Academic Sessions: Liverpool 2002
\'Latin American Art:\' The Critical Discourse from Within
Convenors:
Juan A. Martinez (Associate Professor of Art History, Florida International University, 6341 SW 18th St, Miami, FLA 33155, Fax: (305) 3486544. martinej@fiu.edu)
Alejandro Anreus (Art Department, Ben Shahn Hall, William Paterson University, 300 Pompton Rd, Wayne, NJ 07470. anreusfamily@home.com)
Introduction: The Discourse from Within
Juan A. Martinez
An extraordinary recognition of \'Latin American\' art began in the 1990s in both Europe and the United States. Major international exhibitions with ambitious catalogues, anthologies of art and art criticism, and thematic issues in international magazines have defined and categorized the problematic concept of a \'Latin American\' art during the past decade. Although some of the critics defining the contemporary production and marketing of art from Latin America or by Latin Americans have been outside observers, since the early 1960s there have been an increasing number of significant local commentators. Marta Traba, Jorge Romero Brest, Juan Acha, Raquel Tibol, Nestor García Canclini, Nelly Richard, Gerardo Mosquera and others have been creating a critical narrative of Latin America from within. Among the themes most discussed by these critics are the existence of a utopian Latin American identity, a culture of resistance, the dynamics of Periphery/Center relationships, the meanings of Modernity and Post-Modernity in the context of Latin America, etc. We call for papers on specific Latin American critics, or on themes in Latin American art criticism since the 1960s. We are also interested in Latino/a criticism within the U.S.A.
From Global to Regional: Marta Traba\'s Definitions of Latin American Art
Florencia Bazzano-Nelson (Georgia State University, USA)
Marta Traba\'s career as an art critic spanned from the early 1940s to the early 1980s. During these four decades, Traba\'s critical approach to the definition of \'Latin American art\' underwent changes so significant that they problematize interpretations that present her views as homogeneous. This paper will explore a shift in Traba\'s position about the art of Latin America through the analysis of two important texts; her essay "What Does \'An American Art\' Mean?," published in 1955 in the Colombian journal Mito, and her book Two Vulnerable decades in Latin American Plastic Arts, published in 1973, but written, in its first version, around 1969. In the 1950s, Traba denied the existence of a \'Latin American art.\' In accordance with an internationalist vision of modernism she inherited from Jorge Romero Brest, she denounced as detrimental fictions the definitions of national and continental indentities inscribed in the work of Colombian and Mexican muralists. In the 1960s, after confronting the challenge of the Cuban revolution, political persecution, and the influence of the United States over the culture of the hemisphere, Traba reformulated her critical framework. She abandoned her earlier aestheticism and favored an art whose ideological edge and ability to produce critical meanings required stronger links to its community of origin. While these two texts show a shift from the global to the regional, both coincide in one important regard: they give a sense of the theoretical horizon available to Latin American art critics during the 1950s and 1960s.
Rasquachismo and Domesticana: Aspects of Chicano/a Aesthetics and the Art Criticism of Tomas Ybarra Frausto and Amalia Mesa-Bains
Holly Barnet-Sanchez (University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, USA)
Chicano/a art began in the late 1960s in support of the Chicano Civil Rights Movement and developed into an art movement in its own right by the early 1970s. Although there were a few artists and art historians such as Tim Drescher, Rupert Garcia, Carmen Lomas Garza, Shifra Goldman, Yolanda Lopez, Malaquias Montoya, Patricia Rodriguez, and Pedro Rodriguez, among others, who wrote, spoke about, and taught Chicano/a art, it wasn\'t until after 1985 that the aesthetics of Chicano/a art was addressed or theorized in a meaningful fashion. This artistically and politically delicate issue was first approached by Tomas Ybarra-Frausto, a Stanford University professor of Chicano literature who had developed an ongoing interest in the visual arts. His concept-rasquachismo-an aesthetics of "los de abajo" that has been articulated in a number of publications beginning with the 1991 CARA exhibition catalogue encapsulated many of the public and private debates among Chicano/a artists as well as contributed a concrete structure by which to view and understand many aspects (but not all) of Chicano/a visual expression. In the early 1990s, artist, scholar, critic, and educator, Amalia Mesa-Bains, added a refinement or additional layering to Ybarra-Frausto\'s conceptual structure which by then had become a familiar element of the discourse on Chicano/a art, with the publication of her specifically feminine/feminist aesthetic construct of "domesticana," which she saw as an adjunct to or elaboration of rasquachismo. This paper seeks to analyze in some detail, these two structures of art criticism created within the Chicano/a art movement and to analyze the implications of the ideas imbedded in them for a) the analysis of works of Chicano/a art, and b) the further development of a complex, multilayered, and effective art critical discourse for the understanding of Chicano/a art and its connections to other Latino/a art, Latin American art, mainstream art of the United States and Europe as well as other artistic production labelled either as Third World or diasporic.
