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Beyond the Fantastic Contemporary art criticism from Latin America

E dited by th e C uban a rt h isto rian and c ritic ,

A new wave of art and cultural criticism is emerging

G erardo M o sq u era, th is an th olo gy brings

in Latin America. The essays in this collection not only

to g eth er a selectio n of in flu ential essays th a t

represent a serious remapping of art history but some

have inform ed c ritic a l discourse on th e visual

of them have already been influential in revising our

arts in Latin A m erica during th e past tw e lv e

notions of Latin American art and culture.’

years. The book provides an invaluable context for view ing co ntem p orary Latin A m erican a rt and includes co ntrib u tion s from leading critics and art historians: M onica Amor, Pierre E B ocquet, Gustavo B untinx, Luis C am nitzer, N ésto r G arcía C a n c lin i, T icio Escobar, Andrea G iunta, G uillerm o G ó m e z-P e ñ a , Paulo H erkenhoff, M irko Lauer, C e le s te O lalquiaga, Gabriel Peluffo Linari, Carolina Ponce de León, M ari C arm en R am irez, Nelly Richard, Tomás Y barra-F rau sto and G eorge Yudice.

G erardo M osquera is an a rt c ritic , historian and w rite r based in H avana, C uba, and is a c u rato r at The N ew M useum of C on tem po rary A rt in N ew York. He is th e a u th o r of several books and has co n trib u ted to a rt journals around th e w orld including C asa de las A m ericas, A rt Journal, Third Text, P o lie s te r K unstforum and A rt Nexus. He has lectured extensively in A frica, Europe, Latin A m erica and th e U nited S tates.

The In stitu te of In tern a tio n a l Visual Arts is an in d ep en d en t co ntem p orary visual arts organization, w hich prom otes th e w ork of artists, cu rato rs and critics from a p lurality of cultures and cu ltu ral persp ectives.

The MIT Press

Massachusetts Institute of Technology Cambridge, Massachusetts 02142 MOSBP 0-262-63172-5

Jean Franco. Professor Emérita, Columbia University

‘The strength on the international stage of Latin American art has been recognized for some time, but there is a quantity of vital critical writing from within Latin America that equally needs exposure. An anthology like this is long overdue. It is important not just because of its subtle and reflective insights into Latin American art and culture, but because of its bearing on multicultural issues of crucial significance to us all. This is not just some of the best Latin American art criticism, but some of the best art criticism tout court.’ Dawn Ades, Professor of Art History. University of Essex

B eyond th e F a n ta s tic

Beyond the Fantastic Contemporary Art Criticism from Latin America Edited by Gerardo Mosquera

The Institute of International Visual Arts London, England

The MIT Press Cambridge, Massachusetts

FIRST MIT PRESS edition, 1996

Every effort has been made to trace all

Cover: Joaquin Torres-Garcia,

© the Institute of International

copyright holders, but if any have been

Visual Arts (in IVA), 1995.

inadvertently overlooked the editor and

Kirkman House, 12/14 Whitfield Street,

publishers will be pleased to make the

Torres García Family

London W1P 5RD.

necessary arrangements at the first

Collection, Montevideo

All rights reserved. No part of this book

opportunity.

may be reproduced in any form by any

This publication has been made possible

electronic or mechanical means (including

by the generous financial support of the

photocopying, recording, or information

Arts Council of England and London

storage and retrieval) without permission

Library of Congress Catalogue Card Number: 95-82047 Edited by Gerardo Mosquera in association with Oriana Baddeley Produced by Joanna Skipwith Designed by Atelier

Klippans Book Design Smooth Paper

‘Half-Buried Idol’, 1989 courtesy of the artist

ISBN 0-262-63172-5

Printed in England by BAS on

Leonardo Katz, Catherwood Project, Silver print. Photograph

Arts Board.

inIVA

Ink on paper

Frontispiece:

in writing from the publisher.

Typeset by Wayzgoose

Upside-down map, 1943

LONDON

ARTS BOARD

Acknowledgements

Many thanks are due to the authors

for Gerardo Mosquera’s ‘Modernism

whose support for this project has been

from Afro-America: Wifredo Lam’,

invaluable; to Oriana Baddeley who

from Art Nexus, no. 15, January-March

edited the English texts; to Joanna

1995, and Third Text, no. 20, Autumn

Skipwith who managed the production of

1992; Kala Press for Monica Amor’s

the book; and to Victoria Clarke for her

‘Cartographies: Exploring the

help throughout the project. We should

Limitations of a Curatorial Paradigm’,

also like to thank Christabel Gurney,

published in Third Text, no. 28-29,

Jane Heath, Quentin Newark and

Autumn Winter 1994; University of

Libby Willis.

Minnesota Press for Celeste Olalquiaga’s

We are grateful to Gabriel Pérez-Barreiro

Junk from the Street’, first published

‘Holy Kitschen: Collecting Religious for his translation of the following texts

in Megalopolis: Contemporary Cultural

from Spanish: Néstor García Canclini,

Sensibilities; and the Smithsonian

‘La Modernidad después de la

Institution Press, Washington DC,

Postmodernidad’ ; Gabriel Peluffo Linari,

for Tomás Ybarra-Frausto’s ‘The

‘Crisis de un Inventario’ ; Andrea Giunta,

Chicano Movement/The Movement of

‘Estrategias de la Modernidad en América

Chicano Art’ .

Latina’ ; Nelly Richard, ‘Chile, Mujer y Disidencia’ ; Mirko Lauer, ‘Crítica de la

We wish to thank all private owners,

Ideología Populista del Indigenismo’ and

museums, galleries, libraries and other

‘Notas sobre Plástica, Identidad y

institutions for permission to reproduce

Pobreza en el Tercer Mundo’ ; Ticio

works in their collections. We are also

Escobar, ‘Cuestiones sobre Arte Popular’ .

grateful to the following people for their

Our thanks also to David Britt for

help with providing photographs: Yona

translating Pierre Bocquet’s article ‘Arts

Bäcker of Throckmorton Fine Art;

Plastiques et Créolité’ from IJrench.

Carlos Colombino; Chris Dercon and Maaike Ritsema of Witte de With;

The editor and publishers would like to

Robert Epp of the Winnipeg Art Gallery;

thank the authors for permission to

Eugenio Dittborn; Jean Fisher;

reprint their essays. We should also like

Shifra M Goldman; Julia P Herzberg;

to thank the following for permission to

Cildo Meireles and Susan Otto.

reprint copyright material: Art Journal, New York, for ‘Beyond “the Fantastic” : Framing Identity in US Exhibitions of Latin American Art’, from vol. 31, no. 4, Winter 1992; Art Nexus and Kala Press

0L - 2e!O0! I

r

Contents

Foreword Introduction by Gerardo Mosquera

9 10

Continental Divisions Néstor García Canclini: Modernity after Postmodernity Andrea Giunta: Strategies o f Modernity in Latin America Paulo Herkenhoff: The Void and the Dialogue in the Western Hemisphere

20 53 69

‘Other’ Modernities Mirko Lauer: Populist Ideology and Indigenism: A Critique Ticio Escobar: Issues in Popular Art

77 91

Pierre E Bocquet: The Visual Arts and Créolité

114

Gerardo Mosquera: Modernism from Afro-America: Wifredo Lam

121

Feminism and Periphery Nelly Richard: Chile, Women and Dissidence

137

Nelly Richard: Women’s Art Practices and the Critique o f Signs

145

Contextualizing Multiculturalism Luis Camnitzer: Wonder Bread and Spanglish Art

154

Tomás Ybarra-Frausto: The Chicano Movement/The Movement ofChicano Art

165

Guillermo Gómez-Peña: The Multicultural Paradigm: An Open Letter

183

to the National Arts Community George Yúdice: Transnational Cultural Brokering o f Art

196

Out of the Mainstream Luis Camnitzer: Access to the Mainstream

218

Carolina Ponce de León: Random Trails for the Noble Savage

225

Mari Carmen Ramirez: Beyond ‘the Fantastic’: Framing Identity in US

229

Exhibitions o f Latin American Art Monica Amor: Cartographies: Exploring the Limitations o f a Curatorial Paradigm

247

Realignments of Cultural Power Nelly Richard: Postmodern Decentrednesses and Cultural Periphery:

260

The Disalignments and Realignments o f Cultural Power Celeste Olalquiaga: Holy Kitschen: Collecting Religious Junk from the Street

270

Gabriel Peluffo Linari: Crisis o f an Inventory

289

Gustavo Buntinx: The Power and the Illusion: Aura, Lost and Restored

299

in the ‘Peruvian Weimar Republic’ (1980-1992) Mirko Lauer: Notes on the Visual Arts, Identity and Poverty in the Third World

327

Notes on the Authors

339

Glossary

342

L

Foreword

Fig. 1

When I was asked by inIVA to collaborate on the preparation of Beyond the Fantastic

Marta Maria Pérez

for publication in English I was happy to agree, but mainly for the selfish reason of

Bravo Paths (Caminos), 1990

gaining access to many texts that I knew of only by reputation. Those people interested

Silver gelatin print,

in the cultural manifestations of Latin America will know only too well how difficult it

50.8 x 40.6 cms

often is to remain in touch with new ideas across the geographic divide, a difficulty

Courtesy Throckmorton Fine Art Inc., New York

exacerbated by the complex web of histories that unite Europe with Latin America. With this in mind I turned avidly to this impressive body of text, and many readings later I am still returning to the articles with interest and enthusiasm. In the past decade there has been an enormous growth in the external recognition of a ‘Latin American’ art. Large international exhibitions and publications have attempted to categorize and define the existence of such a phenomenon. This shift in the concerns of the international art market has, however, only served to highlight the ambivalent position of many of the producers of culture within Latin America. The defining voice of the international ‘Latin American Boom’ has remained that of the outside observer. In this anthology Gerardo Mosquera has selected a range of writings that offer a complex and multilevelled introduction to critical debates within (and without) Latin America. For the first time an English-language audience can have access to the writ­ ings of the most important cultural theoreticians of contemporary Latin America. Beyond the Fantastic offers an opportunity to review and reconsider some of the vital issues of contemporary artistic and critical practice. Oriana Baddeley Associate Editor

Introduction Gerardo Mosquera

This book is a selection of new theoretical discourses on the visual arts in Latin America, dealing with the critical thought characteristic of the 1980s, which is still current today. They constitute a distinctive corpus o f writing, a revision of the prevailing paradigms from the early 1960s when Marta Traba published the first book to approach Latin American art in a global manner, attempting to give the subject some conceptual unity.1 This established a Latin Americanist social theory of art that, although diverse and often polemical, discussed the particularities of Latin American art in relation to culture and society, and which lasted for two decades. The authors included in this book are products of this process, but they reposition it in accordance with the demands of a new period and within the framework of a critique of modernity and o f the end of a tragic utopia. In some cases the paradigms are adapted, in others they are rejected, but even when completely new viewpoints and strategies are introduced, the discourses are still centred in the notion of Latin America as a distinctive cultural field. While it may be simplistic to label this new moment as postmodern, there can be no doubt that it is conditioned by poststructuralism, cultural studies, and by what we tend to call a postmodern awareness. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s Latin American art criticism experienced a boom that involved such great names as Juan Acha, Aracy Amaral, Damián Bayón, Fermin Févre, Néstor García Canclini, Mirko Lauer, Frederico Moráis, Mario Pedrosa, Marta Traba and others who responded to Acha’s plea for the production of theories.2 This was a reaction to the dominance of impressionism and of metaphorical interpretations within the Latin American tradition of poetic criticism, the greatest exponent of which is perhaps Octavio Paz. Most of these critics were not creative writers, as was (and still is) common, and they attempted to construct a socially based modern Latin American theory, similar to that which had already been established within literary theory. Broad paradigms were explored (baroque, constructive vocation, mestizaje, etc.) in the search for a continental identity, while at the same time the issue of identity - so characteristic of Latin American thought - began to be called into doubt along with the paradigms that had created it.3 With some, especially Frederico Moráis, the critique of an ‘identity neurosis’ reached its most radical extreme, linking it with colonial manipulation and forwarding a ‘plural, diverse and multifaceted’ notion of the continent that was to influence subsequent developments.4 The backbone of these theories was a social and political view, with an emphasis on ideology, which was anti-colonial and anti-imperialist. Its most productive result was the affirmation of a Latin American cultural perspective opposed to Euro-North American dominance, along with the construction of strategies for art to become

