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A rt in N ew York. He is th e a u th o r of several
books and has co n trib u ted to a rt journals
around th e w orld including C asa de las
A m ericas, A rt Journal, Third Text, P o lie s te r
K unstforum and A rt Nexus. He has lectured
extensively in A frica, Europe, Latin A m erica
and th e U nited S tates.
ISBN 0-262-63172-5
Many thanks are due to the authors for Gerardo Mosquera’s ‘Modernism
whose support for this project has been from Afro-America: Wifredo Lam’,
invaluable; to Oriana Baddeley who from Art Nexus, no. 15, January-March
edited the English texts; to Joanna 1995, and Third Text, no. 20, Autumn
Skipwith who managed the production of 1992; Kala Press for Monica Amor’s
the book; and to Victoria Clarke for her ‘Cartographies: Exploring the
help throughout the project. We should Limitations of a Curatorial Paradigm’,
also like to thank Christabel Gurney, published in Third Text, no. 28-29,
Jane Heath, Quentin Newark and Autumn Winter 1994; University of
Libby Willis. Minnesota Press for Celeste Olalquiaga’s
‘Holy Kitschen: Collecting Religious
We are grateful to Gabriel Pérez-Barreiro Junk from the Street’, first published
for his translation of the following texts in Megalopolis: Contemporary Cultural
from Spanish: Néstor García Canclini, Sensibilities; and the Smithsonian
‘La Modernidad después de la Institution Press, Washington DC,
Postmodernidad’ ; Gabriel Peluffo Linari, for Tomás Ybarra-Frausto’s ‘The
‘Crisis de un Inventario’ ; Andrea Giunta, Chicano Movement/The Movement of
‘Estrategias de la Modernidad en América Chicano Art’ .
Latina’ ; Nelly Richard, ‘Chile, Mujer y
Disidencia’ ; Mirko Lauer, ‘Crítica de la We wish to thank all private owners,
Ideología Populista del Indigenismo’ and museums, galleries, libraries and other
‘Notas sobre Plástica, Identidad y institutions for permission to reproduce
Pobreza en el Tercer Mundo’ ; Ticio works in their collections. We are also
Escobar, ‘Cuestiones sobre Arte Popular’ . grateful to the following people for their
Our thanks also to David Britt for help with providing photographs: Yona
translating Pierre Bocquet’s article ‘Arts Bäcker of Throckmorton Fine Art;
Plastiques et Créolité’ from IJrench. Carlos Colombino; Chris Dercon and
Maaike Ritsema of Witte de With;
The editor and publishers would like to Robert Epp of the Winnipeg Art Gallery;
thank the authors for permission to Eugenio Dittborn; Jean Fisher;
reprint their essays. We should also like Shifra M Goldman; Julia P Herzberg;
to thank the following for permission to Cildo Meireles and Susan Otto.
reprint copyright material: Art Journal,
New York, for ‘Beyond “the Fantastic” :
Framing Identity in US Exhibitions of
Latin American Art’, from vol. 31, no. 4,
Winter 1992; Art Nexus and Kala Press
0L - 2e!O0! I
r
Contents
Foreword 9
Introduction by Gerardo Mosquera 10
Continental Divisions
‘Other’ Modernities
Contextualizing Multiculturalism
Fig. 1 When I was asked by inIVA to collaborate on the preparation of Beyond the Fantastic
Marta Maria Pérez
for publication in English I was happy to agree, but mainly for the selfish reason of
Bravo
gaining access to many texts that I knew of only by reputation. Those people interested
Paths (Caminos), 1990
Silver gelatin print, in the cultural manifestations of Latin America will know only too well how difficult it
50.8 x 40.6 cms often is to remain in touch with new ideas across the geographic divide, a difficulty
Courtesy
exacerbated by the complex web of histories that unite Europe with Latin America.
Throckmorton Fine Art
Inc., New York
With this in mind I turned avidly to this impressive body of text, and many readings
later I am still returning to the articles with interest and enthusiasm.
In the past decade there has been an enormous growth in the external recognition
of a ‘Latin American’ art. Large international exhibitions and publications have
attempted to categorize and define the existence of such a phenomenon. This shift in
the concerns of the international art market has, however, only served to highlight the
ambivalent position of many of the producers of culture within Latin America. The
defining voice of the international ‘Latin American Boom’ has remained that of the
outside observer.
In this anthology Gerardo Mosquera has selected a range of writings that offer a
complex and multilevelled introduction to critical debates within (and without) Latin
America. For the first time an English-language audience can have access to the writ
ings of the most important cultural theoreticians of contemporary Latin America.
Beyond the Fantastic offers an opportunity to review and reconsider some of the vital
issues of contemporary artistic and critical practice.
Oriana Baddeley
Associate Editor
Introduction
Gerardo Mosquera
This book is a selection of new theoretical discourses on the visual arts in Latin
America, dealing with the critical thought characteristic of the 1980s, which is still
current today. They constitute a distinctive corpus o f writing, a revision of the
prevailing paradigms from the early 1960s when Marta Traba published the first
book to approach Latin American art in a global manner, attempting to give the
subject some conceptual unity.1 This established a Latin Americanist social theory
of art that, although diverse and often polemical, discussed the particularities of
Latin American art in relation to culture and society, and which lasted for two
decades. The authors included in this book are products of this process, but they
reposition it in accordance with the demands of a new period and within the
framework of a critique of modernity and o f the end of a tragic utopia. In some
cases the paradigms are adapted, in others they are rejected, but even when
completely new viewpoints and strategies are introduced, the discourses are still
centred in the notion of Latin America as a distinctive cultural field. While it may be
simplistic to label this new moment as postmodern, there can be no doubt that it is
conditioned by poststructuralism, cultural studies, and by what we tend to call a
postmodern awareness.
Throughout the 1960s and 1970s Latin American art criticism experienced a boom
that involved such great names as Juan Acha, Aracy Amaral, Damián Bayón, Fermin
Févre, Néstor García Canclini, Mirko Lauer, Frederico Moráis, Mario Pedrosa, Marta
Traba and others who responded to Acha’s plea for the production of theories.2 This
was a reaction to the dominance of impressionism and of metaphorical interpretations
within the Latin American tradition of poetic criticism, the greatest exponent of
which is perhaps Octavio Paz. Most of these critics were not creative writers, as was
(and still is) common, and they attempted to construct a socially based modern Latin
American theory, similar to that which had already been established within literary
theory. Broad paradigms were explored (baroque, constructive vocation, mestizaje,
etc.) in the search for a continental identity, while at the same time the issue of
identity - so characteristic of Latin American thought - began to be called into doubt
along with the paradigms that had created it.3 With some, especially Frederico
Moráis, the critique of an ‘identity neurosis’ reached its most radical extreme, linking
it with colonial manipulation and forwarding a ‘plural, diverse and multifaceted’
notion of the continent that was to influence subsequent developments.4
The backbone of these theories was a social and political view, with an emphasis
on ideology, which was anti-colonial and anti-imperialist. Its most productive result
was the affirmation of a Latin American cultural perspective opposed to Euro-North
American dominance, along with the construction of strategies for art to become
11 Introduction
socially relevant. There were some extraordinary experiments that were left
undeveloped, such as Morais’s ‘New Criticism’ , which involved the critic’s
intervention in the work of art being discussed - especially appropriate for the
installations and performances of socially aware Brazilian conceptual art.
Sometimes these theories bordered on ‘sociologism’ or proposed the socialization of
art as the utopia of a general concern for an increased role of art in society. In this
respect there were strong influences from Marxism and dependency theory, both
fundamental ideas for Latin American consciousness at the time. Fortunately, this
Marxism was undogmatic, independent, contextual, free of links with the Communist
Party or even Cuban orthodoxy. Latin America has always produced Marxists who
could incorporate modernism, with the precedent of the brilliant Peruvian intellectual
and politician José Carlos Mariátegui, who in the 1920s supported the artistic
avant-garde from a militant Marxist perspective, a unique combination anywhere in
the world at that time.
These radical discourses coincided almost exactly with the political and social
situation in Latin America during the 1960s and 1970s. These decades were strongly
marked by the ‘Sixties Spirit’ in its most political sense, influenced to a great degree
by the Cuban Revolution and the activity that generated across the continent. In fact,
much of this spirit was actively created within Latin America, to the extent that one
could speak of a ‘Latin Americanization’ of US culture. This was a time when Latin
America was given a mystical aura, produced by the rise of urban and rural guerrilla
movements, student uprisings, Third World-ism5 . . . which in turn unleashed
unprecedented levels of repression and resulted in military dictatorships. This had
been a time of great hopes inspired by an economic boom (which proved illusory) and
by loans that ultimately led to chronic debt and failed to produce any ‘miracle’ in the
productive infrastructure. This delirium was given physical form in uncontrolled
urban expansion, creating some of the largest megalopolises in the world. These
megalopolises attracted the rural population as part of a structural deformation, a
metaphor for which is the mixture of shanty towns, skyscrapers and mountains in
Rio de Janeiro or Caracas. A record of this chaotic imagery is the book Para verte
mejor, América Latina with a text by Edmundo Desnoes and photographs by Paolo
Gasparini.“ The left dreamed of a free continent in which social justice would reign,
while the right imagined progress towards a developed economy. At this point
Latin America’s precarious and petulant semi-modernity reached its most feverish
pitch of excitement.
Latin America has been the forum for every hope and every failure. Liberation led
to dictatorship, torture, ‘disappearances’, criminal violence . . . The only sector to
12 Beyond the Fantastic
develop fully was drug trafficking, while the economic ‘miracles’ moved to South-East
Asia. The 1980s saw the end of one cycle and the start of another based on failure.
The critics in this anthology all represent to some extent a reaction to this reversal of
a project and its imaginary, strengthening themselves in the stimulated
postdictatorial democratic process. Their anti-utopia is not only the result of a
critique o f modernity and its totalisms, but also comes from the collapse of the high
ideals of modernization during a specific period of this region. It is part of a new
post-utopian thought that is currently one of the few dynamic spaces for the Latin
American left wing. Contrary to appearances, this new mental panorama is very
positive. It shows a lifting of the burden of great schemes and a greater concentration
on small horizontal changes. It implies not pessimism but pragmatism.
Contemporary criticism is in line with a new situation that marks a clear break
with the processes of the 1960s and their repressive consequences. It accompanies the
end of the armed struggle, democratization processes, neo-liberalism, globalization,
migrations and the displacement of culture, the collapse of real socialism, expansion
of mass culture and communication, North American multiculturalism, 'so-called new
social movements and the calamity of the Cuban Revolution. This feeling was
summarized in some graffiti I saw in Caracas several years ago that said: ‘ The dream
has been Castro-ated.’7 There has been a shift from the key concepts of ‘resistance’,
‘socialization’, ‘anti-colonialism’ and ‘revolution’ , which marked earlier rhetoric,
towards ‘articulation’ , ‘negotiation’, ‘hybridization’ , ‘de-centring’ , ‘margins’ and
‘appropriation’, terms that are frequently discussed in this book. The ‘grand policy’ of
vertical transformation has been replaced by specific horizontal micropolicies.
There is a critique of modernity - which is very complex in Latin America given
its fragmentary characteristics and the weight of non-modern components in our
societies - not to mention a sort of premodern postmodernity - or ‘modernity after
postmodernity’, to use Canclini’s term8, which is the result of a diversity of
interacting economic, political and cultural structures. This critique involves a
questioning of the concepts of nation and national culture that has done a great deal
to soften Latin American nationalist fundamentalism. The tendency o f contemporary
discourse to emphasize the fragment has led to a more pluralist view of Latin
America. This is not to say that previously there was no awareness of the diversity of
this geographical/historical/cultural area (or of each of its countries), but nonetheless
there was an attempt to apply, or manipulate, integrationalist narratives that
obscured or minimized social and ethnic differences. Recent migratory floods, with
their massive uprooting of peoples and cultures, have done a lot to weaken the
paradigm of the nation-state. At the same time, the debate on ‘otherness’ has drawn
13 Introduction
attention to the amount of ‘others’ who coexist in countries that have not accepted
their multinational character, and the many implications this has. The benefits have
been pluralism and a sharper focus, which allow one to particularize specific
problems. The risk is that pluralism, used as the ideology o f contemporary
neo-liberalism, can accept difference without threatening the status quo, or even
neutralize conflicts behind a mask of equality, as Yudice, Franco and Flores have
pointed out.9
Beyond any intellectual verification, the ‘others’ themselves - in as much as
they are ‘others’ , and using their own resources - have started to expose the false
communion of our nation-states. An example of this is the Frente Zapatista de
Chiapas against the ‘perfect dictatorship’ of neo-liberal Mexico and NAFTA. These
‘postmodern’ guerrillas have nothing to do with the ideological and strategic schemes
of Che Guevara’s foquismo10 of previous decades; instead their struggle is born from a
specific social and ethnic base, the particular demands of which are fought over
without aiming for an all-encompassing revolution. They are closer to the so-called
new social movements, albeit using ‘old’ guerrilla tactics. On the other hand, the
most effective battles have been fought within language and through a sort of
political performance through the mass media; it has also been a guerrilla war of
the symbolic.
New criticism puts forward particular strategies, working on the margins,
deconstructing power mechanisms and rhetoric, appropriating and resignifying.
This agenda is related to the development of a socially, politically and culturally
aware conceptualism that has sophisticated the symbolic resources of this type of art
in order to discuss the complexity of Latin American societies. It is also related to
artistic tendencies that cynically proclaim their customary Latin American freedom
to take from the centre and freely and often ‘incorrectly’ readapt. The complex of
being ‘derivative’ has been transformed into pride in the particular skill of
appropriating and transforming things to one’s own benefit, encouraged by a
postmodern breaking-down of the hierarchies between the original and the copy.
Paradoxically, new critics are questioning old notions of identity just when the
issue has become relevant to the West as a result of multiculturalism. From this
debate they take and develop a dynamic, relational, multiple and polymorphic view of
identity, making a plausible break with more or less deep-rooted essentialisms that
had affected previous discourses to a certain degree. The increase in migratory
movement, along with the consolidation of Latin American communities in the
United States and of Latin Americans from one country in another, have all
contributed to this ‘liberation of identity’ . Latin America is a continent of internal
r
14 Beyond the Fantastic
and external displacement. This situation has sharpened multiple identities and
emphasized frontier cultures. Many artists have centred their work on this. There is
widespread enthusiasm for ‘hybridization’, a category that critics have underlined as
one of the paradigms with which to interpret contemporary culture in the continent
in several directions. The previous concept of mestizaje, which was based on
ethnocultural identity and for some writers was tainted by an ontological aftertaste,
has been replaced by a more dynamic, encompassing and polymorphic notion that
nonetheless also runs the risk of becoming another all-encompassing term with which
to blur differences, power relationships and conflicts of interest.
There is a tendency on the part of left-wing postmodernist critics to use terms
such as ‘hybridization’ , ‘displacement’, ‘borders’ , ‘decentralization’ or ‘re-articulation’
like mantras of peripheral sociocultural affirmation, with an optimism that prevents a
critique of the internal workings of these categories. There is a risk of making carpet
slippers for the periphery, constructing a complacency in subalternity that prevents a
questioning that might stimulate change and blunts the critical blade that should
always be turning upon itself. This contradictory risk arises from a post-colonial
critique of the hegemony of the centres of economic and symbolic power, accompanied
by a reaffirmation of the margins, one of the most useful achievements of the
contributors to this book.
The postmodern tendency to break down the divisions between ‘cultured’ and
popular has opened the doors to a re-evaluation of indigenous cultures, and to the
vernacular in general. The most important achievement is that this is being done
with a less paternalistic slant. Several artists and critics have expressed their
astonishment at the syncretism and spontaneity of urban popular culture, which has
become an icon for the new paradigms of appropriation, resignification and
hybridization. Critics of the 1960s and 1970s were suspicious of mass culture, which
they associated with imperialist penetration and ideological, consumerist and
pseudocultural manipulation. Now, in contrast, there is a new appreciation and even
a utopian view of it and of kitsch, which has eliminated the Greenbergian distance
typical of previous critics. However, the point is that increasing international contact
between ‘high’ and ‘low’ cultures - which had always been an important factor in
Latin America - implies more o f a mutual exchange of signifiers and resources
between fields that nonetheless remain separate with regard to their signifieds and
specific circuits. The supposed breaking down of distinctions is a postmodern utopia.
Beyond the Fantastic presents a selection of new theoretical discourses on Latin
American visual arts in one volume for the first time, bringing together the most
important exponents of the new criticism. The title, taken from one o f the texts,
15 Introduction
Caribbean identity is at the centre of Bocquet’s article and is also present in my own,
which presents a case of the appropriation of modernism in the search for a non-
Western means of expression. Richard has often discussed the issue of resignification
as a key strategy for Latin American culture, as well as remapping the new
relationship between the centres and the peripheries; her essays on these topics are
here supplemented by her text on feminism and its application to the work of several
Chilean artists. There is a very close relationship between Camnitzer’s conceptual art
and his writings on the visual arts, which are often interpretations of the art of the
centres seen from a Latin American perspective. It was important that this anthology
should include the voices of artists who write, and Camnitzer has focused on their
relationship with the mainstream and on the transcultural problems of the exiled
artist. The critic Ybarra-Frausto offers an analysis o f Chicano art and culture that
serves as an example of the condition of Latin American communities in the United
States. Gómez-Peña is another artist who connects his visual and textual discourses
closely, developing the paradigm of the border as a privileged site for contemporary
culture, together with the issue o f multiple identities. Yúdice criticizes the
‘exportation’ of North American multiculturalism, putting the case for a truly
pluralist cultural valuation. The international circulation of Latin American art is
dealt with by Ramirez and by Ponce de León, who analyse control from the centres
and its cultural implications. Monica Amor criticises the new emphasis on plurality in
Latin American art exhibitions that is replacing the ‘fantastic’ paradigm, going
‘beyond the fantastic’. Olalquiaga’s essay is one of the most radical examples of a
valuation of vernacular urban culture. Peluffo Linari discusses the construction of a
modern national identity in Uruguay through an analysis of urban monuments.
Buntinx’s essay explores the intertwined relationship between art, politics and social
communication, through the analysis of two specific works that reflect a particularly
complex moment in Peruvian history, emphasizing the reconstruction of an aura in
‘cultured’ works through popular perception. The book ends with a text by Lauer
that could almost act as a readjustment of the anthology itself, or at least as a very
apposite warning against certain postmodernist deliriums that ignore the dire social
situation of the continent. Alongside globalization and decentralization, poverty
remains the same. At least, I have not yet heard of ‘postmodern poverty’ .
17 Introduction
NOTES
2 Juan Acha, ‘Hacia una crítica de arte como productora de teorías’, Artes Visuales, 13 (Mexico City, 1977).
3 Mestizaje-, refers to the racial and cultural mix o f European, Indian and African descendants typical of
Latin American society [translator’s note].
4 Frederico Moráis, Las artes plásticas en la América Latina: del trance a lo transitorio (Havana, 1990),
pp. 4-5. First published in 1979. Pages 5-17 summarize the development o f Latin American art criticism
prior to the new stage on which this anthology focuses. See also Juan Acha, ‘La crítica de arte en
Latinoamérica’, Re-Vista, 13 (Medellin, 1979), pp. 18-22.
5 From the Spanish term tercermundismo, a theory that defends the particular characteristics of Third
World culture [translator’s note].
6 Edmundo Desnoes and Paolo Gasparini, Para verte mejor, (Mexico City: América Latina, 1972).
7 In Spanish: ‘El sueño se Castró', a pun on Fidel Castro’s name and castration [translator’s note].
8 Néstor García Canclini, Culturas Híbridas (Mexico City: Grijalbo, 1989), p. 19.
9 George Yúdice, Jean Franco and Juan Flores, ‘Introduction’ to On Edge: The Crisis o f Contemporary Latin
American Culture (Minneapolis and London, 1992), pp. 18-19.
10 Foquismo: the theory o f stimulating focal points o f revolution as a global strategy [translator’s note].
I#f*i
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C ontinental Divisions
M odernity after P ostm odernity
Néstor García Canclini
In Latin America the debate on postmodernism seems to be dying down just as we are Fig. 2 (opposite
previous page)
becoming aware of it. There is no shortage of articles and books on the subject but
Joaquín Torres-García
most of these are blinkered by two false concepts concerning the relationship between Indoamerica, 1938
modernity and postmodernity. Oil on cardboard,
The first misconception, visible above all in sociological and political texts, is 100 x 80 cms
Prívate collection,
expressed in the following question: ‘Why should we be bothered with postmodernity
Buenos Aires
when modern advances have not yet fully arrived in our continent, and are not
available to all?’ We have not experienced solid industrialization, neither do we have
intensive technological agriculture, nor a sociopolitical organization based on material
and formal rationality that, from Kant to Weber, would have become common sense in
the West. Neither evolutionist progress nor democratic rationality are popular causes
among us.
The second misconception, common among those who concern themselves with art
and literature, is in thinking that postmodernity has come to replace modernity. Thus
it is believed that the avant-garde and all utopian or progressive programmes have
been discarded as naïve ways of conceiving history.
My main thesis in this text is that postmodernist movements are relevant and
interesting for Latin America in as much as they prepare the ground for a rethinking
of the links between tradition, modernity and postmodernity.
in fact they were creating elite cultures by ignoring the huge Indian and peasant
populations; these reacted against their exclusion through countless revolts and in
migrations that ‘disturbed’ the cities. Populism seemed to incorporate these
excluded sectors, but its policy of economic and cultural distribution, without
structural change, was reversed in a few years or diluted into a demagogic form of
customer service.
‘Why still pretend to have a state,’ asked the writer José Ignacio Cabrujas when
he was consulted by the Presidential Commission for the Reform of the Venezuelan
State, if the state is ‘a system of deceptions?’ Venezuela, he argued, was created like a
campsite, first inhabited by nomad tribes and then by the Spanish, who used it as a
stop-over on the search for promised gold, en route to Potosí or El Dorado. Progress
meant that this campsite was transformed into an enormous hotel in which citizens
are like guests and the state becomes the manager, ‘permanently failing to guarantee
the comfort of his guests’ .
To live, i.e. to accept life and expect my actions to have some effect, to move in
a historical framework towards a goal, is to act against the rules of the hotel.
If I am to stay in a hotel, I do not expect to change the furnishings, or improve
them, or adapt them to my wishes; I simply use them.
It was once thought that a state was necessary to administer this hotel,
with a number of institutions and laws to guarantee a basic level of order,
certain elegant principles, Apollonian more than elegant, through which we
would enter into the civilized world.
It would have been fairer to have made up a list of those rules which we
always find in hotel rooms, usually on the door: ‘How you should live here’,
‘At what time you should leave’, ‘Please do not eat in the rooms’, ‘No dogs
allowed’ , etc. This would be a pragmatic set of rules with no affectation of
being based on principles. ‘This is your hotel, enjoy it and try to cause as little
trouble as possible,’ could be the most effective way of redrafting the first
clause of the National Constitution.4
How can we explain this conflict between modern Latin American states, their
societies and their political culture? What is the role of professional culture and of
everyday culture in the true development of our countries? The international debate
on modernity and its culture may help us to understand this state of uneasiness or
suspicion. We will return to some of the recent historical and sociological research in
Latin America that has started to develop a different view of the links between
22 Beyond the Fantastic
modernism and modernization. First we must establish some guidelines for what we
now understand by modernity.0
modernity; and modernism, those cultural projects that take place at several points
along the development of capitalism.1
6 To take Latin America as the subject for an
analysis of these three factors can be too daunting a task and creates a false
homogeneity. Neither modernization nor modernism developed in the same way in all
the countries of the continent. Nonetheless, there are enough important shared
characteristics and parallel historical developments - as well as a differential
economic and symbolic relationship with the rest of the international economic and
symbolic markets - to justify speaking of Latin America as a whole.
As Renato Ortiz has pointed out, the Brazilian case is totally different.' How could
artists and writers have a specialized readership if 84 per cent of the population was
illiterate in 1890, 75 per cent in 1920 and still 57 per cent in 1940? Until the 1930s
the average print run of a novel was 1,000 copies. For many more decades authors
could not make a living from writing alone, so they worked as teachers, civil servants
or journalists, all of which created a literature dependent on state bureaucracy and
the mass media. For this reason, Ortiz concludes, in Brazil there was never a clear
European distinction between artistic culture and the mass market, hence there was
less mutual antagonism than in Europe.3
Studies on other Latin American countries show a similar or worse situation.
As long as modernization and democratization affects only a small minority it is
impossible to create symbolic markets in which autonomous cultural fields can grow.
If in the modern world to be cultured is to be well-read, this was something
impossible for more than half the population of Latin America in 1920. This
restriction was highlighted by access to higher education, the gateway to modern
culture. In the 1930s not even 10 per cent of secondary school students went to
university. As Brunner says with reference to Chile during this period, a ‘traditional
constellation of elites’ demanded that those who attended literary salons or wrote in
cultural magazines and newspapers had to belong to the ruling class. Oligarchic
hegemony created divisions within society that limited its modern expansion by
‘opposing the organic development of the state with its own limitations (the
narrowness of the symbolic market and the Hobbesian division of the ruling class)’.9
Modernization thus has a limited market, democratization is for the minority,
ideas are renewed but with little effect on social development. The gap between
modernization and modernism is useful for the ruling classes to protect their
hegemony - not always to justify it, but simply to reaffirm their status. With the
written word this was done by limiting schooling and access to books and magazines.
In visual terms it was achieved in three ways that made it possible for the elite
continually to re-establish its aristocratic conception after each modernizing change:
a) by spiritualizing cultural production into artistic ‘creation’, thus separating art
from craft;
b) by freezing the circulation of symbolic goods, putting them into collections and
concentrating them in museums, palaces and other exclusive centres;
c) by advancing that the only legitimate way of consuming these goods is through an
equally spiritualized and hieratic form: contemplation.
If this was the visual culture advanced by schools and museums, what could the
avant-garde do? How could they find a new way to represent (in both senses of the
25 Modernity after Postmodernity
word, transforming reality into images and being representative of this reality) these
heterogeneous societies in which several cultural traditions live together and
contradict each other all the time, with different reasoning and absorbed unevenly by
different sectors? Is it possible to promote cultural modernism while socioeconomic
modernization is so uneven? Some art historians have come to the conclusion that
innovative movements were ‘transplants’ or ‘drafts’ disconnected from our reality.
[In Europe] Cubism and Futurism relate to the artists’ admiration and
enthusiasm for the physical and mental transformations generated by the first
machine age. Surrealism was a revolt against the alienation of technology.
Concrete art appeared with functionalist architecture and industrial design in
the programme to create a new all-encompassing human habitat. Art informel
is another reaction against rationalism. The asceticism and mass production of
the functional age is the result of a deep moral crisis, the existential abyss
created by the Second World War . . . We have gone through this same
sequence of movements without entering the ‘mechanical reign’ of the
Futurists, without reaching any industrial climax, without fully entering into
consumer society, without being swamped by mass production, without feeling
restricted by excessive functionalism. We have experienced existential anguish
without Warsaw or Hiroshima.10
Before questioning this comparison I would like to admit that I also quoted, and
extended it, in a book I published in 1977.11 Among the other disagreements I now
have with this text (the reason why I have not authorized reprinting of my book) are
those born of a more complex vision of Latin American modernity.
Why did the metropolitan model of modernization arrive so late and in such an
incomplete manner to our countries? Is it just because of the structural dependency
created by a deterioration in economic relations or the selfish interests of the ruling
classes who resisted social modernization while elegantly dressing their privileges
with modernism? The failure of these interpretations comes partly from measuring
our modernity against an idealized vision of how this process happened in the central
countries. The first revision is to see whether there are in truth so many differences
between European modernization and our own. Then we should examine whether the
view of a repressed and delayed Latin American modernity, automatically dependent
on the metropolis, is quite as accurate and dysfunctional as studies on our
‘backwardness’ tend to declare.
26 Beyond the Fantastic
It is worth quoting from this statement at length because it contains the mixture
of correct analysis and hasty mechanical distortion with which we are often
interpreted from the centre and which we too often imitate. The first fault of
Anderson’s nonetheless stimulating analysis, and one that was also popular in the
Third World until recently, is to group Colombia, India and Turkey under the same
umbrella. The second is to consider One Hundred Years o f Solitude - an incredible
flirtation with our assumed magical realism - as symptomatic of our modernism.
The third is (and this even in a text by Anderson, one of the most perceptive thinkers
in the debate on modernity), the rustic determinism of attributing the ‘cause’ of
literary and visual masterpieces to socioeconomic factors.
Although this mechanistic model spoils some of Anderson’s argument, the article
does include some passages of more subtle exegesis. For example, he illustrates the
fact that cultural modernism does not express economic modernization by recognizing
that England, his own country, despite being the birthplace of industrial capitalism
and having dominated the world market for some one hundred years, ‘did not
27 Modernity after Postmodernity
produce a native modernist movement of any significance in the early decades of this
century’ . Anderson suggests that modernist movements arose in continental Europe
not where structural modernization took place but where complex situations were
created by ‘the intersection of different temporal moments’ . This type of situation
arose in Europe as a three-way cultural field in which the decisive forces were:
a) the codification of a highly formal academicism in the arts, institutionalized by
states and societies dominated by aristocratic or landowning classes that had been
overtaken economically but which remained powerful in politics and culture until
the First World War;
b) the emergence in these societies of the technological products of the second
industrial revolution (telephone, radio, automobile, etc.);
c) the perceived proximity of social revolution that arose with the Russian Revolution
and in other social movements in Western Europe.
The persistence of the anciens régimes, and the academicism concomitant with
them, provided a critical range of cultural values against which insurgent
forms of art could measure themselves . . . At the same time, however, the old
order, precisely in its still partially aristocratic coloration, afforded a set of
available codes and resources by which the ravages of the market as an
organizing principle of culture and society . . . could also be resisted.13
José Vasconcelos to Carlos Fuentes and Carlos Monsiváis, the issue of what it means
to write literature in a society lacking a market strong enough to support an
independent cultural field has been a determining factor for authors. What is the
purpose of being a writer in countries where liberal democracy is fragile, where the
state does not invest in the arts or in science, and where the creation of modern
nation-states has not overcome ethnic divisions nor the unequal distribution of a
supposedly shared heritage? These issues are not simply questions to be raised in
essays and in the debates between ‘formalists’ and ‘populists’ : they are an essential
part of the difference between Jorge Luis Borges and Roberto Arlt or Octavio Paz and
Gabriel García Márquez. When a sociology of reading is established in Latin America,
one can imagine this question being debated as a determining factor in the
relationship between these authors and their public.
The coincidence between the interpretations of social historians concerning the Fig. 3
Emiliano di Cavalcanti
rise of cultural modernization in Latin America is significant. What happened was
Five Young Women
not a transplant, especially with regard to the leading artists and writers, but rather from Cuaratinguetà
a re-elaboration to contribute to social change. The attempt by artists to create (Cinco Mogas de
independent cultural arenas, secularize images and organize themselves Guaratinguetà), 1930
Oil on canvas,
professionally was not meant to encapsulate their world aesthetically, as some
92 x 70 cms
European modernist movements had done in order to hide away from social Museu de Arte de Sao
modernization. In all histories, individual creative projects are thwarted by the Paulo Assis
Chateaubriand
paralysis of the bourgeoisie, the lack of an independent art market, provincialism
Photograph by Luiz
(even in key cities like Buenos Aires, Sao Paulo, Lima and Mexico City), arduous
Hossaka
competition with academicism, colonial attitudes, naive Indianism and regionalism.
Faced with the difficulties of simultaneously injecting Indian and colonial traditions
with new tendencies, many sympathized with Mario de Andrade’s comment at the
end of the 1920s that the modernists were a group ‘isolated and protected by their
own convictions’ :
. . . the only part of the nation that placed the national artistic question as
their almost exclusive concern. In spite of this, they do not represent any part
of Brazilian reality. They are outside our social rhythm and our economic
instability, beyond Brazilian worries. While it is possible that this minority
adapted itself to Brazilian reality and developed an intimate knowledge of
Brazil, in contrast, Brazilian reality never managed to develop an intimate
relationship with them aesthetically.18
Fig. 4 the whole field that translates’ .19 As fragile as this field may be, it is the area for
Frida Kahlo
reformulation and reorganization of foreign models.
My Grandparents,
My Parents, and I
In several cases cultural modernism, rather than denationalization, provided the
(Family Tree), 1936 impulse and symbolic repertoire with which to construct national identity. The
Oil on tempera on intense search for a Brazilian identity starts with the avant-garde of the 1920s.
metal plate,
‘We will only be modern if we are national,’ was the catchphrase according to Renato
30.7 x 34.5 cms
The Museum of Ortiz. From Oswald de Andrade to the construction of Brasilia, the battle for
Modern Art, New York modernization was a movement to create a nation critically opposed to that proposed
Gift of Allan Roos, MD, by oligarchies, conservative forces or foreign powers. ‘Modernism is an idea which is
and B Mathieu Roos
out of place and which expresses itself as a project.’20
Photograph © 1995
The Museum of After the Mexican Revolution several cultural movements emerged, aimed
Modern Art, New York simultaneously at modernization and at independent national development. These
movements invoked the project to establish cultural centres (ateneismo) established
during the government of Porfirio Diaz, with its occasionally absurd pretensions
such as Vasconcelos’s wish to spread classical culture to ‘redeem the Indians’ and
free them of their ‘backwardness’ . For many artists opposition to the Academia de
San Carlos and involvement in postrevolutionary change forced a questioning of the
divisions created by uneven and dependent development: cultured art against
popular art, culture and work, avant-garde experimentation and social awareness.
The Mexican attempt to overcome these critical divisions of capitalist modernization
was linked to the creation of a national society. Alongside the spreading of Western
education and culture to the lower classes, the desire was to include Mexican art
and crafts in a supposed common heritage. Rivera, Siqueiros and Orozco
produced an monographic synthesis of national identity inspired by Aztec and
Maya art, church altarpieces, vernacular bar decorations, the colours and forms
of local pottery, Michoacán lacquer and the experimental achievements of the
European avant-garde.
This hybrid reorganization of visual language was backed by changes in the
relationship between artists, the state and the working class. Murals in public
buildings, calendars, posters and widely read magazines were the result of a forceful
statement of new aesthetic tendencies within the newborn cultural field along with
the new relationships that artists were building up with official educational
administrators through the unions and popular movements.
Mexican cultural history from the 1930s to the 1950s shows the fragility of this
utopia and its erosion by intra-artistic and sociopolitical factors. The cultural field,
made uniform by dogmatic realism, too much emphasis on content and the
dominance of politics over art, lost its vitality and resisted innovation. Also, it was
36 Beyond the Fantastic
difficult to emphasize the social role of art when the revolutionary impulse had been
‘institutionalized’ or marginalized into opposition movements.
Despite the formation of a modern cultural field in Mexico with the unique
possibility of accompanying a transformative process with monumental and massive
works, when the new modernizing impulse came in the 1950s and 1960s, the cultural
situation in Mexico was not very different from that of other Latin American
countries. The National Realist legacy was still alive but hardly produced important
works. The Mexican state was still richer and more stable than most in Latin
America and still had the resources to build museums and cultural centres, and
award grants and benefits to intellectuals, writers and artists. This support began to
diversify, creating unexpected tendencies. The central discussions became similar to
those of other Latin American societies: how to articulate the local and the
cosmopolitan; the promise of modernity and the inertia of tradition; how to increase
the independence of the cultural field and make it compatible with the fragile
development of the artistic and literary market; the industrial reorganization of
culture; the uneven development that a dependent capitalist modernity reproduces
and emphasizes.
Our conclusion should be that in none of these societies was modernism the
mimetic adoption of imported models, neither was it the search for purely formal
solutions. Jean Franco has pointed out that even the names of the movements show a
social concern: while European avant-garde artists took names that emphasized their
rupture with art history - Impressionism, Symbolism, Cubism - in Latin America
they preferred to refer to themselves by names that suggest a response to factors
outside art: modernismo, nuevomundismo, indigenismo,21
It is true that these projects of social inclusion became partially diluted into
academicism, variations on official culture or market games, as happened to varying
degrees with Peruvian indigenism, Mexican muralism or Portinari in Brazil. These
frustrations were not due either to a doomed artistic destiny, or to a discrepancy with
socioeconomic modernization. Their contradictions and discrepancies are due to
sociocultural heterogeneity, the difficulties of sharing a present with several different
historical timescales. It would appear that, in contrast to those theories determined to
back either traditional or avant-garde culture, we should try to approach slippery
Latin American modernity in terms of modernism as the attempt to intervene in the
conflict between the dominant semi-oligarchical order, a semi-industrialized capitalist
economy and semi-transformative social movements. The problem is not that what
happened in Latin America was a delayed or imperfect version of a process that had
been perfect in Europe, neither is there any point in the reactive search for an
37 Modernity after Postmodernity
alternative, absolutely independent paradigm when the traditions have already been
transformed by the expansion of international capitalism. In the most recent stage,
when the transnationalization of the economy and of culture makes us, in the words
o f Octavio Paz, ‘the contemporaries of all men’ without eliminating national
traditions, it is an unacceptable simplification to choose exclusively between
dependency and nationalism or modernization and local tradition.
political desire for culturalization, which was especially dramatic when it occurred
within the same movement or even within the same person. Those who were
renewing and expanding the sociocultural field were the same people who wanted to
democratize artistic creation. At the same time that symbolic differentiation was at
its highest, with formal experimentation and rejection of the acceptable, there .was a
desire to associate with the masses. In the evening one could go to private views in
avant-garde galleries in Sao Paulo or Rio de Janeiro or a happening at the Di Telia
Institute in Buenos Aires, and the next morning could be taking part in the attempts
to spread information and consciousness from popular arts centres or the radical CGT
in Argentina. This was one of the divisions of the 1960s. Another related division was
between the public and private spheres, with the resulting clash of loyalty for artists
between the state and business, or between business and social movements.
The frustration of the political will has been examined in many works, while the
thwarted cultural will has not been studied. Its failure is attributed to suffocation by
the crisis with the revolutionary forces with which it worked, which is partly true but
there has been no attempt to analyse the cultural causes of the collapse of this
attempt to make modernism interact with modernization.
One key to this is the overvaluation of transformative movements without taking
into account the logic of development of the cultural field. Almost the only social
mechanism that is analysed in critical literature on art and culture of the 1960s and
early 1970s is that of dependency. This ignores the restructuring that had been taking
place for two or three decades beforehand in the cultural field and in its relation to
society. This fault is evident when one rereads the manifestos, political analysis and
discussions of the period.
Recent views on the communication of culture are based on two basic tendencies
in social logic: on the one hand, the specialization and stratification of cultural
production; on the other hand, the restructuring of the relationship between the
public and private spheres, with big business and private foundations taking over.
The first symptoms of this first development can be seen in the changes in
Mexican cultural policy during the 1940s. The state, which had promoted the
integration of tradition with modernity and of the popular with the erudite, now
launched a project in which popular utopia gave way to modernization and
revolutionary utopia gave way to industrial planning. It was during this period that
the state divided its cultural policies in line with social class: the Instituto Nacional
de Bellas Artes was created for ‘high’ culture, and within a few years the Museo
Nacional de Artes e Industrias Populares and the Instituto Nacional Indigenista were
also founded. The creation of this separate bureaucratic apparatus indicated a new
40 Beyond the Fantastic
direction in institutional policy. Despite the occasional attempts of the INBA to make
cultured art less elitist, and the way in which organizations dedicated to popular
culture have tried to reactivate the revolutionary ideal of a classless society, the
divided structure of cultural policy illustrates how the state viewed social
reproduction and the differentiated renewal of consensus.
In other countries cultural policy also responded to the fragmentation of symbolic
universes. It was the increase in differentiated investments into either the elitist or
the mass-market sectors that accentuated the division between them. Combined with
the increased specialization of producers and consumers, this division changed the
meaning of the gap between cultured and popular. This gap was no longer defined as
it had been until the second half of this century in terms of social class, as the
division between an educated elite and an illiterate or semi-literate majority. High
culture became the domain of a small faction within the bourgeoisie and middle
classes, while most of the upper and middle classes, along with almost all of the
working class, became subject to the mass programming of the cultural industry.
The cultural industry gives artists, writers and musicians a greater effectiveness
than could ever have been achieved by the most successful attempts at cultural
diffusion led by artists themselves. Concerts in folk clubs and at political meetings
reached a tiny amount of people in comparison to what the same musicians could
achieve through recordings and television. Magazines dealing with culture, fashion or
decoration sold in newsagents or supermarkets place literary, visual and architectonic
innovations in the hands of those who never go to museums or bookshops.
Along with this change in the relationship between ‘high’ culture and mass
consumption there was also a change in the relationship of all classes with the
metropolitan innovations. There was no longer the need to belong to an upper-class
family or receive a foreign grant in order to be up to date with the changes in artistic
or political fashions. Cosmopolitanism became more democratic. Although the
mechanisms o f differentiation re-emerged in the ways of appropriating these
innovations, in an industrialized culture that needs constantly to expand its
consumption the possibility of reserving areas exclusively for the minority becomes
increasingly difficult.24
modernity, organized by another type of industry. The general tendency is for the
modernization of culture for the elite to be undertaken by the state as the masses
become the responsibility of private enterprise.
While traditional heritage remained the responsibility of the state, the promotion
of modern culture was increasingly the responsibility of business and private
organizations. Two styles of cultural action were born of this difference. As the state
understood its policy to be the protection and preservation of heritage, innovatory
projects passed into society, especially into the hands of those with money to risk. The
arts provide two types of symbolic return: for the state, legitimacy and consensus as it
identifies itself as the representative of national history; for business, profit as it uses
avant-garde culture to create an ‘independent’ image for its economic expansion.
As we saw in the previous sections with reference to the metropolis, the
modernization of visual culture that historians of Latin American art tend to discuss
purely in terms of experimentation by artists has been almost totally dependent on
big business for the past thirty years. This has been the result of corporate
sponsorship of innovation or the mass distribution of these innovations through
industrial and graphic design. A history of the contradictions in Latin American
cultural modernity would find itself discussing how much it was a result of a policy
as premodern as patronage. The starting point would be the subsidies with which
the oligarchies at the end of the nineteenth century and the first half of the
twentieth century supported artists, writers, cultural centres, literary and visual
salons, concerts and musical associations. The key moment was in the 1960s.
In the wake of the productive revolution and the new consumption patterns that it
created, the industrial bourgeoisie designed foundations and experimental centres to
give private enterprise the leading role in the restructuring of the cultural market.
Some of these activities were promoted by transnational companies and arrived as
exports of postwar aesthetic tendencies born abroad, especially in the United States.
For this reason, critiques of our dependency in the 1960s were justified, especially
the studies by Shifra Goldman. With a knowledge of North American sources, she was
able to see how large conglomerates (Esso, Standard Oil, Shell, General Motors) used
museums, magazines, artists and critics from North and Latin America to promote a
‘depoliticized’ formal experimentation to replace social realism in our continent.20
Those historical interpretations that concentrate exclusively on the conspiracies
and Machiavellian alliances of the dominators ignore the complexity and conflicts
of modernization.
During this period the radical transformations in Latin American society,
education and culture that I described earlier were taking place. The use of new
42 Beyond the Fantastic
The cultural competition between private enterprise and the state in Mexico is
concentrated in a large business group, Televisa. This company controls four national
television channels with booster stations all over Mexico and the United States, video
production and distribution studios, publishing houses, radio stations, museums of
‘high’ and of popular art (until 1986 the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo Rufino
Tamayo and now the Centro Cultural de Arte Contemporáneo). Such diverse activity,
under the control of a monopoly, structures the relationship between cultural
markets. We saw how between the 1950s and 1970s the gap between elite and mass
culture widened because o f differentiated investment and the increasing
specialization of artistic producers and consumers. In the 1980s macroindustries took
control of cultural programming for both the elite and the masses. A similar process
took place in Brazil with Rede Globo, the owner of television companies, radio
stations, soap operas for national and foreign consumption and the creator of a new
business approach towards culture that set up highly professional relationships
between artists, technicians, producers and the public.
The simultaneous ownership of large exhibition areas and advertising spaces, and
the influence on critics in television, radio, magazines and in other institutions
allowed these companies to plan expensive cultural activities with maximum impact,
control the circuits through which they were communicated, and manipulate both the
critics and, to a lesser extent, the way in which different groups interpreted them.
What are the implications of this change for elite culture? If modern culture is
created by the increasing independence of the cultural space formed by the agents of
each specific discipline - in art, for example, artists, galleries, museums, critics and
the public - then these all-embracing foundations attack a central part of this project.
Subordinating the interaction between agents of the artistic arena to a single
business will tend to neutralize the independence of the field. As regards cultural
dependence, while it is true that the imperial influence of metropolitan companies
does not disappear, the immense power of Televisa, Rede Globo and other Latin
American organizations is changing the structure of our symbolic markets and their
interaction with those of the central countries.
A remarkable example of this evolution of monopolies of patronage is the almost
unipersonal institution led by Jorge Glusberg, the Centro de Arte y Comunicación
(CAYC) in Buenos Aires. Glusberg is the owner of one of Argentina’s largest lighting
article companies, Modulor, which gives him the resources with which to finance the
activities of the centre and its artists (Grupo de los 13, and later the Grupo CAYC),
and of those who exhibit there or are sent abroad. Glusberg pays for the catalogues,
advertising and transport, and sometimes the artists’ materials if they cannot afford
44 Beyond the Fantastic
winning a prize at the 14th Sâo Paulo Biennial in 1977, to which Glusberg responded
with a promise to ‘represent the humanism of Argentine art abroad’ . The third stage
was launched in December 1983, one week after the collapse of military rule and the
election of Alfonsin, when Glusberg organized the Sessions for Democracy in the
CAYC and other Buenos Aires galleries.28
In the 1960s the increasing influence of galleries, dealers and especially the
Di Telia Institute, led to Argentina being referred to as a ‘country of distributors’,
alluding to the intervention of these factors in the social process that constitutes
aesthetic meaning.29 Recent foundations do much more than this in that they not only
intervene in the circulation of works, they also reformulate the relationships between
artists, intermediaries and the public. To do this they subordinate the interactions
and conflicts between agents in various positions of the artistic field to a few powerful
figures, or sometimes just one. In this way a structure in which previously the
horizontal connection and fights for legitimacy and renovation were largely based on
artistic criteria, creating the independent dynamics of the cultural field, was replaced
by a pyramid structure in which the force lines were compelled to converge under the
will of a patron or businessman. Aesthetic innovation became a game within the
international symbolic market in which, as is the case with the most advanced and
‘universal’ technologies (film, television, video), national identities that had been a
concern of many avant-garde movements until the 1950s were diluted. While the
internationalizing tendency is typical of the avant-garde, it is worth mentioning that
some had searched for a way of uniting the experimental use of materials and
languages with an interest in critically redefining the cultural traditions from which
they drew inspiration. This interest now decayed as the result of a more mimetic
relationship with the hegemonic tendencies of an international market.
In a series of interviews I conducted with Argentine and Mexican visual artists to
discover what they thought an artist should do to sell and become famous, the most
common reference was to the depression of the Latin American market in the 1980s
and the ‘instability’ to which artists were subjected, partly because of the
obsolescence of aesthetic tendencies and partly because of the economic unevenness
of demand. Under these conditions there is a very strong pressure to conform to an
uncritical and playful style, without social concerns or aesthetic daring, ‘without too
much stridency, elegant, but not too passionate’, which characterizes the art of this
fin de siècle. Those who do well show that a successful work is based as much on
visual discoveries or talent as on skills from journalism, publicity, fashion, travel,
large telephone bills and keeping up to date with international journals and
catalogues. There are those who resist the idea that these extra-aesthetic activities
46 Beyond the Fantastic
should take first place, yet they will still admit that these complementary activities
are essential.
To be an artist or writer and to produce meaningful work amid this reorganization
of global society and markets of symbolism, and to communicate with a broad public,
has become much more complicated. Just as artisans and the producers of popular
culture can no longer refer exclusively to a traditional universe, neither can artists
who want to produce socially acceptable work remain in their particular fields. The
popular and the cultured require new strategies as they are mediated by an
industrial, commercial and spectacular reorganization of symbolic processes.
By the 1990s it is impossible to deny that Latin America has modernized. Socially
and culturally, symbolic modernism and socioeconomic modernization are no longer
so far apart. The problem is that this modernization took place in a way different
from how we expected it to in previous decades. In the second half of this century
modernization was led not so much by the state but by private enterprise. The
‘socialization’ or democratization of culture has been achieved by the cultural
industry (usually in private hands) more than by the cultural or political good
intentions of the producers. There is still an uneven appropriation of symbolic goods
and access to cultural innovation, but this unevenness is no longer as simple and
polar as we thought when we divided each country into the oppressed and the
oppressors, or the world into imperial and dependent countries.
traditions that have not vanished, a modernity that never quite arrives, and a
postmodern questioning of the evolutionary projects that enjoyed hegemony during
this century. Among us, postmodernism doesn’t appear as a tendency with which to
replace modern art, as the trans-avant-garde believes. Neither will it replace
traditional popular art, as some technocratic modernists insist. It is more a complex
situation of cultural development, a transformative process. At its heart is the
reorganization o f the principles that ruled high and traditional art, and the opposition
between them when they worked as separate structures.
The mass communicational and political processes that reorganized the rules of
hegemony and subordinance created the situation that we now call postmodern, one
of the characteristics of which is the breaking-down of the divisions between erudite
and popular. The great folkloric, populist and modernist accounts that organized and
structured types of culture lost their relevance. The repertoire is so mixed that it is
impossible to be cultured simply by knowing great works of art, just as being popular
is more than merely knowing and using the objects and messages generated within a
small community (ethnic, local or class). Now these categories are unstable, they
change with fashion and cross over constantly; on top o f this, users can create their
own collections. Everybody can collect their own repertoire of records, cassettes and
videos that combine ‘high’ culture and pop, including those who already do so in the
structure of their work (such as national Mexican rock, for example, which uses folk,
jazz and classical music).
In fact this process began in Latin America in films during the 1940s and in
television in the 1950s, when the popular was mixed with fragments of high culture,
and then both were subordinated to the grammar of production and the distribution
logic of cultural industries. Since the 1960s literature, music and the visual arts have
also become areas of constant crossover. In particular I am thinking of bossa nova,
which fuses the post-Webern avant-garde with jazz and Afro-Brazilian melodies (Astor
Piazzola did the same with the tango); writers like Manuel Puig and Monsivais who
practise a transclassist intertextuality; visual artists and artisans who combine pre-
Columbian, colonial and modern art, subverting the comfortable distinction that
separated the history of fine arts from folk art.
The first result of all this is that one can no longer rigidly link social class with
cultural status, neither can this status be linked with a fixed repertoire of symbolic
goods. While it is true that many works remain within the minority or popular groups
in which they were produced, the general tendency is for all sectors to have a taste for
items that come from backgrounds that were previously opposed. I am not suggesting
that this fluidity and complexity has done away with social difference. All I am
48 Beyond the Fantastic
pointing out is that this reorganization of the cultural scene and the crossing of
identities lead one to re-examine the order that rules the relationship between
various groups.
The second consequence is that we should admit that the way in which, politically
and culturally, we used to associate ‘popular’ with ‘national’ in the 1960s and 1970s is
no longer valid. The opposition between imperialism and national-popular culture not
only deserves the criticism directed towards the dependency theory from which it
arose, it also obscures a reorganization of the symbolic market. Studies on cultural
imperialism allowed us to examine the mechanisms used by international centres of
artistic, scientific and communicational production that conditioned, and still do
condition, our cultural development. But this model is inadequate to explain
contemporary international power relations. It does not explain the global
development of an industrial, technological, financial and cultural system, the centre
of which is not in a single nation but in a dense network of economic and cultural
structures. Although its decisions and benefits are concentrated in the metropolitan
bourgeoisie, its hegemony occurs less through the imposition of metropolitan culture
than through the adaptation of international knowledge and images to the experience
and habits of different cultures. Neither can we now agree with the theories of
omnipotent manipulation by multinationals or those that reduce the popular to its
traditional and local manifestations. For this reason Renato Ortiz recently used the
term ‘international-popular’ when discussing the fact that in Brazil the massive
restructuring of culture did not imply, contrary to widespread opinion, a greater
dependence on foreign production. Statistics show an increase in cinematic
production in Brazil, in the percentage of Brazilian films on show, of books by
Brazilian writers, and of recordings of Brazilian music, while imports have fallen.
There has been an increasing independence and nationalization of cultural products
while some of them, notably soap operas, are increasingly exported, making Brazil an
active agent in the international market of symbolic goods; passing from the ‘defence
of national-popular to the export of the international-popular’ .31
While this tendency is not the same in all Latin American countries, there are
similar aspects in those with a greater modern cultural development that force a
rethinking of local and foreign articulations. These changes do not neutralize the
issue of how different classes benefit from and are represented by the culture
produced in each country. The radical transformation of the fields of production and
consumption, together with the character of the goods being presented, means that it
is now impossible to keep insisting that the popular is ‘naturally’ associated with the
national and thus is stubbornly opposed to the international.
49 Modernity after Postmodernity
The third consequence allows us to judge the depth of this change. The definition
of popular identity has always been in relation to a certain sense o f territory: with
local and community culture in folklore and anthropology, with the neighbourhood in
the participative research of urban sociology, with national territory in political
populism. To affirm and assert popular identity implies a recovery of sovereignty over
these spaces in which the characteristic aspects of each group are created. There can
be no doubt that this connection with a particular scene remains the basis of many
cultural constructions and that the recovery of heritage is a key concern for countries
as devastated as those of Latin America.
Nonetheless, in this decade there has been a willingness (largely in popular
movements and progressive intellectuals) in many Latin American countries to reflect
on what it means for a culture to move away from its original territory and to
communicate and interact with others. Crafts migrate from the countryside to the
cities; songs and films that speak of popular events are shown in other countries.
How does one fit the new currents of cultural circulation caused by the migrations of
Latin Americans to the USA, people from the poor Latin American countries to the
richer ones, or of peasants to the city, into the unidirectional model of imperialist
domination? How does one account for the hybrid and new cultural forms that these
movements generate? It is no coincidence that the most innovative thought on these
processes is emerging in the main area of migrations on the continent: the frontier of
Mexico and the USA. This is where intercultural movements show their saddest face
- unemployment and the rootlessness of farmers and Indians forced to leave their
homes to survive - but it is also where a powerful creativity is being born. If there are
more than 250 radio stations and television channels and 1,500 publications in
Spanish, along with a growing interest in Latin American music and literature, this is
not only owing to the market created by 20 million ‘Hispanics’ , (or 8 per cent of the
US population - 38 per cent in New Mexico, 25 per cent in Texas and 23 per cent in
California). This interest is also due to the fact that the so-called Latino culture
produces films like Zoot Suit and La Bamba, music by Rubén Blades and Los Lobos,
Luis Valdéz’s plays and Brazilian soap operas, which are imported for their aesthetic
quality and for their ability to represent a type of popular culture that can interact
with modern and postmodern symbolic structures.
At this crossroads of traditional popular symbolism with the international circuits
o f the culture industry, the questions facing identity, nationality, defence of
sovereignty and the uneven appropriation of knowledge and art are transformed.
Conflicts are not resolved, as neo-conservatives would have it, but they move into
another register: that of an increasing displacement of culture. Popular movements
50 Beyond the Fantastic
that shift their activities on to this new stage combine the defence of their own
traditions with what one Mexican artist who lives between Tijuana and San Diego
calls ‘a more experimental, multifocal and tolerant view of culture’ .32 In other words,
cultures whose independence is more conditioned than in traditional societies but
which are more innovative and democratic.
NOTES
1 Sendero Luminoso: literally ‘Shining Path’, a Peruvian Maoist guerrilla movement especially powerful in
rural areas [translator’s note].
3 Octavio Paz, El ogro filantrópico (Mexico City: Joaquín Mortiz, 1979), p. 64.
4 José Ignacio Cabrujas, ‘El Estado del disimulo’, in Heterodoxia y Estado: 5 respuestas: Estado y reforma
(Caracas, 1987).
5 This text forms part o f a book in preparation in which I discuss the philosophical and sociological
interpretations o f modernity (Habermas, Bourdieu, Becker and Lyotard, among others) and their
implications for the Latin American debate on the relationship between erudite, popular and mass
cultures. In this article I am limiting myself almost exclusively to the creation of modernity in elite
culture.
6 I have adapted the tripartite distinction made in Marshall Berman’s book All That Is Solid Melts Into Air:
The Experience o f Modernity (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982), p. 11.
7 Renato Ortiz, A moderna tradigáo brasileira (Sáo Paulo: Brasiliense, 1988), pp. 23-8. The previous
statistics quoted are taken from this book.
8 Ibid., p. 29.
9 José Joaquín Brunner, ‘Cultura y crisis de hegemonías’, in J J Brunner and G Catalan, Cinco estudios
sobre cultura y sociedad (Santiago de Chile: FLACSO, 1985), p. 32.
10 Saúl Yurkievich, ‘El arte de una sociedad en transformación’ , in Damián Bayón (ed.), América Latina en
sus artes, 5th edn (Mexico City: UNESCO/Siglo XXI, 1984), p. 179.
11 Néstor García Canclini, Arte popular y sociedad en América Latina (Mexico City: Grijalbo, 1977). The
Portuguese translation is called A socializando da arte (Sáo Paulo: Cultrix, several editions).
12 Perry Anderson, ‘Modernity and Revolution’ , New Left Review 144 (1984), p. 109.
13 Ibid., p. 105.
14 Ibid., p. 105.
15 Roberto Schwarz, Ao vencedor as batatas (Sáo Paulo: Duas Cidades, 1977), pp. 13-25.
16 Aracy A Amaral, ‘Brasil, del modernismo a la abstracción, 1910-1950’, in Damián Bayón (ed.), Arte
Moderno en América Latina (Madrid: Taurus, 1985), pp. 270-81.
