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| The Archival
Avant-garde Avant-garde: Latin American Art & The UK Taína Caragol & Isobel Whitelegg, Department of Art History & Theory, University of Essex, UK |
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| This co-authored paper is informed by a project in which we are each involved as researchers at the University of Essex. Modern and Contemporary Latin American Art in the UK: History, Historiography, Specificity is a preliminary study of the presence and critical reception of art and artists from Latin America in the UK, covering from the 1960s to the present.[1] This research defines our perspective in considering the topic and presuppositions of this symposium. Focusing on exhibition practice, our paper compares different interpretations of the history of Latin American modern art from a US and a UK perspective. Amongst US exhibitions, the premise of this symposium invites consideration of the 2004 show Inverted Utopias: Avant-garde Art in Latin America, held at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the theoretical model posited by its curators Mari Carmen Ramírez and Héctor Olea. We accept an implicit invitation to discuss this show, and admit to instrumentalizing it somewhat for comparison. In contradistinction, we argue that the conceit of “Latin American art as the site of the last avant-garde” has no currency within UK exhibition practice. To reinforce this, we will present two manifestations of an alternative approach, one that we are positing as characteristic of the present development of the UK field. The exhibitions Transcontinental (1990) and Oiticica in London (2007) do not attempt to insert the art of Latin America within the established canon of Modernism, nor do they position it in relation to the project of the historical avant-garde. Instead an interpretation of history is formed via a focused archival and empirical review of artistic practice. Differences: UK and USA fields of study The differences in approach inherent to the US and UK relate, we argue, to the different structure of Modern Latin American art as a field of study within each country. In relation to the UK, this symposium’s presupposition that Modern Latin American art is re-emerging as a priority needs to be qualified. In Britain, Modern Latin American Art qua Modern Latin American Art is not a priority in academia or the museum. Within the academic discipline of Art History & Theory, there is one department that validates Latin American Art & Architecture as a specialist area of post-graduate study, and this makes the description of it as a “field” difficult to justify; it comes into being as such only when it operates internationally. To sustain Modern Latin American Art as a sufficiently dynamic field within the UK, it has long been necessary to form collaborations with adjacent areas of study (e.g. Latin American Studies, Modern and Contemporary Art History). Over the past decade, the possibilities for collaboration have increased, and they continue to proliferate. This poses a structural tension: in order to be able to state that diverse research in Latin American art is taking place in the UK, a nominal field, i.e. Latin American art, must persist at the same moment that its limiting geographical specificity is either criticized or disregarded. Within the UK field therefore, the subject of the modern history of Latin American art functions somewhat as a cipher. A recent development (our own project is symptomatic) is self-consciousness of this fact; an awareness that studying such a history is particularly anomalous in a location where there is not a defined market for Latin American art, no immediately obvious geo-political links, and limited access to Latin American artworks. Since the first, and only survey of Modern Latin American art in the UK, in 1989, it has been possible to perceive this incipient self-consciousness, its transformation into distinctive interpretative strategies that include, most recently, an effort to authenticate the apparently anomalous ownership of Latin American art in the UK. Comparison: Inverted Utopias The way in which the study of Latin American art is presently being extended within the UK will no doubt find parallels in the US. Inverted Utopias, however, remains an exemplar of an exhibition that seems to rely on a large-scale confrontation between a Latin American and European/US modern art canon. Such confrontations are not viable within the UK. Taken as a milestone of the development of Latin American art exhibitions in the US Inverted Utopias is an interesting case to consider in relation to the direction of the UK field. Aside from its achievements as a visual event, and its commendable aim to propose new frameworks for addressing the art of Latin America beyond the prevalent discourse of cultural identity, Inverted Utopias contains contradictions that invite speculation about the problems that the historical interpretation of modern Latin American art carries within itself. Based on the historical theory implicit to models of exhibiting Latin America in the UK, we assert that using competition between these canons as the grounds for such debates cannot, at this point, serve the critical extension of the discourse, that the persistence of such models might in fact be a grounds for a self-deception, entrapment, and stasis. The term avant-garde, as ascribed to Latin American Art by the title of Inverted Utopias, is not a geographically neutral given. From the moment