11 Introduction

socially relevant. There were some extraordinary experiments that were left undeveloped, such as Morais’s ‘New Criticism’ , which involved the critic’s intervention in the work of art being discussed - especially appropriate for the installations and performances of socially aware Brazilian conceptual art. Sometimes these theories bordered on ‘sociologism’ or proposed the socialization of art as the utopia of a general concern for an increased role of art in society. In this respect there were strong influences from Marxism and dependency theory, both fundamental ideas for Latin American consciousness at the time. Fortunately, this Marxism was undogmatic, independent, contextual, free of links with the Communist Party or even Cuban orthodoxy. Latin America has always produced Marxists who could incorporate modernism, with the precedent of the brilliant Peruvian intellectual and politician José Carlos Mariátegui, who in the 1920s supported the artistic avant-garde from a militant Marxist perspective, a unique combination anywhere in the world at that time. These radical discourses coincided almost exactly with the political and social situation in Latin America during the 1960s and 1970s. These decades were strongly marked by the ‘Sixties Spirit’ in its most political sense, influenced to a great degree by the Cuban Revolution and the activity that generated across the continent. In fact, much of this spirit was actively created within Latin America, to the extent that one could speak of a ‘Latin Americanization’ of US culture. This was a time when Latin America was given a mystical aura, produced by the rise of urban and rural guerrilla movements, student uprisings, Third World-ism5 . . . which in turn unleashed unprecedented levels of repression and resulted in military dictatorships. This had been a time of great hopes inspired by an economic boom (which proved illusory) and by loans that ultimately led to chronic debt and failed to produce any ‘miracle’ in the productive infrastructure. This delirium was given physical form in uncontrolled urban expansion, creating some of the largest megalopolises in the world. These megalopolises attracted the rural population as part of a structural deformation, a metaphor for which is the mixture of shanty towns, skyscrapers and mountains in Rio de Janeiro or Caracas. A record of this chaotic imagery is the book Para verte mejor, América Latina with a text by Edmundo Desnoes and photographs by Paolo Gasparini.“ The left dreamed of a free continent in which social justice would reign, while the right imagined progress towards a developed economy. At this point Latin America’s precarious and petulant semi-modernity reached its most feverish pitch of excitement. Latin America has been the forum for every hope and every failure. Liberation led to dictatorship, torture, ‘disappearances’, criminal violence . . . The only sector to

12 Beyond the Fantastic

develop fully was drug trafficking, while the economic ‘miracles’ moved to South-East Asia. The 1980s saw the end of one cycle and the start of another based on failure. The critics in this anthology all represent to some extent a reaction to this reversal of a project and its imaginary, strengthening themselves in the stimulated postdictatorial democratic process. Their anti-utopia is not only the result of a critique o f modernity and its totalisms, but also comes from the collapse of the high ideals of modernization during a specific period of this region. It is part of a new post-utopian thought that is currently one of the few dynamic spaces for the Latin American left wing. Contrary to appearances, this new mental panorama is very positive. It shows a lifting of the burden of great schemes and a greater concentration on small horizontal changes. It implies not pessimism but pragmatism. Contemporary criticism is in line with a new situation that marks a clear break with the processes of the 1960s and their repressive consequences. It accompanies the end of the armed struggle, democratization processes, neo-liberalism, globalization, migrations and the displacement of culture, the collapse of real socialism, expansion of mass culture and communication, North American multiculturalism, 'so-called new social movements and the calamity of the Cuban Revolution. This feeling was summarized in some graffiti I saw in Caracas several years ago that said: ‘ The dream has been Castro-ated.’7 There has been a shift from the key concepts of ‘resistance’, ‘socialization’, ‘anti-colonialism’ and ‘revolution’ , which marked earlier rhetoric, towards ‘articulation’ , ‘negotiation’, ‘hybridization’ , ‘de-centring’ , ‘margins’ and ‘appropriation’, terms that are frequently discussed in this book. The ‘grand policy’ of vertical transformation has been replaced by specific horizontal micropolicies. There is a critique of modernity - which is very complex in Latin America given its fragmentary characteristics and the weight of non-modern components in our societies - not to mention a sort of premodern postmodernity - or ‘modernity after postmodernity’, to use Canclini’s term8, which is the result of a diversity of interacting economic, political and cultural structures. This critique involves a questioning of the concepts of nation and national culture that has done a great deal to soften Latin American nationalist fundamentalism. The tendency o f contemporary discourse to emphasize the fragment has led to a more pluralist view of Latin America. This is not to say that previously there was no awareness of the diversity of this geographical/historical/cultural area (or of each of its countries), but nonetheless there was an attempt to apply, or manipulate, integrationalist narratives that obscured or minimized social and ethnic differences. Recent migratory floods, with their massive uprooting of peoples and cultures, have done a lot to weaken the paradigm of the nation-state. At the same time, the debate on ‘otherness’ has drawn

13 Introduction

attention to the amount of ‘others’ who coexist in countries that have not accepted their multinational character, and the many implications this has. The benefits have been pluralism and a sharper focus, which allow one to particularize specific problems. The risk is that pluralism, used as the ideology o f contemporary neo-liberalism, can accept difference without threatening the status quo, or even neutralize conflicts behind a mask of equality, as Yudice, Franco and Flores have pointed out.9 Beyond any intellectual verification, the ‘others’ themselves - in as much as they are ‘others’ , and using their own resources - have started to expose the false communion of our nation-states. An example of this is the Frente Zapatista de Chiapas against the ‘perfect dictatorship’ of neo-liberal Mexico and NAFTA. These ‘postmodern’ guerrillas have nothing to do with the ideological and strategic schemes of Che Guevara’s foquismo10 of previous decades; instead their struggle is born from a specific social and ethnic base, the particular demands of which are fought over without aiming for an all-encompassing revolution. They are closer to the so-called new social movements, albeit using ‘old’ guerrilla tactics. On the other hand, the most effective battles have been fought within language and through a sort of political performance through the mass media; it has also been a guerrilla war of the symbolic. New criticism puts forward particular strategies, working on the margins, deconstructing power mechanisms and rhetoric, appropriating and resignifying. This agenda is related to the development of a socially, politically and culturally aware conceptualism that has sophisticated the symbolic resources of this type of art in order to discuss the complexity of Latin American societies. It is also related to artistic tendencies that cynically proclaim their customary Latin American freedom to take from the centre and freely and often ‘incorrectly’ readapt. The complex of being ‘derivative’ has been transformed into pride in the particular skill of appropriating and transforming things to one’s own benefit, encouraged by a postmodern breaking-down of the hierarchies between the original and the copy. Paradoxically, new critics are questioning old notions of identity just when the issue has become relevant to the West as a result of multiculturalism. From this debate they take and develop a dynamic, relational, multiple and polymorphic view of identity, making a plausible break with more or less deep-rooted essentialisms that had affected previous discourses to a certain degree. The increase in migratory movement, along with the consolidation of Latin American communities in the United States and of Latin Americans from one country in another, have all contributed to this ‘liberation of identity’ . Latin America is a continent of internal

r 14 Beyond the Fantastic

and external displacement. This situation has sharpened multiple identities and emphasized frontier cultures. Many artists have centred their work on this. There is widespread enthusiasm for ‘hybridization’, a category that critics have underlined as one of the paradigms with which to interpret contemporary culture in the continent in several directions. The previous concept of mestizaje, which was based on ethnocultural identity and for some writers was tainted by an ontological aftertaste, has been replaced by a more dynamic, encompassing and polymorphic notion that nonetheless also runs the risk of becoming another all-encompassing term with which to blur differences, power relationships and conflicts of interest. There is a tendency on the part of left-wing postmodernist critics to use terms such as ‘hybridization’ , ‘displacement’, ‘borders’ , ‘decentralization’ or ‘re-articulation’ like mantras of peripheral sociocultural affirmation, with an optimism that prevents a critique of the internal workings of these categories. There is a risk of making carpet slippers for the periphery, constructing a complacency in subalternity that prevents a questioning that might stimulate change and blunts the critical blade that should always be turning upon itself. This contradictory risk arises from a post-colonial critique of the hegemony of the centres of economic and symbolic power, accompanied by a reaffirmation of the margins, one of the most useful achievements of the contributors to this book. The postmodern tendency to break down the divisions between ‘cultured’ and popular has opened the doors to a re-evaluation of indigenous cultures, and to the vernacular in general. The most important achievement is that this is being done with a less paternalistic slant. Several artists and critics have expressed their astonishment at the syncretism and spontaneity of urban popular culture, which has become an icon for the new paradigms of appropriation, resignification and hybridization. Critics of the 1960s and 1970s were suspicious of mass culture, which they associated with imperialist penetration and ideological, consumerist and pseudocultural manipulation. Now, in contrast, there is a new appreciation and even a utopian view of it and of kitsch, which has eliminated the Greenbergian distance typical of previous critics. However, the point is that increasing international contact between ‘high’ and ‘low’ cultures - which had always been an important factor in Latin America - implies more o f a mutual exchange of signifiers and resources between fields that nonetheless remain separate with regard to their signifieds and specific circuits. The supposed breaking down of distinctions is a postmodern utopia. Beyond the Fantastic presents a selection of new theoretical discourses on Latin American visual arts in one volume for the first time, bringing together the most important exponents of the new criticism. The title, taken from one o f the texts,

15 Introduction

alludes to the stereotype of the marvellous so common in the expectations of European and North American audiences with regard to Latin America, an assumption that is radically called into question by these critics. Some of the writers included, like Canclini and Lauer, were also leading figures of a previous moment. Canclini moved rapidly from a sociology of art and Gramscian Marxism towards cultural studies, becoming a leading contemporary critic. Lauer is a good example of how rigid chronologies are, for while he is a bridge to the current phase, as is Aracy Amaral who is still active and influential, they both continue to favour the sociological viewpoint characteristic of the earlier period. I have included Lauer’s texts for their importance to the structure of the anthology. This anthology aims to show the current issues under discussion, along with different positions, methodologies and discursive strategies. It attempts to place a fair emphasis on traditional and popular aesthetic-symbolic production, although this sector is not central to the book. There is a similar concern with Afro- and Indo-American presences in the visual arts. In Latin America, more than in other regions, visual culture is decisively determined by vernacular production. This book aims to find a balance in this sense, despite being aimed at art critics and artists, leaving aside anthropologists or scholars of cultural studies. The map of Latin America I had in mind when selecting the texts covers the whole American continent, including the Caribbean and the United States (one of the countries with the most active Latin American cultures, as well as being the fifth Spanish-speaking nation after Mexico, Spain, Colombia and Argentina, and projected to be the third or fourth within a few years). However, this collection has aimed to be representative not of countries but of authors, while trying to include the broadest geographical and cultural base possible, as well as an even gender balance. Neither is it a survey of critics; it tries to structure its own discourse as a book through a conjunction of issues, authors and discourses. The anthology opens with an essay by Canclini that incorporates the second chapter of, and part of the introduction to, his influential book Culturas Híbridas. It serves as a general framework for the anthology by critically presenting the sociocultural situation in Latin America and the issues to be discussed in terms of a rethinking of modernity and in relation to contemporary processes. The short texts by Giunta and Herkenhoff expand and specify some of the basic issues. Lauer analyses the relationship between modernity and Indo-American cultures, the construction o f ‘indigenism’ and the possibility of an ‘other’ modernity. Escobar debates the issue of change - in response to the contemporary situation - in traditional and popular art, within dynamic identity criteria. The construction of a

r 16 Beyond the Fantastic

Caribbean identity is at the centre of Bocquet’s article and is also present in my own, which presents a case of the appropriation of modernism in the search for a nonWestern means of expression. Richard has often discussed the issue of resignification as a key strategy for Latin American culture, as well as remapping the new relationship between the centres and the peripheries; her essays on these topics are here supplemented by her text on feminism and its application to the work of several Chilean artists. There is a very close relationship between Camnitzer’s conceptual art and his writings on the visual arts, which are often interpretations of the art of the centres seen from a Latin American perspective. It was important that this anthology should include the voices of artists who write, and Camnitzer has focused on their relationship with the mainstream and on the transcultural problems of the exiled artist. The critic Ybarra-Frausto offers an analysis o f Chicano art and culture that serves as an example of the condition of Latin American communities in the United States. Gómez-Peña is another artist who connects his visual and textual discourses closely, developing the paradigm of the border as a privileged site for contemporary culture, together with the issue o f multiple identities. Yúdice criticizes the ‘exportation’ of North American multiculturalism, putting the case for a truly pluralist cultural valuation. The international circulation of Latin American art is dealt with by Ramirez and by Ponce de León, who analyse control from the centres and its cultural implications. Monica Amor criticises the new emphasis on plurality in Latin American art exhibitions that is replacing the ‘fantastic’ paradigm, going ‘beyond the fantastic’. Olalquiaga’s essay is one of the most radical examples of a valuation of vernacular urban culture. Peluffo Linari discusses the construction of a modern national identity in Uruguay through an analysis of urban monuments. Buntinx’s essay explores the intertwined relationship between art, politics and social communication, through the analysis of two specific works that reflect a particularly complex moment in Peruvian history, emphasizing the reconstruction of an aura in ‘cultured’ works through popular perception. The book ends with a text by Lauer that could almost act as a readjustment of the anthology itself, or at least as a very apposite warning against certain postmodernist deliriums that ignore the dire social situation of the continent. Alongside globalization and decentralization, poverty remains the same. At least, I have not yet heard of ‘postmodern poverty’ .

