvement in three stages: “Cloaca— Original,” “Cloaca—New and Improved,” and “Cloaca—Turbo.” The improved model, thanks to the help of a team of biologists, engineers, and chemists, is a machine that, after being fed restaurant leftovers, is able to process the food in six hours and deliver a credible set of feces.1 In Latin America the scatological tradition was interrupted in visual arts after Rodríguez, but it managed to stay somewhat alive in poetry. In his Poemas y antipoemas (1954), Chilean poet Nicanor Parra includes: “Look, even in the sewers there is a little shit.” Decio Pignatari followed in 1957 with his variations on “drink Coca-Cola” (“beba coca cola”) and the variations ending in “sewer” (cloaca): beba coca cola babe cola beba coca babe cola caco caco cola cloaca

Research would undoubtedly unearth many more examples, but an exhaustive survey would exceed the limits of this article. We skip therefore 176

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directly to 1986, when scatology in the visual arts returned with a bang. In that year, Argentine artist León Ferrari exhibited, in the Biennial of São Paulo, a cage with two pigeons, whose excretions fell through a stencil of a cross onto a reproduction of Michelangelo’s “Final Judgment.” Two years later, Ferrari had the pigeon droppings fall on dollar bills, which he then sent to Pres. Ronald Reagan with the request that they be used to help pay off either the Latin American debt or the U.S. debt, at Reagan’s discretion. Here one sees a clear resurrection of the political strategy in scatology first introduced by Rodríguez. During the early 1990s, Brazilian artist Cildo Meireles started working on his “KU KKA KA KKA.” It was intended to be exhibited in Spain in 1994 in the exhibition “Lo Crudo y lo Cocido” in the Museum Reina Sofía. However, Spanish authorities did not permit the installation because of existing health regulations. Two 3 × 3 × 3-meter glass cubes contained glass shelves, alternating vases with real and artificial roses, and bedpans with real and artificial feces. The philosophical bent in his piece came from a story Meireles’ father had told him as a child. A shack in a village had a sign saying: “Discover the truth.” For one cruzeiro, people could go into the shack to receive a jar covered with paper. The public was to use a finger to poke through the paper and discover the excrement underneath.2 While the scatological tradition in Latin America has tended to be more politicized than in the mainstream, there is nevertheless a common sensibility. Both make an effort to achieve critical distance in order to reevaluate the status quo.3 All the examples cited in this essay, no matter where they took place, have in common a strategy of substitution. Feces and/or their containers are offered in the place of art. There is a critique of art here in which the main statement is not “This is a piece of shit,” even if you are looking at it, but, rather, “Art is a piece of shit.” Even when not explicitly made, such a message is implicit in the fact of its being shown in a gallery setting. Thus, what might well appear to the uninitiated as a cheap, crude, even offensive statement, to the initiated would appear as a somewhat more subtle critical reference to the rituals surrounding the art object. However shocking, whimsical, or childish this swap of meanings may seem, it is undeniably a simple object-for-object exchange. And even more significant, it is an exchange in which the critical act is absorbed into the unified history of art whereupon a second exchange takes place: a concrete monetary value is substituted for the critique. The inevitable failure of the scatological art piece to realize its objecFlying in Weightlessness

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tive raises an interesting question about the value and efficacy of insult. A plain insult works like a mosquito sting: it may bother momentarily but disappears quickly. An elaborate and well-crafted insult may make it into posterity, but not with the same effect as was originally intended; with renown comes an increase in value, which is justified on grounds of quality, which in turn robs the barb of immediacy. A famous and expensive epithet somehow lacks the instantly annoying impact one expects from a wellaimed insult. Perhaps it is impossible to achieve a good artistic insult. On the other hand, perhaps not. It’s possible to see a direct and unmitigated insult as more like a terrorist act, in that it delivers a blow in the moment but fails to have a long-term impact, while a good artistic insult is more an act of subversion, possessing the potential to alter culture. (Sometimes one thing can become the other.)4 I would guess that, when Manzoni filled his cans, he was primarily producing in the insult mode, for he would not have been able to foresee the subsequent success of his piece(s). Their success caused them to lose their terrorist quality but at the same time granted them cultural leverage. The fate of Manzoni’s cans is an example of the market defusing the aggression of the insult through commodification, which in turn made them grow in renown, thereby allowing them to smuggle critique into the story of art. However slightly, and whichever way you look at it, Manzoni’s cans subverted art history—either by forcing acceptance of shit as art, or by redefining everything catalogued around them. Something similar can be said about Andrés Serrano’s “Piss Christ” (1989), in which he submerged a crucifix in a glass of urine. The insult or critique is not always embedded in the work of art. When in 1999 British artist Chris Ofili showed his “Holy Virgin Mary” (1996) in the Brooklyn Museum as part of the “Sensation” show, Mayor Giuliani cut off city funding to the museum. Ofili had used elephant dung on the canvas, and Giuliani (and the cardinal of New York and a lot of other people who didn’t see the exhibition) considered that an insult. Ofili correctly stated that “the people who are attacking this painting are attacking their own interpretation, not mine.”5 According to Ofili, he only wanted to give the painting the feeling that it had “come from the earth rather than simply hung on the wall.” During the interview, Ofili was painting a canvas about a “magic monkey” reaching out to “three elements of life: sex, money and drugs” represented by three piles of elephant droppings. The heyday of feces in the art of the mainstream may be over. Not so in the Latin American tradition, where it would seem that the use of scatology for political art has prolonged its life. For example, in contem178

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plating the context in which Guagnini’s piece appears, I found myself looking anew at a 1996 installation by Uruguayan artist Ricardo Lanzarini. On July 6 of that year, Lanzarini completed an art piece that made use of an equestrian monument in Montevideo erected in honor of Aparicio Saravia, one of the country’s heroes. On one side of the base of the monument Lanzarini wrote in big black letters: “The fatherland was built riding horses.”6 On the other side he wrote: “Like good shitting horses, the horses of the fatherland smell rotten.”7 Hanging above the texts were bloody bones acquired fresh from a butcher. On July 8, Lanzarini was arrested (and subsequently released, pending a court decision) and charged with having committed “aggravated damage.” Lanzarini was at that time a public employee, working in a museum administered by the city. For many viewers, this made his vandalism even more reprehensible. In justification of his piece, Lanzarini told the press that “what I tried to do was to reformulate a monumentality I believe is not perceived but which is precisely what projects us into the future. Otherwise, the bronze horse continues being bronze, and what interests me is that it [the horse] be true. It is a way of saying that we may be in bad shape, but we are more alive than ever. . . . Thus, there is no criminal act here, no damage. Moreover, this monument was never photographed as often as it is now; I gave it a new life.”8 Using knowledge acquired from his museum training, Lanzarini made certain his action was completely reversible, and a week later he contracted a company to clean the monument. Immersed in what had become a national scandal, nobody at the time realized that Lanzarini had no legal right to contract a private company to perform the cleaning of a national monument. From a legal point of view, he was tampering with evidence. On December 23, the Court of Appeals declared Lanzarini innocent of the charges against him. The judge determined that he had neither damaged nor affected the functions of any part of the monument (“the natural destiny of the base, which is to support the statue of Aparicio Saravia, was not affected”). On the contrary, the court wrote, the action should be considered an artistic expression, “although a very peculiar one.” At no time was the scatological aspect of this scandalous work even mentioned. Lanzarini was aware that what he had to prove was that he was doing a work of art, not committing vandalism. He wrote a letter to the commander-in-chief of the local police precinct in which he asked for protection of his work and attached his art school diploma to certify his professionalism. In his explanation to the commander he wrote: “To ask myself: What is the fatherland? What is art? These are questions that Flying in Weightlessness

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stem from the same doubts. To ask myself: What type of engagement? etc., is very much connected with the question: With what horse will I build my fatherland, with a live horse or with a bronze horse?”9 Meanwhile, Lanzarini heard one of the policemen arresting him (unaware of his letter) muttering to the other: “Give us murderers and thieves. Don’t give us artists, they complicate our life.”10 It took a while for the political ripples of Lanzarini’s piece to die down.11 Uruguay has a tradition of two main political parties: the Blancos (Whites) and the Colorados (Reds). Aparicio Saravia is a hero cherished by the Blancos. A third party, the Frente Amplio (Broad Front), has emerged in recent decades and won the presidential election in 2004. It is a leftist coalition of small parties that has controlled the capital for many years. The Blancos tried to use the Lanzarini incident to embarrass the mayor of Montevideo, who happened to be a Frente Amplio politician, and demanded that Lanzarini be fired from his job on the public payroll. Lanzarini responded: “That is ridiculous. When I received the prize of the U.S.-Uruguay Alliance [a cultural subsidiary of the U.S. Embassy] and received a grant to go to New York, I did not ask for a salary raise.”12 Coincidentally, the same day the monument was being cleaned, the Blancos organized an act of vindication. After some speeches, a wreath was placed at the base of the monument. The cleaners watched the ceremony as they waited for it to be over, and then cleaned the text away. Later, the wreath was viewed as Lanzarini’s, in mourning for the end of his piece. Comments in the Uruguayan media ranged from a demand for mind control (“The imagination too is accountable to the law”)13 to empathy (“I believe that monuments are rather ridiculous, so that there is nothing that can offend them. Birds shit on them every day”).14 Meanwhile Lanzarini resigned from his city job. He had hoped that after the storm had passed he would be rehired, but that didn’t happen. Compared to Lanzarini’s piece of 1996, Guagnini’s monkey shit piece is both less spectacular and more insidious. It was enacted over the period from December 26, 2002, to October 16, 2004, when it culminated in the publication of a booklet. Guagnini was hired by Time Out New York, an entertainment magazine, to review exhibits of interest, particularly those involving nonmainstream artists. Guagnini made the decision to define his task as having two tracks. His manifest responsibility was to write an informed, informative, and intelligent short review of the shows; the hidden task he set for himself was to make sure that in each of his reviews he found a way to mention either apes or feces. 180

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The easiest review for the achievement of his dual purpose was an essay on the work of Manzoni. For reasons mentioned previously, he only had to cite the title of Manzoni’s cans.15 Another review, about nineteenthcentury French painter Theodore Chasseriau, turned out to be a lucky choice. He wrote: “The son of a French diplomat and a French-Creole woman, the small, dark-skinned Chasseriau (a mistress dubbed him ‘the little monkey’) joined the studio of Jean-August-Dominique Ingres at the prodigious age of 12.” Information from one of the labels provided the text for the parenthetical addition.16 Later, in a review about the work of Oyvind Fahlstrom, Guagnini was able to write that “the overall compositions immediately suggest gigantic digestive apparatuses, and the events they describe . . . have the inescapable, organic logic of bowel movements.”17 Guagnini finally ended the cycle with a review of MoMA’s exhibition of Latin American art in the Museo del Barrio in 2004, in which he accurately describes the museum’s acquisition policy during the 1930s and 1940s as a “‘monkey see, monkey do’ approach.”18 Significantly, Guagnini’s project did not end with the cycle of reviews. His seven articles were then reproduced in a booklet to which were added separate essays by Dan Graham and John Miller. Dan Graham’s piece reminds the reader that, during a presentation of the Art Workers Coalition on April 10, 1969, he, Graham, had declared that “the art world stinks; it is made of people who collectively dig the shit; now seems to be the time to get the collective shit out of the system.” John Miller plays a more interesting role in Guagnini’s booklet. In his essay, he makes explicit what up to then had been the hidden and virtually unperceivable structure of Guagnini’s actions. We also find out that Miller was hired to write his piece, and that he was paid exactly the amount that Guagnini had earned for writing his reviews for Time Out New York. Miller thus provides the critically important information that Guagnini has reduced himself to funneling Time Out New York’s money to Miller. In other words, Guagnini also has subverted himself. The announcement launching the publication of Guagnini’s booklet reached the arts editor of Time Out New York, who, admiring the piece, shared the news with the magazine’s editor-in-chief. The reaction of this individual, however, was not a happy one. He immediately fired Guagnini for infringement of copyright. Standing back, Graham’s 1969 hope of getting the feces out of the system seems an antiquated utopianism. But making shit visible is still badly needed. A Challenger space mission in 1985 included two monkeys to serve as lab animals for research into the effects of zero gravity. The Flying in Weightlessness

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monkeys were put into a normal cage. Once weightlessness was achieved, their waste floated out through the bars of the cage, compromising the work of the crew. “The monkeys were not Colonel Overmyer’s favorite passengers; he expressed considerable annoyance when waste leaked from their cages into the shuttle laboratory and the cockpit.”19 It could be said that the monkeys used the conditions offered by the system that kept them captive. Using those conditions, they were able to subvert that system. In their case, this was the result of a lucky coincidence; they didn’t strategize or even have to think about it. In the case of Lanzarini earlier and Guagnini now, it is the use of critical distance that purposefully creates the equivalent of weightlessness, making things visible. It is irrelevant who generates the raw materials that make this insight possible. What matters is that it be made visible.

Notes 1. “Cloaca—Original” was first shown in MuHKA, Antwerp (2000); “Cloaca—New and Improved” was exhibited in the Migros Museum in Zurich and in the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York (2002). In a conversation during the time of the exhibition, the artist expressed his puzzlement about the public in New York, which applauded each time the machine evacuated. 2. The piece was eventually shown in 1999 in the Gallery Lelong in New York and in the Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art in Helsinki. 3. Sometimes the act of distancing from the status quo, rather than the content, is the political statement. Cuban artist Tomás Esson painted his “SPOULAKK” in 1987, showing the back of a person in full action. The title, when spelled out phonetically, reads “esepeoueleakaka,” roughly translating into “that fart smells like shit.” The conjunction of image and title was intended to be scandalous in the Cuban scene. In 1990, on the occasion of the exhibit “El Objeto Esculturado” (The Sculpted Object) in Havana, the artist Ángel Delgado (who was not part of the show) went to the opening, carefully laid down a piece of newspaper on the floor, lowered his pants, and deposited his work. As a consequence, he was jailed for six months. 4. In 1986, Mexican artist Roger Von Gunten was ordered by the court to produce paintings in order to comply with a contract agreement with his dealer, Serapión Fernández Stark. Feeling that the verdict was unjust, Von Gunten painted nineteen canvases with texts explaining his version of the case. The first canvas started with “I paint these 19 canvases to comply with the order of the Superior Tribunal of Justice” (Sam Dillon, “Here’s Paint in Your Eye, or the Artist’s Revenge,” New York Times, April 3, 1996, p. A4). A lengthy analysis of the case was written by Francisco Reyes Palma in Curare, no. 16, July–December 2000.

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After several appeals alternating culpability, the case was finally settled against Von Gunten in 2004, forcing him to put his house up for auction. 5. Carol Vogel, “Chris Ofili: British Artist Holds Fast to His Inspiration,” New York Times, September 28, 1999. 6. “A lomo de caballo criollo se hizo la patria.” 7. “Los caballos de la patria como buenos caballos cagadores tienen olor a podrido.” 8. “Arte y justicia,” Tres (Montevideo), July 12, 1996. 9. Letter to the captain of the 12th Police Precinct, Montevideo, July 6, 1996. 10. Lanzarini in a letter to the author, October 7, 1996. 11. Lanzarini’s piece generated many second-rate emulators, and in the city of Cerro Largo, the monument in honor of José Artigas, the founding father of Uruguay, although placed in front of the police headquarters, appeared with the inscription “Sex and Drugs” (La República [Montevideo], August 6, 1996). 12. “Arana cómplice,” Tres (Montevideo), July 19, 1996, p. 57. Mariano Arana is the mayor of Montevideo. 13. Ramón Díaz in a debate with Lanzarini broadcast by Radio Sarandi. 14. Gabriel Lagos, La República (Montevideo), July 9, 1996, p. 13. 15. “Piero Manzoni: Achrome,” Time Out New York, October 16, 2003, p. 82. 16. “Theodore Chasseriau (1819–1856): The Unknown Romantic,” Time Out New York, December 26, 2002, p. 53. 17. “Öyvind Fahlström, the Complete Graphics and Multiples from the Bank One Art Collection,” Time Out New York, April 3, 2004. 18. “MoMA at El Museo: Latin American and Caribbean Art from the collection of the Museum of Modern Art,” Time Out New York, April 1, 2004. 19. “Col. Overmyer, Commander of Shuttle Missions, Dies at 59,” New York Times, March 24, 1996, p. 48.

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Chapter 22

Brazil in New York (2001)

BrasilConnects and the Guggenheim Museum turned out to be an ideal little odd couple, capable of dreaming up a spectacle that looks like a disco enhanced with artistic decoration. The Brazilian corporation had already shown its ideas and level of taste in the Carmen Miranda exhibit in the recent Venice Biennial (though there it had a better justification and was more interesting). In any case, during the past several years, the Guggenheim Museum has shown a preference for immediate visual effects over scholarly rigor. On this occasion, the worst personality traits of both enterprises seem to have come together. The museum is painted black with spotlights that carefully silhouette each exhibited object. One seems to circulate through a night populated by midair glass vitrines, without the benefit of the refreshing evening breeze. Making the mistake of looking up, one can appreciate a promotional projection about the exhibit—an allusion to tropical foliage with the title of the exhibition, “Body and Soul.” To avoid any peril of empty spaces, all the nooks of the museum have their own projections providing more atmosphere than information, or having peripheral interest (for example, footage of an unfinished Orson Welles movie about the raft voyage of some Brazilian fishermen).1 Agoraphobia rules, with the alibi of tropical baroque. It is there to satisfy the dreams of some delirious travel agent. One cannot understand how this disaster, organized by a group of prestigious curators and a famous architect, could come about.2 More than a consistent exhibition, the group of works can be understood (maybe unwittingly) as an accumulation of small exhibits interspersed with videos that contribute picturesque information. The primary purpose of BrasilConnects seems to be the export of Brazilian cultural goods in order to increase tourism and sales. But if this was the aim of the exhibition, it is beyond comprehension why a serious team of art historians would lend itself to this charade. The topic of export of national culture has long been an important 184

issue in Brazil and has had an impact on the country’s intellectual attitudes and art production. The title Oswaldo de Andrade gave to his manifesto about poetry in 1924, Pau Brasil, refers to wood for export (“pau” means wooden stick in Portuguese). A year later he used the same title for his book, illustrated by Tarsila de Amaral, and the cover showed the same words in the circle at the center of the Brazilian flag. The Brazilian concrete poetry movement had the export of its work as a primary concern: the poets were interested in having their movement inserted into the international avant-garde on the same level as the hegemonic movements. The São Paulo Biennial was created to establish an international event in Brazil to compete with the Venice Biennial. All these actions and many more were part of a strategy in which anticolonialism and the longing for independence sometimes mixed with an unjustified inferiority complex in regard to hegemonic cultures. In the cases mentioned, the positive aspects of the strategy produced work which often became unwillingly regionalist and autochthonous, created an identity, and made for a memorable production. However, in this exhibition the inferiority complex seems to come to the fore at the expense of any positive contributions and leaves one with an uncomfortable taste of embarrassment. The announcement in art magazines proclaims via two-page spreads that “Brazil is ready to occupy its place on the stage of world culture.” Accordingly, the ad presents an inventory (which according to BrasilConnects is only partial) of a series of exhibitions that, starting with the past Venice Biennial, continues through New York to Washington, Paris, Bordeaux, London, Cambridge, Oxford, and Bilbao in less than a year. The message is definitely more about occupation than about connection. “Body and Soul” seems more palatable when seen as a necklace of tiny exhibitions and not as one comprehensive show of Brazilian art.3 It doesn’t work as a coherent discourse because it doesn’t make any sense to have a Brazilian show with indigenous culture minimally represented by a small group of examples and Baroque art occupying the greatest amount of space. Not having counted the works (and the catalog has no checklist), one can only say that the publication for the exhibition has six hundred pages, weighs eight pounds in soft cover, and, reflecting the priorities of the exhibition, has thirteen pages for all the aboriginal art, six dedicated to eighteenth-century Baroque candleholders, and another fifty-five pages for saints and cherubs of the same period. It is only fair to say that Edward Sullivan’s introductory text, in which he valiantly tries to give some coBrazil in New York