17 Mirko Lauer, Introducción a la pintura peruana del siglo X X (Lima: Mosca Azul, 1976).
51 Modernity after Postmodernity
19 Carlos Altamirano and Beatriz Sarlo, Literatura!sociedad (Buenos Aires: Hachette, 1983), pp. 88-9.
21 Jean Franco, La cultura moderna en América Latina (Mexico City: Grijalbo, 1986), p. 15.
22 Sérgio Micheli, Intelectuals e classe dirigente no Brasil (1920-1945) (Sao Paulo/Rio de Janeiro: Difel, 1979),
p. 172.
23 Luis Alberto Romero, ‘Libros baratos y cultura de los sectores populares’ (Buenos Aires: CISEA, 1986);
Emilio J Corbiére, Centros de cultura populares (Buenos Aires: Centro de Estudios de América Latina,
1982).
24 Research on this subject remains to be done. A precursory text is José Carlos Durand, Arte, privilègio e
distingào (Sào Paulo: Perspectiva, 1989).
26 I have analysed the Argentine case in some depth in La producción simbólica, 4th edn (Mexico City: Siglo
XXI, 1988), especially in the chapter ‘Estrategias simbólicas del desarollismo económico’ . The Portuguese
translation was published by Civilizaqáo Brasileira.
27 Of particular interest in the bibliography on this period is the documentation and analysis in Rita Eder’s
book Gironella (Mexico City: UNAM, 1979), especially chapters 1 and 2.
28 Opinions on the CAYC and on Glusberg are divided among artists and critics, as can be seen from the
research o f Luz M García, M Elena Crespo and M Cristina López in CAYC (Escuela de Bellas Artes,
Facultad de Humanidades y Arte de la Universidad Nacional de Rosario, 1987).
29 Marta F de Slemenson and Germán Kratochwill, ‘Un arte de difusores. Apuntes para la comprensión de un
movimiento plástico de vanguardia en Buenos Aires, de sus creadores, sus difusores y su público’, in J F
Marshal et al., El intelectual latinoamericano (Buenos Aires: Edit, del Instituto, 1970).
30 Andreas Huyssen, ‘Guía del postmodernismo’, Punto de Vista 29, year 10 (1987). The original version was
published in New German Critique, 33 (1984).
32 Guillermo Gómez-Peña, ‘Wacha ese border, son’, La Jornada Semanal 25 (October 1987), pp. 3-5.
S trategies of M o d ern ity in
Latin A m erica
Andrea Giunta
Them and Us
The ‘encounter of two worlds’ was marked by certain characteristics. In its first
version the image of the New World was defined by its difference from the Old.
The European logos was forced to stretch itself to cope with a new and diverse reality,
which, not fitting the patterns, was inevitably distorted in this process. This was a
conflict that affected, above all, language. In response to this, Alejo Carpentier was
to propose the use of localisms, even of exoticisms, as an answer to his question:
‘Are we to suffer the anguish of Hernán Cortés when he complained to Charles V of
not being able to describe certain great things in America “because I do not know the
words by which they are known”?’6 The dispute between a reality and a language that
tried to describe it is revealed in a graphic and eloquent manner by Carpentier in
El siglo de las luces:
Esteban was astonished as he realized how, in these islands, language had been
54 Beyond the Fantastic
Columbus arrived in America with a clear image of what he was going to find.
Pierre d’Ailly’s Imago Mundi, Pliny’s Historia Natural (in its 1489 Italian version),
Aeneas Sylvius’s Historiae Rerum Ubique Gestarunt, and Marco Polo’s Voyages (1485),
were the sources from which he could select the images that would shape his
perception of foreign worlds. Columbus did not discover, he verified and identified,
mutilated and reduced. He started a long tradition of interpreting the reality of
America through the reality of Europe, ignoring indigenous perceptions of it.8 Our
image was made through a deforming mirror reflection. Our cultural development
has been marked by being defined in terms of the ‘other’ .
Modernity is another great organizational discourse with symbolic and
interpretative value (after the Conquest and along with nationality), and continues
this tradition of ‘relative to . . . ’ definitions. Our most typical means of operation has
been transgression of central discourse to communicate with a different reality.
history of schemes and wit. One can borrow in order to develop one’s own version,
turn it upside down, deform, and selectively and intentionally assimilate.
Modernity in Latin America was a misappropriated and modified project. An
educated and travelling intelligentsia built up alliances between a project born in the
context of nascent capitalism in the nineteenth century and a discordant periphery.
However, they soon realized the contradiction in singing the praises of technology and
the machine age in countries where there were few cars (and those were imported) or
roads on which to experience the heady excitement of speed.
Borges, Mariategui and Vallejo all suggested an initial inversion of values. They
coincided in criticizing the ideology of novelty.9 Peripheral strategies relativize the
absolute truths of dominant discourse (be they of unlimited progress or ‘the end of
history’). By deconstructing this discourse they can find the relevant parts and
rebuild it in relation to a diverse object. Latin American culture has worked in this
way since it first gained independence. To formulate strategies and tactics requires an
intelligent use of arms and tools, in this case cultural.
Fords
Viaducts
Coffee aroma
In a framed silence.11
From Amazonia to the big city, Macunaima’s migratory journey also superimposes
56 Beyond the Fantastic
scenes. Mario de Andrade also questions the belligerences of language that are now
disputes translated into a bricolage of discourses, quotations and meta-narratives.12
It is a conflict that leaves Macunaima for a week ‘unable to eat, play or sleep just
because he wanted to know the languages of the land’.13
Sao Paulo had a transformational impact that found montage to be the only way
not to impoverish its description:
The shacks o f saffron and ochre among the greens of the hillside favelas, under
cabraline blue, are aesthetic facts. The Carnival in Rio is the religious
outpouring of our race. Pau-Brazil. Wagner yields to the samba school of
Botafogo. Barbaric, but ours . . .
The learned side. Fate of the first white colonizer, the political master of the
virgin jungle. The graduate. We can’t stop being learned. Doctors. Country of
anonymous pain, anonymous doctors. The Empire was like that. We are all
erudite . . .
Language free of archaisms, free of erudition. Natural and neological. The
millionfold contribution of error. How we speak. How we are.15
The battle for the new, which in the 1922 Week of Modern Art still lacked a
distinctive visual aesthetic, would vindicate the option of also starting from what is
given.16 From this reality Pau-Brazil inverted values and launched its export plan for
a culture that assimilates all it can in a new creation:
One lone battle - the battle for the way forward. Let us distinguish: imported
poetry. And Pau-Brazil Poetry, for export.17
Markets, letters, industrial and telegraph towers, hillsides, fruits, cubes, are all
filtered through an aesthetic that mixes Art Deco with Legeresque Cubism; Tarsila do
57 Strategies of Modernity in Latin America
Amaral’s landscapes define the new in terms of the different. Nature is hot,
rationalized, anthropomorphic and anthropophagite. In Abaporu (fig. 7) the whole
painting is filled with a man, naked, whose giant size is greater than nature. The
anamorphic body extracts its meaning from the land on which it rests. The man-
eating man is, for Oswald de Andrade, the Brazilian devourer o f cultures, the creator
of an existent culture that refounds, through each appropriation, its own culture:
With the foundation, with Michel Seuphor, of Cercle et Carré (1930), Torres-García
58 Beyond the Fantastic
Revista de A n tro po fa g ia
M AN IFESTO A N TR O P O FAG O
Só a antropofagia nos une. Social pobre declarado dos direitos do Só podemos ittender ao mundo
mente. Económicamente. Philoso- homem. orecular.
phicamente. A edade de ouro annunciada pela
America. A edade de ouro. E todas Tinhamos a justiga codificado da
Unica lei do mundo. Expressáo as girls. vinganga A sciencia codificado da
mascarada de todos os individualis Magia. Antropofagia. A transfor
mos, de todos os collectivisino. De Filiagáo. O contacto com o Brasil m a d o permanente do Tabú em tó
todas as religióes. De todos os trata Caraliiba. Oú Villeganhon print ter tem.
dos de paz. re. Montaigne. O homem natural.
Rousseau. Da R e v o lu to Francesa Contra o mundo reversivel e as
Tupy, or not tupy that is the ao Romantismo, á R e v o lu to Bol ideas objectivadas. Cadaverizadas.
question. chevista, á. R evoluto surrealista e O stop do pensamento que é dyna-
ao barbaro technizado de Keyserl mico. O individuo victima do syste-
Contra toda as cathecheses. E ing. Caminhamos. ma. Fonte das injustigas classicas.
contra a máe^dos Gracchos. Das injustigas románticas. E o es-
Nunca fomos cathechisados. Vive quecimento das conquistas interio
Só me interessa o que nao é ineu. mos atravez de um direito sonam res.
Lei do homem. Lei do antropófago. bulo. Fizemos Christo nascer na Ba
hia. Ou em Belem do Parí. Roteiros. Roteiros. Roteiros. Ro-
Estamos fatigados de todos os ma teiros. Roteiros. Roteiros. Roteiros.
ridos catholicos suspeitosos postos Mas nunca admittimos o nasci
em drama. Freud acabou com o mento da logica entre nós. O instincto Carahiba.
enigma mulher e com outros
sustos da psychologia im- Morte e vida das hypothe-
pressa. ses. Da equagáo eu parte do
Kosmos ao axioma Kosmos
O que atropelava a verdade parte do eu. Subsistencia. Co-
era a roupa, o impermeavel nhecimento. Antropofagia.
entre o mundo interior e o
mundo exterior. A reacuño Contra as elites vegetaes.
contra o homem Em eonununicado com o sólo.
vestido. O cinema
americano informa Nunca fomos cathechisados.
rá. Fizemos foi Carnaval. O indio
vestido de senador do Imperio.
Filhos do s o l , Fingindo .de Pitt. Ou figuran
máe dos viventes. do ñas operas de Alencar cheio
Encontrados e ama de bons sentimentos portugue-
dos ferozmente, com zes.
toda a hypocrisia
da saudade, pelos im Já tinhamos o
migrados, pelos tra communismo. Já ti
ficados e pelos tou- nhamos a lingua'1
ristes. No paiz da surrealista. A eda
cobra grande.
de de ouro.
Catiti Catiti
Foi porque nun
Imara Notiá
ca tivemos gram-
Notiá Imara
maticas, nem *col- Dcacuho de Turelln 1928 - De cxposigáo de Junho
lecgóes de velhos Ipejú
vegetaes. E nunca soubemos o que
era urbano, suburbano, fronteirigo e Contra o Padre Vieira. Autor do A magia e a vida. Tinhamos a re-
continental. Preguigosos no mappa nosso primeiro emprestimo, para lagáo e a distribuigáo dos bens phy-
mundi do Brasil. ganhar commissáo. O rei analpha- sicos, dos bens moraes, dos bens di-
Urna consciencia participante, gnarios. E sabíamos transpor o mys-
beto dissera-lhe : ponha isso no pape!
tuna rythmica religiosa. mas sem muita labia. Fez-se o em terio c a morte com o auxilio de al-
prestimo. Gravou-se o assucar bra- gumas formas grammaticaes.
Contra todos os importadores de sileiro. Vieira deixou o dinheiro em
consciencia enlatada. A existencia Portugal e nos trouxe a labia, Perguntei a um homem o que era
palpavcl da vida. E a mentalidade o Direito. Elle me respondeu que
prelogica para o Sr. Levy Bruhl era a garantía do exercicio da pos-
estudar. O espirito recusa-se a conceber o sibilidade. Esse homem chamava-se
espirito sem corpo. O antropomor Galli Mathias. Comi-o
fismo. Necessidade da vaccina an-
Queremos a revolugáo Carahiha. tropofagica. Para o equilibrio contra Só nao ha determinismo - onde ha
Maior que a r ev olu to Francesa. A as religióes de meridiano. E as in- misterio. Mas que temos nós com
unificadlo de todas as revoltas ef- quisigóes exteriores.
ficazes na direcgáo do homem. Sem isso?
nós a Europa nao teria siquer a sua
Continua na Pagina 7
59 Strategies of Modernity in Latin America
Ftg. 6 had been a protagonist of the avant-garde in Europe. The development of his
Anthropophagite
production connected successively to Mediterranean Classicism, Vibracionismo,
Manifesto in Revista
Cubism, Fauvism; and the incorporation in his final Paris visit of the Golden Section
de Antropofagia, 1928
and of a formal repertoire linked to pre-Columbian cultures had become by 1934 the
form of a programme that Torres would redefine on arriving in M ontevideo/1 The
journey was a break for him. It is significant that Historia de mi vida (the
autobiography that Torres narrates in the third person, from outside, as though it
were about another person) ends precisely with his arrival in Uruguay, where he
started a task of, first of all, recognition:
The steamship enters into the port, looks for a place and . . . over there a
group of people. Torres-García has very fine eyesight and can already recognize
them . . . He is among his own! Now he recognizes it well! He breathes. Then
he recognizes the houses and the paving stones, with little pieces of grass
between them! That’s them, the same ones! And for the rest about Torres-
García, someone else will tell.22
What Torres did not find in the artistic field that he entered on his return he
searched for in houses, colours, the air, the great River Plate, the special and different
appearance of people (a type based simultaneously on the European, the Indian
mestizo or the negro).23 It was a different city in which Torres denied precisely the
distinguishing features of modernity visible in the new neighbourhoods, in as much as
these traces of modernity were not his own ones. At this point Torres started to use
his characteristic method of searching for a synthesis in opposed elements: dynamic
syntheses that, in their contradictions, demonstrate the complex mixtures of a culture
for which he wants to define a programme that is both sacrificial and integral.
Torres’s concern is not with written or spoken language but with forms. His
gesture takes on a graphic and visual form. To invert the map is a decontextualizing
and resemanticizing operation. Once again it is the inaugural gesture of wanting to
establish new parameters, which are now spatial:
. . . Our north is the South. There should be no north for us, except in
opposition to our South.
That is why we now turn the map upside down, and now we know what
our true position is, and it is not the way the rest of the world would like to
have it. From now on, the elongated tip of South America will point insistently
at the South, our North. Our compass as well; it will incline irremediably and
60 Beyond the Fantastic
forever towards the South, towards our pole. When ships sail from here
travelling north, they will be travelling down, not up as before. Because the
North is now below. And as we face our South, the East is to our left.
This is a necessary rectification; so that now we know where we are.24
To not take a line or motif of Inca art, but instead to create with the ruler, with
geometric order. The extreme austerity characteristic of Torres’s work in the years
following his return can be understood as the most radical expression of an art that,
overcoming all temptation (pictorial, vanguard, realist), allows him to create an
anonymous and monumental art. The abandoning of all sensual elements would
become the pictorial expression of that stony and monumental art that was his
ultimate aspiration.29
Torres’s utopia, simultaneously retrospective and foundational, synthesized the
most extreme aspirations of European modernity. With his return journey to
Montevideo his original ideas would be submitted to a series of inversions that would
allow him to reformulate his project and make America the measure of the Universe.
Appropriation of Appropriation
When Wifredo Lam created The Jungle (1942-3, fig. 20) in Cuba he repeated an act
that the European avant-garde had done previously and which he now charged with a
subversive content. Lam took the forms and structures of Cubism, which had itself
appropriated the forms and structures of primitive art, in a movement that he himself
described as intentional:
Since my stay in Paris I had a fixed idea: to take African art and to make it
operate in its own world, in Cuba. I needed to express in a work combative
energy, the protest of my ancestors.30
However, rather than repeating a form of operation, Lam wanted a rebellion based
on a vindication of cultural mixture. This mix has much more to do with his own
pictorial formation than with ethnicity. His development also allows one to
reconstruct a double itinerary: the consolidation process of the Latin American
artistic field and that of the European avant-gardes.
On Lam’s biographical ‘journey’ he stopped over at the best ports offered by
Western culture at the time. From Cuba, Lam constructed his first imaginary map of
Europe: Paris, the Louvre, Catalonia, Chardin, Anglada Camarasa.31 He started his
academic formation in San Alejandro, Havana, and completed it in the Prado with
Fernando Alvarez de Sotomayor: José Ribera, Pedro Berruguete, Diego Velázquez,
Goya, Zurbarán, knowing Klee and Brancusi (which would take on another dimension
when he met Picasso in Paris). This journey was also the confrontation of the magical
62 Beyond the Fantastic
world of his birth town (Sagua la Grande) with Spain’s religious world."’ And it
gave him experience of an event that cut across the intellectual world of the 1930s:
the Spanish Civil Wait Subsequently, Paris, Picasso, Leiris, Marseille’s Surrealism
with his images for Breton’s Fata Morgana, then the return to Cuba with a new
starting point.
European modernity’s appropriation of ‘primitive’ formal structures as food for a
self-centred discourse was imitated and disarticulated as an operative system in
Lam’s work after his return to Cuba. He made the mechanisms of the centre evident,
repeated them and charged them with a new meaning. He fed from their usurped
forms. He expressed his ‘otherness’ in the central discourse so as to insert it, alive,
into the universalizing discourses of modernity. Thus it was discovered that what, in
European discourse, was a horizon of desires or the object of a laboratory experiment,
in the Caribbean was the latent everyday, hidden and suppressed since the Conquest
and slavery.
Lam, in common with other Latin American intellectuals, managed to establish an
undoubtedly privileged position through his cultural travels. This was owing to his
coexistence from childhood with America’s cultural mix and because he also shared
and participated in the European cultural and social laboratory. Lam did not observe
the West from outside, he rather recognized himself and learnt. It is all this heritage
that allowed him to undertake new researches upon his return. A knowledge of the
decontextualizing operations of the European avant-gardes allowed him in turn to
decontextualize the forms of the avant-garde to charge them with revolutionary and
prophetic contents. And not only with the forms, but also with the utopian telos of
modernity, allowing him to conceive his programme as the start of a different time.
Lam repeated the pillaging gesture he had learnt, using whatever served his purpose
of giving form to a different culture for which he had, through his journeys, developed
a new vision that he now proposed as a recontextualizing programme.
In The Jungle, the revenge of a small Caribbean country, Cuba, against the
colonizers is plotted. I used the scissors as a symbol of a necessary cut against
all foreign imposition in Cuba, against all colonization . . . To paint The
Jungle, I used to the maximum the lessons learned from a study of the
classics . . . I did my work like a ritual, based on experiences acquired in Spain
and France.33
As Gerardo Mosquera has said: ‘It is amazing how critics and art historians have not
recognized Wifredo Lam as the first artist who presented a vision from the African in
America in all the history of gallery visual arts.’34
Lam is a protagonist of the modern construction of Afro-American visuality. It is a
construction in which, from the baroque aspects of Cubism, he discovered the sensual
outlines of a nature that is simultaneously vegetable and religious. He wrote his own
modern project taking advantage of the complex receptive constitution of European
modernity and feeding it, in turn, with new components. Simultaneously, he
interpreted' his rereading as a cut: in America, culture is both summary and project; it
gives new forms from difference.
To be Modern in America
The cultural responses artists made when faced with contexts that the transoceanic
journey would necessarily redefine were, above all, visionary gazes towards the
future. As an organizational discourse of experiences and expectations in which
projective and reactive components germinated in a complex jumble of culture,
modernity in the periphery was also an irritative, subversive and activist proposal.
A response in which nationalism, cosmpolitanism, regionalism and internationalism
coexisted and fought for hegemony. A proposal that was also articulated from research
in existing lexicons and catalogues and which, when the conflict proposed by these
doubts demanded a renunciation of all simulation, gave rise to a discourse that aimed
at a rupture and subversion of the moral, spatial and temporal parameters in which it
had initially moved.
This travelling backwards through the tracks of the conquistador towards a brief
voluntary exile undertaken by a sector of the enlightened intelligentsia was fed by the
fantasies provided by reading and fragmentary images and was also, for this reason, a
voyage of self-discovery. A construction guided by diverse data, deposited in diverse
times, and to which that which came from European political history (especially
regarding wars and revolutions) was not alien and which, when faced with the reality
of this land until the moment of the long-awaited journey was inevitably modified.
This was a modification that would also affect the vision of Latin America when it
was time to come home.36
The strategies used by Torres-García, Lam, Tarsila do Amaral or the Andrades to
meditate on the cultural map of America were born of a kaleidoscopic game. Europe
and America were reconfigured from shattered images, the fragments of which
declared a battle to impose a new order.
Since the sixteenth century America had been an active element in the
64 Beyond the Fantastic
NOTES
1 Encomienda: concession granted by the Spanish king for some Spanish colonists to receive tribute and
labour from the Indians. The encomendero was supposed to look after the Indians financially and
spiritually.
2 For an account o f the diverse white-Indian alliances, see S Stern, ‘The Rise and Fall of Indian-White
Alliances: A Regional View o f “ Conquest” ’, The Hispanic American Historical Review, vol. 6, no. 3
(August 1981).
3 Although I do not totally agree, I am strategically adopting a unilateral view of the Conquest. I would like
to point out, however, that there is another aspect at least as^important as that which I am discussing: the
powerlessness o f the Indians when faced with the savage destructive power (psychological, economic,
demographic) o f the European Conquest. On this subject, see N Wachtel, Los vencidos: los indios del Perú
frente a la conquista española (1530-1570) (Madrid: Alianza, 1976).
4 M ita: the system (originally o f Indian origin) with which the Spanish controlled Indian labour. Indians
were selected to work in the mines by drawing lots (translator’s note].
5 Taqui-Ongo: name o f the religious sect whose beliefs spread in the 1560s in the provinces o f Central Peru
as a way o f confronting Christianity. See Wachtel, op. cit., pp. 285-9.
6 Alejo Carpentier, ‘Problemática del tiempo y del idioma en la moderna novela latinoamericana’, lecture
given in Venezuela, 1975, in Razón de ser (Havana: Letras Cubanas, 1984), p. 81.
8 See B Pastor, El discurso narrativo do la conquista de América (Havana: Casa de las Américas, 1984),
p. 24.
9 The young Borges, influenced by Expressionism during his stay in Europe (1914-21), discovered his natal
city of Buenos Aires when he returned. This can be seen in his books, Fervor de Buenos Aires (1923), Luna
de enfrente (1925), Cuaderno de San Martín (1929) and in his collection o f essays Evaristo Carriego. In the
1930s César Vallejo also launched his attack on the avant-garde: El tungsteno (1931) and España, aparta
de mí ese cáliz (1939) are in a very different vein from his most famous book Trilce (1922). As a
compromise, Mariátegui also fought for an avant-garde that was not limited to formal issues. See Jorge
Schwartz, Las vanguardias latinoamericanas: Textos programáticos y críticos (Madrid: Cátedra, 1991).
65 Strategies of Modernity in Latin America
10 Oswald de Andrade’s Anthropophagite Manifesto is dated at the end ‘Piratininga [Indian name for the area
on which Sáo Paulo was built in 1554, around a school founded by the Jesuits], the year 374 after the
swallowing o f Bishop Sardinha’. The manifesto was published in 1928.
12 See Raúl Antelo (ed.), Macunaíma o herói sem nenhum caráter (Brasilia: edn Crítica CNPq, 1988),
pp. 255-65.
13 Mário de Andrade, Macunaíma o herói sem nenhum caráter, op. cit., p. 88.
14 Oswald de Andrade, lPau-Brazil Poetry: Manifesto’ , in Dawn Ades, Art in Latin America (London: South
Bank Centre, 1989), p. 310.
15 Ades, op.cit.
16 For the Week o f 1922, see Aracy Amaral’s fundamental reconstruction, Artes plásticas na Semana de 22
(Sáo Paulo: BM&F, 1992).
17 Ades, op.cit.
19 Haroldo de Campos, ‘Da razáo antropofágica: diálogo e diferenga na cultura brasileira’, Boletim
Bibliográfico Biblioteca Mário de Andrade 44 (January-December 1983), p.107. Quoted by J Schwartz,
op. cit., pp. 135-6.
20 Torres-García, The School o f the South, 1935. Reproduced in Mari Carmen Ramirez (ed.), El Taller
Torres-García. The School o f the South and Its Legacy (Austin: University o f Texas Press, 1992), p. 53.
21 See Margit Rowell, ‘Ordre i simbol: les fonts europées i americanes del constructivisme de Torres-García’,
in Torres-García: estructura-dibuix-simbol, exhibition catalogue (Barcelona: Fundado Joan Miró, 1986),
pp. 15-16. The incidence and the protagonism o f this culture in Torres-Garcia’s work has been evaluated
in different ways. Juan Fió says: ‘The influence o f pre-Columbian art in Torres-García is irrelevant. The
Indoamerican art, as all primitive arts and that o f the main archaist cultures, are of interest to him if they
are part o f the art paradigm with an aesthetic sense, but not linked with an imitative representation.’ See
Juan Fió, Torres-García en (y desde) Montevideo (Montevideo: Arca, 1991), p. 48. I agree with this idea.
However, I think Torres-García had an American programme. See Torres-García, Metafísica de la
prehistoria indoamericana (Montevideo: Asociación Arte Constructivo, 1939) and many chapters of the
Universalismo Constructivo: Contribución a la unificación del arte y la cultura de América (Buenos Aires:
Poseidón, 1944).
23 An analysis o f the different tendencies in this field can be found in an unpublished lecture by Gabriel
Peluffo Linari, ‘ Regionalismo cultural y la vanguardia: el Taller Torres-García’, presented in Austin,
Texas, 1991.
24 Torres-García, The School o f the South, 1935. Reproduced in Mari Carmen Ramirez (ed.), op. cit., p. 53.
25 The studies o f the American Constructivist tradition started by Torres-García in 1938 were developed by
the Asociación Arte Constructivo. This work was continued in the Taller Torres-García.
26 Juan Fió has written: ‘Torres’s Montevideo period is not only significant in itself, but also because it provides
us with some important keys with which to understand his whole trajectory.’ See J Fió, op. cit., p. 9.
66 Beyond the Fantastic
27 Rioplatense: literally ‘o f the River Plate’, adjective used to characterize the shared culture o f Buenos Aires Fig. 7
and Montevideo [translator’s note|. Tarsila do Amaral
Abaporu, 1928
28 Torres-García, Metafísica de la prehistoria indoamericana (Montevideo: Asociación de Arte Constructivo,
Oil on canvas,
1939). Original emphases.
85 x 75 cms
29 Fió, op.cit., pp. 28-9. Collection of Maria
Anna and Raul de
30 In Antonio Nuñez Jimenez, Wifredo Lam (Havana: Editorial Letras Cubanas, 1982), p. 173.
Souza Dantas Forbes,
31 Ibid., p. 71. Sao Paulo, Brazil
32 Ibid.t p. 83.
34 Gerardo Mosquera, ‘Modernismo desde afroamérica: Wifredo Lam cambia el sentido’, mimeograph, p. 6.
35 For an interpretation o f the transoceanic journey between Europe and America, see Nicolás Casullo’s
article, ‘ La modernidad como destierro: la iluminación de los bordes’, in A A .W Imágenes desconocidas.
La modernidad en la encrucijada postmoderna (Buenos Aires: CLACSO, 1988), pp. 31-5.
36 See Aníbal Quijano, ‘Modernidad, identidad y utopía en América Latina’, in A A .W , op. cit., pp.17-24.
67 Strategies of Modernity in Latin America
The Void and the D ialogue in the
W estern H em isphere
Paulo Herkenhoff
<=*8 In the Museum of Modern Art’s Information catalogue (1970) two Brazilians, Helio
Oiticica Oiticica and Cildo Meireles, wrote similar things. Oiticica said: ‘I am not here, in this
of Mangueira
exhibition, to defend either a career or a nationality. Actually, I would rather speak
mrr- Parangole P4,
tape 1,1964 about a region that does not appear on official maps, a region called the Southern
=*»ctograph courtesy Cross. Its original inhabitants never divided it. Others came, however, who for some
rr Witte de With
reason did.’
Although I do not represent Brazil either, I do recognize that this is the starting
point of my outlook. I take the work of Cildo Meireles as the guide for my own
discourse, reuniting within it the symbolic and the real. I am talking here of art and
not just the relations between institutions.
If we value the development of a dialogue between the hemispheres, it is necessary
for us to recognize clearly the vacuum in which it takes place. What are the
dimensions of that vacuum in which the dialogue is conducted, transforming voices
into silence?
The Southern Cross is not only an emblem of the Conquest but also an emblem of
inter-American relations since Independence. There have been 200 years o f relations
bedevilled by suspicion, resentment and a feeling of victimization, intervention,
seduction and paternalism, and repression of languages and ideas.
In the expansion of imperialism what ideals were juxtaposed and displaced?
In the 1960s why did the focus of the dialogue on pan-Americanism change to
Latin Americanism? ‘For if Aesthetics supports Art, then Politics supports Culture,’
says Cildo Meireles. His Coca-Cola project with the inscription ‘Yankees Go Home’
(see fig. 9) is the individualized emblem of an idea - which is also shared by
Camnitzer, Antonio Manuel and Caro - about the ideological circuits of that economic
expansion that affects freedom, culture and identity.
How is it possible to establish dialogue in a landscape of outstanding hegemony?
How will it be possible to establish dialogue among historically antagonistic
neighbours? What are the functions of such a dialogue in the conjuncture of these
500 Years of America that are also 500 years of resistance? What is the geopolitical
function of such a dialogue in the context o f the radical transformations in Eastern
Europe that bring no hope to the poor people of the world?
The political connotations of the process that defines cultural identity are
variable. If, by breaking away from Graeco-Roman patterns, primitivism represented
for Europe the search for the Other, in Brazil it meant just the opposite: in Tarsila’s
paintings the search for a nationalist identity goes back to the native Indian, who
until then was the Other, and starts the search for the Self as part of a Brazilian self.
The Eden-like jungle is not the Hegelian place of historical absence but precisely the
70 Beyond the Fantastic
only possibility of history, for as Cildo Meireles has stated: ‘in the jungle there are no Fig. 9
Cildo Meireles
lies, there are only personal truths.’
Insertions into
In an almost peaceful search for cultural identity, dialogue imposes a certain Ideological Circuits
amount of caution: Coca-Cola project,
Kg. 10 In the Western hemisphere the dialogue is split by a line that separates the North
Z-kjo Meireles
and South slightly ‘above’ the Equator. We can no longer believe that material
insertions into
theological Circuits
inequalities restrict man’s expressive capacity, although they may most certainly
Bank-note project, affect the social circulation of cultural assets. Perhaps for this reason, after creating
1970 a ‘zero cruzeiro’ bill Cildo Meireles created the ‘zero dollar’ bill, to represent an
Wyjtograph by Pedro
exchange that disbelieves the international mechanisms that regulate art and
Oswaldo Cruz,
courtesy of the artist
currency. All attempts at cultural diplomacy start with political games and stop in
front of the determinant forces of the art circuit and the art market. There is no
incompatibility between the market and the artist’s language or geographical origin.
Political hegemony has its correspondence in the writings of art history and
curatorial practices. We can no longer give shelter, as a serious academic attitude, to
the great international historical and theme shows that disregard the quality
production of the peripheral countries. The Pompidou Centre was not responding to
its own question to Latin America - ‘Qu’est-ce que la sculpture moderne?’ [What is
modern sculpture?] - when it excluded from the exhibition such artists as Lygia Clark,
Helio Oiticica or the Madi group. Upon Oiticica’s exclusion from the exhibition ‘Von
Klang der Bilder’ a deadly silence, unprecedented on the world circuit, fell over an
insurmountable relation between art and music. The political hegemony represented
intellectual disdain and arrogance in addition to playing its defining role in following
and serving the already established market.
Evidently, the art of Latin America is beginning to constitute a specialized field of
curatorial practice that inspires a proliferation o f art catalogues and shows
throughout the world. This microphysics of power contains other limits to dialogue
and new forms of exclusion. What is the place of Latin American art historians and
critics within this new geography of art, where the artist leaves the ghetto? Will they
remain disengaged from the competitive work market? Will their voices be recorded
in the regional geographic register?
The hemisphere’s dialogue finds its ethical questioning in Cildo Meireles’s Olvido,
a tepee covered with currency bills from American countries, with its connotations
concerning the action of the Church, the Government and Capital. He reaffirms that
dialogue cannot take place without the history of dialogue.
I endorse the coincident discourse of Oiticica and Cildo Meireles. Rather than
representing a nationality, artists assert the vigour of art discourse. It is precisely
within this position, which does not dissociate the relation between aesthetics and
ethics as Art Measure, that any attempt at a dialogue gains significance.
O th e r’ M odernities
76 Beyond the Fantastic
Populist Ideology and Indigenism :
A Critique
Mirko Lauer
11 (opposite A significant factor in the growing prestige and interest accorded to precapitalist
page) contemporary visual arts from Latin America has been their indigenous status - or
Suter
perhaps one should say their potential to be indigenous. ‘Indigenism’ 1operates as a
Ib Animal of
w rrses (El Animal de kind of funnel through which objects and processes become a touchstone of cultural
■ Sorpresas), 1987 identity (from within) or of exoticism (from without). In the visual arts, as elsewhere,
the series
indigenism represents what is pure and real, and any change constitutes an
f esta Tierra, del
adulteration. We find ourselves in a realm of ahistorical immobility, where past,
n y los Infiernos
iotograph present and future can be manipulated in an all-encompassing falsification. To use
n_rtesy Galería OMR, the terminology of the dominant powers, change has never been related to the
indigenous in Latin America: its colonial past was predominantly Luso-Hispanic; its
•iç. 12 (opposite)
imperialist past was largely Anglo-Saxon and its capitalist background is criollo.2
Jaar Downey Indigenism (as always, in the eyes of the dominant) is the natural state for this
tanomani Indian - continent, the immutable fact against which modernity is to be valued. Indigenism is
M e Orinoco, 1976
our starting point, our way of becoming Latin Americans.
»wtograph
Co-rtesy of the Juan Indigenism is a generalized concept derived from a dominant perspective, an
Downey Foundation amalgam of pre-Christian and precapitalist diversity. As a concept it concerns the
‘other side’ of criollo, and later bourgeois, Latin America, and has undergone changes
simultaneously with capitalist modernism. The Indian is the noble savage (possessed
of a soul in the writings of Bartolomé de las Casas, a pure soul by Rousseau’s time),
who made the lumières of the Latin American Enlightenment shine ever brighter. He
is a mountain of a man, all biceps and telluric features, a symbol of the shackled but
latent strength of a continent repeatedly humiliated by wave upon wave of
domination (the mythical bronze race versus the Yankee eagle). He is the successful
inhabitant of an America that resists physical domination, and who does so asking for
nothing in return. Thus we create a category of ‘extra-natural’ dimensions, able to
camouflage and tame reality. To paraphrase Borges, we could say that where
indigenism is concerned the idea is monumental, but the protagonist does not
measure up. At times it seems to contain the whole of Latin American identity, yet
always ends up as a universal symbol of its abject poverty.
From this perspective progress erodes identity, whereas permanence preserves it.
However, since the Conquest indigenism has represented a potential (rather than a
real) market, a possible modernity implicit in demography. A modernity that included
indigenism, however, would have required a level of democracy and redistribution of
wealth beyond the bounds of the acceptable. That is why indigenism was, and had to
be, traditionalism too. This became especially marked when patterns of land
ownership began to change and the Indian became an immigrant in the bourgeois
nation, ‘a candidate for integration’, or rather ‘to be integrated’ {whether or not
78 Beyond the Fantastic
actual physical migration took place). Thus every capitalist criollo settlement seeking
to embrace modernity had its own Indian, who embodied the universal values of
tradition, land, origin, identity, or Man’s communion with Nature, just as his modern
counterpart seeks to embody singlehandedly the alternative universal meaning of a
fast-developing West. This is why the visual arts of the bourgeoisie try to create an
alternative universal category from contact with indigenism; specific characteristics
are irrelevant, just as the specifics of caricatured landowners are irrelevant at a
native Indian fiesta.
Still, ideology cannot block out the dazzling light of reality. These abstract
universal concepts of generic indigenism come face to face with the reality of the
many ethnic groups who are victims of poverty and oppression and who, in many
Latin American countries, constitute if not a majority, at least a considerable number.
From the earliest colonial times a consistent attempt has been made to reconcile such
generalized notions of indigenism with reality, to create the ideological foundations
for a policy of coexistence with large groups of oppressed people. Garcilaso’s
chronicles of the Inca legends were not only a defence of personal identity, but also a
literary expression of the Hispanic urge for colonization (or coexistence) instead of
extermination. Implicit in these notions towards a defeated race is a policy that treats
it as the ‘other side’ of Latin America. The visual arts are no exception.
Modernism sees itself as progress (and its rationale derives from a development of
the forces of production). Historically this progress is situated at the tail-end of a
sequence that took the Indian past as its starting point and developed through
colonialism and republicanism (although its simultaneous truncations and
continuations are deceptive). Viewed as part of the past, indigenism is a foundation
stone, but as part of the present it calls into question and criticizes the monopolizing
effects of modernity. Modern-day indigenism is considered to be an obstacle that
makes the fulfilment of Western paradigms of modernity impossible. For the
bourgeoisie, who internalized the imperialist version of the past, their attempts at
modernization were thwarted by that very past, a ‘past in the present’ , a dead weight.
As José María Arguedas wrote in the poem Llamado a ciertos doctores (A Call to
Certain Doctors): ‘They tell us we’re backward, and that they’ll replace our hearts
with better ones.’ The dominant ideologies should take this past in the present and
neutralize it, first of all by making a clean break with that ‘real’ past and then
inverting concepts o f time. In their mythical version o f time, pre-Hispanic grandeur
has a more ‘real’ presence than postrepublican poverty.
Where indigenism and the Indians are concerned, this crossfire of fiction and fact
has a long history, forged throughout centuries in the melting pot of Latin America’s
79 Populist Ideology and Indigenism: A Critique
colonial and neo-colonial experience, with its many ideologies of class, race and
ethnicity. This process reached a critical turning point with the rise of populism (to
use the term current at the time) among the middle classes, which spread throughout
Indo-America from the 1920s until the late 1960s. From its outset populism sought
deliberately to erase the differences between visual production by the Indian
populations and that of the erudite elite who adopted indigenism as their leitmotif.
That is the sense of indigenism. Good intentions notwithstanding, it was an amalgam
of disparate elements in which class differences were confused and finally subsumed.
Indigenism was a well-intentioned example of historical engineering, and twenty,
forty or fifty years later we can see the results.3
After many years of indigenism native culture is beginning to call for its specificity
to be considered, drawing on an awareness of otherness developed by cultural
anthropologists. From a Marxist perspective, as exemplified by Perry Anderson in his
approach to European feudalism, ‘Native Americanism’ in the visual arts can no
longer be viewed in the same way as before. It is no longer about the commonplaces
of a nominal abstraction, but about the specifics (social, territorial, demographic,
historical, ethnic, etc.) that shape the diversity of its forms. There are, after all,
many ‘indigenisms’ in Latin America: there is an almost virgin primitivism; the
conquered primitive, the dominated precapitalist (‘Asian’, ‘tributarian’, etc.);
and all the other stages en route to capitalism. There is of course capitalist
indigenism, too, and within that, the spectre of indigenism: the ‘bourgeois Indian’,
who reveals the rules of the game and destroys the magic of the whole construct. This
latter is rare, but it provides a token element of reality to bring the abstractions of
indigenism back down to earth and to introduce the complementary character of the
‘proletarian Indian’.
A historical overview of these issues reveals that the whole concept o f indigenism
evolved simultaneously with the growth of nationalism as the ideology of the
bourgeois nation-state in Latin America. This was especially evident in the form of
Latin Americanism, the exportable version of nationalism. The high points of this
phenomenon were perhaps the following: Bolivar’s dream of united sovereign
republics and a strong sense of unity among the intellectual elite as expressed
through the rhetoric of modernist poetry and a shared devotion to positivism; the
anti-imperialist solidarity from the turn of the century on, marked by the repeated
rise and fall of nationalisms and the possibility o f continental uprisings represented
by Che Guevara; and finally the presence of native populations and cultural groups as
a factor that both differentiated and united Latin America. It should be noted,
however, that in all three examples Latin Americanism arose out of the isolation of
80 Beyond the Fantastic
the dominant groups from those who were dominated in their respective countries. In
each case indigenism took a different form.
In colonial times the prevailing images of Indian culture evolved into a
bureaucratic familiarity with subjugation, following on from the initial shock felt by a
parochial Europe that as Gabriel Giraldo Jaramillo has noted, ‘added the notions of
barbarism and infantilism to a religious conception’ .4 In the earliest representations'
of the Indian he inhabits an America that is either utopian or demonic (an
anonymous painting in the Janelas Verdes museum in Lisbon shows the devil wearing
the headdress of an Amazonian Indian). Over the centuries attitudes towards the
Indian revealed in differing measures bewilderment, incomprehension and disdain,
but it is important to place these attitudes in context. The humanist logic of a
Montaigne is much closer to European intellectual sentiment than to the attitudes of
the earliest colonists. On a philosophical level the rationalism of Bolivar’s time could
afford a certain literary tolerance towards native peoples, but in the political sphere
its legacy was to be a social structure based on their exploitation. This duality has
lived on, informing our conceptualizations of what indigenism means.
On more than one level criollo nationalism was strengthened by the defeat of
Indian revolutionary movements in the seventeenth century. Tupac Amaru in
particular had a profound impact on the entire Andean region. Also, the main
benefits for the Indians following independence from Spain were not primarily of a
material nature; indeed in many respects colonial society encouraged a closer, more
cohesive relationship between the dominant powers and the indigenous populations.
In a way, the colonial ‘we’ positioned the Indian within a sombre mantle o f religiosity,
where social and cultural differences could meet. From the very start the criollo
bourgeoisie excluded the indigenous peoples from its conception of culture and society.
That is why, 100 years after independence, there was a pressing need to include them
in the precarious framework of dependent capitalism. It was only then that
indigenism truly began to change, though the process had begun in the late
nineteenth century with modernist thinkers such as Manuel González Prada, José
Marti and the Liberals who led the Mexican Revolution. Even for them, however, the
indigenist debate was more concerned with distributive justice than with any real
issues of indigenous identity.5
In the 1920s these concerns with the Indian heritage led to the development of
Indigenism, an intellectual movement popular in many Latin American countries. At
its heart was a vision of the Indian elaborated by provincial middle-class intellectuals.
One of the main themes of Indigenism was the belated and ingenuous discovery of the
Iberian legacy, and its cultural significance for republicanism. The main thrust of the
81 Populist Ideology and Indlgenlsm: A Critique
movement was anti-oligarchic and it adopted for its own ends an image of the native
Indian as mysterious. This was supposed to provide an ideological (but, significantly,
not a practical) alternative to the ruling bourgeoisie, made up of what José Carlos
Mariátegui called ‘the descendants of the Spanish encomenderos’ [the powerful
landowners of the colonial period]. This was not a ‘pro-Indian movement’ and it had
little to do with the peasant uprisings of the time. Instead it was the ideological
product of a set of class-based alliances within capitalist modernity, seeking to forge
its own identity separate from that of the Spanish oligarchy. Hence their colonization
of fictional spaces untouched by social reality in countries such as Peru. It is tempting
to see the Spanish cultural legacy of the Spanish Golden Age in their recreations of
past grandeur and Arcadian utopias.6
Jorge Basadre has described Indigenism of the 1920s as an intellectual construct
made up of many diverse elements. Historically there are echoes of the early
colonists’ defence of the Indians, the reports of missionaries who had contact with
indigenous peoples, and also of Montaigne’s views as formalized by Rousseau. In the
political arena there were ‘the liberal groups of the post-independence era, who
sought to base their new states on indigenous traditions’, plus radical land reform
and Marxist sociology. Culturally there were important archaeological findings at the
end of the nineteenth century, and at the beginning of this century the rise of
pro-Indian associations. The output of this movement was, however, primarily literary
and artistic; in the political sphere it was more of an effect than a cause. Indigenism
was constructed and then deployed by outside forces, from whom the indigenous
populations reaped virtually no benefit. Indeed, in Peru, the effects of
decentralization and an initial focus on the provinces led only to a greater
consolidation of the power of the landowning classes.'
Underlying the Christian taboo on idolatry (which reached its height of obsession
in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries), the Romantic revival of the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries, and later Indigenism (which coincided with the rise of
populism in several countries), are the visual arts of the native populations. Few
recognize trends or traditions in these arts, tending rather to state their reality,
taking up issues of survival or revival. Broadly speaking, could we ask whether those
complex universes of forms that have fed so much romantic or radical ideology might
not themselves be romantic, or radical? These terms are not usually considered
appropriate, and indeed the subject is rarely discussed in this way. There is no real
tradition o f radicalism in the native visual arts. There is conservation, resistance,
secret codes perhaps, but no sense of rebellion. What we see is a marked tendency to
internalize the experience of domination, a prime example of this being the depiction
82 Beyond the Fantastic
of themes marginal to domination that deal with issues of coexistence rather than
confrontation with a stronger opponent. This is why much native art is like a two-
way mirror: we do not see, but are seen through it. This has been the case from the
first moments of discovery through to the radical devotion of Third Worldism.8
We need therefore to trace an unequivocal dividing line between the visual arts of
the erudite elites, and those of the indigenous peoples themselves. Then we can start
to explore the class divisions that underlie ethnic or racial specificity and help make
sense of their historical trajectory. The central themes of the elite have until now
made the Indian mysterious, turned him into folklore, focused on the grotesque and,
finally, sublimated him, reproducing images that focus on the Indian’s feathers, his
muscularity, his bucolic environment, his historic immobility as idol. Anthropologists
were the first to point to a public awareness of a discrepancy between these two
versions of reality. Since then the ideologies of the populist bourgeoisie have tried to
‘bridge the gap’ and, at the same time, to set down the new cultural foundations for
the domination of indigenous peoples. The process of social and cultural change
among these peoples, however, has made this more difficult, as they no longer
conform so readily and unproblematically to the categories of indigenism.
The dominant concept of the Indian, which Guillermo Bonfil has described as
‘a category situated in colonialism’, has lost its way and retains no more than a
partial truth.9 The ideological constructs of the Indian - as the factual one of
anthropology, or ethnography in the visual arts - find themselves afloat in a double
whirlpool of social change and its consequences. Indigenism fights back or is
assimilated, prevails or surrenders, changes or remains static. Its patterns change,
either as the result of outside forces, or from within. But the thrust of social change
brought about by Latin American development has determined most of the rules of
the indigenist game. By this we mean in particular the creation of the basis for the
survival of an identity that diverges from the capitalist process of cultural and
spiritual proletarianization. A head-on collision with the logic of capitalism was
delayed in some instances by the survival of precapitalist forms of production. While
it would be an overstatement to suggest that the days of indigenism are over, we can
say that what we have been witnessing for some time now is a version of reality that
for the traditional exponents of indigenism (progressive and reactionary alike) would
scarcely be recognizable.
Bonfil has pulled together the various elements of this new state of consciousness
to develop an ‘Indian political initiative’ in Latin America. Drawing on contemporary
thinking by Latin American intellectuals, he criticized the paradigm of a
homogeneous nation. According to this view the pursuit of homogeneity is largely
83 Populist Ideology and Indlgenlsm: A Critique
responsible for the notion of ‘indigenism as part of the bourgeois-nation’ . In its more
radical form indigenism became the cornerstone of a ‘popular democracy’or a ‘new
democracy’. Bonill’s approach to indigenism also sets forth a view of the Indian as
predisposed to change. Clearly this approach stems from his contact with leading
figures in society who are in a position to shape political strategies that are not
necessarily in line with the political practices of their respective ethnic groups. We
should also note that the dominant discourses in those countries do not amount to
more than the projections (imaginings) and conceptualizations o f leading figures
about the historical interests of the various classes and groups involved. In his
guidelines for indigenism Bonfil highlights a set of common characteristics that in his
view constitute a political programme.
The key features of this Indian political theory in Latin America include: a
rejection of Western values; pan-Indianism as the expression of a civilization; a new
historical narrative; a re-evaluation of Indian cultures; a view of humankind in
harmony with the natural environment rather than at its mercy; a critique of the
politics of domination; a reassessment of mestizaje; and a move towards a vision of
the future that is more than a mythical return to an idyllic past. This framework also
calls for certain conditions to be met. These involve: land protection and recognition;
official recognition of ethnic and cultural specificity; and equal rights, including the
right not to be victims of violence or repression. Bonfil argues against the suppression
of ethnicity at the hands of modernity in any shape or form, and finally he asserts the
status of the Indian as a differentiated political being within Latin American society.
‘Even if most of the workforce is wage-earning, or some of their production enters the
marketplace, Indian groups often retain patterns of work that are distinct from those
of the capitalist order, as seen in the organization of labour, in the valuation of goods,
in access to resources and in patterns of distribution and consumption.’
Although Bonfil does not specify which of these forms of production would allow
for the ‘reproduction of differences’, his theory is useful in that it touches upon issues
at the heart of indigenism in Latin America. Can native cultures actually survive? If
the answer is yes, then how can this be achieved? What will their distinguishing
features be? Could the cultural specificity of Latin American indigenism not dovetail
with the construction of an overarching pattern, along the lines of the ‘Indo-America’
proposed by Mariategui and Haya de la Torre, or Vasconcelos’s ‘bronze race’? Behind
the history of periodic ignorance or appreciation of indigenism there is another
history of social transformations that can force us to look again beneath the surface
and to see the vestiges of the old whei;e all seems new. And to distinguish, on the
other hand, what is new and radically different behind the masks of traditionalism.
84 Beyond the Fantastic
In my view, this interplay of illusion and reality is particularly evident in the story of
Latin American indigenism.
Bonfil’s theories apply to particular aspects of workers’ movements in Latin
America, and to the specific historical struggles that Indian populations were involved
in, rather than arising out of a concern with Indian consciousness or Indian issues as
such. His arguments reflect this stance, as they do not in any way fit into the
conventional schema for understanding indigenism. We are led to examine a specific
instance of their social reality, which could be described as the moment when the
burden of domination, as embodied in the abstracting and totalizing attempt to
contain them within the concept of ‘Indianism’ , was overruled. This is not in any way
to deny the distinct cultural identities of Latin America’s native populations, but to
suggest that these identities are not necessarily a simple continuation of what went
before (in the sense that Englishness is not a mere extension of an Anglo-Saxon past,
and neither are French and Spanish identities rooted exclusively in their respective
Gallic and Visigothic pasts). One could add to Bonfil’s apt critique of pretensions to a
‘homogeneous nation’ a further critique of the mythical immutability and continuity
of Indian identity.
Andean indigenism, as discussed by Rodrigo Montoya, for example, consists of a
series o f specific encounters between pre-Hispanic elements and the Spanish feudal
legacy.1" What we are dealing with here is the description of a historical moment, after
the expansions of the Inca empire and prior to the final disappearance of
precapitalism in the Andean region. Montoya is very careful to define his terms of
reference, but in discussions of Andean issues (and of indigenism in general), there is
often a reluctance to differentiate historical circumstances in referring to the
dialectics of illusion and reality mentioned above. In fact, we cannot speak of the
victims of oppression at the hands of the Incas, the Spaniards, the republican
landowners or modern-day capitalists in Peru as if they were socially identical beings.
Could we say, then, that in the process of change ethnic specificity has become an
empty shell? I do not believe so. In my view this specificity has shaped those changes
in particular ways, but perhaps only up to a point.
This point is the crucial juncture at which the indigenous disappears, when the
forms of production are no longer able to ‘reproduce differences’ at their base,
because of their articulation to a means of production that abolishes difference. In
Latin Americans’ view, it is precisely at this point that analysis must become doubly
rigorous, as reality ‘veers o ff and its appearance, nourished in turn by the ‘secondary
realities’ of ideology, becomes its substance. From this point on, as in the case of Peru,
we see how indigenist ideologies on the one hand, and statistics on the other, give out
85 Populist Ideology and Indlgenism: A Critique
contradictory and conflicting messages. This is reflected not just in the debate on
whether Peruvian society is feudal or capitalist, but also in the arguments about the
many local forms of ‘Andeanism’. These centre on questions about what is deemed to
be popular; the extent to which prevailing criteria in other disciplines, such as class,
may or may not be applied to Andeanism; or how to describe the stages of modernist
progress in an Andean context. The days of crude attempts to bring about a
‘renaissance of Tahuantinsuyu’, as criticized by Mariátegui, are over, but the populist
tendency to relegate indigenism and its variants to the basement of history lives on.
All this leads us to register our dissatisfaction with the disappearance of
indigenism insofar as one of the hallmarks of domination is the internalization by the
oppressed of a version of themselves as defined by the oppressor. Whenever a culture
is eroded we react with righteous indignation and mobilize our forces into research
and defensive action. When this happens, however, we ought to stop and analyse what
it is that really bothers us. This internalization of oppression is an integral part of
indigenism and to that extent we can argue that there is a pattern of cultural identity
that extends far beyond the bounds of indigenism. In the case of Peru this pattern
involves a capacity for superseding an entire set of markers of identity moulded by
Peru’s feudal past in order to take on those required to survive as a people
(a culturally differentiated group of workers), even in the context of a marginalized
urban existence. This urban marginalization is undoubtedly one of the most
significant phenomena to affect the Andean biological material as identified by
Mariátegui, a type whose mestizaje11 neither started nor ended with the arrival of the
Spanish. One problem is that capitalism not only destroys indigenism (already largely
destroyed by ‘Hispanic’ assimilation and the power of the West), its progress is at
odds with the whole pattern of Indian cultural identity. This means that indigenism is
not compatible with new forms of modernity under capitalism that encourage, in
turn, the cultural proletarianization of the workers. Capitalism not only erodes
indigenism, it gives nothing in exchange, which is one of the defining characteristics
of its supremacy. Clearly then, to label the current situation as ‘indigenist’ raises
questions of taste or of falsification. The use of the word was justified, and perhaps
still is, by a belief in what it means, and the need to challenge cultural
proletarianization at the hands of capitalism. Adopting a reactionary, anti-change,
position (the ‘true values’ of indigenism) would also be inappropriate. We should seek
to change these patterns from within, from that state of consciousness whereby
ethnicity, for the workers, means a form of class specificity and not the subsuming of
social differences in ethnic differences.
These arguments should not be confused with ‘cultural Friedmanism’ , and its
86 Beyond the Fantastic
attitude of laissez faire, laissez mourir, which, hand in hand with capitalist
modernization, leads to ethnocide. My thesis is that the only way forward for an
ethnic identity within a capitalist system is on a popular-class basis. Indeed, survival
in precapitalist times was implicitly based on those terms. It seems that notions of
class independence and class identity have not yet acquired common currency and
have not therefore been incorporated into the mainstream o f contemporary Indian
politics. This is somewhat surprising given the extent to which the politicized elites of
many ethnic groups have internalized outsiders’ definitions of themselves as cultural
beings. The existence of divisions along class lines in many of these groups is neither
a chimera nor an irrelevant detail, but a major dynamic as it relates naturally to
issues of identity and survival.
These criss-crossing networks of illusion and reality, native identity and survival,
which include the dominant mystifying imagination and the objects deriving from
precapitalism, seem perfectly clear, as does the role they have played in the
emergence of an ideology surrounding native crafts. Populist ideology failed to
distinguish native production from its derivations as filtered through the dominant
discourses. Underlying this problem are also issues about the non-artistic nature of
the visual production of the oppressed, and their status as suppliers rather than
generators of ideas in their own right. For co-optation and populist mystification to
work, native visual arts must retain their indigenous prestige, since the only way to
ensure their future is by catering to the demands of the dominant ideological
paradigm. The oppressed Indian is forced to show his ancient indigenous features and
not reveal his new and true proletarian nature. We could argue that the workers who
have experienced the changes wrought by capitalist modernity also experience within
themselves a need for a ‘new identity’ to replace the one that is vanishing. For them,
this is in fact a new identity based on the old and not an attempt by the dominant
powers to continue with the shabby outward forms of past domination.
It is important to note that change itself allows for a clearer and more dynamic
definition of subaltern groups to emerge within the so-called traditional societies. In
themselves, the debates surrounding identity are not part of a nostalgic enterprise
but a mobilization of cultural awareness with a clear orientation towards the new.
Even in those cases where a part of the historical legacy is preserved in precapitalist
forms, preservation tends to be more effective where a radical overhaul of material
structures has taken place. Many traditional forms have been preserved through the
introduction of new techniques, etc. The commercialization of textiles has undergone
modification as a result of the réintroduction of natural dyes, as seen for example in
the Kamaq Maki Crafts Association, or in the case of San Pedro de Cajas, where input
87 Populist Ideology and Indlgenlsm: A Critique
from outside sources has revived textile techniques that had not been used since
the Conquest.
If we accept that the dubious concept of indigenism is a component in the identity
of the visual object from precapitalist times, we must also recognise its coexistence
with its counterpart: modernity, a modernity that derives from indigenism. According
to populist ideology modernity equals the decadence of indigenism, and therefore of
what it considers to be its gangrene: crafts. This is the case in capitalist modernity.
The problem with populism is its inability to conceive of a modernity other than
capitalist. It cannot conceive for instance, of an indigenous modernity that might
employ an alternative mode of production, nor of the modernity of the very forms of
production that reproduce indigenism today. Indigenist ideology (‘Indian political
thought’ ), therefore, cannot be a partner to modernist capitalism in the preservation
of the past. It must compete in the struggle to construct a socialist future. That is
why we suggest that everything that is a Toss of true values’ is of great interest and
deserves our utmost attention. That is where we shall see the emergence of
something new. Rudolf Baranik has suggested that in the context of the USA ‘at
present, modernism belongs to Rockefeller’ .12 We might add that, in the context of
contemporary Latin America, ‘traditionalism’ can be found at Artesanías del Perú,
Artesanías de Colombia, Fonart and at all the other large companies that promote
artistic crafts.