17 Introduction

NOTES 1 Marta Traba, La pintura nueva en Latinoamérica (Bogotá, 1961). 2

Juan Acha, ‘Hacia una crítica de arte como productora de teorías’, Artes Visuales, 13 (Mexico City, 1977).

3

Mestizaje-, refers to the racial and cultural mix o f European, Indian and African descendants typical of Latin American society [translator’s note].

4

Frederico Moráis, Las artes plásticas en la América Latina: del trance a lo transitorio (Havana, 1990), pp. 4-5. First published in 1979. Pages 5-17 summarize the development o f Latin American art criticism prior to the new stage on which this anthology focuses. See also Juan Acha, ‘La crítica de arte en Latinoamérica’, Re-Vista, 13 (Medellin, 1979), pp. 18-22.

5

From the Spanish term tercermundismo, a theory that defends the particular characteristics of Third World culture [translator’s note].

6

Edmundo Desnoes and Paolo Gasparini, Para verte mejor, (Mexico City: América Latina, 1972).

7

In Spanish: ‘El sueño se Castró', a pun on Fidel Castro’s name and castration [translator’s note].

8

Néstor García Canclini, Culturas Híbridas (Mexico City: Grijalbo, 1989), p. 19.

9

George Yúdice, Jean Franco and Juan Flores, ‘Introduction’ to On Edge: The Crisis o f Contemporary Latin American Culture (Minneapolis and London, 1992), pp. 18-19.

10 Foquismo: the theory o f stimulating focal points o f revolution as a global strategy [translator’s note].

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C ontinental Divisions

M odernity after P ostm odernity Néstor García Canclini

In Latin America the debate on postmodernism seems to be dying down just as we are

Fig. 2 (opposite

becoming aware of it. There is no shortage of articles and books on the subject but

previous page)

most of these are blinkered by two false concepts concerning the relationship between modernity and postmodernity. The first misconception, visible above all in sociological and political texts, is expressed in the following question: ‘Why should we be bothered with postmodernity when modern advances have not yet fully arrived in our continent, and are not available to all?’ We have not experienced solid industrialization, neither do we have intensive technological agriculture, nor a sociopolitical organization based on material and formal rationality that, from Kant to Weber, would have become common sense in the West. Neither evolutionist progress nor democratic rationality are popular causes among us. The second misconception, common among those who concern themselves with art and literature, is in thinking that postmodernity has come to replace modernity. Thus it is believed that the avant-garde and all utopian or progressive programmes have been discarded as naïve ways of conceiving history. My main thesis in this text is that postmodernist movements are relevant and interesting for Latin America in as much as they prepare the ground for a rethinking of the links between tradition, modernity and postmodernity. Modernity without Modernization?

‘How can we speak of postmodernism in a country where we have such a pre-modern movement as Sendero Luminoso?’ Henry Pease García asked recently.12 The contradictions in each country may be different but there is a general impression that although liberalism and parliamentary representation have entered into constitutions, we lack sufficient social cohesion or modern political culture to make our societies governable. Caudillos (political chiefs) still make political decisions through informal alliances and force. As Octavio Paz has pointed out, positivist philosophers and then social scientists modernized university life but the thoughts of the masses are governed by small local politicians, religion and manipulation by the media. The elite enjoys poetry and avant-garde art while the masses are illiterate.3 Modernity tends to be seen as a mask, a simulacrum of the elite and of state machinery, especially that concerned with the arts and culture, which by this very characteristic is rendered unrepresentative and incongruent. The liberal oligarchies of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries considered their rule to be like that of a state, but they only organized some parts of society to promote subordinate and inconsistent development. They acted as if they were creating national cultures, while

Joaquín Torres-García Indoamerica, 1938 Oil on cardboard, 100 x 80 cms Prívate collection, Buenos Aires

21 Modernity after Postmodernity

in fact they were creating elite cultures by ignoring the huge Indian and peasant populations; these reacted against their exclusion through countless revolts and in migrations that ‘disturbed’ the cities. Populism seemed to incorporate these excluded sectors, but its policy of economic and cultural distribution, without structural change, was reversed in a few years or diluted into a demagogic form of customer service. ‘Why still pretend to have a state,’ asked the writer José Ignacio Cabrujas when he was consulted by the Presidential Commission for the Reform of the Venezuelan State, if the state is ‘a system of deceptions?’ Venezuela, he argued, was created like a campsite, first inhabited by nomad tribes and then by the Spanish, who used it as a stop-over on the search for promised gold, en route to Potosí or El Dorado. Progress meant that this campsite was transformed into an enormous hotel in which citizens are like guests and the state becomes the manager, ‘permanently failing to guarantee the comfort of his guests’ . To live, i.e. to accept life and expect my actions to have some effect, to move in a historical framework towards a goal, is to act against the rules of the hotel. If I am to stay in a hotel, I do not expect to change the furnishings, or improve them, or adapt them to my wishes; I simply use them. It was once thought that a state was necessary to administer this hotel, with a number of institutions and laws to guarantee a basic level of order, certain elegant principles, Apollonian more than elegant, through which we would enter into the civilized world. It would have been fairer to have made up a list of those rules which we always find in hotel rooms, usually on the door: ‘How you should live here’, ‘At what time you should leave’, ‘Please do not eat in the rooms’, ‘No dogs allowed’ , etc. This would be a pragmatic set of rules with no affectation of being based on principles. ‘This is your hotel, enjoy it and try to cause as little trouble as possible,’ could be the most effective way of redrafting the first clause of the National Constitution.4 How can we explain this conflict between modern Latin American states, their societies and their political culture? What is the role of professional culture and of everyday culture in the true development of our countries? The international debate on modernity and its culture may help us to understand this state of uneasiness or suspicion. We will return to some of the recent historical and sociological research in Latin America that has started to develop a different view of the links between

22 Beyond the Fantastic

modernism and modernization. First we must establish some guidelines for what we now understand by modernity.0 What it Means to be Modern

I believe that contemporary interpretations of modernity fall into four basic movements: projects of emancipation, expansion, renewal and democracy. By a project of emancipation I understand the secularization of the cultural field, self-expressive and self-regulated production of symbolic practices, and their development in independent markets. The rationalization of social life and growing individualism, especially in large cities, are part o f this emancipatory movement. The expansive project is the tendency of modernity to extend knowledge and possession of nature, and also the production, distribution and consumption of goods. Expansion tends to be motivated by increase in profit, but we also find it, away from any commercial impulse, in scientific discovery, industrial growth, demographic growth and even in alternative trends that seek an expansive conception of human evolution. The project of renewal covers two areas that are often complementary. On the one hand there is the incessant search for improvement and innovation typical of a relationship between nature and society in which there are no sacred rules on how the world should be. On the other hand there is the need continually to re-establish the distinctive marks that mass consumption erases. A democratizing project is one in which faith is placed in education, the distribution of art and of specialized knowledge in order to develop in a rational and moral way. This spreads from the Enlightenment to UNESCO, from positivism to the educational programmes to popularize science and culture initiated by liberal and socialist governments. As they develop, these four projects have often turned out to be contradictory. The difficulties that the avant-garde faced - for example in the Bauhaus or with constructivism - when it tried to launch several of these projects simultaneously, serve as an illustration of the difficulty in making them compatible. But it is in Latin America more than in Europe that modernity appears to have failed. Those cultural movements that wish to combine their vocation for freedom and renovation with a democratization o f their new experiences are often diluted into a varied package of fleetingly satisfied promises as they come into contact with oligarchical or authoritarian systems and unstable or chaotic economic expansion. To explain these frustrations, we must distinguish between modernity as a historical stage; modernization as a social process that attempts to construct

23 Modernity after Postmodernity

modernity; and modernism, those cultural projects that take place at several points along the development of capitalism.1 6 To take Latin America as the subject for an analysis of these three factors can be too daunting a task and creates a false homogeneity. Neither modernization nor modernism developed in the same way in all the countries of the continent. Nonetheless, there are enough important shared characteristics and parallel historical developments - as well as a differential economic and symbolic relationship with the rest of the international economic and symbolic markets - to justify speaking of Latin America as a whole. The Avant-Garde: Anticipation or Anachronism?

The most common theory on modernity put forward in Latin American literature is that we have had an exuberant modernism within a faulty modernization. We have already come across this view in Paz and Cabrujas, and it is common in other essays, histories and sociological texts. Considering that we were colonized by the most backward European nations involved in the Counter-Reformation and other anti­ modern movements, it was only with independence that we could start to bring our countries up to date. Since then, there have been several waves of modernization: first at the turn of the century led by a progressive oligarchy, intellectuals inspired by Europe, and higher literacy levels; then, during the 1920s and 1930s, through the expansion of capitalism, the push for democracy from liberal middle classes, the input of immigrants and the wider expansion of schooling, press and radio; and finally, since the 1940s through industrialization, urban growth, increased access to secondary and tertiary education and as a result of the new cultural industries. These movements could not achieve the same effects as European modernity. They did not create independent markets for each artistic field, a professional base for artists and writers, nor an economic development capable of sustaining these efforts at experimental renovation and cultural democratization. The statistics are conclusive. In France the literacy rate was 30 per cent during the ancien régime, but by 1890 it was 90 per cent. In 1860, 500 different newspapers were published in Paris, rising to 2,000 by 1890. In the early twentieth century England had a literacy rate of 97 per cent; The Daily Telegraph doubled its distribution between 1860 and 1890, by which time it had sales of 300,000; Alice in Wonderland sold 150,000 copies between 1865 and 1898. This created a double cultural space. On one side, literature and the arts developed through a limited distribution, with occasional massive sales, as in the case of Lewis Carroll. On the other side, a huge reading public was created, principally by newspapers in the early part of the century.