Rewriting Modernism: Romero Brest and Other Genealogies for Modern Art
Andrea Giunta (Universidad de Buenos Aires, Argentina)
The purpose of this paper is to analyse the strategies Romero Brest elaborated in order to explain Pop Art without breaking with tradition. In 1962 the Argentinian art critic Jorge Romero Brest was for the first time in front of an Oldenburg\'s hamburger made of canvas filled with rubber foam and cardboard boxes. Years later he wrote about the shock he received looking at a work of art that was in total contradiction to all he had learned and taught about the development of modern art. For Romero Brest, who had spent a lot of energy trying to introduce the idea of modern art into Latin America and into the art of his own country, Argentina, this was terribly upsetting. Romero Brest was a seminal critic in Latin America. At the beginning of the 1960s, he was in a situation comparable to that of Clement Greenberg. Just like the American critic, Brest had defended formalism and high art against kitsch and the effects of the widespread consequences of industrial civilisation. But instead of taking Greenberg\'s position that defined him as representative of modernism against the emergent aesthetics, Brest tried to understand the changes. As the Director of the Instituto Di Tella - an experimental center whose main objective was to establish Argentinian art in the world - he couldn\'t close the doors to what seemed to be the "new" art. The conceptual contradictions of Brest\'s critical and curatorial discourses reproduced the traps that beset the artistic development of a country that, from the periphery, was awaiting the appropriate context to leap into the hub of the center. This paper will focus on a paradigmatic critic to understand the process of Latin American art in the 1960s.
Critiquing the Critique: Some Thoughts on Latin American Art Criticism
Conclusions: Alejandro Anreus
The art criticism that we might define as \'Modern\' emerged in Latin America as a commentary on the manifestations of avant-garde art in Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, Peru and Cuba. The stylistic roots of these criticisms is to be found in polemical journalism as well as literary criticism. Conceptually, these criticisms synthesized a concern for the authentically national, the formal innovations of the avant-garde, and a utopic aspiration with Marxist dimensions. Authors like Andrade, Vallejo, Borges, Novo and Carpentier wrote some of this early criticism, so did theorists/philosophers like Mariátegui, Vasconcelos, Marinello and Mañach. In the mid to late 1930s a slew of \'professional\' art critics emerge: Julio Payro and Jorge Romero Brest in Argentina, Guy Pérez Cisneros and José Gómez Sicre in Cuba, and most significantly the Guatemalan Luis Cardoza y Aragón (who is also an important poet), who will produce his entire body of work as an exilein Mexico. Cardoza\'s discourse synthesized a lyrical prose with the aesthetic openness of Surrealism, as well as a Marxist understanding for the social basis of art. After Cardoza, the criticism becomes denser and more dynamic, we can state simplistically that art criticism from the late 1950s through the 1960s in the Spanish-speaking Americas could be seen as a polemic between Mexico\'s Raquel Tibol and Colombia\'s Marta Traba (both are Argentinean women!). Tibol comes out of the \'Old Left\' and her discourse is connected to Mexican muralism, particularly Siqueiros, while Traba reflects the \'New Left\' and her discourse is connected with both Informalismo and Neo-Figuración. After Traba, and perhaps because of her, critical theory enters the mainstream of art criticism in Latin America. Juan Acha, Nestor García Canclini, Nelly Richard, Gerardo Mosquera, etc., are only possible in a \'post-Traba\' environment. Marxism, particularly connected to the Cuban Revolution of 1959, is a significant component in all of this. Yet the question remains: can there be an independent, truly critical, even Marxist, art criticism in Latin America, which avoids \'the party line\' regarding Cuba and the institutionalization of the Left?