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herence to the exhibit, doesn’t mention aboriginal art at all. This seems to confirm the suspicion that this area was added as an afterthought, and to maintain a semblance of political correctness. It would seem, then, that the theoretical purpose of the exhibition is to show the art of colonization (by submission, assimilation, or resistance), but not to really show work produced outside colonization. The difficulty of placing aboriginal art in the context of Western or Westernized art is discussed in the catalog by José Antônio Fernandes-Dias; however, there is no mention of the dilemmas posed in the Guggenheim. The ethnographic part lands arbitrarily in some architecturally convenient space, totally decontextualized and breaking any chronology that might be hinted at by the exhibition. If, on the other hand, the thesis is that these artifacts represent a culture that is parallel in time and for whatever reason has remained uncontaminated by “civilization,” the explanation is missing. Once the visitor decides that this is not an exhibition but an art fair, the mind quiets down somewhat. With the eyes now better adapted to the penumbra and trying to ignore the enormous altar of São Benito de Olinda (reassembled in the center of the museum), one starts to discover some real jewels that justify the visit. O Aleijadinho (Antônio Francisco Lisboa, 1738–1814) is probably the most important sculptor in the whole of the hemisphere from Tierra del Fuego to the North Pole. An equal to Michelangelo, Riemenschneider, and any other European giant, he is practically unknown in the U.S. His presence subdues any criticism one might have of the show. Although the more important pieces are only “attributed” (meaning that they probably are fakes), his work shown here next to a disproportionate multitude of saints (which probably are authentic), stands out in such a way that the latter look like factory dolls. It is one of the occasions where the accompanying video really adds to the atmosphere that a museum struggles to provide for works extracted from their original environment.4 The altar of São Benito de Olinda is an example of what happens with this extirpation. In the museum it lacks the scale given by the church for which it was designed and built. There, ornate windows act as an echo to what is intended to look like the work of an architectural goldsmith. With a height that reaches four of the six spiraling circles of the Guggenheim, the altar looks like a crude and bombastic misstep. The cost of bringing the altar to New York was half a million dollars. A private collection of sculpted wooden heads made for the top of the masts of fishing boats is another minishow that rewards patience.5 These popular and anonymous pieces, though made during the twentieth cen186

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tury, have the same power of the sculptures from the Baroque that precede them. A group of ex-votos with a freshness stemming from simplicity and a rudimentary quality are well gathered in a stylistically chaotic group. They are offerings of gratitude for miracles and cures and come together in their aesthetic naïveté and fervor, a pleasure to look at. The treatment of Afro-Brazilian works reveals another unsolvable problem. Given their enormous influence, it is often difficult to decide on their placement under any circumstance. In “Body and Soul” the criteria keep fluctuating. O Aleijadinho is shown in the context of Western Baroque. However, in another section there is a more folkloric grouping. Under the title of “Afro-Brazilian art” one can see Mestre Didi and other popular artists with obvious African roots. Their works don’t represent a synthesis but are really the product of the “Brazilianization” of other customs (the same as with Brazilian Baroque), showing an important process in the country’s culture. For some curious reason, the works by Ronaldo Rego and Rubem Valentim appear in the catalog as part of this group, while in the exhibition they are mixed with art of the concrete movement. Interestingly, either position is defensible, even if here the wavering seems to be a consequence of curatorial indecision. Clearly, both Rego and Valentim have a connection with concrete art. However, in practice, their position can be seen as anticoncrete. There is, for example, a visual link to Lígia Pape’s “The Book of Time” (1961). Pape, Rego, and Valentim also work with variations of modules, and the temptation to group the artists considering formal criteria is understandable. In this case, it is also a way of opening the overly rigid borderlines of traditional art history. Nevertheless, the reading of the works is clearer in the catalog. Here they are in a group with Mestre Didi and GTO (Geraldo Teles de Oliveira). In this context, the works reveal a strange syncretic quality, their elitist format and language of “high culture” filled with santero [a santería priest] meanings. From a concretist point of view, the works now have a patina of sentimentalism that negates the rigor of any concrete art precedents. These precedents are mostly from the 1950s—Valentim’s work is from the seventies and Rego’s, from the nineties. In the context of Afro-Brazilian art, the concretist elements become secondary and serve only as decorative devices to organize a much more important spiritual system. The modernist section in the exhibition starts with the artists who participated in the historic Modern Art Week. This event, which marked Brazilian modern art, was organized by Emiliano de Calvacanti in São Brazil in New York

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Paulo in 1922. The section continues until the 1950s in what is a condensed and impoverished version of the big exhibition held in 2000 by the IVAM of Valencia. Many of the same works here had already been seen in the MoMA exhibition of 1993.6 In some cases (da Veiga Guignard, de Calvacanti, Portinari), that repetition is regrettable, since, for a public without access, it reduces the stature of these artists to a few works. On the other hand, the section offers some pleasures. There is Tarsila de Amaral with a surprising turn into a personal version of Social Realism, as well as an interesting solitary and strong painting by Anita Malfatti (1917). But then there is also the uncomfortable profusion of works by Víctor Brecheret. Today these can be interpreted as funerary kitsch. Or a surprising neglect of the very important Brazilian printmaking movement. There are five works by Lazar Segall and a glaring absence of Goeldi, Abramo, and Grassman. Brazilian concretism is shown as another subexhibit including the concretist works by Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticica, though excluding those by Geraldo de Barros. Much in the show’s version of the Brazilian twentieth century is very predictable. The absences, however, are totally unpredictable. Waldemar Cordeiro and Mira Schendel, both figures of transition and connection between concretism, poetry, and Conceptualism in areas that were not covered by Oiticica and Clark, are inexplicably left out. History, in the chronological sense, seems to end abruptly, to then reopen with new, very weird, holes. Nothing by Antônio Dias, Cildo Meireles, Artur Barrio, or Waltércio Caldas, all internationally accepted and historically important figures during the last three decades. Instead of meriting a systematic study of this period, there are some capriciously pointed and isolated examples. Standing out among them are the “Phantom” (1993) by Antônio Manuel, and the “Paradox of the Saint” (1994) by Regina Silveira. Silveira’s installation sums up in one work the whole “Body and Soul” exhibition. A little anonymous wooden sculpture representing a saint riding a horse here casts an enormous and distorted shadow over the space of the room. The twist is that the shadow belongs to another work: an equestrian monument made by Víctor Brecheret. Other pieces are letdowns. Ernesto Neto, who represented Brazil in the past Venice Biennial and is known for his big installations that combine sensual shapes and the aromas of spices, has only a minimal piece here, just to state his presence.7 Although the Guggenheim Museum complains that, as a consequence of 9/11 it has lost 20 percent of its public, the space seems crowded. This is even more surprising with tickets costing fifteen dollars. Crowds may be 188

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partly explained by the coinciding exhibit of the North American SocialRealist painter Norman Rockwell. Rockwell, famous for his covers for the Saturday Evening Post and his calendar aesthetics, is one of the most popular icons of U.S. art, although critics debate if his work should even be classed as art. It is clear that we are living in a period where intellectual rigor clashes with economic interests. As an example, in an editorial (December 27, 2001), the San Francisco Chronicle denounced the “commercial politics” of the Smithsonian Institution. The Smithsonian is one of the few cultural institutions financed by the government. Two-thirds of the budget is provided by Congress, and the rest is completed through private donations. The institution controls sixteen museums dedicated to different activities, among them the Hirshhorn Museum and the Museum of Natural History. The newspaper denounced arrangements negotiated by, or with, the director, Lawrence Small, to create a hall for the history of the means of transportation. The hall was to be named after General Motors, which would pay $10 million for the honor. The paper feared that a conflict of interest might ensue, leading to an exaggerated presence of cars in detriment to public transportation. Fuji had donated $7.8 million for an exhibition about panda bears. For the money (aside from tax deductions), Fuji was allowed to show a huge stuffed bear holding a sign that advertised Fuji films. Besides the big promotional advertisement value, Fuji also received a prize for its entrepreneurial leadership. All of this doesn’t mean that commercial patronage and economic interests are bound to corrupt intellectual research. It proves, however, that the borderlines with corruption are very fragile. The moral seems to be that in an economy in recession all conflicts of interest have to be watched carefully. Without implying that corruption has reached the Guggenheim Museum, the line was touched not long ago when a big exhibition of Armani designs was subsidized by the company. While the economic interests of BrasilConnects may or may not have had a role in “Body and Soul,” at least they don’t seem to be directly reflected in the show. For the majority of the public, a visit to the museum is interesting as a first, touristy, contact with the art of a country that has overwhelming artistic riches. In that sense, there is something positive in this event, and this was recognized by the very complimentary U.S. critics. The negative consequences of an exhibition of this type—the megaexhibit that focuses on the spectacle and not on the content—are more serious and bigger. Thanks to this very superficial and incomplete show, Brazil in New York

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we now will have to wait several decades before somebody can find funds and space to do the rigorous job the subject deserves. “Body and Soul” is in the Guggenheim Museum, New York, from October 11, 2001, until May 29, 2002. It will then go to Bilbao.

Notes 1. It’s All True, 1942, documentary about a protest trip from Fortaleza to Rio de Janeiro by four fishermen. 2. The team of curators was directed by Edward Sullivan and included, among others, Germano Celant, Nelson Aguilar, Emanoel Araújo, Mari Marino, and Julio Zugazagitía. The design of the exhibition was by Jean Nouvel. 3. Guggenheim Museum, New York, October 11, 2001–January 21, 2002; Museo Guggenheim, Bilbao, March 23–September 29, 2002. 4. The other useful video is about a visit to Brasília in conjunction with the work of architect Oscar Niemayer. 5. The collection is the property of Pedro Ramos Carvalho. 6. “Latin American Artists of the 20th Century,” New York, 1993. 7. The absence of contemporary artists is not necessarily a consequence of curatorial error. An analysis of the Brazilian political/cultural tensions exceeds the limits of this article. It should suffice to point out the controversial nature of Edemar Cid Ferreira, president of BrasilConnects. The reasons range from an accusation of his being responsible for the separation of Ivo Mesquita as director of the next Biennial of São Paulo, to the accusation by journalist Claudio Júlio Tognolli of having received a death threat because of statements he made in the press. After international protests, Mesquita was reinstalled in his post to then resign of his own free will. The polemic around Tognolli was accessed on www .geocities.com/reportagens/banqueiro2.htm.

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The Keeper of the Lens (2005)

Chapter 23

No, Hiroshima! No! Not in front of the children! Peter Minshall, Callaloo and de Crab

Peter Minshall’s field of action has worked against his recognition within the mainstream art world: he doesn’t use traditional art forms, choosing instead to work with Carnival performance, the huge popular street celebration, and his base of operations is in Trinidad and Tobago. Carnival places him in an area generally unsuitable for “high” art expectations, and Trinidad puts him in the context of a colonial and postcolonial culture rather than within the interests of the cultural centers. Minshall’s work doesn’t address the small crowd of the art world, but, rather, the big crowd of the streets of Port-of-Spain. And yet, Carnival in Trinidad, or, more precisely, mas—a derivation of masquerade and used as in “playing mas”—features practically all the dynamics of cutting-edge performance art and installation while predating those forms by over a century. Because it belongs to a different history, it is considered a local, vernacular, and popular expression, lacking significance for any speculation about “high art.” But it is precisely this vernacular, bottom-up quality that gives Minshall’s art so much power. It is surprising that, in spite of the strong multicultural push of the 1980s and 1990s, Carnival hasn’t really made a serious entry into the canon. The first time Carnival’s presence was acknowledged in mainstream art history was on the occasion of the belated recognition of the work of Brazilian artist Hélio Oiticica, whose participation in a Rio de Janeiro samba school influenced his work and, thereby, the world of high art. But, in Oiticica’s case, Carnival serves as anecdotal background, not his area of influence. The reverse process takes place with Minshall, who, informed by European mainstream culture, works within and gives expression to the world of the popular. Aware that his feet are planted firmly in both worlds and that places on the periphery such as Trinidad are hardly ideal pads from which to be launched into the mainstream, Minshall once wrote: 191

“To the First World artist, mas is likely to appear exotic. . . . And to the native Trinidadian, although he may love his mas, he will not have the cultural self-confidence to think it worthy of a place alongside paintings in the Louvre. . . . Yet, if one considers the extent to which a work in the mas engages members of the community, by comparison to a work in the medium of painting or sculpture, this alleged ‘exoticism’ begins to fall away.”1 A complex conglomerate of traditions and expressions even in the grayest of cultural climates, Carnival finds unusually fertile ground in Trinidad. The island is a zone of encounters, an information hub more than just a geographical place. Under the virtual reign of the designer George Bailey (1935–1970), Carnival absorbed as much information from local life as it did from various African traditions, as much from the latest expressions of Black Power as from Hollywood war movies and biblical superproductions. Today, thanks to Minshall, the cross-fertilizations continue to take place, mixing such disparate sources as Mexican dances of death, mainstream Western art trends, and images and ideas from local and international politics.2 At the same time, he continues to honor the oldest of traditions, those coming from Africa, which he refers to as consistent with his belief that Africa is “the Dionysus of culture.” His masks, no matter what the source, he says, are tools for “looking at the spirits.” All of these cultural variables compacted into the life of a small island of one and a half million inhabitants means that Trinidadian Carnival benefits from a cornucopia of information that can be digested and recycled by a living community. The complex web of diverse populations in Trinidad—Afro, Indian, Euro (predominantly French and British), Chinese, Middle Eastern; poor, rich, middle class, and, in between, Christian, Hindu, Muslim—all flow into a vast river of activity beginning months before and culminating in two days of nonstop movement in celebration. It is this collectivity that Minshall molds into the human artwork of his mas, a process that involves the creator’s shaping of the spontaneous energies of the multitude, engaging in a dialectic of freedom and control. Carnival of course has a tendency to take on the character of a ritual, with fixed structures and orders, a dynamic that can affect both creators and participants. And yet, Carnival is a place for the individual to let go, to express personal freedom, personal dreams. It is with this juxtaposition that Minshall as creator plays: participants can do whatever they wish as long as it fits into his loosely planned choreography. The artist provides structures and costumes that amplify the 192

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physical energy of the participants. This amazing integration of forces— often contradictory and potentially clashing—also manifests itself in the negotiation of the relations of the individual vis-à-vis the collective. In its beginnings in Trinidad during the early nineteenth century, Carnival was a form of collective expression of resistance to white racism and colonial rule. It combined the French Creole tradition of pre-Lenten celebration with the canboulay festivities (cannes brûlées, or burned canes, after sugarcane cutting), which became more assertive after the emancipation of the slaves. Carnival remained a form of political and cultural resistance into the twentieth century, which may explain why there seems to be room reserved for individuality and individual transgression in the very structure of the event. Carnival’s covering the spectrum from collective to individual, with its ambiguities and its shifting electricity, creates the space within which the artistic effect takes place. Both the Catholic Mass and the bullfight are parallel spectacles to Carnival, but they provide their aesthetic power through rigidly imposed patterns. Carnival, instead, has a stable frame of reference with a flexible structure that allows for individual variations. And while Mass and bullfight stay within the ritual, Carnival is expected to provide new spectacles from year to year. However, Carnival is also burdened by being an expensive proposition. The production costs for each participating “band,” which sometimes number as many as five thousand members, can be staggering. The necessity of providing elaborate costumes, running a mas camp workshop for production, trucks with sound equipment (forty-foot tractor-trailer rigs with either DJ teams or live bands), supplies of food and drink, support personnel, security crews, et cetera, makes the spectacle a major enterprise well beyond what one may expect from traditional art or even from a theater play. There is no state subsidy, and each band has to fund itself, primarily by having participants pay for their own costumes. Designers are free to do whatever they want in terms of artistic creation—as long as the members are willing to pay. This puts the burden of acceptance on the designer—there is always speculation on how far the band members will be willing to go. So, while mas is a negotiation between the individual and the collective, it is also a terrain for social and economic forces; the “designer” initiative is unlimited as long as the cart of the ritual can be pulled successfully. The inertia of anonymous collective rituals encounters free enterprise, and free enterprise often sponsors commerce at the expense of creativity. Thus, creators like Minshall are continually facing the pressure coming from the more-cost-efficient aesThe Keeper of the Lens

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thetics based on “bikinis, beads, and feathers,” an aesthetic takeoff from Las Vegas.3 One of Minshall’s strengths is precisely the avoidance of the traps of commercialism—his keeping the area of creation clean. And while there have been several innovators in the mas tradition (George Bailey, acknowledged by Minshall as one of the masters, being a prominent example), Minshall is probably the only artist who has been able to truly blend in high-art devices as well. Minshall’s paradigmatic position, therefore, is not only a consequence of his spectacular productions. He also successfully embodies all of the contradictions of being a free artist who follows his creative instincts on the highest and most rigorous level and of being an intelligent producer and negotiator. His art training at the London Central School of Arts and Design prepared him to be a creator from the “top down,” one who addresses a relatively passive public. He was educated to be an individualist creator (and Minshall definitely fits that profile), communicating and sharing his insights with the public. Indeed, it is his preparation in abstract thinking and individualist intuition, his education in the appreciation of the developments in contemporary art, and his understanding of the shape of spectacles that has allowed him to use crowds as canvases for abstract shapes and colors, to use their movements to create kinetic sculptures, and to integrate imagery weighted by tradition into “gallery aesthetics.” Yet, even while Minshall was in London working on theater sets, his thoughts were on the Trinidadian mas. In 1971, he wrote his memorable instructions for a Josephine Baker costume. The costume was to be worn by his adopted sister in the Junior Carnival of 1972, and the instructions took the form of a ninety-two-page letter to his mother, who was in charge of the production of the piece.4 The letter, filled with illustrations that were minutely precise so as to eliminate any ambiguity, laid the groundwork for what would become Minshall’s major research tool to find images in his mind: the making of the thumbnail drawings that account for the bulk of this exhibition. Each Minshall project starts with countless pads filled with sketches that range from a simple line capturing a position to detailed ornaments to small mechanical articulations. Rigorous editing leads what seems to start as chaos to a honed, finished spectacle. Once Minshall’s works reach their final form they undergo a skilled accentuation of contrasts. In “Danse Macabre” (1980), for example, darkness is embodied in an image of death materialized as an enormous spidery contraption twenty feet high and forty feet wide, a dress made into 194

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a dancing cathedral that is effortlessly activated by the walking of a single performer.5 The image speaks both to the street and to the spirits. It kills with sublimity. In other works, such as “Carnival Is Colour” (1987), the waving of colored fabric creates a flowing river of ephemeral happiness, the colors billowing independently or united into a woven fabric. In “Red” (1998), one sees a mass of red “sculpted” people carrying chairs, the bubbling color coming to a rest when, due to some mysterious expression of unanimity, everybody stops to sit down in front of the panel of jurors and stare at them. In Minshall’s work, patterns created by the movement of masses of people are always played against the actions of individuals. The counterpoint either articulates the collective or is present in monumental iconic images. And in all of this, the dynamic “from the bottom up,” the truly popular sense of aesthetics often despised at the top, is sufficiently porous to hold Minshall in check, forcing him to pick up on cues that ultimately enrich his individual magic. It is a loving game of pull-and-push on which he thrives. Nevertheless, it should be noted that he is equally comfortable when, free of tradition, he designs inaugural spectacles for the Olympic Games or produces a performance installation, as he did for the Sixth Biennial of Havana.6 Minshall’s mas band, produced by his Callaloo Company, one of the prominent large bands of the 1980s, has become somewhat smaller (around fifteen hundred members).7 The word “callaloo” refers to a Trinidadian pot of mixed vegetables primarily prepared with dasheen leaves and okra. However, as with the Cuban ajiaco and the Colombian sancocho, callaloo serves mainly as an excuse to assemble foods. Callaloo, for Minshall, is much more than a metaphor; it is his nourishment. In 1984, he used the term to entitle an epic story that informed most of the themes he has been using in his productions for over a quarter of a century. In the story, Callaloo is the main character, an everyman (the melting pot anthropomorphized into a hero) who is persecuted by his nemesis, Madame Hiroshima. Hiroshima is an enormous, explosive, evil woman whose main function is to attempt Callaloo’s destruction. Callaloo could be any one of us, but he is also very much Minshall himself. According to Minshall, there is a connection between Trinity, New Mexico, where the first atomic bomb was tested on July 16, 1945, and Trinidad, the country. In “Callaloo,” incommensurable human evil is undermined by sexual playfulness and humor; terror is downplayed into The Keeper of the Lens

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matter-of-fact advice. Minshall’s “No, Hiroshima! No! Not in front of the children!” is a warning on so many levels it knots the stomach against an explosion of laughter. The exuberant story, as much fit for Homer as for comic strips, is written in Trinidadian, a local version of English heavily enriched with patois. The story, as with Minshall’s mas productions, is about the epic battle between cosmic evil and quotidian goodness, where goodness is not a consequence of saintliness, but a reflection of harmlessness, since we are only “a smudge of light in an incomprehensible darkness.”8 Some years ago, during an informal conversation, Minshall described himself as “the Fellini of Carnival.” The statement was revealing on many levels. In a later conversation Minshall didn’t recall the comment but justified it by admiring Fellini’s combination of the “gorgeous with the grotesque, and his interest in circus life.” Fellini, however, was much more than that and is indeed a perfect analogue for Minshall. The director was an idiosyncratic individualist-populist, somebody as much in touch with himself as with the audience, or, more, somebody who used the audience as a lens through which to perceive himself while also helping the audience to see itself. He was able to blur the borderlines between personal epic and collective perception. One could speculate that if Minshall had operated in a more affluent society he might have become a grand filmmaker. However, by working with mas instead of film, Minshall has been able to develop a different relationship with his audience, which he respects for showing active participation. As he has often pointed out, in mas people pay for the right to be a part rather than for the opportunity to be a witness. Playing mas, in other words, is the real spectacle; the audience is not there for gawking but because it wants to enjoy a “spectator sport” in the best of senses. As Minshall puts it: “The senses reel. All things come together. Chaos meets order. The chasm that separates audience from performer is crossed with ease.”9 Playing off the affection of mainstream art history for labels, Trinidadian artist and critic Chris Cozier refers to Minshall’s work as “roadworks,” contrasting his spectacles with “earthworks,” which have an honored place in mainstream art discourse while being largely inaccessible to the public. Echoing Minshall’s own views, Cozier underlines the role of location for the achievement of recognition and the consequences of not being in the center: “If something like [Minshall’s spectacles] were to happen in one of the power locations for art theory, there would be miles of text.”10 Minshall’s work, and his particular role in shaping culture, reminds us that, ultimately, there is no real canon, that there are only vernacular 196

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forms of expression. Within them, the mainstream erects its own form of vernacular as the canon, but in doing so it may be even more provincial and certainly less receptive than the periphery. Fortunately, this is not very relevant. The lens of Carnival is a better one for understanding reality and coping with it than many others. And Minshall’s most lasting contribution, perhaps even greater than the amazing imagery he has contributed as an individual artist, is probably the polishing of this lens to protect it from the fog of “bikinis, beads, and feathers” that in recent years has consumed much of the Carnival tapestry, and reserving vision for the renewal of forms and the development of identity. Fittingly, Minshall once described his beginnings in 1974: “I was on my island. The heavens opened upon me. The light filled my being. I had been blind before. Now I could see.” As the guardian of acuity, Minshall is in the enviable position of remaining an individual voice while advancing the expression of a whole community. This position of true cultural leverage is one that no artist in the mainstream can claim.