24 Beyond the Fantastic

As Renato Ortiz has pointed out, the Brazilian case is totally different.' How could artists and writers have a specialized readership if 84 per cent of the population was illiterate in 1890, 75 per cent in 1920 and still 57 per cent in 1940? Until the 1930s the average print run of a novel was 1,000 copies. For many more decades authors could not make a living from writing alone, so they worked as teachers, civil servants or journalists, all of which created a literature dependent on state bureaucracy and the mass media. For this reason, Ortiz concludes, in Brazil there was never a clear European distinction between artistic culture and the mass market, hence there was less mutual antagonism than in Europe.3 Studies on other Latin American countries show a similar or worse situation. As long as modernization and democratization affects only a small minority it is impossible to create symbolic markets in which autonomous cultural fields can grow. If in the modern world to be cultured is to be well-read, this was something impossible for more than half the population of Latin America in 1920. This restriction was highlighted by access to higher education, the gateway to modern culture. In the 1930s not even 10 per cent of secondary school students went to university. As Brunner says with reference to Chile during this period, a ‘traditional constellation of elites’ demanded that those who attended literary salons or wrote in cultural magazines and newspapers had to belong to the ruling class. Oligarchic hegemony created divisions within society that limited its modern expansion by ‘opposing the organic development of the state with its own limitations (the narrowness of the symbolic market and the Hobbesian division of the ruling class)’.9 Modernization thus has a limited market, democratization is for the minority, ideas are renewed but with little effect on social development. The gap between modernization and modernism is useful for the ruling classes to protect their hegemony - not always to justify it, but simply to reaffirm their status. With the written word this was done by limiting schooling and access to books and magazines. In visual terms it was achieved in three ways that made it possible for the elite continually to re-establish its aristocratic conception after each modernizing change: a) by spiritualizing cultural production into artistic ‘creation’, thus separating art from craft; b) by freezing the circulation of symbolic goods, putting them into collections and concentrating them in museums, palaces and other exclusive centres; c) by advancing that the only legitimate way of consuming these goods is through an equally spiritualized and hieratic form: contemplation. If this was the visual culture advanced by schools and museums, what could the avant-garde do? How could they find a new way to represent (in both senses of the

25 Modernity after Postmodernity

word, transforming reality into images and being representative of this reality) these heterogeneous societies in which several cultural traditions live together and contradict each other all the time, with different reasoning and absorbed unevenly by different sectors? Is it possible to promote cultural modernism while socioeconomic modernization is so uneven? Some art historians have come to the conclusion that innovative movements were ‘transplants’ or ‘drafts’ disconnected from our reality. [In Europe] Cubism and Futurism relate to the artists’ admiration and enthusiasm for the physical and mental transformations generated by the first machine age. Surrealism was a revolt against the alienation of technology. Concrete art appeared with functionalist architecture and industrial design in the programme to create a new all-encompassing human habitat. Art informel is another reaction against rationalism. The asceticism and mass production of the functional age is the result of a deep moral crisis, the existential abyss created by the Second World War . . . We have gone through this same sequence of movements without entering the ‘mechanical reign’ of the Futurists, without reaching any industrial climax, without fully entering into consumer society, without being swamped by mass production, without feeling restricted by excessive functionalism. We have experienced existential anguish without Warsaw or Hiroshima.10 Before questioning this comparison I would like to admit that I also quoted, and extended it, in a book I published in 1977.11 Among the other disagreements I now have with this text (the reason why I have not authorized reprinting of my book) are those born of a more complex vision of Latin American modernity. Why did the metropolitan model of modernization arrive so late and in such an incomplete manner to our countries? Is it just because of the structural dependency created by a deterioration in economic relations or the selfish interests of the ruling classes who resisted social modernization while elegantly dressing their privileges with modernism? The failure of these interpretations comes partly from measuring our modernity against an idealized vision of how this process happened in the central countries. The first revision is to see whether there are in truth so many differences between European modernization and our own. Then we should examine whether the view of a repressed and delayed Latin American modernity, automatically dependent on the metropolis, is quite as accurate and dysfunctional as studies on our ‘backwardness’ tend to declare.

26 Beyond the Fantastic

The ‘Semi’ Continent

A good starting point from which to reformulate these issues is an article by Perry Anderson that, speaking of Latin America, repeats the tendency to see our modernity as a different or deficient echo of that of the central countries.12 His argument is that European literary and artistic modernism reached a high point in the first three decades of this century, after which it became a ‘cult’ of this aesthetic ideology without the vigour of its original artists or works. The later transfer of this creative vitality into our continent happened because: . . . in the Third World generally, a kind of shadow configuration of what once prevailed in the First World does exist today. Pre-capitalist oligarchies of various kinds, mostly of a landowning character, abound; capitalist development is typically far more rapid and dynamic, where it does occur, in these regions than in the metropolitan zones, but on the other hand is infinitely less stabilized or consolidated; socialist revolution haunts these societies as a permanent possibility, one indeed already realized in countries close to home - Cuba or Nicaragua, Angola or Vietnam. These are the conditions that have produced the genuine masterpieces of recent years that conform to Berman’s categories: novels like Gabriel García Marquez’s One Hundred Years o f Solitude from Colombia, or Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children from India, or films like Yilmiz Giiney’s film Yol from Turkey. It is worth quoting from this statement at length because it contains the mixture of correct analysis and hasty mechanical distortion with which we are often interpreted from the centre and which we too often imitate. The first fault of Anderson’s nonetheless stimulating analysis, and one that was also popular in the Third World until recently, is to group Colombia, India and Turkey under the same umbrella. The second is to consider One Hundred Years o f Solitude - an incredible flirtation with our assumed magical realism - as symptomatic of our modernism. The third is (and this even in a text by Anderson, one of the most perceptive thinkers in the debate on modernity), the rustic determinism of attributing the ‘cause’ of literary and visual masterpieces to socioeconomic factors. Although this mechanistic model spoils some of Anderson’s argument, the article does include some passages of more subtle exegesis. For example, he illustrates the fact that cultural modernism does not express economic modernization by recognizing that England, his own country, despite being the birthplace of industrial capitalism and having dominated the world market for some one hundred years, ‘did not

27 Modernity after Postmodernity

produce a native modernist movement of any significance in the early decades of this century’ . Anderson suggests that modernist movements arose in continental Europe not where structural modernization took place but where complex situations were created by ‘the intersection of different temporal moments’ . This type of situation arose in Europe as a three-way cultural field in which the decisive forces were: a) the codification of a highly formal academicism in the arts, institutionalized by states and societies dominated by aristocratic or landowning classes that had been overtaken economically but which remained powerful in politics and culture until the First World War; b) the emergence in these societies of the technological products of the second industrial revolution (telephone, radio, automobile, etc.); c) the perceived proximity of social revolution that arose with the Russian Revolution and in other social movements in Western Europe. The persistence of the anciens régimes, and the academicism concomitant with them, provided a critical range of cultural values against which insurgent forms of art could measure themselves . . . At the same time, however, the old order, precisely in its still partially aristocratic coloration, afforded a set of available codes and resources by which the ravages of the market as an organizing principle of culture and society . . . could also be resisted.13 If mechanization was a powerful stimulant for Parisian Cubism and Italian Futurism, these tendencies neutralized the physical meaning of technological modernization by abstracting the techniques and artifacts of the social relationships of production. According to Anderson, an overall view of European modernism shows that in the first decades of this century it ‘arose at the intersection between a semi-aristocratic ruling order, a semi-industrialized capitalist economy, and a semi-emergent, or semi-insurgent, labour movement’ .14 If modernism is not the expression of socioeconomic modernization but rather the way in which the elite takes charge o f an intersection o f different historical timescales and uses them to try to forge a global project, which are those time scales in Latin America and what contradictions do they generate? In what sense have these contradictions been obstacles to the modern emancipatory, expansive, renovative and democratic projects? Contemporary Latin American countries are the result of the sedimentation, juxtaposition and cross-breeding of Indian traditions (especially in Central America and the Andean region), Hispanic Catholic colonialism and modern political,

28 Beyond the Fantastic

educational and communicative actions. Despite attempts to give elite culture a modern face, by rejecting Indian and colonial traits in popular culture, an interclass mestizaje (the racial and cultural mix of European, Indian and African descendants typical of Latin American society) has created hybrid forms in all social strata. Modernist secularization and renovation has had more effect in ‘erudite’ groups, but some elites maintain their links with Hispanic-Catholic traditions, or Indian traditions in some rural areas, to justify the privileges of the anden régime under threat from the expansion of mass culture. In the homes o f the bourgeoisie and the educated middle class in Santiago de Chile, Lima, Bogotá, Mexico City and many other cities, one finds multilingual libraries next to Indian crafts, cable television and satellite dishes among colonial furniture, magazines full of advice on the best investment o f the week coexisting with centuries-old family and religious rituals. To be cultured, even in the modern world, is not so much to connect oneself with a repertoire of exclusively modern objects and messages but to know how to incorporate avant-garde art and literature, as well as technological advances, into traditional patterns of social privilege and symbolic distinction. This multitemporal heterogeneity of modern culture is the result of the fact that very rarely did modernization replace the traditional or the ancient. The rupture caused by industrial growth and urban expansion happened later than in Europe, but also faster. An artistic and literary market was created by increased access to education, which allowed some artists and writers to become professional. The battles of liberals in the late nineteenth century and of positivists in the early twentieth, which resulted in the 1918 University Reform Movement in Argentina, soon spread to other countries and created a secular and democratic university system before most European countries produced one. However, the creation of these independent scientific and humanistic fields contrasted with the illiteracy of half the population, who existed within premodern economic and social structures, with premodern political uses. This contradiction between the erudite and the popular has been dealt with more extensively in the literary and visual arts than in their historical interpretations, which almost always record the importance of these works for the elite. The way that these histories have discussed the distance between cultural modernism and social modernization shows the dependence of intellectuals on metropolitan thought and ignores the importance of social conflict for writers and artists and their attempts to communicate with their own people. From Juan Domingo Sarmiento to Ernesto Sábato and Ricardo Piglia, and from

29 Modernity after Postmodernity

José Vasconcelos to Carlos Fuentes and Carlos Monsiváis, the issue of what it means to write literature in a society lacking a market strong enough to support an independent cultural field has been a determining factor for authors. What is the purpose of being a writer in countries where liberal democracy is fragile, where the state does not invest in the arts or in science, and where the creation of modern nation-states has not overcome ethnic divisions nor the unequal distribution of a supposedly shared heritage? These issues are not simply questions to be raised in essays and in the debates between ‘formalists’ and ‘populists’ : they are an essential part of the difference between Jorge Luis Borges and Roberto Arlt or Octavio Paz and Gabriel García Márquez. When a sociology of reading is established in Latin America, one can imagine this question being debated as a determining factor in the relationship between these authors and their public. Importation, Translation and Self-Construction

To analyse how these contradictions between modernism and modernization condition the works and the sociocultural function of the artist, any theory must be free of automatic ideological reactions or a direct and mechanical correspondence between raw material and its symbolic representations. I believe that a good starting point is Roberto Schwarz’s introductory essay ‘As idéias fora do lugar’ (‘Displaced ideas’) in his book on Machado de Assis Ao vencedor as batatas (‘To the Conqueror, the potatoes’).15 How is it possible that part of the Declaration of the Rights of Man was written into the 1824 Brazilian constitution while slavery still existed? The dependency of farming on the foreign market meant that bourgeois rationalist economic ideas on working in the shortest time possible arrived in Brazil, yet a ruling class that based its power on total control over a slave’s life preferred to extend work to the longest time and thus control the full day of the worker. According to Schwarz, if we are to understand why these contradictions were ‘unimportant’ and could coexist with the successful diffusion o f liberalist ideas, we must take into account the institution of the favour. Colonization created three social strata: the landowner, the slave and the ‘free man’ . The relationship between the first two was perfectly clear. Most people in the third category, who were neither owners nor the proletariat, depended on the favour of someone powerful. This system created a wide range of free men; favouritism also extended into other areas, involving the other two groups in government, politics, commerce and industry. Even the liberal professions like medicine, which in Europe were considered to owe nothing to any man, in Brazil were governed by ‘our almost universal mediation’ .