Juan A. Martinez (Associate Professor of Art History, Florida International University, 6341 SW 18th St, Miami, FLA 33155, Fax: (305) 3486544. martinej@fiu.edu)
Alejandro Anreus (Art Department, Ben Shahn Hall, William Paterson University, 300 Pompton Rd, Wayne, NJ 07470. anreusfamily@home.com)
Introduction: The Discourse from Within
Juan A. Martinez
An extraordinary recognition of \'Latin American\' art began in the 1990s in both Europe and the United States. Major international exhibitions with ambitious catalogues, anthologies of art and art criticism, and thematic issues in international magazines have defined and categorized the problematic concept of a \'Latin American\' art during the past decade. Although some of the critics defining the contemporary production and marketing of art from Latin America or by Latin Americans have been outside observers, since the early 1960s there have been an increasing number of significant local commentators. Marta Traba, Jorge Romero Brest, Juan Acha, Raquel Tibol, Nestor García Canclini, Nelly Richard, Gerardo Mosquera and others have been creating a critical narrative of Latin America from within. Among the themes most discussed by these critics are the existence of a utopian Latin American identity, a culture of resistance, the dynamics of Periphery/Center relationships, the meanings of Modernity and Post-Modernity in the context of Latin America, etc. We call for papers on specific Latin American critics, or on themes in Latin American art criticism since the 1960s. We are also interested in Latino/a criticism within the U.S.A.
From Global to Regional: Marta Traba\'s Definitions of Latin American Art
Florencia Bazzano-Nelson (Georgia State University, USA)
Marta Traba\'s career as an art critic spanned from the early 1940s to the early 1980s. During these four decades, Traba\'s critical approach to the definition of \'Latin American art\' underwent changes so significant that they problematize interpretations that present her views as homogeneous. This paper will explore a shift in Traba\'s position about the art of Latin America through the analysis of two important texts; her essay "What Does \'An American Art\' Mean?," published in 1955 in the Colombian journal Mito, and her book Two Vulnerable decades in Latin American Plastic Arts, published in 1973, but written, in its first version, around 1969. In the 1950s, Traba denied the existence of a \'Latin American art.\' In accordance with an internationalist vision of modernism she inherited from Jorge Romero Brest, she denounced as detrimental fictions the definitions of national and continental indentities inscribed in the work of Colombian and Mexican muralists. In the 1960s, after confronting the challenge of the Cuban revolution, political persecution, and the influence of the United States over the culture of the hemisphere, Traba reformulated her critical framework. She abandoned her earlier aestheticism and favored an art whose ideological edge and ability to produce critical meanings required stronger links to its community of origin. While these two texts show a shift from the global to the regional, both coincide in one important regard: they give a sense of the theoretical horizon available to Latin American art critics during the 1950s and 1960s.
Rasquachismo and Domesticana: Aspects of Chicano/a Aesthetics and the Art Criticism of Tomas Ybarra Frausto and Amalia Mesa-Bains
Holly Barnet-Sanchez (University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, USA)
Chicano/a art began in the late 1960s in support of the Chicano Civil Rights Movement and developed into an art movement in its own right by the early 1970s. Although there were a few artists and art historians such as Tim Drescher, Rupert Garcia, Carmen Lomas Garza, Shifra Goldman, Yolanda Lopez, Malaquias Montoya, Patricia Rodriguez, and Pedro Rodriguez, among others, who wrote, spoke about, and taught Chicano/a art, it wasn\'t until after 1985 that the aesthetics of Chicano/a art was addressed or theorized in a meaningful fashion. This artistically and politically delicate issue was first approached by Tomas Ybarra-Frausto, a Stanford University professor of Chicano literature who had developed an ongoing interest in the visual arts. His concept-rasquachismo-an aesthetics of "los de abajo" that has been articulated in a number of publications beginning with the 1991 CARA exhibition catalogue encapsulated many of the public and private debates among Chicano/a artists as well as contributed a concrete structure by which to view and understand many aspects (but not all) of Chicano/a visual expression. In the early 1990s, artist, scholar, critic, and educator, Amalia Mesa-Bains, added a refinement or additional layering to Ybarra-Frausto\'s conceptual structure which by then had become a familiar element of the discourse on Chicano/a art, with the publication of her specifically feminine/feminist aesthetic construct of "domesticana," which she saw as an adjunct to or elaboration of rasquachismo. This paper seeks to analyze in some detail, these two structures of art criticism created within the Chicano/a art movement and to analyze the implications of the ideas imbedded in them for a) the analysis of works of Chicano/a art, and b) the further development of a complex, multilayered, and effective art critical discourse for the understanding of Chicano/a art and its connections to other Latino/a art, Latin American art, mainstream art of the United States and Europe as well as other artistic production labelled either as Third World or diasporic.