Hence the need to create a truly native modernity as distinct from, and in
opposition to, an alien modernity that in this case means capitalism (in the past it
meant Spanish feudalism). This implies the development of a critical awareness as
the touchstone of cultural identity. It also involves a reframing of what indigenism
means so that it can conceive of itself as both inside and outside that category. If we
are to reach a point where the native Indian can define that which defines it as
indigenous, we need a critical understanding that challenges cultural domination in
the condition to define indigenism from itself. That must be the theoretical point of
departure of a ‘symbolic strategy’ for a subjugated art. It also explains why its leading
exponents are today involved in a process of dissolution rather than in the
perpetuation of ancient cognitive and production structures. That is how, in the
process of assimilation and retrenchment that characterizes relations between the
powerful and powerless, the most highly developed and formalized traditional sectors
of the visual arts have submitted to domination while the rest are left out of the story.
88 Beyond the Fantastic
NOTES Fig. 14
Tunga
1 The term indigenism is used throughout this article in the broader sense, as it relates to Indian cultural
A Vanguardia Viperina,
practices, rather than to the intellectual and artistic movement of the 1920s also known as Indigenism
1986
[translator’s note].
Snakes and ether
2 Criollo: a Latin American o f Spanish descent. Usually used to refer to the descendants o f the early Photograph by Lucia
colonists who in the postcolonial era constituted the ruling class [translator’s note]. Helena Zaremba
3 For a detailed account o f indigenous visual arts in Peru, see Mirko Lauer, Introducción a la pintura
peruana del siglo X X (Lima: Mosca Azul, 1976).
4 Gabriel Giraldo Jaramillo, ‘El indio americano en el arte europeo’, in Estudio históricos (Bogotá: Biblioteca
de Autores Colombianos, 1954), p. 180.
5 For a detailed analysis o f indigenous visual arts in nineteenth-century Mexico, see Ida Rodriguez
Prampolini, ‘La figura del indio en la pintura del siglo XIX, fondo ideológico’, in Arte, sociedad, ideología
(Mexico City, 1977).
6 José Carlos Mariátegui, Seis ensayos de interpretación de la realidad peruana (Lima: Editorial
Amauta, 1928).
7 Jorge Basadre, Historia de la República del Perú (Lima: Ediciones Historial, vol. 10, 1963).
8 From the Spanish term tercermundismo, a theory that defends the particular characteristics o f Third
World culture [translator’s note].
9 Guillermo Bonfil, ‘La nueva presencia de los indios: un reto a la creatividad latinoamericana’, paper
presented to the Simposio sobre cultura y creatividad intelectual en América Latina, Mexico City, 1979.
11 Mestizaje: refers to the racial and cultural mix o f European, Indian and African descendants typical of
Latin American society [translator’s note].
backwardness and mimetic parody. This choice between isolation and alienation is a
false one; self-imposed quarantine is as negative as the automatic adoption o f imposed
forms. Through isolation, art cannot tackle dependency: its only option is to face up
to it and try to reformulate and transgress its conditions.
The issue is not whether change is possible, nor what should be conserved and
what should be changed, but rather whether or not we have any control over this
change. There is no point in paternalistically pontificating from outside on what
should or could be changed. Popular creativity is perfectly capable of assimilating new
challenges and formulating answers and solutions according to its own needs and at
its own speed. According to the creators themselves, popular art can preserve
centuries-old elements or incorporate new ones. The only real condition of
authenticity is that traditional or innovatory choices are made in response to internal
cultural demands and that they be generated by the dynamics of this culture. For this
reason any innovation and appropriation of alien elements or any use of images or
techniques created elsewhere are only valid in as much as they are adopted by a
community according to its needs; the slightest incorporation of alien systems is
enough to disturb a cultural process, distort its forms and confuse its meaning. Seen
from outside, a cultural body seems terribly fragile, a small pressure is enough to
damage it. Seen from within, it is vigorous and resistant, able to withstand great
weight and cope with sharp resistance without changing its course.
A subordinate culture can respond to an invasion of alien forms by integrating
these into its own processes, although this requires a huge assimilative effort. Since
the impact o f colonization Indians have endlessly demonstrated an almost limitless
capacity for the process of digestion that a culture must endure when forced to
survive and adapt to new conditions, take a leading role and direct its own
development. When it is the community itself that chooses the elements to be
preserved, incorporated or overcome, however shocking the acculturation process
may appear, it will be resolved in a natural and successful way. Generally speaking,
ethnic groups preserve a basic formal reserve connected to their symbolic nuclei; they
tend not to change expressive systems related to their deepest sociocultural functions,
for example, mythical ceremonies and rituals, especially featherwork, ceremonial
baskets and pottery (Guarani Indians), body paint, tattoos and caraguatá textiles
(Chaco Indians). In contrast, they often change customs related to domestic matters,
play, intertribal festivities, commerce, etc. When the Chiriguano Guarani went to the
central region in the fifteenth century they conserved the techniques and decorative
motifs of their japepó (large ritual vessels), but they soon adopted the rich forms and
decorative patterns of sub-Andean ceramics and later of colonial mestizo iconography.
93 Issues in Popular Art
From here, they developed decorative schemes of undoubted value based on the
widest possible stylistic sources.
When the Caduveo Guaykurú attacked the Jesuitical mission in Belén at the end
of the eighteenth century they were so impressed with the ornamentation on the
ceremonial clothes, embroidery, tapestries and book illustrations that they
incorporated it into their pottery, which thus became covered in surprising
Renaissance and baroque arabesques. A similar process happened with the Payaguá
who, living on the outskirts of Asunción during the early colonial period, thought
nothing o f decorating their mates (tea-drinking vessel) with dynamic designs based on
European models to make them easier to sell, nor of decorating their shamanic pipes
with biblical scenes (although in this case it was probably to increase the shaman’s
power by using the Christian conquistador’s powerful imagery).
Deep down, all cultural phenomena are essentially hybrid. The dream of pure
cultures is a romantic myth with fascist implications and ancient roots; a myth that
obscures the fact that all assimilation is nutrition and that change is essential to
ensure the flow of cultural forms, challenge the imagination and prevent automatic
repetition. Many of the elements that we now consider to be typical of certain
communities are in fact sudden and late adoptions: decorations on glass beads,
characteristic of certain ethnic groups, were made as a result of contact with Venetian
glass brought by missionaries; all the ceramics and woollen textiles of the Chaco Indians,
like typical Chamacoco basketwork, are the result of late colonial and inter-ethnic
influences. Woodwork, which became a powerful medium, was introduced by civilian
or missionary settlements and has no precursor in precolonial Indian practice.
Also, the phenomenon o f mestizaje itself - recognized and glorified as the mixed
origins of genuine paraguayidad (Paraguayan-ness) - is always aware of its double
character. Many of the most representative criollo3 craft traditions derive directly
from Europe: ñandutí, a development of Tenerife lace; religious imagery, o f Spanish,
Italian, German or Austrian Catholic origin; crafts in leather, silver and ebony, of
proud Western and Christian origin.
These factors are enough to show the inevitable mixture of cultural processes and
the changing and complex nature of their symbols. This much is beyond doubt. But at
this stage the mechanisms of myth lay a trap. They accept that Indians have
incorporated foreign systems at some distant point in their history and approve of the
fact that folk crafts also derive from the same double root that sustains our criollo
past (at the end of the day this hybrid characteristic of culture serves to illustrate a
sweetened version of history based on the idyllic encounter between Indians and
conquistadors and to justify the numerous dualisms in official discourse), yet they
94 Beyond the Fantastic
consider that history is always in the past and that today popular culture is already
made and is as it is; if it changes, it loses value, and so on. This myth is more
widespread than one would imagine: many anthropologists, historians, journalists and
cultural intermediaries believe, more or less explicitly, that the value o f the popular
lies in tradition and that it is impervious to change. This train of thought is largely
based on the damage done by urban-industrial acculturation of popular forms, the
invasion o f mass images, the loss of greatly expressive unique techniques and forms,
the alarming proliferation of kitsch encouraged by tourism, etc. Faced with these
circumstances, the problem has been badly put; its solution, as we have seen, is not
to bury one’s head in the sand but to find a way of controlling its impact. Many
changes now taking place in popular culture are heartening in as much as they
demonstrate its ability to negotiate difficulties and face challenges using all its
imagination, resources and memory. Through its actions, everyday popular culture
resolves the conflicts that arise between tradition and new techniques. Pottery, for
example, has easily absorbed urban subjects without compromising its rich stylistic
inheritance. Certain pieces made in Tobati are based on ancient anthropomorphic
forms, but they now incorporate audacious subjects and unautochthonous solutions:
fat women wearing tiny bikinis or cheerful miniskirts. Their formal success and
powerful energy make Tobati’s fat women as valid as the best expressions of a closed
rural environment. Other situations have created forms charged with a unique
temperament; some of the recent pottery of Areguá (figures made on potter’s wheels
or in moulds and painted with industrial enamel) manages to show new aspects of
suburban culture and suggest a new originality.4 Recently we have seen popular
manifestations using industrial rubbish (such as candlesticks and lamps made of tin),
images from mass culture and prefabricated elements. In all these cases
expressivity has not been compromised: novelty has been absorbed and recreated
by the community.
Even rituals include new systems. It is common today to see impressive kurusu
jegua montages using neon lights; traditional pesebres using artificial flowers, tin foil,
photographs and plastic ornaments; local festivals that include dramatizations of
current national and international events (as in the ancient San Pedro y San Pablo
festival in Altos where, alongside the archaic ritual of fire and the capture of women
by the Guaykurú, an obsession since colonial times, people wearing masks and
dressed in elaborate leaf costumes act out recent events: beauty contests, political
disputes, fashion shows, satires on international celebrities, etc.).
The traditional agricultural festival of the Chiriguanos, the Areté guasú, has
joined up with the criollo carnival, keeping its social cohesion and proprietary rites
95 Issues in Popular Art
Figs. 15-19 through a ceremony full o f alien signs without losing its originality and its poetry
PWlowing pages)
(see fig. 15). The masks used for the ceremony are of chañé arawak origin, the top
hats are a colonial legacy, the outfits show an Andean influence on mestizo clothes,
Fg. 15
Aneté guasú festival, the ornaments are Chiriguano, criollo, Andean, Nivaklé, Lengua, maybe Mennonite.
ita . Teresita, Gran Some of the disguises, alongside jaguar skins, heron feathers and caraguatá textiles,
Chaco
use motorcycling gloves, fake wigs and dark glasses. Wooden samuhú masks are
Photograph by
Ticio Escobar,
decorated with falcon wings that carry, like a collage, a face cut from a magazine.
Pebruary 1986 Masks made from the fur of wild cats, pécari or deer coexist with others made of
fig . 16
cardboard and plastic; representations of ancestors or mythological beasts share the
Arete guasú festival, festival with Batman and ET. But the festival as a whole is perfectly coherent beyond
Sta. Teresita, Gran its apparent heterogeneity and disorder; it is a surviving and sane ritual capable of
Chaco
absorbing anything and assimilating it, able to digest the most distant images and
Photograph by
Ticio Escobar, find its own value in them.
February 1989 Sometimes certain models that were considered unchangeable are suddenly
transgressed by novelty, curiosity, imagination and the personal taste of individuals
Fig. 17
who, by re-establishing the altered meanings into a new order, are stimulating the
Julia Isidrez at work,
Tobati, Paraguay sociocultural field. In a Tomároho (Chamacoco) ceremony in San Carlos, Alto
Paraguay in 1986, one of the konsáha (shamans), intrigued by the colour of a plastic
Fig. 18
medicine box we had taken, cut the box in long thin strips and carefully wove them
Apyka
Indigenous carving
into a crown, which he then placed into his feather headdress. In cases such as this
from Ava Chiripá, Alto the substitution of forms is based on the characteristic rhetorical mechanism of any
Paraná, Paraguay aesthetic discourse: signifiers move about freely according to formal or semantic
associations. Through metaphor or metonym, old codes are changed and new
Fig. 19
Chamacoco ritual, San truths established.
Carlos 1984-5 Asuté (Ayoreode war chiefs) wear a conical hat made of jaguar fur called ayoi as a
Photograph by Ticio
sign of their domination over a dangerous enemy. During the 1960s a group of
Escobar
Ayoreode, the Totobeigosoode, who had been living isolated in the jungle until then,
felt themselves under increasing attack from landowners and fanatical missionaries.
Many lost their freedom or even their lives in evangelical concentration camps (like
those of Nuevas Tribus), they were decimated by unknown illnesses and persecuted
by a civilization imposed like a punishment. At one point in the middle of 1965, in the
Cerro León region, an asuté, feeling his land and life under threat, killed a
businessman from a petrol company and made himself a new ayoi from his victim’s
‘skin’ . The hat of the invading company was substituted, in a figurative sense, for
that of the jaguar.5
A community can resist cultural impacts and change or adapt its formal repertoire
as long as it has a guaranteed space for creation and symbolic control from which it
96 Beyond the Fantastic
97 Issues in Popular Art
18
98 Beyond the Fantastic
can challenge new elements with its own answers. For this reason the point is not to
isolate communities under threát of acculturation (any form of apartheid is
discriminatory) but rather to recognize the need to strengthen their capacity for
internal organization. While some communities have been culturally emptied in a
brutal way (like the Ayoreode, who lost their entire ritual universe to the
missionaries in just four decades), others, culturally integrated, have managed to
maintain their internal strength and thus continue to survive even the most adverse
circumstances. It is amazing to see in urban Asunción to this day estacioneros and
pasioneros dressed in colonial costume, carrying candles, lamps and banners while
chanting plaintive songs in certain celebrations (kurusu jegua, Easter). One can still
see the presence of kambá ra’anga in the very heartland of modernity and progress.
San Bernardino is a small bourgeois spa town 40 kilometres from the capital,
overlooking Lake Ypacarai. It boasts a luxurious international-style Casino Hotel with
clean spaces free of historical reference and staff trained to the highest international
standards. Yet on certain June evenings some of the waiters and croupiers leave their
dinner jackets, green tables and friendly English phrases behind and go back to the
nearby Compañía Yvyhanguy (from which most of them come) and cover their faces
with shiny black masks to enact an obscure ancient ritual.
be unique to popular culture. There are many thinkers who propose a salvation of the
authenticity of popular art by conserving traditional techniques and motifs at all cost,
or even reviving them where they have disappeared, in an attempt to go backwards in
history to discover a chosen spot that can act as the paradigm of authenticity. Certain
Indians are encouraged - for aesthetic or commercial reasons - to use archaic
vegetable dyes (the piece becomes more valuable in direct proportion to the
redundance of the technique), natural colours, ancestral techniques and ancient
motifs. It is of no interest whether those communities respond to these colours, if
these techniques allow them freer expression, or if those motifs have any current
symbolic meaning. The point is to make the objects appear more authentic and
natural, corresponding as much as possible to an archetypal view of what a popular
image should be (rustic, archaic, earthy and with a hint of the savage).8
Of course it is important to support traditional techniques whenever possible, but
only when the communities need it. Sometimes, as a result of a dismissal of popular
culture, the impossibility of getting certain supplies or the coercive imposition of
foreign models, a community can lose the use of a technique or image that is still
valid. In these cases there can be no doubting the value in removing obstacles and
recovering native expressive media. What is unacceptable is to force a group to cure
itself by faking emotions it no longer feels.
Some have tried to rescue typical techniques or motifs by applying them to alien
practices. An example of this is the use of Indian or rural motifs applied to industrial
design, or the mannerist use of stereotypical images or symbols without
understanding their meaning. Pretence and falsity in art have disastrous effects:
when rural scenes are recreated from outside, the result is a clumsy realism that
always betrays reality by making typical caricatures. When anyone tries to reproduce
the assumed signs of Guarani culture (the paradigm of Paraguayan indigenism) the
resulting images are indistinguishable from any standard mass-media Indian image
(zigzag patterns, Apache headbands, bright colours, etc.),
c) The break in the unity between form and function has been approached in
two ways:
1) Aestheticism, faced with the extinction of popular art, tries to save at least the
forms, even if the functions have to be sacrificed (sometimes willingly). From the
point at which there is a lack of continuity between artistic creation and the social
conditions of production (and therefore an increasing autonomy of form over
function), more often than not as a result of cultural inertia, formal patterns continue
to be used even after their original meanings have become exhausted. This continuity
of forms in a vacuum can be explained in terms of the particular strength of certain
101 Issues in Popular Art
expressions that are so deep-rooted that they can survive their own loss of functional
validity. This phenomenon, characteristic of all creative activity, is somehow more
evident in popular art, in which forms have a greater social dimension. According to
Giménez: ‘In as much as they create a lasting system, class habits or ethos can also
explain the survival of cultural forms and practices even after the disappearance or
deterioration of their material bases. In other words, they can explain the frequently
noted discrepancy between the economic base and ideological-cultural superstructure.’9
Traditional popular art (mestizo and Indian) has its own pace, a different
timescale from other cultural systems, and a more conservative approach towards the
repetition of community models, which is how, even when faced with new
circumstances, it can continue to produce formal solutions relating to previous
demands. At this point forms appear to be disconnected from their function.
This proposal keeps popular art in this limbo and suggests that it keep producing
in terms of pure forms, thus making it comparable to the ‘uselessness’ of ‘high’ art.
This attitude is present in a common approach to popular art that, by promoting its
aesthetic characteristics, forgets its utilitarian or symbolic roles. Although this
promotion is a stimulus to creativity and a recognition of the artistic possibilities of
popular art, it also encourages a dualism between form and function that alters its
communal productive mechanisms and distorts its meaning.10
2) Technical functionalism opts for a sacrifice of aesthetic factors, hoping to improve
the technical quality of the product, thus guaranteeing its survival and opening it to a
more demanding market. This attitude is typical of development theories:
emphasizing commercial aspects and technical fracture but ignoring symbolic
implications and historical context. In Paraguay the Banco Interamericano del
Desarollo (Consejo Nacional de Entidades Benéfïcas) carries out a programme that is
a clear illustration of this technocratic thinking. Projects for the ‘promotion of crafts’
are developed with the help of foreign technicians and institutions, totally ignoring
creative factors. The results are risible and oscillate unhappily between complete
stereotype and ‘urban applied crafts’ that, like all attempts at distortion, end up as
insipid kitsch.
All the attitudes we have discussed so far approach the issue from the point of
view of the dominant culture and try to rescue popular art by isolating it from its
context, fragmenting its practices, arbitrarily favouring certain aspects (aesthetic,
commercial, utilitarian, symbolic) and trivializing its deepest meanings. To
summarize: notwithstanding some good intentions, dominant culture tries to
appropriate popular expressions, making them into trophies, objects for scientific
research, commercial goods or souvenirs. It rescues popular art on condition that it
102 Beyond the Fantastic
control its distribution (through museums, boutiques, tourist shops, galleries), that
it change to fit expectations and satisfy particular desires (primitive nostalgia,
authenticity, references to colonial tradition, etc.). Looked at from this point of view,
it is clear that the only option for popular art if it is to survive is to try to catch up
with an alien modernity or to shut itself away in the past and renounce historical
destiny. Therefore these proposals are paternalistic; from outside they try to write the
rule book for popular art - whether or not it can sign its own products, innovate, or
sell. Its fortunes (or death) are decided from outside: change is feared, and projects
are formulated that should be the responsibility of the community.
assumes an aim that is not necessarily the same. Bartolomé and Robinson have
argued that the way in which Indian societies are seen as precapitalist (i.e. part of the
history and economic development of the West) places them ‘behind’ this history,
while in fact: ‘Indian societies relatively unaffected by colonialism are “ acapitalist”
and not “precapitalist” . Therefore they present per se a different social and political
model from that created by the economic and political history of our society.’12 For
this reason Colombres also chooses to use the term ‘acapitalist’ rather than
‘precapitalist’ as the latter assumes an unavoidable and unique destiny.13
2) The use of the concept of hegemony can question the assumption that the
dominant is an all-powerful force, able to cover every area and devour everything in
its path. Canclini has spoken of a ‘theological concept’ concerning the omnipotence of
a capitalism that controls everything; in societies as complex as those of peripheral
capitalism, sociocultural processes are the result of conflicting forces. ‘One of them is
the continuance (or the remains) of communal economic and cultural organizations
interacting with the dominant culture in a much more dynamic manner than is
assumed by those who only speak of the penetration into and destruction of native
cultures.’14 For this reason: ‘Supra-urban capitalist development, its need for
standardized production and consumption, are limited by the specific characteristics
of any particular culture and by the interest that the system itself may have in
preserving ancient forms of social organization and representation; the dominant
culture preserves certain archaisms to reconfigure and recontextualize.’15 Thus,
although they may not contribute directly to the development of new forms of
production, certain precapitalist forms are necessary for a balanced reproduction of
the system as they can hold together large sectors of society, be an additional source
of income for the countryside, renew consumption and stimulate tourism.16
3) The price paid by ‘traditional forms’ to gain acceptance is that they adapt to the
general mechanism of the system and do not get in the way. This is why the
hegemonic culture tries to polish and change those forms that do not fit into its
system; picturesque folklore, invasion, distortion of meaning and undermining of the
symbolic base are characteristic strategies of this process. The dominant fragments
the culture of its subordinate and isolates its elements to manipulate and recondition
them as it sees fit. However, as we noted before, popular culture is not a weak and
shapeless vessel that passively accepts invasion and gives in to its demands. Also,
popular culture is not only seduced, it allows itself to be seduced, to back down and
give up; its aims are not always very clear, nor are the boundaries between itself and
its adversary so stable. For this reason it incorporates and appropriates many harmful
elements and gratefully receives diverse false presents.
104 Beyond the Fantastic
We have also pointed out how the very contradictions of the dominant system
create small pockets of dissent within itself in which the right to cultural difference is
defended. From these pockets it is possible to encourage this right and disable many
mechanisms designed to empty popular discourses.
The notion that popular art is irredeemably condemned to disappear in the face of
advances made by cultural industries, with the assumption that this industry is
responsible for all the problems of traditional expression, is based in part on a
mechanical application of critical theories of the Frankfurt School to dependent
cultures. This school believes that the uncontrollable advance of a new culture
destroys all previous ones, reducing its differences and particularities. But these
critics were speaking from different contexts; for this reason Brunner insists that
before we apply critical theories we should analyse the meaning of Latin America’s
cultural industry, obviously different from that it could have in a totally different
historical context. ‘For a start . . . European criticism of the cultural industry was
never related to a discourse on the survival of popular cultures . . . Quite the opposite:
its complaint was that the cultural industry destroys “ high” culture, submitting it to
a new form of mass culture. In contrast, in peripheral and developing countries,
cultural industries act over huge areas of popular culture . . . ’ His conclusion is that
a rejection of everything that comes from the cultural industry and enters into
popular culture, ‘is based on the assumption that consciences are manipulated,
recipients are vulnerable and that cultural consumption is totally passive’ .11
We have already noted how the mechanical application of a concept to different
cultural realities generates simplifications. In this case the shift creates a large rift
between popular culture (originally innocent and good) and cultural industry
(alienating and fatally corrupting). The former is seen as passive and malleable, the
latter as a destructive and unstoppable avalanche. We have seen how the complex
ambiguity of popular art and its conflictive nature act as forces of tension, constantly
threatening it with a loss of coherence and understanding. However, these same
forces paradoxically guarantee its survival: they create a parallel mental landscape
full of hiding places, a residual world without frontiers or doors in which popular
symbols can develop protected by shadows and hybrid images; they hide and grow
beyond the control, interest or reach of the dominant culture.
4) Attempts to define popular art in terms of a particular socioeconomic system
(in this case, precapitalist production) tends to assume a mechanistic simplification
of signification processes, understanding them to be locked into the conditions
they express.
The condition o f Palaeolithic peoples illustrates this point well. Let us examine the
105 Issues In Popular Art
strength with which to reinterpret new conditions. But when any group preserves a
significant productive space it can reconstruct a social repertoire to incorporate these
new conditions. It is then that worship can be readjusted, myths of origin adapted
and new figures created to explain recent events. The assumption that cultural
systems of meaning are totally defined by original social conditions is based on the
fantasy that myths are not historical. In fact, Tomároho stories today explain the
arrival of white men, horses, aeroplanes and firearms; they also speak of mythical
heroes of the Chaco War (1932-5). Many old Ebytoso keep the Anabser as stowaways
of this new religion: they link Axnuwerta with the Virgin Mary and Nemur with Jesus
Christ, and explain the extinction of their culture as the fulfilment of the curse of the
last Anábsoro.
Referring to this subject and evoking Levi-Strauss’s hypothesis (which Clamstres
applied to Guarani culture), Miguel Bartolomé says that it is feasible to assume that
the Zamuco were archaic groups, ancient farmers who were forced to become hunters
by other historical circumstances. Thus, their original Neolithic mythical-cultural
pattern would have adjusted to new cultural demands and started to conceive forms
typical of Palaeolithic conditions. He quotes the case of Araucanian farmers who,
escaping the frontier battles on their territory, moved in the eighteenth century to
Argentina; there they became equestrian hunters, first of ostriches, then of cattle
until, finally, they became settled shepherds. For this reason contemporary
Araucanian rituals show the intermixing of several worlds: they are essentially
farming ceremonies including offerings of fruit and animal sacrifices (originally from
their experience as hunter-gatherers) and elements from the current status as
shepherds. Bartolomé adds that it is difficult to imagine a Jew or Christian in New
York recalling that their religion started among shepherds, and was then readapted
and changed according to new conditions.18
At the end of the day, what is the subject matter of Western art if not an
accumulation o f residues, different substrata and forms originally belonging to other
histories, vanished systems and forgotten situations?
Although conditions have changed and although it may drag along considerably
outdated forms and techniques, contemporary art has developed along basically
Renaissance lines. Although it may be hard to accept, Picasso’s painting is essentially
easel painting. What is more, Renaissance forms did not spring from nowhere in the
fifteenth century, but were built up from previous forms that escaped their own
destinies by transforming or adapting themselves to the demands of a new age, where
they could once again establish themselves and reproduce.
How many remnants of forgotten systems lie under contemporary iconography,
107 Issues In Popular Art
visual codes and techniques? How many Palaeolithic, pastoral or feudal symbols can
we find in the rich heritage that Western art claims for itself?
If this forgotten Chamacoco community can keep open the possibility of
generating meanings, it can find solutions for the challenges it faces by reworking
established forms or creating new ones in which the residues of the old will always
be present.
c) Owners of Symbols
For this reason the issue is not whether one should conserve, protect, overcome or
integrate popular art. If the question is posed in these terms, from outside, the
solutions will inevitably be populist or protectionist. Discussions on popular art
should always take its constitutional process into account. A work is not popular
through any inherent qualities it may have but through its use by popular sectors.
As long as these sectors maintain their control the object will still be a piece of
popular art even if its qualities, functions and stylistic elements change. As long as
people engage in their own aesthetic production there will always be popular art,
whether it is traditional or not.
The destiny of any particular form of popular art will depend on whether or not it
is backed up by a collective imagination, and whether or not a community can
recognize itself in it, whether it is seen to respond to moments in its identity and
experience, its sensibility and history.
New conditions that separate the campesino19 and the Indian from their products
create serious problems. Yet, even then, this separation should not be considered as
the transgression of a norm, rather as a conflict with many possible solutions.
From the early colonial period onwards, many pieces were made that escaped the
system of consumption by makers and barter: religious images created for family
altars and local chapels, and some other articles so expensive and luxurious that they
tended to be used more by rich criollos than by campesinos - for example, ñandutí
(fine lace for elegant altars and dresses), silver and gold pieces (mates, harnesses and
jewellery), fine furniture and doors. Demand for these products grew in the late
eighteenth century to cater for a new commercial bourgeoisie that was more refined
than its predecessor. Even so, they are expressions marked by the solemn and simple
taste of Paraguayan rural art; they are popular forms, even if their consumption does
not coincide exactly with the community that made them.'"
When a rural community maintains control over its own symbolic production,
creating symbols in which it recognizes itself, in which its experiences and desires
are condensed, then these symbols are popular even if new economic conditions have
108 Beyond the Fantastic
consciousness has diagnosed its own crisis and announced that it has overcome its
limitations, becoming ‘post’-itself (in a way that preserves the omnipotence and
narcissism of the system it was supposed to replace). For the first time in history we
are contemporary with a ‘state of post’ (postmodernism), which was normally decided
in retrospect. Faced with the collapse of so many rationalist utopias, the discrediting
of technological paradigms and the cliché o f indefinite progress, late-modern culture
is in the grip of a deep unease and the subject of painful questions.
On the one hand, this crisis has symptoms that oscillate between scepticism and
nihilism, disappointment and nostalgia, cynical irony and frank disillusionment. On
the other hand, critical positions vary from radical attacks on fundamental modern
myths to diverse attempts at a solution. Postmodernism, as promoted by certain
metropolitan centres, attacks the consequences of modernism without quite managing
to free itself from its vices. Somehow it harkens back to old forms, not to find
nourishment there or a basis from which to launch into the future, but a refuge, an
alibi in which to hide from new conflicts. Thus postmodernism becomes more of an
epigonal movement than one of rupture; it questions the avant-garde but ends up as
another avant-garde, though without the original innovatory power. It laments the
death of utopias but is incapable o f proposing alternatives. It is opposed to the
cultural uniformity o f technological imperialism while it again imposes and diffuses
standard forms and abstract patterns, still dependent on technological powers.
On its way to a confused modernity, there is no reason why Latin American
culture should suffer the consequences of a process in which, generally speaking, it
played a passive role as spectator or was considered to be an eternal loser. The cult of
indefinite progress, dependent on industrialized production, or the glorification of
technological reason and the crushing expansion of international functionalism
invaded our histories and left behind bastard children, uniform (or barren) territories
and scant benefits. In fact, our societies never totally believed in uninterrupted
progress, nor did they trust a Reason that they never fully understood. Our first
avant-garde movements could not promise much: isolated from society, repressed or
ignored, they were either unimportant parodies or did not have the strength to
capture and express collective dreams. For this reason we should be on our guard to
avoid paying for goods we did not have the time or the opportunity to explore. ‘ [We
arel condemned to live in a world in which all images of modernity come from outside
and become obsolete before we can use them.’22 We should take advantage of this
situation by not running after the broken plates of a foreign banquet. Peripheral
countries can resist and not enter the dead end that exhausted and cynical cultures
have led themselves into. Stuck in this process, the latter are unable to escape by
111 Issues in Popular Art
imagining another time or finding an escape in artistic practices that can turn on
history and question it.
Artistic experiments in Latin America have not yet exhausted many possibilities
or even entered paths that now appear'to be closed; they have not shared
assumptions, histories and values that have created many frustrations and
disappointments. Many of these experiments have been made by popular
marginalized sectors who have different memories and desires. Therefore they still
have opportunities to propose projects through ancient myths or newly acquired
symbols; they still have the right to utopia.
At the same time, one can still learn from the critique of modernity in as much as
it has questioned the cultural homogenization created by the terrible weight of
technological forces; new attention has been given to particular and alternative voices
and to small fragments, to specific efforts that can create new meanings and found
other projects without messianic or apocalyptic overtones.
What is the ultimate destiny of popular art in this universal machine? What place
do its forms have in a history that is always looking forward? How do these
‘primitive’ forms fit into the internal forces of progress?
Today these questions seem somehow innocent. But maybe the prestige of Reason
will recover and it will try once again to organize everything into totalities (so
necessary to fill emptiness), fuse images into a single memory and all symbols into
the same mould. In the meantime we can enjoy this breathing space, this truce
maybe, to examine those many events that do not fit into universalist projects and
which are not blessed by Reason; some shreds of condemned cultures that stubbornly
survive despite decrees and plans.23
It is pointless to ask after the ultimate destiny of many forms discarded by an
exclusive history. The fact is that they exist now. They are here, hidden or threatened,
supported by their own memories or in their pure present, they are still alive, each
reflecting a particular slice of time.
When Ayoreode chiefs are defeated and taken to the missions they leave their furs
and feathers behind; they have lost the right and the pride to wear them. When
Chamacoco shamans approach farms to offer their labour and powers of healing they
wear no garlands or crowns. But the last free chiefs and shamans zealously seek out
the chosen birds and patiently carry out complicated rituals that their children will
not use, but which right now can summon forth the ephemeral truth of the moment,
conjure up alien timescales and capture an intense and fleeting moment in its
unbearable lightness, as beautiful and real as a bolt of lightning.
112 Beyond the Fantastic
NOTES
1 Marilena Chauí, Conformismo e resistencia. Aspectos da cultura popular no Brasil (Sáo Paulo: Brasilense,
1986), p. 120.
2 Mirko Lauer, Crítica de la artesanía: Plástica y sociedad en los Andes peruanos (Lima: Centro de Estudios
y Promoción del Desarollo, 1982), p. 111.
3 Criollo: a Latin American o f Spanish descent who in the postcolonial era constituted the ruling class
[translator’s note].
4 Osvaldo Salerno, Artesanía y arte popular (Asunción: Museo Paraguayo de Arte Contemporáneo, 1983), p.
20.
5 From the 1950s on, certain oil companies began to make exploratory excursions into the Cerro León region
(Paraguayan Chaco). The entry into Ayoreode territory caused violent clashes resulting in the death of
some Paraguayans and several Indians. This case o f the ayoi was told to me by Luke Holland of Survival
International, who, several years after the event, bought the object for a ridiculous price in the Nuevas
Tribus mission (where the Totobeigosoode were then confined) and donated it to the Museo Etnográfico
de Asunción.
6 This process o f commercializing a natural economy occurred fundamentally as a result o f the agrarian
reform and also because o f the hegemonic imposition o f financial capital. This process was especially
important during the Second World War, and since then capital has been advancing steadily on the
countryside. From this point the farmer starts to produce a universal product for export (cotton, soya,
tobacco, etc.) and becomes a vital part o f the nation’s economic activities; he no longer produces for his
community but for Asunción, multinationals and the rest o f the world.
7 Effective urbanization in Paraguay started only at the end o f the 1960s. Morinigo has pointed o u t :
‘Another factor in the configuration o f Paraguayan cultures is the lack of a dynamic urban process.
Paraguay was a rural country until the 1970s. While it is true that Asunción was undoubtedly in charge,
the rural-agricultural economy and its demography impeded a strong urban cultural presence in the
countryside. On the contraiy, Asunción as a city o f peasant migration, without sufficient industrialization
to absorb this migration, defined itself partly through the influx of rural culture.’ José Nicolás Morinigo,
‘El impacto de la cultura urbano-industrial’, in El hombre paraguayo y su cultura, Semana Social
Paraguaya, Cuadernos de Pastoral Social 7, Conferencia Episcopal Paraguaya, Equipo Nacional de Pastoral
Social (Asunción, 1986), p. 53.
8 Baudrillard has analysed authenticity from the dominant point of view in those objects he calls marginal
(‘unusual objects, baroque, folk, exotic, ancient’ ). According to him, these objects have a very specific
function within this system: they signify time, not real time but ‘signs or indicators o f time’. The system,
albeit with difficulty, tries to control it seeing that ‘nature and time, all is consumed in these signs’. For
this reason, however authentic these objects may seem, they are always somewhat false; for this reason
they cannot escape the demands o f a ‘defined, consummate self’ . The mythological object exists in the
perfect tense: ‘It is what has its place in the present as though it had had a place in the past, and for this
reason is authentic . . .’ This demand is expressed through two aspects that mythify the object: ‘nostalgia
o f its origins and obsession with authenticity’. Jean Baudrillard, El sistema de los objectos, 8th edn
(Mexico City: Siglo XXI, 1985), pp. 83-96.
9 Gilberto Giménez, Cultura popular y religion en el Anáhuac (Mexico City: Centro de Etudios Ecuménicos,
1978), p. 229.
113 Issues in Popular Art
10 At this point I am referring to those proposals that try to rescue popular art from outside. I am not in any
way denying the right of any community to develop artistic processes that favour the formal aspects over
traditional functions.
11 Néstor García Canclini, Las culturas populares en el capitalismo, 3rd edn (Mexico City: Nueva Imagen,
1986). p. 104.
12 Miguel A Bartolomé and Scott S Robinson, ‘Indigenismo, dialéctica y conciencia étnica’, Journal de la
Société des Americanistes, publié avec la concours du Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique,
Tome LX, extrait, au siège de la Société Musée de l’Homme (Paris, 1971), p. 296.
13 Adolfo Colombres, Liberación y desarollo del arte popular, Textos de Cultura Popular del Museo del Barro
(Asunción, 1986), p. 26.
15 Ibid., p. 192.
16 Ibid., p. 104.
17 José Joaquín Brunner, Los debates sobre la modernidad y el futuro de América Latina, (FLACSO 293,
Santiago de Chile, April 1986), pp. 30-1.
18 This quotation is from an interview I held with Miguel Bartolomé in April 1987 on the current situation of
the ayoreo, forced into Nuevas Tribus missions. This interview remains unpublished.
20 Lauer argues that: ‘It is when production is made in advance to cater for a demand outside the village or
region (and the dominated sectors) that we start to see precapitalist producers moving from one market
system into another.’ (Lauer, op. cit., p. 187). In colonial, and even more republican, Paraguay the
production o f artisans is made in advance in almost all those areas listed. For example, the black
silversmiths who lived near Asunción, image makers, furniture makers o f Itá, ñandutí makers, etc.,
accumulated products to sell outside the community.
21 Particularly in the case o f ethnic cultures, support for a dedicated creative space is as important as the
fight for a living space. Creativity guarantees a group’s identity and is a force for resistance. When exposed
to forces o f ethnocide communities fall apart and become alienated.
23 In this last point I am no longer referring to those signs that can readapt to new circumstances and grow
in spite o f them, but to those that appear to be unchangeable.
The Visual Arts and C réolité
Pierre E Bocquet
‘Imité ka détenn’
The past and the present can meet in unexpected ways, and sometimes these chance
encounters themselves go down in history. In 1992 the disintegration of the Eastern
Bloc coincided with a new stage in the building of the European Union; and, at the
same time, in many places and in the most varied forms, people celebrated the
quincentenary of the discovery of America by Christopher Columbus. Meanwhile the
Caribbean, where that first encounter with the New World had taken place, remained
a backwater, largely forgotten as events proceeded. The fact is that geopolitical
upheavals, past and present, alter life in painful and often irreversible ways, and the
Caribbean past all too clearly bears witness to the successive stages o f this process.
First came the annihilation of an existing civilization, in this case Amerindian.
Then invasion by the Great Powers, and - in the course of a long and often erratic
process of colonization - population movements, including above all the African slave
trade, the most gigantic deportation operation in history. Latterly there has been the
difficult transition from a colonial to a market economy, reinforced by a natural,
historical process of fragmentation that has defied all theories and all principles.
Homo creolus
Whatever their birthplace, their vernacular speech or their ancestry, the people of the
Caribbean - and a fortiori its artists - carry within them pre-Columbian America,
Europe, Africa, and sometimes even far-off Asia. Ambivalent at best towards their
collective memories, and in most cases actually cut off from them, the Caribbean
peoples are preoccupied by the quest for an identity of their own. Many once thought
they had found that identity through Negritude; in the 1960s they set out in search of
a West Indian identity; yet in their hearts they knew themselves to be Creoles. But
that was a word that, to many people, seemed to bear too heavy a burden of history.
Originally the word ‘Creole’, which exists in French, English and Spanish versions,
was used to refer solely to whites born in the recently discovered territories.1 The
term was later extended to everyone born in the West Indies, without distinction of
race. Down to our own time, usage has evolved in different ways in different places,
languages and societies.
The use of the word to denote languages rather than people is comparatively
recent. More than 100 spoken Creoles have been identified. Most, including those of
Jamaica and the other formerly British-ruled Caribbean islands, are based on
115 The Visual Arts and Créolité
English. French forms the basis of fifteen or so Creoles, including those of Haiti,
Guadeloupe and Martinique.
In the Caribbean local Creole languages at first evolved endogenously: that is,
through contact between Europeans and the natives, over the relatively short period
of less than a century before the Amerindian population became extinct.
Subsequently, in an exogenous process, the languages were enriched through the
importation of slave labour from Africa. Later the various forms evolved and
expanded as a result of various processes, as they are still doing to this day. First
came migrations into the Caribbean area from a number of directions: India, East
Asia and the Near and Middle East. Then, and especially in the period from the
Second World War to the end of colonial rule, there was a constant movement of
families and individuals to and from Europe and the USA. The main migration routes
were from Jamaica and Trinidad to London (later also New York), and from Haiti,
the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico to New York and Miami. The same kind of
movement still continues between Guadeloupe, Martinique and Continental France;
but the United Kingdom has now halted immigration, and (Puerto Rico excepted) it
has become harder to get into the USA.
Versions of Creole are now spoken not only in their countries of origin but also in
all those parts of the world inhabited by people of Caribbean origin, who are more
numerous in some localities than they are in their native islands. This is a tightly
knit diaspora, keen to preserve its identity. Within it, contact between members of
different island communities has opened the way to a degree of merging between
different forms of Creole. In popular music - in the zouk, for example - the
French-based Creoles of Guadeloupe and Martinique sometimes merge: those who
are at times disparagingly called the Negropolitains, because of their lengthy stays in
Europe, have given currency to these transitions, and have made possible the alchemy
of a pan-Creole language.2
collection of West Indian sea stories.4 Raphaël Confiant, who won the Prix Novembre
in 1991 for his novel Eau de café, published five books in Creole between 1979 and
1987.5 Bilingual publications include many children’s books, copiously illustrated,
which reflect their authors’ concern with the survival of the Creole language. Hence
the publication of a number of early learning books such as Bé a ba jou démaré, a
Creole ABC, and a number of books designed to teach Creole to Haitians resident in
the USA, such as SIWOLIN: Kreyol Lessons and Ann réfléchi sou lang nou pale a.6,7
A number of grammars and dictionaries have been published of late, in addition to
audiovisual learning materials.8
In those islands where Creole speech is linguistically based not on French but
on English or Spanish, the terminology works differently; and this has its importance
for the study of trans-Caribbean communication and of the culture of the region as
a whole.
Etymologically, the French word créole translates into English as ‘Creole’ ; but this
word does not mean the same thing in Britain as it does either in the USA or in the
formerly British Caribbean islands. In the USA, for example, the word ‘Creole’ tends
to be associated with the French presence in Louisiana and is much used in
cookbooks and on menus. In the English-speaking islands, on the other hand, where
the authority of The Concise Oxford Dictionary still mostly holds sway, the word
‘Creole’ essentially refers to a person born in the West Indies, but of European (or
Negro) descent.9 This is confirmed by local publications. A Trinidadian dictionary
defines a Creole as a ‘native’ born of a cross between European and black. The local
dialect, which is tinged with French survivals, is known as patois, a word that bears
connotations o f ‘provincial’, ‘rustic’ or ‘illiterate’ .10
Be this as it may, the phenomenon known in French as Créolité is present in all
the English-speaking Caribbean islands, though discussed in different terms. Colette
Maximin, who has researched deep into the twentieth-century literature, oral
tradition and popular culture of the English-speaking Caribbean, speaks of: ‘the
hybridism of the Caribbean . . . The ethnic amalgam and the literary mixture,
reflecting each other’ .11
Although the word ‘Creole’ is probably Spanish in origin (criollo), in that language
its connotations are more restricted than they are in French. For the Cuban writer
and musicologist Alejo Carpentier it denotes a drawing-room song of the later
nineteenth century, close to la mûsica guajira (the guajiros being the white Creole
farmers and highlanders of Cuba).12 The relative whiteness of these Cuban criollos,
by comparison with the Creoles of other islands such as Jamaica or Martinique, is
explained by ethnic and social factors connected with the history of the agrarian
117 The Visual Arts and Créolité
economy. In Jamaica in 1800 the population contained 88 per cent slaves and less
than 2 per cent whites (the balance being the ‘free’, mostly half-caste, population),
but in 1827 in Cuba 44 per cent were slaves and 40 per cent whites.13
All the same, when Antonio Benitez Rojo speaks of the emergence of a Creole
culture in Cuba he has in mind the culture of the country people who lived not only
outside the centres of colonial power but also away from the plantations, in isolated
inland areas that nurtured a more open society with far more racial interaction than
elsewhere. The resulting culture was ‘supersyncretic’, characterized by its complexity,
its individualism and its ‘instability’ .14 Benitez Rojo also emphasizes the
terminological difference between la cultura criolla and the adjective criollo itself.
In some contexts criollo bears ‘an essentially cultural connotation and applies to
those who were born in the Americas, whether Aborigines, Europeans, Africans,
Asians or the product of any form of interbreeding, and who speak the official
language of the colony . . . but without reference to more complex factors [notably]
of a cultural kind’ .10 Hence the necessity, still according to Benitez Rojo, to distinguish
all this from a cultura criolla in which other factors are involved beyond the purely
local, so that it constitutes a phenomenon on the national level. Thus defined, the
cultura criolla is not far removed from Créolité, defined as a cultural cement: ‘the
interactional or transactional aggregate of Carib, European, African, Asian and
Levantine cultural elements, united on the same soil by the shared yoke of history’ .16
is all that the general public tends to think of when it hears of Caribbean art.
The Cuban artist Wifredo Lam never sought to deny his origins. Far from it: in his
work he mingled the various currents of European painting with elements from
Spanish and African culture, and he became, in global terms, one of the most popular
of all twentieth-century painters. Other artists, most of them expatriates, have
strenuously disowned their Caribbean origins, not only in relation to their work but
in their public attitudes, too. This total rejection goes a long way beyond aesthetics.
What cannot ultimately be denied is that art from the Caribbean, or art made by
people of Caribbean ancestry, bears the influence of its origin; the same, of course,
goes for most arts and for all cultures.
As in the rest of the world, Caribbean artists have often formed groups, linked by
personal ties or by affinities in their work. Whether on critical or historical grounds,
they have also found themselves categorized into schools. Having fought off such
epithets as ‘naïf’ , ‘doudouiste’ or ‘exotic’ , will Caribbean artists, and especially those
who regard themselves as artists first and West Indians second - as if this order of
precedence could make any difference to the common fund upon which, consciously or
unconsciously, they all draw - allow their art, like their own origins, to be described
as Creole? It would be unwise to count on it.
The reality is, however, that cultural hybridism (mestizaje) in the Caribbean is
an undeniable fact, and no one form of art is more immune to its influence than any
other. Pierre Gaudibert describes mestizaje as one of the expressive forms of
acculturation, which may be defined as an array of (violent or non-violent)
interference phenomena between cultures, the effects of which may take many
forms.19 He adds, however, that it is not by any means a sure measure of artistic
success, and that one often finds juxtapositions of the conventional and distinctive
signs of different cultures; ill-absorbed borrowings and telescopings; exotic
incompatibles pieced together . . . This piecing together [bricolage] becomes
increasingly frequent as mestizaje is pressed forward ever more hastily; in the
great civilizations of the past, it was a very slow process, which often lasted for
centuries on end.20
In which case, why not take advantage of the five centuries that have elapsed
since the (mostly brutal) first encounter between Europeans and Amerindians,
followed by the encounter with Africa, and with all the other cultural currents that
have flowed into the Caribbean? This mestizaje is the process historically covered by
the word ‘Creole’, whether in its Spanish, French or English variants. As a word,
‘Creole’ may sound retrograde to some, but it does have the unique advantage of
distinguishing mestizaje in the Caribbean from mestizaje elsewhere. All West Indians,
119 The Visual Arts and Créolité
whatever their native language, their racial origins or their mode of expression, can
find a common identity in Créolité-, for it implies no specific racial ties, no particular
degree of assimilation, no particular language or mode of expression. Above all,
Créolité is a matter of fact: to identify with it is merely to proclaim a fact, since it
exists whether anyone wants it or not. It has a twofold advantage: it enables
Caribbean artists to unite both against the crushing force of the hegemonic cultures
that are poised to impose cultural uniformity, and against a standardization by which
everyone stands to lose.
Finally, allegiance to Créolité, which is an inclusive and not a limiting concept,
would put an end both to petty inter-island rivalries, in which all lay claim to a
meaningless cultural supremacy, and to those trifling disputes and controversies that
poison the artistic climate o f individual communities. It is up to all concerned to join
forces in promoting the development o f artistic taste within their own islands and,
consequently, in the Caribbean region as a whole.
NOTES
1 On the origins o f the word ‘Creole’ see, in particular, Robert Chaudenson, Les Créoles français
(Paris, 1979), pp. 9ff.
2 Lambert Felix Prudent, ‘La Pub, le zouk et l’album’, in Prudent, Antilles: Espoirs et déchirements de l ’âme
créole (Paris: Autrement, 1990), pp. 212ff.
3 Jean Bernabé, Patrick Chamoiseau and Raphaël Confiant, Eloge de la créolité (Paris: Gallimard/Presses
Universitaires Créoles, 1989), p. 13.
4 Térèz Léotin, Lèspri Lanmé - Le Génie de la mer, contes marins des Antilles (Paris: Presses Universitaires
Créoles/L’Harmattan, 1990).
6 Igo Drane and Daniel Boukman, Bé a ba jou démaré: Manuel d ’alphabétisation en créole (Paris: Editions
Mango, 1989).
7 Ernst Mirville, SIWOLIN: Kreyol Lessons for English Speaking People (Miami: Elakak, 1990); Eddy
Bayardelle and Yves Dejean, Ann réfléchi sou lang nou pale a: Let Us Think About The Language We
Speak (New York, 1985).
8 Among the most recent are: Ralph Ludwig, Danièle Montbrand, Hector Poullet and Sylviane Telchid,
Dictionnaire créole-français (Guadeloupe: Servedit/Editions Jason, 1990); Jean Bernabé, Grammaire créole,
Fondas Kreyol-la: Eléments de base des créoles de la zone américano-caraïbe (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1987);
Robert Damoiseau, Eléments de grammaire du créole martiniquais (Fort-de-France: Hatier Antilles, 1984);
Hector Poullet and Sylviane Telchid, Le Créole sans peine (Assimil, 1990), with cassettes; Richard Crestor,
Annou palé kréyol: Cours de créole antillais (Fort-de-France, 1987), with cassettes.
9 The Concise Oxford Dictionary (London: Oxford University Press, 1971), p. 288.
120 Beyond the Fantastic
10 John Mendes, Cote ce cote la: Trinidad and Tobago Dictionary (Trinidad: Arima, 1986), pp. 40, 114.
According to the same source (see p. 38), one o f the meanings of the phrase ‘Cote ce cote la' is ‘patois’ .
11 Colette Maximin, La Parole aux Masques (Paris: Editions Caribéennes, 1991), p. 267.
12 Alejo Carpentier, La Musique à Cuba (Paris: Gallimard, 1985), pp. 293, 296.
13 Antonio Benitez Rojo, La isla que se repite: El Caribe y la perspectiva postmoderna (Hanover, N.H.:
Ediciones del Norte, 1989).
17 For an extensive study o f the relationship between Créolité and literature, see Patrick Chamoiseau and
Raphaël Confiant, Lettres créoles: Tracées antillaises et continentales de la littérature 1635-1975 (Paris:
Hatier, 1991).
19 Pierre Gaudibert, ‘Métissages artistiques’, in Métissages: Nouvelle Revue d ’ethnopsychiatrie, no. 17,
‘La Pensée sauvage’ (1991), p. 183.
The history of art has, to a large extent, been a Eurocentric story. It is a construction
‘made in the West’ that excludes, diminishes, decontextualizes and banishes to
bantustans a good part of the aesthetic-symbolic production of the world. It is
becoming increasingly urgent - especially for Latin Americans - to deconstruct it
in search of more decentralized, integrative, contextualized and multidisciplinary
discourses, based on dialogue, hybridization and transformation, open to an
intercultural understanding of the functions, meanings and aesthetics of that
production and its processes. Some time ago Etiemble invalidated ‘any theory which
is based exclusively on European phenomena’, and his remark has a tinge of urgency
in our field.1
This article follows the above guidelines. It tries to interpret the work of
Wifredo Lam from Africa in the Americas. Since Lam was a paradigmatic artist of
Latin American modernism, such an analysis could be extended to a reading of
modern art in Latin America from Latin America.
I want to look at the work of this Cuban painter less as a product of Surrealism or
in terms of the presence of ‘primitive’, African or Afro-American elements in modern
art, than as a result of Cuban and Caribbean culture and as a pioneering contribution
to the role of the Third World in the contemporary world.2 It is a change of viewpoint
rather than a different reading. Lam’s cultural sources have been fully recognized,
although they have always been subordinated to Western avant-garde art; they have
never been examined from the point of view of their own effect on that art, in terms
of their own particular construction of contemporary ‘high’ culture. The displacement
to which I am referring means, for example, that the emphasis would no longer be
placed on the intervention of these cultural elements in Surrealism; rather, this
movement would be seen as a space in which those elements are given expression
outside their traditional sphere, transformed into agents of the avant-garde culture
by themselves. This is what Lam must have meant when he said that he was a
‘Trojan horse’ .3
This change o f perspective does not correspond to a binary displacement. On the
contrary, it implies recognition of Western culture as characteristic of the world today,
through the global expansion of industrial capitalism, which for the first time
integrated the world into a global system centred in Europe.4 Many elements of this
culture have ceased to be ‘ethnic’ and have become internationalized as intrinsic
components of a world shaped by the development of the West. Art itself, as a
self-sufficient activity based on aesthetics, is also a product of the Western culture
122 Beyond the Fantastic
exported to the rest of the world. Its complete definition, moreover, was given only at
the end of the eighteenth century. The traditional art of other cultures, as well as that
of the West from other epochs, was a different production, determined by functions of
a religious, representational or commemorative nature. The current art of such
cultures is not the result of an evolution in traditional art: the concept itself was
inherited from the West through colonialism.
This new approach to Lam does not imply non-recognition of his academic
training and the influence of Picasso and Surrealism, or mean that we no longer
consider him as a participant in the modern movement. He himself once surprised me
during an interview when he' showed me a picture of a work, which was clearly
African in appearance, and commented: ‘You need to have seen a lot of Poussin to do
this.’ Although the tension of ‘Who eats whom?’ is more or less implicit in any
intercultural relationship, its processes, even in a relationship based on domination,
are rather in fact those of give and take, as Fernando Ortiz has said. The active role
of the receiver of foreign elements, who selects and adapts them to new ends, was
stated a long time ago in anthropology by Boas, Lowie, Kroeber and Herskovits,
among others. Curiously enough, almost simultaneously, the Brazilian modernists
had proposed as a programme the selective ‘cannibalism of difference’ .5It was a
difficult enterprise - heralding postmodernism - since it was not carried out in a
neutral context but in one of domination, with a praxis that tactically assumes the
contradictions of dependency and postcolonial deformations.
The difficulties are many. The reverse of exclusion and silence is tokenism. The
centres have an enormous capacity for reifying dissidence.6 Even though
postmodernity introduces a heterogeneous diversification in the centre-periphery
and hegemony-subordination oppositions, it was imposed and controlled by the
centre, reproducing its domination. The centre, disguised as relativism, ‘threatens
to supplant the periphery in its alternative role’, as Richard has pointed out, and to
deprive it o f oppositional force by integration.7 The postmodern interest in otherness
is, once again, Eurocentric, a move from the dominator towards the dominated: the
‘other’ is always us. The danger arises that we may deliberately make ourselves
‘other’ in an attempt to satisfy the Western neo-exoticism. In all events, the
subordinate cultures must exploit for themselves the possibilities offered by this new
situation and the rhetorics of decentralization. One of the unavoidable challenges,
more postcolonial than postmodern, is the transformation to their advantage of the
dominant culture, de-Eurocentralizing it without depriving it of its capability for
contemporary action.
Despite the prevailing structures of domination, the breakdown of totalization
123 Modernism from Afro-America: Wifredo Lam
that this implies may be, as Kapur suggests, a consequence rather than a description
of ‘a realigned universe’ by the praxis of societies hitherto totally displaced.8 This
praxis does not consist in a return to a past that predates the globalization brought
about by Western expansion, but of the construction of contemporary culture - the
ability to act hie et nunc - from a plurality of perspectives.
The intercultural dialogue implicit in Lam’s work is an example of the
advantageous use of ‘ontological’ diversity in the ethnogenesis of the new Latin
American nationalities, of which the Caribbean is paradigmatic.9 Born as a result of
Creole-oriented, hybridizing processes, these nationalities are part o f the Western
trunk, although they are also modulated from within by very active non-Western
ingredients. European culture lies at their origins and is not something foreign, as it
might be in Africa or Asia, divided as their countries are between their old traditional
culture and that imposed by colonialism. Lam could paint in the academic, Cubist or
Surrealistic style within a familiar tradition, even as ‘second mark’ . His contribution
was to make a qualitative turn and base his art on those elements of African heritage
that are alive in Cuban culture. To some extent his work reproduces the plurality
characteristic of the Caribbean, centring it on the African component, which
determines the profile of the region. He constructs identity by assuming what is
diverse from the non-Western angle, providing a rich response to the endemic
problems of identity in Latin America, so often lost between Euro-North American
mimesis, repudiation of the West, the utopia of a ‘cosmic race’, or the nihilism of
finding itself in the midst of chaos.
This turn in the interpretation of Lam is a response to a new orientation of the
discourses that is taking place from the periphery towards the centre in which the
former ceases to be a reservoir of tradition, leading to a multifocal, multiethnic
decentralization o f ‘international’ culture, along with the strengthening of local
developments.10 These processes encourage the dismantling of the history o f art as a
totalizing and teleological paradigm of Western art, the need for which I noted earlier.
It is surprising that art critics and historians have not seen Wifredo Lam as
the first artist to offer a vision from the African element in the Americas in the
history of gallery art. This fact was an undeniable landmark and was the essential
achievement of Lam, much more important than what may have been his
‘Americanist’ renovation of Surrealism, Cubism, abstract Expressionism or
modernism in general.11
Furthermore, what Lam did for modernism was to provide it with a new range of
meanings, multiplying its scope and using it to turn its perspective within itself
without contradicting it but rather appropriating it, recycling, adapting,
124 Beyond the Fantastic
resemanticizing. In this sense he was also the forerunner of the heterodox challenge
to Western monism, through readjustment rather than rejection, which is now
spontaneously developing along the periphery.