30 Beyond the Fantastic

Favouritism is as anti-modern as slavery, yet it is more ‘friendly’ and able to coexist with liberalism because of its emphasis on mediation and the process of valuation and self-valuation through which material interests pass. While it is true that European modernization is based on human independence, universal law, disinterested culture, objective remuneration and the work ethic, favouritism creates dependency, special exceptions, interested culture and payment for personal services. Considering the difficulty of survival, ‘nobody in Brazil would have the idea or above all the strength to be, for example, a Kant of favouritism’, battling against its implicit contradictions. Schwarz adds that the same happened with the attempt to create a modern bourgeois state without destroying the client system; as though decorative European wallpaper or painted classical architectural scenes covered mud walls. Even the Brazilian national anthem of 1890 is full of progressive emotions but unconcerned with their relevance to the real world: ‘We will not accept that formerly there were slaves in such a noble country’ (‘formerly’ was just two years earlier, as slavery was abolished in 1888). If we accuse these liberal ideas of falsity, we will not advance. Should one ignore them? It is more interesting to follow their simultaneous play between truth and falsity. Liberal principles are not expected to correspond with reality but to provide prestigious justification for the mediation involved in the exchange of favours and the ‘stable coexistence’ it provides. It may surprise us that ‘independence means dependence; utility, whim; universality, exception; merit, kinship; and equality, privilege’ if we believe that liberal ideology has a cognitive value, but not if we constantly live through experiences of ‘loans and counter-loans, especially in the key moment of mutual recognition’, because neither part is willing to report the other for invoking an abstract principle. This way of interpreting new ideas with inappropriate meanings is at the heart of some of our greatest literature: Machado de Assis seen through the eyes of Schwarz, Roberto Arlt and Jorge Luis Borges as analysed by Ricardo Piglia. Is this contradictory relationship of an elite culture with its society the simple result of its dependency on the metropolis? According to Schwarz, this disconnected and dissonant liberalism is ‘an internal and active element of [national] culture’, an intellectual exercise with the intention of absorbing the conflictive structure of society, its dependence on foreign models and the projects to change it. What works of art do with this triple conditioning - internal conflict, foreign dependence and transformative utopia - and the specific materials and symbolism they use are not explicable through irrationalist interpretations of art and literature. Far from resorting to the notion of a ‘magical realism’ , which assumes a shapeless and

31 Modernity after Postmodernity

mysterious matter behind the use of a particular symbolism, socioanthropological research shows that this symbolism can be better understood if we consider the context to which it refers and the way in which artists rework it. If we consider the visual arts we find evidence that this gap between concepts developed in the metropolis and local reality is not always an ornamental trick of exploitation. The first phase of Latin American modernism was stimulated by artists and writers returning to their home countries after a time in Europe. It was not so much the direct, transplanted, influence of the European avant-garde that awoke the desire for modernization in Latin American visual arts but rather the questions raised by Latin Americans themselves as to how to make their international experience relevant to developing societies, or in the Mexican case, to the Revolution. Aracy Amaral has pointed out that the Russian painter Lasar Segall could not provoke a reaction from the provincial atmosphere o f Sâo Paulo when he arrived in 1913, yet in the same year Oswald de Andrade found a positive response to Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto and he confronted the industrialization launched by Italian immigrants to Sâo Paulo. Mario de Andrade, Anita Malfatti (who turned Fauvist after a visit to Berlin), and other artists and writers organized the Week of Modern Art (Semana de arte moderna) in 1922, the year o f the centenary of Brazilian independence. This was an interesting coincidence. To be cultured it was no longer necessary, as it had been in the nineteenth century, to imitate European behaviour and to ‘ashamedly reject our own characteristics’, as Amaral has written.16 Modernity coincided with the desire to explore and define what it is to be Brazilian. The modernists used two opposed sources: international, especially French, information and ‘a nativism which is apparent in the inspiration from and search for Brazilian roots’ . [It was also in the 1920s that research began into Brazilian folklore.] This fusion is apparent in Emiliano di Cavalcanti’s painting Five Young Women from Guaratinguetâ (fig. 3), where Cubism provided the vocabulary with which to paint mulattas. It is also there in Tarsila do Amaral’s work (see fig. 7), where the constructive structures she learnt from André Lhote and Fernand Léger were filled with Brazilian colour and atmosphere. In Peru the rupture with academicism occurred in 1929, led by a group of young painters who were as interested in artistic questions o f form as they were in visually commenting on contemporary national problems and painting ‘Andean people’ . For this reason they were called ‘indigenists’, although they went beyond an identification with folklore. Their aim was to launch a new art that represented the national as part of international modern aesthetic developments.1'

32 Beyond the Fantastic

The coincidence between the interpretations of social historians concerning the rise of cultural modernization in Latin America is significant. What happened was not a transplant, especially with regard to the leading artists and writers, but rather a re-elaboration to contribute to social change. The attempt by artists to create independent cultural arenas, secularize images and organize themselves professionally was not meant to encapsulate their world aesthetically, as some European modernist movements had done in order to hide away from social

Fig. 3 Emiliano di Cavalcanti Five Young Women from Cuaratinguetà (Cinco Mogas de Guaratinguetà), 1930 Oil on canvas, 92 x 70 cms Museu de Arte de Sao

modernization. In all histories, individual creative projects are thwarted by the

Paulo Assis

paralysis of the bourgeoisie, the lack of an independent art market, provincialism

Chateaubriand

(even in key cities like Buenos Aires, Sao Paulo, Lima and Mexico City), arduous competition with academicism, colonial attitudes, naive Indianism and regionalism. Faced with the difficulties of simultaneously injecting Indian and colonial traditions with new tendencies, many sympathized with Mario de Andrade’s comment at the end of the 1920s that the modernists were a group ‘isolated and protected by their own convictions’ : . . . the only part of the nation that placed the national artistic question as their almost exclusive concern. In spite of this, they do not represent any part of Brazilian reality. They are outside our social rhythm and our economic instability, beyond Brazilian worries. While it is possible that this minority adapted itself to Brazilian reality and developed an intimate knowledge of Brazil, in contrast, Brazilian reality never managed to develop an intimate relationship with them aesthetically.18 The additional information we have nowadays permits us to be less harsh on these avant-garde movements. Even in those countries, like Argentina, where both ethnic histories and traditions were decimated, those artists ‘addicted’ to European models were not mere aesthetic importers. Neither, at the end of the day, were they the insignificant minorities they assumed in their own texts. A movement as cosmopolitan as that spearheaded by the magazine Martin Fierro in Buenos Aires, influenced by Spanish Ultraism and the French and Italian avant-garde, redefined these influences in response to the social and cultural conflicts taking place in Argentina: emigration and urbanization (so important in early Borges), the discussions with previous literary figures (Lugones and the criollista tradition), the social realism of the Boedo group. Altamirano and Sarlo comment that if we intend to carry on using ‘the metaphor of translation as the typical intellectual activity of the literary elites of peripheral capitalist countries, we must take into account that it is

Photograph by Luiz Hossaka

33 Modernity after Postmodernity

34 Beyond the Fantastic

35 Modernity after Postmodernity

Fig. 4

the whole field that translates’ .19 As fragile as this field may be, it is the area for

Frida Kahlo

reformulation and reorganization of foreign models.

My Grandparents, My Parents, and I

In several cases cultural modernism, rather than denationalization, provided the

(Family Tree), 1936

impulse and symbolic repertoire with which to construct national identity. The

Oil on tempera on

intense search for a Brazilian identity starts with the avant-garde of the 1920s.

metal plate, 30.7 x 34.5 cms

‘We will only be modern if we are national,’ was the catchphrase according to Renato

The Museum of

Ortiz. From Oswald de Andrade to the construction of Brasilia, the battle for

Modern Art, New York

modernization was a movement to create a nation critically opposed to that proposed

Gift of Allan Roos, MD,

by oligarchies, conservative forces or foreign powers. ‘Modernism is an idea which is

and B Mathieu Roos Photograph © 1995 The Museum of Modern Art, New York

out of place and which expresses itself as a project.’20 After the Mexican Revolution several cultural movements emerged, aimed simultaneously at modernization and at independent national development. These movements invoked the project to establish cultural centres (ateneismo) established during the government of Porfirio Diaz, with its occasionally absurd pretensions such as Vasconcelos’s wish to spread classical culture to ‘redeem the Indians’ and free them of their ‘backwardness’ . For many artists opposition to the Academia de San Carlos and involvement in postrevolutionary change forced a questioning of the divisions created by uneven and dependent development: cultured art against popular art, culture and work, avant-garde experimentation and social awareness. The Mexican attempt to overcome these critical divisions of capitalist modernization was linked to the creation of a national society. Alongside the spreading of Western education and culture to the lower classes, the desire was to include Mexican art and crafts in a supposed common heritage. Rivera, Siqueiros and Orozco produced an monographic synthesis of national identity inspired by Aztec and Maya art, church altarpieces, vernacular bar decorations, the colours and forms of local pottery, Michoacán lacquer and the experimental achievements of the European avant-garde. This hybrid reorganization of visual language was backed by changes in the relationship between artists, the state and the working class. Murals in public buildings, calendars, posters and widely read magazines were the result of a forceful statement of new aesthetic tendencies within the newborn cultural field along with the new relationships that artists were building up with official educational administrators through the unions and popular movements. Mexican cultural history from the 1930s to the 1950s shows the fragility of this utopia and its erosion by intra-artistic and sociopolitical factors. The cultural field, made uniform by dogmatic realism, too much emphasis on content and the dominance of politics over art, lost its vitality and resisted innovation. Also, it was

36 Beyond the Fantastic

difficult to emphasize the social role of art when the revolutionary impulse had been ‘institutionalized’ or marginalized into opposition movements. Despite the formation of a modern cultural field in Mexico with the unique possibility of accompanying a transformative process with monumental and massive works, when the new modernizing impulse came in the 1950s and 1960s, the cultural situation in Mexico was not very different from that of other Latin American countries. The National Realist legacy was still alive but hardly produced important works. The Mexican state was still richer and more stable than most in Latin America and still had the resources to build museums and cultural centres, and award grants and benefits to intellectuals, writers and artists. This support began to diversify, creating unexpected tendencies. The central discussions became similar to those of other Latin American societies: how to articulate the local and the cosmopolitan; the promise of modernity and the inertia of tradition; how to increase the independence of the cultural field and make it compatible with the fragile development of the artistic and literary market; the industrial reorganization of culture; the uneven development that a dependent capitalist modernity reproduces and emphasizes. Our conclusion should be that in none of these societies was modernism the mimetic adoption of imported models, neither was it the search for purely formal solutions. Jean Franco has pointed out that even the names of the movements show a social concern: while European avant-garde artists took names that emphasized their rupture with art history - Impressionism, Symbolism, Cubism - in Latin America they preferred to refer to themselves by names that suggest a response to factors outside art: modernismo, nuevomundismo, indigenismo,21 It is true that these projects of social inclusion became partially diluted into academicism, variations on official culture or market games, as happened to varying degrees with Peruvian indigenism, Mexican muralism or Portinari in Brazil. These frustrations were not due either to a doomed artistic destiny, or to a discrepancy with socioeconomic modernization. Their contradictions and discrepancies are due to sociocultural heterogeneity, the difficulties of sharing a present with several different historical timescales. It would appear that, in contrast to those theories determined to back either traditional or avant-garde culture, we should try to approach slippery Latin American modernity in terms of modernism as the attempt to intervene in the conflict between the dominant semi-oligarchical order, a semi-industrialized capitalist economy and semi-transformative social movements. The problem is not that what happened in Latin America was a delayed or imperfect version of a process that had been perfect in Europe, neither is there any point in the reactive search for an

37 Modernity after Postmodernity

alternative, absolutely independent paradigm when the traditions have already been transformed by the expansion of international capitalism. In the most recent stage, when the transnationalization of the economy and of culture makes us, in the words o f Octavio Paz, ‘the contemporaries of all men’ without eliminating national traditions, it is an unacceptable simplification to choose exclusively between dependency and nationalism or modernization and local tradition. Consumer Expansion and Cultural Will-Power

In Latin America from the 1930s on, cultural production became more independent. The rise of the middle classes in postrevolutionary Mexico, through the Radical movement in Argentina or through similar processes in Brazil and Chile, formed a cultural market with its own dynamism. Sergio Micheli, in a study of this phenomenon in Brazil, has written of the ‘substitution of imports’ in the editorial field.22 In all these countries, migrants with experience in this area and emergent national producers created a cultural industry with commercial outlets in urban centres. Together with the expansion of cultural circuits caused by increased literacy, writers, businessmen and political parties stimulated an important national production. In Argentina during the 1920s and 1930s there was an expansion in the workers’ libraries and popular education facilities that had been founded by anarchists and socialists since the turn of the century. The Claridad publishing house, which produced editions of 10,000-25,000 copies during this period, was the result of a rapidly expanding readership and contributed towards the creation of a political culture, as did magazines and newspapers that intellectually developed national processes in relation to the innovations of international thought.23 It is at the start of the second half of this century that the elites in social sciences, art and literature find clear signs of socioeconomic modernization in Latin America. Between 1950 and 1970 there are at least five categories that indicate structural change: a) the take-off of a more sustained and diversified economic development based on technologically advanced industries, increased industrial imports, and salaried workers; b) the consolidation and expansion of the urban growth started in the 1940s; c) the broadening of the cultural market, partly due to urban concentration but above all to the rapid increase in schooling at all levels (illiteracy fell to 10 per cent or 15 per cent in most countries, the number of people at university rose from about 250,000 in 1950 to 5,380,000 at the end of the 1970s); d) the introduction of new communications technology, especially television, which