it is uttered, it both asserts the need for dialogue and releases the danger of co-dependency. The show offers the Avant-garde as a lingua franca, an effective means by which Latin American art is made immediately legible to the language of Modernism. Rather than interrogating the premises that uphold the theory of the Avant-garde however, the exhibition instead incorporates the apparatus of the Avant-garde as its Modernist deus ex machina. In so doing we suggest that it also accepts Modernism as a model of history; this is the model with which the theory of the Avant-garde is complicit and logically compatible. A historicist notion of originality, and with it the position of Latin American art within a progressive history, are upheld. The notion of an “inverted utopia” is given to constitute a set of apparently original and radical modifications to the avant-garde project, for example, the pre-war Latin American avant-gardes’ valuing of a connection to art historical tradition and their countering of post-war nihilism with a “late” utopian impulse. But whether simple “inversion” is properly radical is doubtful. Its meaning remains dependent on the model it reverses; moreover it relies on the normalcy of that model; that is, it leans on a schematic, non-complex and sometimes misrepresented version of the model it is required to invert. Consequently, despite the differences in “content” the parallel narrative of Modern art history that Inverted Utopias provides is operatively similar to the structure of the Avant-garde; taken as the project of 20th-century art. Such logic is reinforced by the structural limitations of the exhibition. In choosing to continue to widely “field” Latin American art, the large-scale exhibition necessitates a prescribed narrative to foster immediate comprehension. In the case of Inverted Utopias the project of the Avant-garde structures that narrative. This project is traced over a series of discrete historical moments. Conveying the passage of time as an unfolding totality, the exhibition replicates the survey model from which it desires to break away in terms of display. Several abiding concerns are left in the wake of Inverted Utopias. Like other recent exhibitions, such as Geometry of Hope: Latin American Abstract Art from the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Collection (The Blanton Museum of Art, University of Texas 2007) this is a history of Latin American art in which the region’s external points of contact and/or accumulated history of European-American reception are crucial. It engages with the transnational nature of artistic practice in the post-war period, but does not answer to that practice’s particular test to the given geographical parameters of Latin America. To take a concrete example in Inverted Utopias, Antonio Dias, for example, cannot be instrumentalized to typify an “original” Latin American version of conceptualism; his most celebrated works were provoked by the context of 1968 Paris, at least as much as if not more than Brazil as his “point of origin.” Many of the works and practices included within Inverted Utopias compel the Latin American specialist to seek the hand of the non-specialist. But at the same time that the works it supports seek this relation, the geographical specificity of Inverted Utopias refuses it; the exhibition is not ready to acknowledge and fully interrogate the role of non-Latin American sites of production and reception.[2] Within this particular paradox, it is tempting to ask in whose name the region is being defended. In a period defined by complexity, by multiple, intricate processes of political change - not simply pre-war/post-war - by unpredictable, inconsistent itinerancy, by multiple geopolitical commitment, by multiple sites of reception - pan-Latin American authority cannot be authentically claimed. An acknowledgement of this fact brings with it the demand to reconsider whether statements on twentieth century Latin American art should be reached with such expediency, and whether they should always be so BIG. A noble reason for the continuation of the method inherent to Inverted Utopias is that both scale and geographical specificity allow for a large number of not usually seen works to be presented - temporarily, all at once. However, the presupposition that the “temporary, all at once” mode of viewing history is a sustainable method for understanding or knowing history requires examination. The invisibility of Latin American art cannot be countered by the temporary excess in visibility that large scale exhibitions offer. The excess offered by the survey-scale, together with the rhetorical authority offered by the specialist, might persistently deny the larger extent of what is not known about the field – and why. Such a method does not acknowledge the fact that holes in historical knowledge remain nor does it acknowledge or anticipate the ongoing work of the Art Historical field within Latin America. Inverted Utopias leaps from the field or what is known to a general theory of the Latin American Avant-garde. The question might be asked therefore, whether scale and expediency in presentation can be compatible, sensitive or responsive to the nature of the history of 20C Latin American art, and of Latin American art as a field of study. Taking as a point of departure her own experience as a Professor of Latin American art at University of Essex, the scope and organization of Dawn Ades’ exhibition aimed to propose a useful pedagogic model to understand the artistic