Rewriting Modernism: Romero Brest and Other Genealogies for Modern Art
Andrea Giunta (Universidad de Buenos Aires, Argentina)
The purpose of this paper is to analyse the strategies Romero Brest elaborated in order to explain Pop Art without breaking with tradition. In 1962 the Argentinian art critic Jorge Romero Brest was for the first time in front of an Oldenburg\'s hamburger made of canvas filled with rubber foam and cardboard boxes. Years later he wrote about the shock he received looking at a work of art that was in total contradiction to all he had learned and taught about the development of modern art. For Romero Brest, who had spent a lot of energy trying to introduce the idea of modern art into Latin America and into the art of his own country, Argentina, this was terribly upsetting. Romero Brest was a seminal critic in Latin America. At the beginning of the 1960s, he was in a situation comparable to that of Clement Greenberg. Just like the American critic, Brest had defended formalism and high art against kitsch and the effects of the widespread consequences of industrial civilisation. But instead of taking Greenberg\'s position that defined him as representative of modernism against the emergent aesthetics, Brest tried to understand the changes. As the Director of the Instituto Di Tella - an experimental center whose main objective was to establish Argentinian art in the world - he couldn\'t close the doors to what seemed to be the "new" art. The conceptual contradictions of Brest\'s critical and curatorial discourses reproduced the traps that beset the artistic development of a country that, from the periphery, was awaiting the appropriate context to leap into the hub of the center. This paper will focus on a paradigmatic critic to understand the process of Latin American art in the 1960s.
Critiquing the Critique: Some Thoughts on Latin American Art Criticism
Conclusions: Alejandro Anreus
The art criticism that we might define as \'Modern\' emerged in Latin America as a commentary on the manifestations of avant-garde art in Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, Peru and Cuba. The stylistic roots of these criticisms is to be found in polemical journalism as well as literary criticism. Conceptually, these criticisms synthesized a concern for the authentically national, the formal innovations of the avant-garde, and a utopic aspiration with Marxist dimensions. Authors like Andrade, Vallejo, Borges, Novo and Carpentier wrote some of this early criticism, so did theorists/philosophers like Mariátegui, Vasconcelos, Marinello and Mañach. In the mid to late 1930s a slew of \'professional\' art critics emerge: Julio Payro and Jorge Romero Brest in Argentina, Guy Pérez Cisneros and José Gómez Sicre in Cuba, and most significantly the Guatemalan Luis Cardoza y Aragón (who is also an important poet), who will produce his entire body of work as an exilein Mexico. Cardoza\'s discourse synthesized a lyrical prose with the aesthetic openness of Surrealism, as well as a Marxist understanding for the social basis of art. After Cardoza, the criticism becomes denser and more dynamic, we can state simplistically that art criticism from the late 1950s through the 1960s in the Spanish-speaking Americas could be seen as a polemic between Mexico\'s Raquel Tibol and Colombia\'s Marta Traba (both are Argentinean women!). Tibol comes out of the \'Old Left\' and her discourse is connected to Mexican muralism, particularly Siqueiros, while Traba reflects the \'New Left\' and her discourse is connected with both Informalismo and Neo-Figuración. After Traba, and perhaps because of her, critical theory enters the mainstream of art criticism in Latin America. Juan Acha, Nestor García Canclini, Nelly Richard, Gerardo Mosquera, etc., are only possible in a \'post-Traba\' environment. Marxism, particularly connected to the Cuban Revolution of 1959, is a significant component in all of this. Yet the question remains: can there be an independent, truly critical, even Marxist, art criticism in Latin America, which avoids \'the party line\' regarding Cuba and the institutionalization of the Left?