Academic Sessions: Liverpool 2002
The Latin-American Left and Avant-garde Art, or Jose Carlos Mariategui and Unorthodox Socialism
Convenors:
David Craven (David Craven, Department of Art and Art History, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM 87131-1401, USA, Tel: (001) 505 277 2513, Fax: (001) 505 277 5955, kbelle@unm.edu or mamdur@unm.edu)
Jose Carlos Mariategui (1894-1930) of Peru was one of the most original thinkers from Latin America in the entire 20th century. Significantly, he is often called the \'Latin American counterpart to Gramsci\' because of the way that he analysed art and culture in relation to uneven development. His unorthodox use of classical Marxism caused him to write with striking subtlety about avant-garde art from both sides of the Atlantic and beyond. A key forum for his analysis of early modernism was his journal Amauta (1926-1930). While Mariategui has often been hailed in political theory for his resourceful look at the role of the popular classes in a \'war of positions\' against hegemonic forces and sometimes praised in literary theory for his nuanced examination of contemporary literature, he has been almost ignored in Art History. This is the case despite his active support for the Mexican Mural Renaissance during the 1920s and notwithstanding his notable impact on cultural policy immediately following both the Cuban Revolution of 1959 and the Nicaraguan Revolution of 1979. Our session will explore the rich yet overlooked contribution of Mariategui to a critical engagement with Latin American and European art.
The Panamanian Origins of \'Latin America\'
Aimes McGuiness (University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, USA)
In our exploration of race and nation within what we now call Latin America, latter-day scholars would do well to recall how \'American Latina\' as a spatial category has itself been racialised, beginning with its inception in 1850s. Recent scholarship on Pan-Latinism in the 1850s has made it increasingly clear how early advocates of Pan-Latin politics were active participants in contemporary debates over race and politics, rather than the passive recipients of a terminology invented by European intellectuals. As Torres Cacideo and Arosemena hoisted the banner of a united Latin America, they did not simply mimic ideas emanating from Europe. They participated in their very formation in public speeches, newsprint, and other venues. Arosemena\'s call for \'Latin American\' unity in Bogota in July 1856 suggests that we must rethink the chronology and the geography of Pan-Latinism in the 1850s yet again. Rather than the invention of any single individual or any single place, the creation of \'America Latina\' is perhaps better understood as the product of a more complex struggle over questions of sovereignty, race, and empire in the 1850s. This was a struggle with multiple fronts, ranging from the battlefields of central Americas and the salons of Paris to the pages of Bogatano newspapers. The importance of Justo Arosemena as an \'americanista,\' or as an advocate of Latin American unity, has been touched upon many times by Don Justos\' numerous biographers. But the role that Arosomena played in the creation and diffusion of the very concept of \'America Latina\' in the mid-1850s has gone relatively unappreciated. Indeed, many historians continue to assume that the notion of a specifically \'Latin\' America did not gain widespread currency until the 1860s, in the context of Napoleon III\'s intervention in Mexico.
Mariategui\'s Influence on Nicaragua\'s Art Since 1979
Raul Quintanilla (art critic/editor ArteFacto, Nicaragua)
Few other modern thinkers influenced the Nicaraguan Revolution of 1979 more than did Jose Carlos Mariategui. Moreover, that influence has outlasted the Sandanistas\'s impressive decade in power. Since 1990, Mariategui has continued to influence progressive artists who have critically engaged with the neo-liberal policies instituted by the post-revolutionary administrations allied to US interests in the area. This paper will deal with the way that Mariategui\'s conception of uneven historical development still influences the artistic practice of such leading Nicaraguans as those linked to ArteFacto, Central America\'s main art journal.
