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| Opening remarks
for Day 2 Daniel R. Quiles |
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| Welcome to the second day of “Latin America: The Last Avant-Garde.” I would first like to thank yesterday’s presenters Jennifer Josten, Dana Ospina, Gina Tarver, and Jodi Kovach, and moderator Claudia Calirman for an excellent first panel, as well as Rubén Gallo for his thought-provoking keynote lecture. Thanks also to all of today’s participants, who I will be introducing in turn. Lastly I would like to thank my co-organizer, Irene Small, with whom it has been a genuine privilege to work on this conference and enjoy that rarest of academic dialogues: a honest one. I wanted to introduce today’s considerations of institutions and abstraction with a brief discussion of a concept fundamental to our understanding of avant-gardes: the network. It is safe to say that without the network, the avant-garde does not exist; indeed, avant-gardes are themselves networks. For Latin American artists, “networks” have comprised not only connections with galleries and institutions but also far more elusive and no less important informal exchanges spanning international borders. Networks thus mark geographical, professional, and aesthetic trajectories, while productively undermining “Latin American” as a fixed identity. Through ideational and capitalist networks, “Latin American” art is always already dispersed throughout the world. As I am defining it, the mapping of networks might yield more specificity than the “constellation” model devised by Mari Carmen Ramírez and Héctor Olea for their paradigmatic Inverted Utopias exhibition. Adapted from Theodor Adorno, the “constellation” maps “a series of randomly connected luminous points that have no intrinsic relationship to one another.”[1] In contrast, the network tethers us to history, to actual movement, and to circuits of exchange and capital. A few recent examples demonstrate the possibilities of attending to networks in the historicization of our field. Gabriel Pérez-Barreiro’s The Geometry of Hope exhibition eschewed a broad sampling of the entire continent by privileging networks in just five cities: Buenos Aires, Rio de Janeiro, São Paolo, Caracas, and Paris.[2] In knowingly exposing himself to criticism that he was focusing on centers of power and money at the expense of what might be called “the periphery of the periphery,” Pérez-Barreiro did highlight the importance of city-based networks—in some cases in foreign cities—for Latin American modernism. In contrast, Ramírez’s celebrated Documents of 20th Century Latin American and Latino Art Project at the International Center for the Arts of the Americas (begun 2001) in which research institutions in different cities throughout the Americas share documents and research, has effectively created its own scholarly network.[3] The fact that these many materials will ultimately be collected in at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, reminds us that networks tend to be hierarchical, not rhizomic. A historical example speaks to the centrality of the network in contexts in which resources or freedoms are limited. Inaugurated in 1969 by lighting entrepeneur and art critic Jorge Glusberg, the Centro de Arte y Comunicación [CAYC] oversaw the majority of art production in Argentina in the 1970s and 1980s and served as a conduit for international artists and exhibitions traveling through the country.[4] Advocating an Argentine conceptual art that he dubbed, following artists such as Hans Haacke, arte de sistemas, Glusberg utilized his connections with the larger figures in New York conceptualism such as Lucy Lippard, Seth Sieglaub, and Willoughby Sharp to bring well-known American and European artists to CAYC, among them Dennis Oppenheim, Lawrence Weiner and Mel Bochner. Glusberg also promoted his own group of conceptual artists, which met weekly, worked collaboratively, and often attended biennials together. This Grupo de los Trece exemplifes an “avant-garde” that owed its very creation to an institutionally-based network.[5] CAYC devised a uniform graphic design for its publications. Yellow leaflets, always in the same font, were distributed internationally for every show. Group exhibitions, such as the multiple iterations of Arte de sistemas allotted each artist the same amount of page space in the “catalogues,” often consisting of separate pages collected in a box.[6] These were templates—here with a grid format as a substrate for each contribution—that presented, quite tidily, difference within sameness. This practice of standardization was a ubiquitous formal device for CAYC, an analogy for its larger ambition as a network. The collection and assimilation of artists of different nationalities and practices seeks to elide distinctions (formal, cultural, political) between them. That being said, the Center’s focus always returned to Argentine conceptual artists; at root it was a promotional apparatus, and one can only promote the specific. The “close reading” of the formal structures of publications and exhibitions institutional networks produce may thus enrich our understanding of the art they support and exhibit.
Endnotes [1] Mari Carmen Ramírez, “The Displacement of Utopias,”
in Versions and Inversions: Perspectives on Avant-Garde Art
in Latin America, ed. Héctor Olea and Mari Carmen Ramírez
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), p. 127. |
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