If the Africans participated in the integration of the Caribbean cultures, many
expressions of the latter, although not related to African traditions or themes, nor
directly in contact with the popular sectors dominated by blacks and their customs,
may have some African chromosome encompassing particular features and tastes that
helped determine the particular Caribbean identity. This term, beyond its purely
geographical sense, has in practice extended southwards and towards the Pacific to
refer to the internal presence in the culture of decisive elements of African origin.
In ‘cultured’ art we can see, from modern times onwards, certain rhythms,
colours, lines, accents and structures frequent in those works whose Caribbean
character is strongly evident. It is very possible that the African origin has played a
highly active role in the emergence of these features - not so much in stylistic terms,
but as the substantial presence of African cultural elements at the heart of their
structure. Less in terms o f the development of any material expression of such a
culture, than through a Promethean intervention of its conscience; that is, through
the direct intervention of the spiritual culture of Africa - with its world views, values,
orientations, modes of thought and customs - in the ethnogenesis of the Caribbean
and, by extension, in the forms in which the new culture is identified and recognized.
Wifredo Lam was the first artist in whom the presence of African culture appears
in its own right as a decisive factor of expression. This was the result of a complex
process. The son of a Cantonese immigrant and a mulatta, Lam grew up in Sagua la
Grande, where his mother’s family, native to that region, must have had a strong
influence on his development. His godmother was a priestess in the chapter of Santa
Barbara (Shango), which still exists in the town, located in a region with a strong
Afro-Cuban tradition. Although Lam was not initiated into santeria he did grow up in
contact with it and in an environment marked by African traditions.12 Even if this
had not been the case, the African element, to a larger or lesser extent, is present
throughout the Caribbean: it is an essential feature of its culture and the Afro-Cuban
tradition is familiar to everyone.
When Lam left Cuba in 1923 he was not seeking the Paris of the avant-garde
movement, but the Spain of the Academy. There he acquired a classical training and
earned his living with portraits. Towards the end of the 1920s he produced some
works within the trend of Spanish Surrealism, tinged with academicism. In Paris,
where he arrived in 1938 because of the Spanish Civil War, he consolidated himself as
a late modernist, with the support of Picasso. His painting from 1938 to 1940,
125 Modernism from Afro-America: Wifredo Lam
although based to a large extent on African masks and geometry, was reminiscent of
the style of the artist from Málaga and, in general, of the School of Paris: as a formal
resource in the first place, within a ‘brew’ already developed by the latter, an epigonal
language made up of a combination of ingredients (synthetic Cubism, Matisse, Klee,
etc.).13 At that time he also began to develop a passion for the traditional art of Africa
and of other ‘primitive’ peoples (although it has been said that this interest was
already present when he was in Spain, without having at that time any influence on
his work). It was such an important discovery for Lam that he became a permanent
collector of such pieces.
In discussions on the Picasso-Lam intertextuality, the emphasis is usually placed
on the turn of the century ‘black’ Picasso, to the detriment of pictures of the beach at
Dinard (very different, considered as his most Surrealist works), and a number of
oilworks and drawings from 1937-8, that is, one of the lines along which he was
working when he met the Cuban. It is symptomatic that the features that most
attracted Lam to Picasso would subsequently become, after ‘mixing’, decisive in his
own painting: the African element, and deformation as fable-making. Picasso was
interested in African art in terms of geometry, as a constructive synthesis of the
human image. His most Expressionist or fable-like works were based less directly on
African geometry, which inspired colder and more abstract-oriented works. In Lam
there emerged a kind of link between both elements, a process that was to lead to his
own personal kind of expression. It occurred in France, in works dating from 1940,
such as Portrait, Homme-Femme and Symbiosis (the last two titles are significant in
terms of what the works intend to communicate - the unity of existence - as we shall
see below) and from 1941, such as his illustrative drawings for Breton’s Fata
Morgana. In these works the poetics that was to characterize him henceforth is
already apparent. This evolution was undoubtedly connected to his relationship with
the Surrealist's and their fascination with tribal cultures, although Lam, a loner
owing to his heterodox background, with its different worlds and poetics, never
actually joined the movement. Nevertheless, he began to employ features valued by
the Surrealistic visual imagery, such as double eyes, and adopted the pictorial
figuration o f Julio González, which was to become the basis of his own figuration.
He tended to present mythological, fantastic and yet more carnal figures than his
earlier schematized characters from Afro-Cuban geometry. He was interested in the
African mask less as a lesson in synthesis - its morphological teaching - than as an
inventive exploit for shaping the supernatural - its mytho-poetical and expressive
teaching. Unlike other religious forms of representation, the mask does not simply
embody the sacred: it must personify it, make it a moving presence, a physical entity
126 Beyond the Fantastic
that can be seen and felt. Lezama Lima said that ‘the mask is the permanence of the
supernatural order in the transitory’ .14 It depicts the supernatural as something
natural, it makes real what is wondrous.15 Its design has required enormous amounts
of imagination striving towards the personification of this acting fantastic.
At the time of his arrival in Cuba, Lam seems to have moved towards his final
poetics in the midst of many and numerous displacements. The cultural mood
introduced by Surrealism had encouraged him to express his own world, the world of
his culture, in an exercise of modernity. His arrival in Cuba marked his encounter
with that world in reality, and its overflowing into painting. This arrival did not
produce any sense of astonishment at the tropics, but a feeling of belonging. It was
the confirmation of, and final encounter with, his own space. It was a ‘retour au pays
natal’ , in the sense of the moving poem by Aimé Césaire.
Clifford has remarked: ‘Perhaps there’s no return for anyone to a native land -
only field notes for its reinvention.’16 The work of the Cuban artist henceforth is an
achievement that can be seen in this perspective, related to négritude as conscious
and neological construction of a black paradigm. On the island the painter
rediscovered his cultural universe as a personal artistic universe. The return occurred
at the right moment, at a time when he was prepared to do it given the evolution of
his interests. It was a fruitful connection at the right time. Fascinated by African and
‘primitive’ elements thanks to modern art, he had begun to give outward expression
to ‘African’ and ‘primitive’ aspects of himself. This process was defined through his
direct contact with Afro-Cuban traditions. In Cuba, as Ortiz writes, ‘the Afroid world
is in Lam and in all his environment’ : it is not some diffuse feeling, a dream, a sense
o f longing or something in a museum.17 The Cuban folklore specialist Lydia Cabrera
played a central role in this process, when she helped familiarize Lam with the myths,
liturgies and representations of that world. Lam was also affected by the light and
nature. He had come, as Carpentier said, from a ‘fixed’ world to another kind of
world, ‘one of symbiosis, metamorphosis, confusion, vegetable and telluric
transformations’.18 But, once again, I should like to emphasize that the key to all these
discoveries lies in the fact of his anagnorisis of himself as a ‘Caribbean man’ by
someone trained as a modernist in Europe, without contradictions and giving
expression to the various facets implicit in this new experience.
From 1942 - when he returned to Cuba - his works became the vehicle for his
own, definitive kind of expression, the first vision ever of modern art from the
standpoint o f Africa within Latin America. There were formal changes in these
works, with the prevalence of a figuration that, although indebted to Cubism,
distanced itself from the analytical breaking down of forms, or their synthetic
127 Modernism from Afro-America: Wifredo Lam
reduction, and moved towards invention, with the objective of communicating, rather
than strictly representing, a mythology of the Caribbean. There is a baroque
gathering of natural and fantastic elements in these works, woven into a visual and
semiotic texture (which has been decodified by Navarro) whose message is the unity
of life, a vision characteristic of the Afro-Cuban traditions, where everything is
interconnected because everything - gods, energies, human beings, animals, plants,
minerals - is full of mystical force and depends and acts on everything else.19 In this
sense many of Lam’s paintings could be compared to the ngangas of the Palo Monte
religion, the recipients of power that structure sticks, leaves, earth, human and
animal remains, iron, stones, signs, objects, spirits and deities into a kind of summary
of the cosmos.
Along with this integrated vision or implicit in it, Lam’s art, with its fusion of the
terrible and the beautiful, the fertile and the malignant, vitality and destruction,
embodies a universe that is not regulated by the polarity of good and evil, light and
darkness, of the Jewish Christian tradition. It is consonant with the plurality of
Sudanese polytheism and the traditional Bantu religions, to which the dual
conception so dear to the West is totally foreign.
Lam’s painting is a ‘primitive’ modern cosmogony, a recreation of the world
centred in the Caribbean, although it uses the devices of Western art and the space
opened up by it. It is a story of genesis, of the proliferation of life, of universal
energy. Ortiz speaks of ‘living natures’ : the term alludes to a genre established by the
Western pictorial tradition (still life), which Lam uses as a reference or artistic
structure and at the same time transforms, because in the world view implicit in his
art nothing is dead but only in metamorphosis, because everything is full of an
energetic spiritual presence.20 In this way Lam came to create Awakening o f Still Life
in 1944.
There is also in his discourse a relationship with Elegguá. This god (the Brazilian
Exu, the Yoruba Eshu-Elegbara, the Ewe-Fon Legba) is the only one whose basic
image was used almost literally by Lam in nearly all his pictures. Elegguá is the
‘trickster’, the principle of uncertainty, a diachronic figure of change, in opposition to
Orula-Ifa, the principle of structure and accumulated wisdom. Elegguá is the master
of doors and crossroads, he opens and closes everything but is unpredictable and
mischievous.21 The mutant sense of Lam’s painting, where everything seems to
change into something unexpected, might be related to this god. Lam’s art is also a
metamorphosis, ‘a praise of osmosis’ , as he titled one of his paintings. There is also a
similarity with Elegguá in the displacement of vision brought about by this art, as a
fundamental change in itself and as the cultural crossroads that it depicts.
128 Beyond the Fantastic
This new meaning was the result of a different objective and methodology,
which introduced changes in language without the radical invention of a new
language. Picasso and many modern artists sought inspiration in African masks
and statues, essentially to achieve a formal renovation of Western art, unaware of
the context of these objects and their meanings and functions. Lam discovered
African and ‘primitive’ art in Picasso, and began to use it in the same way. However,
under the drive of Surrealism, his own personal world became activated in a way
that was to determine a more internal manipulation of those forms. As a modern
artist Lam displaced the focus from forms to meanings, in a coherent, natural
and spontaneous manner, something that had never been achieved before in
modern art.
The ‘primitive’ contents o f other cultures are thus introduced into Western
painting, giving it a new life. However, being centred in different experiences and
perspectives, they also inaugurate the long journey towards its possible multifaced
transformation - as meta-culture of the contemporary - within the complex
contradiction of postcolonial developments. Lam filled Cubism with the meaning that
the movement had ignored in its morphological use of African art, a meaning that
originated in the fulfilment of religious functions. If we compare an ‘African’ figure
by Picasso and one by the ‘Picasso-period’ Lam of 1938-40 with any figure (even
similar to these) by the ‘Cuban’ Lam, we can see that the former are geometrical
human figures, whereas the latter are mythological entities that are almost never
fully individualized. It is not that the painter resemanticized the African masks,
endowing them with their original meanings. There is no strict quotation of specific
kinds of masks, given the degree of decomposition, mixing and processing of the
sources (although some, such as the gbon, can still be recognized). The intertextuality
here is one of genetics and meaning. Lam was inspired by the semiotic imagination of
the masks in an attempt to achieve for himself, and within the context of a more
personal imagery, what those masks sought: the construction of something fantastic
and natural, which was part of an environment and a conception of the world. It was
an abstract approximation, through the necessarily different resources and functions
of easel painting and modern Western art, to the mystical sense that the masks
endeavoured to express in their contexts. This approach helped him express his vision
from within himself and from the African dimension of the Americas.
There is no precise encoding in Lam either, in spite of the fact that often his
painting is described as a set of symbols. Lam himself said: T do not tend to use an
exact symbology.’22 His reference to Afro-Cuban religious and cultural complexes is
always indirect. Very few elements can be identified, except for the effigy of Elegguá,
129 Modernism from Afro-America: Wifredo Lam
already noted. Yet not even in this case does the figure appear explicitly related to the
powers, myths, rites or ceremonial space of this deity, except at a very general level.
This is true even when the titles of paintings refer to specific gods and altars, which
would remain totally unrecognizable for any believer, since reinvention takes
precedence over description. A stricter symbolic codification appears only in a few
large oilworks from the second half of the 1940s, such as Eternal Presence, The
Wedding, Belial and Annunciation, which are also characterized by a greater
naturalism in the figuration and by their Expressionist aggression.23 Lam merely
seeks to transmit, through the tropological devices of modern art, a world view
conditioned by African elements alive in his original culture, a general mystical sense
that proceeds from them.
This change of vision lies in the internal presence within the culture of the
Caribbean of certain general traits of the African conscience: its religious
philosophies, its world views, its mythological thought and ethno-psychologies. An
integrated opposition between aristocratic academicism and a Dionysian ‘primitivism’
seems to become explicit in his works. In an ink drawing from 1943, for instance, a
beautiful woman in the style of a classical Picasso looks into a mirror that reflects the
image of a mythological being. Such pieces are metaphors for the kind of Third World
criticism of the West that is an integral part of his artistic proposal. Interiorized and
dissolved traces of this African conscience have been absorbed into the sensibility and
imagination of the Caribbean and its special symbolic world. For example, there is the
natural way in which mythological thought operates in the Caribbean within the
modern conscience, without any contradiction - a feature that extends from Bastide’s
‘p rincipe de coupure’ down to ‘magical realism’ .24 It is not a question of the survival of
myths, but rather a natural inclination towards a mythologizing process
characteristic of ‘primitive’ thought, this time in contemporary ‘cultured’ creators,
capable of focusing the world through the structures of mythological thought, and
reflecting a reality where magic and myth are operative aspects within contemporary
problems.
The displacement that occurs in Lam was sometimes proclaimed in a polemical
manner. His painting is often very aggressive towards bourgeois good taste, as he
himself admitted when he said he wanted to create ‘hallucinating figures that can
cause surprise and trouble the minds of the exploiters’ .25 Such an ingenuous
programme can only be understood in a figurative sense, as a posture within his own
art, as poetics. He had a preference for certain aggressive forms such as thorns, horns
and teeth (which sometimes filled an entire picture, as in Escolopendras), grotesque
shapes alluding to repulsive animals, snake-like forms, gros orteil, like enormous feet
130 Beyond the Fantastic
NOTES
5 Primitive Art (Franz Boas) is dated 1927; Revista de Antropofagia was founded the following year, with the
first number including Oswald de Andrade’s Manifiesto Antropófago. For a critical examination o f his
programme, see Z Nunes, Os males do Brasil: Antropofagia e a questao da raça (Rio de Janeiro, 1990).
6 ‘Centre’, ‘periphery’ and ‘Third World’ are all controversial and problematic terms. I am using them to
refer to historically established situations of domination, without any hierarchical or discriminatory
implications.
7 Nelly Richard, ‘La centro-marginalidad postmoderna’, paper presented to the Symposium on Artistic and
Cultural Identity in Latin America, Sáo Paulo, 1991.
8 Geeta Kapur, ‘Tradición y contemporaneidad en las Bellas Artes del Tercer M undo’, in Debate abierto:
Tradición y contemporaneidad en la plástica del Tercer Mundo, Third Havana Biennial, 1989, p. 12.
9 The term ‘Caribbean’ is now used in ethnological theory to refer to a paradigm opposed to monocultural
narrative; see James Clifford, The Predicament o f Culture: Twentieth Century Ethnography, Literature,
and Art (Cambridge and London, 1988), pp. 14-15.
10 Mosquera, ‘Tercer Mundo y cultura occidental’, Lápiz, Madrid, year VI, no. 58, April 1989, pp. 24-5.
11 Through painters like Gorky and Pollock, less by means of Surrealist automatism than by its ‘primitive’
sensibility.
12 On this crucial aspect o f his life, see A Núñez Jiménez, Wifredo Lam (Havana, 1982); and Max-Pol
Fouchet, op. cit.
13 For the development o f Lam’s painting, see J M Noceda and R Cobas Amate, Wifredo Lam desconocido,
catalogue o f the Fourth Havana Biennial, 1991, pp. 155-60.
14 José Lezama Lima, ‘Homenaje a René Portocarrero’, in La Cantidad Hechizada (Havana, 1970), p. 380.
15 So might we say in an allusion to Alejo Carpentier, who uses Lam as a paradigm of his concept of the
marvellous-real in his prologue to El reino de este mundo (1959), where the idea is expressed for
the first time.
17 Fernando Ortiz, ‘ Las visiones del cubano Lam’, Revista Bimestre Cubana, Havana, vol. LXXI, nos. 1, 2
and 3, July-December 1950, p. 269. This text is one o f the fundamental interpretations o f the painter’s
work, and a fine example o f the baroque in Cuban prose.
18 Alejo Carpentier, ‘Un pintor de América: El cubano Wifredo Lam’, El Nacional, Caracas, 1947, reproduced
in the catalogue to the exhibition Exposición antològica “Homenaje a Wifredo Lam ”, 1902-1982
(Madrid: Museum o f Contemporary Art), pp. 77-8.
132 Beyond the Fantastic
19 Desiderio Navarro, ‘Lam y Guillén: Mundos comunicantes’, in Sobre Wifredo Lam (Havana, 1986); Fig. 20
‘Leer a Lam’, in the same author’s Ejercicios del criterio (Havana, 1988). Wifredo Lam
The Jungle, 1943
20 Ortiz, op. cit., p. 259.
Gouache on paper
21 On Elegguá, see Roger Bastide, ‘Immigration et métamorphoses d’un dieu’, Cahiers Internationaux de mounted on canvas.
Sociologie (Paris, 1956); L Cabrera, El monte (Havana, 1954); Juana Elbein dos Santos, ‘Exu Bara, 239.4 x 229.9 cms
Principle o f Individual Life in the Nago System’, in La notion de pei'sonne en Afrique noire (Paris, 1973); The Museum of
and Jean Wescott, ‘The Sculpture and Myths o f Eshu-Elegba’ , Africa, London, year XXXII, no. 4, Modern Art, New Yoc*
October 1962. Inter-American Fund
Photograph © 1995
22 See the interpretation o f Eternal Presence by Suzanne Garrigues, ‘Cultura y revolución en la eterna
The Museum of
presencia de Wifredo Lam’, in Plástica del Caribe (Havana, 1988), pp. 183-92.
Modern Art, New Yor*
23 Quoted by Max-Pol Fouchet, op. cit., p. 68. For a different interpretation, see Alvaro Medina,
‘Lam y Shangó’, in Sobre Wifredo Lam, op. cit., pp. 26-62.
Fig. 21 (opposite Any cultural analysis establishes a relationship with its subject conditioned by
previous page) circumstances that raise issues of manner (of which type?) and aim (to which end?)
Otelia Rodriguez
in relation to the specificity of the environment. These circumstances are not an
Landscape with Two
■hemispheres Floating, additional factor outside the analysis itself (assuming its independence and
T992 autonomy), which could then be reconstituted to contextualize the form and content
O i on canvas, of the discourse. They are a conditioning and interactive part of the whole process of
T29.5 x 97 cms
analytical construction; they shape and influence the mode and conduct of thought
Collection of the artist
Wtotograph by Simon and play a vital part in the dynamics o f the text’s reception.2 To theorize is an activity
Rotoerton materially conditioned by factors that are not only academic or disciplinary but also
institutional or sociocommunicative and which control - by stimulating or restricting
Fig- 22 (opposite)
-au\a Santiago
- intellectual functions and critical exercise in each sociocultural medium.
Strait-jacket (Camisa What I wish to point out is how the following text is marked by the context in
re Fuerza), 1994 which it was produced: contemporary Chile. Any attempt to comment on the
= ce paper and woven
relationship (as yet unarticulated) between postfeminist theory and critical discourse
■air, 27 x 20 x 15 cms
Courtesy of the artist in Chile can only be approached taking into account its limitations and fragility. This
context demands urgency of any cultural proposal.
In this article I will attempt to pursue only some of the paths that position this
relationship: the subordinate status of Latin American culture and the complexities
that surround the operation and transfer of imported references; the international
circulation of postmodern notions of ‘difference’ and the ambiguity in the uses, or
counter-uses, to which they are put in the periphery; the political-military rupture in
Chile and the re-creation of an alternative cultural scene to empower languages and
dissidence with which to interpret the fracturing of identity that took place under the
authoritarian regime.
represses and excludes those who do not share the keys with which to decode it.
In other words, it is seen as the accomplice of a masculinity that brings together
reason and force into its coercive discourse.
To discard thus the theoretical opening and confrontation that takes place
through the interchange of references by accusing it of colonialism is not only self-
limiting but also favours a national process of isolationism. To confuse a critique of
the operations of power-knowledge with the forced abandonment of its materials leads
to the paradox of a supposedly anti-authoritarian movement, just as censorious as the
authoritarianism it opposes, becoming the accomplice of the obscurantism that
defends the pact between lack of knowledge (confiscation of meaning) and power.
There is an urgent need to find the productive articulations that will instil
imported references with a critical faculty of reappraisal that can question certainties
and free doubts. The pressing double question remains how to take advantage of the
advances of international theory and its dialogue with the intellectual context of
which it forms part, and at the same time question the imitative play of a non-critical
transplantation. At the same time, how does one make this theory interact with the
dynamics (social, political, cultural) of the local context within which it should be
useful and transformative?
modernity causes the accent to shift on to the diverse, multiple and fragmentary, does
this herald the fall of masculinity as the archetype of representation?
Without doubt, a critique of modernity favours a greater expression of any
‘otherness’ (be it feminine or Latin American) to challenge the monocentric canons
of ‘sameness’. Unique perspectives are now diffracted into thousands of fragments
and meanings. All discourses based on a linear and homogeneous meta-rationality
are suspect.
European (masculine) culture has dominated with the illusion that its values and
systems of representation are universal and foolproof.6 Clearly, the way in which
postmodernism questions all totalizing fictions affects the credibility of the
Eurocentric and phallocentric model.
Nonetheless, the results of this questioning and the subversive gains achieved
against all centralism are in danger of being neutralized by a new academicism
that collates this decentralization. At this point the parodical techniques of
counter-appropriation should come into play to avoid the ‘difference’ of women and
of Latin Americans becoming an appendix to the postmodernist chapter on the crisis
of centralities.
women taking control of the family away from the man, forcing sociologists to
broaden their terms of analysis to account for this new leading role. Equally, the
current crisis over the term ‘political’ in Chile and the resulting widening and
flexibility of the term allowed the incorporation into the debate of issues previously
marginalized - for example, those related to the dominant sexual ideology.'
These new changes in women’s identity have been analysed and discussed within
the social sciences, which attempted to activate the new issues of femininity to
contest the masculine basis of the current discriminatory system, the sexist
economics of its power relations and the authoritarian paradigm that controlled the
semantic and institutional universe of the captive subject through imposition and
punishment.8 These studies also attempted to revise and criticize the doctrinaire
orthodoxy of the political left, attacking its way of neutralizing the question of
femininity for sexual differentiation and protesting against the censorship of
ideological discourse.
This same question has rarely been applied to cultural production: the discursive
mechanics and the strategies of language and meaning able to produce an ‘other’
subjectivity (alternative to the dominant-masculine one) with which to oppose the
call to arms.
However, it is precisely in the artistic and cultural fields that the shattering and
dispersing effect of recent social violence in Chile has been sharply registered and
interpreted in such a way as to recodify its signs in a new critical awareness of the
fragment. Art and literature especially have reconceptualized their linguistic
mechanisms to communicate a meaning under the gaze of institutionalized censorship
and resymbolized traumatic material in a social and historical configuration of
oblique and rebellious signs and counter-signs.
The whole of society fell under the influence of a language of restrictions and
control, so that everyday life seemed to be shaped by this one-dimensional sense that
categorized everything from a nominative omnipotence. Art and literature in
particular became subversive against this disciplined and regimented social language.
The multiple references within a trembling word and the open references of images
full of allegory and metaphor acted as ambiguities to shake a system that promoted
an authoritarian single view. The truths upon which this view was based, truths
that defend fraud, were shattered in the new critical configuration of an anarchic
image or verb.
This ideological-discursive system in which reason and force unite to promote a
single coercive viewpoint was also challenged by the feminine, which found in this
decentralized literature a perfect platform from which to attack the basis of authority.
143 Chile, Women and Dissidence
It is because of this that we have the auspicious conjunction between a new Chilean
textuality and the emergence of a feminine voice questioning literature to show
its opposition (through changes of ‘genders’) to the institutional language of
received culture.9
Where writing is a process of symbolic/cultural remodelling of the categories of
thought and identity created by the language of the dominant social rationality,
women can find the perfect place from which to disorganize the model of signification
(logical principle, syntactic rule or communicational structure) that controls the truth
in the name of self-centred representation. This encounter is not a natural privilege
(as it responds to a certain construction of the feminine, a hypothesis of femininity),
neither is it exclusive to women. Many male texts have managed to deal with the
femininity, or counter-domination, released through opposition to the censorship and
marginalization created by decrees and authoritarian language. But it is women who,
owing to the decentredness of their place on the map of configurations of identity,
perhaps have a more complex and dynamic relationship with the potential rebel and
subversive of the heterodox word than a man could have.
The current Chilean circumstances of radical transformation of the parameters of
historical intelligibility, and the demands of criticism faced with a system that bases
its authoritarian discourse and masculine/patriarchal axiality in the infallibilty of
order, have led to some daring experiments in art and literature since 1975 that
attempted to erode the rhetoric of official ideology. It is within this critical framework
that women can try to find their voice among a catastrophe of meaning.
Art and literature as critical of, and metaphorical expedients confronting, the
language of majority discourse and its dominant social purpose beckon women to
participate in the play of unmasking. This is how women, creativity and dissidence
bring their three alienated and subversive voices together to celebrate, in the
plurilingualism of the explosion of codes, the destruction of official dogma and the
exhaustion o f ideological creeds.
144 Beyond the Fantastic
NOTES
1 Revised version o f an article requested for a special issue o f the journal Eutopias (University of Minnesota)
on feminist theory (March 1988).
2 ‘Our language limits what and how we know. Schools and reading determine the direction and level of
knowledge. Geography and class play a role in elitizing or distributing knowledge. And all o f this
knowledge cannot be separated from its institutions or from the practices that operate it. And equally, it
cannot be reconstructed without a reconstruction o f those institutions - schools, works, professions, and so
on. Nor is it an ideal operation that transcends sexuality, or personal power, or physical sustenance. The
reconstruction o f knowledge cannot be separated from the redistribution o f power along sex, class and
racial lines.’ Michael Ryan, Marxism and Deconstruction (The John Hopkins University Press, 1982).
3 What I refer to collectively here as ‘postfeminism’ are the multidirectional theories that revise the basis of
original feminist claims, and that formulate their thoughts along the idea o f the feminine as difference.
4 Mestizaje refers to the racial and cutural mix o f European, Indian and African descendants typical of Latin
American society [translator’s note].
5 Referring to a complex narrative and its symbolic/textual mechanism, this model is here theoretically
recoded: ‘This maternal body is a Latin American body; a body that, consciously or unconsciously, has
wanted to forget which language penetrates her and rigidly textualizes it. It seems as though it is only her
unconscious that is aware o f the way in which she has been mythified. The daughter appropriates this
imaginary world, which was submitted by distant and alienating symbolism, and she uses it to mobilize the
signifiers that her mother-tongue allows her to glimpse in its matrix. The ethnic substratum - less codified
and therefore more flexible - is mixed with the Spanish language, yet no longer in an unconscious and
uncontrolled manner but as the mechanism that can close the novel to the unique meaning of logocentric
culture. The aim is to distribute these signifiers, which have been incestuously crossed and deliberately
transformed, in such a way that beneath them the multiple meanings o f the American foundational epic
are freed.’ Eugenia Brito, ‘El doble relato en la novela Por la Patria de Diamela Eltit’, paper given at the
Primer Congreso Internacional de Literatura Femenina Latinoamericana (Santiago de Chile, 1987).
6 ‘Recent research into the “ enunciative apparatus” o f visual representation (transmission and reception)
has shown that Western representative systems permit only one view, that of the masculine, or rather that
they demand the subject o f representation to be totally centred, unitary, masculine.’ Craig Owens, ‘El
discurso de los otros: las feministas y el postmodernismo’, in La Posmodernidad (Barcelona: Editorial
Kairos, 1985).
7 This crisis relates to multiple local changes beyond the Gramscian or post-Gramscian ideologies of an
internationally changing left: political action has been substituted or displaced (from factories to
populations, for example), old forms o f militancy have been replaced by a political class reflecting a new
subjectivity not explicable in terms o f partisan politics.
8 See, for example, ‘Feministas y Políticas’, Material de Discusión Flacso No. 63; Notas sobre la vida
cotidiana: el disciplinamiento de la mujer’, by Lechnier-Levy, Material de Discusión Flacso No. 5; ‘Ser
política en Chile’ , by Julieta Kirkwood, FLACSO, 1987.
9 Diamela Eltit led this tendency with Lumpérica (Santiago de Chile: edn del Ornitorrinco, 1983),
and Por la Patria (Santiago de Chile: edn del Ornitorrinco, 1986).
W o m en ’s Art Practices and
the C ritique of Signs
Nelly Richard
In recent years the subject of women has received a certain degree of institutional
attention and commercial promotion through both Chilean literature and the visual
arts. The issue of the feminine (as defined by the specificity and difference of
women’s art practices determined by gender) is analysed in contemporary Chilean
literature by means of a discourse that utilizes the tools of feminist literary theory.
In spite of the recent inclusion of women’s issues in the visual arts, this field has yet
to elicit a feminist interpretation that addresses the relationship between biographical
authorship (the sexual determinant of being a woman artist) and gender
representation (the cultural symbolic records of the feminine that articulate and
disarticulate the language of the work).1
Nonetheless, during the past decade certain art practices by Chilean women have
defied the military and patriarchal dictatorship by linking power with disobedience.
These practices challenged the institutional canon of Chile’s official culture, thus
revealing a feminist perspective on the breakdown of identity and strategies of
language and power.
preconstructed), is what characterizes women’s art, we run the risk of: Santiago
Mixed media
1) reproducing as feminine those representations of woman (sensitivity, corporeality,
Photograph courtesy
affectionateness) already stereotyped in the dominant sexual ideology, and confirming of the artist
as the exclusive realm of women the same characteristics legitimized in the construct
of the sexual divide - woman=nature, man=culture, society - that discriminates Fig. 24
Catalina Parra
against her and relegates her to the margins of historical discourse;
Diariamente, 1987
2) reformulating an essence of woman and confining her to a condition of universal Mixed media,
femininity inherent in an identity-substance that is often laden with biological 71.1 x 55.8 cms
Photograph courtesy
(sexual) determinism insofar as the body is regarded as woman’s
of Ronald Christ
natural referent.
These problems arise out of the need to deny the signifiers of the feminine, and Fig. 25
posit the argument of what is to be understood by women’s art (art signed by women Lotty Rosenfeld
A Mile o f Crosses on
artists that does not necessarily question how the masculine/feminine difference is
the Pavement, 1979
articulated and symbolized); feminine art (art that illustrates the range of values and Art action on
feelings ascribed to universal femininity); and feminist art (art that acts upon visual Manquehue Street,
culture to question the fact that codifications of identity and power always favour the Santiago
Photograph by
hegemony of masculinity when structuring the representation of sexual difference).
Francisca Cerda and
Rony Goldschmit,
Signs, Power and Disobedience courtesy of Julia P
Herzberg
In the midst of a sociocultural landscape disfigured by repressive violence and
ideological censorship, a series of Chilean art practices known as the ‘new scene’
set out (under the military regime) to reconceptualize artistic and critical discourse
of the culture.2 The work of several women artists was at the centre of a remarkable
discussion of the inherent critical function of artistic language, in response to the
breakdown of established codes of historical and social representation. I will give a
brief overview of four specific expressions of women’s practices that exemplify the
symbolic disarticulation of the mechanisms of signification in the dominant
male culture.
Catalina Parra was one of the first Chilean women artists to circumvent the
restrictions of censorship under authoritarianism. In 1977 she exhibited Imbunches at
Galería Epoca in Santiago, a body of work that veiled political and social denunciation
in an allusive-elusive play (see fig. 24). Her work manipulated one of the official
symbols of Chile, the daily newspaper El Mercurio, as an illustration of the way in
147 Women's Art Practices and the Critique of Signs
148 Beyond the Fantastic
which the media’s monopoly of a single imposed truth distorts meaning. The methods
Parra employed to reveal the official press’s imposition/imposture of that truth were
intended to open gaps (cracks, fissures) at the core of the fraudulent construction of
the coercive message.
In order to subvert the restricting orders of the official press Parra metaphorically
‘wounds meaning’ through surgical procedures and materials (gauze, bandages,
stitches, and so forth). The resulting scar was the printed re-enactment of ‘the
undercover war between the image and the word’, which played with the notion that
the word is masculine (the patriarchal antecedent of symbolic-cultural verbalization),
and the image is feminine (because it struggles against the univocal meaning of
speech).3 Parra’s work broke with the (typo)graphic body of press communication,
creating conflicts of meaning around truths that were decreed unassailable by official
propaganda. The object of this break was to illustrate that a text whose interpretation
has been programmed by authority can be deprogrammed (deauthorized) by breaking
down its signifiers so that the verbal chains that bind power to action and its ritual of
enunciation can be loosened or severed.
Two years later, in 1979, Lotty Rosenfeld performed A Mile o f Crosses on the
Pavement (fig. 25), an art action that freed the impulse of civil disobedience that lay
dormant in everyday life.4 That art action disengaged the rules of linguistic
transmission from their social contents by converting the - (minus) sign into
a + (plus) sign and intersecting the white dividing lines that regulate and discipline
behaviour. In so doing, Rosenfeld committed an infraction against unidirectionality,
frustrated the imposition to march forward and altered the straight course set by a
teleological horizon.
Rosenfeld marked with a cross the sites where authority is symbolically
concentrated and where male brokerage of political power (Washington DC) and
economic power (the Santiago Stock Exchange) takes place. But the cross also served
to intersect political rationalities, social poverty and critical utopias, in such works as
the one performed at the unfinished San Migues Hospital in December of 1989. In
that instance the cross that appeared on the video monitors was formed by the
vertical line that intersected the horizontal line on the 1988 plebiscite ballot paper.5
This new sign signalled a crossroads where diverse ideologies converged.
The - sign, one that subtracts and divides, was transformed into the + sign, one
that adds and multiplies. In the process, the Manichean stroke of the dictatorship
was converted into a crosswork pattern evocative of democracy. Rosenfeld’s actions
activated and empowered gender difference vis-à-vis male political discourse
The work of Virginia Erràzuriz also reflects upon the signals that guide our
149 Women's Art Practices and the Critique of Signs
perception o f space. The artist accomplishes this by utilizing the walls and floors of
museums and galleries as support for her artistic depunctuation. Her work resolves
the fragmentation of visual groupings that defy the reunifying syntheses
(summarizing and conclusive) of the general focal point. The artist challenges the
conventional concept of eye-level and cancels the possibilities of visually grasping
objects fully. She disperses bits and pieces of spatial geometries throughout the room,
including its corners, thus upsetting the hierarchies of vision. Errazuriz forces the
audience to lower its gaze towards the floor (the veritable absence-of-height) and the
sides of the room (see fig. 23). In doing so, the artist disrupts the line of vision and
disempowers the frontality of the masculine gaze.
The discontinuities caused by Errazuriz in the visual field are equivalent to the
creation of voids in meaning: blank spaces - gaps - that defer the possibilities of
arriving at a total understanding of things. The artist’s work circumvents the
referential load of signs by precariously rescuing the minutest detail that negates the
importance of male heroic speech. Against the grandiloquent rhetoric of a monumental
history, Errazuriz always works with interrupted meanings, with minute fictions of
fragile lexicons that direct attention to areas not vitiated by explanatory discourse.
In the years that preceded the publication of Diamela Eltit’s first novel Lumperica
in 1983 the author performed segments of this work in urban settings, particularly
certain pictorial elements in the original novel that were documented as art and
refictionalized as literature. Fragments o f the work-in-progress were read and filmed
in a brothel on Maipu Street. Spoken in the middle of the street in a poor
neighbourhood, the literary word squandered the baroque luxury of its lexicon amid
the squalor that breeds prostitution. By this act Eltit symbolically subverted the rules
of sexual commerce and questioned the assumptions of male profit in the trade of
money, words and women. Just as when she kissed the vagrant in her 1982 video
Love’s Labour Among the Vagrants in the Shelter (fig. 26), Eltit freed the pleasure
of the word and the act of giving o f herself, because she wanted to do so for the sake
of art and for the love of art. By means of this free transaction Eltit disrupted the
rules that govern the exchange of goods and services for exclusive male enjoyment
and reward.
The videos of Eltit’s performances served as a Third World metaphor for
technological failure. In recording and disseminating a ‘bad image’ the videos spoil
the showcase appearances of urban consumerism. The images also operate as a simile
of the errata of womanhood: imperfection operating as style in order to upset the
control of a master image.
The works described above do not make overt feminist statements. Nonetheless,
150 Beyond the Fantastic
151 Women's Art Practices and the Critique of Signs
NOTES
1 The largest exhibition by women artists was ‘Women in Art’ , organized by SERNAM (National Women’s
Service Ministry) at the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes (National Museum o f Fine Arts) in March 1991. It
included more than 120 contemporary Chilean women artists.
2 The term ‘new scene’ encompasses the whole array of Chile’s unofficial practices in the visual arts, poetry
and literature after 1977. Their neo-avant-garde innovations with formats, languages and media clashed
violently with Chile’s traditional academicism, official cultural policies o f the dictatorship, and the
ideological sensitivity o f the orthodox left. Among the principal figures in this movement were Diamela
Eltit, Lotty Rosenfeld, Raul Zurita, Carlos Leppe, Eugenio Dittborn and Carlos Altamirano. These
practices are analysed by Eugenia Brito in Campos mirtados: Literatura post-golpe en Chile (Santiago de
Chile: Cuarto Propio, 1991) and by Nelly Richard in Margins and Institutions: Art in Chile since 1975
(Melbourne: Art and Text, 1986).
3 See Ronald Christ, ‘Images After the Words’, in Catalina Parra in Retrospect (New York: Lehman College
Art Gallery, Lehman College, The City University of New York, 1991), pp. 33-44. The exhibition was
organized by Julia P Herzberg.
4 Rosenfeld’s model is the dividing line that separates traffic lanes: she intersects that line perpendicularly
with another white line, thus generating a series of + signs on the pavement. See Maria Eugenia Brito
et al., Desacato (Santiago de Chile: Francisco Zegers, Editor, 1986).
5 The government issued ballot papers with horizontal lines; in casting their votes Chileans were required to
draw a vertical line, thus forming a cross sign [editor’s note).
C ontextualizing M ulticulturalism
W onder Bread and Spanglish Art
Luis Camnitzer
In its comparatively short life the USA has both adapted and developed a great variety Fig. 27 (opposite
previous page)
of cultural paradigms and myths that give cohesion to its national identity. These
Alfredo Jaar
constructs, by no means always a product of a conscious strategy, overshadow and Two or Three Things I
help to reduce the diversities in population identity, a diversity that would normally Imagine About Them.
tend to undermine a sense of unity. Some of the ideas are notorious and past their 1992
Whitechapel Art
prime, like the ‘American dream’ and the ‘melting pot’ . Some take their place in
Gallery collaboratto*-
economics, like the ‘trickle-down’ theory. Sometimes a little military action furthers with Gayatri
the cause of unity, like the invasion of Grenada, which was approved by 63 per cent of Chakravorty Spivak
Photograph courtes»
the polled population.
of the artist
‘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 tastebuds 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 but
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 becomes also 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 centre and the periphery.
The increasing pervasiveness of ‘Wonder Bread’ outside the USA 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
tastebuds, it is the indirect pressure that subverts and eventually substitutes taste,
creating a new canon. ‘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 takes
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 historical processes are linear and develop
progressively in the search for quality. It follows that art that provides the media with
the latest news and gains acceptance becomes ipso facto the canon. The desirability of
155 Wonder Bread and Spanglish Art
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 could only occur if the values displaced were 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 ‘centre’,
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 co-ordinated 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 impossibility 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 centres. The periphery invests in education and the hegemonic centre
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 pre-dates postmodernism, but often matches it in
157 Wonder Bread and Spanglish Art
with affectation. Work under these conditions runs the risk of half-heartedness.
It is in the third case, in which the artist migrates to the cultural centre, that
there is, in theory, the greatest chance for success in the mainstream. Until the
mid 1950s that cultural centre was provided by Europe, but then it slowly shifted to
the USA. It is estimated that from 1945 to 1965 alone, at least 17,000 researchers and
high-level technicians emigrated from Latin America to the USA. During 1986
24 per cent o f PhDs awarded in the sciences went to non-US citizens and, according
to a report published by the National Research Council in January 1988, in
engineering PhDs the figure reached 60 per cent; in turn, 60 per cent of this figure
did not return to their countries of origin. Out of the 500,000 people who left Puerto
Rico during 1980-5, 14 per cent 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 USA, where migration on those levels was motivated primarily
by economic considerations.7 Political exile was the other major reason for
resettlement during recent decades. A high percentage of these exiles, intellectuals
fleeing right-wing dictatorships, went to Europe and Australia, which provided a
friendlier atmosphere for their dissenting ideologies than the USA.
For the migrants themselves, however, the common unifying experience is that of
uprootedness, an experience also familiar to second-generation artists who underwent
a non-assimilationist 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,
consciously 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 o f 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 towards 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
non-existent or, at best, sporadic. The audience becomes an abstraction, frozen in a
159 Wonder Bread and Spanglish Art
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 centre
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.9 Used in relation
to speech the term has negative connotations, implying the absence of a functional
tool, and its substitution by a non-working 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
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
experiences 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 to 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 programmes, 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 USA and interested in breaking into the mainstream, her memories
and nostalgia prevented her successful assimilation. It was a fact that she at first
resented then, towards the end of her life, accepted. Pressed for further examples,
I would cite the work of Juan Sanchez and of Alfredo Jaar. Sanchez is probably the
clearest example of sophisticated New York/Puerto Rican expression. He tries to get
to his roots, but finds them layered under neighbourhood experiences and
160 Beyond the Fantastic
161 Wonder Bread and Spanglish Art
interpretations. The independence of Puerto Rico becomes a solution to 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 ari
that has been lumped together simplistically under the ethnic label ‘Hispanic’.10 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.11
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, which, in effect, posits a distance
between these artists and the mainstream.12 At best, this ascribed distance reflects
their poor fit within the parameters o f 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 of 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
162 Beyond the Fantastic
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
emigration towards the centre, this reduction serves the interests of ‘Spanglish’
artists and their real and potential audiences.
NOTES
1 The New York Times o f 25 October 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 o f Age (William Morrow and Co., New York, 1981).
3 Miguel Barnet, ‘Identidad Cultural y Liberacion Nacional’, paper presented at the First Meeting o f
Intellectuals for the Sovereignty o f our America (Havana, 1981).
4 Geeta Kapur points out that: ‘In societies like India, modernization in the capitalist style has produced the
commercialization o f not only the traditions themselves, but also o f the traditional forms and artefacts, to
serve both the state and the market.’ (Tradition and Contemporaneity in the Fine At'ts o f the Third World,
paper presented at the 3rd Biennial o f Havana, November 1989).
5 The Brazilian poet Oswald de Andrade, for example, published an Anthropophagite Manifesto in 1928, in
which he wrote o f the ‘absorption o f the sacred enemy’ .
6 Le Monde, Paris, 27 January 1987, quoted by Alvaro Medina in ‘Las nuevas y viejas estrategias’,
Arte en Colombia no. 34. Schneckenburger was referring to a lack o f 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 o f 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 has lately resorted to asking its fellows for
donations in order to ensure the preservation of regional programmes, using the alumni psychology.
The example given for a threat o f possible cuts is the Latin American programme. 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 USA
and then reimported to the periphery under the aegis of a US foundation. The US foundation appears as
having an increased philanthropical scope, while the Argentinian money presumably re-enters 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 1965-6 about myself and my work, in 1977 I wrote: ‘I thought that the
verbal description o f a visual situation could elicit the creativity o f the spectator in a better way than the
visual situation itself. A text also had the advantage o f 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 though t. . . There was the megalomaniac and optimist version: I was working for
Uruguay, in advance o f my own time; some day I will achieve the changes in the perceptual mechanisms :
164 Beyond the Fantastic
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 USA 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 being alien although I don’t want it to; the other that is alien because I want it to be
and because I do not conceive o f it not being alien; I am an alien resident . . . My country does not exist
any more, except in my memory. I am a citizen o f my memory, which does not have laws, passports or
inhabitants; it only has distortions.’
9 I used these ideas for the First time in an essay, ‘Latin American Art in the US: Latin or American?’ (which
served as a starter for this one) for ‘Convergences/Convergencias’, an exhibition at the Lehman College Art
Gallery, New York City, in 1988.
10 In ‘Homogenizing Hispanic Art in Houston’, The New Art Examiner (September 1987), Shifra M Goldman
cites Rodolfo Acuna, 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 more
easily’. (Rodolfo Acuna, A Community Under Siege, Chicano Research Center, UCLA, 1984).
11 For a detailed discussion o f the topic, see Martha E Gimenez, ‘Latino/“ Hispanic” - Who Needs a Name?
The Case Against a Standardized Terminology’, International Journal o f Health Services, vol. 19, no. 3
(1989), pp. 557-71.
12 It is not just a distance in the realms o f art. Pat Robertson’s call for increasing procreation in the USA
(during his 1988 presidential campaign) was implicitly a call to Anglo middle-class procreation and
explicitly to ensure the survival o f US mainstream values.
The Chicano M o v e m e n t/
The M o vem en t of Chicano Art
Tomas Ybarra-Frausto
Born in the tumultuous decade of the 1960s, Chicano art has been closely aligned
with the political goals of Chicano struggles for self-determination. As an aesthetic
credo, Chicano art seeks to link lived reality to the imagination. Going against
mainstream cultural traditions of art as escape and commodity, Chicano art intends
that viewers respond both to the aesthetic object and to the social reality reflected in
it. A prevalent attitude towards the art object is that it should provide aesthetic
pleasure while also serving to educate and edify. In its various modalities Chicano art
is envisioned as a model for freedom, a call to both conscience and consciousness.1
dancer, musician or writer - this meant appropriation of his or her own self. The Fig. 29
Yolanda Lopez
novelist Tomas Rivera further defines the enterprise:
Runner: Guadalupe
Series, 1978
The invention of ourselves by ourselves is in actuality an extension of our will. Pastel on paper
Thus, as the Chicano invents himself he is complementing his will. Another Photograph courtesy
of the artist
complement. This is of great importance because these lives are trying to find
form. This development is becoming a unifying consciousness. The thoughts of
the Chicano are beginning to constantly gyrate over his own life, over his own
development, over his identity, and as such over his own conservation . . .
Chicano literature has a triple mission: to represent, and to conserve that
aspect of life that the Mexican American holds as his own and at the same time
destroy the invention by others of his own life. That is - conservation, struggle
and invention.2
Esto fue por eso del ano 1968 . . . Era la epoca del grape boycott y del Third
World Strike en Berkeley. We would meet regularly to discuss the role and
function of the artist in El Movimiento. At first our group was composed
mainly of painters and we would bring our work and criticize it. Discussions
were heated, especially the polemics on the form and content of revolutionary
art and the relevance of murals and graphic art. Posters and other forms of
graphics were especially discussed since many of us were creating cartelones as
organizing tools for the various Chicano mitotes (spontaneous ‘happenings’ ) in
the Bay Area.
Our group kept growing and soon included local poets and intellectuals like
Octavio Romano. In March of 1969 we decided to hold an exhibition in a big
old frame house on 24th Street here in Oakland. The spacious but slightly
rasquache house had been christened ‘La Causa’. The exhibition was called
167 The Chicano Movement/The Movement of Chicano Art
169 The Chicano Movement/The Movement of Chicano Art
Rg. 30 ‘Nuevos Símbolos for La Nueva Raza’ and attempted to visually project images
juillermo Gomez-Pena
of el hombre nuevo: the Chicano who had emerged from the decolonization
From Border-Wizard
Border Brujo), 1989 process.
Photograph by Opening night was a todo dar with viejitos, wainitos and vatos de la calle
Wax Aguilera walking in, checking it out and staying to rap. Algunos poetas locales read
their work and there was music and plática muy sabrosa. We all sensed the
beginning of an artistic rebirth. Un nuevo arte del pueblo.3
This ‘nuevo arte del pueblo’ (a new art of the people) was to be created from
shared experience and based on communal art traditions. Necessarily, a first step was
to investigate, and give authority to, authentic expressive forms arising within the
heterogeneous Chicano community. In opposition to the hierarchical dominant
culture, which implicitly made a distinction between ‘fine art’ and ‘folk art’, attempts
were made to eradicate boundaries and integrate categories. An initial recognition
was that the practices of daily life and the lived environment should be primary
constituent elements of the new aesthetic. In the everyday life of the barrio art
objects are embedded in a network of cultural sites, activities and events. ‘The way
folk art fits into this cultural constellation reveals time-tested aesthetic practices for
accomplishing goals in social, religious and economic life. And these practices are
ongoing; they do not point to an absolute standard or set of truths.’4 Inside the home,
in the yard, and on the street corner - throughout the barrio environment - a visual
culture of accumulation and bold display is enunciated. Handcrafted and store-bought
items from the popular culture of Mexico and the mass culture of the USA mix freely
and exuberantly in a milieu of inventive appropriation and recontextualization. The
barrio environment is shaped in ways that express the community’s sense of itself,
the aesthetic display projecting a sort of visual biculturalism.
As communal customs, rituals and traditions were appropriated by Movimiento
artists, they yielded boundless sources of imagery. The aim was not simply to reclaim
vernacular traditions but to reinterpret them in ways useful to the social urgency of
the period.
common images from the almanaque tradition are the Virgin of Guadalupe, and an
Aztec warrior carrying a sleeping maiden (a representation of the ancient myth of
Ixtacihuatl and Popocatepetl, two snow-covered volcanoes in the Valley of Mexico).
Almanaques are printed in the United States, but the lithographed or
chromolithographed images are generally imported from Mexico because of the
immense popularity of famous almanaque artists such as Jesus Helguera and
Eduardo Catano.5 Their pastel romanticized versions of Mexican types and customs
are saved from year to year and proudly displayed in homes. In the almanaque
tradition, many community centres began issuing calendarios Chícanos in the
mid 1970s.
A lta res Artists also focus on altares (home religious shrines) as expressive forms of
cultural amalgamation. In their eclectic composition they fuse traditional items of
material folk culture with artifacts from mass culture. Typical constituents of an
altar include crocheted doilies and embroidered cloths, recuerdos (such as flowers
or favours saved from some dance or party), family photographs, personal mementos,
santos (religious chromolithographs or statues) especially venerated by the family,
and many other elements. The grouping of the various objects in a particular
space - atop a television set, on a kitchen counter, atop a bedroom dresser, or in a
specially constructed nicho (wall shelP - appears to be random but usually responds
to a conscious sensibility and aesthetic judgement of what things belong together and
in what arrangement. Altares are organic and ever-changing. They are iconic
representations of the power of relationships, the place of contact between the human
171 The Chicano Movement/The Movement of Chicano Art
and the divine. Altares are a sophisticated form of vernacular bricolage and their
constituent elements can be used in an infinite number of improvised combinations
to generate new meanings. A number of Chicano artists, among them Amalia
Mesa-Bains and René Yanez, became known as altaristas (makers of altars),
experimenting with the altar form in innovative ways.
E xpressive form s from you th cu ltu res Chicano youth cultures were acknowledged
as guardians and generators of a style, stance and visual discourse of pride and
identity. Urban iconography melds customs, symbols and forms of daily-life practices
in the metropolis. Plaças (graffiti), tattoos, customized ranflas (low-rider cars), gang
regalia and countless other expressive forms evoke and embody a contemporary
barrio sensibility. It is a sense of being that is defiant, proud and rooted in resistance.
Gilbert Lujan, Willie Herron, John Valadez, Judith Baca and Santos Martinez are
among legions of artists who experiment-with barrio symbolism in their work.
hand, attention is always given to nuances and details. Appearance and form have
precedence over function.
In the realm of taste, to be rasquache is to be unfettered and unrestrained, to
favour the elaborate over the simple, the flamboyant over the severe. Bright colours
(chillantes) are preferred to sombre, high intensity to low, the shimmering and
sparkling over the muted and subdued. The rasquache inclination piles pattern on
pattern, filling all available space with bold display. Ornamentation and elaboration
prevail and are joined with a delight in texture and sensuous surfaces. A work of art
may be rasquache in multiple and complex ways. It can be sincere and pay homage to
the sensibility by restating its premises, i.e. the underdog world view actualized
through language and behaviour, as in the dramatic presentation La Carpa de los
Rasquaches by Luis Valdez. Another strategy is for the artwork to evoke a rasquache
sensibility through self-conscious manipulation of materials or iconography. One
thinks of the combination o f found materials and the use of satiric wit in the
sculptures of Ruben Trejo, or the manipulation of rasquache artifacts, codes and
sensibilities from both sides of the border in the performance pieces of Guillermo
Gómez-Peña. Many Chicano artists continue to investigate and interpret facets of
rasquachismo as a conceptual lifestyle or aesthetic strategy.
up to its name by focusing on art forms outside the ‘high-art’ canon, such as
caricature and cartoons. The pervasive aesthetic norm was rasquachismo, a bawdy,
irreverent, satiric and ironic world view.
In California, among the first expressions of this rasquache art were the political
drawings o f Andy Zermano, which were reproduced in El Malcriado from 1965 on.
With trenchant wit Zermano created Don Sotaco, a symbolic representation of the
underdog. Don Sotaco is the archetypal rasquache, the dirt-poor but cunning
individual who derides authority and outsmarts officialdom. In his cuttingly satirical
cartoons Zermano created vivid vignettes that are a potent expression of campesinos’
plight. His drawings clearly point out the inequalities existing in the world of the
patron (the boss) and the agricultural worker. To a great extent these graphic
illustrations of social relations did much to awaken consciousness. With antecedents
in the Mexican graphic tradition of José Guadalupe Posada and José Clemente
Orozco, the vivid imagery of Andy Zermano is a striking example of art created
for a cause.
The farmworkers’ newspaper El Malcriado was also significant in its efforts to
introduce Chícanos to a full spectrum of Mexican popular art. Its pages were full of
people’s corridos (ballads), poems and drawings. Its covers often reproduced images
garnered from the various publications of the Taller de Grafica Popular (Workshop
for Popular Graphic Art), an important source of Mexican political art. Through this
journalistic forum Chicano artists became acquainted with the notion that art of high
aesthetic quality could be of substantial help in furthering Chicano agrarian
struggles. As a primary impetus towards collaboration between workers and artists,
El Malcriado planted the seed that would come to fruition in many other co-operative
ventures between artists and workers. The,creative capacities of artists were placed
at the service of and welcomed by those struggling for justice and progress.
Simultaneously with the cultural expression of the farmworkers’ cause, a highly
vocal and visible Chicano student movement emerged during the mid 1960s. Related
to the worldwide radicalization of youth and inspired by international liberation
movements - especially the Cuban Revolution, the Black Power movement and
varied domestic struggles - the Chicano student movement developed strategies to
overcome entrenched patterns of miseducation. Institutionalized racism was targeted
as a key problem, and cultural affirmation functioned as an important basis for
political organization.
Chicano culture was affirmed as a creative hybrid reality synthesizing elements
from Mexican culture and the social dynamics of life in the USA. Scholars such as
Octavio Romano published important essays debunking orthodox views of Chicano
174 Beyond the Fantastic
life as monolithic and ahistorical; Chicano culture, contrary to these official notions,
was celebrated as dynamic, historical, and anchored in working-class consciousness.
Within the student movement art was assigned a key role as a maintainer of
human communication and as a powerful medium that could rouse consciousness.
Remaining outside the official cultural apparatus, the student groups originated
alternative circuits for disseminating an outpouring of artistic production. As in the
nineteenth century, when Spanish-language newspapers became major outlets for
cultural expression in the South-West, contemporary newspapers functioned as
purveyors of cultural polemics and new representations. Although varying in
emphasis and quality, most student-movement periodicals shared a conscious focus on
the visual arts as essential ingredients in the formation of Chicano pride and identity.
For many readers it was their first encounter with the works of the Mexican
muralists, the graphic mastery of José Guadalupe Posada, the Taller de Grafica
Popular, and reproductions o f pre-Columbian artifacts. Equally important,
Movimiento newspapers such as Bronze, El Machete, El Popo, Chicanismo and
numerous others published interviews with local Chicano artists while encouraging
and reproducing their work.
Knowledge of the Hispanic-Native American art forms of the South-West came
from neither academic nor scholarly sources, but rather from elements within the
movement such as El Grito del Norte, a newspaper issued from Española, New
Mexico, launched in 1968. This journal had a grass-roots orientation and placed
emphasis on preserving the culture of the rural agrarian class. Often its articles
included photographic essays focusing on local artisans or documenting traditional
ways o f life in the isolated pueblitos of northern New Mexico. Cleofas Vigil, a
practising santero (carver o f santos) from the region, travelled widely, speaking to
groups of artists. The carvers Patrocinio Barela, Celso Gallegos, and Jorge Lopez
(all master santeros whose works were collected, documented and exhibited by Anglo
patrons during the first part of the century) gained renewed influence within the
budding associations of Chicano artists. Old and tattered exhibition catalogues,
newspaper clippings and barely legible magazine articles that documented their work
were examined and passed from hand to hand to be eagerly scrutinized and savoured.