Notes 1. Peter Minshall, “Carnival and Its Place in Caribbean Culture and Art,” Caribbean Visions: Contemporary Painting and Sculpture (Alexandria, Va.: Art Services International, 1995), p. 52. Minshall’s education and life exemplify the difficult passage from colonial status to independence that characterizes the cultural experience of much of the modern world. It was Minshall’s booming and precise voice that announced, over the radio, the ceremonies of the first raising of the national flag in 1962, an occasion blessed by the queen of England, who sent her cousin Princess Alice as a representative and witness. The event featured the acceptance of a new coat of arms designed by Carnival artists George Bailey and Carlisle Chang and the singing of a newly minted national anthem. Typically for such an anthem, the music was not inspired by local (calypso) music, but, rather, by the long-dead European model that determined heroic songs elsewhere during the independence movements of the nineteenth century. Even as Trinidadian lives are pledged to “this our native land” and the “blue Caribbean Sea,” it is done with the archaic and alien phrase “to thee.” It all suggests a lack of urgency in the cutting of artificial, and imperial, umbilical cords. 2. Minshall’s sources are much more profuse, among them, Alexander Calder, Akira Kurosawa, Bertolt Brecht, Antonio Gaudí, Chinese kites, Oskar Schlemmer, Richard Serra, René Magritte, and a multitude of others. 3. By emphasizing these ferments, bands avoid the production of elaborate costumes and maintain titillation. The words have become emblematic for a defilement of Carnival in Trinidad. In the 2005 Carnival, a children’s band with the The Keeper of the Lens

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name “We Fed Up of de Same Ting Over and Over” performed a critical caricature of this tendency, wearing an exaggerated amount of feathers, beads, and flaps. Minshall did not participate in this Carnival, prompting another children’s band to parade with the name “A Pinch of Minsh.” The increase of the Las Vegas look has changed the character of Carnival, increasingly separating spectators from participants. Minshall is in fact alienated from those nonparticipants who solely come to relish the bikini aesthetics: “Fools are they who pay their money to go and sit in the Savannah to see this continual parade and the same tune playing all the time. If you want to see naked ladies, stand up on the pavement; much closer view” (“A conversation re.: the exhibition ‘1981,’” Minshall at CCA7, February 23, 2002). The Savannah refers to the platform stage across which the mas bands pass and perform, and the grandstand and bleachers on either side, which are located in the Queen’s Park Savannah, a large expanse of parkland in Port-of-Spain. 4. Pat Ganase, 2005, communication with the author. 5. One of the inspirations for Minshall’s complex construction is backpacks with aluminum frames. He extended the structures with spring-steel wires and connected some bars to the ankles, thus adding both foot control and stability to his constructions. 6. Even though the work for the Olympics was in a more traditionally professional arena, it should be noted that Minshall still had to negotiate the artist’s vision with the tastes of the producers, the need to motivate thousands of nonprofessional volunteer participants, and the need to appeal across language and culture to the “common” masses of a worldwide audience—not so dissimilar from the negotiation required by a mas band in Trinidad. 7. This still puts Minshall’s mas band among the twelve to fifteen large ones, which is to say, among those with over eight hundred members. 8. Peter Minshall, September 1988, address to the World Carnival Conference, Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut. 9. Peter Minshall, July 20, 1992, letter to friends from Barcelona. 10. Chris Cozier, “Trinidad: Questions about Contemporary History,” manuscript, 1998, later published as “Caribe insular, exclusión, fragmentación y paraíso,” Revista de Casa de las Américas.

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The Two Versions of Santa Anna ’ s Leg and the Ethics of Public Art (1995)

Chapter 24

General Santa Anna, famous in Mexico for having been the governing leader of his country eleven times as well as for having lost half of its territories to the U.S., was also known for the loss of his leg. One of his nicknames was quinceuñas (fifteen nails). The diminution took place during what was called the Pastry War, when the French invaded Mexico to avenge a commercial wrong committed against a French baker. The amputating cannonball was shot during one of the skirmishes. Santa Anna, who was very affectionate toward his body, not only had his leg buried with statesmanlike pomp, he also commissioned a monument in honor of his extremity. Everything until here is fairly understandable. Santa Anna, as if he were an artist, suffered from a good dose of fetishism that was enriched with morbidity. But what turned out to be most remarkable happened later. During one of the insurrections against him, the mob went to the leg’s burial site and disinterred it. The leg was attached to a rope and dragged around the city until it disappeared, eroded against the cobblestones of the streets. The leg, the same as a work of art, was the meeting place of shared fetishisms. It acted as a kind of involuntary telephone through which Santa Anna tried to have a loving conversation with his public. And the public, which, surprisingly, accepted the fiction of the metaphorical telephone, decided to ignore the intention. One could say that, as a work of art, Santa Anna’s leg was both a failure and a phenomenal success. It was a failure because, clearly, it did not comply with the aims of the author. However, it was excellent because the public, by using it in its own way, managed to fully express itself. The public fully appropriated both form and symbolism to give itself (and the leg) a totally different destiny, to integrate them into another reality and other more urgent needs, organized within their own coherence. The fetishism surrounding Santa Anna’s leg was not limited to this

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anecdote. It grew and played out on an international scale. The general had many artificial legs that he used while leading his troops against the invading U.S. troops in 1846. During one of the military operations, the enemy occupied Santa Anna’s home and took one of the prostheses as a war trophy. Once the war was over, an enormous number of U.S. cities claimed they owned Santa Anna’s artificial leg: with peace, every city that had sent a battalion into war seemed to have one. The authentic leg was proof of the valor that the local team had shown on the battlefield. Besides the implicit fetishism in all war trophies, this example is even more interesting because of the subtlety of the idea of authenticity when referring to an artificial limb. It is a Duchampian act made collective by the masses. The distinction acquired by the urinal thanks to Duchamp’s choice is an echo of the distinction acquired by the leg thanks to its contact with Santa Anna’s stump. It is a symptom of the same psychology that gives priority to the work made by the hand of the artist and diminishes the value of that made in his name by an assistant, although there is no noticeable difference. Or the one that favors a signed work over the same without a signature. Thus, Santa Anna’s leg becomes a paradigm for postmodern art and for modern art, in that order. As in postmodernism, in the process of disinterment there is a process of appropriation used as a creatively valid process to achieve a semantic change in the work of art. And then, by celebrating the fetishism of individuality, the process of authentication of the artificial leg reaffirms bourgeois modernism. The object was anointed with the author’s spirit thanks to bodily contact with the artist, with which the individual creator stood apart from the collective. One could therefore say that postmodernism was either born in Veracruz on December 5 of 1838—the day of the surgical cannonball—or in 1843, when the memorial monument was inaugurated. Modernism, on the other hand, followed in 1848, when the prosthesis was stolen. In light of this information, the French contribution to modernism is still important, but it is a lesser force in historical terms than is usually assumed when the texts of Baudelaire from 1855 or Manet’s “Dejeneur sur l’herbe” of 1863 are invoked to make the point. And in case it is of any interest, the most authentic artificial leg of Santa Anna’s artificial legs is conserved in a vault in the Military Museum of the Military and Navy Department in Springfield, Illinois. My fascination with the leg of Santa Anna dates from long ago, although my interest focused on it as a mysterious example of how the bitterest of enemies can share fetishism above discrepancies and hate. How200

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ever, in writing this I can see important ethical implications that I would like to explore more seriously. Whenever we members of the art elite talk about art, one of the topics that concerns us the most is its circulation and dissemination. We talk about how to get to the public/market, or the people, depending on our political positions and commercial interests. And even with those artists who claim that they only work for themselves, inevitably, their work ends up on some wall or public space and feeds the subjective observation of others. Those of us who make art have a propensity to striptease, and those who presume to undress in a private room do so surrounded by glass walls. Artistic monologue doesn’t exist: art is a dialogical process, and the work is only fully completed as a result of that dialogue. Even when private, the work cannot be just a monologue—emitted discourses without a response. At the least it is a dialogue with oneself, with a public of one. Generally, however, the work is not private. It openly addresses a bigger public, and it is a physical support for the conversation that is meant to be held. Strangely enough, when discussing art—if the conversation is a good one—we tend to compliment the telephone more than the interlocutor, or whoever is generating the conversation. This is due to two reasons. One is that the telephone—the work of art—can be bought. The other is because, deep down, we really are obscurantist, capable of attributing spirits to idols and, by extension, also to telephones. We confuse the bearers of symbols with the symbols themselves. The analogy between work of art and telephone is not totally precise, because the telephone itself does not produce any conversation and because it is a totally open instrument. The work of art compares better with a toy telephone of the kind that has a prerecorded tape with part of a conversation to which the child can answer in any way it wants. In any case, we have the artist who wants to show off, who wants to have a conversation with the public, and who, with this in mind, distributes objects with the attribution of his or her own spirit. The marvelous part of the situation is that the public—that segment of the population to whom the work is being addressed—accepts the artist’s needs. This includes the acceptance of the attribution of spirits, even if sometimes, as in the case of Santa Anna’s leg, they may change the tenor of the conversation. It is through that acceptance, with the understand‑ ing of a very basic set of conventions, that the work of art becomes the place of a fetishism shared by artist and public—which is one more form of dialogue. The Two Versions of Santa Anna’s Leg

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I don’t think that we have to discuss whether we artists perform or don’t perform striptease. The issue is only the degree of exhibitionism we employ. And language is revealing enough, since we talk about exhibitions and shows. I believe that, at least for the moment, fetishism in art is inevitable. We may reveal and denounce this condition, but it is one we have to accept in order to keep the bridges of communication open. The rebellion against Santa Anna was aesthetically expressed through the destruction of his leg. The people had to accept the symbol in order to deny it. They could have stopped at the destruction of the monument, but with that they only would have erased the symptom. Dragging the leg, instead, was a form of exorcism. Santa Anna’s mistake was not in the material creation of his piece, the monument. It was in aspects that were immaterial but integrally connected with the work. I am thinking here of three fundamental issues that also concern us as artists. First, it is the choice of the public in whose presence we want to exhibit ourselves and with whom we want to converse. The second is the kind of response or exchange we expect from that public. The third, connected with the preceding two, is the type of relationship we want to establish by means of our work. These are considerations that help us think about how our work will be read. They all somehow circulate through our work and give it a spark of life. These are considerations we have take into account so there is no need for exorcism, so the public doesn’t drag our dead limb across the cobblestones. It is in this context that we should start analyzing what it means to design site-specific pieces for a museum. Working within these parameters is, somewhat, putting the cart before the horse. We predefine a relationship with a public selected not by us but by the museum. We accept the implications of a relationship with that public, one that by means of its space also has already been defined by the museum. Only after those two definitions, public and space, do we try to start the exchange we would have wanted. Normally, the process goes the other way: the artist decides on the quality of the exchange and on the public, and then chooses a space. For this reason, once we engage in site-specific works we are doing something akin to architecture. This is not because of the condition of organizing space. The utilization of a specific space is only an incidental factor; it is a formal condition that coincides with and supports other conditions. I am more interested in the conditions that are supported, because not only are they ideological, but they are connected with the circulation of information. They determine the ethical-political condi202

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tions the artist establishes with the observer, and they define the kind of existence the work will have. The spatial organization is no more than the packaging of that ideology. In the case of site-specific pieces for a museum, the museum delivers an ideology, and the artists have to gift wrap it. The challenge, then, is to see if one can change the ideology through the wrapping. It is interesting that when we talk about the ideology in a work of art we usually refer only to the content. The work is reactionary or progressive according to the political tendencies of the narrative of the message. Trying to make the reasoning more sophisticated, we pass over the techniques and shapes and place ideology in the relations of ownership. The work is reactionary if it ends as private property ornamenting a living room. It is progressive if it nears the common good, something like a mural or a print. Traditionally, the warranty for progressive correctness was given by a combination of categories that arithmetically produced examples like the Mexican murals or the print with a leftist message. The pathetic aspect of this simplistic approach is that with it we abrogate and ignore art’s function as an operation of creation and use of symbols. Santa Anna, in this sense, was infinitely more advanced than this crude schematic notion. He clearly attempted the creation of a symbol, not an object. Like any demagogue with inclinations toward the cult of personality, he tried to redirect a whole culture by the use of parareligious props that were designed after his size and image. He was successful in the creation of a symbol, but it was one different from what he originally had in mind, even if it inhabited the same formal shell he had conceived of. By not defining ourselves clearly as generators of symbols, we allow for the formation of involuntary contradictions (which are generally not exploited after they appear), among which we choose the message and the shapes that will determine the means of presentation. Thus, we start failing on the most superficial level that is used to identify an ideology. That is the case of the politically leftist painting with an anticapitalist message, so common among preceding generations. In them the manifest message was obvious and descriptive. But the means employed—painting—was also both by definition and tradition an instrument to create art merchandise. It promoted a consumer market and passive consumers. Simultaneously, however, the implicit and often explicit aim of the work was to raise the awareness of the observer against oppressive social and economic conditions as they were symbolized by merchandise and passive consumption. What we usually call “public art” seems to address the problems of The Two Versions of Santa Anna’s Leg

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consumerism and to try to solve them. Monument and mural do away with the private property of the work—on that scale it becomes irrelevant who the material owner is—and the work stops being commercial in the conventional sense. But the loss of the commercial potential is not enough to make public art a progressive tool, even if its explicit message refers to enlightened causes that promise a perfect future. Public art, no matter its content, has invariably shared premises with the consumerist pedagogy. The work is as inescapable for the spectator as the teacher is for the student. The same as the traditional professor, the work imparts knowledge: that is, it forces knowing instead of generating knowledge. Enlightened statements are not necessarily enlightening. The classroom becomes a prison, and forced circulation around public art acts like one too. The teacher’s authority is parallel to the scale of the work, and both affirm themselves against the critical potential of the audience. Therefore, we have here a forced and indoctrinating dialogue. Returning to Santa Anna, the public then submits or reacts, disinterring the leg. Santa Anna’s error was not that he didn’t predict the dragging of his leg. It was that he believed that he would be able to create a symbol capable of indoctrinating people without their acquiescence and participation. Under different circumstances, that same public could have asked for that same monument to celebrate his leg. History is full of examples of human fragments invested with that power. Tongues and other body parts are found in sanctified vitrines, and former Argentine dictator Juan Domingo Perón’s hands were detached from his body many years ago with the consequence that many people today still pray for their return. The pedagogical analogy is important because it illuminates a discussion that usually remains entangled in objects. Works of art are the trees that don’t allow us to see the forest of ideology. Instead, education in the broadest sense is clearly an ideological transmission or exchange, which more openly reveals the power play beyond the appearances of the messages. A good teacher demystifies that power play instead of using it to hide and shares the attribution of power to foster exchanges with the student. The work of art that interests me does the same thing: it shares the attributed power with the spectator to foster a response and creative activities. It is of no interest to me when the work of art acts as a façade, hiding the artist and reducing the spectator to the role of a passive receiver of messages. In the same vein, I believe in the open classroom, where the student stays because of his or her interest and not because of obligation. 204

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Consequently, I also believe in work that allows the viewer to see it or to ignore it, to submit or not submit to information. Far beyond postmodernism, in art we are in a post–Santa Anna period. With Santa Anna, as with Duchamp, the object was just that, with and without symbolic signification. Today we confront information much more directly and crudely. In earlier times, customs were concerned with the contraband of very concrete properties: watches, radios, cigarettes. Today customs are concerned with diffused properties: contraband of drugs, money, and commercial secrets. Earlier, the onion was a concrete object. Today it is a series of concentric shells that, when peeled too much, reveal the void. As a metaphor for art, it forces the artist to determine precisely which shell is to communicate its particular onionness. One layer too much or too little produces misunderstandings and, worse, illiteracies due to a change in codes. Increasingly, control is about information rather than things, and the possession of copyright and patent is more important than the possession of the object. Objects are becoming anachronistic instruments to filter information. An installation in a museum is somewhere between a public monument and the ephemeral organization of information. The viewer doesn’t have to go to the museum, and once there he or she assumes the personal risk and responsibility of seeing art. The pressure is cultural and ideological, not physical, and that is why museums are often compared to churches. Both buildings sanctify ideas and objects, but, theoretically speaking, there is no obligation to pray to them. Both buildings serve as tools for fragmentation, contradicting their own premises. If the ritualizing is based on the belief in a god, that belief should govern all our ideas and actions and should not be limited to occasional praying. Our whole life, not just a fragment of time used in a fragment of space, should be the homage. If the ritualizing is based on a creative dialogue, that creativity should not be limited to the reading of some objects in a particular place, but should be a continual emission and reading, a permanent dialogue and exchange. In this regard, the museum is an unfocused institution that, instead of understanding itself as an administrator of information, still perceives itself as a repository of fetishes. Today’s museum should be a collector of copyrights rather than objects. The idea is so clear to me that I started its copyright process. It has been over thirty years now that I have collected museums for my curriculum vitae. I give or sell to them an object and in exchange I acquire the right to use and exploit their institutional name. The Two Versions of Santa Anna’s Leg

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Returning to the continuous prayer or the permanent creative dialogue, this way of reasoning obviously takes us to the conception of an ideal society or an unrealizable utopia. The traditional church and museum, then, are both places inhabited by a fragment of realized utopia. It is strange that utopia is always imagined as a static place, a perfect place, and therefore an extremely boring one. I have always been intrigued by this, because, ultimately, it is something that denies itself. I am interested in a utopia, but not a boring one. Therefore, utopia can’t be perfect, and, if it’s not perfect, it can’t be utopia. I like to define utopia as a process through which one seeks perfection, where perfection, like a mirage, constantly grows distant at the same speed one believes oneself to be nearing it. Something similar to the revolution in the revolution, to use language from the sixties. The preceding suggests distrust of the project of doing something for a museum. However, in our society it would be absurd to refuse the invitation. The refusal would be infantile misanthropy, equivalent to deciding not to talk to people and to lock myself in a silent monologue. Museums in our society give artists the power to attack power. Museums are a fundamental instrument within the limited strategies available to us. All the projects I prepared for my participation in this exhibition come from a common ideology that is not only mine, but which I also found in the thoughts of Simón Rodríguez.1 Among them there is, however, one of the interventions that is my favorite. It is the one with the flyers quoting a text by Rodríguez that says: “To deal with things is the first part of education, and to deal with those who have them is the second.” One and a half centuries after it was written, this continues to be the most concise definition of education I have been able to find, even though it doesn’t mention copyright. By putting the stacks of flyers in the rooms exhibiting the works of the collection I am trying to appropriate all the pieces and include them in the flow of dialogues, mine and Simón Rodríguez’, with the public. We are, then, together with the public, seeking to flee fetishism and to enter a dialogue within the ideological context that is able to explain things without obscurantism. We are looking for perfection and therefore immediately entering a state of utopia. It is an intervention in the museum, but one that makes the objects relative and that releases us from the museum and frees us. Of course I am dreaming. I have no doubt that upon leaving the museum I will find the flyers littering the street. Stepped on, the papers will disappear, eroded against the cobblestones as pure information. I am satisfied with the idea that, just as with Santa Anna’s leg, they will express a 206

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quota of free will, as much my own as that of the spectator. And if there is still a trace fetishism among the visiting public, it will be expressed only by those few who choose to keep one of the flyers as a souvenir.