38 Beyond the Fantastic

contributed to the massification and internationalization of cultural relations and promoted the ever-increasing sales of ‘modern’ products now made in Latin America (cars, electrical appliances, etc.); e) the increase in radical political movements that believe that modernization can bring profound change in social relations and a fairer distribution of basic goods. Although, as we know, the articulation of these five processes was not simple, it is now apparent that they transformed the relationship between cultural modernism and social modernization and between the freedom and dependence of symbolic practices. There was a move towards secularization, visible in everyday life and political culture: the social sciences were professionalized and replaced the often irrational essay tradition with empirical research and more consistent interpretations of Latin American society. Sociology, psychology and studies on the mass media contributed to a modernization of social relations and of planning. Allied with industry and new social movements, they made the structural/functionalist model of the relationship between tradition and modernity the received wisdom of cultured opinion. Faced with rural societies governed by a subsistence economy and archaic values, the elites promoted the benefits of urban life, competition and free choice. Political movements for development favoured this ideological and scientific climate and used it to create a consensus among future politicians, professionals and students for their modernization projects. The growth of higher education and of the artistic and literary market helped to professionalize cultural life. Even the majority of artists and writers who were not able to make a living from their books or paintings moved into teaching or specialized journalism where their independence was recognized and from where they could promote it. The first museums of modern art were created in capital cities and a number o f galleries provided an arena for the selection and valuation of symbolic goods. In 1948 museums of modern art were created in Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro; in 1956 in Buenos Aires; in 1962 in Bogotá and in 1964 in Mexico City. The expansion of the cultural market favoured specialization, experimentation with artistic languages and a greater synchronicity with the international avantgarde. As ‘high’ art became more introvert in its formal experiments, there was an abrupt separation between the elite and the tastes of the middle and working classes caused by the cultural industry. While this was part of the dynamics of expansion and fragmentation of any market, cultural and political groups of the left worked in the opposite direction in an attempt to socialize art, communicate developments in thought to a wider public and encourage their participation in a hegemonic culture. There was a clash between the socioeconomic logic to expand the market and the

39 Modernity after Postmodernity

political desire for culturalization, which was especially dramatic when it occurred within the same movement or even within the same person. Those who were renewing and expanding the sociocultural field were the same people who wanted to democratize artistic creation. At the same time that symbolic differentiation was at its highest, with formal experimentation and rejection of the acceptable, there .was a desire to associate with the masses. In the evening one could go to private views in avant-garde galleries in Sao Paulo or Rio de Janeiro or a happening at the Di Telia Institute in Buenos Aires, and the next morning could be taking part in the attempts to spread information and consciousness from popular arts centres or the radical CGT in Argentina. This was one of the divisions of the 1960s. Another related division was between the public and private spheres, with the resulting clash of loyalty for artists between the state and business, or between business and social movements. The frustration of the political will has been examined in many works, while the thwarted cultural will has not been studied. Its failure is attributed to suffocation by the crisis with the revolutionary forces with which it worked, which is partly true but there has been no attempt to analyse the cultural causes of the collapse of this attempt to make modernism interact with modernization. One key to this is the overvaluation of transformative movements without taking into account the logic of development of the cultural field. Almost the only social mechanism that is analysed in critical literature on art and culture of the 1960s and early 1970s is that of dependency. This ignores the restructuring that had been taking place for two or three decades beforehand in the cultural field and in its relation to society. This fault is evident when one rereads the manifestos, political analysis and discussions of the period. Recent views on the communication of culture are based on two basic tendencies in social logic: on the one hand, the specialization and stratification of cultural production; on the other hand, the restructuring of the relationship between the public and private spheres, with big business and private foundations taking over. The first symptoms of this first development can be seen in the changes in Mexican cultural policy during the 1940s. The state, which had promoted the integration of tradition with modernity and of the popular with the erudite, now launched a project in which popular utopia gave way to modernization and revolutionary utopia gave way to industrial planning. It was during this period that the state divided its cultural policies in line with social class: the Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes was created for ‘high’ culture, and within a few years the Museo Nacional de Artes e Industrias Populares and the Instituto Nacional Indigenista were also founded. The creation of this separate bureaucratic apparatus indicated a new

40 Beyond the Fantastic

direction in institutional policy. Despite the occasional attempts of the INBA to make cultured art less elitist, and the way in which organizations dedicated to popular culture have tried to reactivate the revolutionary ideal of a classless society, the divided structure of cultural policy illustrates how the state viewed social reproduction and the differentiated renewal of consensus. In other countries cultural policy also responded to the fragmentation of symbolic universes. It was the increase in differentiated investments into either the elitist or the mass-market sectors that accentuated the division between them. Combined with the increased specialization of producers and consumers, this division changed the meaning of the gap between cultured and popular. This gap was no longer defined as it had been until the second half of this century in terms of social class, as the division between an educated elite and an illiterate or semi-literate majority. High culture became the domain of a small faction within the bourgeoisie and middle classes, while most of the upper and middle classes, along with almost all of the working class, became subject to the mass programming of the cultural industry. The cultural industry gives artists, writers and musicians a greater effectiveness than could ever have been achieved by the most successful attempts at cultural diffusion led by artists themselves. Concerts in folk clubs and at political meetings reached a tiny amount of people in comparison to what the same musicians could achieve through recordings and television. Magazines dealing with culture, fashion or decoration sold in newsagents or supermarkets place literary, visual and architectonic innovations in the hands of those who never go to museums or bookshops. Along with this change in the relationship between ‘high’ culture and mass consumption there was also a change in the relationship of all classes with the metropolitan innovations. There was no longer the need to belong to an upper-class family or receive a foreign grant in order to be up to date with the changes in artistic or political fashions. Cosmopolitanism became more democratic. Although the mechanisms o f differentiation re-emerged in the ways of appropriating these innovations, in an industrialized culture that needs constantly to expand its consumption the possibility of reserving areas exclusively for the minority becomes increasingly difficult.24 The State Conserves the Heritage, Companies Modernize It

Symbolic differentiation began to act in another manner, through a double separation: on the one hand between the traditional, administered by the state, and the modern, by private enterprise; on the other hand between a modern, or experimental, modernity for the elite promoted by one type of industry and a mass

41 Modernity after Postmodernity

modernity, organized by another type of industry. The general tendency is for the modernization of culture for the elite to be undertaken by the state as the masses become the responsibility of private enterprise. While traditional heritage remained the responsibility of the state, the promotion of modern culture was increasingly the responsibility of business and private organizations. Two styles of cultural action were born of this difference. As the state understood its policy to be the protection and preservation of heritage, innovatory projects passed into society, especially into the hands of those with money to risk. The arts provide two types of symbolic return: for the state, legitimacy and consensus as it identifies itself as the representative of national history; for business, profit as it uses avant-garde culture to create an ‘independent’ image for its economic expansion. As we saw in the previous sections with reference to the metropolis, the modernization of visual culture that historians of Latin American art tend to discuss purely in terms of experimentation by artists has been almost totally dependent on big business for the past thirty years. This has been the result of corporate sponsorship of innovation or the mass distribution of these innovations through industrial and graphic design. A history of the contradictions in Latin American cultural modernity would find itself discussing how much it was a result of a policy as premodern as patronage. The starting point would be the subsidies with which the oligarchies at the end of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century supported artists, writers, cultural centres, literary and visual salons, concerts and musical associations. The key moment was in the 1960s. In the wake of the productive revolution and the new consumption patterns that it created, the industrial bourgeoisie designed foundations and experimental centres to give private enterprise the leading role in the restructuring of the cultural market. Some of these activities were promoted by transnational companies and arrived as exports of postwar aesthetic tendencies born abroad, especially in the United States. For this reason, critiques of our dependency in the 1960s were justified, especially the studies by Shifra Goldman. With a knowledge of North American sources, she was able to see how large conglomerates (Esso, Standard Oil, Shell, General Motors) used museums, magazines, artists and critics from North and Latin America to promote a ‘depoliticized’ formal experimentation to replace social realism in our continent.20 Those historical interpretations that concentrate exclusively on the conspiracies and Machiavellian alliances of the dominators ignore the complexity and conflicts of modernization. During this period the radical transformations in Latin American society, education and culture that I described earlier were taking place. The use of new

42 Beyond the Fantastic

materials (acrylic, plastic, polyester) and techniques (electronic and luminous systems, mass production of works) in art was not a simple imitation of metropolitan developments because these materials and techniques were being incorporated into industrial production, and therefore into the everyday life and taste of Latin Americans. We could say the same of the new icons of avant-garde visual art: television, textile fashion, mass media personalities. These material, formal and iconographical changes were consolidated by the appearance of new spaces for the exhibition and discussion of symbolic production. In Argentina and Brazil the institutions representative of the agro-exporting oligarchy (academies, traditional magazines and newspapers) lost ground to the Di Telia Institute, the Matarazzo Foundation and sophisticated weekly magazines like Primera Plana. A new system of distribution and valuation was established that, while it proclaimed greater independence for artistic experimentation, showed it to be part of a general process of modernization in industry, technology and everyday life led by the businessmen in charge of the foundations and institutes.26 In Mexico the cultural activities of the modernizing bourgeoisie and of the artistic avant-garde did not arise in opposition to a traditional oligarchy, which had been marginalized after the Revolution, but rather against the nationalist realism of the Mexican school promoted by the postrevolutionary state. The discussion between those who defended the hegemony of visual production and those new painters who wanted to renew figuration (Tamayo, Cuevas, Gironella, Vlady) was long and bitter.2' The quality of the new painters and the stagnation of the Old Guard meant that the new tendencies were recognized in galleries and private cultural institutions and even by the state, which began to include them in its policy. As well as the creation of the Museo de Arte Moderno in 1964 there were other official examples of recognition. The avant-garde began to win prizes, take part in national and international exhibitions supported by the government and receive public commissions. Until the mid 1970s state and private support were balanced in Mexico. Despite the inadequacy of these two sources to meet the demands of artists, this balance resulted in the artistic field being less dependent on the market than it was in countries like Colombia, Venezuela, Brazil or Argentina. Towards the end of the 1970s, and especially since the economic crisis of 1982, the neo-conservative forces that tried to push back the state and cancel the modernizing development policies brought Mexico closer to the situation in the rest of the continent. As large sectors of production previously under state control were passed into the private sector, one type of hegemony in which all classes were subject to the nationalist unification of the state was replaced by another in which private business appeared to be the promoter of culture in all areas.