Primarily through oral tradition and the informal sharing of visual documentation
Chicano artists became aware of a major ancestral folk art tradition. And aside from
the Movimiento press, literary and scholarly journals such as El Grito and Revista
Chicana Riqueña often published portfolios of artists’ works. All these alternative
forces inserted art into life, propagating enabling visions of Chicano experience.
Asserting that Chicano art had a basic aim - to document, denounce and delight -
175 The Chicano Movement/The Movement of Chicano Art
individual artists and artists’ groups resisted the formulation of a restricted aesthetic
programme to be followed uniformly. The Chicano community was heterogeneous,
and the art forms it inspired were equally varied. Although representational modes
became dominant, some artists opted for abstract and more personal expression.
Artists in this group felt that internal and subjective views of reality were significant,
and that formal and technical methods of presentation should remain varied.
P osters The combative phase of El Movimiento called for a militant art useful in the
mobilization of large groups for political action. Posters were seen as accessible and
expedient sources of visual information and propaganda. Because they were portable
and inexpensive to reproduce, they were well suited for mass distribution. Moreover,
posters had historical antecedents in the Chicano community.' Many of the famous
planes or political programmes of the past had been issued as broadsides or posters to
be affixed on walls, informing the populace and mustering it for political action.
The initial phase of Chicano poster production was directly influenced by both the
work of José Guadalupe Posada and images from the Agustín Casasola photographic
archives, which contained photographs documenting the Mexican Revolution.8 Early
Chicano postermakers appropriated Posada and Casasola images from these two
primary sources and merely reproduced and massively distributed them, embellished
with slogans such as Viva La Causa and Viva La Revolución. Francisco ‘Pancho’ Villa
176 Beyond the Fantastic
and Emiliano Zapata, iconic symbols of the Mexican Revolution, were among the first
images that assaulted Chicano consciousness via the poster. Poster images of Villa and
Zapata were attached to crude wooden planks and carried in picket lines and
countless demonstrations. Quoting from Mexican antecedents was an important
initial strategy of Chicano art; having established a cultural and visual continuum
across borders, Chicano artists could then move forward to forge a visual vocabulary
and expressive forms corresponding to a complex bicultural reality.
Used to announce rallies, promote cultural events, or simply as visual statements,
Chicano posters evolved as forms of communication with memorable imagery and
pointed messages. The superb craftsmanship of artists such as Carlos Cortes, Amado
Murillo Peña, Rupert Garcia, Malaquias Montoya, Ralph Maradiaga, Linda Lucero,
Ester Hernandez and a host of others elevated the poster from a mere purveyor of
facts into visual statements that delighted as well as informed and stimulated. Formal
elements such as colour, composition and lettering style echoed diverse graphic
traditions: the powerful, socially conscious graphics of the Taller de Gráfica Popular
in Mexico; the colourful, psychedelic rock-poster art of the hippie counter-culture; and
the boldly assertive style of the Cuban affiche.
Such eclectic design sources taught graphic artists how to appeal and
communicate with brevity, emphasis and force. Chicano posters did not create a new
visual vocabulary, but brilliantly united various stylistic influences into an emphatic
hybrid expression. The two salient categories were political posters and event posters.
The primary function of both forms was ideological mobilization through visual and
verbal means.
Chicano posters were generally issued in handmade silk-screened editions of
several hundred or in lithographed runs of several thousand. They were posted on
walls, distributed free at rallies or sold for nominal prices. Within many sectors of the
community, they were avidly collected and displayed in personal spaces as a matter of
pride and identification with their message. For a mass public unaccustomed and
little inclined to visit museums and art galleries the Chicano poster provided a direct
connection to the pleasures of owning and responding to an art object. The posters
were thus valued both as records of historical events and as satisfying works of art.
M u rals The barrio mural movement is perhaps the most powerful and enduring
legacy of the Chicano art movement nationwide. Created and nurtured by the
humanist ideals of Chicano struggles for self-determination, murals functioned as a
pictorial reflection of the social drama.
Reaching back to the goals and dicta of the Mexican muralists, especially the
177 The Chicano Movement/The Movement of Chicano Art
pronouncements of David Alfaro Siqueiros, in the mid 1960s Chicano artists called for
an art that was public, monumental and accessible to the common people. As in
Mexico, the generative force o f Chicano muralism was a mass social movement but
the artists as a whole did not have the same kind of formal training as the Mexican
muralists, and they fostered mural programmes through an alternative circuit
independent of official sanction and patronage.
For their pictorial dialogue, muralists used themes, motifs, and iconography that
gave ideological direction and visual coherence to the mural programmes. In the main
the artistic vocabulary centred on the indigenous heritage (especially the Aztec and
Mayan past); the Mexican Revolution and its epic heroes and heroines; renderings of
both historical and contemporary Chicano social activism; and depictions of everyday
life in the barrio. Internationalism entered this vocabulary via monographic
references to liberation struggles in Vietnam, Africa and Latin America, and motifs
from cultures in those areas. The muralists’ efforts were persistently directed towards
documentation and denunciation.
Finding a visual language adequate to depict the epic sweep of the Chicano
movement was not simple. Some murals became stymied, offering romantic
archaicizing views of indigenous culture, depicting Chicano life uncritically and
portraying cultural and historical events without a clear political analysis. Successful
mural programmes, however, were highly significant in reclaiming history. As the
community read the visual chronicles it internalized an awareness of the past and
activated strategies for the future.
Apart from its aesthetic content, muralism was important in actualizing a
communal approach to the production and dissemination of art. Brigades of artists
and residents worked with a director who solicited community input during the
various stages of producing the mural. Through such collaborative actions, murals
became a large-scale, comprehensive public education system in the barrio.
In retrospect it can be affirmed that Chicano art in the 1960s and 1970s
encompassed both a political position and an aesthetic one. That art underscored a
consciousness that helped define and shape fluid and integrative forms of visual
culture. Artists functioned as visual educators, with the important task of refining
and transmitting through plastic expression the ideology of a community striving for
self-determination.
A Chicano national consciousness was asserted by a revival in all the arts.
Aesthetic guidelines were not officially promulgated but arose within the actual arena
of political practice. As opposed to mainstream art movements, where critical
perspectives remain at the level of the work (art about itself and for itself), the
178 Beyond the Fantastic
Chicano art movement sought to extend meaning beyond the aesthetic object to
include transformation of the material environment as well as of consciousness.
Later works such as the Great Wall o f Los Angeles developed a new genre of
murals which have close alliance with conceptual performance in that the
overall mural is only one part of an overall plan to affect social change.
Muralists such as ASCO (a performance group) began to use themselves as the
art form, dressing themselves like murals and stepping down off walls to
perform. Experiments with portable murals and new social content continue.
There is a shift of interest from the process to the product. While fewer murals
are being painted, they are of higher quality and the forms of image-making
continue to be viewed as an educational process.9
and are affected by the social mobility implied by that, and as public art forms have
diminished in frequency, tracings of a new agenda of struggle have surfaced.
Given demographic data indicating that the number of people of Latin American
descent in the USA is growing, and given sociological data indicating that
Spanish-speaking groups remain definitely ‘other’ for several generations, new
cultural undercurrents among Chícanos call for an awareness of America as a
continent and not a country. In the new typology an emergent axis of influence might
lead from Los Angeles to Mexico City, then from there to Bogotá, Lima, Buenos Aires,
Managua, Barcelona, and back to the barrio. For artists, such new political and
aesthetic filiations expand the field with hallucinatory possibilities. As the
performance artist Guillermo Gómez-Peña points out:
To-ing and fro-ing between numerous aesthetic repertoires and venues including
mainstream galleries, museums and collections as well as alternative infrastructures
created by El Movimiento, Chicano artists question and subvert totalizing notions of
cultural coherence, wholeness and fixity. Contemporary revisions of identity and
culture affirm that both concepts are open-ended and offer the possibility of making
and remaking oneself from within a living, changing tradition.
In contemporary Chicano art no artistic current is dominant. Figuration and
abstraction, political art and self-referential art, art of process, performance and video
all have adherents and advocates. The thread of unity is a sense of vitality and
continual maturation. The mainstream art circuit continues to uphold rigid and
stereotypical notions in its primitivistic and folkloristic categorizations of ‘ethnic art’ .
This is an elite perspective that blithely relegates highly trained artists to a nether
region in which Chicano art is inscribed in an imagined world that is a perpetual
fiesta of bright colours and folk idioms - a world in which social content is interpreted
as a cultural form unconnected to political and social sensibilities.
For the denizens of the arts establishment Chicano art is uneasily accommodated
within two viewpoints. It can be welcomed and celebrated under the rubric of
pluralism, a classification that permissively allows a sort of supermarket-like array of
choices among styles, techniques and contents. While stemming from a democratic
180 Beyond the Fantastic
impulse to validate and recognize diversity, pluralism serves also to commodify art,
disarm alternative representations and deflect antagonisms. Impertinent and
out-of-bounds ethnic visions are embraced as energetic new vistas to be rapidly
processed and incorporated into peripheral spaces within the arts circuit, then
promptly discarded in the yearly cycle of new models. What remains in place as
eternal and canonical are the consecrated idioms of Euro-centred art. Seen from
another perspective, the power structure of mainstream art journals, critics, galleries
and museums selectively chooses and validates what it projects, desires, and imposes
as constituent elements of various alternative artistic discourses. In the case of
‘Hispanic’ art, this selective incorporation often foregrounds artwork deemed
‘colourful’ , ‘foikloric’, ‘decorative’ and untainted with overt political content. While
these elements might be present in the artistic production of ‘Hispanic’ artists, they
do not necessarily cohere into consistent and defining stylistic features.
Belonging to a wealth of class-based and regional traditions, Chicanos in the USA
have activated complex mechanisms of cultural negotiation, a dynamic process of
analysis and the exchange of options between cultures. In an interconnected world
system traditions are lost and found, and angles of vision accommodate forms and
styles from First and Third World modernist traditions as well as from evolving
signifying practices in the barrio. What is vigorously defended is a choice of
alternatives.
In the visual arts this process of cultural negotiation occurs in different ways. At
the level of iconography and symbolism, for example, the Chicano artist often creates
a personal visual vocabulary freely blending and juxtaposing symbols and images
culled from African American, Native American, European and mestizo cultural
sources. Resonating with the power ascribed to the symbols within each culture, the
new combination emerges dense with multifarious meaning. Beyond symbols, artistic
styles and art-historical movements are continually appropriated and recombined in a
constant and richly nuanced interchange. Current Chicano art can be seen as a visual
narration of cultural negotiation.
At present in the USA, entrenched systems of control and domination affirm and
uphold distinctions between ‘us’ and ‘them’ . Dichotomies such as white/non-white,
English-speaking/Spanish-speaking, the haves/the have-nots etc. persist and are based
on social reality. We should not dissemble about this fact, but neither should we
maintain vicious and permanent divisions or permit dogmatic closure.
My own sense o f the dialectic is that in the current struggle within the Chicano
community for cultural maintenance and parity, there are two dominant strategies
vying for ascendancy On the one hand, there is an attempt to fracture the
181 The Chicano Movement/The Movement of Chicano Art
NOTES
1 This text is a reworking o f my unpublished manuscript ‘Califas: California Chicano Art and Itfe Social
Background’. Sections have been excerpted in Chicano Expressions: A New View in American Art (New
York: INTAR Latin American Gallery, 1986) and The Mural Primer (Venice, California: Social and Public
Resource Center, 1987). My analysis parallels ideas in James Clifford, The Predicament o f Culture:
Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature and Art (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1988).
2 Tomas Rivera, Into the Labyrinth: The Chicano in Literature (Edinburgh, Texas: Pan American University,
1971).
4 Kay Turner and Pat Jasper, ‘La Causa, La Calle y La Esquina: A Look at Art Among Us’, in Art Among
Us: Mexican American Folk Art o f San Antonio (San Antonio: San Antonio Museum Association, 1986).
5 See the catalogue Jesús Helguera: El Calendario Como Arte (Mexico City: Subsecretaría de
Cultura/Programa Cultural de Las Fronteras, 1987).
7 See Shifra M Goldman, ‘A Public Voice: Fifteen Years o f Chicano Posters’, Art Journal 44, no. 1
(Spring 1984).
8 Victor Sorell, ‘The Photograph as a Source for Visual Artists: Images From the Archivo Casasola in the
Works of Mexican and Chicano Artists’, in The World o f Agustín Victor Casasola: Mexico 1900-1938
(Washington, DC: Fonda del Sol Visual Arts and Media Center, 1984).
9 Judith Baca, ‘Murals/Public Art’, in Chicano Expressions: A New View in American Ai't (New York:
INTAR Latin American Gallery, 1987), p. 37.
10 Guillermo Gómez-Peña, ‘A New Artistic Continent’ , High Performance 9, no.3 (1986), p. 27.
The M ulticultural Paradigm :
An Open Letter to the National Arts Community
Guillermo Gómez-Peña
The following text was drafted after conversations with more than thirty artists and
cultural leaders from around the USA. Quotes from colleagues are intertwined with
my own views on the historical moment we are living as ‘Latinos’ in the USA. Given
the vertiginous speed with which contemporary culture metamorphoses, this
document carries the risk of soon becoming outdated. The quotes that appear without
attribution are anonymous statements recorded in the chaotic pages of my travelling
notebooks. I don’t remember who said them, yet I feel it is important to keep them as
quotes to emphasize the empirical and consensual nature of the document.
Intercultural Dialogue
The social and ethnic body of the USA is riddled with interstitial wounds, invisible to
those who didn’t experience the historical events that generated them, or who are
victims of historical amnesia. Those who cannot see these'wounds feel frustrated by
the hardships of intercultural dialogue. Intercultural dialogue unleashes the demons
of history.
Arene Raven, an artist and writer in New York, once told me: ‘In order to heal the
wound, we first have to open it.’ In 1989 we are just opening the wound. To truly
communicate with the cultural ‘other’ is an extremely painful and scary experience. It
is like getting lost in a forest of misconceptions or walking on mined territory.
The territory of intercultural dialogue is precipitous and labyrinthine, filled with
geysers and cracks, with intolerant ghosts and invisible walls. Anglo-Americans are
laden with stereotypical notions about Latinos and Latin American art. Latin Americans
are exaggeratedly distrustful of initiatives towards binational dialogue coming from
the other side (‘el otro lado’ ). Bicultural Latinos in the USA (Chicanos, Nuyorricans
or others) and monocultural citizens of Latin America have a hard time getting on
together. This conflict represents one of the most painful border wounds, a wound in
the middle of a family, a bitter split between two lovers from the same hometown.
Fear is the sign of the times. The culture of the 1980s is one o f fear. Everywhere I
go I meet Anglo-Americans immersed in fear. They are scared of us, the ‘other’ , taking
over their country, their jobs, their neighbourhoods, their universities, their art world.
To ‘them’ ‘we’ are a package that includes an indistinctly Spanish language, weird
art, a sexual threat, gang activity, drugs and ‘illegal aliens’ . They don’t realize that
their fear has been implanted as a form of political control; that this fear is the very
source of the endemic violence that has been affecting this society since its foundation.
Border culture can help dismantle the mechanisms of fear. Border culture can
guide us back to common ground and improve our negotiating skills. Border culture
is a process of negotiation towards utopia, but in this case utopia means peaceful
coexistence and fruitful co-operation. The border is all we share (‘La frontera es lo
unico que compartimos’).
My border colleagues and I are involved in a tripartite debate around separatism.
Some Chicano nationalists who still haven’t understood that Chicano culture has
been redefined by the recent Caribbean and Central American immigrations feel
threatened by the perspective of intercultural dialogue and Pan-Americanism.
Meanwhile, sectors of the Mexican intelligentsia, viewing themselves as ‘guardians’ of
Mexican sovereignty, see in our proposals for binational dialogue ‘a disguised form of
integration’ - and pull back. Ironically, the conservative Anglo-Americans who are
186 Beyond the Fantastic
witnessing with panic the irreversible borderization of the USA tend to agree with
Chicanos and Mexican separatists who claim to speak from the left. The three parties
prefer to defend ‘their’ identity and culture, rather than to engage in dialogue with
the cultural ‘other’. The three parties would like to see the border closed. Their
intransigent views are based on the modernist premise that identity and culture are
closed systems and that the less these systems change, the more ‘authentic’ they are.
In 1989 we must realize that all cultures and identities are open systems in a
constant process of transformation, redefinition and recontextualization. What we
need is dialogue, not protection. In fact, the only way to regenerate identity and
culture is through ongoing dialogue with the ‘other’. This acknowledged, the question
is, what does dialogue mean?
Dialogue is a two-way ongoing communication between peoples and communities
that enjoy equal negotiating power. Dialogue is an expression in microcosm of
international co-operation. When it is effective we recognize ourselves in the ‘other’
and realize we don’t have to fear. Dialogue has never existed between the First and
Third Worlds. We must not confuse dialogue with neo-colonialism, paternalism,
vampirism or appropriation. Dialogue is the opposite of national security,
neighbourhood watch, racial paranoia, aesthetic protectionism, sentimental
nationalism, ethnocentrism and monolinguality.
In order to achieve dialogue we must learn each other’s language, history, art,
literature and political ideas. We must travel south and east, with frequency and
humility, not as cultural tourists but as civilian ambassadors. Only through dialogue
can we develop models of coexistence and co-operation. Only through an ongoing
public dialogue in the form of publications, conferences and collaborative
intercultural art and media projects can the wound effectively heal. It will be a long
process. It might take from thirty to fifty years. We cannot undo centuries of cultural
indifference, domination and racism overnight. All we can aspire to is to begin a
dialogue. This document is a humble contribution. I ask you to join in.
A whole generation of artists and intellectuals has begun the dialogue. It is mostly
artists, writers and arts administrators (not politicians, scientists or religious leaders)
who are leading this effort, and of those, the most vocal and enlightened are women.
In the late 1980s the true cultural leaders of our communities are women.
wants a cheap, undocumented labour force to sustain its agricultural complex without
having to suffer the Spanish language or unemployed foreigners wandering in its
neighbourhoods, the contemporary art world needs and desires the spiritual and
aesthetic models of Latino culture without having to experience our political outrage
and cultural contradictions. What the art world wants is a ‘domesticated Latino’ who
can provide enlightenment without irritation, entertainment without confrontation.
‘They don’t want the real thing. They want microwave tamales and Frida Kahlo
T-shirts.’ They want ranchero music sung by Linda Ronstadt, not Lola Beltran (the
‘queen’ of Mexican ranchero music); the Mexicorama look of The Milangro Beanfield
War, not the acidity of Chicano experimental video. We must politely remind the art
world that hype is never a substitute for culture. It is reality that must be addressed,
no matter how painful or complex it might be. As the border graffiti says: ‘Simulacra
stops here’ (at the border).
In this Faustian moment of perplexity and sudden attention given to ‘Latinos’ by
major cultural institutions and mainstream media, we are concerned about the way
‘Latino art’ is being presented and re-presented.
Some frequent mistakes include homogenization (all Latinos are alike and
interchangeable), decontextualization (Latino art is defined as a self-contained system
that exists outside Western culture), curatorial eclecticism (all styles and art forms
can be showcased in the same event as long as they are Latino), folklorization and
exoticization (no explanation needed).
Latino artists are being portrayed as ‘magical realists’ , ‘pre-technological
bohemians’ , ‘primeval creatures in touch with ritual’ , ‘hypersexual entertainers’,
‘fiery revolutionaries’ or ‘amazing success stories’ . Our art is being described as
‘colourful’, ‘passionate’, ‘mysterious’, ‘exuberant’ , ‘baroque’ etc. - all euphemistic
terms for irrationalism and primitivism. These mythical views can only help to
perpetuate the colonizing notions of the South as a wild and exotic preindustrial
universe ever waiting to be discovered, enjoyed and purchased by the entrepreneurial
eye of the North.
It is mainly the artists who voluntarily or unknowingly resemble the stereotypes
who end up being selected by the promoters of the ‘Latino Boom’. Where are the
voices of dissent that delineate the boundaries of the abyss? Where are the artists
experimenting with the new possibilities of identity? Where are the artists working in
performance, video or installations, the more politicized ones? And where are the
Latinas? Women have been notably instrumental in the creation of a Latino culture
in the USA. Why are all these key artists being left out of the blockbuster Hispanic
shows and the all-encompassing Latino festivals? Some people think these questions
191 The Multicultural Paradigm
fig. 31 between an alternative space and a local community organization with the common
b lo w in g pages)
goals of sharing audiences and producing a specific event, an exhibition or a
Guillermo Gomez-Pena
publication. Other models must be brought forward.
End of the Line
r m de la Linea) Am I asking too much? Multiculturalism must be reflected not only in the
Performance of the programmes or publicity of an organization but also in its administrative structure,
BAW/TAF, October 1986
in the quality of thought of its members, and eventually in the audience it serves.
Mexican/American
Border
I’m becoming exhausted repeating it: multiculturalism is not an art trend, not a
grant language, not a new investment package for art maquiladoras. It is the very
core of the new society in which we live!
Given the global realities of the 1990s, NAFTA represents a vital strategic national
interest for the US. Mexico stands waiting for an infusion of US know-how,
technology and investment capital . . . This policy has the potential to extend to even
more Latin American countries a critical platform for modernization of economic
infrastructure . . . Most economists predict that US Hispanic business owners may be
among those who benefit the most.1
The US stands on the edge of a new frontier - a world both home and abroad, that is
in flux and out of balance . . . The new frontier is a complex global society that will
demand the power of the imagination and the forces of regeneration to meet its
challenges.
For America’s artists and cultural institutions this is a time of great opportunity.
We can offer more than a colourful banner and a theme song in support of this quest.
We bring our untapped capacities as bridge builders, translators and problem solvers.
We bring the language and technology of transformation . . .
America, the lone remaining ‘superpower’, must now learn to operate in an
environment of shifting, toppling, and even flattening hierarchies - a world where
information technology, multinational finance, world famine, ethnic conflict and ozone
depletion are but a few of the interconnecting threads in the emerging global fabric . . .
While we were watching the transformation of the world on CNN, the US has
undergone a metamorphosis as well. The dramatic shift in population from north-east
to south-west, the move from an industrial to a service- and information-based
economy, the ongoing deterioration of our human services, education and public
works infrastructures, our widespread political disaffection, and our emergence as the
globe’s first truly multicultural society, are but a few indications of the monumental
changes taking place.2
I would like to focus on the as yet unexamined brokering role that such
phenomena as multiculturalism and identity politics offer to Latin American artists,
specifically, and ‘Third World’ artists generally. I emphasize the word ‘unexamined’
because the focusing of attention on these phenomena has been seen, by progressives
(the set of groups in which I am most interested and with whom I identify), as a
democratization of civil society; that is, as a politics of recognition and access for all,
and most particularly for the historically excluded. It should be obvious from my
choice of epigraphs that I understand this US multicultural democratization to be
contradictory, for, according to my observations, the majority of groups involved tend
to engage in an identity politics that subordinates how other groups are represented
to the internal agendas of the struggle for resources and recognition. A salient
example of this is the historical reconstruction of Africa by US Afrocentrists within
the institutional and cultural politics of African-Americans. Paul Gilroy addresses the
rooted ‘Americocentric’ character of this family-minded construction of pan-ethnicity:
institutions that are not sensitive to the differences among these groups.
Multiculturalism, at least in most of its US versions, is eminently Americocentric.
This has been evident in many recent exhibitions in which the curators have selected
US artists of colour to represent their ‘extended family’ in other countries,
particularly Asia, Africa and Latin America. One such exhibition was ‘The Decade
Show’ held in New York in 1990, subtitled ‘Frameworks of Identity in the 1980s’ .
The catalogue essay states:
increased as a means to overthrow de facto discrimination, the judicial process Photograph courtesy
of Carolina Ponce
increasingly had to deal with rights in ways that emphasized needs. And needs came
de Leon
to be defined in relation to cultural specificity (of ethnic and racial as well as gender
and sexuality groups). Consequently the judicial process had to expand the function of
interpretation, to determine in what ways regulations, laws and rights had to be seen
in the light of group needs.8 Identity factors thus became ever more important.
The effect of this increasing recognition of ‘alternatively’ defined needs - that is,
needs that did not correspond to the dominant groups - was the gradual dismantling
of hierarchies of values that served to reproduce the hegemony of English-speaking,
Anglo-cultural, and heterosexually and masculine-biased groups. From a society in
which political interest was distributed in relation to a hierarchy sustained by social
class and ethnoracial belonging in more or less fixed ways, the USA was becoming a
society in which a multiplicity of identity factors came to have greater importance.
The conservative backlash constitutes the second moment in this brief historical
sketch. Conservatives mobilized to reverse the gains made by ethnoracial minority
groups, women, gays and lesbians. This took place not only on political and juridicial
terrain but, most significantly, on the cultural one as well. Latinos, for example,
who had managed to win judicial struggles to institute bilingual education
programmes, came increasingly under attack, particularly on the national language
question. Against their stated needs, the backlash argued that bilingualism was
divisive, that it eroded the commonality of national identity - ignoring, of course,
that Spanish-speaking groups, particularly in the South-West, had lived in the USA
for centuries and that more recent migrants, like the Puerto Ricans, were
Spanish-speaking citizens of the USA. The backlash was also a way of reversing the
upward mobility that Latinos had achieved through the education system.9 An
example of gains made by other groups that the conservative backlash has sought to
reverse is the extension to gays and lesbians of rights to health insurance and other
benefits accorded to married couples. This was made possible by redefining the family,
another instance of the interpretability of rights that led to a dehierarchization of
society in the 1980s.
Multiculturalism as a more or less coherent movement was born in a third
moment, precisely when the conservative right returned to the White House.
The election of Reagan helped to bring together into a loose alliance the disparate
201 Transnational Cultural Brokering of Art
202 Beyond the Fantastic
Performance art could be said to extend into everyday life a modernist principle
of aesthetics: defamiliarization, estrangement. Much has been premised on this effect,
with influential artists and art critics taking it as the sine qua non of art, some
(followers of Brecht) even attributing a political function to it. Performance art has
made use of this paradoxical means of bringing together everyday life and art: the
events of Fluxus, the self-mutilation of Chris Burden, the from-the-(feminine)-body
gesticulations and vocalizations of Meredith Monk and other women performance
artists were all at first experienced as epiphanic and bewildering. By the late 1970s,
however, insight and bewilderment had given way to expectation. In those venues
where performance art is practised spectators expect to see the ‘strange’, only it no
longer seems so strange or uncanny. On the contrary, spectators recognize and take
pleasure in a familiar defamiliarization, they come to discern the normalizing
conventions against which the strange might once have fired the bolts of a
bewildering insight.
Today, however, the enactments of defamiliarization seem to have lost their
‘transcendent’ reference to a beyond (the sacred, the unspeakable, the absurd).
Anchored as they are in de rigueur references to race, gender, sexuality and a limited
set of other marginalises, these ‘constitutive exclusions’ no longer beckon from the
uncanny, as -the underside of normalization; rather, they account for the social
production of identity. In Bodies that Matter Judith Butler puts forth an argument
regarding performativity whereby individuals assume their identities by
rearticulating others’ discourse and simultaneously misrecognizing, in keeping with
the Derridean logic of supplementarity, the constitutive role that the discourse of such
others has in the identification process. Furthermore, both the rearticulation and the
misrecognition are overdetermined by power relations: ‘Thus every insistence on
identity must at some point lead to a taking stock of the constitutive exclusions that
reconsolidate hegemonic power differentials, exclusions that each articulation was
forced to make in order to proceed.’10 Such an interpretation of performativity
privileges those acts in which ‘constitutive exclusions’ are flaunted, and (as in
Butler’s previous book, Gender Trouble) attributes to these acts a political
effectiveness based on ‘practices of parody’ (another characterization of
rearticulation) that have the effect of demonstrating that ‘failures’ to take on socially
sanctioned identities (the ‘constitutive exclusions’ ) are no less (nor more) real than
the ‘successes’.11
Lucy Lippard argues that ‘since its inception in the late 1960s [performance art]
has provided some of the most powerful statements in the art world’ by ‘acting out of
the unspeakable, often empowering [the performance artists] in the process’.12
204 Beyond the Fantastic
However, we might say that the ‘ineffability’ of 1960s and early 1970s performance
(think of Raphael Ortiz hacking a piano to smithereens, or Carolee Schneeman
pushing the ‘exuberant sensory celebration of the flesh’13 to the limits of sensuality by
integrating her body and that of other performers with chickens, raw fish, sausages,
and paint as artistic material, or Meredith Monk moving and sounding abnormally in
ways that resist comprehension) has given way to an all-too-comprehensible (even
sociologizing) enactment that appeals to questions of identity or disidentity.14 Earlier
performance art posited a ‘metaphysics of acts’ , a ‘rediscovery of the event-value of
both actions and objects in the formation of perception and knowledge’15 - in contrast
to the often self-evident meaning of the gender-, racial- and sexual-bending of
contemporary performance that confirms the views of the audience.
The performance artist uses his or her body, vocalizations, gestures, clothes,
demeanour and other ‘props’ allusive of personal and group identity, to dramatize, or
better yet, to enact a contestation of values. Adrian Piper challenges viewers to
engage with questions of racial identity, employing the audience’s ‘misrecognition’ of
her as white as an artistic ‘material’ in some of her perform'ances. Annie Sprinkle
enacts her sexuality by publicizing her private parts, having spectators look through a
speculum into her vagina. Karen Finley smears herself with chocolate while she
speaks of the degradation of women, making the point that women are treated like
shit. This form of making not only ‘gender trouble’ but, more generally, ‘culture
trouble’ has become a central feature of her performance as it relates to the recent
‘culture wars’ around funding from the National Endowment for the Arts.16
Guillermo Gomez-Pena, bedecked in charro outfit with sombrero, makes himself
the abject border-crosser and greaser who has historically caused unease among
Anglo-Americans - without, however, lapsing into a simplistic reference to identity,
but instead unsettling even the very notion of the Chicano or Mexican American.
Recently Ron Athey, a performance artist with AIDS, used his blood as part of his
piece, disturbing the public at large with the threat of ‘contamination’ and unleashing
a new round of attacks in Congress on funding of the arts. Today Athey’s
performance has a clear meaning and a predictable effect on the audience. It is a
fairly direct political message being sent rather than a ‘rediscovery’ of the
metaphysics of the act.
These are not, however, performances that depart from the ethos of public life in
the USA today, even when they intend to challenge or break with social conventions.
On the contrary, they are fully continuous with the character of public life in the
USA. Although not performance artists, people as diverse as Anita Hill and Clarence
Thomas, Rodney King, Bill and Hillary Clinton, Jackie Mason, the Menendez
205 Transnational Cultural Brokering of Art
brothers, Lorena and John Wayne Bobbit, and 0 J Simpson, have all sought to enact
a performance that by default (and by intention in some cases) makes evident and
opens to critique the conventions by which we live. Performance art only restages (as
in the work of Anna Deveare Smith) that which has already been staged by celebrities
and ‘ordinary’ people who get their fifteen minutes of fame! Geraldo, Oprah, Montel
Williams, Sally Jesse Raphael and other talk-show hosts make their fortune precisely
by feeding the appetite the public has for gender-, sexual- and racial-benders. The
categories within which the contestatory cultural politics of today make their claims
are no different from those that fascinate the public.
There are interpretations of performance art - particularly that which seeks to
challenge normative codes of socialization - that attribute to it political intentions
and/or consequences, such as countering, by literally re-embodying public life, the
alienation (separation from our own bodies) produced by an omnivorous market in
images. There is no doubt that many performance artists have such intentions, but I
should like to argue that the very means by which they seek to produce their political
effects have been conditioned by the very mass media and other regulatory
institutions they intend to counter. Performance art, I would say, follows a similar
trajectory to that of ethnomethodology, which also seeks to make social conventions
(people’s everyday methods for making sense of institutional experience) visible and
thus open to discussion. It thus engages in a ‘politics of visibility’17, not necessarily
endorsing identity but, nevertheless, working through or over predictable identity
factors having to do with race, gender and sexuality.
Such performance art events ultimately produce a sceptical, if not sometimes
cynical, attitude towards norms. In fact, the public comes to mirror the performer
through the common recognition that social norms are behaviours that can be
brought to light from their concealment in private life. This phenomenon, however,
is not exclusive to performance art; the media have long practised it, starting,
perhaps, with Candid Camera and continuing with the videotaping of the everyday
life of the Louds, and most recently with a BBC transmission of a couple’s orgasm
via microtelecameras inserted into the woman’s vagina and the man’s penis. The
difference between performance art and such media intrusions into the private, of
course, is that in the first the purpose is ‘aesthetico-political’ (there is an intention
to impugn regulatory norms by means of staging), while in the second this purpose
is overridden by the generalized effect of making visible a privacy that, it must be
recognized, is as constructed as other, more public forms of behaviour. The norms
by which these private behaviours are constructed thus lose some of their
cognitive and moral effectiveness. However, it is precisely for this reason that
206 Beyond the Fantastic
consultants, the underlying agenda of the museum directors was to set down the
history of the 1980s ‘Latino Boom’, taking Mexican painting as a point of departure.
Although nineteen countries were represented, the emphasis on Mexico and the USA
was meant to suggest parity between the two countries, especially in view of the
inclusion of the most successful painters of the 1980s: Basquiat, Fischl, Haring, Salle,
Scharf, Schnabel. This consultant pressured the directors to include minority artists
as well as those from the Francophone and Anglophone Caribbean, but met with stiff
resistance. The minority artists who were included - Carlos Almaraz, Luis Cruz
Azaceta and Juan Sánchez - already had substantial representation in US
institutions, unlike other Chicano and Puerto Rican artists. The emphasis on painting
and the absence of other kinds of work, such as installations, made it easy to avoid
more political art. The overall effect was to support those artists already inscribed
within the gallery network. The catalogue essay by Charles Merewether (1991) did,
however, make extensive reference to the different kinds o f work that might have
been represented had this been a more inclusive exhibition.
These two exhibitions are examples of a transnational brokering on the level of
mainstream institutions, with an important role played by Latin American financial
interests. Ramirez mentions three factors that account for the rise of this new kind of
transnational cultural brokering. Firstly, the new reality of globalization has spawned
a ‘fluid transit of artists, exhibitions, curators, private sponsorship, and a novel breed
of entrepreneurial collectors that circulate back and forth between international art
centres and the Latin American capitals’ . Secondly, this circuit is ‘controlled by the
promotional and financial interests of private sectors that, since the late 1970s, have
increasingly taken over the role of art patronage previously held by national
governments’ and now ‘embody[ingJ a type of marketing tool or symbolic capital for
Latin American economic elites’ . Thirdly, it is the ‘new Latin American financial
interests [that] have played [the active role] in promoting the third exhibition and
market “boom” of Latin American art’ .21
There is another kind of transnational cultural brokering that takes place at the
level of the ‘alternative’ art world. If the mainstream institutions of the North and
South seek to traffic in marketable commodities and brand names, the alternative art
world cultivates the marginal, often in a redemptive way typical of US
multiculturalism and identity politics. I have already given a brief description of how
these trends developed. It is important to understand, however, how art and other
cultural institutions came to embody them as well. Many of these institutions did not
start out with such a representative agenda, but rather one of exhibiting work on the
cutting edge in the late 1970s and 1980s. As the struggle with the conservative
209 Transnational Cultural Brokering of Art
backlash heated up, the notion of marginality - no longer just of individuals but
especially of groups on the margin - heralded the emergence of multiculturalism as a
banner under which to regroup all alternative forces. Artwork that dealt with identity
(or disidentity) issues came to be defined as the cutting edge. This trend was
buttressed by the new guidelines to distribute resources to as broad as possible a
constituency of artists as well as publics (particularly ‘underserved’ ones), subscribed
to by state arts councils, art organizations, foundations such as Ford, Rockefeller,
MacArthur, and Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest, the National Endowment for the Arts,
and other institutions. The result was the gradual incorporation of the same criteria
of race, gender and sexuality that had been secured by those who struggled in the
name of identity politics.
Increasingly these institutions of the alternative art world have been able to place
women and minorities in middle and even high-level managerial positions. These are
now the individuals who, in conformity with the second epigraph, serve as ‘bridge
builders, translators and problem solvers’ . However, in many cases some mainstream
institutions have been incorporating the discourse of marginality typical of the
alternative art world as a means of raising income as funding agencies are cut back or
eliminated. Several analysts of arts management have pointed to the recent reduction
in funding for arts organizations and, also, to the need to attract new publics in order
to increase revenues, both from ticket sales and from government agencies that foster
inclusion of all sectors of society. Increasingly, as Whittaker observes, ‘arts
organizations cannot get funding without proving their relevance to the community’ .22
And Gilmore adds that since the National Endowment for the Arts, like other federal
agencies, is directly accountable to members of Congress for funding - ‘members who
represent many separate and diverse constituencies’ - ‘the question of distributional
equity and public resources is a growing concern’ .23
Given the transnational character of several ethnic groups in the USA, it is not
surprising that the concerns of other nationalities become imbricated in the
negotiation of ‘distributional equity’ . As Langley notes, this equity embodied in
multiculturalism was ‘forced on to the agenda as a result of the rapidly changing
demographics of birth rates, migration, and emigration, not to mention some rather
vociferous demands by increasingly political minority groups’ .24 Indeed, such issues
are even addressed in museum exhibitions like the recent ‘Beyond the Borders: Art
by Recent Immigrants’ at the Bronx Museum of the Arts. According to the catalogue
essay, for ‘most immigrants now arriving in the US, “American” culture is not a
newly encountered concept. The innovations of global telecommunications and travel
have reshaped cross-cultural knowledge and fixed notions of cultural proximity and
210 Beyond the Fantastic
distance.’ Consequently these new immigrants have already worked out some
accommodation to ‘American’ culture and seek to make an input that creates a space
for their own ideas. ‘The work by immigrant artists thus becomes a basis for
questioning established ideas and cultural positions within American culture.’25
Another example o f how the funding situation of cultural institutions opens up
spaces of negotiation between minorities, big business, and foreign governments and
institutions, can be appreciated in Day’s discussion of her curating experiences with
Aztec art. She had to keep in mind the need to attract new audiences for financing
purposes: ‘Successful museums today are playing new roles in their communities.
Not only are they meeting new educational challenges but they are attempting to
draw new visitors into the museum and to address the concerns and interests of
non-traditional audiences. Reasons for this vary. Partially, it is based on institutional
financial requirements; obviously new audiences bring in additional memberships and
admission fees. In addition, diverse audiences often open up new opportunities for
funding from foundations and government agencies.’ Introduction into the museum
of new constituencies brought a whole new set of demands. Latino groups demanded
to have some say in the presentation of the history of the Aztecs. They also lobbied
for a more accessible, as opposed to scholarly, catalogue. The popular character of the
catalogue also satisfied the need to raise funds. An unprecedented 25,000 copies were
sold. To satisfy the educational requirements of such an enterprise the museum
offered seminars, involving volunteers from the larger Denver community, one half of
whom were Latinos. Native Americans also sought to have a say in the presentation
of the exhibition, particularly in the matter of skeletal remains that are sacred within
their culture. The pressures brought by the local minority communities involved the
museum in an unusual negotiation with lending institutions in Mexico, as Day
explains, ‘institutions whose political and cultural concerns we needed to consider’
and who did not initially understand the inclusion of Hispanics and Indians in the
planning of the exhibition. Finally, because the exhibition was a costly event, but an
event that highlighted relations between Mexico and the USA, corporations ‘were
particularly anxious to add the cultural excitement of the “Aztec” exhibition to their
economic concerns. Both cash contributions and “ in kind” donations from these
international businesses were a significant funding factor in the large exhibit
budget.’ The upshot was success both cultural and economic, confirming Garcia
Canclini’s arguments about ‘cultural reconversion’ in his Culturas Híbridas. ‘We
know that about 725,000 people saw the exhibit,’ Day records, ‘that the impact on
the Denver economy was $60-$70 million; that about 60 per cent of our visitors
came from outside the Denver area (100,000 of these from foreign countries); and
211 Transnational Cultural Brokering of Art
. . . more difficult to sustain with respect to Latin American artists who ‘make’
it in the United States, as they are already positioned in one way or another
whether they have been duly recognized or not within the transnational art
circuit. The mainstreaming of Latin American art as ‘marginal’ has further
complicated the tensions between both groups of artists. For, while Latino art
has served to broker the acceptance of Latin American identity into US
institutions, it has not gained equal access to them. Mainstream public
museums under pressure to represent Latino artists invariably manage to
displace their responsibility by buying Latin American art, whose Value is well
established in the market. As a result, attempts to establish a real market for
Latino art have been slow to materialize.28
A Chicano art critic makes this very point in his response to those institutions
that capitalize on such notions as ‘border culture’, which was coined by Chicanos, and
yet seek to represent it with Latin American artists. In his letter of critique to the
notorious 1993 Whitney Biennial he forcefully rejects the idea that ‘American’ art
should be opened up to Latin America before it is fully representative of US
212 Beyond the Fantastic
minorities. But perhaps more important than this is the very notion of marginality to
which the few Latino (Chicano and Puerto Rican) artists who are included are
relegated. This marginality is a result first of the dynamic I have described above
whereby inclusion is negotiated in a reformist manner of ‘supplementing the centre’
with marginal ‘others’ . Secondly, the kind of ‘cutting edge’ pursued by the Whitney
Biennial emphasized ‘social, cultural and political concerns over “traditional” forms
such as painting and sculpture, thus relegating the representation of Latino art to
“categories” [e.g. “ folk art” ] that are easily dismissed as tangential to real art, real
aesthetics’ .
US minorities thus face a damned if you do, damned if you don’t situation. When
institutions seek ‘traditional’ forms they are likely to choose a Latin American artist
over a Chicano or a Puerto Rican. When they do choose a Latino, they are likely to
relegate the artist to a ‘marginal’ category that is irrelevant to the art market. But
the situation is not very easy for Latin American artists either. They too, especially
those who do not have mainstream market representation, face a damned if you do,
damned if you don’t situation. They have the choice of representing the exotic that
mainstream institutions have traditionally sought from them, on the one hand, or, on
the other, of entering alternative exhibitions as quasi-Latinos, which is likely to raise
the ire of the ‘real’ ones.
Multiculturalism and identity politics, at least as they operate in the USA, often
boomerang ironically against those whom they should help. As I have argued above,
the cause of this is that representativity is overdetermined by welfare state, legal,
market and media factors that make it difficult if not impossible to set an agenda
unilaterally. One possible strategy to overcome these liabilities, at least partly, is to
establish transnational partnership networks between curators and institutions of
both North and South. This is, I think, what Gerardo Mosquera, Carolina Ponce de
León and Rachel Weiss attempted and partly achieved in their Ante América
(Regarding America). Rather than adopting a US multicultural perspective that tends
to circumscribe ‘America’ within the borders of the USA, this exhibition brought
together substantial resources from South America, particularly Colombia, where it
originated (and from where it travelled to the USA), with a combination of
perspectives too complex to accommodate the more facile terms of identity evident in
the North. In the foreword to the catalogue Mosquera makes reference to the
different dynamic of identity that characterizes the South. Latin Americans are more
heterogeneous, more hybrid and more fluid than the identity categories that the US
context has to offer. In a sense, to represent Latin America from a US perspective,
multicultural or not, is like jamming square pegs into round holes. Although he uses
213 Transnational Cultural Brokering of Art
‘categories’ to refer to the background of the artists represented, I do not think they
are codified terms. Rather, they enable him to refer to the heterogeneity to which the
exhibition attempts to approximate:
To be sure, the exhibition could not have been free of pressures to represent
particular constituencies, particularly those that had been excluded both in Latin
America and the USA. After all, the reality to be represented is nothing short of a
continent. What is evident, however, is that neither the call to exoticism of
mainstream US and European institutions nor the appeal to marginality of US
identity politics served as the axis on which the exhibition was mounted. As a
partnership it was more of a dialogue on varied aesthetics than a showcase for the
market or an affirmative action venue.
Ante América, neither the self-promotion of Latin American art markets (like
Mito y Magia) nor a cannibalizing of differences (like ‘The Decade Show’), points to
the possibility of differently structured multiculturalism, one not beholden to the
categories of the US context yet fully respectful of differences, unlike the track record
of most mainstream shows of Third World art in US and European capitals. This
different multiculturalism, it seems to me, expresses a process of negotiation that
cuts through and across national borders and institutional structures, opening up
transnational public spheres of deliberation. I am not speaking of a utopia in which
any values go, in which the market does not rear its head, or in which politics does
not play a role. The reality is more interesting: a sphere in which actors from
different contexts can engage not only in dialogue but also in reciprocal critique.
214 Beyond the Fantastic
NOTES
2 William Cleveland, ‘Bridges, Translations and Change: The Arts as Infrastructure in 21st Century
America’, High Performance (Fall 1992), pp. 84-5.
3 Paul Gilroy, ‘It’s a family affair: black culture and the trope o f kinship’, in Small Acts: Thoughts on the
politics o f black cultures (London: Serpent’s Tail, 1993), pp. 196-7.
4 See Yen Le Espíritu, Asian American Panethnicity: Bridging Institutions and Identities (Philadelphia:
Temple, 1992).
5 See Suzanne Oboler, ‘The Politics o f Labeling Latino/a Cultural Identities of Self and Others’, Latin
American Perspectives 19,75 (Fall 1992), and Howard Winant, Racial Conditions: Politics, Theory,
Comparisons (Minneapolis: University o f Minnesota Press,1994).
6 Nelly Richard, ‘Los delineamientos del saber académico; lincas de fuerza y puntos de fuga’, paper
presented at the First Conference o f the Inter-American Cultural Studies Network (4 May 1993), p. 12.
8 See Nancy Fraser, ‘Women, Welfare, and the Politics o f Need Interpretation’, in Unruly Practices: Power,
Discourse and Gender in Contemporary Social Theory (Minneapolis: University o f Minnesota Press, 1989);
Kristie McClure, ‘On the Subject o f Rights: Pluralism, Plurality and Political Identity’, in Dimensions o f
Radical Democracy: Pluralism, Citizenship, Community, edited by Chantal Mouffe (London: Verso, 1992);
Martha Minow, ‘We, the Family: Constitutional Rights and American Families’ , in The Constitution and
American Life, edited by David Thelen (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988); Martha Minow,
Making All the Difference: Inclusion, Exclusion, and American Law (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,
1990).
9 Juan Flores and George Yúdice, ‘Living Borders/Buscando America: Languages of Latino Self-Formation’,
Social Text 24 (Spring 1990).
10 Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter (New York: Routledge, 1993) p. 118.
11 Ibid., p. 146.
13 Leslie C. Jones, ‘Transgressive Femininity: Art and Gender in the Sixties and Seventies’, in Abject Art.-
Revulsion and Desire in American Art (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1993), p. 49.
14 ‘Disidentification’ has been brought into usage as a challenge to identity politics, which, according to some,
relies on the belief that identities are already given, a belief that forecloses the possibility o f recognizing
that any identity is premised on ‘constitutive exclusions’. However, it seems to me that a ‘politics of
disidentification’ is but the other side o f the coin o f ‘identity politics’, insofar as the ‘failure of
identification’ (i.e. disidentification) - in relation to the very same categories of racial, gender and sexual
identification - is taken as a point o f departure for ‘democratizing . . . internal difference’ within the
experience o f identity. My argument is that disidentification does not challenge the status quo precisely
because it continues to use the same categories that structure identity. See Butler, Bodies that Matter, op.
cit., p. 219.
15 Katherine Stiles, ‘ Between Water and Stone: Fluxus Performance: A Metaphysics o f A ct’, in In the Spirit o f
Fluxus, organized by Elizabeth Armstrong and Joan Rothfuss (Minneapolis: Walker Art Centre, 1993), p. 65.
215 Transnational Cultural Brokering of Art
16 See George Yúdice, ‘For a Practical Aesthetics’, Social Text 25/26 (1990).
17 Pace Peggy Phelan (1993). That Karen Finley explicitly refers to the meaning of the chocolate spread on
her body as an allusion to the fact that ‘women are shit in this society’, or that Athey says that he ‘wanted
to bring attention to people with AIDS’, runs counter to Phelan’s interpretation of performance art as ‘an
active vanishing, a deliberate and conscious refusal to take the payoff of visibility’. I would certainly say
that this was the intention o f earlier forms o f performance art, like that o f Fluxus or Meredith Monk, but
not o f art that relies on explicit meaning and predictable effects. See Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The
Politics o f Performance (London/New York: Routledge, 1993), p. 19.
18 Judith Huggins Balfe, ‘Artworks as Symbols in International politics’, The International Journal o f
Politics, Culture and Society 1,2 (Winter 1987), p. 195.
19 Octavio Paz, ‘The Power o f Ancient Mexican Art’, New York Review o f Books (6 December 1990), p. 19.
20 Shifra M. Goldman, ‘Metropolitan Splendors. The Buying and Selling o f Mexico’, Third Text 14
(Springl991), p. 17; see also Dimensions o f the Americas: Art and Social Change in Latin America and the
United States (Chicago: University o f Chicago Press, 1994)
21 Mari Carmen Ramirez, ‘Brokering Identities. Art Curators and the Politics of Cultural Representation’,
revised version o f a paper presented at the Working Seminar on Curatorial Studies, Bard College (April
14-17, 1994).
22 Beajaye Whittaker, ‘The Arts o f Social Change: Artistic, Philosophical, and Managerial Issues’, JAMLS
23.1 (Spring 1993), p. 32.
23 Samuel Gilmore, ‘Minorities and Distributional Equity at the National Endowment for the Arts’, JAMLS
23.2 (Summer 1993), p. 138.
24 Stephen Langley, ‘The Functions o f Arts and Media Management in Relation to the Conflicting Forces of
Multiculturalism and Mediaculturalism’, Journal o f Arts Management, Law and Society 23,3 (Falll993),
pp. 181-2.
25 Beyond the Borders: Art by Recent Immigrants (New York: The Bronx Museum of the Arts, 1994),
pp. 13-14.
26 Jane Stevenson Day, ‘Interpreting Culture: New Voices in Museums’, JAMLS 23,4 (Winter 1994),
pp. 309, 313, 315.
27 Tom Redburn, ‘Arts World: Many Tiny Economic Stars’ , The New York Times (6 October 1993), p. B6.
29 Gerardo Mosquera, Foreword, Ante América, Regarding America, exhibition catalogue (Bogotá: Biblioteca
Luis-Angel Arango, 1993), p. 9.
O ut of the M ainstream
A ccess to the M ainstream
Luis Camnitzer
To address ‘access to the mainstream’ in the arts is to address the topic of success in Fig. 33 (opposite
previous page)
the market. For this reason the subject has always elicited contradictory emotions -
Eugenio Dittborn
primarily desire and resentment - and these emotions have been particularly strong Airmail painting
among those artists who do not belong to the social group that produces and number 112
supports what is considered ‘mainstream’ art. Although the term ‘mainstream’ La Cuisine et la
Guerre (fragment),
carries democratic reverberations, suggesting an open and majority-supported
1994
institution, it is in fact rather elitist, reflecting a specific social and economic class. Paint, stitching and
In reality, ‘mainstream’ presumes a reduced group of cultural gatekeepers and photo-silkscreen on
represents a select nucleus of nations. It is a name for a power structure that 24 sections of cotton
and polyester,
promotes a self-appointed hegemonic culture. For this reason the wish to belong to
420 x 1680 cms
the ‘mainstream’ and the wish to destroy it often arise simultaneously in the Photograph courtesy
individuals who are, or feel, marginal to it. Depending on origin and background, of the artist
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 socio-economic 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 is the best - if not the 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 o f ‘integration’, with the problems of two parties to be
analysed 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
221 Access to the Mainstream
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 only conducive 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.
224 Beyond the Fantastic
Random Trails fo r the N oble S avage
Carolina Ponce de Leon
*< 3 4 Critical debate in recent years has focused on identity, multiculturalism and
:*e c Meireles difference. The new politics of cultural frameworks is altering both monocultural
* V Southern Cross
hegemony and the pyramidal structure of modernism. Latin American art has been
Cruz del Sur), 1969-70
»«ctograph courtesy viewed mostly within this frame and its basic situation has been considered equal,
zf the artist or at least similar, to art concerned with class, gender and race.
Although the great attention given to these issues in the past years has shaken
cultural, institutional and political frameworks, and has favoured a higher profile for
Latin American art, the predictable shift of the art scene has placed both Latin
American art and multiculturalism on uncertain and slippery ground.
The expansion of art’s territory to subcultural areas - ethnicity, race, gender
(which was an impossibility within the modernist paradigm) - has certainly led to an
increasingly complex and wider cartography of contemporary art. But rather than
cartography we should speak of taxonomy, for the expansion has given rise to new
categories and problems: in the first place there is a ‘tribalization’ of art that is
interpreted and broadcast as ‘artistic opening’, and, needless to say, politics as
well. The situation is now so widespread that the expectations regarding each
group - Latino, gay, feminist etc. - have been limited in such a way that their
self-representations only overlap or connect in a sort of unifying coherence.
Thomas McEvilley has named this the Tower of Babel.
Accompanying the construction of this tower is a reductive aspect of the
phenomenon due to ‘political correctness’ . From an institutional point of view a
colonial behaviour hides behind the good intentions of the Romantic liberal who
seeks to vindicate the ‘noble savage’ within himself or herself. If eighteenth-century
Europe underwent its self-criticism through this figure, today’s condescending
understanding of difference only reiterates a similar kind of relationship that is
constituted as an inverted model of the centre.
Political correctness has become a moralist scourge, a power device that seeks
to preserve differences tamed and under control: it’s perhaps like a Thanksgiving
banquet (with natives included) where you don’t eat the turkey but the lettuce around
it, with the frightening possibility that the enthusiasm for ‘peripheral garnish’ will
probably soon be forgotten in what will come after the economic recession.
‘Tribalization’ and political correctness are two sides of the same coin and
constitute a challenge for any artist or curator bound to face the following dilemma:
how to set himself or herself free from the expectations of ‘otherness’ placed upon
them - as if ‘otherness’ were not hybrid, nomadic and everchanging - and on the
other hand, how to mark the specific difference between the type of art he or she does
or shows and Eurocentric modernism.
226 Beyond the Fantastic
This represents a sad cultural loss, considering that they can offer a wider range
of options than of classical modernism. The general outlook towards art of the
‘others’, and particularly towards Latin American art, has been based on the
expectations of vindicating cultural identity in regard to what should be represented
or how it should represent itself. The need, though, is to transgress the specific and
autonomous limitations of modernist art so as to fuse new artistic identities and new
cultural constructions that would expand the function and possibilities of art.
The power structure built by institutions such as MoMA, the art market and the
auction houses - which still deal with Latin American art as a separate category -
around multiculturalism and the possibility that Latin American art can overcome
geopolitical determinants seems to be a considerable obstacle blocking the possibility
of viewing Latin American art within more accurate aesthetic or cultural terms.
The multicultural debate sustains an important phenomenon produced by the
drastic demographic, social and language transformations that the flowing migration
to the centres has caused. But there is a need to re-establish more accurate strategies
for cultural exchange. At this point what is at stake is not the problem of acknowledging
‘difference’, but the possibility of recognizing that art systems have been proliferating
within structures that are no longer binary (north/south, east/west, centre/periphery).
In the 1950s and 1960s the Argentine art critic Marta Traba claimed a form
of ‘resistance’ for Latin American art in opposition to what she called the
‘meta-linguistics’ of the art of the centres. This valiant position was prompted
by the wave of ideological independence that the Cuban Revolution extended to the
continent. Today it seems that transformation is preferred to rupture, and the
emancipation of models to that o f ‘resistance’ .
The intricate geometry that links Eurocentrism, multiculturalism and political
correctness demands a keen awareness on the part of artists, curators and critics of
the need to keep in permanent motion those globalizing schemes that seek to reorder
diversity within linear, if not vertical or binary, perspectives. They should articulate
the options of ‘cultural negotiation’ offered by contemporary complexity and
overcome the crippling effect produced by political correctness and the
institutionalization of multiculturalism. This is what is needed to maintain the
tension suggested by Hélio Oiticica when he says: ‘We live on adversities.’
Latin American art seems to be dealing with the different cultural negotiations
established by today’s nomadism. This complex network of strategies constitutes a
privileged support of contemporary Latin American art. Because, though it shares
formal resources with postmodern art - such as pastiche, quotation, appropriation
and other relational processes - it is based on a self-contained cultural practice that
228 Beyond the Fantastic
‘The question of the fantastic is the question of identity and of Otherness. It is also
the question of the origins.’2
Art exhibitions are privileged vehicles for the representation of individual and
collective identities, whether they consciously set out to be so or not. By bringing
together works produced by artists, as individuals or as members of a specific
community, they allow insights into the ways those artists visually construct their
self-image. This identity-projecting role of exhibitions has been at the heart of
controversies surrounding the unprecedented number of shows of Latin American/
Latino art organized and funded by US institutions (museums, galleries, alternative
spaces) over the. past decade or so. The exhibition boom has taken place at a time
when the heightened visibility of the more than thirty million Latinos in the USA (as
well as that of other Third World peoples and ethnic minorities) is forcing a series of
unresolved problems on museums throughout the country. The denunciation by
artists, art critics and supporters of the Latin American/Latino community of the
cultural stereotypes presented by these exhibitions has brought the issue of the
representation of this marginal culture directly into the heart of the US mainstream.3
At stake is not only the question of whether the image of the Latin American or
Latino ‘other’ that emerges from these shows truly engages the cultural
constituencies it aims to represent, but also how museums and the art establishment
at large respond to the cultural demands of an increasingly influential community.
The reasons why exhibitions are such contested vehicles for the definition and
validation of Latin American art in the USA are deeply embedded in the neo-colonial
legacy that has shaped US/Latin American relations since the nineteenth century.