Note 1. Simón Rodríguez (1769–1853) was the teacher of Simón Bolívar and wrote profusely about teaching and about politics.

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Chapter 25

The Biennial of Utopias (1999)

It is not an accident that in 1896 the Olympic Games were revived and shared the Biennial’s spirit a year after the first Biennial of Venice had taken place. Both expressed the assertion of the nation-state model and competitiveness. The prime achievements translated into the medalsper-country ratio, and the games—art or sport—became the unbloody arena for both hot and cold wars. Both the biennial art exhibition model and the Olympic Games have survived a hundred years of apparent evolution from modernism to postmodernism, from colonialism to postcolonialism, from nationalism to globalism, with minimal changes of format. There are some ravages caused by time, however. The Olympic Games finally acknowledged that sports are business and consequently accepted professionals. Meanwhile, the Venice Biennial has been accompanied by eulogies for the past thirty years, each Biennial postulated as the last one because of its decaying quality. Forced to identify a challenge to this history, one has to pick the Biennial of Havana, the first version of which opened in 1984. It was a biennial created to answer the dissatisfaction with the art monopoly held by the economic centers of the world, and the even deeper dissatisfaction about placement on a periphery designed by those centers. The Biennial tried to cope, within the art field, with the needs of the less-powerful pole in a bipolar world. Bipolarity was expressed mostly ideologically as a Right-Left division, but in fact it was more of an empire-colony, developed-developing, independence-dependency, richpoor, center-periphery, North-South partition of the world. It is interesting that by the time the Biennial of Havana was created, this bipolar mode was starting to formally wane thanks to the blurring action of transnational economies and globalization. While the root of the evils probably still can be detected and explained in a bipolar fashion—particularly the rich-poor opposition—most other forms started to escape the simple design of binary opposition. Imported Coca-Cola is clearly an imperialist symbol. Coca-Cola bottled in a local bottling 208

facility, while creating some jobs, is nothing more than an imperialist company’s money-saving device. But Coca-Cola being made locally starts messing up the notions about national pride. Is that Coke our Coke or their Coke? Following the evolution of the Biennial through its six versions, it becomes clear that the process tried to adapt an old model to a new and changing reality, without really developing a new model.1 This may account for a certain loss of steam in what had started as a revolutionary change in the use of international exhibitions. The Biennial was extremely successful, and it is only thanks to hindsight that it can be said to have had built-in flaws that, eventually, may have brought it to stagnation. The cultural impacts the Biennial of Havana had—and to some extent still has—makes it deserving of both a history and a search for the reasons for its loss of energy. After the death of Wifredo Lam in 1982, and by the initiative of Fidel Castro, the Cuban government decided to create both a Center for the Arts in his honor and a biennial exhibition which was to be organized by that center. The center was to be dedicated to the research and promotion of the contemporary art of the Third World. The choice of Lam’s name for this enterprise, beyond the fact of his international fame and his unflagging support for the Cuban Revolution, was no accident. Lam seemed to be the perfect paradigm: he combined ethnicities and cultures like few others. Chinese and black, santero and Christian, Cuban and European in his painting, he was a walking salad that embodied many of the mixtures the center intended to address. Like many of the ideas of the Cuban government, these projects seemed to border on delirium, and, like many as well, they were nevertheless successful. Fifteen years later it is clear that any cultural history about Latin America in the twentieth century will have to record these events. Overcoming internal economic problems and external political obstacles, both the center and the Biennial succeeded in establishing themselves as a Latin American and Third World artistic clearinghouse. The center pursued its mission of research, exhibitions, and publications and, at a certain point, even contemplated the possibility of opening offices in other countries, including one in New York. The Biennial, in particular, set the tone for subsequent events organized in Turkey, South Africa, and Korea, among others, and broke the monopoly on international art events until then held by Venice, São Paulo, Kassel, and, somewhat later, Sydney. In fact, one may trace the recent appointment of Okwui Enwezor to the directorship of Documenta XI to the path opened by Havana. Periodicity in art exhibits is nothing new. The need for cyclical reprises The Biennial of Utopias

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is a consequence of a mixture of artists being trained for competition and the assumption that there are trends to be identified. Most of these regular events around the world owe their existence to the august model of the annual French salon. Salons are still popular in Latin America, where they have a much more local focus than the French ever had, and are even more geared for competition. There is, of course, the honor of acceptance and then the honor of the prize. The grand prize winner is the national grand artist, at least for one year. History may often forget the name soon after, and the locality of the event precludes any possible entry into the annals of the mainstream. Sometimes, as in Colombia, the institution multiplies and generates regional salons that, preceding the national one, serve as a filter for it. Salons always come associated with controversy. One may have discrepancies with hierarchies, taste of juries, social function, and ideological problems with the competitiveness of art. But it should be recognized that the institution serves well in terms of hyping the arts, eliciting good press coverage, and raising the desirability of art making. In the U.S. the salon has taken different shapes, from juried competitions to that supersalon called the Whitney Biennial. And, invariably, salons elicit a hate-love reaction from the artists. Traditionally, the reaction of those rejected is not to boycott the event forever, but to create yet another one, the Salon des Refusees. I have never participated in a salon myself, and in 1963, when two extremely conservative artists were arbitrarily appointed to a jury in Uruguay, I helped occupy the premises in protest. The sit-in lasted three months, and the salon was suspended for nearly two decades. At least our operation succeeded in generating both an artists’ and a writers’ union. For a while, since 1893, when it was decided to celebrate the marriage of Umberto the First and Margarita of Savoy with an international biennial exhibit (the first one took place in 1895), Venice has served as the paradigm for the salon format with international ambitions. It never became clear why it was to be biennial. Worse, the institution never was able to solve the tensions between national politics and the international quality it aspired to. The biennial rhythm itself acquired a certain sanctity, to the point that the word “biennial” became a qualitative term, often disconnected from the original time concept. Many events of this kind were organized only once and used the word for the sake of pomposity. There was a “Sports Biennial” trying to encourage artists to illustrate sports issues that happened only once, organized during and by the military dictatorship in Uruguay. The Cuban Biennial went into an occasional three210

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year rhythm: 1986 to 1989, 1991 to 1994 to 1997), and others had belated resurrections after deaths that were presumed if not announced, like the Biennial of Medellín, in Colombia. There are also triennials and quadrennials, but they are much less popular and reserved for design and printmaking. Documenta, mercifully, leaves out the time definition and uses spans that oscillate between four and five years. So, “biennial” came to be mostly a euphemism for international scope and ambitions of quality, while “salon” was reserved for national prominence. But one grew out of the other, and the biennial was to be the “salon of salons,” a place dignified enough that nations could compete. The history of this development would not be complete without mentioning the recent addition of a new word to the art-exhibits repertoire. The word is “fair,” as in art fair, and signifies that things are primarily for sale, though of course, this occurs within extraordinary criteria of quality. This is not to imply that salons and biennials don’t sell the work. It is that they don’t do it blatantly. They usually take a lower percentage than a gallery, and their primary function is to show the work. The fair, on the other hand, does away with any intermediate stages between the galleries and the public. Commerce is shown as commerce, but with a seal of quality. Art fairs are now all over the place (Miami, Bogotá, Caracas, Guadalajara for a while, Buenos Aires, and the ARCO fair in Madrid work specifically to compete for the Latin American market), but the grand dame is still the one in Basel, which, since 1971, has served as a model for the others.2 The high-quality art fair, however mythical the quality may be, became crucial for the higher-class dealers—it allowed them to pursue business without losing the gatekeeping image. One Venice Biennial year (1972), I saw Leo Castelli walking across the Piazza San Marco. He was surrounded by a circle of de facto bodyguards that made him totally inaccessible to either sycophantic or scheming artists. I saw him again two days later at the Basel art fair. This time he was sitting at the counter of his booth waiting for business like any other shopkeeper. There is a reason for delving into these three aspects of periodic art events—salon, biennial, art fair. All three often coexist in different degrees, and all of them cast a reflection, at one time or another, on the Biennial of Havana. The convergence was not necessarily planned, but it happened. Although the Havana Biennial was ostensibly created as an homage to Wifredo Lam, it had a political mission. The purpose was to make Cuba once again a Latin American cultural center of the magnitude it had been during the decade of the 1960s. During the first decade of the The Biennial of Utopias

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Revolution, Cuba had become a natural magnet for the Latin American Left. One institution in particular, Casa de las Américas, had acquired a status comparable to a ministry of Latin American cultural affairs. Prizes given by the Casa for literature, drama, and printmaking were among the most coveted for their intellectual prestige. The institution also amassed a remarkable collection of Latin American art of that decade, a particularly fertile decade for the continent. During subsequent decades, Casa de las Américas’ continental influence remained in literature, but somewhat waned in the arts. The Centro Wifredo Lam was to expand the Casa’s function into the Third World (in the original political sense of the term) and to focus on the visual arts. The function of the First Biennial was therefore to put Havana back on the map. One could say that the Biennial tried to accomplish for Cuba what Documenta had done for Germany since the end of the Second World War.3 The planning sessions for the Biennial started in 1983, about a year before the opening. They were conducted in the form of open team meetings. I happened to be in Havana at the time and was invited to one of the meetings involving members of the Ministry of Culture, Casa de las Américas, and the potential staff of the Centro Lam, which was in the process of being created.4 I recall Lesbia Vent Dumois from the Casa, Beatriz Aulet from the ministry, and Gerardo Mosquera, then the most distinguished art critic in Cuba. I was called in because I happened to be in the next room hanging an exhibit. Asked my opinions, I was rather dismissive of what I perceived to be a hurried, amateurish, and delirious project. I should have known better. My own exhibit was still on the floor with unpainted walls the day before the opening, but perfectly hung when the first people arrived next evening. And I was subsequently invited to come to the Biennial so that I could eat my words. The Biennial was by no means perfect, but it was impressive. Twentytwo hundred works by 835 artists gave an accurate visual profile of Latin American culture, an experience that was more important than just seeing a few choice art pearls. There were not too many of those. Thanks to the U.S. blockade and some of the still-operating dictatorships, the delivery of work to Cuba was particularly difficult, and required smuggling strategies through third-party countries. Also, curatorial policies varied. In one country a “curator” charged a fee. In another, participation was open to “friends and family.” Those problems, increasingly corrected in subsequent versions of the Biennial, determined that quantity made up 212

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for the quality. The Biennial became a sociological and anthropological event much more than a hedonistically delectable spectacle. As is customary in those events, the “locals” had the best and biggest space and provided the biggest fireworks. Thus, the Cuban artists shone, and in that sense the Biennial was a salon. What was more remarkable, however, was that the Cubans would have stood out the same even if the other countries had had easy and full access. Artists like José Bedia, Flavio Garciandía, Ricardo Rodríguez Brey, Juan Francisco Elso Padilla, Leandro Soto, Arturo Cuenca, Gustavo Acosta, Tomás Sánchez, Rubén Torres Llorca, Gory, and Tonel, all internationally known today, left their first mark on outside visitors in this biennial. The Cuban representation was larger and more ecumenical than the artists just mentioned. It was clear that dogma had no room here and that Cuban art was blooming. This openness was the image that probably lingered the most after one left the Biennial. It should be noted, however, that from the very beginning, the organizers made a point of not showing more Cuban artists than artists from other countries. It was crucial for the success of the Biennial to keep a clearly expressed internationalist image and to leave out any trace of chauvinist contamination. In spite of its Third World intentions, the first Biennial was limited to Latin America. This was for logistical reasons, especially the short planning time. Nevertheless, the announcements about future expansion to include Asia and Africa were interpreted as boasting. An enormous international symposium about Wifredo Lam and several important one-person exhibits surrounding the Biennial (Matta and Toledo, among others) all seemed to point to the fact that this was a one-shot deal to establish Cuba in the forefront of Latin American visual art. It also reflected a wish to lead Latin American countries in the task of defining a cultural identity independent from the U.S. Two and half years later, thus still keeping the biennial commitment, the second Biennial of Havana opened, and, as promised in its charter, it included Asia and Africa. The Centro Lam now existed in reality, though still without its own building. Llilian Llanes was its director and therefore also the director of the Biennial. Mosquera was the curator and also a part of the center. Llanes and Mosquera together constituted what probably was the most energy-laden team in the history of Latin American art. This time there were twenty-five hundred pieces by seven hundred artists from sixty countries. The possible readjustments drawn from the first Biennial experience (better choice of local curators, more rigorous selections of more work by The Biennial of Utopias

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fewer artists, etc.) got lost in the context of the broadening of directions and the appearance of new problems. As in the first Biennial, prizes were given by an international jury. The awarding of prizes posed an ideological contradiction. A capitalist competitive structure was inserted within a self-proclaimed socialist society. Prizes obscured the broader collective cultural signification of the Biennial of Havana by underlining the celebration of some individuals over others. That contradiction became more blatant and awkward in this second version because of the inclusion of popular crafts. At this point I should make clear that I was a member of that second jury.5 During the deliberations it became obvious to the jury that, however diversified our perceptions, ideologies, and definitions of art, we still were very much inhabitants of the mainstream. It was also clear that many objects in the show, like certain masks which had been sent from Cambodia, had definitely not been produced for competition in a Western context. To us they actually looked like airport trinkets and lacked artistic merit. Were we supposed to punish them for that? Were we qualified to punish them? Our Third World unity (a very political one, still based on the 1955 Conference of Bandung) sounded nice but turned out to be a myth. We were still foreigners in relation to each other, and we had to defer to the authority of whichever colleague was closer to the topic being discussed. An artist from Mali, Dagnoko Nene Thiam, nearly didn’t get his award. Although we had voted unanimously for the work, none of us had memorized his name. Instead, we had written somebody else into the minutes. While walking out of the exhibition rooms, one of us picked up a label from the floor, lying near the piece, and noticed that it had the name of the true author. In our mutual politeness we were also careful not to push for our own countries. The Argentine artist Antonio Seguí, who arrived two days late, accused us of ignoring an Uruguayan artist who then, indeed (and with my abstention), received an award. Nevertheless, through an unexplainable fluke, all the countries represented in the jury ended up getting awards. We only noticed the embarrassing fact once we were accused of favoritism. There was only one case of “horse trading.” It took place with the work “Por América,” an idiosyncratic rendition of Martí by Elso Padilla. It was the most memorable piece of that Biennial and by now is a classic icon of the Latin American art of the century and housed in the Hirshhorn Collection. The work elicited paranoia among our Cuban colleagues. They feared that the public might react bitterly to the approval of what could be interpreted as tampering with a “sacred” image. Thus, instead of one 214

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of the ten main prizes, we had to settle for an honorable mention. We of course exacted some concessions for this, but I won’t go into details. The conundrums the jury had to face were important enough to lead us to the inclusion of a strong recommendation to abolish prizes altogether in our communiqué, a recommendation that fortunately has been heeded until today. While the First Biennial of Havana was a big success in terms of the public—175,000 people came during its six weeks—this second one was successful in going to the people. An opening-night concert with Mercedes Sosa, Chico Buarque, and Pablo Milanés drew forty thousand people. Forty-five exhibits accompanied what was considered the Bi­ennial show and were distributed all over Havana and the suburbs. Again, many symposia were held. Telarte, an art-textile project sponsored by the Ministry of Culture, printed twenty thousand meters of fabric bearing the (Lam-inspired) logo of the Biennial. The symbol could therefore be seen on flags, dresses, jackets, and bags. Havana had been taken over. There were even rumors of a Second Biennial cocktail that presumably was made with rum, which I never tasted. But what seemed something of an extravaganza was also a statement about the policies of the Biennial. It was to emphasize the use of the city. It was not to be an exhibit but “a mosaic of exhibitions, and its mission was to stress that the visuality of the Third World also included a visuality of the street.”6 It therefore was not to be just an exhibition, it was to be a place of meeting and the exchange of ideas. To this effect, beyond the exhibits, the spectacle, and the symposia which generated scholarly books,7 there were many workshops run by artists. Among them were one led by Julio Le Parc on participatory sculpture, and one by Marta Palau on textiles.8 Compared to the first Biennial of Havana, the flow of foreign public increased markedly (a process which continued geometrically during many Biennials following). A group of U.S. artists led by Rudolf Baranik had organized a gift exhibit (“Over the Blockade”) that, among other things, included works by Claes Oldenburg, Sol Lewitt, Hans Haacke, Joseph Kosuth, Leon Golub, Keith Haring, and Carl Andre.9 And, though this time there was more official support from the different countries and more space for each artist, the Cuban artists again stole the limelight. The salon function continued. Many of the artists were repeats from the First Biennial of Havana but with more polished work, and a second generation (including Consuelo Castañeda, Humberto Castro, and José Franco) made a powerful entrance.10 The Second Biennial of The Biennial of Utopias

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Havana also signaled the importance for the younger Cuban artists of both the installation format and appropriationism. These features, which prompted some foreign visitors to the quick and superficial labeling of Cuban art as postmodernist, also generated serious elucidations of postmodernism and the periphery. Due to its scope and ambition, the Second Biennial of Havana did not manage rigorous selection processes either. During the early Biennials I felt like I do when visiting the home of a beloved relative. There are all kinds of things on the wall, they mostly reveal the personality of the owner rather than tell much about individual artists, and their quality or lack of it doesn’t affect the family relationship. But the organization of the First and Second Biennials of Havana helped to create the contacts around the world that then served to build the foundation for the ones that followed, in which more rigor was applied. And this second Biennial placed Cuba as an active cultural player not just in the arts of the continent, but also in a global context. It thus complemented the image that Cuba had wanted and had already developed with its political and military relations with Angola. The Third World approach of the Centro Wifredo Lam did not exclude a focus on Cuban art itself as well. In 1987, the center launched an in-depth study of the arts in the country. It covered not only the “fine arts,” but also things like religious representations and comics. The study ended on a critical note, referring to the disorganization of support institutions and the concession to market conditions in the visual arts, the conservatism prevailing in Cuban sculpture, the lack of recognition for those artists producing comics, the indiscriminate taste of the public in relation to ceramics, and the general ignorance of aesthetic and ethnographic values applied to religious representations, in particular within the Afro-Cuban tradition. The report included recommendations for improvements in all these areas. The center also started sponsoring exhibits by Cuban artists and prepared dossiers which reproduced complete collections of press clippings concerning their work. These were available to the press during the Biennial and were offered in exchange for publications from foreign institutions. By the time the Third Biennial of Havana took place, things had become less easy. The economy had started to suffer and politics had hardened. This time it had taken three years to get organized, and a reduction, partly due to logistical problems, led to a much more rigorous exhibition (43 countries, 190 artists, and 684 works). The Centro Lam had received a temporary home, and a lot had been learned from the previous two 216

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events. The curatorial work was done primarily by the staff of the center (led by Llanes, Mosquera, and Nelson Herrera Ysla—a curator for the center). The identification of qualified advisors in each of the participating countries added a lot of serious research, and the whims of outside “help” were drastically reduced. A new experiment was introduced this time. It was the use of a topic that arched over the whole event, in this case, “tradition and contemporaneity.” The title not only gave more curatorial cohesion, but served as a tool to identify possible commonalities (however vague) among the messy bunch that composed the “Third World.” The “main” exhibit was further reduced in importance to the benefit of parallel shows, workshops, and discussions. But the budget had been reduced by 50 percent, with only a bare minimum left to convert into hard currency. The generous guestswith-all-expenses-paid program was abolished, and the whole staff, including the cleaning lady, was brought down from the more than fifty who had worked for the preceding Biennial to fourteen. That year the comparison at hand was no longer how Havana rated against Venice and São Paulo; by now the Biennial had been accepted as an established fact. This time the reference was the French exhibit “Les Magiciens de la Terre.” But while the “Magiciens” exhibition was about “otherness” and the paternalism implicit in the term, the Havana Biennial was about something that could be called “itness.” With the absence of prizes, Havana was finally free to mix popular arts and “spontaneous” art—the term used in Cuba in place of naïve or outsider art—with “high art,” without any artifice or smugness. In that sense, the Third Biennial of Havana was probably the most exciting version of them all. However, the impact of the salon function this time was diminished in relation to the preceding ones. The reason for the diminished salon wasn’t because of a weaker Cuban art, but because of a fragmented display. The salon space was dispersed all over the place. José Bedia had a one-person exhibit, probably his best ever, in one of the old fortresses of Havana, the Castillo de la Fuerza. Good work by Garciandía, Marta María Pérez, Alejandro Aguilera, Rubén Torres Llorca, and Ricardo Rodríguez Brey were in the main exhibit. And, for the uninitiated, new and stunning talent like Carlos Cárdenas, Ciro Quintana, Glexis Novoa, and Lázaro Saavedra was presented as well. The problem was that the latter were not included in the so-called essay exhibition with the title of “Three Worlds.” Instead, they were all included in a historical show called “Tradition of Humor in Cuba.” The The Biennial of Utopias