43 Modernity after Postmodernity

The cultural competition between private enterprise and the state in Mexico is concentrated in a large business group, Televisa. This company controls four national television channels with booster stations all over Mexico and the United States, video production and distribution studios, publishing houses, radio stations, museums of ‘high’ and of popular art (until 1986 the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo Rufino Tamayo and now the Centro Cultural de Arte Contemporáneo). Such diverse activity, under the control of a monopoly, structures the relationship between cultural markets. We saw how between the 1950s and 1970s the gap between elite and mass culture widened because o f differentiated investment and the increasing specialization of artistic producers and consumers. In the 1980s macroindustries took control of cultural programming for both the elite and the masses. A similar process took place in Brazil with Rede Globo, the owner of television companies, radio stations, soap operas for national and foreign consumption and the creator of a new business approach towards culture that set up highly professional relationships between artists, technicians, producers and the public. The simultaneous ownership of large exhibition areas and advertising spaces, and the influence on critics in television, radio, magazines and in other institutions allowed these companies to plan expensive cultural activities with maximum impact, control the circuits through which they were communicated, and manipulate both the critics and, to a lesser extent, the way in which different groups interpreted them. What are the implications of this change for elite culture? If modern culture is created by the increasing independence of the cultural space formed by the agents of each specific discipline - in art, for example, artists, galleries, museums, critics and the public - then these all-embracing foundations attack a central part of this project. Subordinating the interaction between agents of the artistic arena to a single business will tend to neutralize the independence of the field. As regards cultural dependence, while it is true that the imperial influence of metropolitan companies does not disappear, the immense power of Televisa, Rede Globo and other Latin American organizations is changing the structure of our symbolic markets and their interaction with those of the central countries. A remarkable example of this evolution of monopolies of patronage is the almost unipersonal institution led by Jorge Glusberg, the Centro de Arte y Comunicación (CAYC) in Buenos Aires. Glusberg is the owner of one of Argentina’s largest lighting article companies, Modulor, which gives him the resources with which to finance the activities of the centre and its artists (Grupo de los 13, and later the Grupo CAYC), and of those who exhibit there or are sent abroad. Glusberg pays for the catalogues, advertising and transport, and sometimes the artists’ materials if they cannot afford

44 Beyond the Fantastic

to pay themselves. Thus he has built up a complex network of professional and semi-professional loyalties with artists, architects, town planners and critics. The CAYC also works as an interdisciplinary centre that puts these experts in contact with specialists in communication, semiologists, sociologists, technicians and politicians, which gives them many possibilities to enter into different areas of the cultural and scientific world in Argentina; it also puts them in touch with leading institutions abroad (catalogues are usually published in Spanish and English). For the past two decades, the CAYC has organized annual exhibitions of Argentine artists in Europe and the United States. There are also exhibitions of foreign artists and symposia in Buenos Aires in which famous critics take part (Umberto Eco, Giulio Carlo Argan, Pierre Restany, etc.). Simultaneously, Glusberg has been a critic on many subjects in almost all the CAYC catalogues; as art and architecture editor for important newspapers (La Opinión, then Clarín)-, and with articles on both disciplines in international magazines in which he promotes the activities of the centre and suggests readings in line with the thesis of the exhibitions. A key element in maintaining this versatile activity is the permanent control that Glusberg has had as President of the Argentine Association of Art Critics and as Vice-President of the International Association of Critics. Through the use of several cultural fields (art, architecture, press, associations and organizations) and links with economic and political forces, the CAYC managed an amazing continuity during twenty years in a country in which only one constitutional government has completed its mandate in the past forty years. Its control over so many aspects of artistic production and distribution has meant that the centre has only ever received favourable criticism; no one has yet questioned it to the extent of diminishing its national standing, despite its having gone through at least three contradictory stages. The first stage, between 1971 and 1974, concentrated on pluralist actions by artists and critics of several schools, promoted avant-garde experiences outside the commercial sphere and searched for original means of communication with the public. This was important for independent aesthetic innovation because it supported experiences that had not yet entered into the market, such as conceptual art. Sometimes there were attempts to bring art to a wider public, as with the exhibitions planned for Buenos Aires squares (of which only one, in 1972, took place and was repressed by the police). From 1976 Glusberg changed his position. His relationship with the military government, established in that year and lasting until 1983, was excellent, as can be seen in the official promotion his exhibitions were given and the telegram he received from the President, General Videla, congratulating him for

45 Modernity after Postmodernity

winning a prize at the 14th Sâo Paulo Biennial in 1977, to which Glusberg responded with a promise to ‘represent the humanism of Argentine art abroad’ . The third stage was launched in December 1983, one week after the collapse of military rule and the election of Alfonsin, when Glusberg organized the Sessions for Democracy in the CAYC and other Buenos Aires galleries.28 In the 1960s the increasing influence of galleries, dealers and especially the Di Telia Institute, led to Argentina being referred to as a ‘country of distributors’, alluding to the intervention of these factors in the social process that constitutes aesthetic meaning.29 Recent foundations do much more than this in that they not only intervene in the circulation of works, they also reformulate the relationships between artists, intermediaries and the public. To do this they subordinate the interactions and conflicts between agents in various positions of the artistic field to a few powerful figures, or sometimes just one. In this way a structure in which previously the horizontal connection and fights for legitimacy and renovation were largely based on artistic criteria, creating the independent dynamics of the cultural field, was replaced by a pyramid structure in which the force lines were compelled to converge under the will of a patron or businessman. Aesthetic innovation became a game within the international symbolic market in which, as is the case with the most advanced and ‘universal’ technologies (film, television, video), national identities that had been a concern of many avant-garde movements until the 1950s were diluted. While the internationalizing tendency is typical of the avant-garde, it is worth mentioning that some had searched for a way of uniting the experimental use of materials and languages with an interest in critically redefining the cultural traditions from which they drew inspiration. This interest now decayed as the result of a more mimetic relationship with the hegemonic tendencies of an international market. In a series of interviews I conducted with Argentine and Mexican visual artists to discover what they thought an artist should do to sell and become famous, the most common reference was to the depression of the Latin American market in the 1980s and the ‘instability’ to which artists were subjected, partly because of the obsolescence of aesthetic tendencies and partly because of the economic unevenness of demand. Under these conditions there is a very strong pressure to conform to an uncritical and playful style, without social concerns or aesthetic daring, ‘without too much stridency, elegant, but not too passionate’, which characterizes the art of this fin de siècle. Those who do well show that a successful work is based as much on visual discoveries or talent as on skills from journalism, publicity, fashion, travel, large telephone bills and keeping up to date with international journals and catalogues. There are those who resist the idea that these extra-aesthetic activities

46 Beyond the Fantastic

should take first place, yet they will still admit that these complementary activities are essential. To be an artist or writer and to produce meaningful work amid this reorganization of global society and markets of symbolism, and to communicate with a broad public, has become much more complicated. Just as artisans and the producers of popular culture can no longer refer exclusively to a traditional universe, neither can artists who want to produce socially acceptable work remain in their particular fields. The popular and the cultured require new strategies as they are mediated by an industrial, commercial and spectacular reorganization of symbolic processes. By the 1990s it is impossible to deny that Latin America has modernized. Socially and culturally, symbolic modernism and socioeconomic modernization are no longer so far apart. The problem is that this modernization took place in a way different from how we expected it to in previous decades. In the second half of this century modernization was led not so much by the state but by private enterprise. The ‘socialization’ or democratization of culture has been achieved by the cultural industry (usually in private hands) more than by the cultural or political good intentions of the producers. There is still an uneven appropriation of symbolic goods and access to cultural innovation, but this unevenness is no longer as simple and polar as we thought when we divided each country into the oppressed and the oppressors, or the world into imperial and dependent countries. Towards a New Century: Postmodern Restructuring

We would be missing half the point if we saw the result of modern contradictions as only the triumph of a market expansion at the expense of modern emancipatory, democratizing and renovative projects. The restructuring of culture that we call postmodernism implies a radical reformulation of the relationship between tradition and modernity or between ‘high’ , popular and mass culture that goes far beyond the concerns of the market. It also implies changes in collective identities, national and foreign articulations and in almost all the dilemmas we have been dealing with. It is worth pointing out here that 1 am not suggesting that postmodernism is a new tendency that will replace modernity and traditionalism. In line with thinkers such as Jameson and Huyssen, I understand it not as a discontinuity or rupture with modernism but rather as the reorganization of its internal forces and its relationship with tradition.iu More than a new paradigm, postmodernism is a peculiar type of construction on the ruins of modernity, raiding its vocabulary and adding premodern or non-modern ingredients. In Latin America we have a similar process in as much as we live in an age of

47 Modernity after Postmodernity

traditions that have not vanished, a modernity that never quite arrives, and a postmodern questioning of the evolutionary projects that enjoyed hegemony during this century. Among us, postmodernism doesn’t appear as a tendency with which to replace modern art, as the trans-avant-garde believes. Neither will it replace traditional popular art, as some technocratic modernists insist. It is more a complex situation of cultural development, a transformative process. At its heart is the reorganization o f the principles that ruled high and traditional art, and the opposition between them when they worked as separate structures. The mass communicational and political processes that reorganized the rules of hegemony and subordinance created the situation that we now call postmodern, one of the characteristics of which is the breaking-down of the divisions between erudite and popular. The great folkloric, populist and modernist accounts that organized and structured types of culture lost their relevance. The repertoire is so mixed that it is impossible to be cultured simply by knowing great works of art, just as being popular is more than merely knowing and using the objects and messages generated within a small community (ethnic, local or class). Now these categories are unstable, they change with fashion and cross over constantly; on top o f this, users can create their own collections. Everybody can collect their own repertoire of records, cassettes and videos that combine ‘high’ culture and pop, including those who already do so in the structure of their work (such as national Mexican rock, for example, which uses folk, jazz and classical music). In fact this process began in Latin America in films during the 1940s and in television in the 1950s, when the popular was mixed with fragments of high culture, and then both were subordinated to the grammar of production and the distribution logic of cultural industries. Since the 1960s literature, music and the visual arts have also become areas of constant crossover. In particular I am thinking of bossa nova, which fuses the post-Webern avant-garde with jazz and Afro-Brazilian melodies (Astor Piazzola did the same with the tango); writers like Manuel Puig and Monsivais who practise a transclassist intertextuality; visual artists and artisans who combine preColumbian, colonial and modern art, subverting the comfortable distinction that separated the history of fine arts from folk art. The first result of all this is that one can no longer rigidly link social class with cultural status, neither can this status be linked with a fixed repertoire of symbolic goods. While it is true that many works remain within the minority or popular groups in which they were produced, the general tendency is for all sectors to have a taste for items that come from backgrounds that were previously opposed. I am not suggesting that this fluidity and complexity has done away with social difference. All I am

48 Beyond the Fantastic

pointing out is that this reorganization of the cultural scene and the crossing of identities lead one to re-examine the order that rules the relationship between various groups. The second consequence is that we should admit that the way in which, politically and culturally, we used to associate ‘popular’ with ‘national’ in the 1960s and 1970s is no longer valid. The opposition between imperialism and national-popular culture not only deserves the criticism directed towards the dependency theory from which it arose, it also obscures a reorganization of the symbolic market. Studies on cultural imperialism allowed us to examine the mechanisms used by international centres of artistic, scientific and communicational production that conditioned, and still do condition, our cultural development. But this model is inadequate to explain contemporary international power relations. It does not explain the global development of an industrial, technological, financial and cultural system, the centre of which is not in a single nation but in a dense network of economic and cultural structures. Although its decisions and benefits are concentrated in the metropolitan bourgeoisie, its hegemony occurs less through the imposition of metropolitan culture than through the adaptation of international knowledge and images to the experience and habits of different cultures. Neither can we now agree with the theories of omnipotent manipulation by multinationals or those that reduce the popular to its traditional and local manifestations. For this reason Renato Ortiz recently used the term ‘international-popular’ when discussing the fact that in Brazil the massive restructuring of culture did not imply, contrary to widespread opinion, a greater dependence on foreign production. Statistics show an increase in cinematic production in Brazil, in the percentage of Brazilian films on show, of books by Brazilian writers, and of recordings of Brazilian music, while imports have fallen. There has been an increasing independence and nationalization of cultural products while some of them, notably soap operas, are increasingly exported, making Brazil an active agent in the international market of symbolic goods; passing from the ‘defence of national-popular to the export of the international-popular’ .31 While this tendency is not the same in all Latin American countries, there are similar aspects in those with a greater modern cultural development that force a rethinking of local and foreign articulations. These changes do not neutralize the issue of how different classes benefit from and are represented by the culture produced in each country. The radical transformation of the fields of production and consumption, together with the character of the goods being presented, means that it is now impossible to keep insisting that the popular is ‘naturally’ associated with the national and thus is stubbornly opposed to the international.