Despite the North American fascination with the exoticism of peoples south of the
border, US policies towards them have been characterized by attempts to undermine
their sovereignty through outright intervention, exploitation of resources, financial
manipulation and racial discrimination. As Shifra Goldman has effectively argued,
the Latino exhibition boom of the 1980s was no exception to this play of neo-colonial
politics. Behind the exhibition glitter lay a web of political and diplomatic factors,
ranging from US attempts to dominate Central American governments and alienate
their Latin American supporters, to the strategies of marketing firms attempting to
230 Beyond the Fantastic
corner the US Latino consumer population (a factor that significantly influenced the
emergence of a highly successful Latin American/Latino art market).4
The perception and representation of Latin American art in the USA have not
only gone hand in hand with US foreign policies but have also replicated the uneven
axis of exchange between both continents.6 Latin American/Latino art, for instance,
is not formally studied in art history programmes except as ‘exotica’ or as a
manifestation of cultural ethnicity. The contributions of important artists from this
culture, present on the US scene since the 1920s, have until recently been largely
ignored by the academic and art world establishment. With some notable exceptions,
these artists are represented in only a handful of museum collections. This unequal
axis of exchange can also be blamed for the application of different standards of
professionalism and scholarship to the organization of exhibitions of Latin American/
Latino art in mainstream museums from the standards applied to other exhibitions.
The majority of such exhibitions have been organized by curators of modern
European art who are not versed in the language, history or traditions of the many
countries that constitute Latin America. This factor, together with the relatively
small quantity of art historical material available in English and the comparatively
poor network of visual-arts information originating in the countries themselves, has
helped to entrench an easily stereotyped and marketable image of Latin
American/Latino art in the USA.
The elaboration of an effective agenda for the 1990s, however, requires that we
step beyond denunciation of the neo-colonial politics at work in the Latin
American/Latino exhibition boom and focus more precisely on the ideological and
conceptual premises that guided the organization of these art shows. At the heart
of this phenomenon lies the issue of who articulates the identity of these groups.
As the debates surrounding these exhibitions demonstrated, the most powerful agents
in this process were neither the producers, nor the cultural groups represented, nor
the audiences, but the North American exhibition curators who set out to construct
specific narratives to define Latin American art.6 We may well ask how curators
steeped in the values and symbols of a hegemonic culture can attempt to speak for, or
represent, the very different, heterogeneous traditions embodied in the Latin ‘other’ .
The answer is inevitably tied up with the conceptual crisis confronting the North
American art museum as a result of the challenges that ethnic groups and new social
movements are mounting against its self-centred exclusivist practices.
At the core of this problem lies the inadequacy of the conceptual framework that
informs North American curatorial practices to deal with the complex logic that gave
rise to modern art in a continent recently described by the Argentine cultural theorist
231 Beyond 'the Fantastic'
Néstor García Canclini as the continent of the ‘semi’ , i.e. semi-modern, semi-developed,
semi-European, semi-indigenous. Any attempt to address the issues posed by modern
art in Latin America has to start by questioning the validity of the term ‘Latin
American art’ itself, for in reality no single identity for the countries south of the
border exists. Far from being a homogeneous region, Latin America is a conglomerate
of more than twenty countries of diverse economic and social make-up, which in turn
encompass a broad mixture of races and several hundred ethnic groups. Behind the
shared legacy of European colonialism, language and religion lie highly mixed
societies whose dynamic o f transculturation has produced not a single hybrid culture
but what can be more adequately characterized as a ‘heterogeneous ensemble’ .7
Unlike Eastern or Native American indigenous cultures, Latin American culture, by
reason of its colonial legacy, is inscribed in the Western tradition and has always
functioned within its parameters. The specificity of its ‘alternate way of being
Western’ resides in its appropriation, recycling or ‘repossessing’ of Euro-American
culture to respond to the needs of Latin American realities.8 The same logic applies to
the Latino population of the USA. Latinos do not comprise one sole race, or etnia, but
rather an amalgam of races, classes and national heritages that elude any attempt at
easy classification. This admixture includes ‘conquered’ citizens, such as Mexican
Americans and Puerto Ricans, as well as immigrants from South and Central America
and the Caribbean.9 In this sense there is no Latino art per se, but a broad gamut of
expressive modes and styles, each of which is socially and politically specific.
Despite the variety of themes and exhibition formats, it is possible to identify at
least one pervasive exhibition model exemplified by the historical or contemporary
surveys organized by large mainstream museums in the mid 1980s in response to
demographic and art market trends. This model reflects the ideological framework of
Euro-American (i.e. First World) modernism that constitutes the conceptual basis of
the North American art museum network. Predicated on the tenets of a rational
society, progress, universality and the autonomy of the aesthetic, this ideology,
however, is revealed to be inherently flawed when it engages the concept of cultural
or racial difference embodied in peripheral societies. There modernity has been at
best delayed or incomplete, and artistic developments have frequently evolved in
tension with the prevailing mode of Western modernism. Curatorial practices tend to
mask this intrinsic limitation by proceeding on the assumption that artistic
production can be separated from its sociopolitical context (i.e. the notion that an
‘aesthetic will’ exists over and above the parameters of culture), and that the role of
museum exhibitions is to provide contexts for the presentation and contemplation of
the ‘more purely artistic and poetic impulses of the individual’ .10 Such practices rely
232 Beyond the Fantastic
on a teleological view of art based on sequences of formal change that privileges the Fig. 35
Catalogue cover for
concept of aesthetic innovation developed by the early twentieth-century avant-garde.
Art of the Fantastic
They also subscribe to an absolute notion of ‘aesthetic quality’ that transcends Latin America,
cultural boundaries. In this way they select, elevate or exclude works to their own 1920-1987, 1987
Art of the
Fantastic
234 Beyond the Fantastic
Because of their impact, the way in which they tapped key themes of the Latin Fig. 36
Catalogue cover for
American/Latino experience, and the degree of controversy that they elicited, three
Images of Mexico:
exhibitions - ‘Art of the Fantastic: Latin America, 1920-1987’, organized by the The Contribution of
Indianapolis Museum of Art in 1987; ‘Images of Mexico: The Contribution of Mexico Mexico to Twentieth-
to Twentieth-Century Art’ , organized by the Frankfurt Kunsthalle and presented at Century Art, 1988
the Dallas Museum of Art in 1988; and ‘Hispanic Art in the United States: Thirty
Fig. 37
Contemporary Painters and Sculptors’, organized by the Museum of Fine Arts, Catalogue cover for
Houston, in 1988 - provide useful case studies for analysing the shortcomings of the Hispanic Art in the
Euro-American approach towards Latin American/Latino art. ‘Art of the Fantastic’ United States:
Thirty Contemporary
focused on the historical development of the Latin American version of modernism.
Painters & Sculptors,
It brought together more than thirty of the most distinguished Latin American artists 1987
of the twentieth century in an attempt to characterize the specific nature of their
contribution to the modern art tradition. ‘Images of Mexico’, the largest exhibition to
date on this subject, dealt with the development of modern art in Mexico from 1910
until approximately the early 1960s. The Houston show, on the other hand, presented
the contemporary production of a group of thirty Latino artists from across the USA.
It was the first such exhibition ever undertaken in a North American museum and
the first attempt to legitimate Latino art in the context of the mainstream.
‘Art of the Fantastic’ and ‘Images of Mexico’, like a host of other survey
exhibitions, began their investigation in the 1920s, the crucial decade when Latin
American artists first engaged with modern art. The artists in question were key
figures who had travelled and studied in Europe and who returned home imbued with
the language and formal experiments of the avant-garde, which they introduced in
their respective countries. Taking place amid attempts by national elites to modernize
countries long subsumed under colonialism, their efforts are generally recognized by
Latin Americans as leading to the birth of a self-consciousness (or identity) for Latin
American art. Indeed, the selection of works in the exhibitions enabled the viewer to
appreciate the ways in which Latin American artists approached the languages and
styles of European movements and adapted them to the necessities of their own time
and place. This process implied, more often than not, revising and tearing apart
artistic codes in order to reconstruct them from their own critical perspective. Such
was the case for the Mexican muralists, who combined the formal experiments of
post-First World War Cubism and Futurism with indigenous and historical subject
matter in their wall paintings; or for Joaquín Torres-García, who sought a synthesis
(however utopian) of the principles of Constructivism, Neoplasticism and Surrealism
with those of pre-Columbian art.
‘Art of the Fantastic’ best exemplifies the tendency towards reductionism and
235 Beyond ‘the Fantastic'
of Mexican muralism, as well as the abstract and geometric movements of the 1960s
and 1970s. It concentrated instead on the artistic production of Mexican artists as
revealed in the more intimate vehicle of easel painting, which focused on depictions of
everyday life, festivities, love, and death - areas where presumably the primal spirit
of the Mexican people manifested itself. The search for authenticity also led Billeter
to exalt the inaccurate fact that ‘in no other country have artists with little or no
training achieved fame and honour as in Mexico’, and she proceeded to put forward
the art of two women, Maria Izquierdo and Frida Kahlo, and an introvert, Abraham
Angel, as examples supporting the modernist myth of the marginalized, untrained
artist. Billeter’s selection concluded with Francisco Toledo, in whose work the ‘Indian
spirit continues to survive’ .
The notion of ‘authenticity’ , however, belies a fallacious Romantic construct, with
no basis in the culture in which it is supposed to reside. The very process of
transculturation from which Mexican society emerged cancels the validity of such a
concept. Moreover, the image of the Indian that Billeter so zealously upholds was a
construct of the political and cultural elites of the Mexican Revolution to facilitate
national unity and development. It hid the defeat of the popular movements of the
Mexican Revolution (represented by the forces o f Villa and Zapata) at the hands of a
middle class that was far removed from the reality of the exploited Indian population.16
Therefore, to continue to uphold such notions of ‘authenticity’ as the basis for the
selection of works to be included in exhibitions of Mexican or Latin American art is to
reduce the artistic expression of these regions to a one-dimensional or false mode of
expression. This error ultimately functions to limit the potential of artists from these
regions to engage the manifestations of European art on equal terms.11
If ‘Art of the Fantastic’ and ‘Images of Mexico’ set the framework for the
discourse of the fantastic and Surrealism in the context of Latin American and
Mexican art, the ‘Hispanic Art’ show achieved something similar for the production
of artists of Latin American descent. The homogenizing bias of modernism was at
work from the start in the use of the controversial term ‘Hispanic’ to lump together
artists of such diverse origins as Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans, Chileans,
Uruguayans, and many others of Latin descent.18 Not surprisingly, the curators
approached ‘Hispanic art’ as American art of a somewhat distinct sort, whose
strategies of resistance and cultural affirmation only confirmed the ‘classic pattern’
of a pluralistic society such as that of the USA, where different cultures have
traditionally vied for recognition from the mainstream.19 Such a view obscures the
status of Latinos as conquered peoples or immigrants that resulted from US foreign
policies towards Latin America, as well as the long-standing Latino tradition of
238 Beyond the Fantastic
political and cultural activism. In its place it upholds the image of an all-embracing
and benevolent US society. Identity here was reduced to ethnicity, as the glue that
holds together artists of widely diverse populations and marks them out from the
dominant society. Thus the exhibition set out to identify those areas where artists
maintained their distinctiveness, while at the same time seeking to be part of
mainstream America.
More than any of the other exhibitions mounted during the 1980s, the Houston
show brought to the fore the mechanisms at work in the aestheticizing bias of
European modernism. The curators’ insistence on underscoring the strong ‘aesthetic
will’ that manifested itself through Latino art, over and above the particularities of
social and cultural development (termed the ‘sociological’ aspects), masked
unwillingness to deal with the harsh realities of discrimination that have shaped the
experience of Latino groups within North American society and have found strong
expression in their art. Such a position also implied a task of justifying and elevating
the expression of these groups from their marginal, grass-roots position to the realm
of high art. In the words of John Beardsley, co-curator of the exhibition, the selection
of works ‘provided the basis for investigating the degree to which an enduring sense
of ethnic distinctiveness can enter the legitimate territory of high art’ .20 The external
us/them relation was then exemplified by the liberal-populist curators attempting to
vindicate the artistic expression of the underdog. The aestheticizing bias was also
responsible for the range of media chosen by the curators to represent the work of
Latino artists. Leaving aside the important role that posters, prints, photography and
video have played in Latino art, the curatorial choice was limited to painting and
sculpture, the traditional media of high modernism. Undertaken in a decade that saw
the return to painting of a neo-Expressionist, primitivistic bent, the selection focused
almost exclusively on works that revealed, or rather mirrored, these tendencies,
complemented with naive and folk styles.
In line with the aesthetic emphasis of the exhibition, Beardsley’s co-curator Jane
Livingston attempted a ‘stylistic’ analysis of the work of Latinos. Moving from the
‘self-taught’ to the folk and naive artists, and ending with a sub-genre of ‘Latino/
Hispanic modernism’, which she designated ‘Picassesque Surrealism’ (i.e. ‘Picasso via
Lam, Matta and Miro’), she attempted to show how these artists evolved a common
aesthetic out of their shared cultural legacy, combined with the influences of modern
art.21 Rather than addressing the specificity of Latino visual expression, however,
Livingston’s analysis revealed a displacement of European modernism’s concern with
primal forms of organic identity, unspoilt means of expression and nostalgic reversion
to craftsmanship vis-à-vis the aesthetic production of Latino artists. The first of these
239 Beyond 'the Fantastic’
paradigms refers to the notion of the Latino subject as a primitive outcast or outsider
inhabiting a space closer to nature and the preindustrial, premodern world than his
or her European or North American colleagues. This outsider/outcast paradigm was
poignantly underscored by the selection of Martin Ramirez, a self-taught
institutionalized schizophrenic of Mexican origin, as emblem for the exhibition. In
turn, landscape images, such as those by Patricia Gonzalez and Carlos Almaraz, came
to define the primitive, magical space inhabited by the Latino ‘other’ . The primal,
close-to-nature condition exalted by the exhibition framework was further echoed in
the metaphors and images of animalism and animal-related phenomena used by art
critics in their reviews of the show. For instance, Paul Richard, writing in the
Washington Post, marvelled at the half-human, half-animal characteristics of Hispanic
art and the ability of artists to ‘shift their shapes’ , becoming dogs, birds, sharks or
tigers. While, according to Richard, this dual nature has inevitably plunged the Latino
artist into isolation, it is his or her ability to walk the edge between both worlds, to
‘look back towards one world while seeking out another’, that explains the strength
and impact of his or her art.22
Complementing the outsider/outcast paradigm is the emphasis on ritual and
communal values that presumably characterize the life experience of Latino artists.
As the ‘fantastic other’, deprived of a real place in the social structure of the
dominant culture, Latino artists can find a signifying system only in the nostalgic
remnants o f the collective identity that ties them to their past and their origins. As a
result the selection o f works focused on the contextual elements of tradition, popular
rites and communal lifestyles that define the marginal locus of the fantastic. Thus, in
the ‘Hispanic Art’ show, works by consciously naïve artists, such as Carmen Lomas
Garza, or those working in folk traditions, such as Felix Lopez or Felipe Archuleta,
came to define the particular style grounded in the ethnicity of Latino artists. This
type of characterization reveals that what the discourse of the fantastic upholds as
‘different’ about these forms of art, and therefore what constitutes the ‘identity’ of
the ‘other’ , remains tied to a traditional past or to a primitive, mythical or atavistic
world view. Absent from the visual representation of the fantastic are examples of
those works that stress the urban and cosmopolitan character informing much of the
contemporary artistic production of Latino artists. By insisting on the ritual character
of this art the discourse of the fantastic obliterates the fact that while such forms may
be linked to the Latino artist’s cultural experience, that experience remains tied to
his or her life in thriving urban spaces rather than to anything that is purely ethnic
or exclusively a question of cultural identity. In addition, this discourse sidetracks the
fact that the artists involved often approach these traditions with a critical
240 Beyond the Fantastic
perspective that questions the very conventions they set out to recover.
The third paradigm (the reversion to craftsmanship) relates to the formal
signifiers of the ‘fantastic’, summarized by a bold, tropical colour range; ‘chromatic
and compositional lushness’ ; and an ‘impatience with the material’ in favour of gut,
savage expression and/or a ritualistic approach to formal conventions.23 While the
formal qualities of North American art are seen as resting on rational analysis and
the description of visual or emotional phenomena, the formal novelty of the Latino
artist is seen to lie in his or her manipulation of the materials of painting, mainly
through such stylistic and expressive conventions as distortion, fractured lines and
abusive colour harmonies, whose effect is that of lifting the viewer past conventional
reality into a realm of phantoms or a ‘material dream’ .24 This view presupposes
modernism’s fascination with the materiality of the painting medium itself as
expressive objectification and assertion of the subject.
In the minds of the curators of these exhibitions, what justifies the construction of
the ‘fantastic other’ in the terms we have described thus far is the legitimizing
category of Western ‘aesthetic quality’ . By claiming that this quality can be
recognized over and beyond any cultural or ethnic consideration, they are ultimately
asserting the privileged position of the First World curator while simultaneously
separating the form from its Latin American meaning. As a result the selection of
artists and works in these exhibitions invariably functioned not as representative of
what is ‘different’ in Latin American art and culture but as a reflection of the
modernist values and ideology of the First World museum curators. Rather than
establishing a paradigmatic difference, the works selected for these shows ended up
mirroring the fascination and concern with the elements of the exotic and the
primitive implicit in modernism’s self-gratifying discourse. This condition explains
the absence in the ‘Art of the Fantastic’ and ‘Hispanic Art’ shows of artists or artistic
movements whose driving force either was not predicated directly on the tenets of
European modernism or was based on a conscious rejection of all or certain aspects of
modernism. Such was the case with the radical Chicano art movement, as well as that
of Puerto Rican artists whose weapon against colonialism was the refusal to play the
role of modernism’s ‘other’ .
The construction of identity in the terms laid out by these exhibitions exposes the
predicament of Latin American/Latino artists and intellectuals: it forces them to
stage ‘authenticity’ , and to insist on the configuration of a particular cultural image,
as a means of opposing external, often dominating, alternatives. Yet this is in every
way a no-win situation, for modernism’s claim to the representation of authenticity
exclusively in terms of formal innovation over and above the particularities of content
241 Beyond ‘the Fantastic'
The real strength of Latin American art now seems to lie in the ability to
conjure up memorable images with great poetic power while only rather
cautiously extending the limits of conventional formats . . . Latin American
artists . . . have an ability to come close to the actual nerve of life, often while
making a stand from a purely subjective viewpoint, which is missing from the
work of most of their European and North American contemporaries.25
In this way the ‘fantastic’ construct exposes the social and political structures that
underlie the Euro-American/Latino axis, i.e. it reasserts the dominance of the
Western subject’s art over that of the Third World ‘other’ . Deprived of any power of
logic, reasoning or artistic innovation, the ‘fantastic’ can only revel in its primal and
exotic Third World of colours and emotions while being upheld as a picture or an
image for aesthetic gratification. This phenomenon suggests that even the artists’
cultural identity, and therefore the nature of art production itself, can be manipulated
through the representations of these particular visual discourses. This process, as
Goldman has pointed out, becomes superexploitation when applied by a developed to
a dependent country.2“
Given the far-reaching implications of the representation of the fantastic, it is
important to question the function of this discourse at the end of a decade when
postmodernism has thoroughly attacked and dismantled many of the myths of
modernism. On one hand, it could be argued that such a representation of Latin
American art, which continues to be upheld by many US museums, may be useful at
the present moment of exhaustion of the modernist tradition and the art market’s
transformation of the art object into the ultimate financial instrument. Like the
primitive and naive artists of high modernism, Latin American/Latino artists have
emerged as substitutes for the role of pure artistic agent who reclaims value for a
debased Western art. On the other hand, however, it is useful to recall
postmodernism’s recognition that the ‘other’ is a mirror-construct or illusion of the
242 Beyond the Fantastic
West’s own making, a product of the hegemonic stance of modernism that has never
produced anything but the fatal misappropriation and misrepresentation of other
people’s cultures. Thus, if the ‘fantastic other’ can still be a relevant category with
which to approach Latin American art, it is because the neo-colonial mind-set still
governs museum practice in both continents.
It is precisely the process of homogenization at work in the modernist model that
must be called into question if we want to arrive at an understanding of the
fundamental logic implicit in the artistic production of the many societies that make
up Latin America and their counterparts in the USA. To attempt to reduce the
complexity of these cultural groups to models of representation predicated on
categories of Euro-American aesthetic development is to continue to perpetrate the
legacy of exclusion, incorporation and domination. From this point of view, the
principal issue at stake for the post-1992 agenda is not so much that of denouncing
the self-centred authority of Europe or North America as that of engaging the
specificity of the Latin American/Latino realities. In order to understand the overall
implications of the project we must approach it from the perspective of the artists
themselves and their traditions. From this vantage point it is the USA and Europe
that constitute the ‘other’ . This condition suggests a dual role for modern art in Latin
America, one that is never recognized on account of the hegemonic nature of Western
discourse but that is clearly manifest in the attitude of Latin American artists and
intellectuals towards the cultural legacy of the West.
Néstor García Canclini has argued that Latin American society is the product of a
complex process of blending in which different logics of development have intersected
to create a culture that straddles various levels of tradition and modernity.27 The two
key questions that follow from this are: what did it mean to produce modern art in
societies where the old and the new coexist at conflictive levels, indifferent to each
other; and what was the nature of the modernism that developed there? The answers
to these questions, in turn, call for a recognition of the historical and ideological
forces that have shaped the relationship of Latin American artists with Western
modernism as well as a critical revision o f such fundamental notions as cultural
identity, authenticity and appropriation. As James Clifford has argued, these concepts
do not stand for static, fixed essences but for a relational system based on a tactical,
political or cultural invention.28 The pervasive notion of cultural identity in the Latin
American discourse, for instance, constitutes a specific ideology invoked by national
elites at different historical junctures in response to a confrontation with First World
powers. From this point of view the consistent claims by Latin American/Latino
artists on behalf of ‘cultural identity’ constitute both a form o f resistance to what can
243 Beyond 'the Fantastic'
be termed ‘the appropriating gaze of the West’, and a way to secure a legitimate space
for their artistic and cultural production.29 This partly explains why, despite its
pluralism of identities and modes of expression, a common trait of art produced in
Latin America is its constant reference to the social or geographical context in which
it was produced.
At the core of these issues lies the notion of appropriation and the particular role
it has played in the Latin American/Latino version of modernism to counteract the
ethnocentric discourse of the West. Whether self-consciously assuming their colonial
condition, exalting their mixed-blood ‘race’, or reclaiming after Borges their
‘citizenship of the West’ , Latin American/Latino artists have approached the artistic
legacy of the West as an endless reservoir of conventions, images and motifs.30 This
has yielded a symbolic system based on hybridization and synthesis that has
traditionally been condemned by Western authorities. And yet in this context
appropriation assumes a positive function. Rather than leading to a pool of formal
signifiers aimed at revitalizing a symbolic system or recreating its mirror-image, it
may be considered, as Luis Camnitzer has observed, ‘a process of enrichment that can
generate syncretic work, helping to absorb and digest the impact of the imposed [or
dominant] culture’ .31
Within this framework, a more accurate approach towards the representation of
Latin American/Latino art implies a thorough questioning of the centrality of
prevailing curatorial practices and the development of exhibition criteria from within
the traditions and conventions of the many countries that make up Latin America or
the different groups that make up the Latino population of the USA. It implies, as
Gerardo Mosquera has suggested, shifting the vertical axis of neo-colonialism to a
horizontal one based on intercultural dialogue and exchange. It also calls for
developing new exhibition formats.32 This task, however, requires an interdisciplinary
framework of analysis that current curatorial practices are unable to provide. The
new framework would allow for the adequate analysis of the works of art within the
structural web of meanings in which they are inscribed in the community for which
they were generated. Such an approach, in turn, involves expanding the expertise of
museums by the incorporation of professionals versed in the Latin American/Latino
heritage, experimenting with innovative exhibition formats and installations that will
allow for the presentation of the points of view of those being represented, and
ultimately revising the role and function of curators to turn them into mediators of
cultural exchange. If demographic trends continue, pressuring US museums to
respond to specific constituencies, the role of curators and exhibition organizers will
have to change from one of exclusive arbiters of taste and quality to one closer to that
244 Beyond the Fantastic
of ‘cultural brokers’ , whose function will be to mediate between the groups whose
works they exhibit and audiences unfamiliar with the cultural traditions represented.
It is evident that the survey format is not only biased but outdated for these
purposes. Finding an alternative, however, is a complicated issue. The conceptual
quagmire in which many mainstream museums find themselves as a result of
budgetary constraints and changes in constituency has shifted this responsibility to
institutions outside the mainstream’s sphere of influence. In the past few years a
number of such institutions have sought to correct the distortions imposed by what
was clearly an untenable strategy of representation, with exhibitions that address the
issues of Latin American and Latino identity from a revisionist perspective. For
instance, ‘The Decade Show’, organized in 1990 by three New York institutions (the
Studio Museum in Harlem, The New Museum of Contemporary Art and the Museum
of Contemporary Hispanic Art), provided a starting point by questioning prevalent
museum practices. Instead of upholding the univocal perspectives of one or two
curators, they introduced a comparative, thematic format grounded in the team
efforts of curators from each of the communities that the exhibition purported to
represent. Such valuable efforts, however, have suffered from their reliance on the
mainstream for approval and legitimation of their points of view, and therefore have
not yet produced an adequate working model.33 What are needed in turn are more
specifically focused exhibitions that allow for in-depth analysis of particular movements
or groups of artists, as well as the establishment of comparative frames of analysis.
We can conclude that if North American curators are to arrive at a different, more
equal, approach - that is, if they are to substitute for Latin America’s role o f passive
object that of being the subject o f its own narrative - they will need to rethink the
categories and parameters of their analysis beyond the limitations imposed by the
Euro-American framework. In turn, those of us working from within the Latin
American/Latino perspectives will have to resist pressures to produce exhibitions that
conform to the conceptual parameters of the mainstream. A rethinking and revamping
of curatorial practices along these lines should open up the possibilities of apprehending
the complex issues posed by Latin American/Latino art that the exhibition phenomenon
of the 1980s buried under such artificial constructs as the ‘fantastic’ .
245 Beyond ‘the Fantastic'
NOTES
1 Gerardo Mosquera, ‘The New Art o f the Revolution’, in The Nearest Edge o f the World: Art and Cuba Now,
exhibition catalogue (Brookline, Mass: Polarities, 1990), p. 9.
2 Carlos Fuentes, ‘Jacobo Borges’, in Holliday T Day and Hollister Sturges, Art o f the Fantastic: Latin
America, 1920-1987, exhibition catalogue (Indianapolis: Indianapolis Museum of Art, 1987), p. 242.
3 For in-depth reviews o f these shows as well as critiques o f the myths and cultural stereotypes that they
projected, see Shifra M Goldman, ‘Latin Visions and Revisions’ , Art in America 76, no. 5 (May 1988),
pp. 138-47, 198-9; Edward Sullivan, ‘Mito y realidad: Arte latinoamericano en los Estados Unidos’,
Arte en Colombia 41 (September 1989), pp. 60-6; Charles Merewether, ‘The Phantasm o f Origins: New
York and the Art o f Latin America’, Art and Text 30 (1989), pp. 55-6; and Coco Fusco, ‘Hispanic Artists
and Other Slurs’, Village Voice, August 9, 1988, pp. 6-7.
4 Shifra M Goldman ‘Latin American Art’s US Explosion: Looking a Gift Horse in the Mouth’, New Art
Examiner 17, no. 4 (December 1989), pp. 25-9.
5 For an analysis o f previous exhibition booms and their relationship to US foreign policies, see Eva
Cockcroft, ‘The United States and Socially Concerned Latin American Art: 1920-1970’, in Luis R Cancel
et al., The Latin American Spirit: Art and Artists in the United States, 1920-1970, exhibition catalogue
(New York: Bronx Museum o f the Arts, 1988), pp. 184-221.
6 For more on these issues, see Ivan Karp and Steven D Lavine (eds.), Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and
Politics o f Museum Display (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991), especially pp. 11-24,
151-8.
7 The concept o f transculturation was originally introduced by the Cuban Fernando Ortiz. It refers to a
dynamic whereby different cultural matrices have a reciprocal impact, though not from positions of
equality, to produce a heterogeneous ensemble. See George Yúdice, ‘We Are Not the World’, Social Text 10,
no. 2-3 (1992), p. 209.
8 Ibid.
9 For more on the composition and ethos o f the Latino community, see Juan Flores and George Yúdice,
‘Living Borders/Buscando América: Languages of Latino Self-Formation’, Social Text 24 (1990), pp. 57-84.
10 Jane Livingston and John Beardsley, ‘The Poetics and Politics o f Hispanic Art: A New Perspective’, in
Karp and Lavine (eds.), Exhibiting Cultures, op. cit., pp. 108-9.
12 For an analysis o f the impact that European Surrealism had on important Latin American cultural
developments such as mundonouismo, Carpentier’s ‘marvellous realism’, and Borges’s fantastic literature,
see Roberto González Echevarria, Alejo Carpentier: The Pilgrim at Home (Austin: University o f Texas
Press, 1990), pp. 108-29.
15 Erika Billeter (ed.), Images o f Mexico: The Contribution o f Mexico to Twentieth-Century Art, exhibition
catalogue (Dallas: Dallas Museum o f Art, 1988), p. 21.
16 I have dealt extensively with this aspect o f the representation of the Indian in Mexican art in ‘The
246 Beyond the Fantastic
Ideology and Politics o f the Mexican Mural Movement’, PhD dissertation (University of Chicago, 1989).
17 It should be noted that the ‘authenticity’ bias also determined the selection and framework of the
Metropolitan Museum o f Art’s blockbuster exhibition ‘Mexico: Splendors of Thirty Centuries’, in which
Frida Kahlo had the honour o f being the last ‘authentically Mexican’ artist to have been included.
18 The term ‘Hispanic’, introduced in the 1970s by government and marketing technocrats to package a
heterogeneous population, not only links these groups with the legacy o f the Spanish Conquest, but also
homogenizes the cultural, geographic, and racial differences that characterize the Latino population.
The term ‘Latino’ (from Latin America) is more inclusive, designating those who come or descend from a
racially and culturally diverse geographical region where the Spanish legacy is dominant but not exclusive.
See Shifra M Goldman, ‘Homogenizing Hispanic A rt’, New Art Examiner 15, no. 1 (September 1987), p. 31;
and Lucy R Lippard, Mixed Blessings: New Art in a Multicultural America (New York: Pantheon Books,
1990), pp. 32-3.
20 Beardsley, ‘And/Or Hispanic Art, American Culture’, in John Beardsley and Jane Livingston, Hispanic Art
in the United States: Thirty Contemporary Painters and Sculptors, exhibition catalogue (New York:
Abbeville Press, 1987), p. 46.
21 Livingston, ‘Recent Hispanic Art: Style and Influence’, in Hispanic Art in the United States, op. cit. p. 106.
22 Paul Richard, ‘The Brilliant Assault’, Washington Post, October 10, 1987.
23 Livingston, ‘Recent Hispanic Art: Style and Influence’, in Hispanic Art in the United States, op. cit. p. 106.
26 Shifra M Goldman, ‘Rewriting the History o f Mexican Art: The Politics and Economics o f Contemporary
Culture’, in Jerry R Ladman (ed.), Mexico: A Country in Crisis (El Paso: Texas Western Press, 1986), p. 113.
27 Néstor García Canclini, Culturas híbridas: Estrategias para entrar y salir de la modernidad (Mexico City:
Grijalbo, 1990).
28 James Clifford, The Predicament o f Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art
(Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1988), p. 12.
29 Jean Fisher, ‘Magicien de la Terre + Bildung’ , Artforum 28, no. 1 (September 1989), p. 158.
30 Jorge Luis Borges, ‘El escritor argentino y la tradición’ (1928), in Obras completas (Buenos Aires: Emecé,
1972), pp. 162-89.
31 Luis Camnitzer, ‘The Politics o f Marginalization’, paper presented at the New Museum of Contemporary
Art, New York, April 1988.
32 Gerardo Mosquera, paper presented at the international symposium ‘Art and Identity in Latin America’ ,
Memorial de América Latina, Sáo Paulo, September 1991.
33 I have analysed the limitations o f the multicultural model that guided these exhibitions in ‘Between Two
Waters: Image and Identity in Latin-American Art’, paper presented at the international symposium ‘Art
and Identity in Latin America’, Memorial de América Latina, Sáo Paulo, September 1991.
C artographies: Exploring th e
Lim itations of a C uratorial Paradigm
Monica Amor
‘It is not necessary to renounce normal vision, to renounce a wide ideological horizon
in order to examine the total specificity of art. The wider the horizon, the brighter
and more distinct is the individuality of each concrete phenomenon.’ M Bakhtin
paradigm of inclusion that wants to claim the right to differentiation in the face of a
homogenizing Euro-American tendency towards the countries south of the Rio
Grande. The importance of these exhibitions has to be recognized primarily as the
fact that they constitute a strategic move out of the reductive frames of reference that
in the 1980s shaped Latin American art according to notions of exoticism, primitivism,
authenticity and the fantastic.2 In this sense the task of reformulating, of questioning,
of opening up new venues and possibilities in relation to Latin American art has been
performed, in part, by these exhibitions. Thus a next step calls for the exploration of
specific and particular issues and concerns. ‘Plurality’ is the ground from which new
theoretical perspectives should derive in order to problematize specificities and
questions of difference. Otherwise one must ask how long are we going to limit Latin
America’s artistic critical discourse to a subject that so far seems to be the only one
permitted for it, namely cultural identity. It is not a matter of dismissing issues related
to cultural identity but of ceasing to treat them in general terms, as abstractions, and
of moving towards a closer reading of the images, objects and performative aspects of
our cultures and o f establishing interesting dialogical relationships not only among
Latin American peoples but also with other countries and communities that will
enrich our understanding o f contemporary cultural phenomena.
I would emphasize here how important it is to establish a dialogue with the
so-called ‘Western’ countries in order to transgress the binary opposition that tends
to subordinate ‘Third World’ countries to a peripheral position and thus reinscribes a
kind of marginalization enacted through language and symbolic production. Our own
retreat into seemingly open but actually deeply fixed notions of plurality, with
which only the so-called peripheral cultures can identify, leads to a position of
self-marginalization. This is precisely the subject of one of the installations in
‘Cartographies’ by the well-known Cuban artist José Bedia, entitled The Little
Revenge from the Periphery (fig. 38). The work consists of an enframing black circle
within which the faces of people of four different races (Black, Indian, Asian,
Aborigine) surround a white face attacked by arrows and other handmade weapons.
The rhetorical devices of the work seem to parallel some versions of postcolonialism
in the field of contemporary art. It is important to develop an awareness of the
discursive structure implicit in some unfoldings of postcolonial theory, which
automatically assume subordinate relationships between a centre and a periphery,
a Self and an Other. There is also the problem of dealing with a category, applicable to
critics and artists, and thus falling again into that classificatory mania of modernity
that pretends to encompass a certain totality within the concept. As Vijay Mishra and
Bob Hodge write: “. . . the postcolonial is reduced to a purely textual phenomenon,
249 Cartographies: Exploring the Limitations of a Curatorial Paradigm
between self, morals, culture and society of Nahum Zenil, who reproduces his
‘archetypal’ face in his works on paper in an obsessive mode; the theatrical spaces,
interrupted maps and infinite road cartographies where Guillermo Kuitca deploys
imaginary places of transition; and the ambiguous and grandiloquent installation of
Gonzalo Díaz. In the same spirit of ‘diversity’ we met the polysemic installations of
Maria Fernanda Cardoso, who by choosing a meaningless object such as a typical
Colombian sweet (bocadillo) constructs a flag and displaces the institutionalized-
national for the familiarized-popular (see fig. 39), along with the ambiguous
psychological self-explorations of Julio Galán in paintings of rich formalism and
abundant iconography.
The question is, can we represent pluralism? It is unlikely if we take the term to
mean an array of unlimited possibilities related to each other by links as much as by
interstices and fissures. Because as much as there are differences within plurality,
there are also points of contact. To investigate them, to connect them and theorize
them is the main challenge that the cultural critic has to face in relation to
contemporary art. To study, for example, the complexity of meanings articulated in
the photographs of Marta María Pérez Bravo, who undertakes an ongoing exploration
of the tripartite paradigm woman/body/culture, in relation to the more aestheticized
images of Mario Cravo Neto, whose photographed black bodies assume an overt
formal character through the play of shapes, shadows and lights. In dismissing
confrontation between particular works we are running the risk of falling into the
easy arbitrariness of the ‘anything goes’ and thus cancelling the possibilities of
developing an engaging, challenging, compelling, sophisticated and provocative
critical discourse. We will then find ourselves once more located in the backyard,
dealing over and over again with fragments that seem too disparate to interrelate.
I would suggest that it is worth looking at these fragments for what they are and
to study the meanings they acquire as they travel in time and space. No matter how
free of influences we think our approach as curators or critics is, it is always
embedded in our specific ‘sites of enunciation’. Why, then, dismiss one of our major
responsibilities by reducing the terms of the discussion to pluralism, or to an endless
debate between centre and periphery? What is crucial in deploying a perspective is
always to keep in mind that ours is just one story among many others and that we
speak from open and contingent positions, always in the process of becoming, with no
claims to truth. I would argue that the time has arrived for models of cultural
production that go beyond reductive geopolitical parameters and the fashionable
discourses on ‘otherness’, ‘plurality’ and ‘multiculturalism’. A strategic move would
be to depart from plurality to explore relevant cultural and artistic issues, to deploy
252 Beyond the Fantastic
and not only thematize a multicultural praxis.' We should avoid what Gerardo Fig. 38 (opposite)
José Bedia
Mosquera has identified as an ‘otherizing tendency’ in the arts.8 It seems a
The Little Revenge
precondition today that to enter the museum, the gallery, the publishing circuit, Latin from the Periphery
American artists and writers have to present ‘otherizing’ credentials. The result is [Pequeña Venganza
the reinscription of old hierarchies of power where the ‘Third World Subject’ is desde la Periferia),
1993
allowed some space in the public sphere but only under a disguised essentialism
Installation
delineated by those who control the infrastructure that supports the arts. Courtesy of the
Totalizing terms like ‘Latin America’ or abstract and general categories of inquiry Frumkin/Adams
(such as plurality and multiculturalism) overthrow the possibility of a deep Gallery, New York
This should not be a problem, though, because the time for any kind of essentialist
B Zenil
solution, of a concept or definition of Latin American art, has passed.
AJI Due Respect
Todo Respeto),
NOTES
media on paper, 1 Non-numbered quotes are from the catalogue by Ivo Mezquita, Cartographies (Winnipeg Art Gallery, 1993).
42 cms
2 A step further in the articulation o f this pluralistic paradigm has been taken by other exhibitions such as
Collection,
‘Americas’ (1992), presented at the Monasterio de Santa Cruz in Spain; ‘Regarding America’ (1992-3),
City
which toured Venezuela, Colombia and various cities in the USA and Costa Rica; ‘Space of Time’ (1993),
presented at the Americas Society; and ‘About Place: recent art o f the Americas’ (1995) at the Art Institute
o f Chicago. While these exhibitions counteracted the essentialist historical surveys o f Latin American art
they were still predicated on geopolitical paradigms that emphasize the reconceptualization (geopolitical
expansion) o f the name America, now encompassing a multicultural continent.
3 Vijay Mishra and Bob Hodge, ‘What is Postcolonialism?’ in Colonial Discourse and Postcolonial Theory
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), p. 278.
4 Ibid., p. 285.
5 Louise Marcil-Lacoste, ‘The Paradoxes o f Pluralism’, in Chantal Mouffe (ed.), Dimensions o f Radical
Democracy (London: Verso, 1992), pp. 130-1.
6 Mari Carmen Ramirez, ‘Beyond “the Fantastic” : Framing Identity in US Exhibitions of Latin American
Art’, see p. 229.
7 The New Museum o f Contemporary Art and The Drawing Center in New York are among the institutions
that in the past have articulated what I am calling here a ‘multicultural praxis’ . Namely, including in their
exhibitions artists from very different cultural backgrounds in relation to contemporary issues like
technology and globalization. See for example ‘The Last Frontier’ (1993) and ‘Trade Routes’ (1994) at the
New Museum, and the recent autumn, winter and spring selections of drawings at The Drawing Center.
8 Gerardo Mosquera, ‘The Marco Polo Syndrome: A Few Problems Surrounding Art and Eurocentrism’,
in The South Atlantic Quarterly, ‘Postmodernism: Center and Periphery’, Summer 1993, vol. 92, no. 3
(Duke University Press), p. 529.
R ealignm ents of Cultural P ow er
P ostm odern D ecentrednesses and
Cultural Periphery:
The D isalignm ents and R ealignm ents of Cultural P ow er
Nelly Richard
Ever since the Spanish Colony obliged the continent to speak through division in the Fig. 41 (opposite
language of the conqueror, Latin America has known a rift between sign (the name previous page)
Uliana Porter
established through coercion) and referent (the refractory substance of enforced
Reconstruction Wit
speech). This founding fracture between sign and referent conditioned the way Latin Mirror, 1988
America would thereafter distrust the categories of dominant-Western rationality, Collage on paper
(acrylic, silkscreer
with the suspicion that its nominal pruning, by means o f words, exerted the primary
charcoal),
colonizing violence of a superimposed nomenclature. 101.6 x 76.2 cms
When the intellectual and strategic programme of historical modernity patented Photograph cou
its formula of reason and progress as a metropolitan formula, suspicion of the of the artist
machinations of Logos was reoriented against the centre. This was not only because
the centre presented itself as the origin of and foundation for the unfolding of the
civilizatory process that universalized the dominant-Western paradigm, but also
because it geographically controlled the international currency of exchanges of
economic and cultural power. This function of control depended on the instrumentation
of the centre as a place of hierarchy and dominion that established legitimacies,
dictated guidelines of meaning and conduct, prescribed usages and regulated
communications.1 One of the prerogatives of the centre was always that of ordaining
conventions, achieving this through the modernity= progress equation that rendered
absolute the value o f the New.
The modernism of the New, as a metropolitan fantasy transferred to the Latin
American periphery, carried with it a conflict of definitions and interests that was an
inevitable result of the tensions within its origins and conveyance. Some of the
gestures conceded in connection with the new data brought from abroad remained
captive to a dependent reflection, through continued subservience to the
Europeanizing model. Meanwhile, others denounced the treachery of mimetic
reproduction, seeking immediately to indicate a position of resistance to the
hegemonic scheme. The sociology of culture in Latin America highlights how literary
aesthetics, artistic vanguards and movements of ideas have successively
accommodated one or another gesture according to the oscillation o f identity of its
creators and intellectuals (the educated elite) who served as enlightened guardians in
the chain of transmission of the metropolitan paradigm; and also according to the
type of energy (attraction or rejection) aroused by the context of the reception
attending the arrival of the cosmopolitan data.
The socioeconomic modernization that industrialized culture, and its ‘North
Americanization’ of consumption under the grammar of the world economy of the
capitalist market, proceeded to influence the debate about culture and identity in
Latin America until such debate was significantly recast - in the 1960s - as an
261 Postmodern Decentrednesses and Cultural Periphery
Another postmodern device - that of the parodic quote - also has diverse
implications according to the contexts in which it is employed. It is not the same
thing to parody codes by means of signs that possess an equal fluency of circulation
(no matter how dissimilar the registers may be: from cult to popular, from private to
public, etc.) because they all share the same horizon of interchangeability of values
that characterize the ‘society of the spectacle’,-as to do this where each sign is
traversed by the contradiction of belonging to completely heterogeneous registers of
social identity that divide it between rite and progress, heritage and
telecommunications, folklore and transnationalism, etc. Therefore, in contrast to
what occurs in contexts where the parodied and the parodist are both playful
components o f one and the same masquerade of signs, contemplatively transacted
by a subject equidistant from its bonds of power, the Latin American parody
always carries with it an implicit critical reference to the colonizing matrix (the
dominant-Europeanizing belief in the superiority of the Originals) and to its inverted
reflection: the simulacrum impulse that resolves the Latin theme of borrowed
identities in the transference of the Copy. The ‘crisis of the model’ (another
postmodern designation related to the end of meta-references) does not mean the
same in post-auratic contexts, where the notion of the Model has been vulgarized
in the Series, as it does in traditionally subordinate contexts, where even the
theorizations concerning the loss of the Model - resublimatized as Model because of
its metropolitan seal - are in danger.
All of these ambivalences of meaning that arise from the ‘unequal and oppressive
relation of metropolitan knowledge and its institutions’ to the ‘vital world’ o f the
periphery reconfirm for us the urgency to subject the postmodern formula of
‘decentredness’ to a strict inspection of contexts.20 However, this obviously does not
imply rejection or condemnation of all the postmodern formulations enunciated at
the centre, considering them fatally guilty as representatives of its framework of
power. Not only may the enunciations be refunctionalized in accordance with the
theoretico-political interests of the periphery to the point of forcing them to betray
the commitments of interests confirmed by their paths of origin; but, in addition,
many of the positions defended by its intellectuals may reinforce shared connections
with the strategies of a certain peripheral marginality. To strengthen the supporting
network of this ‘alternative postmodernity’, one ‘that is not limited by geopolitical
boundaries but rather crosses them and becomes conscious of their signification’21,
would also permit the de-emblematization of the discourse of international theory
concerning difference, by confronting it with the multiple-differential of marginalized
practices, whose ‘situational specificity’ should inform the politics of the marginal.22
268 Beyond the Fantastic
NOTES
That is, the centre never really exhausted its meaning in the simple geographical realism o f its
metropolitan function. It operated - and operates - as centre, or rather as centre-function: a system of
references that makes every axis rotate around its symbolics o f authority.
The semiotized code o f this denunciation is formulated by its classic doctrinal text Para leer el Pato Donald
(icomunicación de masas y colonialismo) [Guide to reading Donald Duck (mass communication and
colonialism)!, by Dorfman and Mattelart (Mexico: Siglo Veintiuno Editores, 1972).
For a new Latin American reflection on modernity and postmodernity, see particularly José Joaquín
Brunner’s thesis Un espejo trizado [A cracked mirror! (Santiago de Chile: FLACSO, 1988); and Néstor
García Canclini’s Culturas Híbridas [Hybrid Cultures] (Mexico City: Grijalbo, 1989).
Alejandro Piscitelli, ‘Sur, post-modernidad y después’ [‘South, post-modernity and after’], in Imágenes
desconocidas: la modernidad en la encrucijada postmoderna [Unknown images: modernity at the
postmodern crossroads] (Buenos Aires: Clerics, 1988).
Celeste Olalquiaga, ‘Tupinicopolis: la ciudad de los indios retrofuturistas’ [Tupinicopolis: the city of
retro-futurist Indians] in Revista de Critica Cultural no. 3 (Santiago de Chile, 1990).
Perhaps the most lucid formulation regarding the ambiguities and contradictions of that First
Worldism-Third Worldism tension is theorized by Gayatry Spivak, when she asks herself about the folds of
her own inscription as a postcolonial theorist. ‘As a postcolonia], I am concerned with the appropriation of
alternative history or histories. I am not an historian by training. I cannot claim disciplinary expertise in
remaking history in the sense o f rewriting it. But I can be used as an example of how historical narratives
are negotiated.’ (‘Who claims alterity?’ in Barbara Kruger and Phil Mariani (eds.), Remaking History,
New York: Dia Art Foundation [Discussions in contemporary culture, no. 4], Seattle Bay Press, 1989).
And: ‘More and more people have found in me a very convenient marginal, capital M, and this of course I
have myself found politically very troubling.’ (‘The new historicism’, in The post-colonial critic (New York
and London: Routledge, 1990.)
Craig Owens, ‘El discurso de los otros: las feministas y el posmodernismo’, in La posmodernidad
(Barcelona: Editoria Kairos, 1985); and ‘The discourse o f others: Feminists and postmodernism’, in
Hal Foster (ed.), Postmodern Culture (London: Pluto Press, 1985).
8 Jorge Ruffinelli, ‘Los 80: ingreso a la posmodernidad?’ [‘The 80s: Entry to postmodernity?’] in Modernidad
y posmodernidad en América Latina (i), Nuevo Texto Crítico no. 6 (San Francisco: Stanford University,
1990).
9 Gayatry Spivak quoted by George Yúdice in ‘El conflicto de posmodernidades’ [‘The conflict of
postmodernities’], Modernidad y posmodernidad en América Latina di), Nuevo Texto Crítico no. 7
(San Francisco: Stanford University, 1991).
11 ‘ What we must eliminate are systems o f representation that carry with them the kind o f authority that,
to my mind, has been repressive because it does not permit or make room for interventions on the part of
those represented . . . we must identify those social-cultural-political formations that would allow for a
reduction o f authority and increased participation in the production o f representation, and proceed from
there.’ Phil Mariani and Jonathan Crary, ‘In the shadow o f the West: an interview with Edward Said’, in
Discourses: Conversations in postmodern art and culture (New York: The New Museum of Contemporary
Art. 1990).
269 Postmodern Decentrednesses and Cultural Periphery
13 ‘It would be necessary to modify the institutions through which the public sphere is reproduced and in
which this aestheticizing “ marginocentrality” is blinded when confronted with everyday experiences o f the
great diversity o f social subjects and actors that constitute Latin America. To modify institutions implies
the reconfiguration o f the discursive and behavioural types through which subjects are formed and
thorough which - at a microphysical level - the distribution of value and of power is reproduced.’ George
Yúdice, ‘El conflicto de posmodernidades’, op. cit.
14 ‘The postmodern contribution is useful . . . insofar as it reveals the constructed and dramatized character
o f every tradition, including that o f modernity: it refutes the origination of traditions and the originality of
innovation.’ Néstor García Canclini, Culturas Híbridas, op. cit.
15 Alberto Moreiras, ‘Transculturatión y pérdida del sentido' [Transculturation and the loss o f meaningj,
Nuevo Texto Crítico no. 6 (San Francisco: Stanford University, 1990).
16 This knowledge learnt at the periphery, with regard to the determining materials and symbolics that
condition the practice o f cultural transference, denies the naivety of believing that: ‘ Postmodernism is a
sign o f the loss o f the colonial model o f a universal culture spread out to educate the world at large. It is
rather a theory for a postcolonial world of products made and sold in different places without a centre.
It is like the lingua franca o f this world: it can be made and consumed everywhere and nowhere.’
John Rajchman, ‘Postmodernism in a nominalist frame’, Flash Art no. 137 (Milan, 1987).
17 ‘Totalization proceeds from the factic discourse o f socioeconomic power and its ideological projections.’
Alberto Moreiras, op. cit.
18 Elisabeth Fox-Genovese, quoted by George Yúdice in ‘Marginality and the ethics of survival’, in Universal
Abandon? The Politics o f Postmodernism (Minneapolis: Minnesota Press, 1989).
19 ‘For Americans are politically always already in a condition of postmodern fragmentation and
heterogeneity in a way that Europeans have not been; and the revolt against the centre by those
constituted as marginal is an oppositional difference in a way that poststructuralist notions o f difference
are not. These American attacks on universality in the name o f difference, these “ postmodern” issues of
Others (Afro-Americans, Native Americans, women, gays) are in fact an implicit critique of certain French
postmodern discourses about Otherness that really serve to hide and conceal the power of the voices and
movements o f Others.’ ‘Interview with Cornel West’, in Universal Abandon? The Politics o f
Postmodernism, op. cit.
20 Neil Larne, ‘Posmodernismo e imperialismo’, Nuevo Texto Crítico no. 6 (San Francisco: Stanford
University, 1990).
22 ‘What to me seems essential . . . is the need to convert the greedy and binary slogan o f difference into the
quite different denomination o f situation-specificity, at a location that can always be concrete and
reflective.’ Frederic Jameson, in ‘Prefacio a Calibán’ [‘Preface to Caliban’1, Nuevo Texto Critico no. 5
(San Francisco: Stanford University, 1989).
Holy Kitschen: C ollecting Religious
Junk from the S treet
Celeste Olalquiaga
‘Kitsch causes two tears to flow in quick succession. The first tear says: How nice to
see children running on the grass! The second tear says: How nice to be moved,
together with all mankind, by children running on the grass! It is the second tear that
makes kitsch kitsch.’ Milan Kundera, 1984
Catholic imagery, once confined to sacred places such as church souvenir stands,
cemeteries and botanicas, has recently invaded the market as a fad. In the past few
years the realm of religious iconography in Manhattan has extended beyond its
traditional Latino outlets on the Lower East Side, the Upper West Side and Fourteenth
Street. The 1980s appropriation of an imagery that evokes transcendence illustrates
the cannibalistic and vicarious characteristics o f postmodern culture. This melancholic
arrogation also diffuses the boundaries of cultural identity and difference, producing a
new and unsettling cultural persona.
A walk along Fourteenth Street used to be enough to travel in the hyper-reality of
kitsch iconography.1 Cutting across the map of Manhattan, Fourteenth Street sets the
boundary for downtown, exploding into a frontier-like bazaar, a frantic place of trade
and exchange, a truly inner-city port where, among cascades of plastic flowers,
pelicans made with shells, rubber shoes, Rita Hayworth towels, $2 digital watches,
and pink electric guitars with miniature microphones, an array of shrine furnishings
is offered. Velvet hangings picturing the Last Supper are flanked on one side by
bucolic landscapes where young couples kiss as the sun fizzles away in the ocean, and
on the other by 1987’s ‘retro’ idol, Elvis Presley; while the Virgin Mary’s golden aura
is framed by the sexy legs of a pin-up, and the Sacred Heart of Jesus desperately
competes in glitter with barrages of brightly coloured glass-bead curtains.2
Nowadays the Catholic iconography brought to the United States by immigrants
from Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Mexico and Cuba is displayed in places
where the predominant attitude towards Latino culture is one of amused fascination.
Religious images serve not only as memorabilia in fancy souvenir shops but also as
decoration for nightclubs.3 The now-exorcized Voodoo, on Eighteenth Street, used to
have a disco on its first floor and a bright green and pink tropical bar on the second.
The bar’s ceiling was garnished with plastic fruits hanging from one end to the other,
and in the centre of the room stood an altar complete with Virgin Mary, flowers and
votive candles. Fourteenth Street’s Palladium, famous for a postmodern scenario in
which golden Renaissance paintings emerge from behind a bare high-tech structure,
celebrated All Saints’ Day in 1987 by sending out an invitation that unfolded to
reveal images of and prayers to Saint Patrick, Saint Francis of Assisi and Saint
Michael the Archangel.
271 Holy Kitschen
Suddenly, holiness is all over the place. For $3.25 one can buy a Holiest Water
Fountain in the shape of the Virgin, while plastic fans engraved with the images of
your favourite holy people go for $1.95 - as do Catholic identification tags: ‘I’m a
Catholic. In case of accident or illness please call a priest.’ Glowing rosary beads can
be found for $1.25 and, for those in search of verbal illustration, a series of ‘Miniature
Stories of the Saints’ is available for only $1.45. In the wake of punk crucifix earrings
comes designer Henry Auvil’s Sacred Heart of Jesus sweatshirt, yours for a modest
$80, while scapularies, sometimes brought all the way from South America, adorn
black leather jackets.4 Even John Paul II has something to contribute: on his travels
the Holy Father leaves behind a trail o f images, and one can buy his smiling face in a
variety of Pope gadgets including alarm clocks, pins, picture frames, T-shirts and
snowstorm globes.5
This holy invasion has gone so far as to intrude into the sacred space of galleries
and museums, as a growing number of artists incorporate Catholic religious imagery
in their work. Some recent examples are Amalia Mesa-Bains’s recasting of personal
altares, Dana Salvo’s photographs o f Mexican home altars and Audrey Flack’s
baroque re-representations of Spanish virgins.8 Can the objects found in botanicas
and on Fourteenth Street, the ones sold in souvenir shops and those exhibited in
galleries, be considered one and the same? I will argue for their synchronized
difference, that is, for contemporary urban culture’s ability to circulate and support
distinct, and often contradictory, discourses.
Since most of the people who make them have low incomes their economic worth is Fig. 42
Audrey Flack
symbolic, conveyed by glitter and shine, mirrors and glass, a profusion of golden and
Macarena Espe
silvery objects, and sheer abundance. This symbolic richness accounts for the artificial 1971
look of altares, as well as for the ‘magical kingdom’ feeling they evoke. Oil on canvas,
Fundamentally syncretic, altares are raised or dedicated to figures who are public 116.8 x 167.6 ci
Courtesy the H
in some way, usually taken from the Catholic tradition, a local miraculous event or
Collection
national politics. Instead of following a formal chronology, home altars rearticulate
history in relation to events relevant to the believer. To symbolize personal history
they transgress boundaries of time, space, class and race. This is well illustrated in
the Venezuelan cult of Maria Lionza, a deity who is revered with heroes of the
Independence and contemporary presidents - such as Carlos Andrés Pérez - on the
gigantic altar o f Sorte, a ritual hill dedicated to her worship. In both their elaboration
and their meaning altares are emblematic o f the mechanics of popular culture: they
familiarize transcendental experience by constituting the creation of a personal
universe from mainly domestic resources. In so doing they stand in direct opposition
to the impersonal politics of high and mass culture, although they steal motifs and
objects from both.
That the altares tradition is being appropriated by artists both in the USA and
abroad (the Cuban artist Leandro Soto’s home altars to revolutionary heroes, for
example) at the same time that their components are being heavily circulated in the
marketplace is no coincidence. This phenomenon is based on the stealing of elements
that are foreign or removed from the absorbing culture’s direct sensory realm,
shaping itself into a vicarious experience particularly attracted to the intensity of
feeling provided by monographic universes like that of Latin American Catholicism.