Marcos, or the Mariateguist Gospel According to Enrique Krauze
Sergio Rivera-Ayala (Wayne State University, USA)
When the Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN) rebellion began in the state of Chiapas in January 1994, the Salinas de Gortari administration as well as most of the Mexican media tried to discredit it. Specifically, they attempted to portray the Zapatistas as a guerrilla movement sorely out-of-step in an era in which modernity - modernidad - was linked to the idea of democratic process and, more importantly, to the market economy of neo-liberal ideology. Within the official discourse, the Zapatista leadership was either referred to as a group of foreigners or said to be supported by a foreign state, particularly Cuba. One twist of this view was Mexican historian Enrique Krauze who proposed that the popular ideology behind Subcomandante Marcos, the EZLN leader, is linked to the Peruvian intellectual Juan Carlos Mariategui. To support this argument, Krauze makes an analogy between Peru and Chiapas in part by underlying the sociopolitical and historic similarities of the Andean country and the Mexican State. Krauze\'s view of Peruvian writers makes Marateui look like a far left ideologue, almost fundamentalist. With this in mind he is not only disparaging Mariategui\'s social thought but also that of Marcos. The present paper will show the discursive strategies used by Enrique Krauze to establish a link between Mariategui and Marcos as he seeks to portray the latter as an obselete far left ideologue.
The Face of Socialism: George Grosz and Jose Carlos Mariategui\'s Amauta
Barbara McCloskey (University of Pittsburgh, USA)
This paper considers the relationship between George Grosz, Communist Party artist and Weimar Germany\'s most notorious satiric illustrator, and Jose Carlos Marietegui in the 1920s. The political incisiveness of Grosz\'s works, which characteristically included caustic images of fleshy, scarred German bourgeois types, landed him in court on three separate occasions in the 1920s on charges of insulting the military, obscenity, and blasphemy, respectively. Given the cultural and political specificity of Grosz\'s work, it is surprising that Mariategui chose to feature essays on the artist and frequent reproductions of his art in his radical Peruvian journal Amauta. This paper explores their connection, including Mariategui\'s early essay on Grosz as well as Grosz\'s written contribution to Amauta and the function of his illustrations within the journal\'s overall programme. An analysis of their collaboration not only expands our historical understanding of Grosz\'s art but also illuminates the contours of Mariategui\'s aesthetic and political thought. Mariategui\'s interpretations of Grosz\'s work reveal certain affinities with Lukacs, Trotsky, and Sorel on aesthetics. His use of Grosz\'s art in Amauta also highlights the question of embodiment in Mariategui\'s politics and the specific \'face\' he gave to socialism and the idiosyncratic Marxism for which he became recognised.
Nueva York: Puerto Rico\'s Largest City and Art Capital
Petra Barreras (University of Puerto Rico at Rio Piedras, Puerto Rico)
Puerto Rico, the easternmost of the Greater Antilles, 100 miles long by 35 miles wide, has generated a disproportionate amount of powerful visual expressions since the 1950s. Beginning in the 16th century, the island\'s colonial relationship with Spain first and then with the United States since 1898, has inhibited the development of its socioeconomic, political, and governmental structures. While the repression in these areas has been brutal at times, cultural production, unattended, has more room to grow, on occasion even supported by the colonial governments. In the 1960s and 1970s, the migration of close to one million Puerto Ricans (one third of the Island\'s population), to the New York area create the breeding ground for new artistic trends to develop. The Nuyoricans took advantage of the resources in the city that had become the art capital of the world; they also benefited from the Afro-American civil rights fight, and from the \'back to the roots\' movement it generated. Four Puerto Rican visual artists living in New York, Philadephia, and Chicago have attained critical recognition since the 1980s with work that explores a \'minor\' migrant culture: Rafael Ferrer, Juan Sanchez, Amaldo Roche, and Pepon Osorio.
Interchange and Isolation: Distance and Intimacy with the Metropolis in Puerto Rican Art
Nathan E. Bodoff (University of Puerto Rico at Rio Piedras, Puerto Rico)
There is a great deal of tension orbiting the juncture or disjuncture between national, regional, and global. In cultural terms these notions are often extraordinarily charged. Puerto Rico\'s unique status as an unincorporated territory of the United States has fomented an especially strong desire to project and protect a fully autonomous culture. Yet this curious relationship is one of the elements that has formed a rich artistic culture in Puerto Rico. This intimacy with New York can be seen as effecting the artistic environment from the beginning of the past century, but I will focus on two artists from the Generacion de los cinquenta, Jack Delano and Rafael Tufino. Their generation most directly addresses art to social and educational issues. Jack Delano, an American, and Rafael Tufino, born in New York, were key figures in developing Puerto Rican art; a dialogue with ideas from the metropolis is essential to their work. The occasional immigration of artists to the island and a flow of local artists to and from New York has created the mixture of isolation and cosmopolitanism that allows distinct ideas to flourish. I will present my own work as a recent example in this continuum.