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work by these new artists was humorous, but more than that, it was also politically acerbic. By including them in the humor show, the politics were defused and the work was decontextualized. Thus, the third generation of Cuban artists in the decade of the 1980s (artists born in the early 1960s) appeared as and in a sideshow. This was particularly notable because this generation includes a large number of constructively critical artists who are much less interested in the research of formal devices than their immediate predecessors were. Instead, they want to revitalize and deconstruct the worn slogans of the Revolution. The decision to somewhat downgrade this group did not happen in a vacuum, but was the effect of a relatively bureaucratic and ideological hardening. The atmosphere caused some incidents that involved censorship. Marcia Leiseca, vice-minister of culture in charge of the visual arts and one of the main architects of the flourishing of the arts during the decade, had been fired from her job. She had failed to remove work that was politically offensive and personally insulting from an exhibition two months earlier, and she was nowhere to be seen during that Biennial.11 This had not been an isolated event, but one more in a string of incidents. Censorship and suggested self-censorship had started with an exhibition by the painter Tomás Esson in January of 1988. The artist himself closed the exhibition in protest of demands made to remove some pieces considered offensive.12 The use of the Castillo de la Fuerza as a new exhibition space was the Ministry of Culture’s soothing response to the dissatisfaction of the artists with the new ministerial policies. It was ironic that this then became the place for an escalation of censorship. The effects of the hardening affected other influential intellectuals as well.13 At the time, Gerardo Mosquera became aware of pressures concerning some essays he wanted to have published. As a critic who stood by this generation of artists, he felt that his position was becoming too difficult and unproductive, and he decided to resign from his posts to become a freelance writer. Thus, the Third Biennial of Havana became his last. The knowledge of the preceding events and the “segregation” of the younger artists dampened the celebratory mood in the Biennial, and many visitors feared that the so-called Cuban Renaissance was in danger. Nevertheless, overcoming these shadows, this third version of the Biennial seemed to have completely finished with the initiation rites. It also kept the public-spectacle component by organizing an enormous fashion show with the fabrics printed by Telarte. The event took place in conjunction with an exhibition of the designs in the Centro de Desarrollo de 218

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las Artes Visuales. With blaring music and thousands of spectators, the models walked over an enormous bridge spanning the plaza in front of the building that held the show. The Fourth Biennial of Havana took place three years later, in 1991, in a climate of deep economic crisis. The countries of the former Soviet Union and its bloc had stopped honoring contracts—particularly fuel deliveries and parts—which for the purposes of the Biennial were serious, since they affected public transportation. The dire situation prompted Cubans to joke that, after having won freedom from Spain and the U.S., they had now won their independence from the Soviet Union. The general atmosphere was, however, one of great depression. Cuba was going through what Castro called a “special period,” and it was not exactly an ideal moment for a mega art event. The theme this time was “A Challenge to Colonization,” chosen in anticipation of the quincentenary of the trip Columbus took to our hemisphere. Though maintaining the Third World approach, for budget reasons the scale tipped back toward Latin America. There were twenty Latin American countries and twenty from all the other continents together. There were 180 artists (10 fewer than three years earlier), but they were better represented than ever (eleven hundred pieces, nearly twice as many as before). The parallel exhibition format (forty of them) was maintained and so were workshops and symposia. It seemed the Biennial had matured and reached a high point in quality, a self-assuredness drawn from a serious review of the preceding ones. The process showed in both the tone and length of the introductions written by Llilian Llanes and Nelson Herrera Ysla in the name of the Biennial. In his piece, Herrera Ysla wrote that, if it were to be insisted “that we are the Other, so be it: they will have to struggle for many years to understand something that is as familiar to us as the smell of guayaba.”14 The space of the Biennial was increased, taking over the fortress of La Cabaña, transformed into stunning exhibition rooms. Thanks to the lack of public transportation (down to 50 percent of the norm already, and expected to drop to 25 percent shortly after), the broader base of the Cuban public was excluded from these sites. Meanwhile, the foreign public kept increasing, creating a previously unknown feeling of alienation and separation between the Biennial and the Cuban people. A new phenomenon was taking place as well: for this occasion, many of the foreign artists in the Biennial personally came to Havana. One of the aims of the Biennial of Havana had always been to become a sort of “creativity lab” as much—if not more—as a place for exhibitions. The Biennial of Utopias

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Therefore, the presence of the foreign artists seemed to fulfill this dream. But what really happened was something else. A great majority of the visiting artists came loaded with promotional literature, slides, and calling cards. They were more preoccupied with promoting their careers among the art tourists than with exchanging experiences with other artists. Thus, the art fair component started to enter the Biennial of Havana in this fourth version. Meanwhile, the salon quality for the Cuban artists seemed even more degraded than in the previous Biennial. Many of the artists who had defined the exceptional Cuban decade of the 1980s were not living in Cuba anymore. They either were absent from the exhibit or appeared in oneperson or satellite shows. Also, one of the powerful trademarks of Cuban art, the installation, had spread into the work shown by many other countries, and chairs and light bulbs seemed to be the new icons of the year. The real new Cuban talent was to be seen in separate shows at ISA (the Instituto Superior de Arte), Cuba’s renowned graduate school, and in some one-person exhibitions. During all the Biennials, the school had been the showcase for the newest Cuban talent, embodied in its student body. There one could see a preview of the artists to be exhibited in the next Biennial following, and the ISA show was always a refreshing extension and counterpart to the Biennial’s Cuban representation. This time, ISA introduced Fernando Rodríguez and his fictional associate, the blind Francisco de la Cal. The work, celebrating heroic moments of the Revolution, was “dictated” to Rodríguez by de la Cal. Rodríguez then executed it in both tongue-incheek and extremely sophisticated naïve fashion. Kcho (Alexis Leiva), at the time twenty-one years old, had his first gallery show with satirical and critical allusions to Cuba via the use of the image of the map. Another exhibition, parallel with the Biennial, that raised expectations, by Lázaro Saavedra, did not take place. Poking fun at a mercenary trend that he perceived among Cuban artists, Saavedra had designed a display of documents about his own achievements. His display was organized to lead to a final piece, a letter in which he would express his willingness to accept any grants or paid foreign travel offered to him. The director of the gallery, who disagreed with the tenor of the show, decided to take the exhibit down before it opened. Saavedra came to the opening, didn’t like the empty walls, and punched the gallery director. The incident was later referred to as “the punch of his generation,” and the closing of Saavedra’s exhibit was seen as the consequence of censorship.15 And yet, Kcho’s exhibit, whose satire of national symbols was 220

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a traditionally much more unacceptable action, did not encounter any problems, thus impeding easy generalizations. The situation of ideological hardening that had started three years earlier was still an unresolved issue among the bureaucrats themselves, and there was no clear policy to be followed.16 The problems did, however, cast a pall on the Biennial and led to meetings between visitors and the minister of culture to express their concerns. The Fifth Biennial of Havana, by now a totally unexpected event, since Cuba was at the bottom of its worst economic crisis ever, took place three years later, in 1994. The time passed had brought an unbelievable deterioration. The streets were crowded with beggars, and friends seemed to have lost a good third of their weight. Ghostly and ghastly, Havana seemed to have become a dangerous place. Acutely aware that our activities were completely alien, we felt guilty about living well. The need to use tourist taxis and the perception that the new economic ruling class was formed by the drivers and waiters we were giving tips to, increased this alienation even more.17 False rumors that the German chocolatier and collector Peter Ludwig was financing the Biennial made the atmosphere of separation even greater. Ludwig had bought most of the work of a Cuban exhibition in the Kunsthalle of Düsseldorf in 1990 at extremely low prices. This being perceived as a good deed, he was now in Havana to receive an honorary degree from the university. The Biennial was also scheduled to travel to the Ludwig Forum in Aachen.18 Of the 171 artists (from 41 countries), 104 had come to Havana to hang their work. Lack of transportation and general depression diminished the interaction with Cuban artists, defeating what was probably the most important function of the Biennial. Added to the artists, there were more than 400 foreign visitors from the international art establishment. Most Cuban artists, with their commercial innocence lost and following the example of the foreign artists, now were also prepared for any eventuality with slides and calling cards. The art fair component seemed to have overridden the salon. It was understandable, but having seen all of the bienales until that moment, it was also extremely sad. Somehow the Biennial had triumphed in terms of its acceptance by the mainstream. It was accepted as an institution, and Cuban art had become a feasible currency in the international market. The Biennial had also triumphed inasmuch as it was seen as the periphery’s alternative to the big mainstream biennials. But the cultural thrust, as opposed to any commercial thrust, was gone. Even the famed ISA exhibit showed the strain. “Appropriationism,” which The Biennial of Utopias

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in earlier generations had been a form of recycling information, had now become a trend. The newest artists, with diminished freshness, quoted the artists from the Western mainstream as much as they did Cuban establishment artists. By mainstream standards, the Fifth Biennial of Havana was probably the best. The “quality” level of the work exhibited was the highest. The catalogue, donated by the administration of Gran Canaria in the Canary Islands and by its Centro Atlántico de Arte Moderno, was the first one ever with color reproductions and slick design. The salon quality was now seamlessly merged into the bigger picture, with the parallel exhibits more balanced than ever. Exceptional work by Rodríguez Brey, Tonel, Ponjuán and Rodríguez, Kcho, and Tania Bruguera, among others, stood strongly among very powerful contributions by artists from other countries. In that sense everything was at its best. It was a victory by the Biennial of Havana, but the question remained of how pyrrhic it really was. During one of the panel discussions, U.S. dealer Alex Rosenberg declared that the business of art could thrive only through the acquisition of today’s avant-garde work, particularly that which at present had low prices and which would provide the basis for future valuable collections. Unwittingly, he thus defined the function that big art events on the periphery fulfill for the mainstream. Implicitly, he also allowed the drawing of the conclusion that attacking the art market was equivalent to attacking the artist. With that he pinpointed one of the irreconcilable contradictions of the Biennial of Havana at a time when the minister of culture was organizing cocktails for the visiting gallery owners in the hope of promoting commerce. During the Forum of São Paulo in 1995—an international meeting about the state of the earth—Abel Prieto (head of the Cuban Writers and Artists Union) was questioned about Cuba’s new strategy in making concessions not just to capitalism, but to neoliberalism as well.19 His answer was: “We are going in the opposite direction of the classic lines of neoliberalism: The Cuban state becomes a partner of foreign capital, but it does so with the aim of generating and redistributing the profits under socialist principles. We appeal to certain capitalist tools to survive, but we don’t take away the state’s ability to act on economic processes.”20 In conjunction with the subtext of Rosenberg’s statement, the question arises of whether it is possible to utilize corruption without becoming corrupt. The Fifth Biennial of Havana had some panel discussions, but the emphasis this time was on none of these issues, but only on the Biennial itself as an institution. Thus it had become a reified object. One could still say 222

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that the Biennial of Havana had placed itself one short step before commodification. Even the use of the topic was problematic this time. It was not one theme but a collection of subject matters that, while evocative on their own, ultimately became meaningless, since much of the work fit well into any of the sections.21 Over its thirteen years of existence, more by coincidence than by design, the Biennial of Havana has served as an indicator of Cuba’s “state of mind,” much more so than similar events do in other countries. In other places, political changes produce shifts in the content and form of the artworks favored. In Cuba, the fluctuations have not had an effect on these—the aesthetic openness has been continual and has striven for a fair representation of the present. Instead, things have taken place on the more subtle level of the design and effect of the overall spectacle. The Biennial of Havana has gone from leadership of Latin America to a form of an artistic Ospaaal (Organization of Solidarity with the People of Asia, Africa & Latin America), to then become an alternative independent forum, and finally to become a provider to the international market. The Sixth Biennial of Havana took, again and justifiably, three years to be opened. This time, the guiding topic was “The Individual and His Memory,” with the intention of giving expression to those “who appeal to the registers of their memory as a form of hindering the destruction of their human and social identity,” “those who portray the process of loss of identity,” those “who look at their roots rescuing their history, gathering the historical memory which in the Third World is the memory of unresolved conflicts,” and those “who appeal to their individuality, to the communication of their human feelings not to lose their identity.”22 It is clear that, after the previous five Biennials, all dealing with the general topics of imperialism, colonialism, and periphery, a theoretical focus on the individual was needed and due. Consistent with the past, the context of that focus remained a combative one. However, one cannot help drawing a correlation between this new focus and Cuba’s new strategy of juggling with capitalist resources and methods. The artist was definitely accepted as an individual producer, and the suspicion was that some of the edge is being lost, and that the Biennial had become a biennial (no matter the three-year rhythm). Participants included 177 artists from forty-four countries, with an even bigger attendance by international specialists and a further separation from the average Cuban citizen (the National Museum, in the center of the city, this time was closed for renovations) due to the poor or nonexistent public transportation. In many ways, the Sixth Biennial of The Biennial of Utopias

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Havana was a replay of the fifth, with minimal changes and, according to comments, equal or somewhat weaker in quality. In certain ways, the defeat of the Biennial of Havana always has been built into its own success, creating an irresolvable dilemma if the organizers are to keep the structure unchanged. The process of paralyzing success is something that worries the organizing committee. Llilian Llanes had already declared after the fifth that the Biennial should not continue if it was to become a “sales outlet.”23 At the time, her speculation was also thematic, since she wanted to address nongeographic peripheries, flows of information, technological and nontechnological approaches to problem solving, and so on. However, a review of the six past bienales would indicate that the problems and dangers are not so much located in the topics as they are in the structure, and that a structural revision may be needed to keep experimentation and independence alive. No matter what happens to the Biennial of Havana in the future, one can at least speak of its first ten memorable years as the ones that helped give the Third World not only a collective artistic identity, but also artistic leverage in the international art market. Mainstream art has been forced to assume its own identity in relation to art on the periphery. The monopoly of the definition of and the standards for art has been temporarily broken. The Biennial of Havana has shown that art is produced in an array of provinces among which the mainstream is only one among equals. That is no small feat for a “hurried, amateurish, and delirious project.” But it is not totally what the Biennial of Havana intended. However, one must also say that, looking back, there is now a feeling of uneasiness. Did something go off course or wrong? Or at least, might a new beginning lead to a better and more durable structure? With the advantage of knowing history, one could say that the political models used by the Biennial of Havana were, if not outmoded from the very beginning, so quickly obsolescing that the Biennial was inevitably condemned. A revival and expansion of the policies of Casa de las Américas, and then the translation of Ospaaal into the art world, were gambits too connected with a local Cuban political vision to become internationally sustainable. The concept of “Third World” that the Biennial of Havana used was still nurtured by the aura of political nonalignment, by focal economic dependencies, and by a belief in precise geographies. With the vertiginous metastasis of megatransnational corporations already well on the way when the First Biennial of Havana was being organized, this framework made sense only within the more narrow and local perspective shared by both 224

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Cuban and Latin American intellectuals of the Left, but it did not have a broad enough perspective. Galleries in the mainstream were operating on a transnational level as early as the seventies. Malborough was expanding all over the place, and Castelli, Sonnabend, and Sperone were creating their own axis. Like medieval royalty, marriages and postmarriages created links unifying the market in the decades following: Castelli and Sonnabend, Boone and Werner, Weber and Nosei, all linking to yet other galleries like Templon, Fisher, and Toselli. And when it wasn’t them, it was their secretaries and directors who split into subgalleries both competing and collaborating with their former bosses. Artists of the mainstream didn’t enter a gallery, but a circuit of galleries. It becomes clear now that the problems and questions faced by the jury in the Second Biennial of Havana were not limited to a fragmented panorama in the arts (as the jury interpreted the situation), but also included the inoperativeness of the model at large. The Biennial of Havana, like all biennials until then, was torn between what ultimately was still a nationstate perspective of the world, and the respect for the object. Havana was still thinking internationally in an increasingly transnational market. There was an important innovation, which consisted of the division of those nations into center and periphery and in examining the effects of the use of power in the production of art. But it was, though new for the structure of biennials, a belated innovation in relation to reality, and one placed within an old understanding. There were and are different social classes at work, different kinds of dependencies, clashing interests, and Fourth, Fifth, and Sixths Worlds with many more to come, which could not simply be compressed into a Third World term nor by an activity like art, which is mostly defined by middle-class values. There was a certain political expediency in lumping together countries and cultures under one term that could be opposed to the options presented in a bipolar ideological model. In such a schematic structure, it was easy for Cuba to become a clear spearhead, and so it did. It was mostly a matter of “us” against “them” with the model of the bipolar 110-volt plug which fits only one way into the outlet. The elegance of this helped the Biennial of Havana to quickly become successful. In the traditional setup of hegemonic biennials, there were winners, losers, and absentees. Here, artists from the periphery were released from having to triumph in the “them” market, and, instead, it was the recognition from “us” that should and would reward their work. The strategy seemed applicable during the early versions of the Havana The Biennial of Utopias

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Biennial, but it becomes clear now that then both “us” and “them” were terms too blurry in their definitions. The traditional division into nations had started to be redefined by the transnationalism of corporations, including art corporations. Diasporas had emulsified national identities, and “us” and “them” ultimately became a matter of individual choice. The term “Third World” itself had lost precision, having become a term fitting some form of Cuban political judgment, but also following U.S. racial interpretations. The Biennial of Havana recognized the problem and continually tried to adapt to the changes by emphasizing ethnicity over nationality. Thus, special efforts were made to invite artists in the diaspora and representatives of minorities in the centers. The solution was to increasingly focus on the individual artists as expressers of problems. But then, wasn’t this also the stated agenda of Documenta, the Aperto section of the Venice Biennial (a biennial within the Biennial), or, even worse, what the better art fairs were trying to address? Political correctness was introducing tokenism in many of them, further blurring the differences, and, finally, more biennials sprang up on the periphery, now fostering a competition among exhibitions (and the countries organizing them). As Rachel Weiss asserts, under present conditions, if one wanted to predict the future “winner” among the leading nonhegemonic biennials (in Turkey, South Africa, Korea, and Cuba), one would wisely pick the one that has more funds available and the better technocratic team administering it. In stating it this way, one is conceding the defeat of the intended Biennial of Havana, even if one were to pick Havana as the winner. The reason is that, in speaking of both “funds” and the “better technocratic team,” one is accepting the values of the former “them.” From the people’s point of view, art should of course serve to generate knowledge and shape culture. But from the point of view of the sponsor, art is a representation of power, and from the perspective of the artist in a capitalist system, it is (also) a form of production which hopefully generates some income. Biennials were created, under the guise of the first, to make the point of the second. It is the by-product of the third, the marketplace, which took over the space opened by the weakening of national power structures. One could thus say that it is the “art fair” construct which slowly has become the natural, nonhypocritical model for a globalized situation that lacks ideological antibodies. Following the Cuban model, the Art Fair of Guadalajara as well as ARCO in Madrid now have high-level symposia with their ultimately commercial exhibits, thus trying to give their enterprises intellectual credibility. 226

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One could, in art terms and jokingly, date the beginning of postmodernism to June of 1971, when the first art fair in Basel opened under the aegis of the global flow of capital and, with it, the threat that shadowed the Biennial of Havana long before it started. The ideology of consumerism, with the globalist push toward a single unified cultural market, had always opposed the art-as-creation position with its regional, national, and communitarian roots. Now the Biennial of Havana is finally in serious danger of being co-opted and even absorbed by this model, and only a structural refocusing can save it. The Biennial of Havana will have to develop a structure that reflects and is dedicated to the generation of knowledge and the shaping of culture. This means that the direction of the flow of information will have to be redressed with the same global approach that presently is colonizing the world. It is the only way that will enable the Biennial to maintain an identity within what seems to have become a unipolar world. This urgently needed “globalism of the underling” probably requires a radical decentralization of the Biennial of Havana and a time continuity of its activity, where the traditional exhibition event doesn’t act as the essence, but merely as punctuation. Art is seen as a purely individual activity both in the international market and in Cuba. It is in the intended destiny of the artistic service that they may sometimes differ, and where ideologies become evident. This individuality invariably leads to the exhibition of tangible, signaturebearing products. Exhibitions as an institution are the outgrowth of this tangibility. Over the years, the accent on art-as-object has increased the vulnerability of the Biennial of Havana even more. Had the focus been more on the Centro Lam than on the spectacle of the Biennial, things might have developed differently. Instead of grouping artists under topics and subtopics as an exhibition device, the center could have addressed the sponsorship of networks of artists to share positions, aims, and research through correspondence, symposia, and exhibitions. Thus, the Biennial of Havana could have become a periodic testing ground for more collective conclusions derived from an equally minded peer group unbound by geographic borders. The main effort, however, would not be invested in the show, but in a collective activity that stressed the continual nature of a process. Only then could one start conceiving of a center for a “globalized” resistance to what presently is no more than a takeover by neoliberal economics aided by a unidirectional flow of information.

