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| Response for the panel “Locating
Abstraction”* Kaira M. Cabañas, Columbia University |
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| Together these papers highlight two main concerns that situate the study of modern art in Latin America. On the one hand, there is the repeated thematic reference to the rejection of a pictorial language solely premised on European modernism in favor of what I would call, following Gayatri Spivak, a “strategic essentialism”—that is, a desire on the part of artists be it in Brazil or Cuba to infuse their work with images of the local as a way to create a nationalist visual language, particularly in the 1920s and 30s. Indeed, this “strategic essentialism” in search of “Brazilianess” or lo cubano became a way for artists to instantiate a rupture with the traditions of European painting. On the other hand, the papers also address the historical moment of the 1950s and the general move toward abstraction, be it geometric in the case of Brazil and Venezuela or gestural in the case of Cuba. At this time, artists abandoned the iconographic and figurative elements associated with an earlier generation of painters. Yet the limit case in the context of this panel is the work of Elenor Koch in relation to the development of concrete art in Brazil. I’ll come back to this point when I speak to Fernanda’s paper. For me, I think what is largely at stake in these papers, and in the writing on abstraction in Latin America more generally, is the question of how to write this history without falling into the tropes of the fantastic, peripheral, derivative, imported or even the inverted, as proposed in the title of Mari-Carmen Ramírez’s exhibition Inverted Utopias. Indeed, the terms usually associated with Latin American art—at least in the United States and thus the particular context in which and from which I speak—position artists in Latin America as always already other or through a model of “inversion” do not necessarily chip away at the dichotomous thinking that largely subtends such a framework. Here, I would like to add that it would be productive to revisit the concept of “network” that Dan introduced this morning as a way of problematizing the model of “constellation” proposed by Inverted Utopias. Moving on to the papers, I will pose some questions that the speakers may choose to think about further or address at this time. * Taisa, in terms of your assessment of Guignard’s paintings as painting, you chart a shift toward an “atmospheric expansion” that ultimately serves as the pictorial ground within which architectural elements are situated. It is with the development of this abstract spatiality that you direct our attention to the autonomy of painting, foregrounding the dissolution of form and the materialization of pictorial devices in Guignard’s work. In this context, would it be productive for you to think about the late Guignard in relation to Armando Reverón? Luis Pérez-Oramas describes Reverón’s work within the terms of what he calls an “involuntary modernism.” This concept might be quite suggestive for you in accounting for Guignard’s work and the tension it exhibits between visual description and modernist effects. Fernanda, you ask how is one to think Koch’s “non adherence to ‘pure’ constructivism”? You begin to develop a possible answer to the question you pose, and I would like to ask to what extent you might think about Koch’s non-pure concretism as anticipating in the realm of painting some of the concerns that are ultimately radicalized in the work of neo-concrete artists. For me, this is ultimately to ask: What is Koch’s relation to phenomenology? Her early work exhibits a tension between materiality—the unevenness of the pigment load in each stroke, as well as the luminosity of her technique—and the way that line does not serve to imitate the visible, but rather renders visible within her application of abstract colored planes. Can you elaborate on this tension between what one sees and what one is given to conceptually understand through Koch’s rather limited use of line in her paintings of the early 1960s? And could you further place her work in relation to her contemporaries? For example, you might consider the work in relation to Idéia visível (1956) by Waldemar Cordeiro. Megan, you persuasively develop the cultural anxiety in Venezuela that “Venezuela had to catch up with Universal time.” But rather than the grid “covering over” and “replacing the sky” as you maintain, what might it mean in the context of Otero’s Policromías to say that the grid and sky are looked at together, that they exist in metonymic or even indexical relation with one another. Basically, I would like to put forth a few questions: How do the material conditions that the Policromías inhabit (i.e., the light and sky, their attendant changes depending on the season and time of day) modify the perception of the Policromías’ blue colored surfaces? How can one begin to think Otero’s polychromatic grid apart from the model of “importation” that you propose? My final question concerns more specifically local architectural traditions in relation to polychromy and whether in distinguishing the tradition of policromía from the mural you might further nuance your analysis. Thus, together with Otero’s Policromías, I would like to show two images of colonial churches in Venezuela that highlight this polychromatic tradition, which is to be distinguished from the mural tradition. In the case of Cuba, Abby, your paper nicely contributes to an understanding of how abstraction is made to signify in different ways and how the very ambiguity or ambivalence of abstraction—its lack of explicit iconographic motivation—in large measure determines its abandonment in Cuba. However, you end by framing the revolution as perhaps a bit too punctual in its abandonment of abstract art. And, while outside the purview of your paper, I was wondering if you have thought about the contributions of members of Los Once in attempting to define a revolutionary aesthetic (in particular Hugo Consuegra). Also, given that the dominant mode of painterly abstraction in Cuba differs from abstraction as it unfolds in Argentina, Venezuela and Brazil, how do you account for the historical specificity of Cuban abstract painting in terms of the prominence of geometric abstraction in these other Latin American countries? * Lastly, I would like all panelists to position their work in relation to the discursive framing and conceptual conceit of the symposium, Latin America: The Last Avant-Garde. How is one to think about this lastness that in some instances is experienced as if for the first time. And is lastness something that ultimately never arrives, a perpetual deferment that leaves the possibility of an avant-garde an open question for the future rather that the product of a foreclosed past.
*Author’s note: Aspects of the text’s oral presentation have remained unchanged in its present incarnation. |
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