Vicariousness - to live through another’s experience - is a fundamental trait of
postmodern culture. Ethnicity and cultural difference have exchanged their intrinsic
values for the more extrinsic ones of market interchangeability: gone are the times
when people could make a persuasive claim to a culture of their own, a set of
meaningful practices that might be considered the product of unique thought or
lifestyle. The new sense of time and space generated by telecommunications - the
substitution of instantaneousness and ubiquity for continuity and distance - has
transformed the perception of things so that they are no longer lived directly but
through their representations. Experience is mainly available through signs: things
are not lived directly but rather through the agency of a medium, in the consumption
of images and objects that replace what they stand for. Such rootlessness accounts for
the high volatility and ultimate transferability of culture in postmodern times.
The imaginary participation that occurs in vicarious experience is often despised
273 Holy Kitschen
274 Beyond the Fantastic
275 Holy Kitschen
for its lack of pertinence to what is tacitly agreed upon to be reality, for example in
the generalized notion that mass entertainment is dumbfounding. Ironically enough,
vicariousness is in fact similar to the classical understanding of aesthetic enjoyment,
which is founded on a symbolically distanced relationship to phenomena. This
symbolic connection, which used to protect the exclusivity of aesthetic experience by
basing it on the prerequisites of trained sensibility and knowledge, has given way to
the more ordinary and accessible passageway provided by popular culture. Therefore
it is not against living others’ experiences - or living like another - that high-culture
criticisms are directed, but rather against the popular level at which this
vicariousness is acted out and the repercussions it has on other cultural projects.
Vicariousness is acceptable so long as it involves a high-level project (stimulating the
intellect) but unacceptable when limited to the sensory (stimulating the senses).
Acceptance of vicariousness enables an understanding of how, as the result of a
long cultural process, simulation has come to occupy the place of a traditional,
indexical referentiality. For this process is not, as many would have it, the sole
responsibility of progressively sophisticated media and market devices, but is rather a
radicalization of the ways in which culture has always mediated our experience. The
difference in postmodernity is both quantitative and qualitative, since it lies in the
extent to which experience is lived vicariously as well as in the centrality of emotion
to contemporary vicariousness. The ‘waning of affect’ in contemporary culture is
intrinsically related to a distance from immediate experience caused in part by the
current emphasis on signs.7 Attempting to compensate for emotional detachment, this
sensibility continually searches for intense thrills and for the acute emotionality
attributed to other times and peoples. The homogenization of signs and the wide
circulation of marketable goods make all cultures susceptible to this appropriation,
and the more imbued with emotional intensity they are perceived to be, the better.
It is in this appeal to emotion that religious imagery and kitsch converge. The
connection proves particularly relevant because kitsch permits the articulation of the
polemics of high and low culture in a context broader than that of religious imagery,
smoothing the way for a better understanding of its attraction and importance for
vicarious experience.
Known as the domain of ‘bad taste’ , kitsch stands for artistic endeavour gone sour
as well as for anything that is considered too obvious, dramatic, repetitive, artificial
or exaggerated. The link between religious imagery and kitsch is based on the
dramatic character of their styles, whose function is to evoke unambiguously,
dispelling ambivalence and abstraction. After all, besides providing a meaningful
frame for existence and allocating emotions and feelings, Catholicism facilitates
276 Beyond the Fantastic
through its imagery the materialization o f one o f the most ungraspable of all
experiences, that of the transcendence of spiritual attributes. Because of the
spiritual nature of religious faith, however, iconolatry (the worship of images or
icons) is often seen as sacrilegious, as the vulgarization of an experience that should
remain fundamentally immaterial and ascetic. In this respect not only Catholic
iconography but the whole of Christian theology has been accused of lacking
substance, and therefore of being irredeemably kitsch.8 Like kitsch, religious imagery
is a mise-en-scene, a visual glossolalia that embodies otherwise impalpable qualities:
mystic fervour is translated into upturned eyes, a gaping mouth, and levitation;
goodness always feeds white sheep; virginity is surrounded by auras, clouds, and
smiling cherubim; passion is a bleeding heart; evil is snakes, horns and flames. In
kitsch this dramatic quality is intensified by an overtly sentimental, melodramatic
tone and by primary colours and bright, glossy surfaces.
The interchange between the spheres o f the celestial and kitsch is truly fitting.
Religious imagery is considered kitsch because of its desacralization, while kitsch is
called evil and the ‘anti-Christ in art’ because of its artistic profanities.9 Kitsch steals
motifs and materials at random, regardless of the original ascription of the sources. It
takes from classic, modernist and popular art and mixes all together, becoming in this
way the first and foremost recycler. This irreverent eclecticism has brought both glory
and doom upon kitsch, for its unbridled voraciousness transgresses boundaries and
undermines hierarchies. Religious kitsch is then doubly irreverent, displaying an
impious overdetermination that accounts, perhaps, for its secular seduction.
Kitsch is one of the constitutive phenomena of postmodernism. The qualities I
have attributed to kitsch so far - eclectic cannibalism, recycling, rejoicing in surface
or allegorical values - are those that distinguish contemporary sensibility from the
previous belief in authenticity, originality and symbolic depth.10 Furthermore, the
postmodern broadening of the notion of reality, whereby vicariousness is no longer
felt as false or second-hand but rather as an autonomous - however incredible -
dimension of the real, facilitates the current circulation and revalorization of this
aesthetic form. Likewise, in its chaotic juxtaposition of images and times,
contemporary urban culture is comparable to an altar-like reality, where the logic of
organization is anything but homogeneous, visual saturation is obligatory, and the
personal is lived as a pastiche of fragmented images from popular culture.
enables and even seeks their subsistence. This peculiar coexistence of divergent
visions is made possible by the space left by the vertical displacement of depth by
surface, which implies a gathering on the horizontal level. Fragmentary but
ubiquitous, discontinuous and instantaneous, this new altar-like reality is the arena
for a Byzantine struggle in which different iconographies fight for hegemony. In this
manner cultural specificity has given way to the internationalization of its signs,
losing uniqueness but gaining exposure and circulation. Within this context it is
possible to distinguish, according to their means of production and cultural function,
three degrees of kitsch that have recently come to overlap in time and space.
In what I will call first-degree kitsch, representation is based on an indexical
referent. Here, the difference between reality and representation is explicit and
hierarchical, since only what is perceived as reality matters. Acting as a mere
substitute, the kitsch object has no validity in and of itself.11 This is the case with the
imagery available at church entrances and botánicas, sold for its straightforward
iconic value. Statuettes, images and scapularies embody the spirits they represent,
making them palpable. Consequently this imagery belongs in sacred places, such as
home altars, and must be treated with utmost respect. In first-degree kitsch the
relationship between object and user is immediate, one of genuine belief. Technically
its production is simple and cheap, a serial artisanship devoid of that perfectly
finished look attained with a more sophisticated technology.12 In fact, these objects
exhibit a certain rawness that is, or appears to be, handmade. This quality reflects
their ‘honesty’ , as lack of sophistication is usually taken as a sign of authenticity.
On the other hand, this rawness adds to first-degree kitsch’s status as ‘low’ art,
when it is considered art at all: usually, if not marginalized as folklore, it is
condemned as gaudy.13
Almost a century old, first-degree kitsch is what is usually referred to in
discussions of kitsch. It is not, however, inherently kitsch. It is understood as such
from a more distanced perspective, one that does not enjoy the same emotional
attachment that believers have to these objects. For them, kitsch objects are
meaningful, even when they are used ornamentally. Yet for those who have the
distanced perspective, whom I will call kitsch aficionados, it is precisely this
unintentionality that is attractive, since it speaks of a naive immediacy of feeling
that they have lost.14 Aficionados’ nostalgia leads them to a vicarious pleasure that
gratifies their desire for immediacy. They achieve this pleasure by collecting kitsch
objects and even admiring their inherent qualities: bright colours, glossy surfaces and
figuration. By elaborating a scenario for their vicarious pleasure, kitsch aficionados
paradoxically reproduce the practice o f believers, since this scenario is meant to
278 Beyond the Fantastic
discovery. Hence, like first-degree believers, they are not among the store’s customers,
though it is located in the East Village, home to a substantial Latino community.
Mass-marketed, these products involve a more elaborate technology and often
come from mass-culture production centres like Hong Kong. First-degree homeliness
is replaced by the mechanical look of serial reproduction. Designed as a commodity
for exchange and commerce, second-degree kitsch has no trace of use-value, no longer
being ‘the real thing’ for connoisseurs. The passing over of kitsch to mass culture is
similar to the desacralization of high art occasioned by mechanical reproduction.17
In both cases the loss of authenticity derives from the shift from manufactured or
low-technology production to a more sophisticated industrial one, with its consequent
displacement of a referent for a copy. To consider second-degree kitsch less authentic
than first-degree kitsch because of its predigested character would be contradictory,
since kitsch is by definition predigested. The difference lies in how intentional, or
self-conscious, this predigestion is.
The mass marketing of religious imagery as kitsch is only possible once the icon
has been stripped o f its signifying value. The religious kitsch that was available
before the 1980s was first-degree kitsch, albeit mechanically reproduced. The change
to a fad, something fun to play with, is a recent phenomenon. What matters now is
iconicity itself; worth is measured by the icon’s traits - the formal, technical aspects
like narrative, colour and texture. Void, except in a nostalgic way, of the systemic
meaning granted by religious belief, these traits are easily isolated and fragmented,
becoming totally interchangeable and metonymical. As floating signs, they can adhere
to any object and impart to it their full value, ‘kitschifying’ it. This lack of specificity
accounts for the suitability of neo-kitsch objects’ for random consumption.
baroqueness of the imagery, makes her work ‘popular kitsch’, a kitsch that takes
itself seriously and is sentimental and Romantic. Flack distinguishes this kitsch from
‘art-world kitsch’, which in her opinion covers sentiment with humour. Emotional
identification is the basis for her claim to a more valid relationship with religious
imagery than that of other artists.21 Flack’s emotional affinity with the Virgins
notwithstanding, her use of them is mainly functional and isolated from the Marian
tradition as a whole. A syncretist, she takes elements from any religion that suits her
needs, in an interchangeability that renders the specificity of religious traditions
secondary.
Third-degree religious kitsch consists of a revalorization of Catholic iconography
and the accentuation of those traits that make its aesthetics unique: figurativeness,
dramatization, eclecticism, visual saturation - all those attributes for which kitsch
was banned from the realm of art. In providing an aesthetic experience that
transcends the object, kitsch is finally legitimized as art, an issue that has been of
more concern to art critics than to kitsch artists. Consequently it has been argued
that the recirculation of kitsch is but a co-optation by the late avant-garde, a formal
gesture of usurpation stemming from its desperate attempt to remain alive.22 There is
little difference between the use of kitsch as a motif by the market and its use by
avant-garde art, since for both the value of the icon lies in its exotic otherness, its
ornamental ability to cover the empty landscape of postindustrial reality with a
universe of images. Such pilfering of religious imagery is limited to reproduction,
displacing and subordinating its social function but not altering the material in any
significant way.
But what is happening in the third-degree revaluation of kitsch is more than the
avant-garde’s swan song. It is the collapse of the hierarchical distinction between the
avant-garde and kitsch - and, by extension, between high and popular art - a
collapsing of what modernity considered a polar opposition. According to that view,
sustained principally by Clement Greenberg, the avant-garde revolution transferred
the value of art from its sacred function (providing access to religious transcendence)
to its innovative capabilities (leading to a newly discovered future via experimentation
and disruption). Since kitsch is based on imitation and copy, countering novelty with
fakeness and artificiality, it was consequently understood as the opposite of the
avant-garde and considered reactionary and unartistic.23
The current crisis of representation, however, implies not only disillusionment
with progress, originality and formal experimentation, but also a reconsideration of
all they excluded. It follows that copy, simulation and quotation are raised to a new
level of interest, representing a different experience of art and creativity. In
284 Beyond the Fantastic
postmodern culture, artifice, rather than commenting on reality, has become the most
immediately accessible reality. Fakery and simulation were present in modernism as
aesthetic means; they had a function, as in the reproduction of consumer society’s
alienation in Andy Warhol’s work. In postmodernity there is no space for such
distances: fake and simulation are no longer distinguishable from quotidian life. The
boundaries between reality and representation, themselves artificial, have been
temporarily and perhaps permanently suspended.
Moreover, these boundaries are questioned not only by third-degree kitsch, but
also by the current recirculation of all kitsch. Anticipating this postmodern taste,
Walter Benjamin wrote in a brief essay that kitsch is what remains after the world of
things becomes extinct. Comparing it to a layer of dust that covers things and allows
for a nostalgic recreation o f reality, Benjamin believes kitsch - the banal - to be more
accurate than immediate perception (thus favouring intertextuality over indexicality).
For him immediacy is just a notion of reality, and only the distance left by the loss of
this immediacy permits a true apprehension of things. He therefore trusts dreams,
rhythm, poetry and distraction. Because of its repetitiveness - worn by habit and
decorated by cheap sensory statements - kitsch is most suitable for this nostalgic
resurrection, making for an easier and more pleasurable perception.24 In discussing
the Iconoclastes and their fury against the power of religious images, Baudrillard
ascribes to simulacra a similar nostalgic function. Yet in his characteristic
neutralization of signs, Baudrillard fails to assign them any discursive power.25
Such empowerment is precisely the issue at stake in third-degree kitsch.
Besides imploding the boundaries o f art and reality, the third-degree type carries
out an active transformation of kitsch. Taking religious imagery both for its kitsch
value and its signifying and iconic strength, it absorbs the icon in full and recycles it
into new meanings. These meanings are related to personal spiritual experiences,
recalling believers’ relationships to first-degree imagery, except that the first-degree
images are part of a given cultural heritage and as such they are readily available and
their usage is automatic. Third-degree kitsch, on the other hand, appropriates this
tradition from ‘outside’ , searching for an imagery that will be adequate to its
expressive needs. Its cannibalization of imagery, however, stands in sharp contrast to
previous appropriations. In the early avant-garde, for instance in Picasso’s use of
African masks, the break with Western imagery had a symbolic function. Similarly, in
Surrealism and the release of the unconscious, exploring difference meant disrupting
a cultural heritage perceived as limited and oppressive. Venerated for its ability to
offer an experience in otherness, difference stood as the necessary counterpart of
Western culture. Its function was to illuminate. Yet this assigned purposefulness
285 Holy Kitschen
tamed the perception of those cultures, ultimately erasing difference from the
Western imaginary landscape.
In the work of the artists mentioned earlier, Catholic religious imagery provides
access to a variety o f intense emotions that seem otherwise culturally unattainable.
In Salvo’s photography the pleasure seems to come from the intimacy of the home
altars, where family history is revered in a colourful clutter of figures and personal
objects. This affectionate and ingenuous assortment stands in contrast to the
photographic gaze through which it is perceived. For their viewers the beauty of
altares lies in their direct connection to reality, a connection that succeeds in stirring
the capacity for amazement. A similar pleasure is found in Flack’s Virgins, whose
melodramatic intensity becomes almost sublime, following the tradition of Catholic
hagiography. Meanwhile, Mesa-Bains and other Chicano and Nuyorrican artists are
moving towards a radical transformation of tradition by imposing their will on the
material they work with, as in Mesa-Bains’s use of altares to sanctify contemporary
femininity.
This colonization of religious imagery, in which it is occupied by alien feelings and
intentions, can be said to work in both directions. After all, the exotic, colonized
imagery has now become part and parcel of the appropriator’s imagination - it is part
of the cannibal’s system. Instead of appropriation annihilating what it absorbs, the
absorbed invades the appropriating system and begins to constitute and transform it.
The unsettling qualities of such crosscultural integration are underscored by kitsch’s
syncretic tradition of mixture and pastiche. Since kitsch can readily exist in a state of
upheaval and transformation, there is no eventual settlement o f the absorbed.
Previously this reverse colonization has been minimized by adverse historical
conditions. Yet the vast Latin American immigration to cosmopolitan urban centres in
the past few decades is forcing a redefinition of traditional cultural boundaries, one
that both shapes and is shaped by the circulation of images. If at one time exotic
images were domesticated, they now seem to have lost their tameness to a newly
found space: the one left by the exit of traditional referentiality. It isn’t surprising,
then, that third-degree kitsch in the USA is coming mainly from the East and West
Coasts, since it is in these places that a new culture, deeply affected by Latinos, is
being formed.
Religious imagery in third-degree kitsch surpasses the distance implied in
second-degree kitsch. Instead of consuming arbitrarily, third-degree kitsch constitutes
a new sensibility whose main characteristic is the displacement of exchange by use.
The consumption of images has been qualitatively altered: images are not chosen at
random; they must convey a particular feeling, they must simulate emotion.
286 Beyond the Fantastic
Third-degree kitsch is the result of that search. Whether its potential destabilization
will have a concrete social result before it is annihilated by a systematic assimilation
that hurries to institutionalize it - making it into second-degree kitsch, for example -
is debatable. Still, it is not a question of this assimilation seeping down into the
depths of culture and carrying out some radical change there. After all, American
culture is basically one of images, so that changes effected at the level of imagery
should not be underestimated. Since commodification is one of the main modes of
integration in the USA, it can certainly be used as a vehicle of symbolic intervention.
Third-degree kitsch may therefore be considered a meeting point between different
cultures. It is where the iconography of a culture, instead of ceasing to exist, is
transformed by absorbing new elements. Rather than speaking of active or passive
cultures, one can now speak of mutual appropriation. Even if an iconography is
stolen, it remains active, and the artists’ work discussed here illustrates how this
iconography can occupy the appropriator’s imagination by providing a simulation of
experiences the native culture has become unable to produce.
It can be said that each degree of religious imagery satisfies the desire for
intensity in a different way: in the first degree through an osmotic process resulting
from the collection and possession of objects still infused with use-value; in the second
degree by the consumption of commodified nostalgia; and in the third degree by
cannibalizing both the first and second degrees then recycling them into a hybrid
product that allows for a simulation of the lost experience. Even though they are
produced at different moments, these three degrees inhabit the same contemporary
space. Their synchronicity accentuates the erasure of cultural boundaries already
present in third-degree kitsch, throwing together and mixing different types of
production and perception. This reflects the situation of the urban cosmopolis, where
myriad cultures live side by side, producing the postmodern pastiche. Such an
anarchic condition destabilizes traditional hegemony, forcing it to negotiate with
those cultural discourses it could once oppress. The ability of cultural imagery to
travel and adapt itself to new requirements and desires can no longer be mourned as
a loss of cultural specificity in the name of exhausted notions of personal or collective
identities. Instead, it must be welcomed as a sign of opening to and enjoyment of all
that traditional culture worked so hard at leaving out.
287 Holy Kitschen
NOTES
1 For a description o f contemporary hyper-reality see Umberto Eco, Travels in Hyperreality: Essays,
translated by William Weaver (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Janovich, 1986); and Jean Baudrillard,
Simulations, translated by Paul Foss, Paul Patton and John Johnston (New York: Semiotextle], 1983).
2 I should like to thank the following people for allowing me to photograph repeatedly in their stores:
Sam and Silvia at Sasson Bazaar, 108 W. Fourteenth Street; Maurice and David at Esco Discount Store,
138 W. Fourteenth Street; and Jamal at Sharon Bazaar, 112 W. Fourteenth Street. Fourteenth Street’s
internationality can be fully appreciated in these people’s polyglotism: most of them speak four or five
languages, including English, Spanish, Hebrew, Arabic and French.
3 Little Rickie is located at 49 V<¿ First Avenue (at the corner o f Third Street). Thanks to Philip Retzky for
letting me photograph in the store. The prices quoted are from 1987, when this essay was written.
4 Available in 1987 at Hero, 143 Eighth Avenue, and Amalgamated, 19 Christopher Street.
5 Much has been written about the video Pope. For his 1984 visit to Puerto Rico, see Edgardo Rodríguez
Julia, ‘Llegó el Obispo de Roma’, in Una noche con las Chacón (n.p.: Editorial Antillana, 1986), pp. 7-52.
For his 1986 visit to France, see the wonderfully illustrated ‘Pape Show’ issue o f the French daily
Liberation, 4 and 5 October, 1986, pp. 1-7.
6 Amalia Mesa-Bains, ‘Grotto o f the Virgins', Intar Latin American Gallery, New York City, 1987; Dana Salvo,
‘Mary’ (group show), Althea Viafora Gallery, New York City, 1987; Audrey Flack, ‘Saints and Other Angels:
The Religious Paintings o f Audrey Flack’, Cooper Union, New York City, 1986.
7 Fredric Jameson, ‘Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism’, in New Left Review 146
(July-August 1984), pp. 53-92.
8 ‘In a vase o f Kitsch flowers there is a formal defect, but in a Kitsch Sacred Heart the defect is theological,’
says Karl Pawek in Tl Kitsch Cristiano’, in Gillo Dorfles, II Kitsch (Milan: Gabriele Mazzotta Editore,
1969), pp. 143-50. For another view o f religious kitsch, see Richard Egenter, The Desecration o f Christ
(Chicago: Franciscan Herald Press, 1967). For kitsch in general see Hermann Broch, ‘Kitsch e arte di
tendenza’ and ‘Note sul problema del Kitsch’, translated by Saverio Vertone, in Dorfles, II Kitsch, op. cit.,
pp. 49-76, and ‘Art and its Non-Style at the End o f the Nineteenth Century’ and ‘The Tower of Babel’,
in Hugo von Hoffmannsthal and His Time: The European Imagination 1860-1920, translated and edited by
Michael P Steinberg (Chicago: University o f Chicago Press, 1984), pp. 3-81 and pp. 43-83. Gillo Dorfles’s
book is a compilation o f essays on kitsch, several o f which have been mentioned throughout this essay.
See also Matei Calinescu, ‘Kitsch’ , in Five Faces o f Modernity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1987),
pp. 223-62; Haroldo de Campos, ‘Vanguarda e Kitsch’ , in A arte no horizonte do provavel (Sáo Paulo:
Editorial Perspectiva, 1969), pp. 193-201; Umberto Eco, ‘Estilística del Kitsch’ and ‘Kitsch y cultura de
masas’, in Apocalípticos e integrados ante la cultura de masas (Barcelona: Lumen, 1968), pp. 81-92;
Clement Greenberg, ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’, in Art and Culture (Boston: Beacon Press, 1961), pp. 3-21;
Abraham Moles, Le Kitsch, L ’Art de Bonheur (Paris: Maison Marne, 1971). Aimée Rankin’s ‘The
Parameters o f Precious’, Art in America (September 1985), pp. 110-17, was brought to my attention after
the completion o f this essay; some o f her arguments about the recycling o f kitsch coincide with my
understanding o f it as pertaining to a vicarious sensibility.
9 Hermann Broch, Hugo von Hoffmannsthal and His Time, op. cit., p. 170.
10 The concept of cultural cannibalism was advanced in a different context by Oswald de Andrade, Do Pau-Brazil
a Antropofagia e as Utopias, Obras Completas, vol. 6 (Rio de Janeiro: Civilizaçao Brasileira-Mec, 1970).
288 Beyond the Fantastic
11 For some art theoreticians, this is a ‘primitive’ confusion between referent and representation.
See Alecsa Celebonovic, ‘Nota sul Kitsch tradizionale’, in Dorfles, II Kitsch, op. cit., pp. 280-89.
12 Decio Pignatari, ‘Kitsch e repertorio’, in Informagao, Linguagem, Comunicaqao (Sao Paulo: Perspectiva,
1968), pp. 113-7.
13 Gillo Dorfles, II Kitsch, and Clement Greenberg, ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’, op. cit.
14. Hermann Broch spoke o f the ‘kitsch-man’ in Gillo Dorfles, II Kitsch, op. cit., p. 49.
15. This term was first used by Abraham Moles, Le Kitsch, pp. 161-86.
16 For camp sensibility see Susan Sontag, ‘Notes on Camp’, in Against Interpretation and Other Essays
(New York: Octagon, 1982), pp. 275-92.
17 See Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work o f Art in the Age o f Mechanical Reproduction’, in Illuminations,
translated by Harry Zohn (London: Jonathan Cape, 1970), pp. 219-53.
18 ‘Ceremony o f Memory’, Museum o f Contemporary Hispanic Art (MOCHA), New York City, 1989. Ironically
this is happening at a time when Hispanics are said to be turning away from Catholicism. See ‘Switch by
Hispanic Catholics Changes Face o f US Religion’ , New York Times, 14 May 1989.
19 For a more extensive account o f Mesa-Bains’s work and o f altares in general, see Tomas Ybarra-Frausto’s
essay ‘Sanctums o f the Spirit - The Altares o f Amalia Mesa-Bains’ , published in the catalogue for this show.
20 In his artist’s statement for the ‘Pastorale de Navidad’ show (Nielsen Gallery, Boston, 1987) Salvo
describes this exchange: ‘The Polaroid process quickly dispelled any apprehension or superstition that
arose, and the instant image generated an enormous amount of enthusiasm. Soon a crowd of villagers
would be about the camera and house. They were moved that their creations were being photographed,
and they treasured the Polaroids, displaying the image as part of the altarpiece . . . Once everyone was
accustomed to the photograph they would oftentimes arrange the interiors better to fit the frame.
Or this would encourage others to add small treasures to an altar as it would be seen minutes later in a
Polaroid image.’
21 Personal interview with Lowery S Sims, published in the catalogue for Flack’s Cooper Union show.
22 Gerardo Mosquera, ‘Bad Taste in Good Form’, Social Text 15 (Fall 1986), pp. 54-64. For another view on
Cuban artistic kitsch, see Lucy R Lippard, ‘Made in the USA: Art from Cuba’, Art in America
(April 1986), pp. 27-35. For kitsch in the USA, see J Hoberman, ‘What’s Stranger Than Paradise?’
in ‘Americanarama’, Village Voice Film Special, 30 June, 1987, pp. 3-8.
23 This is Greenberg’s main proposal. See also Miriam Gusevich, ‘Purity and Transgression. Reflections on
the Architectural Avantgarde’s Rejection o f Kitsch’, Working Paper no. 4, published by the Center for
Twentieth Century Studies o f the University o f Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Autumn 1986.
24 Walter Benjamin, ‘Traumkitsch’, in Angelus Novus, Ausgewahlte Schriften, vol. 2 (Frankfurt am Main:
Suhrkamp, 1966), pp. 158-60.
armed with new international tools and models with which to analyse national issues.
This ‘privatization’ , or even apparent foreignness, of cultural initiatives -
especially evident in artistic patronage - resulted from the strategies of multinational
capital that had been developing in this way since the 1960s.
This move of national cultural activity away from the state - a process that we
could say is universal - parallels the strengthening of the market as the legitimizing
agent of particular ethical and aesthetic tendencies. While it is true that the culture
industry has democratized and connected diverse symbolic languages (which, socially
speaking, had been relatively inert), it has not managed to discourage cultural
operations that value one view in relation to another, creating value systems in line
with rigorous mechanisms of social differentiation.
Between the development of an inventory in the 1960s - based on a humanist
ethic - and the consolidation of the current market system that has created its own
executive and technocratic intelligentsia, we have witnessed the emergence of a type
of intellectual work that is increasingly interdisciplinary and which researches
according to a collective self-awareness. This fact has parallels in some visible aspects
of local artistic practice - both ‘high’ and popular - such as the persistence of a
marked concern with issues of identity and the burning need since the 1980s to adopt
a cultural and aesthetic attitude of inclusion.
If Uruguay’s programme of civilization in the early part of the century emphasized
the supposedly ‘educational’ role of art, and the redeeming projects of the 1960s
invested it with the power to free humanistic potential in line with the demands of
the century, nowadays artistic production is modestly supposed to create (along with
other cultural practices) reduced circuits of intersubjectivity in a fragmented society
attempting to reconstruct itself. Thus, much art is concerned with this existential
reformulation of the everyday as a frame of identity. It is no longer a case of the
Present with a capital ‘P’ , charged with the optimism of modernity or promised
liberation, but a straightforward present, resistant to diachronic interpretations of
individual and collective experience.
Since the 1970s the massive phenomenon of political and economic exile has
emphasized the issues of collective consciousness and what it means to be Uruguayan,
independently of the physical or geographical conditions of its people. Subsequent
Uruguayan research on this subject, and the testimonies given at a symposium in the
University of Maryland in 1987, show the need to create a new national inventory
based on the displacement and discontinuity of our social timescale during and after
the dictatorship.3
The increasing possibilities of individual participation in the cultural activities of
292 Beyond the Fantastic
The dream of patrician descent associated with Terra’s regime attempted to Fig. 44
Juan Manuel Blanes
reformulate Uruguay’s historical imagination, which had been seriously disrupted
(1830-1901)
by the 1929 economic crash.8 It was based on an enlightened traditionalism that Altar of the Nation
tried to revitalize a nineteenth-century pater familias, through its Hispanic and (Altar de la Patria),
hegemonic. Thus the Comisión Nacional de Bellas Artes was set up in 1936 and Llnarl
although its function was to legitimize arts o f all types, it concentrated its efforts on
Fig. 45
the visual arts as they were the most socially effective at the time. It is no coincidence Miltary Government
that during this period the sculptor José Luis Zorrilla de San Martín had a virtual (1973-1991)
Altar o f the Nation
monopoly on urban statuary representing distinctive national characteristics. His
(Altar de la Patria),
emblematic baroque art and the emphatic and triumphal tone of his allegories could
1976
perhaps be seen as a modernist overreaction to the stuffy ‘grand finale’ of Blanes’s Rainforest concrete
Disembarkation o f the Thirty-Three.9 Photograph by
Oscar M Bonilla
On the margins of an official rhetoric still ruled by Juan Zorrilla de San Martin’s
epic discourse, a movement arose towards what we could call regionalism, concerned
with identity and determined to find Uruguay’s place within the historical imagery of
Latin America. This spawned an interest in other strategies for heritage appropriation,
for example, the ‘discovery’ of our countryside. Landscape was almost a synonym for
painting for Uruguayan artists until the 1920s, as though they were attempting a
rebirth of the national landscape and a confirmation of the conciliation between the
city and the countryside - the birthplace of revolutionary leaders and the source of
our nineteenth-century national schizophrenia.
In the 1930s this cultural and environmental heritage was reclaimed and charged
with the issues of social marginalization symptomatic of contemporary political and
social conflicts. All this was filtered through the peculiar Americanist visual code of
Mexican muralism, creating a criollo version of social realism. I should add here that
this interest in regionalism also stimulated a new fashion for collecting Indo-American
artifacts, a phenomenon concentrated among the artists and intellectuals associated
with the Taller Torres-García.10
Despite the heterogeneity of images in this regionalist inventory, it is nonetheless
clear that it was a distinct alternative to that proposed by the enlightened traditionalism
of official art. One only has to compare the aesthetically diverse work of muralists, be
they social realists or of the Taller Torres-García, with the naturalist and florid
painting that won all the prizes in the early Salons, fashionable academic impressionism
295 Crisis of an Inventory
or Blanes at his peak, all aesthetic paradigms of the Comisión Nacional de Bellas Artes.
After the official traditionalist and heritage-based backlash of the 1930s and
1940s, there was another attempt to revitalize the mythology of national origins in
terms of a momentous transcendental restoration during the military regime of the
1970s. This was especially evident in the year of the so-called One Hundred and Fifty
Years of ‘Eastern-ness’ .11 This was an ideological campaign, which used television
(radio had been the medium of the 1930s) to try to impose a paternalist concept on
individuals and families.
The resources used to reformulate a national inventory were not primarily those
used during the 1930s, which consisted of large, official emblematic montages.
Perhaps the most notorious exception was the Plaza de la Bandera (Square of the
National Flag), a grotesque and decontextualized image placed in an undefined urban
space; it does not bear comparison with the Altar to the Nation painted by Blanes in
the 1880s in which a simple female figure with a young criollo face leans on a
pedestal covered with the national flag. These montages were simple, almost innocent
allegorical images that incorporated anthropomorphic and anthropological symbolism
in as much as there was an attempt at national ethnic/cultural characterization in the
girl’s features. In contrast, the military regime manipulated facts, words and
television to introduce their tautological emblems: an empty repetition of ‘patriotic’
and power symbols that never managed to establish a new collective visual tropos.
296 Beyond the Fantastic
Nonetheless, there is a need to examine the imagery put out by television through
news broadcasts and other official programmes at the time to establish to what extent
this medium contributed to a negative definition of national identity, i.e. what we
should not be, what we should not have, and what we should not do.
NOTES
1 Francisco C Weffort, ‘La América equivocada’, in ‘Problemas de América Latina’, Cuadernos de Actualidad
Internacional, 6/7 (Montevideo: Trilce, 1992), p. 8.
2 Batllismo: political philosophy o f José Batlle y Ordóñez ,who, as President of Uruguay in the early decades
o f the twentieth century masterminded the creation of one of the first welfare states in the world as well
as a fully democratic system o f government [translator’s note].
3 Saúl Sosnowski (ed.), Represión, Exilio y Democracia: la Cultura Uruguaya, University of Maryland
(Montevideo: Banda Oriental, 1987).
4 I use the term ‘heritage’ in the sense o f ‘cultural heritage’, in its historical, artistic and environmental
meanings; see Antonio Augusto Arantes, ‘La preservación del patrimonio, como práctica social’, in
Antropología y Políticas Culturales (Buenos Aires: Rita Ceballos, 1989). The concept o f ‘social control’ of
heritage is used loosely in the way o f Guillermo Bonfil’s ‘cultural control’, which he applies to the control
o f heritage that each group exclusively claims as its own; see ‘La teoría del control cultural en el estudio de
proceso étnicos’, in Papeles de la Casa Chata, vol. 3 (Mexico City: Ciesas, 1987).
5 Juan Zorrilla de San Martín (1835-1931), Uruguayan Romantic poet [translator’s note].
7 Criollo: a Latin American o f Spanish descent. Usually used to refer to the descendants o f the early
colonists who in the postindependence era constituted the ruling class [translator’s note].
8 Gerardo Caetano, ‘Del Primer Batllismo al terrorismo: crisis simbólica y reconstrucción del imaginario
colectivo’, in Cuadernos del CLAEH, 49 (1989).
9 Reference to the Treinta y tres orientales, or Thirty-Three Easterners, who fought in the Uruguayan wars
o f independence [translator’s note].
10 Taller Torres-García: association o f Uruguayan artists created in 1943 by the artist Joaquín Torres-García.
Previously he had led the Asociación de Arte Constructivo (1934-43) [translator’s note].
12 Around 1980 the Grupo de Estudios Urbanos (Urban Studies Group) was created by the architect Mariano
Arana with students and graduates from the Faculty of Architecture. In 1980 they made a video called
Montevideo: una ciudad sin memoria (Montevideo: a city without memory).
14 On the general applications o f the term ‘social complicity’ applied to collective heritage, see Néstor García
Canclini, ‘Políticas culturales y crisis de desarollo’, in Políticas Culturales en América Latina (Mexico City:
Grijalbo, 1987).
The P ow er and the Illusion: Aura,
Lost and R estored in the ‘Peruvian
W eim ar R epublic’ (1980-1992)
Gustavo Buntinx
To my friends in Diaspora2
paradigms dominant in the so-called central countries. From the cosmopolitan loss of
the aura to its ‘provincial’ restorations.
The point is to pry into the dialectical tension between proximity and distance
that for Walter Benjamin articulates the auratic condition of art. That ‘unique
phenomenon of a distance, however close it may be’, thrown into a modern crisis by
the mechanical reproduction of the image.5 The problem, however, is not strictly one
of representation but of presence and experience. The aura does not originate in the
image but in the ritual that integrates it with a cult value. And in the spiritual
sensibility thus generated: the expectation that what one looks at looks back, returns
the gaze, according to another definition suggested by Benjamin himself as reported
by Brecht in his diaries.6
In this essay I will try to elaborate on this peculiar dialectic through the detailed
analysis of a very reduced group of works. Essentially just two images, which due to
their chronological placement and historical meaning virtually open and close the
past decade, marking with their differences the decisive change of age that occurred
during the brief period of electoral democracy inaugurated in 1980 and cancelled on
April 5 1992 by the military coup d ’état headed by the then Constitutional President
Alberto Fujimori.
It will not be long before we have an abundance of ‘totalizing’ explanations for the
frail developments and the easy demise o f that local version of the Weimar Republic,
its almost congenitally transitional character. ' What is of interest here, however, is
the personally lived experience of history. The subjective processes that resignify the
moment. Its mentalities, and within them, its emotive conditions. The sensitive
register of broader situations as it is offered by that significant sector of Lima’s
artistic scene that took the radical path during those burning years. To perceive it in
that vein, it is necessary to understand works of art both as symptom and as act, as a
symbolic operation on reality. A ductile reality that artists pretend to modify in the
very gesture of expressing it, interrupting with images of desire the established forms
of social circulation. A context (dis)articulated in the textual materiality itself and in
its new insertion strategies, in its desiderative and politically libidinal charge. The
power and the illusion.
A Modern Huaca
What in Peru we call radical plastic arts have various antecedents. There are, of
course, those that simply prolong the traditional forms of ‘political art’ as they have
been established in the West between the so-called World Wars. But at the same time
there gradually appear attempts to assume on local terms the structural transformation
302 Beyond the Fantastic
of artistic language begun by Pop, Op and Conceptual Art, with the corresponding
variants and consequences.
This last alternative was adopted by a number of artists linked to the least
orthodox sectors of the Peruvian New Left. All through the 1970s they developed a
peculiar style that came to be known as Pop achorado or Pop chicha. Two
untranslatable slang terms: the former (achorado) is used to describe the uncivil and
sometimes openly lumpen or ‘wild’ attitudes currently predominant among the
pauperized urban population and the new generation of mestizos (men or women of
mixed racial origin) who flippantly, almost frantically, appropriate all possible
symbolic means of social mobility. The latter (chicha), complements the first one and
refers to hybrid forms of cultural behaviour widely popular in those cities where
traditional ways of life clash and fuse with various cosmopolitan influences.
In both cases images of modernity are unabashedly appropriated and ‘debased’ to
an almost subversive point. For the artists interested in these processes the point is to
absorb popular experience in its own, distinct modernity, working with the serial
products of a mass culture permeated by satellite globalization, but also by internal
migration, the permanence of Andean culture, and the inescapable presence of misery
and social strife. Permeated as well by the conflicting traditions that each one of
those situations and categories implies. A violent syncretism that ends up being
adopted by the artists as a working model for the incorporation of cosmopolitan
discursive strategies applied to local referents and local needs. Strategies that in Peru
move from deconstruction to the reconstructive, from appropriation to the
(in)appropriate, recovering on their way mythological structures recomposed from the
heterogeneity of their dispersed fragments, integrating them into new universes of
meaning. Bricolages.
Those most successful in developing this proposal did not only give it artistic form,
subverting established plastic languages. In their very acts these innovators raised
the possibility of an artistic circuit different from that of galleries and museums.
New spaces conceived for the development of a culture that would integrate those
social groups that at the time seemed called to transform Peru: peasants, of course,
but only as the rearguard of a loose coalition of urban dwellers, workers, sectors of
the middle class, and - above all - the huge and growing mass of Indians and
mestizos migrating from the country to the city. In the potential alliance suggested by
that imprecise encounter, radical artists and militants projected a social base for what
was then called an alternative modernity for Peru, merging Andean traditions and
socialist revolution in a variety of displaced cosmopolitan idioms. A ‘popular
modernity’ , articulated in a language both ‘national’ and ‘cosmopolitan’,
303 The Power and the Illusion
Peru fetch out a living by sorting through other people’s rubbish. An activity in which
the concept of appropriation acquires its gravest meaning.13
In coherence with all this, shortly after exhibiting Arte al paso Huayco decided to
make a new work over those very same containers (plus 2,000 additional cans). This
time the group chose an even more poignant theme: the portrait of Sarita Colonia, a
popular saint in whose printed image Huayco perceived the mystical face of the new
syncretic culture millions of migrants are building in their long march towards
modernity. The contemporaneity of disparate times rashly crowded together in Lima.
A transitional image in the magico-religious consciousness of the new urban dweller.
A modern remnant and for that very reason the semblance of what is to come.
Condemned by the Catholic Church, Sarita’s cult grows uncontrollably among the
multitude of peasants who moved en masse to the capital during the past six or seven
decades. As is the case with Sarita herself, who arrived in Lima during the 1920s and
died in 1940, identifying her own personal history with the broader history of the
migration process and of those who protagonize it as a major cultural epic. The
millions who lead marginal yet emergent existences, making of the so-called informal
economy — from prostitution to street-vending and clandestine manufacturing— the
principal support of city life. The principal support as well of a new and vigorous
mestizo identity for Lima, whose visual characteristics seem to be partially condensed
by Sarita’s popular iconography, increasingly daring and kitsch at the same time.
There is no space here to ponder deeper over the cultural density of this religious
phenomenon. Suffice it to remark its syncretic qualities and its probable relation with
the permanence of modified Andean traditions in the very midst of Peru’s most
modern city.14
Huayco’s choice was in itself significant, but it would acquire its full complexity
when the group decided not to exhibit the resulting work in an art gallery, where it
could be easily co-opted (as indeed happened with the Arte al paso experience). Sarita
Colonia was never actually exhibited, but rather simply placed in a strategic point
just outside Lima: a desolate hillside facing the city’s southern entryway, between the
ocean and the Panamerican Highway, one of the migrant’s preferred routes. Just a
few miles away stands Pachacamac, perhaps the most important and alive of our
huacas (prehispanic shrines): even to this day, natives descend from the highlands to
perform syncretic rites among its still-sacred ruins. Not just the remains of a defeated
past, but the spiritually charged evidences of an evolving culture that awaits its
second chance.
Such a context made particularly relevant Huayco’s crucial decision not to rework
the original image, rendering instead an almost exact version of the printed popular
305 The Power and the Illusion
model. This critical option, and the location already described, permitted the work to
acquire a fundamental double nature. On the one hand it was perceived as avant-
garde art by a well-educated public that learnt of this piece’s existence and the
peculiarities of its physical support - including the salchipapas’s covered presence -
through leftist publications or specialized texts such as this essay and its
predecessors.15 But on the other hand it was assumed as a religious icon by the
migrants who saw the actual image directly from the highway on which they travelled
to the great criollo city they would soon occupy and transform in their own mestizo
image. Some of them even participated in special pilgrimages to Sarita’s site, leaving
various offerings of popular devotion - and thus reclaiming for themselves an image
that was theirs to begin with. Almost the modern version of the already mentioned
Pachacamac cult among traditional peasants. A ritual reappropriation that turns Pop
Art back into popular culture.
There is in this interchange, in this communication so tacitly established, a
political and cultural charge unprecedented for the Peruvian artistic experience.
Through its accomplished ambivalence, Sarita Colonia manages to articulate -
figuratively at least - petit-bourgeois radicalism with the emergent popular
experience. Figuratively and in a displaced manner: diverse social groups converged
around this peculiar image, but without achieving more organic ties than a mutual
game of approximations. An expression of desire.
The result, nevertheless, is a brilliant symbolization. Even in the strictest,
etymological, sense of that much abused word (sumballein: to join, to bring together,
to reunite).16 A symbolization, almost a mythification - literally a mystification - of
that epoch’s socialist horizon: to link Andean migrants and radicalized sectors of the
middle class in a shared bid for revolutionary power. A utopian horizon in which
religious emotions and ideological convictions converge. Revolutionary change seen as
the result of the encounter of the spiritual and the political. The politics of the
miraculous: Huayco’s Sarita can certainly be seen as political art, but also, inevitably,
as a monumental ex-voto.
A votive painting, perhaps a modern huaca. The aura recuperated by this work is
both ancient and poignantly contemporary, born out of the criss-crossing of dislocated
and superimposed times, of categories and materials originally unconnected. Huayco
feeds on a wide variety of sources, showing a voracious but selective appetite.
Paradoxical even: its strategy is one o f ambivalent appropriation. Local popular
images are appropriated through sophisticated and cosmopolitan procedures, all the
better to revalorize the former and subvert the latter.
The grid of cans could be interpreted as a reference to the chromatic effect of
306 Beyond the Fantastic
the Benday dot system used in comic books. The influence of international Pop art is Fig. 46
Huayco EPS
quite evident here, especially through the work of Lichtenstein. This technique had
Fast-food Art
already been taken into account by other Peruvian artists, such as Jesús Ruiz (Arte at paso), 1980
Durand, who during the early 1970s designed a series of dazzling propaganda posters 10.000 empty cans of
for the military government’s Agrarian Reform, perhaps under the influence of evaporated milk
painted over with
similar artistic experiences developed under the Cuban Revolution.1' But it is in
industrial paint
Arte al paso and Sarita Colonia that Lichtenstein’s Benday dots are no longer
taken as just a subtle pictorial irony but as a powerfully pointed cultural and Fig. 47
Huayco EPS
political argument.
Sarita Colonia, 1980
Those dots turned into empty cans also suggest a sharp parody of Andy Warhol
12.000 empty cans
and his early Peruvian followers. Emilio Hernández, for instance, who during the of evaporated milk
mid 1960s briefly made some portraits of rock stars and publicity girls, uncritically painted over with
industrial paint
following Andy’s cosmopolitan style and subjects. Several crucial developments in
Peruvian art could be summed up by this eloquent transition from the superficial
semblance of Twiggy in Hernández’s work to the dense presence of Sarita in Huayco’s.
A transition that goes beyond the iconography and engages the very concept and
structure of the work of art. The distance between one piece and the other is also the
distance between imitation and appropriation. Unlike Hernández (or that particular
moment in Hernández’s work, as he would later offer far more interesting
alternatives), Huayco metabolizes its sources, transforming them into an energy that
is the group’s own. Warhol turns images - vedettes or soup cans, it does not really
matter what - into specialized objects, sophisticated commodities for an international
elite.18 Huayco, instead, manages to establish an effective communication with
popular sectors by presenting the object itself as a rabidly specific image of poverty
and faith.
A religious faith becoming a political one. This latter would soon prove to be quite
frail, however. Very early in the last decade a profound ideological crisis began to
undermine the unifying vision that lent such powerful credence and conviction to the
Peruvian New Left. Artistic developments are quite transparent in this respect.
Huayco itself would dissolve as its social support gradually disappeared. For a long
while almost all the individual works turned out by its different members offered
melancholy images of failed illusions and lost utopias. A process all too often
culminating in the abandonment of the country.19
But none o f these works is quite as eloquent as the decay now exhibited by
Huayco’s exceptional version of Sarita, apparently forgotten and turned into a
shadow of its former self. It could well serve as a textbook illustration of the intimate
links between social support and physical support. And yet, the aura remains.
307 The Power and the Illusion
308 Beyond the Fantastic
309 The Power and the Illusion
The symbolic energy that even today moves migrants and educated petit-bourgeois
(separately, it is true) to do the hard climb up those sandy hills, in order to reach
i e/ maoismo”,
Sarita’s rusted remains, in search of inspiration for these troubled and confusing
Sfcscreen on paper times.
^ o to g rap h courtesy Another way in which this premature ruin can also be seen as a modern huaca,
3f Gustavo Buntlnx
vaguely related to so many others, prehispanic ones, slowly eroding into the desertical
coastal landscape, confusing their architectural forms with those of nature. Thus time
charges Huayco’s Sarita Colonia with a density that could well be called allegorical.
Its historicity present but caducous. Its sacrality defeated but not extinct. Its latencies?20
Maorilyn
For a while political radicalism seemed to have passed into the hands o f the different
armed subversive groups, including the fundamentalist-maoist party known as
Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path). An organization clearly interested in generating
charismatic images and liturgical behaviour in order to establish a certain emotional
communication with Peru’s illiterate and semi-literate masses. The struggle for
symbolic power is thus a privileged aspect of its practice, so bloody and yet so
carefully scénographie at the same time. Little by little this ritual dimension, though
no less violent for it, suffused the textuality of the times, redefining public identities
and intimate anxieties.
Aware of these circumstances, a group of young graphic artists experimented
during the late 1980s with the appropriation of the visual rhetorics that saturate the
Peruvian political scene, assimilating at the same time the spectacularization of
horror by the mass media. This double coding helps explain the connotations -
political and macabre at the same time - of the name these artists chose to preserve
their semi-anonymity: NN, as in the crosses and tombstones o f the countless victims
of violence who remain unidentified. The works that carry this signature, however,
are often exceptionally fresh, as can be seen in a culminating piece made at the end
of 1989.
A silkscreen with the almost mystical effigy of Mao Tse Tung, not recreated but
reconstructed through the serial repetition of a single loaded newspaper image. The
political liturgy carried out by a group of imprisoned Senderista women who, with
their fists raised and in military formation, chant slogans such as those that appear
all over their prison walls: ‘Partido Comunista del Perú’ (‘Communist Party of Peru’ )
and ‘Viva el maoismo’ (‘Long live Maoism’ ). Those are precisely the phrases that,
ghostly and magnified, reverberate from the thick web of greys that compose the
leader’s face.
310 Beyond the Fantastic
possibility of a critical autonomy, although no less committed to the search for a social
subject of change.26
A first reading of the work could well give the impression that it was an effort to
deconstruct in a single stroke both artistic conventions and political rhetorics. But the
specific ways in which the final image is worked out leaves open a number of
additional suggestions. Starting with the fact that the image chosen is one of female
prisoners in regimented rebellion. Women deprived of their liberty: a doubly
repressed condition that is nonetheless put into question by the extreme, almost
religious, voluntarism that is characteristic of Sendero Luminoso, particularly among
its female militants.27 Furthermore, the main figure reproduces on a larger format the
poster of Mao that presides over the ceremony in the original photograph - as a result
of which he seems to be kissing his own portrait. A curious game of Chinese boxes
(in the many senses of the term) that goes far beyond the multiplication of a
propaganda effect. At the same time, the reiteration of the image and the graphic way
in which its technical processes are made explicit do not aim to desacralize it - far
less to trivialize it - but rather attempt a complex reflection on its role in the cult of
personality and in the struggle for symbolic power. Without resolving to do so
deliberately, NN thus develops Benjamin’s inquiries on the tense relationship that
links an artistic aura in crisis with a renewed political charisma, easily confused with
the religious aura.28
The German thinker pointed out how mechanical reproduction deprives the
artistic work of its aura by radically separating it from the ritual on which it is
founded, and which is replaced by politics turned into spectacle. Part of a larger
process out of which a new sort of mystification ensues, where the traditional figures
of the politician and the actor are displaced - and homologized - by their mass-media
versions: the dictator and the movie star. Both equated by the dissolution of
categories under the omnivorous empire of mass media. The postmodern collapse of
all specificities. This is partly what Warhol intuited in his sequence of contemporary
icons, beginning with his first renderings of Marilyn (1962) and culminating with the
infinite semblance of Mao (1972).
NN would seem to condense this entire process in a single work, emphasizing on
the Chairman’s face those irreverent marks that relate his image to that of the North
American diva. The artists themselves point out the already madeup condition of the
communist leader’s official photograph as one of their sources of inspiration/reflection.
They could just as well refer to the ease with which Warhol reduces Marilyn’s face -
and sexuality - to its most cosmetic features, to the point of multiplying over a canvas
its sole lipsticked smile.29
313 The Power and the Illusion
Perhaps this silkscreen should be titled Maorilyn. In any case, the real name is
not very far from it: ‘Viva el maoismo’ (‘Long Live Maoism’), with quotation marks
included to signal its rhetorical/parodical intentions. A detail that makes evident its
authors’ interest in the political consequences of the loss of the artistic aura, also
revealed by the commercial bar code - commodity fetishism - accompanying their
signature: the chosen numbers coincide with those that identify the law that defines
and penalizes the so-called ‘apology of terrorism’ . A legal norm that some deluded
public official could arbitrarily invoke to repress the very work that exhibits it.30
It is quite suggestive that the constructive element of a work such as this should
be the photograph of a ritual where politics and religion are fused: NN thus confronts
the aestheticization of politics with the politicization of art. And by doing so the group
unknowingly fulfils the final longing in Benjamin’s essay about the work of art in the
age of its mechanical reproducibility: to interrupt the mythical fascination and its
absolute theatricalization; to break into its scene with a discordant gesture that
intends to be also an act of consciousness; to redirect in a reflective and critical way
the terms by which art and politics inevitably interact.
But it should also be noted that the gridlike visual pattern o f that repeated image
vaguely evokes the pattern obtained by the mosaic of cans that serves as the physical
support for the sacred image laid next to the Panamerican Highway . . . with a
passing reference to Warhol’s Campbell’s soup cans. An effect that could well be
understood as a new appropriation, as another inverted quotation: from the
denunciation of a material lack to the signalling of an overbrimming ideology. Perhaps
NN would posit its transvestite version o f Mao as the late 1980s equivalent of what
Huayco’s Sarita Colonia was for the beginning of that decade. Almost the deviated
development o f a political and cultural icon abandoned by those who originally
sustained it.
This time it is a political faith that becomes a religious one, but with an added
element of irony that speaks of the difficulties in establishing a new mythifying
principle for Peruvian radical culture. Nothing expresses this more eloquently than
the peculiar exhibition policy chosen for this print. ‘Long Live Maoism’ was produced
in the silkscreen workshop at the Third Havana Biennial, where NN was also invited
to show its previous work. This piece was subsequently exhibited on the international
circuit as part of a portfolio that included the different items produced by various
artists involved in the same workshop. In Peru, however, all artistic contexts for this
print were scrupulously avoided, reserving it for a more provocative, less
contemplative, function: ‘Viva el maoismo’ served as a starting point to spur
discussions in various meetings with intellectuals of differing ideological positions,
314 Beyond the Fantastic
attempting to derive from the irritating ambivalence of the image some renewed
reflections on the critical national situation.
‘ To put the contradictions in evidence’, was the first phrase with which NN used to
define the meaning of its work. To empower in terms of critical consciousness the
conflicts and anxieties of certain educated petit-bourgeoisie, painfully confronted by a
conflagration as terrible as it is confusing. A virtual civil war characterized by a
shared squandering of cruelty by all involved. The difficulty of making choices. A
difficulty aggravated by the progressive abandonment of political struggle by the
militants of other alternatives for the transformation of the country. Alternatives
replaced by projects of personal accomplishment or ever more insubstantial electoral
calculations. Over this vacuum the preaching and the practice of Sendero Luminoso
advanced almost unresisted. But a certain dispersed radicality remained adrift and
kept growing all through the decade among those youngsters whose age and other
factors spared them the psychological consequences of the New Left’s former
historical failure.
The difficulty o f making choices. As in so many other works conceived during this
period, ‘Viva el maoismo’ expresses not a particular political commitment but a
consideration o f the evidence. And its mise en scène (hence the quotation marks). An
artistic staging of the ambivalences and uncertainties that affected a new urban
generation formed under - although not always assimilated by - the anarchic sign of
punk rebelliousness. An ‘underground movement’ that, starting in Lima during the
mid 1980s, rose against the whole of the established cultural order, in a rupture that
can now be perceived as decisive. What was agonizing in that ‘Peruvian Weimar
Republic’ was the very project of modernity - including its left-wing variants. A moral
and political bankruptcy only comparable to the economic crisis that brought forth a
generalization of misery and the rapid proletarization of the middle classes, throwing
many of their offspring into an aggressive pessimism.31 Nauseated by the corruption,
the racism and the absence of alternatives (‘no future’) in what they paradigmatically
called a ‘sociedad de mierda’ (‘shit society’), Peruvian punks articulated musical
expressions, plastic arts, scenography and scandal with an unprecedented stridency.12
Some of them experimented with the reckless integration of coarsely local signifieds
with revulsive cosmopolitan signifiers (and vice versa). Sendero Luminoso/Sex Pistols:
polar opposites that became complementary referents for a juvenile subculture that
deliberately sought antagonism, generating perplexity and rage both in the
Establishment and in the Maoist orthodoxy.33 Cultural transgression overlaps political
transgression - like the lipstick traces on the pamphlet - subverting subversion itself.
To put the contradictions in evidence. Ultimately these would prove to be too
315 The Power and the Illusion
grave, even for NN. The group broke apart in 1990, and each one of its members took
different personal and professional paths that it would be too arduous to follow here.
But during the intensity of that end of the decade/end of the epoch, everything still
seemed possible. And worthy of contemplation. The illusion of a new radical culture,
built on the project of not repressing nor reconciling differences, but making them
productive. Painting the lips of the deified ‘ Great Helmsman’ was a way of attacking
his aura - allegorizing his symbolism - by making his presence more accessible and
immediate: a rock, punk, anarchist, transvestite Mao . . . But this approximation
was also an appropriation, an attempt to recover for an/other cultural project - the
artists’ own - the messianic furies released by the agony of an exhausted social
order. Maorilyn.
us, ‘any cultural text, to function ideologically, must first arouse utopian desires,
which only then can be defused, controlled, “ managed” ’ .30 In their diverse ways,
Huayco and NN place themselves within this perspective. For them montage does not
function as the obsessive reiteration of a traumatic rupture, but rather as the
structural metaphor of a country in permanent destruction and reconstruction.
In their diverse ways. Benjamin and others have pointed out that what is
important in the procedure of montage is the specific manner by which it organizes
its fragmentary accumulation of originally dispersed meanings. Either the organic
image that procures the artifice of the fusion of its parts, erasing every sign of its
fractures, or the work that makes evident its contradictory and constructed character,
the disarticulation of its parts reciprocally confronted.
At one extreme of the former procedure lie myth and symbol; at the extreme of
the latter lies allegory. Categories that on various occasions Benjamin considered
antithetical. The semantic fracture, the formal fissure, is also the rupture o f any
illusion of totality. But even for Benjamin that destructive aspect of montage admits a
reconstructive possibility. As in those commercial arcades of nineteenth-century Paris,
which in his view accumulated the primordial fragments of bourgeois modernity. Or
as in those Peruvian shanty-towns erected with the superposed remains of ancient
ruins and contemporary leftovers, used as the constructive elements of a new
visuality, a new culture even, without losing their original identity.