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Notes 1. I personally saw the first five Biennials and missed the sixth one. When discussing the sixth one I will refer to reports by colleagues, particularly Rachel Weiss in “A Magnet on the Global Edge: The 6th Havana Bienal,” The New Art Examiner, September 1997. The Biennial continues to be held. 2. Not only model but also a focus for resentment. The short-lived fair in Bologna (revived for 1998) was organized as a response to both the high price per square meter and the bad food offered by Basel. 3. This parallel was suggested to me by Rachel Weiss. 4. When the organization of the Biennial started, there was only a decree mandating the creation of the Centro Wifredo Lam and the consequent legal registration of the organization as an empty shell, to prevent the use of the name by anybody else. Thus, although the First Biennial of Havana was presented by the center (the introduction to the catalogue appears signed “Centro Wifredo Lam”), it was really organized by the Division of Visual Arts and Design of the Ministry of Culture, directed by Beatriz Aulet. 5. The members of the jury of the First Biennial of Havana were Mariano Rodríguez (Cuba), Aracy Amaral (Brazil), Marta Arjona (Cuba), Manuel Espinosa (Venezuela), Julio Le Parc (Argentina), Pedro Meyer (Mexico), and Juan Antonio Roda (Colombia). The members of the jury of the Second Biennial of Havana were Ida Rodríguez Prampolini (Mexico), Luis Camnitzer (Uruguay), Jagmohan Chopra (India), Malangatana Ngwenya (Mozambique), Antonio Seguí (Argentina), Adelaida de Juan (Cuba), and Roberto Fabelo (Cuba). 6. Gerardo Mosquera, conversation with the author, September 1996. 7. Two of them, one on Lam and the other on the visual arts in the Caribbean, were published by the center in editions of five thousand, big print runs in Cuba considering the specificity of the subject matter. 8. In other Biennials there were workshops directed by Carlos Capelán on installations, Gerardo Suter on photography, and Gustavo Naklé on ceramic sculpture, and more general activities like Chinese kite construction and Yoruba adire dying. Though technical in their starting point, these workshops tried to help artists more from a creative than from a crafts point of view. 9. Andre’s piece was a book of lithographs made together with his wife, Ana Mendieta, before she died under unclear circumstances. Within minutes of the opening, the book was, depending on one’s position in relation to Ana’s death, vandalized or enhanced with the words “Andre asesino” written in red ink. 10. All three had also been part of the First Biennial, but with less-impressive work. 11. The exhibit was by artist-duo Ponjuán and Rodríguez. They initially had included, in their exhibition in Castillo de la Fuerza, a drawing showing Fidel Castro in drag and with huge breasts. They removed it under advice, but two further pieces which had passed initial muster proved unacceptable at a later stage.

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One portrayed Fidel Castro as a lighthouse with the line: “The ideas travel further than the light.” The other was a target shield with a mirror in the shape of Castro’s head and titled “Suicide.” 12. They were irreverent paintings with images of the flag and Che Guevara that Esson felt were an intrinsic part of the whole show. 13. It was this hardening that prompted my writing of the book New Art of Cuba (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994, 2004). 14. In Desafíos de una bienal, catalogue of the Fourth Biennial of Havana (Havana: Centro Wifredo Lam, Editorial Letras Cubanas, 1991), p. 53. 15. All the people I spoke to at the time, including high-ranking functionaries, were unanimous both in the criticism of the director’s action and in placing on him personally the responsibility for the closing. 16. In private conversations I found only one cultural administrator who fully justified censorship and one who made an argument for demanding social responsibility from the artist. A majority was confident that the checks and balances of revolutionary education ensured that there was no need for censorship, a point that did not address the problem of induced self-censorship. 17. And still there was a miraculous spirit. Lost at an opening after midnight and without any possibility of a taxi, a passerby offered to lead a group of us to our hotel, since it was on the way to where he was going. The hotel turned out to be a good hour’s walk away, but the man refused the five dollars (a month’s salary for some) that someone tried to put in his hand. 18. It turned out that the Biennial had not been financed by Ludwig. Instead, the $17,000 offered by him for installation expenses was deposited in escrow to be only used in case of emergency. Another $20,000 promised by UNESCO to ship art from Africa never arrived. The Biennial was ultimately financed with the profits derived from art sales by the Cuban Cultural Goods Fund. The African art was brought with a donation by Cuban artist Manuel Mendive. The exhibition did go to Aachen and gave European visibility to the event. Meanwhile, Ludwig instituted a foundation in Havana with a rather modest annual budget of $15,000, claiming that, “first, the important thing is to help Cuban artists. Then, the next step will also be to teach international art in Havana and in Cuba” (interview, La Maga [Buenos Aires], May 24, 1995, pp. 36–37). 19. Prieto has since been appointed as minister of culture, succeeding Armando Hart. 20. Nelson Cesin, “Foro de San Pablo: Los primeros aportes,” Brecha (Montevideo), May 25, 1995, p. 8. 21. The topics were “Fragmented Spaces: Art, Power, and Marginality,” “The Other Shore,” “Appropriations and Interlacings,” “Ambiences and Circumstances,” and “Art and the Individual on the Periphery of Postmodernity.” 22. Centro Wifredo Lam, unpublished draft of the guidelines of the Sixth Biennial of Havana. 23. Conversation with the author during the Fifth Biennial of Havana.

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Chapter 26

Introduction to the Symposium “ Art as Education/Education as Art ” (2007)

During one very unfortunate moment in history, a philistine or group of philistines in a position of power decided to isolate art from education. Art was degraded from its original status as metadiscipline of knowledge to today’s definition as a discipline and a craft. The shift meant that the accent of art slowly focused on the production of objects; that society was split into a few manufacturers, on one side, and many buyers on the other; and that art in the schools was considered a dispensable entertainment instead of a way of thinking. The formats of the “biennial” and the art “salon,” and the more recent and less hypocritical “art fair,” are the efflorescence of this change. They are spaces in which one competes both nationally and individually, and they are geared toward stimulating the relative positioning of artists in the market. It is therefore paradoxical that one of these biennials, the Biennial of Mercosur, escapes this configuration to reappear on the map as a “pedagogical biennial,” a biennial that professes to concentrate on the educational task of art over the idea of a mercantile championship. For the first time, an international art biennial is trying to transcend its own exhibitionist vocation to become a tool radically dedicated to the transformation of culture. Consistent with this decision, the curatorial team of the Biennial has redesigned the structure to underline the relationship between artist and public, to incorporate the visitor into the creative process of the artist, and to start equipping the consumer to become a creator—in other words, to reclaim art as a methodology for knowledge. We wanted the stress of the Biennial to be not on exhibiting the artist’s intelligence, but on stimulating the intelligence of the visitors. In turn, this task stimulates our own intelligence as artists, much more than the usual traditional narcissism. However, it would be naïve and arrogant to believe that the Sixth Biennial of Mercosur could achieve all this. We may aspire only to create a model that slowly fertilizes the ground so that many generations later there might be a profound revision of the social function of art. At this 230

point, we don’t even know yet if our proposed model has a chance for even minimal success. Possibly, it is not the appropriate model, and it may end up being no more than a small experiment in exploring possibilities. In this moment we know only that there are blatantly visible problems in many fields, and that there should be an attempt to solve them. The model for the first five Biennials of Mercosur was the same used by all traditional biennials. First, there was a curator-in-chief with a team of assistants. Together they shaped a curatorial vision through the selection of artworks and their exhibition in the Biennial’s spaces. Thus, the primary purpose, the one considered most important, was satisfied: to create a stage for curators and works of art. A program of cultural outreach was later added with the idea of enlarging and educating the public to appreciate art. The chosen works were good by curatorial decision. The task, now, was to convince the public. Within this format, the Biennials of Mercosur have been very successful, even memorable, such as the first one, which was curated by Frede­ rico Morais. Besides, the mere fact that the institution survived during a decade that was overpopulated by biennials is in itself a remarkable feat. Beyond that, the Biennial had become a reference point for the artists in the participating countries. This is a second important achievement. And yet, in spite of these successes, the curatorial team of this Sixth Biennial decided to change the premise, focusing somewhat less on the works and stressing a greater interactivity with the public instead. The changes, for the moment, affect this Sixth Biennial on only a modest scale. However, we hope that they start a fundamental change in the future direction of the institution. The new premise is that the Biennial should not be just an immense showroom of works, an exhibition where criteria of quality and museography change on a biennial basis. The Biennial for us, in spite of its name, is not an exhibition that resuscitates every two years. It is a living and continual institution that, dedicated to art education, should function on a permanent basis. Among its many activities, it will continue to organize an exhibition every two years, but as part of its pedagogical research. The approach does not diminish the functions of the general curator and his or her curatorial team, but it will place them in a different context with a new and different aim. The position of “pedagogical curator” has been created on the occasion of this Sixth Biennial and for the first time, and I cannot hide my happiness at being the first one called to occupy this position. It was Gabriel Pérez-Barreiro who came up with the idea when he was charged with the “Art as Education/Education as Art”

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general curatorship of the Biennial. For obvious reasons, I feel that this decision was brilliant. I immediately went to Google and checked how many entries there were for the term “pedagogical curator.” There were three in English and 968 in Spanish. And all of them referred to this Biennial. The pedagogical curator is not somebody who influences the choice of artists. It is somebody who acts as an ambassador to the public and observes the event through the eyes of the visitors. It was precisely the eyes of the visitors that led us to see the importance of more permanence and extension of the educational activities. Our first steps were to launch challenges. We asked ourselves: What would happen if some premises were inverted? What benefits, if any, does the public derive from anecdotal information about works and artists? How can a critical distance be generated in a public that lacks experience with works of art? How can one break through the barrier erected by taste when appreciating art? How can one work simultaneously with a multiplicity of publics when the artist usually addresses only one of them? Faced with these questions we organized long meetings with members of all the levels of people involved with the Biennial: the board of directors; the educational team; the mediators; and the schoolteachers in the state. We tried to find out what the criticisms were concerning the preceding Biennials as well as what reservations there might be in regard to the new proposals. To our surprise we found that instead of controversy there was immediate agreement. Those “mediators”—the personnel who interact with the public during the Biennial—who had experienced previous Biennials already had all the original insights I proudly put on the table. There was an atmosphere of unanimity, and, nearly without realizing it, both the curatorial team and the board of directors started to institute a process of transparency that we hope will be shared with the public and will become one of the identifying trademarks of the Biennial. Research and discussion led us to make several decisions: 1. The process of preparation of the personnel mediating between the works of art and the public was revamped, lengthened, and deepened. Rather than training the mediators to supply detailed information about works and artists, they were prepared to think with the public. It was stressed that it was preferable to share ignorance with precision than to share knowledge imprecisely.1 2. Emphasis was placed on the importance of speculation about art over 232

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repeating digested historical data, and on proposing the work of art as a solution to a problem rather than looking at it as a hedonistic object. 3. Pedagogical stations were created all through the exhibition space— places for the exchange of information concerning those artists who participated in the pedagogical project and their works. Here the public tries to understand the problem stated by the artist and then leaves comments that are useful to both the artist and subsequent visitors. 4. Spaces to hold discussions were designed along the walks through the Biennial. The Biennial this time was conceived as a park, with manageable walks frequently interrupted by areas for rest and conversation. 5. An ample educational center with classrooms, studios, auditorium, and library was built as part of the exhibition space. Teachers and students can discuss and work there in relation to what they just saw in the exhibition. The results of their work is exhibited in the studios and on surrounding walls. This space added to the pedagogical stations took about one-tenth of the surface of the Biennial for educational activities. 6. An information and exchange center was designed for the Internet with the hope that it would also be active between Biennials. The main topics for these exchanges are creation processes and art pedagogy. Chat rooms were organized so that the public is able to discuss with both artists and curators in real time. 7. Teams for preparation were sent to schools all over the state of Rio Grande do Sul. Daylong workshops were given to put the Biennial in the context of contemporary art history and to discuss methodologies and ideas present in the works expected in the Biennial. 8. Teachers were prepared to be a nexus with the Biennial. They were to inform the Biennial about their schools, as well as their colleagues and students about the Biennial. 9. Five months before the opening, the schools received pedagogical exercises with problems related to the work exhibited in the Biennial. The point was to stimulate creation instead of reducing information to anecdotal data. Students were able to make works that related to the ideas that informed the work rather than copy particular pieces. Therefore, they could understand the art much better once in the exhibition. In other words, when visiting the Biennial they may exercise art criticism rather than passive consumption and see the works like colleagues of the artists. And finally, ​10. A national symposium about art and education was organized last April, and now this international symposium that I am prefacing with this text. “Art as Education/Education as Art”

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With all these ambitions, it is also true that we may never fully assume the eyes of the public. We may, however, at least create and adjust feedback processes to come as close as possible to the public’s perspective without falling into paternalist demagoguery. One of the anecdotes in the history of the Biennial that had the greatest impact on me was about a group of children who after a long bus trip went to the bathroom in the luxurious building of Banco Santander.2 According to the story, the children were so much in awe of the bathroom fixtures that they never made it into the exhibition. The story is not 100 percent true but was used by a mediator to very effectively make a point. Until that moment I always had believed that the entry into art is producing art, making things. The child manufactures objects that we believe to be “artistic,” and, by organizing classes that envelop and co-opt that activity, we pride ourselves that we are teaching art. The bathroom story showed me a previous step that hadn’t occurred to me until then. An exhibition is organized and hung according to a rather complex reading code, a code that competes with other codes, and this exhibition code has to be learned. The knowledge of this code is actually the first step to accessing art. It is the one that gives an awareness about art. To take for granted that this code is obvious and shared by everybody is an act of classism and arrogance. We therefore suggested as a first exercise that the teachers ask their students in class to make something they considered “art.” Then they were to organize little exhibits of their production in the classrooms. The children could exhibit anything they wished as long it complied with the conditions they had set for “art.” The exhibit was to extol those conditions. By organizing their exhibits, the students were trained to define their “art” as something clearly different from what they perceived as “non-art.” This is a first step in curatorial activity. With it, they start understanding what art is—regardless of whether it’s good or bad—and start coming closer to the code. The purpose of this symposium is to discuss all these problems, issues that go much beyond the conventional art spectacle and its consumption. With it we would like to achieve a better and more precise organization of our positions and tasks. In this Biennial we consider that art is primarily communication and, therefore, that it has an implicit didactic quality, an educational mission inextricably integrated. Art and education are not different things; they are different specifications of a common activity. It is interesting that during the discussions that led to the organization

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of this symposium we never agreed on a precise title. Sometimes we called it “Art for Education/Education for Art.” Other times we referred to it as “Art as Education/Education as Art.” There never was discussion or discrepancy on the subject. We simply didn’t discuss it. Nobody bothered to correct when one or the other was used because they wouldn’t know how. I believe that this lack of a will for precision was very useful. I have to confess that I don’t know what version of the title was printed in the leaflet that announces this event. When I was writing this text I decided not to look it up because, in truth, with this imprecision we are giving validity to both nomenclatures. Standing on one we miss the other and try to incorporate it. It is in this hesitation that we complete the concept. If we were to absolutely fix the title, we would fragment the problem and condemn ourselves to partial ideas. This symposium, like all symposia, is a place for presentation and exchange. There is nothing original here. If we were to claim some innovation it would be to mix two groups of specialists whose integration has been traditionally nonexistent or, at most, unstable. During the thirtytwo years I worked in my last university employment, I was assigned the role of an eccentric. For better or worse, I was seen as somebody who had fun by adding vinegar to the soup with “strange and impractical” ideas. I was tolerated only because I was an artist, but I was not accepted as a normal and logical intellectual. In this symposium we want to combine eccentrics with normals, we want to eliminate the differences, to achieve a work in common. Even if they served to classify personal defects, the categories of “lucid without creativity” and “creative without lucidity,” would be useful only to present us with a profile of distortions and social prejudices. The fact is that we have to introduce art into education as a pedagogical method and as a methodology to acquire knowledge. The fact is that we have to introduce pedagogical notions into art to hone the rigor in creation and to improve communication with the public. The fact is that there is no real education without art and no true art without education. The fact is that the artist who cannot survive in the market goes to teach without knowing how. The fact is that the teacher who runs out of ideas doesn’t dare to go to art to get them. The fact, the tragic fact, is that we socially accept that one can teach without rigor and that one makes art by divine appointment. The symposium format here is so that we listen to each other, that we come to know each other and destroy obscurantist

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prejudices. The format here is so that we achieve an integration of art and pedagogy, of artists and teachers, so that we understand that art and education are the same and only taking form in different media. A second task for this symposium is to start the creation of a body of documentation useful for anybody who couldn’t come to these meetings. Obviously, ten papers and a book putting them together won’t exhaust the topic. That is the reason why we hope that this kind of meeting continues as a regular event not bound by the cycle of the Biennial. We would like for the educational center of the Biennial to become an international clearinghouse about art/education. We would like, independently of the biennial rhythm of exhibitions, for the symposia to be organized following the needs of teachers and artists connected with that clearinghouse. And, we would like for the biennial shows to be organized reflecting the needs that stem from these symposia. This entire search for clarity in the relationship between artist and public and between education and art is also directed to what probably best synthesizes this Sixth Biennial of Mercosur: institutional transparency. Without exception, the team of the Biennial believes that accountability to the public in this kind of activity is an intrinsic part of the process. Transparency is a fundamental ingredient in true pedagogy. All this concentration of efforts in an educational perspective is a consequence of this idea, and the symposium is one of the instruments to achieve it. On the one hand, it appeals to the appropriate intellectual authorities for ideas and challenges. On the other hand, it is an important vehicle to both establish a dialogue and to start forming an international team that helps introduce the needed changes. Before going into the details of this symposium, I want to point out something else. During this year of work, listening to myself and to others when describing this project, I always feared it might sound a little delirious. At this point, I believe that it is indeed a delirious idea and that, mysteriously, it took a real shape. One of the most surprising things during all the work on this Biennial was the lack of any space for fantasy and imagination. Until then my experience had been in institutions where projects became caricatures, where there always were arguments about difficulties and lack of money, and where I systematically was left dreaming of unrealized possibilities. In the work for this Biennial, no matter how utopian or enormous the ideas put on the table were, the immediate reaction was invariably “Okay,” followed by a study of how to best implement them. Never was there a request for more time to imagine and fantasize about the desire for something impossible. I never heard a “That is not possible” 236

Other Histories

or a “We have to think a little about that,” or a “That is too expensive.” This instant unanimity and absence of confrontation was one of the most frustrating and corrupting experiences of my life. I want to quickly cite another anecdote from the Biennial. Hours before the opening I had a quick last meeting with a group of mediators in charge of the section named “Three Borderlines.”3 One of the mediators asked me very simply and without the panic I would have had in his place, what he should do if someone from the public asked him what a “borderline” is. He explained that there are people coming to the Biennial, especially children, who sometimes don’t know that, when crossing a line drawn in cement or a natural obstacle like a river or a lake, there is something called Uruguay, or Argentina, or Paraguay on the other side. Clearly, for these purposes, the Biennial itself already is another country, a place with the danger of its own borderlines. The question revealed how, as artists, we generally address a very particular public. The public is an abstraction that tends to fuse with an intellectual sector of the middle class. It is a definition that excludes most of a potential real public. However, for a teacher the definition of what constitutes a public is inclusive; it comprises everybody present. The fundamental task of this symposium is to see if we can enlarge the definition of public to its maximum and with it get rid of classism in art, to see if we can do away with borderlines and unify the public without diminishing creativity. And to this end, much more than working together, we have to become educator-artists and we have to become artist-educators to such a degree that all of us, absolutely all of us, are pushing in the same direction.

Notes 1. It is interesting to note here that the mediators of the Biennial ended up creating their own community. Spontaneously and independent from the administration of the Biennial they created their own blog to exchange news, ideas, and opinions; they started their own newsletter, for which somebody discovered that the term “mediator comes from Vigotsky’s theories about education and knowledge”; created their own exercises for visitors; and started to create art interventions around the city. 2. The ornate bank building is an early-twentieth-century landmark and is used for special exhibitions connected with the Biennial. 3. The title refers to the point where Brazil, Argentina, and Paraguay meet.

