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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.

In 1970, Bernardo Salcedo, Antonio Caro, Jorge Posada, and a scant handful of other iconoclasts introduced a new kind of anti-aesthetic, text-based work in Colombia. Critics quickly hailed their art as conceptual and explained it as belonging to the latest international avant-garde. For the most part, the young iconoclasts accepted and even embraced the label “conceptual,” yet their work is against internationalism, and they rarely framed their art in terms of the avant-garde. In fact, I argue that they rejected the avant-garde as a model for artistic production as being too elitist. This paper examines that rejection and explains their art as the product of an un-vanguard conception.
In envisioning of a new type of art, they were influenced by the revolutionary culture of the day in Colombia. Their intellectual formation was marked by such revolutionary ideas as those expressed by the Catholic priest turned Marxist guerrilla, Camilo Torres, an important forerunner of liberation theology. These artists sought to revise art from the roots up, aiming at enhancing communication regarding the social and economic problems of the popular classes. Toward this end, they created text-based works, such as Caro’s AQUINOCABEELARTE, that have an immediate and intense visual impact despite being made up primarily of words. Caro, in particular, drew heavily from the aesthetics of popular protest, that is, from the look of the inexpensive posters and banners, often created quickly, that express an urgent need in order to mobilize a public to meet that need. Caro and others proposed art making as a form of activism, as a way to educate, to create a community, and ultimately, to shape society in a manner consistent with grass-roots social movements.