David Craven (David Craven, Department of Art and Art History, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM 87131-1401, USA, Tel: (001) 505 277 2513, Fax: (001) 505 277 5955, kbelle@unm.edu or mamdur@unm.edu)
Jose Carlos Mariategui (1894-1930) of Peru was one of the most original thinkers from Latin America in the entire 20th century. Significantly, he is often called the \'Latin American counterpart to Gramsci\' because of the way that he analysed art and culture in relation to uneven development. His unorthodox use of classical Marxism caused him to write with striking subtlety about avant-garde art from both sides of the Atlantic and beyond. A key forum for his analysis of early modernism was his journal Amauta (1926-1930). While Mariategui has often been hailed in political theory for his resourceful look at the role of the popular classes in a \'war of positions\' against hegemonic forces and sometimes praised in literary theory for his nuanced examination of contemporary literature, he has been almost ignored in Art History. This is the case despite his active support for the Mexican Mural Renaissance during the 1920s and notwithstanding his notable impact on cultural policy immediately following both the Cuban Revolution of 1959 and the Nicaraguan Revolution of 1979. Our session will explore the rich yet overlooked contribution of Mariategui to a critical engagement with Latin American and European art.
The Panamanian Origins of \'Latin America\'
Aimes McGuiness (University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, USA)
In our exploration of race and nation within what we now call Latin America, latter-day scholars would do well to recall how \'American Latina\' as a spatial category has itself been racialised, beginning with its inception in 1850s. Recent scholarship on Pan-Latinism in the 1850s has made it increasingly clear how early advocates of Pan-Latin politics were active participants in contemporary debates over race and politics, rather than the passive recipients of a terminology invented by European intellectuals. As Torres Cacideo and Arosemena hoisted the banner of a united Latin America, they did not simply mimic ideas emanating from Europe. They participated in their very formation in public speeches, newsprint, and other venues. Arosemena\'s call for \'Latin American\' unity in Bogota in July 1856 suggests that we must rethink the chronology and the geography of Pan-Latinism in the 1850s yet again. Rather than the invention of any single individual or any single place, the creation of \'America Latina\' is perhaps better understood as the product of a more complex struggle over questions of sovereignty, race, and empire in the 1850s. This was a struggle with multiple fronts, ranging from the battlefields of central Americas and the salons of Paris to the pages of Bogatano newspapers. The importance of Justo Arosemena as an \'americanista,\' or as an advocate of Latin American unity, has been touched upon many times by Don Justos\' numerous biographers. But the role that Arosomena played in the creation and diffusion of the very concept of \'America Latina\' in the mid-1850s has gone relatively unappreciated. Indeed, many historians continue to assume that the notion of a specifically \'Latin\' America did not gain widespread currency until the 1860s, in the context of Napoleon III\'s intervention in Mexico.
Mariategui\'s Influence on Nicaragua\'s Art Since 1979
Raul Quintanilla (art critic/editor ArteFacto, Nicaragua)
Few other modern thinkers influenced the Nicaraguan Revolution of 1979 more than did Jose Carlos Mariategui. Moreover, that influence has outlasted the Sandanistas\'s impressive decade in power. Since 1990, Mariategui has continued to influence progressive artists who have critically engaged with the neo-liberal policies instituted by the post-revolutionary administrations allied to US interests in the area. This paper will deal with the way that Mariategui\'s conception of uneven historical development still influences the artistic practice of such leading Nicaraguans as those linked to ArteFacto, Central America\'s main art journal.
Marcos, or the Mariateguist Gospel According to Enrique Krauze
Sergio Rivera-Ayala (Wayne State University, USA)
When the Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN) rebellion began in the state of Chiapas in January 1994, the Salinas de Gortari administration as well as most of the Mexican media tried to discredit it. Specifically, they attempted to portray the Zapatistas as a guerrilla movement sorely out-of-step in an era in which modernity - modernidad - was linked to the idea of democratic process and, more importantly, to the market economy of neo-liberal ideology. Within the official discourse, the Zapatista leadership was either referred to as a group of foreigners or said to be supported by a foreign state, particularly Cuba. One twist of this view was Mexican historian Enrique Krauze who proposed that the popular ideology behind Subcomandante Marcos, the EZLN leader, is linked to the Peruvian intellectual Juan Carlos Mariategui. To support this argument, Krauze makes an analogy between Peru and Chiapas in part by underlying the sociopolitical and historic similarities of the Andean country and the Mexican State. Krauze\'s view of Peruvian writers makes Marateui look like a far left ideologue, almost fundamentalist. With this in mind he is not only disparaging Mariategui\'s social thought but also that of Marcos. The present paper will show the discursive strategies used by Enrique Krauze to establish a link between Mariategui and Marcos as he seeks to portray the latter as an obselete far left ideologue.