“Art as Education/Education as Art”

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index

aboriginal art, 185, 186 Abramo, Livio, 188 Abstract Expressionism, 31, 33 Abstraction, 80, 101 Abstractionism, 38 Acosta, Gustavo, 213 Adams, Ansel, 105 adulthood (in art), 150–151 aesthetics: as politics, 14, 63, 68, 72; poetic, 81; of poverty, 28, 71; provincial aesthetic, 33 Afro-Brazilian art, 187 Agueberry, Rodolfo, 95 Aguilera, Alejandro, 217 Albee, Edward, 164 Alecto, 108 Alegría, Fernando, 173 Allende, Salvador, 69 altar of São Benito de Olinda (O Aleijadinho), 186 Amaral, Aracy, 228 Amaral, Tarsila de, 185, 188 “American,” concept of, 115 Americas Society, 164, 172 Anarchist Federation (Uruguay), 65 Andrade, Oswaldo de, “Pau Brasil,” 185 Andre, Carl, 215, 228 Aperto, 226 Appropriationism, 34, 216, 221 aquatint, 158 Arbenz, Jacobo, xi, 133

Archer M. Huntington Gallery (Austin, Texas), 112 Archipenko, Alexander, 107 ARCO fair (Madrid), 5, 211, 226 Arjona, Marta, 228 Armani, 189 arpilleras, 95, 96 “Arrival, The” (Figari), 142 art: and class, 56, 225, 237; as commodity, 1, 12, 201; as communication, 84, 201, 234; as education, 130, 230; and expansion of knowledge, 58, 91–92, 226, 230, 235; “for the people,” 91; function of, 82; as generation of symbols, 203; politics of, 12, 14, 42, 93; as profession, 23, 45; revolutionary, 64; as tool to solve problems, 100 Art Basel, 211, 227 Arte en Colombia. See Art Nexus art fair, 211, 220, 221, 226, 230 Art Fair of Guadalajara, 226 Artigas, José Gervasio, 132, 133 artist: and collective, 84, 227; and determination of quality, 112; economic support, 13; and ethics, 42; and freedom, 77; and individualism, 80, 82, 83, 223, 227; intellectual work, 30; and nationality, 87; and politics, 42; as preacher/provocateur, 94; as a professional: 23,

239

77–78, 79, 134; social role of, 76, 79, 89; as Sunday painter, 134 “Artist’s Shit” (Manzoni), 175, 178, 181 Art Nexus (Bogotá), xii “Art Systems” exhibition, 170, 171 Art Workers Coalition, 181 “Assassination of Quiroga, The” (Figari), 142 assimilation: and colonial artist, 41, 47–48, 50; into hegemonic culture, 51, 88; resistance to, 120, 122; in Uruguay, 131–132 Aulet, Beatriz, 212, 228 avant-garde: in Chile, 69; critique of, 19, 63; First National Meeting of Avant-Garde Art (Buenos Aires, Rosario, 1968), 63; international, 185; and market, 222; as norm, 12; and Pop Art, 31; and revolutionary politics, xiii, 27 Bacon, Francis, 32 Bailey, George, 192, 194, 197 Baranik, Rudolf, 215 Barradas, Rafael, 135, 136, 138 Barrio, Artur, 188 Barrios, Alvaro, 109 Barros, Geraldo de, 188 Baudelaire, Charles, 200 Bauhaus, 24, 25, 134, 146 Bearden, Romare, 38 Bedia, José, 71, 213, 217 Belkin, Arnold, 167 Belloni, José, 18, 21 Berger, Renee, 173 Bianchini Gallery (New York), 34 biennial, concept of, 210–211, 226, 230 Biennial of Chile, 18 Biennial of Havana, 60, 125, 130, 195, 210; First, 212–213, 215, 216, 228; Second, 213–216, 225; Third, 216– 219; Fourth, 219–221; Fifth, 222–

240

Index

223; Sixth, 6, 223–224; and art fair component, 220, 221; and Cuban people, 219, 221; evolution of, 223; political mission of, 211–212; problem of structure, 224, 227; as response to hegemonic center, 208– 209; as salon, 213 Biennial of Medellín, 211 Biennial of Paris, Tenth (1977), 69 Biennial of Venice, 11, 184, 185, 209, 211, 217, 226; founding of, 210; and Olympic Games, 208 bilingualism, 22–23, 28, 121; and Conceptualism, 133 Blanes Museum. See Museo Blanes “Blindados 1” (Ferrari), 161 Bolívar, Simón, 96, 175, 207 “Bombardero con Plumas” (Ferrari), 161 Bonino Gallery (New York), 164, 172 Bonnard, Pierre, 133, 140 Bony, Óscar, 127, 159, 160; works of: “Fair Is Foul and Foul Is Fair,” 162; “Familia Obrera,” 159, 160, 162; “Fusilamientos y Suicidios,” 161; “Sesenta Metros Cuadrados de Alambre Tejido y Su Información,” 161 “Book of Time, The” (Pape), 187 Borges, Jacobo, 142, 155 Botero, Fernando, 38 brain drain, 46–47, 77–78, 120 Branco, Castello, 173 BrasilConnects, 128, 184, 185, 189 “Brazil: Body and Soul,” 128, 184–185, 187–188, 189, 190 Brazilian Northeast Peasant Leagues, 94 Brecha, 18, 20, 127, 130 Brecheret, Víctor, 188 bricolage, 70 “Bringing the War Home: Home Beautiful” (Rosler), 35

Brugera, Tania, 222 Buarque, Chico, 215 CADA (Collective for Art Actions), 69, 75, 95; “Not to Die of Hunger in Art,” 69 Cal, Francisco de la, 220 Caldas, Waltércio, 188 Callaloo, 195 Calvacanti, Emiliano de, 187, 188 Camnitzer, Luis: approach to art history, 125, 129; C.L.I.P., 114; exhibition reviews, 126; Havana Biennial, 228; utopia, definition of, 206; works of: “Kitty Autocaresser,” 114, 116; “The Laments of Exile ,” 120; New Art of Cuba, 130; “The Perfect Etching,” 114–115; “Uruguayan Torture,” 3, 121–122, 125 Capelán, Carlos, 228 Capone, Al, 168 Cárdenas, Carlos, 217 “Carivari” (Daumier), 108 Carnival, 191; dialectic of freedom and control, 192; as form of resistance, 193; negotiation between individual and collective, 192–193, 195–197; ritualistic character of, 192 Caro, Anthony, 173 Caro, Antonio, 3; “Colombia,” 34 “Carta a un General” (Ferrari), 161 Carvalho, Pedro Ramos, 17, 190; “Uca,” 17 Casa de las Américas, 212, 223 Castañeda, Consuelo, 215 Castelli, Leo, 108, 211, 225 Castells, Manuel, “Fourth World,” 89 Castillo, José Guillermo, 36, 158 Castro, Fidel, 66, 209, 219, 228, 229 Castro, Humberto, 215 Catlin, Stanton, 165 censorship (Cuba), 218, 220, 221, 229 center: alternative to, 208–209; cri-

teria of, 1, 38, 45, 222; exploitation of periphery, 46, 77–78; pressure on periphery, 43–44; relationship to colony, 8, 10, 37, 40, 98; success in, 78; values of, 41, 60, 191. See also hegemonic culture; mainstream Center for Inter-American Relations. See CIAR Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris), “Face a l’histoire,” 5 Centro Atlántico de Arte Moderno, 222 Centro de Desarrollo de las Artes Visuales, 219 Centro Wilfredo Lam, 209, 212, 213, 216, 226, 228–229 Charrúas, 131 Chaseriau, Theodore, 181 Chicanos, 95 Chopra, Jagmohan, 228 Christie’s, 60, 102 Christo, 170 CIAR (Center for Inter-American Relations), 128, 137, 143, 149, 164, 173; “Artists of the Western Hemisphere: Precursors of Modernism, 1870–1930,” 165; boycott of, 165; and “Latin American Week,” 167; and Museo Latinoamericano, 167; and U.S. policy toward Latin America, 166, 172; and Vietnam Moratorium, 168 Cid Ferreira, Edemar, 190 Clark, Lygia, 188 C.L.I.P. (“controlled life in packages”), 114 “Cloaca” series (Delvoye), 176, 182 Cobra, 155 collaboration, 130 collecting, as symbiotic relationship: 115–116 Collective for Art Actions. See CADA “Colombia” (Caro), 34

Index

241

colonial art, 27, 137; and aboriginal art, 186; ethics and politics of, 45 colonial artist, 40; and assimilation, 41, 47–48, 50; and collective, 83; freedom, 10–11, 63; professionalism, 134; social role, 79, 83, 93; success, 50–51, 58, 78, 82; and taste, 140 colonial mentality, 107, 126, 127, 171 “Colonial Soiree” (Figari), 142 colony: internal, 45; relationship to center, 8, 10, 37, 40, 98; and resistance, 122, 126 Committee for Justice for Latin American Prisoners, 172 commodity: and Pop Art, 35; resistance to, 33, 68, 128; work of art as, 1, 12, 201 communism, death of, 54 community: destabilization of, 118– 119; utopia of, 119 Comunidad del Sur, La, 152, 154 Conceptual Art. See Conceptualism Conceptualism: approach to artmaking, 127; and art historical narrative, 97, 101; difference between Latina America and mainstream, 160; and ethics, 127, 161; global, 100; in Latin America, 2, 27, 80, 81, 98, 159; mainstream, 159; in periphery, 101; defined by Giovanni Papini in Gog, 19; and politics, 101; and scatology, 175; in the U.S., 34, 98 concrete poetry, 185 concretism, 188 Conference of Bandung, 214 Constructivism, 30, 34, 135 consumerism, 10, 32, 227 contemporaneity, 217; problem of, 115–116 Contrabienal, 169, 170, 171 “Contraif,” 168

242

Index

Cordeiro, Waldemar, 188 corporate sponsorship, 189 corporatization (of culture), 128 Costa e Silva, Arthur de, 168 Cozier, Chris, 196, 198 craft, beauty of, 104; problem with, 109–110, 127, 156 “Creole Dance” (Figari), 142 “Cuadro Escrito” (Ferrari), 159, 160, 161 Cuban Cultural Goods Fund, 229 Cuban Renaissance, 218 Cuban Revolution, 129–130, 173, 209, 218, 220 Cubism, 30 Cuenca, Arturo, 213 Cuevas, José Luis, xi, 155, 170 cultural autonomy, 42, 54 cultural worker, 82, 89, 90 Culture of the Cities, The, (Mumford), 8 Dada, 30, 31 Dalí, Salvador, xi Darío, Rubén, 133 Daumier, Honoré, “Carivari,” 108 Debord, Guy, 71 Debray, Régis, 65 “degenerate” artists (Germany), 115–116 Deira, Ernesto, 155 Delgado, Ángel, 182 Delvoye, Wim, “Cloaca,” 176, 182 dematerialization (of art), 94 democratization (of art), 108–109, 232, 234, 237 deregionalization (of art), 102 Destructionists, 156 Dias, Antônio, 188 diaspora, 95, 100, 226; “free trade diaspora,” 120 (see also brain drain); and market success, 122 Dibujazo, El, 7 Didi, Mestre, 187

Dittborn, Eugenio, 75 Documenta, xiv, 46, 209, 211, 212, 226 Domingo Perón, Juan, 204 Drawing Center (New York), 129 Duchamp, Marcel, 100, 106, 175, 200, 205 Dürer, Albrecht, 106 EAT (Experiments in Art and Technology), 11, 15 Eder, Rita, 75 Edições Licopódio (São Paulo/Buenos Aires), 162 education: as art, 230–237; art education in Latin America, 79; brain drain, 46–47, 77–78, 120; Camnitzer’s method, 25; in Empire: 27, 52, 80; and professionalism, 79; reform of, 18; Reform of Córdoba, 79, 144–145; reform in Uruguay, 134 Egorov, A. G., 56–57, 58 Eiriz, Antonia, 98 Ejército Zapatista de Liberación National. See Zapatista Movement “El Objeto Esculturado” exhibition, Havana (1990), 282 el siluetazo, 95 Elso Padilla, Juan Francisco, 213, 214; “Por América,” 214 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 133 Empire: artist in, 3, 10, 27, 78; dissemination of culture, 10; education in, 27, 52, 80; functioning of, 26; rhetoric of, 8. See also center; hegemonic culture environment art, 68 Enwezor, Okwui, 209 Erro, 35 Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes. See School of Fine Arts, (Montevideo, Uruguay) Espínola, Manolo, 150, 152, 154

Espinosa, Manuel, 228 Esson, Tomás, 218, 229; “SPOULAKK,” 182 exile: consciousness of, 6; experience of, 1, 29; and geography, 117–118; and individuality, 118; “in situ,” 118; and memory, 117; political, 47; traditional notion of, 117, 118; utopia of, 119 Experiments in Art and Technology. See EAT Expressionism, 18, 28, 127, 155; German, 24 ex-votos, 187 Fabelo, Roberto, 228 “Face a l’histoire,” Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris), 5 Fahlstrom, Olyvind, 32, 181 “Fair Is Foul and Foul Is Fair” (Bony), 162 “Familia Obrera” (Bony), 159, 160, 162 Favario, Eduardo, 65 Fernandes-Dias, José Antônio, 186 Fernández Stark, Serapión, 182 Ferrari, León, 127, 159, 160, 162, 170, 176–177; and Michelangelo’s “Final Judgment,” 176; works of: “Blindados 1,” 161; “Bombardero con Plumas,” 161; “Carta a un General,” 161; “Cuadro Escrito,” 159, 160, 161 Ferreira, Edda, 17 Ferrini, Giuseppe, 116 fetishism, 199–200, 201, 202 Figari, Juan Carlos, 142, 146 Figari, Pedro, 125, 126; biography, 138–139; and black subjects, 142–143; and Bonnard, 133, 140; commitment to painting, 141; contradictory position of, 139; and education, 144–145; exhibitions in the U.S., 137; international success, 138; localism, 136; as nation’s

Index

243

forefather, 138; post-Impressionist aesthetics, 139–140; regionalism of, 145–146; and School of Arts and Crafts, 145–146; and School of Fine Arts (Montevideo), 140, 141; as symbol of Latin American identity, 136; works of: “The Arrival,” 142; “The Assassination of Quiroga,” 142; “Bullfight,” 143; “Colonial Soiree,” 142; “Creole Dance,” 142; “Historia Kiria,” 143; “Pampa,” 142; “Troglodytes,” 143 Fine Art Museum (Santiago, Chile), 69 First National Meeting of AvantGarde Art (Buenos Aires, Rosario, 1968), 63 Flores, Julio, 95 folk art, 58 folklorism, 11, 135 Fonseca, Gonzalo, 154 Food And Agriculture Organization (FAO), 118 formalism, 38, 70, 80, 93; conditions of, 127; formalist critique, 100–102; and historical narrative, 80–81, 97, 101 Forum of São Paulo, 222 “Fourth World” (Castells), 89 Franco, José, 215 Frasconi, Antonio, 116, 170, 173 Freire, Paulo, 80 Frente, 167 Freud, Sigmund, 129 Front of Cultural Workers’ Groups (Mexico), 69 Fuerza, Castillo de la, 217, 218, 228 fundamentalism, 77; of printmakers, 110; technical; 104–105 “Fusilamientos y Suicidios” (Bony), 161 gallery circuit, 225 García Márquez, Gabriel, 75

244

Index

Garciandía, Flavio, 213, 217 Garino, Raúl, 18, 21 gatekeepers, 37 Gates, Bill, 105 Gaudí, Antoni, 135 Gego, 161 Gemini GEL, 108 General Workers’ Union (CGT), 64 Geography, new, 90, 95 Gertrude Stein Gallery, (New York), 176 Getty Museum, 116 Girona, Julio, 173 Giuliani, Rudy, 178 globalization, 76, 83, 88, 98, 224– 226; and cultural expansion, 89; different notions of, 102–103; as ideology, 100; resistance to, 42, 99 Glusberg, Jorge, 170, 171, 173–174 Goeldi, Oswaldo, 188 Goeritz, Matías, 170 Gog (Papini), 19 Golub, Leon, 215 Gómez Espínola, Manuel. See Espínola, Manolo Góngora, Leonel, 167, 170 Goodman, Sam, “No-art,” 176 Gordon, Lincoln, 128, 164, 166, 173 Gory (Rogelio López Marín), 213 Goya, Francisco, 106 Graham, Dan, 108, 181 Gramsci, Antonio, 47 Grassman, Marcelo, 188 Greco, Alberto, 101, 155 Grupo CADA. See CADA Grupo Espartaco, 156 GTO (Geraldo Teles de Oliveira), 187 Guagnini, Nicolás, 128, 175, 179, 182; The Seven Reviews of Monkeys and Shit, 128, 175, 180–181 Guevara, Che, 70, 75, 164, 173 Guggenheim Foundation, 26

Guggenheim Museum, 128, 137; “Brazil: Body and Soul,” 184, 186, 188, 189–190 Haacke, Hans, 39, 215 Hamilton, Richard, 35, 36; “Just What Is It That Makes Today’s Homes So Different, So Appealing,” 35 Hanson, Duane, 176 Hardt, Michael, 103 Haring, Keith, 215 Hart, Armando, 229 Havana Biennial. See Biennial of Havana Hayter, Stanley William, 110 Heartfield, John, 35, 36 hegemonic culture, 37–38, 40, 43; assimilation into, 41, 51, 88; complex of, 185; expansion of, 98; and multiculturalism, 87–88. See also center; Empire Heiskell, Andrew (Time Inc.), 173 Hellman, Lillian, 164, 173 Herrera Ysla, Nelson, 217, 219 Hirshhorn Collection, 214 “Hispanic,” 49, 53 history: Camnitzer’s revision of, 125; construction of, 83; criteria for writing, 59; dating, 19; exclusion from, 59; and formalist narrative, 80–81, 97, 101; and “isms,” 97; and power relations, 98; periodization of, 16; subversion of, 178, 187 Hoffman, Abbie, 74 “Holy Virgin Mary” (Olifi), 178 Holzer, Jenny, 35 Homar, Lorenzo, 170 homogenization (of art), 37, 101 hyperrealism, 176 IAFA. See Inter-American Foundation for the Arts Illich, Ivan, 173

IMF (International Monetary Fund), 134 imperialism, 26–27, 42, 100, 170 Imprenta AS, 152, 154 Impressionism, aesthetic of, 144 indigenous culture. See aboriginal art individuality: of artist, 80, 82, 83, 194, 223, 227; and capitalist system, 85; and exile, 118–119; negotiation with collective, 192–193, 195–197 infantilization (of art), 151, 153 Informalism, 31 “Information” exhibition (MOMA), 94–95 installation art: and Carnival, 191; in Chile, 69–70; in Cuba, 70–71, 216, 220; in Latin America, 68, 101; as mestizaje, 71 “Institute Di Tella, Experiencias ’68,” Fundación Proa, Buenos Aires, 163 insult (artistic), 178 Inter-American Foundation for the Arts (IAFA), 164; exclusion of Cuban intellectuals, 164; fourth symposium, Puerto Azul, Venezuela (1967), 164, 172 interdisciplinary art movement (Cuba), 68, 74 internal colonies, 45 International Style, 9, 11, 38, 59, 135; formal devices, 69, 75 ISA (Instituto Superior de Arte), 220, 221 Isou, Isidore, “Manifeste pour la plastique physiologique,” 175 Jaar, Alfredo, 46, 49, 75 Jewish Museum, 165 Jiménez, Luis, 35 Johns, Jasper, 9, 34 Juan, Adelaida de, 228 Julião, Francisco, 94 “Jungle” (Lam), 50

Index

245

“Just What Is It That Makes Today’s Homes So Different, So Appealing” (Hamilton), 35 Kandinsky, Wassily, 134 Kazin, Alfred, 173 Kcho (Alexis Leiva), 220, 222 Kexel, Guillermo, 95 Kiefer, Anselm, 98 kinetic art (Argentina, Venezuela), 80 kitsch, 151 “Kitty Autocaresser” (Camnitzer), 114, 116 Klee, Paul, 134, 152 Klein, Stephen, 114 Knoedler Gallery, 137 Kosuth, Joseph, 109, 159, 160, 162, 215; “One and Five Clocks,” 160; “One and Three Photographs,” 160 Kruger, Barbara, 35 “KU KKA KA KKA” (Meireles), 177 La Cabaña, 219 Lacalle, Luis Alberto, 153, 154 Lam, Wilfredo, 209, 211, 213; “Jungle,” 50 “Laments of Exile, The” (Camnitzer), 120 Lanzarini, Ricardo, 128, 179–180, 182, 183 Lawler, Louise, 35 Left: and Cuban artists, 172—173; and Cuban Revolution, 212; death of communism, 54; and intellectuals, xiii, in the 1950s, 2; nationalist rhetoric, 56–57; postmodernism of, 3 Leiseca, Marcia, 218 Le Parc, Julio, 170, 173, 215, 228 “Les Magiciens de la Terre,” 217 Lettrism, 175 Levine, Sherrie, 36 Lewitt, Sol, 101, 215 Lhote, André, 134, 147

