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Latin America: The Last Avant-Garde

A Conference Sponsored by the History of Art Department at Yale University, the Art History Department at the CUNY Graduate Center, and PART, the online student journal of the CUNY Art History Department

April 4-5, 2008

The following is an abstract of the paper presented at the conference.

On the evening of March 17, 1960, 250 invited guests stood inside the Museum of Modern Art’s sculpture garden to watch Swiss artist Jean Tinguely’s Homage to New York attempt to self-destruct. Meanwhile, German-born, Mexico City-based artist Mathias Goeritz stood outside the Museum’s entrance, distributing a manifesto entitled “Please, Stop!” Goeritz’s call was a literal one, protesting the destructive movement on which Tinguely’s work was based. In the preface to his seminal 1968 Minimal Art, Gregory Battcock attacked Goeritz’s action as an isolated, “reactionary” cry for attention that was “very much out of touch with the times”.

Until recently, studies of contemporary art from the 1950s and ‘60s have largely been framed within national boundaries. This has obscured the extent to which artists based in supposedly peripheral locales, such as Mexico, actually engaged in dialogues with artists based in art-world centers such as Paris and New York after 1945. This paper seeks to bridge this gap by reconstructing the artistic dialogue that was carried out from 1960 to 1962 between Goeritz and the Paris-based Nouveaux Réalistes. By reframing Goeritz’s writings, actions and artworks from this period within their original contexts, I demonstrate that Goeritz’s manifesto was not simply an isolated gesture, as Battcock asserted, but part of a coherent theoretical program of engagement with the international neo-avant-garde.

Goeritz’s manifestos and Mensajes (Messages) from 1960-62 constitute a critical aspect of his larger artistic project of “emotional architecture,” a regionalist theorization of Siegfried Giedion’s World War II-era call for a “new monumentality” for Mexico City’s rapidly developing urban landscape during and after the 1950s. Ultimately, monumental, abstract, site-specific sculptures, rather than gallery spectacles, would serve as the vehicle through which Goeritz expressed his “aesthetic prayers,” works that lie at the nexus of post-1945 Latin American developmentism and his dream of a generalized, modern, cosmopolitan spirituality.