The Face of Socialism: George Grosz and Jose Carlos Mariategui\'s Amauta
Barbara McCloskey (University of Pittsburgh, USA)
This paper considers the relationship between George Grosz, Communist Party artist and Weimar Germany\'s most notorious satiric illustrator, and Jose Carlos Marietegui in the 1920s. The political incisiveness of Grosz\'s works, which characteristically included caustic images of fleshy, scarred German bourgeois types, landed him in court on three separate occasions in the 1920s on charges of insulting the military, obscenity, and blasphemy, respectively. Given the cultural and political specificity of Grosz\'s work, it is surprising that Mariategui chose to feature essays on the artist and frequent reproductions of his art in his radical Peruvian journal Amauta. This paper explores their connection, including Mariategui\'s early essay on Grosz as well as Grosz\'s written contribution to Amauta and the function of his illustrations within the journal\'s overall programme. An analysis of their collaboration not only expands our historical understanding of Grosz\'s art but also illuminates the contours of Mariategui\'s aesthetic and political thought. Mariategui\'s interpretations of Grosz\'s work reveal certain affinities with Lukacs, Trotsky, and Sorel on aesthetics. His use of Grosz\'s art in Amauta also highlights the question of embodiment in Mariategui\'s politics and the specific \'face\' he gave to socialism and the idiosyncratic Marxism for which he became recognised.
Nueva York: Puerto Rico\'s Largest City and Art Capital
Petra Barreras (University of Puerto Rico at Rio Piedras, Puerto Rico)
Puerto Rico, the easternmost of the Greater Antilles, 100 miles long by 35 miles wide, has generated a disproportionate amount of powerful visual expressions since the 1950s. Beginning in the 16th century, the island\'s colonial relationship with Spain first and then with the United States since 1898, has inhibited the development of its socioeconomic, political, and governmental structures. While the repression in these areas has been brutal at times, cultural production, unattended, has more room to grow, on occasion even supported by the colonial governments. In the 1960s and 1970s, the migration of close to one million Puerto Ricans (one third of the Island\'s population), to the New York area create the breeding ground for new artistic trends to develop. The Nuyoricans took advantage of the resources in the city that had become the art capital of the world; they also benefited from the Afro-American civil rights fight, and from the \'back to the roots\' movement it generated. Four Puerto Rican visual artists living in New York, Philadephia, and Chicago have attained critical recognition since the 1980s with work that explores a \'minor\' migrant culture: Rafael Ferrer, Juan Sanchez, Amaldo Roche, and Pepon Osorio.
Interchange and Isolation: Distance and Intimacy with the Metropolis in Puerto Rican Art
Nathan E. Bodoff (University of Puerto Rico at Rio Piedras, Puerto Rico)
There is a great deal of tension orbiting the juncture or disjuncture between national, regional, and global. In cultural terms these notions are often extraordinarily charged. Puerto Rico\'s unique status as an unincorporated territory of the United States has fomented an especially strong desire to project and protect a fully autonomous culture. Yet this curious relationship is one of the elements that has formed a rich artistic culture in Puerto Rico. This intimacy with New York can be seen as effecting the artistic environment from the beginning of the past century, but I will focus on two artists from the Generacion de los cinquenta, Jack Delano and Rafael Tufino. Their generation most directly addresses art to social and educational issues. Jack Delano, an American, and Rafael Tufino, born in New York, were key figures in developing Puerto Rican art; a dialogue with ideas from the metropolis is essential to their work. The occasional immigration of artists to the island and a flow of local artists to and from New York has created the mixture of isolation and cosmopolitanism that allows distinct ideas to flourish. I will present my own work as a recent example in this continuum.