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concept of indigenismo used as a tool of repression or, antithetically, of social empowerment.

      Part II, on the years between the end of World War II and the Cuban Revolution, pits these still‐unresolved efforts to define the nation against competing international ideas, art, politics, and history and situates these changes within the Cold War's reshaping of the world order. Central to this section are the rhetoric and consequences of development. Governments in the region implemented policies aimed at stimulating an accelerated industrialization and, consequently, at “catching up” with the United States and Europe. In this context, artists, architects, and critics took on the question of internationalization, in terms that revealed its inherent contradictions.

      If “Latin America” proves a moving target, then the very definition of art likewise changed dramatically over the course of the historical period covered by this book. A wholesale postwar reevaluation of the notions of painting, sculpture, drawing, and architecture gave rise to a widespread view of art not as a discrete object, but as what the influential critics Ferreira Gullar and Juan Acha termed the “nonobject” – a concept whose profoundly innovative notions of subjectivity and collectivity brought together aesthetics, politics, and psychoanalytic theories of subjectivity and affect. The upheavals of art and society in the 1960s and 1970s are addressed through a variety of topics in the third part: the breakdown of medium specificity and the dematerialization of the art object; the rise of participatory propositions; the growing internationalization of Latin American art and the contingent rise of institutions, museums, and events such as the São Paulo Biennial. The post‐World War II sections thus trace a decisive shift not only in the look and form of art objects but also in the concept of political subjectivity itself – a change in the nature of political agency that was often actively facilitated by and through artistic practice. These are read against the political and social turmoil of the Cuban Revolution and the Cold War, the rise of new guerrilla movements throughout the 1960s and 1970s, the 1968 student protests, and polarization of the political spectrum across Latin America.

      The fourth group of texts examines the rise of conceptual strategies and new media in the 1970s and 1980s in relation to both the repressive right‐wing dictatorships and the retreat of democracy throughout the region. Essays explore a variety of conceptualisms that reach back not to the ontological crisis of modernism prompted by World War II, but to 1959, the rise of dependency theory, and Latin America's colonial past as historically generative markers, aimed at producing aesthetic gestures with the capacity to disrupt dominant discourses in order to open them to dialogical modes of exchange.

      Underlying this book's conception and organization, therefore, is the conviction that exploring Latin America's role in the global and contemporary worlds from multiple transnational perspectives is fundamental to rethinking the reciprocal if asymmetrical encounters, appropriations, and translations produced out of the contemporary's global correspondences and interconnections. Our critique of modernity's geographies and temporalities does not, however, seek simply to replace the Western universalizing model with one of “alternative modernities.” To do so would not only threaten to essentialize “Latin America” as a privileged epistemological viewpoint; it would also dangerously underestimate modernity's prodigious capacity to reproduce and extend itself, even as that universalizing impetus is continually marked by its own instability, unevenness, and incompleteness. A principal aim, therefore, is to consider what the study of modern and contemporary art from Latin America can tell us about the dialectic between modernity's claim to universalism and the necessary impossibility of that claim. Through elucidating the region's inextricable entanglement with modernity's universalizing logic and the consequences of globalization, this book puts on display the heterogeneity of Latin American and Latina/o artistic production and their potential for exposing the constitutive ambivalence inherent in the modern.

      1 András, E. (2012). Provincializing the West: Interview with Piotr Piotrowski. Art Margins (9 October). https://artmargins.com/provincializing‐the‐west/ (accessed 8 January 2019).

      2 Avelar, I. (1997). Toward a genealogy of Latin Americanism. Dispositio 49: 121–134.

      3 Eder, R. (2012 [1979]). Why a Latin American art? In: Resisting Categories: Latin American and/or Latino (ed. H. Olea and M. Kervandjian), 684. Houston: Museum Fine Arts Houston, International Center for the Arts of the Americas.

      4 García Canclini, N. (1995). Modernity after postmodernity. In: Beyond the Fantastic. Contemporary Art Criticism from Latin America (ed. G. Mosquera), 20–52. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

      5 Grobat, M. (2013). The invention of Latin America: A transnational history of anti‐imperialism, democracy, and race. American Historical Review 118 (December): 1345–1375.

      6 Lauer, M. and Oquendo, A. (2004). Presentación. Hueso Húmero 44 (May): 1.

      7 Miller, N. and Hart, S. (eds.) (2007). When Was Latin America Modern? New York: Palgrave.

      8 Sánchez, L.A. (2012). Does Latin America exist? In: Resisting Categories: Latin American and/or Latino (ed. H. Olea and M. Kervandjian), 132–140. Houston: Museum Fine Arts Houston, International Center for the Arts of the Americas.

      9 Traba, M. (1979). Artes plásticas latinoamericanas: La tradición de lo nacional. Hispamérica 8 (23–24) (August–December): 43–69.

      10 Traba, M. (2012 [1975]). We are Latin Americans: The war of Resistance. In: Resisting Categories: Latin American and/or Latino (ed. H. Olea and M. Kervandjian), 749–751. Houston: Museum Fine Arts Houston, International Center for the Arts of the Americas.

      Note

      1 1 José Gómez Sicre, interviewed by Alejandro

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