This is, without a doubt, the code and register in which Huayco gradually places
its work, as can be demonstrated by the instructive contrast suggested by the
representation/support relationship in its two culminating pieces. In Sarita Colonia
each can does not necessarily correspond to a chromatic dot, but rather often brings
together several colours, which moreover are hued in a way reminiscent of the saint’s
image in popular prints, but quite at variance with Lichtenstein’s paintings. In
contrast, the earlier Arte al paso - as far as it can be perceived in the scant
photographic documentation, all of it in black and white - opted for entirely flat
colours, rigorously organized in relation to the grid of cans. This alternative
accentuated the materiality of its physical support - so connotative in itself - and
created a pixel effect, preventing the image’s total assimilation to pictorial illusion. A
formal radicality related to the sophisticated public of Forum Gallery, for which this
piece was conceived. The image obtained in Sarita is less dissonant and more organic,
which probably contributed to its recuperation by the popular sectors. It is unlikely
that this difference in treatment was involuntary. (Mariotti, Huayco’s leader, used to
argue that the pointillism of our era was the one constructed by the reticulated
television screen.)36 Rather, it would seem to reflect a growing symbolic aspiration,
317 The Power and the Illusion
manifest also in the use o f local cacti to frame Sarita in a way that accentuates the
almost telluric link between the work and the landscape.
Despite its modern elements, Sarita can thus be understood in the almost
medieval terms of votive painting (‘all pictures that perform miracles are
anonymous’ , Salazar was fond of saying).37 In contrast, ‘Viva el maoismo' should be
approached - as it has already been done with John Heartfield’s less ambivalent
collages38 - in terms of the baroque genre of emblems, that allegorical montage of
image and text that is at the same time the textual dismantling of the image: the
pictura (image) is superposed with the inscriptio or lemma (title), and the subscriptio
or explanatory epigraph. The purpose is not illusion - either mythic or aesthetic - but
moral and political instruction. In ‘Viva el maoismo' the lemma strikes us from the
very body o f the image, while the bar code acts as its dissonant subscriptio:
commodity fetishism and its repressive codification, alluding perhaps to that other,
political fetishism for which this silkscreen is a mise en scène. ‘Where the dream is as
its most exalted,’ wrote Adorno in relation to Wagner, ‘the commodity is closest to
hand.’39 Commodity itself is a sort of new allegory, in which every original meaning
is arbitrarily and changeably replaced by a price, as unstable and fluctuating as the
meaning of images for the allegorical eyes. ‘The emblems return as commodities,’
Benjamin pointed out.40 A game of analogies that acquires its most factual nature
in the violent and hyperinflationary economy of the ‘Peruvian Weimar Republic’ ,
where the rapid rise in the cost of living went hand in hand with the abrupt
devaluation o f life.
And the two processes went hand in hand with the gradual development of the
allegorical condition, postmodern in its peripheral way.41 Both Sarita Colonia and
Maorilyn (the contrast justifies the use of this name) speak their other (alios
agoreuin) from within the very structures that govern them, permanently oscillating
between pretendedly opposite categories: between art and religion, between sexuality
and politics, between both nuclei and the free permutation of their elements. But
Huayco’s project is precisely to reconcile those differences through a symbolic will
(.sumballein = to join, to bring together, to reunite) that endows its works with an
auratic air. It is Sarita’s deterioration - or better, its development as a ruin - that
slides its more historical dimensions towards a demythifying allegory, but without
managing to destroy the religious aura on which its presence is founded. NN’s
proposal aims instead at exacerbating the oppositions: the discontinuity of an image
that militates against any illusion of harmonious totality. A dislocated image that
problematizes the act of reading, the very act of reference, displacing the gaze from
the signified to the signifier, from history to discourse, from symbol to allegory.
318 Beyond the Fantastic
But also an image that immediately imposes the opposite track. Even in pieces as
ambivalent as ‘Viva el maoismo’, deconstruction insinuates a way towards the
reconstructive (although in the utopian terms of a marginal subculture). And this is a
crucial difference with other, more cosmopolitan and triumphant strategies of
postmodern appropriation. In Peru counterhegemonic gestures are frequently
directed towards the elaboration of new and radicalized forms of hegemony. The same
means are thus used for opposite ends. The multiple demythifying mechanisms
developed in the so-called First World are astutely manipulated all the better to
remythify in an opposite or displaced sense. Deconstruction itself is cannibalized in
order to revitalize the destruction/construction principle of Marxist dialectics. And
obliquely introducing a vaguely mystical element.
It is tempting to proceed with the works here discussed along the lines of the
suggestions that Benjamin derived from the German baroque drama known as
Trauerspiel: ‘to grasp the synthesis which is reached in allegorical writing as a result
of the conflict between theological and artistic intentions, a synthesis not so much in
the sense of a peace as a tregua dei between the conflicting opinions’.42 Perhaps it
would be equally profitable to explore the parallels with the ambivalence that
dominated the life and reflections of the very author of those lines. ‘Benjamin
searched for the aura by denying it,’ wrote Shmucler. ‘He searched for Jerusalem
going to Moscow, its antipodes; he searched for the salvific presence of art by praising
the mechanical, which made it impossible; he thought he could see a route towards
communism at a short-cut which led to Fascism; he awaited the startling coming of
the Messiah but, dazzled by the mystery, he gave to the proletariat the face of Jesus
or Elijah.,4i ‘All so much mysticism, coupled with an anti-mystical stance,’ a
somewhat exasperated Brecht jotted down in his diaries when giving an account of his
conversations with this wandering and persecuted Jew.44 That too could be the
dramatic nucleus, the other, unresolved tension finally staged - with varying accents
- by each of the images here presented. Aura, lost and restored.
The restoration of aura insinuated in the very gesture that enunciates its
irrémissible loss. Just as in Benjamin’s attitude that lays the foundations for this
dilemma. ‘The haughty chronicle of the abandonment of aura is anchored, sentence
through sentence, by a writer who does not wish to believe in it. Paradoxically, the
celebration of each demolishing blow by reproductive technology is made with a prose
that is sacred, ritualized, cultural [cultual?], perhaps deeply pessimistic.’40
It may well be that in the ‘Peruvian Weimar Republic’, as in that other Weimar
Republic that gave origin to Benjamin’s prophetic-melancholic visions, the allegorical
structure is the one best fitted to signify the emotion and the moment, integrating
319 The Power and the Illusion
and expressing its historical dispersion. The factual decomposition of an epoch. Its
imaginary recompositions. Cultural bodies that almost proudly exhibit their fractures,
their contradictions and aporias, deriving from it all a new energy: postsymbolic,
certainly, but perhaps also neoauratic.
‘ [Alllegory itself, writes Benjamin, ‘is more than the “vaporization” - however
abstract - of theological essences . . . [It rather consists in] the survival of those
essences in an unsuitable, indeed hostile environment . . . For an appreciation of the
transience of things, and the concern to rescue them for eternity, is one of the
strongest impulses in allegory . . . Allegory established itself most permanently where
transitoriness and eternity confronted each other most closely.’46 His paradigmatic
example was the German seventeenth century and the distressed sensibility
generated by the bloody religious conflicts that made of that period a landscape of
ruins. The parallel with Germany after the First World War is obvious. The
disgregated Peru of recent years could also be one of those agonic scenes (agony is
not death but struggle with death, struggle to the death). A space of terrible
confrontations, both physical and metaphysical. A ‘pre-human world, semi-divine,
semi-bestial, precarious’ , in the precise, the precious terms of the poem by Montserrat
Alvarez that opens these notes. One of the more disturbingly keen expressions of
what it meant to be an educated petit-bourgeois in the ‘Peruvian Weimar Republic’ ,
‘a country where bonfires/drew/on the nocturnal hills the red glare of hammers/and
sickles’, while ‘in the midnight hour of the Plaza de Armas/Hunger chatted with
Pizarro’ . A time when ‘we drank with Death and with war at/the same table and we
laughed together’ . An abyss in which ‘many/died and didn’t realize it’ .
But the illusion of a new critical consciousness, articulated to a radical project still
to be defined, made a different allegorical experience fleetingly possible: an experience
foreign to the self-absorption and melancholia so predominant in the Trauerspiel, or,
in a different key, in Montserrat’s poetry itself.4' And closer to those dialectical images
in which Benjamin elaborates the possibility of new forms of symbolic energy: ‘the
theory of dialectical images . . . bears witness to the field of tension in Benjamin’s
reflections on myth. The dialectical image, on the one hand, tends to break up the
mythical power of images . . . by means of the dialectic of knowledge, and, on the
other hand, it implies that the genuine form of knowledge itself is, at least in part,
based on images and thereby on myth.’48 Not the simple destruction of myth but its
redemptive destructuralization.49
The aura, however, is not in the image but in the ritual that incorporates it within
a cult value. It is not a factor of representation but of presence, here obtained through
the extreme means of ignoring the artistic institutionality all the better to act on the
320 Beyond the Fantastic
social praxis itself. This position is what permits the artists to turn their work into an
experience that breaks up and redeems myth in the very same gesture, just as
Benjamin wanted: to blast myth, leaving its messianic dimension intact.
Violence and repression, dogmatism and intolerance, exhausted that hope and that
wager, but not the larger situation that engendered them. Our postmodernity - I will
always insist on these concepts - is also a posthumous modernity. The premature ruin
of something never concluded. And not yet cancelled. The Occidental discourse on the
end of ideology is the least accidental and the most ideological of all discourses.
Absolute demythification is in itself a myth. New narratives are formed with the
remains of their fractured discourses. The works here discussed are acquainted with
this. Recycling as a strategy for survival in the shanty-towns inspires and culturally
authorizes the processes of artistic metabolization, the appropriations of all types that
transform an alien textuality into an energy that is the artists’ own. And thus they
construct with the rubble of history a return that is only partially phantasmatic.
‘ Other than power, everything is illusion’ , Senderista fundamentalism preaches
fanatically. But there is also power in illusion. Illusion too is power.60
NOTES
1 This text is a translated and slightly modified version o f the essay ‘El Poder y la Ilusión: Pérdida y
Restauración del Aura en la ‘República de Weimar Peruana’ (1980-1992)’, published in Gabriel Peluffo
Linari (ed.), Arte latinoamericano actual (Montevideo: Museo Municipal de Bellas Artes Juan Manuel
Blanes, 1995), pp. 39-54, the proceedings o f an international symposium organized by the Blanes Museum
in November 1995 under the title Nuevas voces: Ideas y contexto en el arte latinoamericano actual. I am
grateful to Gabriel Peluffo Linari, Co-ordinator o f the museum, and to Pilar Pérez, President of the
Museum Friends, for their continuous encouragement. (Their friendship and support is beyond
acknowledgement.) I would also like to thank Marcelo Pacheco for his generous help in the reconstruction
o f that part o f my library necessary for this essay’s final writing. Other debts o f gratitude must
unfortunately remain unmentioned, save for Jorge Villacorta’s opinions on the translation o f Montserrat
Alvarez’s poem. (All translations from the Spanish are my own.)
2 The primitive version o f this essay was written in early 1991 and presented at a session on Latin American
artistic issues chaired by Mari Carmen Ramirez at the College Art Association Annual Conference held
then at Washington, DC. The density o f what has since happened explains to some extent the text’s
present form, its axis displaced from appropriation strategies to the experience of aura. Perhaps it also
throws some light on that element o f mystery that occasionally peers out from between the lines. An
inevitable risk in an essay finally willing to speculate on the greater mistery o f a brilliant generation that
now languishes broken and dispersed. A generation and an epoch whose historical centre cannot be wholly
reached without wandering through the marginal suburbs to which theology has been confined. Without
relocating theology through materialism and through memory, through mnemonic matter itself. Such a
task requires a new textuality, capable o f not only naming the dialectical tension between the power and
the illusion, but also able to attempt a ‘total immersion and absorption' in its ‘truth’ . Both in the
metaphysical sense that at some point Walter Benjamin gives to that problematic phrase (The Origin o f
German Tragic Drama, London and New York: Verso, 1990, p. 36), and in the more openly political one
321 The Power and the Illusion
coming through other moments o f his writing (‘ [T]ruth is not a process o f exposure which destroys the
secret, but a revelation which does justice to it’, ibid., p. 31). My own writing lacks the resources necessary
for such an endeavour. Here it is offered as just an effort to understand. May it also serve to evoke
friendship and the exceptional times that gave it meaning.
3 In Hannah Arendt (ed.), Walter Benjamin: Illuminations (New York: Schocken, 1969), p. 263.
4 ‘All the bloods’ (‘Todas las sangres') is, o f course, the title o f one o f José María Arguedas’s major novels.
Although Arguedas committed suicide in 1969 his writings offer more than a crucial clue for the
understanding o f violence in contemporary Peru.
5 Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work o f Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, in Arendt (ed.), op. cit., p. 222.
This frequently cited translation has been challenged by authors such as Rodolphe Gasché, for whom
‘Benjamin defines the aura as the unique appearance (Erscheinung), or appearing of a distance (einer
Feme), that is, not merely spatial remoteness or an open space . . . but substantive, if not substantial
distance.’ Rodolphe Gasché, ‘Objective Diversions: On Some Kantian Themes in Benjamin’s “ The Work of
Art in the Age o f Mechanical Reproduction’” , in Andrew Benjamin and Peter Osborne (eds.), Walter
Benjamin's Philosophy: Destruction and Experience (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), p. 187.
6 Héctor Schmucler, ‘La pérdida del aura: Una nueva pobreza humana’, in Nicolás Casullo et al., Sobre
Walter Benjamin: Vanguardias, historia, estética y literatura. Una visión latinoamericana (Buenos Aires:
Alianza y Goethe Institute, 1993), p. 242.
7 I arrived at the concept o f a ‘Peruvian Weimar Republic’ as an immediate consequence of the April 5
putsch and the institutional collapse that revealed the eroded basis o f the existing order. A few weeks later
I made public use o f that expression in an artistic critique not entirely foreign to this essay and its present
circumstances (‘El pabellón ha caído’, in La República, Lima, 14 June 1992, pp. 27-9). It can o f course be
argued that some sort o f electoral democracy has since been restored. But there is no denying that its
original nature has been so distorted that the period 1980-92 maintains a separate and distinct character.
At any rate the expression ‘Peruvian Weimar Republic’ is here meant only in a metaphorical sense:
a poetic licence articulated in terms o f provocation rather than affirmation. The relation thereby posited is
not one o f identity but o f friction. A historical f(r)iction that may perhaps enable some insights into the
dense complexity o f this extreme circumstance in Peru’s contemporary experience. Some of its central
processes admit a vague but profitable contrast with the German Weimar Republic: the aborted
revolutionary movement that inaugurates it (despite the patent differences between the firm Spartacist
will and the never-realized insurrection by the Peruvian New Left, whose lack of resolution opened the
way to Sendero Luminoso’s political-religious proselitism); the frailty and growing ill-repute o f the
democratic institutions; the expansion of diverse forms o f racism and fundamentalism; the dictatorial
closure o f the period. Not to mention the widespread hunger, massive unemployment, hyperinflation . . .
As well as cultural consequences that span the whole range from various forms o f expressionism to
rationalist vocations engaged in the hoped-for construction o f a new order. And running through it all, the
ever-present violence - factual or symbolic, lived or imagined.
8 Mirko Lauer dates the origin o f this process back to the early 1960s, with the appearance of ‘an
autonomous popular cultural consciousness: a new modernity sustained on the economic power of millions
o f people inhabiting the shanty-towns’. Mirko Lauer, Introducción a la pintura peruana del siglo XX
(Lima: Mosca Azul, 1976), p. 157. See, too, Mirko Lauer, Crítica de la artesanía (Lima: DESCO, 1982).
9 Huayco’s composition varied throughout its existence, but for the period corresponding to the works here
discussed, its members were Francisco Mariotti, Maria Luy, Rosario (‘Charo’ ) Noriega, Mariela Zevallos,
Juan Javier Salazar, Herbert Rodriguez, and Armando (‘Sherwin’ ) Williams. This list reproduces the order
322 Beyond the Fantastic
established by the publication that accompanies a video recounting the group’s experience during the year
1980: Huayco EPS. Arte al Paso (Locarno: Edizioni Flaviana, 1981). EPS stands for ‘Empresa de Propiedad
Social’ (Social Property Company), a cooperative structure created by the reforms of General Velasco’s
regime (1968-75). By humorously appropriating this clearly identifiable denomination, Huayco resignified
it, adjudicating new meanings to that acronym, such as ‘Estética de Proyección Social’ (Social Projection
Aesthetics). This deliberate ambiguity underlines the undefined and unresolved relationship o f the artists
with the populism o f Velasco’s government, which almost acted as their political unconscious. (Also to be
mentioned is the group Parenthesis, which acted as an immediate precursor of Huayco and was formed by
many o f those listed above, along with Fernando Bedoya, Emei, Cuco Morales and Lucy Angulo, among
others. )
10 Another significant Quechua term is Yawar Mayu - river o f blood - related to the reddish colour o f the
summer torrents. This ominous aspect is due to the mud and other organic matter that overflowed rivers
carry with them during the rainy season. But the expression is more metaphoric than descriptive: ‘River of
blood . . . that razes and nourishes,’ exclaims Father Cardozo, one of the paradigmatic characters in José
María Arguedas’s apocalyptic posthumous novel, El zorro de arriba y el zorro de abajo. José María
Arguedas, Obras completas (Lima: Horizonte, 1983), vol. v, p. 191. First published as El zorro de arriba y el
zorro de abajo (Buenos Aires: Losada, 1969).
11 The catalogue o f the video that summarizes the group’s experience (Huayco EPS, op. cit.), includes a
detailed technical analysis o f this perverse economics and the nutritional dependency it creates: ‘From 1943
to 1974 national milk production increased 2.5 times while imports increased 60.3 times . . . It is obvious
that government policies are influenced by the daily industry, especially by the subsidiaries of Carnation
and Nestlé.’ (Manuel L. Lajo, ‘Trasnacionales y alimentación en el Perú. El caso de la leche’, in Huayco
EPS, op. cit., n.p.) The insertion o f such arguments in a cultural publication acquires graphic expression in
the accompanying photograph o f one o f Huayco’s members washing the innumerable cans - a veritable
mountain o f them - needed for the Arte al paso experience: right over this image (which was connotatively
printed with the reticulated effect o f a television screen ) a statistical graph gave visual support to the
figures that sustain the article. An invocation by Frederico Moráis, appearing as an epigraph, helps to
articulate the very diverse registers touched upon by Huayco’s proposal: ‘We must prevent the blockade of
the multinationals in the art market and the colonization imposed by the great international exhibitions.
We are the barbarians o f a future age.’ Culture, economics, and politics, analogically integrated in a
language where words slide from one category to the other.
12 Toys, tubes, metal sheets . . . This added value has made the accumulation o f empty cans a frequent
element o f the shanty-towns’ landscape. A fact registered even in one of Bill Caro’s most important
paintings, done in the 1980s from a photograph taken some ten years earlier, when this then-young
Peruvian artist tried to incorporate marginal areas o f the city into his hyper-realist works. Although. Caro’s
option was certainly different from the one eventually worked out by Huayco, in some respects it could be
perceived as an antecedent.
13 Its gravest and most current one: ‘In Peru today, only the popular is modern,’ writes Mirko Lauer in a
notable pamphlet that accompanied the exhibition o f this and other works by Huayco in Forum Gallery.
14 For a study o f the possible links between the changing forms o f Sarita’s cult and the renewed
characteristics assumed by the migrants’ experience in Lima, see Gustavo Buntinx, ‘Sarita iluminada: La
lucha por el poder simbólico en un culto popular peruano’, unpublished paper given at the Primeras
Jornadas de Sociología y Antropología del Arte, Arte, sociedad, cultura e identidad (Buenos Aires,
Universidad de Buenos Aires, Instituto de Historia del Arte Argentino y Latinoamericano, 1993). Previous
versions were presented at the international symposium Identidade artística e cultural da América Latina
323 The Power and the Illusion
(Sáo Paulo, Arte International y Memorial da América Latina, 1991), and at the Museo Nacional de
Arqueología y Antropología (Lima, 1992).
15 The first publication o f Huayco’s Sarita Colonia was through the pages o f a political magazine clearly
identified with the project o f the Peruvian New Left (Alvaro Diez Astete, ‘La imagen milagrosa’, in
Marka 204, Lima, May 1981; reprinted in Huayco EPS, op. cit., n.p.). The present work re-examines and
develops a number o f points I have previously published on the experience o f Huayco and its broader
context: ‘Huayco de ilusiones’, in U-tópicos 1 (Lima: October 1982), p. 5; ‘¿Entre lo popular y lo moderno?
Alternativas pretendidas o reales en la joven plástica peruana’, in Hueso Húmero 18 (Lima: Mosca Azul
1983141), pp. [61J-85; ‘El post-velasquismo pictórico: Un arte joven peruano’, in Arte en Colombia 26
(Bogotá: February 1985), pp. 44-7 (text edited by the publishers); ‘La utopía perdida: Imágenes de la
revolución bajo el segundo belaundismo’, in Márgenes 1 (Lima: SUR Casa de Estudios del Socialismo,
March 1987), pp. 52-98; ‘A Latter-day Shrine Painted in Pop-Art Colours’, in The Journal o f Art
(New York, November 1991), p. 67 (title and text edited by the publishers).
16 For the Greeks, symbols ‘were a sign o f recognition (for example, among members of the same sect) formed
by the two halves o f a broken object that were confronted. Thus, in its very origin it can be seen that it is
the idea o f nexus which gives meaning to the word.’ Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis,
Diccionario del psicoanálisis (Buenos Aires: LABOR, 1981), p. 410. First edition 1971.
17 Jesús Ruiz Durand, ‘Afiches de la Reforma Agraria: Otra experiencia trunca’, in U-tópicos 4/5 (Lima:
December 1984), p. 17. Ruiz Durand is probably the person who coined the term ‘Pop achorado’ when he
uses it to describe - literally in two words - the characteristic style of those posters. By extending that
precise denomination to a category applicable to Huayco’s work, I here attempt a theoretical radicalization
o f the first usage o f that phrase, as in fact the collective work o f that group radicalized the premises of the
velasquista experience that was its antecedent. For a broader perspective on these and other transitions
(albeit with too many printing errors), see Buntinx, ‘¿Entre lo popular . . . ? ’, and ‘El post-velasquismo
pictórico . . . ’, op. cit.
18 Or maybe it does. There is a concern with meaning in Warhol’s art that should not be neglected. This is
being variously suggested by a growing number of studies, including the most important o f those published
in the catalogue o f the MOMA retrospective. The only regret is that none o f them makes a rigorous use of
the allegorical category, so obviously important for the understanding o f this artist’s work. It is a pity too
that proper credit has not been given to Thomas Crow’s decisive essay ‘Saturday Disaster: Trace and
Reference in Early Warhol', Art in America (May 1987), pp. 128-36, discussed in AiA, (October 1987),
p. 21, which focuses on the place o f death and grief, the place of memory, in Warhol’s production from the
early 1960s, its subtly mournful and yet strongly political character. Something of all this was perceived -
or intuited - by the sharp eyes o f the Peruvian artists.
19 Buntinx, ‘La utopía perdida . . . ’, op. cit. Today Juan Javier Salazar is the only member of Huayco’s
original group who still lives in Peru, albeit in an almost reclusive way.
20 ‘The word “ history” stands written on the countenance o f nature in the characters of transience. The
allegorical physiognomy o f nature-history . . . is present in reality in the form of a ruin. In the ruin history
has physically merged into the setting. And in this guise history does not assume the form o f the process of
an eternal life so much as that o f irresistible decay. Allegory thereby declares itself to be beyond beauty.
Allegories are, in the realm o f thoughts, what ruins are in the realm of things.' Benjamin. The Origin o f
German Tragic Drama, op. cit., pp. 177-8. I bring forth this by-now-classical passage because of what it
offers in friction as much as in support o f my line o f thought.
It could also be argued - correctly, up to a point - that Sarita Colonia's decay was already inscribed in
324 Beyond the Fantastic
its very structure and project, in its site-specificity. ‘The site-specific work’, Craig Owens reminds us, ‘often
aspires to a prehistoric monumentality; Stonehenge and the Nazca lines are taken as prototypes. Its
“content” is frequently mythical . . . [Such works) are rarely dismantled but simply abandoned to nature;
Smithson consistently acknowledged as part o f his works the forces which erode and eventually reclaim
them for nature. In this, the site-specific work becomes an emblem o f transience, the ephemerality of all
phenomena; it is the memento mori o f the twentieth century.’ Craig Owens, ‘The Allegorical Impulse:
Toward a Theory o f Postmodernism’, in Beyond Recognition: Representation, Power and Culture (Berkeley
and Los Angeles: University o f California Press, 1992), pp. 55-6. Part o f the problem, however, is to what
extent that decay harms even the critical reception o f a work o f this type. Its artistic memory. In that
terrain the difference between Smithson’s famed pieces and Huayco’s almost marginal endeavours is quite
eloquent. Apart from the texts and gestures already mentioned, almost the only surviving documentation of
the Sarita Colonia project is a video made by Mariotti in Switzerland using a system that is incompatible
with the one used in Peru, where fewer than five people have had the opportunity to see it. Had the
revolutionary project o f the Peruvian New Left succeeded, the situation would undoubtedly be very
different.
21 Owens, op. cit., p. 71. Author’s emphasis. Hal Foster suggests a similar reading and supports it by quoting
Fredric Jameson: ‘The point is not to allow one o f the poles o f the image to settle into the truth of the
other which it unmasks . . . but rather to hold them apart as equal and autonomous so that energies can
pass back and forth between them.' Hal Foster, Recodings. Art, Spectacle, Cultural Politics (Seattle: Bay
Press, 1985), pp. 93, 95.
22 ‘Allegorical imagery is appropriated imagery; the allegorist does not invent images but confiscates them. He
lays claim to the culturally significant, poses as its interpreter. And in his hands, the image becomes
something other . . . He does not restore an original meaning that may have been lost or obscured: allegory
is not hermeneutics. Rather he adds another meaning to the image. If he adds, however, he does so only to
replace: the allegorical meaning supplants an antecedent one; it is a supplement.’ Owens, op. cit., p. 54.
24 Ibid. Following Marx and Baudelaire, Benjamin (Iluminaciones II: Baudelaire, un poeta en el esplendor del
capitalismo, Madrid: Taurus, 1972) has been able to see the street-prostitute as an essential allegory of
capitalism: whereas commodity obtains a commercial and phantasmagoric aura by effacing all traces o f its
production process, in the prostitute seller and commodity occupy - exhibitionistically - the same massified
body. I would like to remark, however, how this image gains in sharpness and complexity under the highly
theatrical forms that prostitution acquires among transvestites, confusing the phantasmagoric with the
phantasmatic: the absent(?) phallus. A spectacle and a simulacrum that are metaphorically displaced into
politics. It should also be pointed out that transvestite prostitution is an open and frequent experience in
Lima, and thus a widely shared cultural reference.
26 Perhaps a more productive parallel than Longo’s is the one offered by Spike Lee’s film Do the Right Thing
(at the time unknown to NN but later exalted by some o f its members). This complex and explosive film
deals with racial tension in the United States through the apparently trivial anecdote of a conflict of ethnic
identities provoked by the photographic display o f ‘famous Italians' in a local pizzeria in one of New York’s
black neighbourhoods. The struggle for symbolic power at its most everyday and existential level. The
cinematographic project is worked through a brilliant play o f oppositions and alternatives (black/white,
love/hate, salsa/rap . . . ), culminating in the juxtaposition o f Martin Luther King’s ultrapacifist message
and Malcolm X ’s vindication o f violence when it restores dignity to the oppressed. A radical ambivalence
325 The Power and the Illusion
literally spelt out on the screen by the textual quotations at the end of the picture and in its brilliant final
image: the photograph that shows the improbable meeting of King and Malcolm can be hung on the pizzeria’s
walls only when it lays in ruins. And the person who finally manages to place it there is the stuttering man
who opens the film painfully articulating the names of both martyrs, and tracing their faces in the
photograph that he tries to sell throughout the duration of the film - generally without success - even to the
owner o f the restaurant. The living image of difficulty. This allegorical density was diluted - although not
totally lost - by the virtual linearity of the biographical film that Lee would afterwards dedicate to Malcolm X.
27 ‘Shining combat trenches’ is how Senderista jargon referred to these prisons, showing a distinctively
bombastic and adjectival use o f language.
28 Benjamin, ‘The Work o f Art in the Age o f Mechanical Reproduction’, op. cit.
30 An earlier version reproduced the telephone number publicized through the media in commercials inciting
the population to make anonymous calls denouncing those they suspected o f being engaged in subversive
activities. In its double register - functional and aesthetic - the bar code is by now a technological emblem
o f commodity fetishism: total information and power for the decodification machines and those who control
them; pure abstraction for those submitted to and seduced by its phantasmagoria. As such, the bar code
has been the motif - and the motive - o f multiple artistic appropriations all over the world. It is interesting
to note, however, that one o f the earliest and most poignant efforts in this direction appeared in these
silkscreens from an increasingly peripheral country such as Peru. There bar codes were making their first
appearances on a few imported goods sold in some o f Lima’s most exclusive supermarkets, which advertised
this new system as a distinctive sign o f privileged shopping. Its design thus became a status symbol, and a
symbolic advance o f that neoliberalism that would later be imposed in a dictatorial and de facto manner.
The fact that the most important o f those supermarket chains carried the name o f its Chinese owners
- Wong - gave this silkscreen an additional level o f irony. An irony also intended in the inclusion, right
under the bar code, o f another manipulated comercial register offered as another signature: the phrase
‘Made in Peru. T.M. [Trade Mark]: NN’ .
31 According to statistics, between 60 and 70 per cent o f the Peruvian population lives in poverty or extreme
poverty.
32 Sociedad de mierda was the name o f one o f the most representative groups at the time, and the title of an
all-too-typical song that was the rage o f the rock subculture. Other names were Leukaemia, Dirty Cop,
Urban Guerrilla . . .
33 Angry attacks were published both by Senderista and conservative publications, although the differences in
their arguments and the changes experienced by these critical positions as time passed deserve a separate
study.
34 These works by Rodriguez juxtapose publicitary, pornographic, religious, and journalistic images in strident
montages generally allusive to political violence. The intended comment aims principally at the more
revulsive aspects offered by the experience o f massification in an increasingly fragmented society. ‘Agit-
porn’ could well be one o f the more adequate terms to describe such pieces. Perhaps the most accomplished
o f these (1984?) displaces the sacred order o f a rural altarpiece towards the profane chaos o f an urban
326 Beyond the Fantastic
newspaper stand, in which the artist accumulates the crossed signs o f our convulsive modernity, its
unresolved tensions: urban graphics, Andean permanences, mass visuality, popular religion, kitsch
sensibility . . . Even the charred shadow o f a revolutionary political hope. All categories neatly segregated
and no longer harmoniously integrated as in the splendid synthesis obtained by Huayco’s Sarita. This is no
longer the moment o f utopia but o f dispersion.
37 Ibid.
38 Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics o f Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge, Mass,
and London: MIT, 1991).
40 ‘The fashions o f meanings Lin baroque allegoryl changed almost as rapidly as the prices o f commodities
change. The meaning o f the commodity is indeed price; as commodity it has no other. Thus the allegoricist
with the commodity is in his element.’ (Benjamin quoted in Buck-Morss, op. cit., p. 181).
41 For Owens (op. cit.), the allegorical impulse is one o f the distinctive features o f postmodern art.
44 Irving Wohlfarth, ‘No-man’s land: On Walter Benjamin’s “ Destructive Character’” , in Benjamin and
Osborne, op. cit., p. 168.
45 Horacio González, 'Benjamín y el fascismo’, in Casullo et al., op. cit., p. 270. There is certainly room for
discrepancies on this point, such as those repeatedly raised by Buck-Morss (op. cit.), but even she at a
certain moment (pp. 244-5) admits the replacement by Benjamin of the natural aura o f the object with
another, metaphysical one that irradiates political meaning over the transformed nature of technology.
46 Benjamin, The Origin o f German Tragic Drama , op. cit., pp. 223-4.
47 To be sure, the allegory formulated by Alvarez’s poem is also to be found in its literary coding: both the
theme and certain rhetorical turns o f phrase (‘vosotros’, ‘decid’ ) make this composition a paraphrasis of
To Future Men, probably the best known o f Brecht’s poems from exile. The artistic recourse refers back to
an historical antecedent, and both refer to the crepuscular notion of the end o f an era. Soon after
publishing this poem, Montserrat Alvarez too left the country.
48 Winifred Menninghaus, ‘Walter Benjamin’s Theory o f Myth’ , in Gary Smith (ed.). On Walter Benjamin:
Critical Essays and Recollections (Cambridge, Mass, and London: MIT, 1991), pp. 314-15 (essay first
published in 1983).
49 Throughout Benjamin’s intellectual development, adds Menninghaus (ibid., p. 323), ‘the motif of
blasting apart myth becomes transfigured into the dialectic o f breaking apart and rescuing myth’.
(Author’s emphasis.)
50 Some o f this essay’s expressions and motivations can be found - displaced to other reflective context - in
Gustavo Buntinx, ‘Desapariciones forzadas/Resurrecciones míticas’, in Arte y poder (Buenos Aires: Centro
Argentino de Investigación de las Artes, CAIA, 1993), pp. 236-55, proceedings of the Quintas Jornadas de
Teoría e Historia de las Artes, Buenos Aires, CAIA, 1993.
N otes on the Visual Arts, Identity and
Poverty in the Third World
Mirko Lauer
This article is an attempt to set an agenda on the subject o f visual arts in the Third
World, rather than offering a specific proposal. Many of the questions raised in this
debate have existed in an amorphous form within the social theory of Latin American
art since the early 1970s, but in the 1990s they have still not been satisfactorily
formulated. The central question here is what do we mean by collectivity, both inside
and outside the production of art? In other words, what unites us despite our obvious
differences?
I.
The expression ‘Third World visual arts’ assumes two concepts: first, that social
groupings with common problems can arrive at similar creative forms; second, that
one can find common social denominators in the creative variety of several cultures.
These ideas have similarities, and may even seem to be complementary, but deep
down they are very different and correspond to opposite concepts of the Third World
within public opinion. This depends on the position of the observer. Seen from far
away, it is possible that the crafts of large regions of Africa or the Americas seem to
possess more similarities than differences, while within these cultures the observer
may find no similarity between the production of neighbouring (geographical and
formal) regions. One can look from outside and from inside at things from the Third
World. Since the end of the Second World War, the concept of ‘Third World’ has been
that of an accumulation of poor countries whose differences among themselves are
not as important as their common distance from the First and Second Worlds. This is
related to the idea of a common situation in the Third World, a notion arising from
theories that view ‘primitive’ art as the expression of the same savage thought. Thus
we have the idea that the differences among visual arts in the Third World are more
geographical than historical: a natural determinism and a historical indeterminism.
However, in recent decades an alternative vision of the Third World has arisen in
which these differences are seen as substantial, especially in the cultural field. This
approach is based on a recognition of the true relationship of the Third World with
history, including the anti-imperial and anti-colonial battles, and in the theoretical
field on the demise of a mechanistic vision in which there is only one possible
development for all social groups. It is essential that any definition of Third World
culture should take into account the continental differences in the visual arts, diverse
cultural traditions, different relationships of the interior and exterior, tribes,
communities, etc. I should say that, deep down, if people are to be liberated in the
economic and political sphere, we should strive for a global community; if, however, we
are interested in intellectual liberation, we should aim for an archipelago of variety.
328 Beyond the Fantastic
As Juan Acha wrote in 1975: ‘We are aware of socioeconomic and cultural
marginalization in many large areas of our Third World and we have a range of
projects and doctrines opposing it, but we have not yet accepted our own psychological
diversity.’ 1 Perhaps we have not accepted it because we were too busy with the urgent
task of defining our political and economic identities during this period of
decolonization and the fight for national liberation. Throughout almost forty-five
years we have been noting that our wretched of the earth are not all repressed in the
same way, nor do they have the same identity. In some Third World countries the
visual arts attempt definitively to assimilate the elusive modernity of Paris or New
York, while in others the fight is for survival, a drama of misunderstanding that often
occurs within the same country or even the same city. Formerly we were interested
exclusively in a common identity; today we are just as interested in reproducing
differences, especially among oppressed peoples, as the differences between the
opulent sectors within Third World capitals and the poor in our countries are part of
the problem, not of the solution.2
Seen from outside, the term ‘Third World’ is too broad for our group of countries;
seen from inside it seems too narrow. The analysis of our own visual arts has been in
line with our changing thoughts on the Third World as a social space. The relationship
between tradition and modernity, the way in which power controls history and creates
a consensus in dominant social expectations, has followed this evolution. Therefore it
is not surprising that, now that Third Worldism is in crisis as a model for analysis
and action within and beyond the arts, the antithesis of tradition vs. modernity
should also be in crisis.3
If the notions of the Third World as an almost arbitrary accumulation defined
from outside and the tradition/modernity antithesis are both under attack, the idea
that poverty is the common denominator of most societies and cultures is still very
much alive. It has been especially fruitful for the analysis of the visual arts of these
countries and has shown us a clearer way of observing our creative differences.
A conventional analysis of our visual arts placed the dominant, modernizing
sectors - those that produced ‘high’ or ‘sophisticated’ art - on the same progressive
platform as other social phenomena. Those parts of our visual arts that came from
oppressed sectors marginal to the capitalist system - crafts or ‘primitive’ art - were
automatically associated with the traditional. The destiny of art in the Third World
was to bring itself up to date by developing in the central markets, while the destiny
of crafts was to languish, disappear or fall into decadence and die on the altar of
modernization. Even those theories that were linked with the economic and political
defence of the exploited did not take into account the historical nature of all aesthetic
329 Notes on the Visual Arts, Identity and Poverty In the Third World
categories. In an inversion of the Marxist defence of ancient Greek art, neither was
there a historical interest in the culture of the colonial periphery.
In Latin America this Marxist and Eurocentric attitude towards art, which was
imported in the 1920s and 1930s, has begun to change only in the past fifteen years.
This attitude, along with the extra-methodological radicalism it produced, helped to
maintain conservative ideas in the visual arts, the same ideas that have shaped Latin
American opinions on the subject since it arrived. Nonetheless, the real process of
radicalization - the changes of consciousness among a sector of producers - resulted
in a questioning of the established ideas about visual arts in the continent.
The first idea to be discarded was the assumption that there was a delay with
regard to European and North American artistic development; the second was the
notion that creative efforts in the Third World could neutralize this supposed delay.
At the same time the idea arose that those art forms that had been considered
traditional could have a legitimate claim to contemporaneity in the world. By the
early 1970s it became increasingly clear that for the art market modernity was equal
to novelty, a monopoly view of the cultural centres that founded and defined it as an
irreversible trend, and which did not take into account a single Third World art
market. This is what Marta Traba, in 1975, defined and criticized as the exacerbation
of consumption, the end of art as fiction and ‘terrorism of the avant-garde’,
manifestations of alienation from the exterior to which she opposed an ‘art of
resistance’ that she perceived in the work of several Latin American artists
(Szyszlo, Zanarty, Cuevas, Reveron, etc.).4 My argument is that these artists were
more concerned with reproducing in their own countries, consciously or unconsciously,
the nationalist lesson of pre-Revolution Mexico than with keeping up with novelties
in the North. Implicit in Traba’s critique is the move of development away from the
international towards the national-regional, along with the first relativization of the
concepts of modernity and tradition in several decades. I will not concentrate here on
tracing the restricting effect that this paradigm of resistance had on the development
of visual arts in Latin America.
The next stage in the evolution of thought on Third World visual arts came with
the First (and last) Sao Paulo Latin American Biennial in 1978, which was dedicated
to the myths and magic of the continent. Perhaps that occasion, conceived and
developed by Juan Acha, is the closest precedent for this Havana Biennial. The Sao
Paulo Biennial, which had always been symbolic of the desire for Latin American art
to be international and up to date, accepted on this occasion the need to reverse this
tendency and to open its doors to what in conventional terms was a more traditional
and less modernizing visual production. It was at a symposium there that the
330 Beyond the Fantastic
Brazilian critic Mario Pedrosa gave a paper titled ‘Rearguard Art’ in which he
proposed that the art o f our countries always works on ‘a series of infinite variations
on a single historical phenomenon characteristic of our continent: poverty, the first
step towards Latin American unity’ .0
This concept of poverty as the key to our identity takes us finally to the centre
of our analysis of visual arts in the Third World. The aim is to establish how our
infinite varieties of poverty affect visual production, distribution, consumption and
representation. Physical poverty, in terms of access to nutrition and services,
surrounds the production of crafts in the city and the countryside. Social poverty, in
terms of consciousness and means of production, surrounds the attempts to establish
international markets and artistic movements in poor countries in which a minority
wallows in luxury. To paraphrase F Scott Fitzgerald, we can say that the poor are
different, because we have been taught that our identity is a limitation; and vice
versa, of course. From the mid 1970s a significant amount of art criticism in Latin
America (Gullar, 1973; Acha, 1979-84; Garcia Canclini, 1977, 1982; Lauer, 1976,
1982; Novelo, 1976; Escobar, 1982; Moráis, 1975) has centred on the importance of
historical specificity for artistic production, a view clearly differentiated from the
so-called Marxist aesthetics that postulate ‘European universals’ (Taylor, 1978;
Lauer, 1982, 1983).
From these critical efforts a number of fundamental ideas have arisen with which
to understand contemporary Third World visual arts and the new relationship
between tradition and modernity in Latin American artistic theories:
1) The application of social and historical analysis to art (old or contemporary) has
shown that the subordinate relationship of dominated to dominant artistic markets
does not change in its physical structure nor in its representation, through artists’
activism and revolt in these societies. In fact, this path has reproduced the
relationship, changing its face to adapt to new realities.
2) More accurate studies of the nation as a forum for visual creation have shown that
the relationship between systems of visual production (art, craft, ‘primitive’ art) has
changed a lot during recent decades. The evolution of these interconnected systems is
not parallel but convergent and can be understood as developing from the common
conflictive social base that any Third World nation has. Class conflict and
development together play a determining role in the creation of national spaces for
the visual arts.
3) Taking into account these conclusions, not only was the modern vs. traditional
antithesis called into question, but also that of the cultured vs. popular due to the
bankruptcy of the concepts that limited the popular to the traditional. Thus we would
331 Notes on the Visual Arts, Identity and Poverty in the Third World
have a ‘crisis o f modernity’ in the artistic field and a ‘crisis of tradition’ in popular
visual arts.
4) The types of changes within crafts, an area previously considered static and
destined to decadence, are becoming increasingly evident. These changes do not
constitute just a dissolution into art or industry but a change within dominated
cultures that have transformed themselves without affecting their basic identity,
and have managed to sketch out a modernity that is popular without becoming
proletarian.
5) A growing awareness of the international mechanisms that define the validity of
any particular art form has led us to consider the horizontal relationship between
different art forms across the Third World to counter the historical mediation of the
European/North American cultural centres that act in their own interest.
In all these changes, what we have generically called poverty produces a visual
creative space that is specific to the Third World. Without a doubt, specific national
and cultural spaces have their own definitions, but I feel that their common
characteristics are like the first step towards a generalization, extending even beyond
Latin America to encompass Africa and Asia. If one were to generalize these dynamics
into a global concept, it would be that we are approaching the end of the period of
searching for the cosmopolitan that has marked Third World efforts towards cultural
modernization since the early part of the century, and in the visual arts from 1945.
Following the abandonment of this search for cosmopolitanism (which has also served
to define the contemporary and the traditional), a period of mutual recognition of the
visual arts of poor countries must take place, creating a greater awareness of the
variety of our visual arts. We do not yet have the proper tools with which to carry out
this exploration, which should produce an adequate intersubjectivity, but it is already
clear that it is an essential part of the work to be done in the field of social theories of
art in coming years.6
II.
The relationship between the visual arts and poverty is, as I have pointed out, one of
socioeconomic influence on creative forms. It is also an issue of representation, of the
way in which visual arts in the Third World show, hide, define or confuse the forms
and experiences of poverty and the way in which aesthetic ideologies participate in
this process. To a vision limited to seeing representation as the ‘ideology of images’,
it is clear that the visual arts (‘high’ or popular) in poor countries are not especially
concerned with this aspect of their circumstances.7 For the fine arts the search for
modernity has been complementary to the discourse on the limitations of the
333 Notes on the Visual Arts, Identity and Poverty in the Third World
fig. 49 medium, or even a way of overcoming an assumed backwardness. In the other forms
Rolando Castellón
of visual art the two main markets - the poor themselves, and tourism together with
Found Object
‘upper’ social classes - have not encouraged representations of poverty that would be
iPost-Columbian
Tripod Series) seen as redundant or subversive, depending on the consumer. In many cases,
Paper, paint and soil, Peruvian crafts for example, the visual impulse to record or protest against poverty
66 x 40.6 cms
has for centuries been diverted into less permanent media like music, dance or the
Photograph courtesy
of the artist
fiesta: the ‘instant meetings’ o f a dominated culture.
On the other hand, it is important to add that, as Gustavo Buntinx has pointed
out, poverty as we understand it in the Third World context is a creation of
modernity, in both senses of the word creation: as the result of actions and as an
ideology that defines itself in relation to foreign prosperity. In this sense the type of
representation to which I refer here is one that has developed in the Third World as
the difference between the haves and have-nots has become greater. It is difficult to
think of the native figures in naturalist prints of the seventeenth, eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries as being poor; they belong to an age in which the semantic
pairing of native was natural and not poor by definition. Equally, the African or
American ‘primitive’ artists who inspired Pablo Picasso or Paul Klee are not thought
of as poor. In contrast, the leading figures of the nationalist saga of the Third World
throughout this century are all considered poor until the opposite is proven.
What I mean to say by this is that, excluding cases of stylistic pauperization,
poverty is in the representative atmosphere, an atmosphere that contains our
perceptions; yet at the same time one of the notorious effects of aesthetic ideology is
to make poverty disappear from our perception of representation. The idea behind
this aesthetic-ideological play is that material poverty has no corresponding cultured
poverty; thus it is in creation that class differences are cancelled and where they are
shown to not determine the human condition. Mario Perniola has shown that
aesthetics are the other side of poverty and that art is the other side of economics.8
This situation is the expression and support of an ideology in which the economic
poor are usually rich in visual forms.
For this reason it is perhaps best to search for poverty not as subject matter but
rather in its action over all the aspects of visual production, in the way it directs
consciousness and practice. It is not the representation of the poor - a universal
subject in the northern hemisphere from Peter Brueghel the Elder to contemporary
social realism - that characterizes the visual arts of our countries. The relationship
between art and poverty has been analysed by European criticism (also including
Marxist aesthetics) in a specific manner suitable for that context, for example in its
concern with the notion of the proletariat, generally considering it to be socially but
not culturally distinct.9 In the Third World the idea of poverty is the domain of
334 Beyond the Fantastic
variety and the attempts to deal with it creatively or critically are usually oblique,
with emphasis on the notion of culture.
Today there are schools everywhere that use the materials and dynamics of
poverty. Generally speaking, the final results o f these aesthetic attempts at poverty
have tended to beautify it, or at least separate it from its historical context. This has
served both complacent and angry attitudes.
III.
Our argument so far has led us to the issue of tradition and contemporaneity, which
in the visual arts is closely linked to that of repetition and innovation. At present
there are two debates on this subject. One relates directly to the visual arts and
concerns the definition of the modern and the traditional that, within the somewhat
taxonomical limits of the question, will redefine the concept o f contemporaneity in
creation. The other debate is to do with the crisis of modernity that we can interpret
as the predominance of reason, Western reason or instrumental reason - three clearly
defined positions in the contemporary world.10,11 The consequence of these debates for
the subject under analysis is a questioning of the dynamics of the system of visual
production in the Third World, when this is understood as the increasing separation
o f two positions, one traditional and the other modern.
For Néstor García Canclini postmodernism in Latin American visual arts is the
‘disorderly coexistence’ of all styles, a situation in which the market and mass media
release the flood barriers between the categories of erudite and popular.12 ‘This is not
a new paradigm but a peculiar work on the ruins of modernity’ , of which the main
victim will be the power of the artist as a demiurge of meaning.
For Aníbal Quijano there is no postmodernism as such, just the debate between
two modes of modernist reasoning, with irrationality attempting to advance its
position in the crisis. The two modes of reasoning are the instrumental and the
liberational; for Quijano the historical process in Latin America since pre-European
times is one of the main sources of the liberational reasoning that has largely taken
place in Europe.
The prevailing idea so far has been that it is only art that can innovate and that
‘primitive’-traditional productions and crafts are static. Thus the conceptual block of
Western-art-modernity has been seen since the beginning of the colonial era as the
most powerful guide of Third World cultural efforts, in opposition or as a complement
to the block of underdevelopment-crafts-tradition. Now two key ideas in this division
of the visual arts (largely developed by European art history) are under attack as the
benefits of the vanguardist ethics developed in the nineteenth century have become
335 Notes on the Visual Arts, Identity and Poverty in the Third World
taboo, and the visual arts outside capitalism can no longer be seen as a stage on
which no significant historical transformations take place, either now or in the
past.13'14 The innovation within crafts and the crisis in the relationship of art with the
modernity that sustained it in our countries are central issues for the debate on
visual arts in the Third World. The characteristics of this debate have varied
according to the type of colonial domination in each country. In those areas where
colonization deeply affected the development of local culture (Latin America, North
Africa), modernity tried to reproduce itself as an alternative to tradition; in those
countries that resisted the most pernicious effects of colonization (China, India),
owing to their density or demographic characteristics, modernity allied itself with the
traditional.1516 Both were long processes, almost as long as colonization, and had
many intermediate stages. Referring to painting in his country, Lang Shaojun accuses
the first Chinese modernists of this century o f being ‘purists who underestimated the
assimilative powers of traditional art’ .1' For him, since 1919, the year of the May 4th
Movement: ‘the question of innovation revolved around controversy and
experimentation on the advisability and means of drawing on the experience of
Western painting.’ Lang has an unbreakable faith in the ability of traditional China
to benefit from European modernity without losing anything significant in the
exchange, a faith that seems unjustified by the actual experience of that difficult
encounter.
In contrast to the Chinese example, it is all the more evident that Latin America
lacks an exclusive concept of self (the Quechua nojayku) with which to face the West.
While the belief was that art brought from outside and adapted to local conditions
could significantly innovate society, nobody considered that crafts/‘primitive’ art could
benefit from this action. Quite the opposite: the idea was that the traditional would
disappear as it was transformed, lacking the ability to become something else, as it
could in ‘high’ art. Perhaps this denial of change comes from an unspoken awareness
that what culturally comes with capitalism for the poor tends to be proletarianization.
336 Beyond the Fantastic
5 Mario Pedrosa, ‘Variaqöes sem tema ou a arte de retaguardia’, Documentos de la la Bienal Fig. 51 (page 338)
Latinoamericana de Arte de Sao Paulo, vol.l (Sáo Paulo: 1979). Joaquín Torres-García
La regla abstracta in
6 Jurgen Habermas, The Theory o f Communicative Action (Beacon: 1981), p. 466.
Nueva escuela de Arte
7 Hadjinicolaou, 1974. del Uruguay,
published by AAC
8 Mario Perniola, L Alienation artistique (Paris: 10/18, 1977), p. 341.
(Asociación de Arte
9 Clara Setkin, ‘Kunst und Proletariat’, Neue Deutsche Literatur 3 (Berlin: 1955), pp. 77-88. Constructivo),
Montevideo, 1946
10 Mustafa Isrui, ‘Mezquita salvaje’, Hueso Húmero 19 (Lima: 1987), pp. 121-4.
12 Néstor García Canclini, Las culturas populares en el capitalismo (Havana: Casa de las Américas, 1982);
‘El debate postmoderno en Iberoamérica’, Cuadernos hispanoamericanos 463 (1989), pp. 79-82.
13 Franco Moretti, ‘El encanto de la indecisión’. Hueso Húmero 25 (Lima: 1989), pp. 59-68.
14 Mirko Lauer, Introducción a la pintura peruana del siglo X X (Lima: Mosca Azul, 1976).
17 Lang Shaojun, ‘An Evaluation o f Innovation in Chinese Painting’, Chinese Literature (Summer 1986),
pp. 173-88.
337 Notes on the Visual Arts, Identity and Poverty in the Third World
338 Beyond the Fantastic
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Notes on the Authors
curator based in Rio de Janeiro. Island’, which was published in Wifredo Lam, Centro
de Arte Reina Sofía (Madrid, 1992), pp. 21-41, and
‘O Vacuo e o Diálogo no Hemisfério Ocidental: Third Text, no. 20, Autumn 1992, pp. 42-68.
Linguagem, Discurso e Política’ was a paper
given at the symposium ‘Art and Identity in
Celeste Olalquiaga
Latin America’, Sáo Paulo, September 1991.
It was published in ‘American Visions”: Artistic (Venezuela/USA) is the author of
and Cultural Identity in the Western Hemisphere, Megalopolis: Contemporary Cultural
Arts International/Institute o f International
Sensibilities. She is a writer living in
Education, 1994, pp. 41-3.
New York City and is currently working
on a book about kitsch.
Mirko Lauer
(Peru) has published several books on art ‘Holy Kitschen: Collecting Religious Junk from
the Street’ was first published in Megalopolis,
and literature. He co-directs the Hueso
Contemporary Cultural Sensibilities (Minneapolis:
Húmero journal and the Mosca Azul University o f Minnesota Press, 1992), pp. 36-55.
publishing house, both in Lima.
‘Crisis de un Inventario’ was first published in “Women’s Art Practices and the Critique of Signs’
Identidad Uruguaya: ¿Mito, Crisis o Afirmación ?, was first published in Recovering Histories:
edited by Hugo Achúgar and Gerardo Caetano, Aspects o f Contemporary Art in Chile since 1982
Editorial Trilce, Montevideo, 1992, pp. 63-73. (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Center for Latino
Arts and Culture, Rutgers, the State University of
New Jersey, 1993), pp. 87-95. The exhibition was
Carolina Ponce de León
curated by Julia P Herzberg.
(Colombia) is an independent curator
and critic. She was curator and Head of ‘Postmodern Decentrednesses and Cultural
Periphery: The Disalignments and Realignments
the Visual Arts Division of the Biblioteca
of Cultural Power’ was first published in Art from
Luis ‘Angel Arango’ in Bogotá and co Latin America: La Cita Transcultural, Museum of
curator of ‘Ante América’. Contemporary Art, Sydney, 1993, pp. 69-78.
of Texas at Austin. She publishes Poetics and Politics o f Museum Display (Washington
DC and London: Smithsonian Institution Press,
regularly on issues of identity, power and
1991), pp. 128-50.
the politics of representation as they
relate to Latin American/Latino art.
George Yúdice
‘Beyond “the Fantastic” : Framing Identity in (El Salvador/USA) teaches Latin
US Exhibitions o f Latin American Art’ was first
American literature at Hunter College
published in Art Journal, New York, vol. 31, no. 4,
Winter 1992, pp. 60-8. and Cultural Studies at the City
University of New York. He has
periphery. She is the editor of the Revista Valoración Cultural’ was written as a paper for
‘Arte, Historia e Identidad en América’, the 17th
de Crítica Cultural in Santiago de Chile.
Coloquio Internacional de Historia del Arte,
‘Chile, Mujer y Disidencia’ was first published in Zacatecas, September 1993. It has since been
Nelly Richard, La Estratificación de los Márgenes, revised by the author.
Santiago de Chile, 1989, pp. 69-78.
Glossary
ACT UP Criollo
AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, Latin American of European, especially
formed c. 1987 as a direct-action Spanish, descent.
pressure group created to force the US
government to take action on AIDS. Estacioneros
Seasonal farmers.
Bantustans
Bantu homelands, the areas of South Iroquois
Africa designated for black South North-American Indian tribes of the
Africans by the Apartheid system. north-east US and eastern Canada; also
More generally, it refers to a ghetto in their languages.
which the residents are prevented from
participating fully in civil life. Mac Fajitas
A pun on McDonald’s using the popular
Barrio Mexican food fajitas (stuffed pancakes).
Neighbourhood, especially in relation to Mexican fast-food.
predominantly Latin areas in US cities.
Mestizaje
Campesino The racial and cultural mix of European,
‘Countryside-dweller’ , more neutral than Indian and African descendants typical
either ‘farmer’ or ‘peasant’. of Latin American society.
Charro Mixtéeos
Picturesque, quaint, can also mean brash Pre-Columbian American peoples
and kitsch. originally from Oaxaca, Mexico.
Chicano Nuyorrican
A citizen of the USA of Mexican origin New York resident of Puerto Rican origin
(from the Spanish mejicano: Mexican) (from New York and Puerto Rican).
Cholo-punk Pasioneros
Aesthetic that combines cholo (poor, Priests who carry out Easter services.
semi-delinquent) with Punk.
PEMEX
Petróleos Mexicanos, the state-owned
petrol monopoly in Mexico.
343 Glossary
Pesebres Velasquista
Nativity scenes, usually made by hand Refers to the military government of
with great skill. General Juan Velasco Alvarado in Peru
(1968-75). Velasco attempted to
Pueblitos reorganize the Peruvian state along lines
Little villages. that were ‘neither Capitalist nor
Communist’, involving ambitious land
Quechua reform and increased worker
People or language of the Andean region participation in industry,
of South America.
Santería
Afro-Cuban religion, fusing elements of
Catholicism with African beliefs.
Televisa
Mexico’s main television channel and
one of its richest and most influential
companies.
Tercermundismo
Literally ‘Third World-ism’, a defense of
the particular characteristics of Third
World culture.
Todo dar
‘Go-for-air.
Tupac Amarú
José Gabriel Condorcanqui [?) 1742-81,
Peruvian descendant of the last Inca
emperor who led an unsuccessful
rebellion against the Spanish in 1780, for
which he was executed. In the 1960s and
1970s a group of left-wing urban
guerrillas took the name ‘Tupamaros’ in
homage to Tupac Amarú.