246

Index

Lichtenstein, Roy, 34, 108 Lindner, Richard, 107 Linowitz, Sol, 166 Lisboa, Antônio Francisco. See O Aleijadinho Littin, Miguel, 173 Llanes, Llilian, 213, 217, 219, 224 local culture, 89, 136 local histories, writing of, 1 local traditions: death of, 11; expression of, 191 “Lo Crudo y lo Cocido,” exhibition at Museum Reina Sofía, 177 “Los Grupos,” Mexico, 68, 75, 95 Lowell, Robert, 164, 173 Ludwig, Peter, 221, 229 Ludwig Forum (Aachen), 221 Macció, Rómulo, 155 mainstream, 37, 214; alternative to, 221; Conceptualism, 98, 159–160. See also center Malborough Gallery, 225 Malfatti, Anita, 188 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 93 Manet, Édouard, “Dejeneur sur l’herbe,” 200 “Manifeste pour la plastique physiologique” (Isou), 175 Manly, Marianne, 143 Mann, Thomas, 128, 165, 173 Manuel, Antônio, “Phantom,” 188 Manzoni, Piero, “Artist’s Shit,” 175, 178, 181 Marcha (Montevideo), xi, xv, 17, 20, 130 March against Death (1969), 67 Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso, 135 market: and cultural expansionism, 38; and homogeneity, 37; for Latin American art, 102, 222; and periphery, 39, 44, 60–61, 77, 83; success, 37; success in the periphery, 84; values of, 45

Martí, José, 214 Martínez, Raúl, 34 Mary Boone Gallery, 225 mas, 129, 191, 192, 193, 195, 196 massacre of Tlatelolco, 169 Matisse, Henri, 106 Matta-Clark, Gordon, 170, 171 Meany, George, 166 medium, 91–92 mega-exhibitions, 189–190 Meireles, Cildo, 3, 33, 127, 188; “KU KKA KA KKA,” 177 Memmi, Albert, Portrait of the Colonized, 47 Mendieta, Ana, 49, 115, 228 Mendive, Manuel, 229 Meroscur Biennial, xiv, 130, 230–237 Merseyside Maritime Museum, (Liverpool), 123 Mesquita, Ivo, 190 mestizaje, 71 métier, 156 Metropolitan Museum, The (New York), 114 Mexican Front of Cultural Workers, 95 Mexican muralism, 18, 68, 80, 136, 203 Meyer, Pedro, 228 Michaux, Henri, 161 Michelangelo, 186; “Final Judgment,” 176 MICLA, 127–128, 164, 168, 171; Committee for Justice for Latin American Prisoners, rally with, 172; and cultural imperialism, 170; split with Museo Latinoamericano, 170 Milanés, Pablo, 215 Miller, John, 181 Minimalism, 28, 80, 97, 155; aesthetic of; 19; and art historical narrative, 97, 101 Minshall, Peter, 125, 129, 191–198; and Fellini, 196; as individual creator,

194; Josephine Baker costume, 194; works of: “Carnival Is Colour,” 195; “Danse Macabre,” 194–195; “Red,” 195 Miranda, Carmen, 184 Modern Art Week (Brazil), 187–188 Modernism, 93; and center, 38; genealogy of, 129, 200 modernity, 44 Moholy-Nagy, László, 134 MOMA (Museum of Modern Art), 50, 86, 114; “Information” 94–95; “Latin American Artists of the 20th Century,” 188 Montessori, 134 Montevideo, 131, 147 Moore, George (First National City Bank), 173 Morais, Frederico, 231 Morandi, Giorgio, 110 Morris, Robert, 100 Morris, William, 146 Mosquera, Gerardo, 50, 212, 213, 217, 218, 228 Mothers of Plaza de Mayo, 95 Movimiento por la Independencia Cultural Latino Americana. See MICLA multiculturalism, 87–88, 98 Mumford, Lewis, The Culture of the Cities, 8 Municipal Salon (Uruguay), 18, 21 Museo Blanes (Montevideo), 2, 7 Museo del Barrio, 181 Museo della Specola (Florence), 116 Museo Latinoamericano, 127–128, 164; activism of, 169–170; boycott of São Paulo Biennial, 169–170, 171; “Contraif,” 168; founding of, 167; platform of, 167; split with MICLA, 170 museums, function of, 205, 206; as utopia, 206

Index

247

Museum of Modern Art (Buenos Aires), 112 Museum of Modern Art (New York). See MOMA Museum of Prints (Buenos Aires), 113, 116 NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement), 94 Naklé, Gustavo, 228 Naranjo, Rubén, 64 National Association of Innovators and Rationalizers (ANIR), 70–71, 75 National Bureau of Standards, 114 national culture, export of, 184–185, 225 National Museum in Havana, 70 National Museum of Modern Art (Baghdad), 113 neo-Conceptualism, 34, 101 neo-Expressionism, 98, 101, 127, 155 neoliberalism, 222, 227 Neto, Ernesto, 188 New Art of Cuba (Camnitzer), 130 New Cuban Art, 4, 95, 130, 215 “New Realists,” 30 New York Graphic Workshop, 158 New York Review of Books, 171 New York Times, 114, 116 Ngwenya, Malangatana, 228 1968, 16; concept of, 20; in Uruguay, 17 “No-art” (Goodman), 176 Noé, Luis Felipe, 98, 127, 155, 170, 173; and printmaking, 156–157, 158 nonalignment, 55, 223 “Not to Die of Hunger in Art” (CADA), 69 Novoa, Glexis, 217 Nuyoricans, 95 O Aleijadinho, 186, 187 OAS. See Organization of American States

248

Index

Ofili, Chris, “Holy Virgin Mary,” 178 Oiticica, Hélio, 3, 34, 188; and Carnival, 191 Oldenburg, Claes, xi, 3, 31, 34, 36, 170, 215 Oldenburg, Richard, 86 Olympic Games, 208 “One and Five Clocks” (Kosuth), 160 “One and Three Photographs” (Kosuth), 160 “Operation Pando” (Tupamaros), 67 Organization of American States (OAS), 164, 169 Oski (Óscar Conti), 152, 154 Ospaaal (Organization of Solidarity with the People of Asia, Africa & Latin America), 223, 224 Other. See otherness otherness, 87, 88, 219; breaking down of, 123, 219 Otra Figuración, 127, 155 “Over the Blockade” exhibition, 215 Pacheco, Jorge (Uruguay), 2 Padilla, Herberto, 171, 173 Padín, Clemente, 170 Palau, Marta, 215 “Pampa” (Figari), 142 Pan American Art Projects, 160 Pan-American Union, 169 Paolini, Giulio, 36 Pape, Lígia, “The Book of Time,” 187 Papini, Giovanni, Gog, 19 “Paradox of the Saint” (Silveira), 188 Parra, Catalina, 75 Parra, Nicanor, 128, 173; Poemas y antipoemas, 176 “Pau Brazil” (Andrade), 185 Paula Cooper Gallery, 168 Paz, Octavio, 169 PCGALA. See Provisional Committee for a General Assembly of Latin American Artists

pedagogical curator, 231, 232 Pedagogy of the Oppressed (Freire), 80 Pedrosa, Mario, 173 Peluffo, Gabriel, 7, 21, 148 Pérez, Marta María, 217 Pérez-Barreiro, Gabriel, 231 Pérez Monzón, Gustavo, 71 “Perfect Etching, The” (CLIP), 114–115 performance art, and Carnival traditions, 191 periphery: access to, 89; alternative to mainstream, 221; and art market, 39, 44, 60–61, 77, 83–84; and class polarization, 54, 56; criteria of success, 84, 133; exchange of ideas with center, 5, 90; exploitation of, 46, 77–78, 222; information flow, 90; national cultural identity, 55; and Pop Art, 3, 31, 33; and postmodernism, 216; pressure on, 43–44; and regionalism, 98, 99; resistance in, 81, 100–101; situation of artist from, 4, 39–40, 77–78, 225 Permeke, Constant, 115 “Phantom” (Manuel), 188 Picasso, Pablo, 50, 106, 107 Pignatari, Decio, 176 Piranesi, Giambattista, 106 “Piss Christ” (Serrano), 78 Plan Condor, 173 Poemas y antipoemas (Parra), 176 Pollock, Jackson, 110 Ponjuán, Eduardo, 222, 228 Pop Art, xi, 3, 155; and art market, 3; and avant-garde, 31; and commodities, 35; first encounter with, 30; internationalization of, 33; in Latin America, 32; and periphery, 3, 31, 33; and politics, 31, 32, 34, 35; and reality, 31; and scatology, 176 “Por América” (Elso Padilla), 214 Porter, Liliana, 158 Portinari, Candido, 188

Porto Allegre, Brazil, 130 Portrait of the Colonized (Memmi), 47 Posada, José Guadalupe, 106, 109 post-Minimalism, 101; aesthetics of, 159; and tautology, 161 postmodernism, 46, 227; left-wing, 39; origin of, 129, 200; and periphery, 216; right-wing, 39 Pratt Graphic Arts Center, 107, 108 Prieto, Abel, 222, 229 Prieto, Rubén, 17 Print Biennial of Tokyo, 156 printmaking: and circulation of information, 106, 109; craft of, 109; edition, concept of, 108; market for, 108; as minor art form, 104; and quality judgment, 106; painters’ approach to, 157 Proceso Pentágono, 69 propaganda, 65 proto-Conceptualism, 156 Provisional Committee for a General Assembly of Latin American Artists (PCGALA), 169 public, location of, 91 public art, 129, 203–204 Quintana, Ciro, 217 Rauschenberg, Robert, 9, 11, 31, 34; “Oracle,” 31 Reagan, Ronald, 176 reform of Córdoba, 79, 144–145 “region,” 99–100 regionalism, of the center, 98; and Pedro Figari, 145–146; and identity, 185; of periphery 98, 99 Rego, Ronaldo, 187 Rembrandt, 105, 106 Report on the Americas, 4 resistance: to assimilation, 120, 122; to capitalism, xiii, 72; Carnival, as a form of, 193; and collectivity, 119;

Index

249

to colonization, 122, 126; to commodity, 33, 68, 128; to “globalism,” 99; idea of, 5; in the periphery, 81, 100–101; of printmaking, 105; of syncretism, 122 Revolutionary Army of People (Argentina), 65 Reyes Palma, Francisco, 182 Richard, Nelly, 75 Riemenschneider, Tilman, 186 Rizzo, Patricia, 162 Rocha, Glauber, 173 Rockefeller, David, 173 Rockefeller, Nelson, 168 Rockwell, Norman, 188 Roda, Juan Antonio, 228 Rodin, Auguste, John the Baptist, 133 Rodó, José Enrique, 132, 133–134 Rodríguez, Fernando, 220, 222, 228 Rodríguez, Mariano, 228 Rodríguez, Simón, 93, 96, 175, 176, 177, 206, 207 Rodríguez Brey, Ricardo, 71, 213, 217, 222 Rodríguez Prampolini, Ida, 228 Roosevelt, Theodore, 134 Rosenberg, Alex, 222 Rosenberg, Harold, 173 Rosler, Martha, “Bringing the War Home: Home Beautiful,” 35 Royal Museum of Antwerp, 115 Rubin, Jerry, 74 Rusk, Dean, 128, 165, 173 Ruskin, John, 146 Saavedra, Lázaro, 217, 220 Sábato, Ernesto, 164 Salle, David, 39 salon, 210–211, 213, 221, 230 Salon des Refusees, 210 Sánchez, Juan, 49 Sánchez, Tomás, 213

250

Index

Santa Anna, general, 129, 199–202, 204–205, 206 Santería, 71 São Paulo Biennial, 185, 209, 217; boycott of, 169–170, 173; Ferrari León at, 176 Saravia, Aparicio, 179, 180 scatology in art, 128, 175; and critical attitude, 177; in Latin America, 178–179 Scharf, Kenny, 39 Schendel, Mira, 188 Schnabel, Julian, 98 Schneckenburger, Manfred, 46 School of Arts and Crafts (Montevideo, Uruguay), 144–145, 146, 147 School of Fine Arts (Montevideo, Uruguay), 17, 133–134, 140–141, 152, 154, 156 Segall, Lazar, 188 Seghers, Hercules, 106 Seguí, Antonio, 214, 228 Sekula, Allan, 35 self-colonization, 1 “Sensation” exhibition (Brooklyn Museum), 178 Serrano, Andrés, “Piss Christ,” 78 “Sesenta Metros Cuadrados de Alambre Tejido y Su Información” (Bony), 161 Seven Reviews of Monkeys and Shit, The (Guagnini), 128, 175, 180–181 Silveira, Regina, “Paradox of the Saint,” 188 Siqueiros, David Alfaro, xi “site-specific” work, 100, 102 Small, Lawrence, 189 Smithsonian Institution, 189 social Darwinism, 85 Socialist Party (Uruguay), 65 social realism, 18, 30, 68, 102, 135, 176, 188

Sommavilla, Godoffredo, 138 Sonnabend Gallery, 225 Sosa, Mercedes, 215 Sotheby’s, 60, 86, 102 Soto, Leandro, 213 “Spanglish art,” 122 Sperone Gallery, 225 Spósito, Américo, 18, 21 “SPOULAKK” (Esson), 182 Stella, Frank, 11, 164, 173 Sturtevant, 34, 36 Subterráno Municipal (Uruguay), 18 Sullivan, Edward, 185, 190 Suma (Mexico), 69 Sumac, Yma, 41 Superbarrio, 4, 71–72, 95 Susini, Clemente, 116 Suter, Gerardo, 228 Sydney Biennial, 209 Sydney Janis Gallery, 30 TAI. See Taller de Arte e Ideología Taller de Arte e Ideología (TAI), 68– 69, 75 Taller Torres-García, 151, 152, 154 Tamayo, Rufino, 170 Tàpies, Antonio, 110 taste, 140; colonization of, 141 tautology, 160–161, 162 Telarte, 215, 217 Tetraedro, 69 Thiam, Dagnoko Nene, 214 third position, 77 Third World, in Havana Biennial, 217, 223, 226 Third World Biennial, 113 “This Is Tomorrow” exhibition (1956), 35 Time Out New York, 180, 181 Tinguely, Jean, 66, 74 Tonel, 213, 222 Torre Nilson, Leopoldo, 164

Torres-García, Joaquín, 80, 126, 132, 135; exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum, 137; influence of, 136, 138, 151–152 Torres Llorca, Rubén, 213, 217 Transatlantic Slave Gallery (Merseyside Maritime Museum, Liverpool), 123 transculturation, 8 transnationalism, 224–225, 226 Travella, “Slim,” 17 “Tucumán Arde,” 4, 34, 63, 68; artists involved in, 72–73 Tupamaros, 2, 4, 13, 27, 63, 65–68; artists involved in, 73–74; name, 73; “Operation Pando,” 67 Twin Towers, 162 Tyler Graphic Studio, 108 United Productions of America, 152 United States of America: chauvinism of, 88; consumption, and, 10, 32; policy in Latin America, 127, 166, 168, 172; war resistance movement, 67 universality, determination of, 10 uprootedness, 47 Uruguayanism, 147 Uruguayan National Liberation Movement (MLN). See Tupamaros “Uruguayan Torture” (Camnitzer), 3, 121–122, 125 utopia: Camnitzer’s definition of, 206; of community, 119; and demise of socialism, 4; and exile, 119; interclass art, 59; internationalist dreams, 55; and Latin America, 94, 95; and museum, 206 Valentim, Rubem, 187 van Weeren-Griek, Hans, 166, 167

Index

251

Varela, José Pedro, 132, 133, 144–145, 147 Vargas Llosa, Mario, 169 Vega, Jorge de la, 127, 155; and printmaking, 156–157, 158 Veiga Guignard de, 188 Vent Dumois, Lesbia, 212 Ver y Estimar (Buenos Aires), xv “Vibrationist” movement, 135 Vidal, Gore, 164 Vienna School, 146 Vietnam Moratorium, 168 Viñar, Marcelo, 117, 119 Viteri, Oswaldo, 170 “Volumen I,” 71, 75 Von Gunten, Roger, 182–183 Wadsworth Athenaeum (Hartford, CT), 112 Wagstaff Collection, 116

252

Index

Warhol, Andy, 3, 32, 34, 108; “Mao,” 32 Warner, Rawleigh (Mobil Oil Corp.), 173 Weiss, Rachel, 226, 228 Wells, Orson, It’s All True, 184, 190 White, John, 166 Whitney Biennial, xi, 210 Whitney Museum of American Art, 114 Whitney Sculpture Annual, 12 work of art: as commodity, 201; construction of, 32; as fetish, 199–200; and ideology, 203, 204; and power sharing, 204; as solution to problem, 233; status of, 129 Yglesias, José, 171, 173 Zapatista Movement, 7 Zegrí, Armando, 137

The essays in this volume have appeared previously in the following places: “Contemporary Colonial Art” was originally delivered as a paper at the Latin American Studies Association conference, Washington, D.C., 1969. The paper was subsequently translated into Spanish and published as “Arte Colonial Contemporáneo” in the Montevideo-based Marcha, July 3, 1970. “The Sixties” was presented as a paper at a conference titled “Dibujando los 60s” at the Museo Blanes, Montevideo, in August 1998. “Exile” was originally published in Luis Camnitzer, the catalog for the retrospective exhibition at Casa de las Américas, Havana, March 1983. “Political Pop” was originally published as “Pop Político” in Trans>arts .cultures.media, Vol. 5, 1998. “Access to the Mainstream” was originally published in The New Art Examiner, June 1987. “Wonder Bread and Spanglish Art” is an expanded version of the text “Latin American Art in the US: Latin or American?” It was originally published in Convergences/Convergencias, Lehman College Art Gallery (Feb. 11–March 31, 1988). This version was originally published as “Spanglish Art” in Third Text #13, Winter 1990–1991. “Cultural Identities Before and After the Exit of Bureau-communism” was originally published in Hybrid States (exhibition catalog), New York: Exit Art, 1992. “Art and Politics: The Aesthetics of Resistance” was originally published in NACLA Report on the Americas, Sept./Oct. 1994. “The Artist’s Role and Image in Latin America” was presented at the ARCO art fair, Madrid, 2005. “Out of Geography and Into the Moiré Pattern” was originally published in the exhibition catalog Face a l’histoire, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, 1996. “The Reconstruction of Salami” was written for the never-published catalog for the exhibition “Stretch” at the Power Plant, Toronto, Canada. “Printmaking: A Colony of the Arts” was presented at the annual conference of the Southern Graphics Council (Tempe, AZ), and was first published in Página 12, Buenos Aires, 1999. “My Museums” was first published in Pellegrini, Maurizio, in Innerscapes: An Anthology of Artists’ Writings (Trieste: Contemporanea, 1998). “The Forgotten Individual” was originally published in the catalog of

the 6th Biennial of Havana (Havana: Centro Wifredo Lam and Paris: Association Française d’Action Artistique, 1997). “Free-Trade Diaspora” was presented at the panel “Who Defines the Contemporary? Diaspora and Experiences in the Visual Arts” at the Smithsonian Institution, 2003. “Pedro Figari” was originally published in Third Text #16–17, Autumn/ Winter 1991. “Re-softenings and Softenings in Uruguayan Art” was originally published in Brecha, 1991. “An Ode to Aquatint” was originally published in Jorge de la Vega, Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires, 2003. “Revisiting Tautology” was originally published as “Introduction” in León Ferrari & Oscar Bony: Revisiting Tautology, Panamerican Art Projects, 2007. “The Museo Latinoamericano and MICLA” was originally published in A Principality of Its Own: 40 Years of Visual Arts at the Americas Society, edited by José Luis Falconi and Gabriela Rangel (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007). “Flying in Weightlessness” was originally published in Art Nexus #58, 2005. “Brazil in New York” was originally published in Lápiz #28, Madrid, 2002. “The Keeper of the Lens” was originally published in Looking at the Spirits (exhibition brochure), published as Drawing Papers #56, The Drawing Center, New York, 2005. “The Two Versions of Santa Anna’s Leg and the Ethics of Public Art” was presented in a panel on the occasion of the Intervenciones en el Espacio exhibition in the Museo de Bellas Artes, Caracas, 1995. “The Biennial of Utopias” was written for an anthology to be edited by Mari Carmen Ramírez and Luis Camnitzer, and to be published by Duke University Press. The planned volume was never finished and this essay has remained unpublished until now. “Introduction to the Symposium ‘Art as Education/Education as Art’” was presented in Porto Alegre, Brazil, in 2007 to open the International Symposium of artists and art teachers in conjunction with the Sixth Biennial of Mercosur.