production of that geopolitical area. The exhibition Art of Latin America Since Independence, curated by Stanton Loomis Catlin (Yale University Art Gallery,1966), served as a model for Ades’ show. Translated into Spanish and Portuguese, the catalogue for Art in Latin America has occupied a particularly central and lasting position within the field of Latin American art internationally. With its thoughtful focused essays by Ades, Stanton Loomis Catlin, and Guy Brett, and reproductions of original manifestoes it has become a mandatory reference for students in the field. Despite this being the most complete exhibition of Latin American modern art since Catlin’s show, within the UK the limits of Art in Latin America were quickly acknowledged and taken as a cue for a change in strategy. The first circumvention of Ades’ survey was an exhibition curated by one of those involved in its realization, Guy Brett. Transcontinental: An Investigation of Reality - Nine Latin American Artists was held in both Birmingham (Ikon Gallery) and Manchester (Cornerhouse) in Spring 1990. Opening just a year after Art in Latin America Brett’s intention was to focus on the work of contemporary artists, a field addressed unevenly by Art in Latin America. It brought responses on the part of contemporary artists to the 1989 show into its content, and Brett, in the preface to the catalogue, addresses the limiting historical and geographic simplifications of the survey as a model for exhibiting Latin American art.[3] Brett’s contribution to Art in Latin America was a section entitled A Radical Leap. Each of the artists included under this section were connected to an expanded network brought into focus by the Signals London Gallery and its Newsbulletin between 1964 and 1966. It was not explicitly stated as such then, but is apparent now, that “A Radical Leap” was a history of art in London as much as, if not more than, a history of art in Latin America. It was a history inseparable from Brett’s own agency and experience. Via Transcontinental this tacit reduction of the history of Latin American art to within the borders of British-European reception seems to be acknowledged more transparently. It is at least considered in the basis for Brett’s selection of artists, who were Cildo Meireles, Tunga, Jac Leirner, Waltercio Caldas, Eugenio Dittborn, Victor Grippo, Regina Vater, Roberto Evangelista, and Juan Dávila. Disclosing his curatorial criteria as well as the limits of the show, Brett defines these artists as participants in “an international urban practice of art”, one that could be “more easily translated to a European gallery than other kinds of work which would need a different preparation if their context and force of its working were not to be lost.”[4] With similarity to “A Radical Leap,” many of these artists were those with whom Brett had established close contact or correspondence over the course of his career. As such, it might be considered a retreat and also an affirmation, in that it presented only what he could possibly, authentically, know about contemporary Latin American art. Also emphasized was the fact that these were artworks that had been made translatable, by virtue of the artists themselves being mobile. In his preface, Brett asks whether a more sophisticated model for understanding their work in relation to Latin America could become possible, one that “takes into account the movements and journeys of artists themselves” as well as “common patterns that arise in attitudes towards experimental art.” [5] Such a speculation, we suggest, does not simply instrumentalize the theories of displacement and hybridity that had particular currency at the time of this exhibition. It might also be used to recover questions of historical process, to comprehend the appearance of common forms within different places or the emergence of contradictory positions within the ‘trajectory’ of the individual artist. The nine artists included in Transcontinental differ in media and strategy. They were re-united, according to Brett, by the impossibility of separating in each case what is ‘local’ from what is ‘global’. In different ways, each artist’s work emphasized a fluidity and ambiguity in form, meaning, or occupation of physical space. Each also displayed responsiveness to multiple contexts, and thus a potential openness toward the difference in reception that a UK exhibition would necessarily provoke. Dittborn’s Airmail Paintings, for instance, are devised as artworks made of cheap materials to be sent, in discreet envelopes, from Chile to art institutions around the world, where they are unfolded and occupy a substantial amount of space. The communicative versatility of Jac Leirner’s work was also emphasized, particularly in Brett’s manner of articulating its meaning via an anecdotal account of his viewing it for the first time. On seeing the floor sculptures that form part of the series Os cem (1986-87) his attention was drawn to their plastic qualities, the way these assembled dingy, bills of a non-descript color occupied space, becoming immensely heavy. On first view he understood the works to playfully mock formalist minimalism; it was only after finding out that they were made of $CR 100 notes, and that these notes were devalued, that he read this heaviness as a metaphor of inertia. In relating the process of his own comprehension, the meaning of this work was not simply explained according to true Brazilian origin and context, the process of his British ‘misunderstanding’ was accepted and accumulatively added. Although subtitled as an exhibition that addressed contemporary Latin America, Transcontinental emphasized individual artist over unifying curatorial theme. Essays on each artist were highly individualized, and reflected a mode of viewing Latin American art - on an artist-by-artist basis – that is the more consistent approach within a UK field. In the UK, Brett’s engagement with Latin American art stands out, as well as focusing on individual artists, he has used exhibitions and writing to emphasize connections between artists. These include those explicitly based on his own experience and sensibility, such as Transcontinental and also those which might appear to be eclectic, but whose ‘constellation-like’ nature has its basis in historical connections and collaborations between artists - such as “A Radical Leap” and the exhibition Force Fields (Hayward Gallery, London, 2000), also curated by Brett. Within each, the avant-garde is not defended as a shared and consistent project, rather it is grasped as a persistent field of research, one that is necessarily created and sustained by a “plurality of tactics.”[6] Shared historical goals are not ascribed. The type of historical process that it suggests is provisional, and thus seems closer to the nature of artistic practice, rather than its retrospective translation into coherent narrative. By focusing upon Latin American artists that have entered into an “international research community,” as described by Brett, Transcontinental placed a stress on artworks whose potential for communication will be differently fulfilled according to place of reception. This is a particular engagement with the field of Latin American art, one that does not explicitly privilege Latin America as the point of origin, and thus does not explicitly privilege that origin as the basis for the artwork’s originality. However within Transcontinental, this origin, this “Latin
America” does persist, in the slippery form of something that
cannot be authentically circumscribed, and that is always modified
by translation. In this it is indicative that a provocative milestone for the UK has not been the creation of a dedicated museum, but of an international acquisition committee for Latin American Art within Tate, the country’s most prominent public collection of International art. This has been the most visible announcement of the terms according to which both literal and symbolic ownership of the history of Latin American Art might be established in the UK. Via the assembly of a committee and through the role of a dedicated associate curator, a specialism has been created nominally, but is not translated explicitly into a defined strand of research or public programming. The activity of translating the need for acquisition into the programming of exhibitions began as a problem to solve, and the terms according to which that problem is negotiated both reflect, and validate, the ambivalent structure of Latin American art as a field of British art historical and theoretical research. In seeking to establish how this event translates into an interpretation of modern history, and of the place of Latin America as a site of the avant-garde, we here place greater emphasis on Tate as collector, and how the expansion of its collection, rather than of its exhibition programme, might come in the future to function as an influential device for historical interpretation. Tate Modern has, so far, stated its commitment to the area of Latin American Art most loudly via large-scale one-person exhibitions. Its acquisition of historical Latin American art however is presented with due caution and often with less publicity. Its one-person exhibitions thus far have focused on artists whose validity has already been fought out and established elsewhere, presupposing a post-avant-garde view of international art history as an already-level playing field, containing (paraphrasing P. Burger) the legitimate side by side existence of different styles and forms, of which none can any longer claim to be the most advanced. The basis for originality here is the individual artists capability to produce work that is sufficiently different, rather than sufficiently advanced, they are not required to have produced works of a certain type before their European or North American contemporaries. Rather, an allusion to vanguardism is maintained obliquely, as the fulfillment of the historical project contained within the brackets of an artist’s “trajectory.” An interpretation of the historical position of Latin American art might be seen to emerge however at the point at which Tate has established a reflexive relationship between the history in which it is willing to permanently invest, as represented by its Collection, and the history that it is willing to acknowledge, as represented by its exhibition of individual artists. The only explicit public manifestation of such an intersection was an understated contextual display, entitled Oiticica in London, which was accompanied by a publication and mounted within Tate Modern’s collection display spaces, to coincide with the traveling exhibition Hélio Oiticica, the Body of Colour. The contextual function of Oiticica in London served Tate’s two branches of acquisition and public programming simultaneously. As a collection display, it created a particular history around which the decision to acquire several works by Oiticica, of which Tropicália was the centrepiece, could be justified; as a publication it allowed for an imported exhibition to nevertheless generate original research, living up to a precedent set by the 2005 Frida Kahlo retrospective. Less explicitly, it was also an important step in making sense of some of Tate’s earliest acquisitions of Latin American art, including those purchased from the Signals London gallery in the mid-sixties. These acquisitions moved quietly from storage to display soon after the creation of Tate’s Latin American Acquisition committee, and their presence within Oiticica in London represented a subtle, temporary, movement from theme to history. The history presented by Oiticica in London however does not explicitly identify Latin America as a discrete site for the post-war avant-garde. With typical ambivalence, it instead constituted the recovery of the British neo-avant-garde via the agency of a Latin American artist, one whose place in contemporary genealogy is now arguably more prominent internationally than British artists of the same generation. Again, that Oiticica possesses necessary originality is a presupposition, and is perhaps this exhibitions own deus ex machina in that it underlies the ability for his work to re-activate and recover the British sixties. If viewed cynically, this small project might be read as a highly successful gesture of appropriation. Literally and symbolically, it made sense of Tate’s ownership of the work of Oiticica, while also acknowledging Signals London as a precedent for the British-internationalist perspective to which Tate is committed. The experimental, collaborative, international and multi-disciplinary milieu surrounding Signals London is a potential seed-bed for several genealogies for contemporary practice, and therefore the importance of this gesture for stimulating research concerning the history of British art is not in dispute. But in what sense can it be recovered a critical, or at least provocative, model for the interpretation of a Latin American avant-garde? Models of historical interpretation that might be recovered from Oiticica in London do resonate with emergent understandings of Latin American art according to its points of transnational contact and reception, and of the history of the avant-garde reconfigured as a series of de-centred, asynchronous processes. The spatio-temporal extension from artist to the process of completing and re-formulating an individual artwork (Tropicália) or from artist to a particular place (London) are historical models that favor discontinuity; they legitimitize the fact that the aims of an artists work might be altered according to place, that an artist might be inconsistent or contradictory in formal terms because of this, and that the achievement of the avant-garde project must therefore be necessarily conceived as a process set by an intimate and shifting set of limits, rather than a goal followed through from start to finish by either collective history or by individual formal trajectory. Such an understanding is in fact more consistent with how artists such as Oiticica conceived their own practice and its responsiveness to the demands of different locations. In this sense Oiticica in London was valuable for encouraging a certain intensity of focus on the particularity of individual works. What is at stake in the permanent acquisition of a work, rather than its temporary display, is a retroactive justification of that artist’s historical position. In this sense, the purchase of Tropicália stimulated more rigorous research than the grounds for inclusion of his work in previous group shows, including those mounted at Tate (e.g. Century City: Art and Culture in the Modern Metropolis, 2001; Open Systems: Rethinking Art c. 1970, 2005) and elsewhere (e.g. Tropicália, Barbican, London, 2006), where any given work by the artist could have been chosen for exhibition, as a token of an unchanging and uncritical affirmation of either Brazilian identity or participatory practice. From the UK, the translation of Latin American art into the English language is more explicitly conceived a subjective and potentially treacherous process. It is a field that appears ready to admit the provisional nature of its enquiry, to state that Latin American art lies beyond an immediate, self-contained, field of knowledge, and to be explicitly driven by seeking - and asserting - transparency and “authenticity” in that knowledge. Like the point reached by Inverted Utopias, this does return a history of Latin American art that is limited to and re-shaped by its external points of contact. The difference is its more explicit confession of this fact, which might open up the question of whether it is possible to continue to conceive of a modern history of Latin American art without acknowledging our role in circumscribing its content. Transcontinental and Oiticica in London are used here as exemplars of the history of art from Latin America treated as a field that is both complex and contingent, one that is unavoidably informed by the different contexts in which it is both produced and received. These approaches incite scrutiny, and thus expand the possibility contained by shorter durations of history, bringing to light contradictions that have a particular capacity to decay the totalizing logic imposed unifying theories of the historical Avant-garde.
Endnotes [1] The Principal Investigator of this research is Valerie Fraser
(Professor, Univeristy of Essex). The research is financed by a
speculative grant from the Art and Humanities Research Council. |
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