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The third consequence allows us to judge the depth of this change. The definition of popular identity has always been in relation to a certain sense o f territory: with local and community culture in folklore and anthropology, with the neighbourhood in the participative research of urban sociology, with national territory in political populism. To affirm and assert popular identity implies a recovery of sovereignty over these spaces in which the characteristic aspects of each group are created. There can be no doubt that this connection with a particular scene remains the basis of many cultural constructions and that the recovery of heritage is a key concern for countries as devastated as those of Latin America. Nonetheless, in this decade there has been a willingness (largely in popular movements and progressive intellectuals) in many Latin American countries to reflect on what it means for a culture to move away from its original territory and to communicate and interact with others. Crafts migrate from the countryside to the cities; songs and films that speak of popular events are shown in other countries. How does one fit the new currents of cultural circulation caused by the migrations of Latin Americans to the USA, people from the poor Latin American countries to the richer ones, or of peasants to the city, into the unidirectional model of imperialist domination? How does one account for the hybrid and new cultural forms that these movements generate? It is no coincidence that the most innovative thought on these processes is emerging in the main area of migrations on the continent: the frontier of Mexico and the USA. This is where intercultural movements show their saddest face - unemployment and the rootlessness of farmers and Indians forced to leave their homes to survive - but it is also where a powerful creativity is being born. If there are more than 250 radio stations and television channels and 1,500 publications in Spanish, along with a growing interest in Latin American music and literature, this is not only owing to the market created by 20 million ‘Hispanics’ , (or 8 per cent of the US population - 38 per cent in New Mexico, 25 per cent in Texas and 23 per cent in California). This interest is also due to the fact that the so-called Latino culture produces films like Zoot Suit and La Bamba, music by Rubén Blades and Los Lobos, Luis Valdéz’s plays and Brazilian soap operas, which are imported for their aesthetic quality and for their ability to represent a type of popular culture that can interact with modern and postmodern symbolic structures. At this crossroads of traditional popular symbolism with the international circuits o f the culture industry, the questions facing identity, nationality, defence of sovereignty and the uneven appropriation of knowledge and art are transformed. Conflicts are not resolved, as neo-conservatives would have it, but they move into another register: that of an increasing displacement of culture. Popular movements

50 Beyond the Fantastic

that shift their activities on to this new stage combine the defence of their own traditions with what one Mexican artist who lives between Tijuana and San Diego calls ‘a more experimental, multifocal and tolerant view of culture’ .32 In other words, cultures whose independence is more conditioned than in traditional societies but which are more innovative and democratic. NOTES 1

Sendero Luminoso: literally ‘Shining Path’, a Peruvian Maoist guerrilla movement especially powerful in rural areas [translator’s note].

2

Henry Pease García, ‘La izquierda y la cultura de la postmodernidad’, in Proyectos de cambio. La izquierda democrática en América Latina (Caracas: Editorial Nueva Sociedad, 1988), p. 166.

3 4

Octavio Paz, El ogro filantrópico (Mexico City: Joaquín Mortiz, 1979), p. 64. José Ignacio Cabrujas, ‘El Estado del disimulo’, in Heterodoxia y Estado: 5 respuestas: Estado y reforma (Caracas, 1987).

5

This text forms part o f a book in preparation in which I discuss the philosophical and sociological interpretations o f modernity (Habermas, Bourdieu, Becker and Lyotard, among others) and their implications for the Latin American debate on the relationship between erudite, popular and mass cultures. In this article I am limiting myself almost exclusively to the creation of modernity in elite culture.

6

I have adapted the tripartite distinction made in Marshall Berman’s book All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience o f Modernity (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982), p. 11.

7

Renato Ortiz, A moderna tradigáo brasileira (Sáo Paulo: Brasiliense, 1988), pp. 23-8. The previous statistics quoted are taken from this book.

8

Ibid., p. 29.

9

José Joaquín Brunner, ‘Cultura y crisis de hegemonías’, in J J Brunner and G Catalan, Cinco estudios sobre cultura y sociedad (Santiago de Chile: FLACSO, 1985), p. 32.

10 Saúl Yurkievich, ‘El arte de una sociedad en transformación’ , in Damián Bayón (ed.), América Latina en sus artes, 5th edn (Mexico City: UNESCO/Siglo XXI, 1984), p. 179. 11 Néstor García Canclini, Arte popular y sociedad en América Latina (Mexico City: Grijalbo, 1977). The Portuguese translation is called A socializando da arte (Sáo Paulo: Cultrix, several editions). 12 Perry Anderson, ‘Modernity and Revolution’ , New Left Review 144 (1984), p. 109. 13 Ibid., p. 105. 14 Ibid., p. 105. 15 Roberto Schwarz, Ao vencedor as batatas (Sáo Paulo: Duas Cidades, 1977), pp. 13-25. 16 Aracy A Amaral, ‘Brasil, del modernismo a la abstracción, 1910-1950’, in Damián Bayón (ed.), Arte Moderno en América Latina (Madrid: Taurus, 1985), pp. 270-81. 17 Mirko Lauer, Introducción a la pintura peruana del siglo X X (Lima: Mosca Azul, 1976).

51 Modernity after Postmodernity

18 Amaral, op. cit., p. 274. 19 Carlos Altamirano and Beatriz Sarlo, Literatura!sociedad (Buenos Aires: Hachette, 1983), pp. 88-9. 20 Ortiz, op. cit., pp. 34-6. 21 Jean Franco, La cultura moderna en América Latina (Mexico City: Grijalbo, 1986), p. 15. 22 Sérgio Micheli, Intelectuals e classe dirigente no Brasil (1920-1945) (Sao Paulo/Rio de Janeiro: Difel, 1979), p. 172. 23 Luis Alberto Romero, ‘Libros baratos y cultura de los sectores populares’ (Buenos Aires: CISEA, 1986); Emilio J Corbiére, Centros de cultura populares (Buenos Aires: Centro de Estudios de América Latina, 1982). 24 Research on this subject remains to be done. A precursory text is José Carlos Durand, Arte, privilègio e distingào (Sào Paulo: Perspectiva, 1989). 25 Shifra M Goldman. Contemporary Mexican Painting in a Time o f Change (Austin/London: University of Texas Press, 1977), especially chapters 2 and 3. 26 I have analysed the Argentine case in some depth in La producción simbólica, 4th edn (Mexico City: Siglo XXI, 1988), especially in the chapter ‘Estrategias simbólicas del desarollismo económico’ . The Portuguese translation was published by Civilizaqáo Brasileira. 27 Of particular interest in the bibliography on this period is the documentation and analysis in Rita Eder’s book Gironella (Mexico City: UNAM, 1979), especially chapters 1 and 2. 28 Opinions on the CAYC and on Glusberg are divided among artists and critics, as can be seen from the research o f Luz M García, M Elena Crespo and M Cristina López in CAYC (Escuela de Bellas Artes, Facultad de Humanidades y Arte de la Universidad Nacional de Rosario, 1987). 29 Marta F de Slemenson and Germán Kratochwill, ‘Un arte de difusores. Apuntes para la comprensión de un movimiento plástico de vanguardia en Buenos Aires, de sus creadores, sus difusores y su público’, in J F Marshal et al., El intelectual latinoamericano (Buenos Aires: Edit, del Instituto, 1970). 30 Andreas Huyssen, ‘Guía del postmodernismo’, Punto de Vista 29, year 10 (1987). The original version was published in New German Critique, 33 (1984). 31 Ortiz, op. cit., pp. 182-206. 32 Guillermo Gómez-Peña, ‘Wacha ese border, son’, La Jornada Semanal 25 (October 1987), pp. 3-5.

S trategies of M o d ern ity in Latin A m erica Andrea Giunta

Fig. 5

‘It starts with a story, almost a parable.’ (Mario de Andrade)

Joaquín Torres-García Upside-down m ap, 1943, ínk on paper

Around 1570 the curacas (chiefs of the ‘ayllu’ or Indian community) of Huamanga

Torres García Family

- a region in the heart of the old Inca Empire - surprisingly joined forces with other

Collection, Montevideo

Andean chiefs to offer Philip II of Spain an enormous bribe to end the encomienda system.1Their offer was 100,000 ducados more than that of any of the Spanish encomenderos interested in maintaining the system. This bribe was not the last strategy of the curacas during the first stage of the Conquest. Once the Inca Empire was dissolved in 1532 those communities freed from oppression chose to ally themselves with the Spanish in a series of negotiations between encomenderos and curacas.2 These negotiations show the Indians’ capacity for developing strategies when faced with the devastating power of the Conquest, and their ability to adapt them as new situations arose.13With the discovery of gold and silver in Atunsulla (1560) and mercury in Huancavelica (1563), Huamanga became an important mineral region, crucial to the colonial economy. Indians, either individually or collectively, found ways of making the most of new economic developments. They even proved to be aggressive entrepreneurs, sending representatives to open mines in the gold sierras abandoned by the Incas. But it was precisely mining and the devastating effect of the mita4 that underlined the irreconcilable interests on which these initial agreements were based. Curacas refused to work in the mines and hostility increased. The final strategy was force. Huamanga burned in the epoch-making revolt of Taqui-Ongo.5 Them and Us

The ‘encounter of two worlds’ was marked by certain characteristics. In its first version the image of the New World was defined by its difference from the Old. The European logos was forced to stretch itself to cope with a new and diverse reality, which, not fitting the patterns, was inevitably distorted in this process. This was a conflict that affected, above all, language. In response to this, Alejo Carpentier was to propose the use of localisms, even of exoticisms, as an answer to his question: ‘Are we to suffer the anguish of Hernán Cortés when he complained to Charles V of not being able to describe certain great things in America “because I do not know the words by which they are known”?’6 The dispute between a reality and a language that tried to describe it is revealed in a graphic and eloquent manner by Carpentier in El siglo de las luces: Esteban was astonished as he realized how, in these islands, language had been

54 Beyond the Fantastic

forced to use agglutination, verbal amalgamation and metaphor to translate the formal ambiguity of things in which various essences were involved. Just as many trees were called ‘acacia-bracelets’, ‘pineapple-porcelain’ , ‘wood-rib’ , ‘broom-ten’, ‘cousin-clover’ , ‘pine-kernel-jug’ , ‘tisane-cloud’, ‘branch-iguana’, many marine creatures were given names that by trying to fix an image, created verbal errors, giving origin to a fantastic zoology of dog-fish, bull-fish, tiger-fish, snorers, blowers, flyers, red-coloured, striped, tattooed, tawnys Columbus arrived in America with a clear image of what he was going to find. Pierre d’Ailly’s Imago Mundi, Pliny’s Historia Natural (in its 1489 Italian version), Aeneas Sylvius’s Historiae Rerum Ubique Gestarunt, and Marco Polo’s Voyages (1485), were the sources from which he could select the images that would shape his perception of foreign worlds. Columbus did not discover, he verified and identified, mutilated and reduced. He started a long tradition of interpreting the reality of America through the reality of Europe, ignoring indigenous perceptions of it.8 Our image was made through a deforming mirror reflection. Our cultural development has been marked by being defined in terms of the ‘other’ . Modernity is another great organizational discourse with symbolic and interpretative value (after the Conquest and along with nationality), and continues this tradition of ‘relative to . . . ’ definitions. Our most typical means of operation has been transgression of central discourse to communicate with a different reality. Tactics and Strategies

The Caracas of Huamanga demonstrated that they were not lacking in understanding. The intention and the fact of bribing are significant in many ways. First they prove that, faced with the appalling conditions created by the Conquest, the curacas could develop an economic strategy. It also shows that Indians - contrary to what one may tend to believe - understood the workings of a monetary economy, even to the point of accumulating cash reserves. Finally, we can see that when the original alliances stopped working, they were able to change them. The curacas of Huamanga proved to be excellent strategists. To speak of cultural strategies implies a conflict with something diverse and opposed. To develop a strategy it is essential to have previous knowledge of a situation in order to attack it through several tactics. It also implies finding weak spots that suggest ways to subvert an established order. Alternatively, it can be undermined through alliances, counter-discourses, value inversions, appropriations, mixtures, hybridizations, and even the practice of a certain clandestinity, creating a

55 Strategies of Modernity in Latin America

history of schemes and wit. One can borrow in order to develop one’s own version, turn it upside down, deform, and selectively and intentionally assimilate. Modernity in Latin America was a misappropriated and modified project. An educated and travelling intelligentsia built up alliances between a project born in the context of nascent capitalism in the nineteenth century and a discordant periphery. However, they soon realized the contradiction in singing the praises of technology and the machine age in countries where there were few cars (and those were imported) or roads on which to experience the heady excitement of speed. Borges, Mariategui and Vallejo all suggested an initial inversion of values. They coincided in criticizing the ideology of novelty.9 Peripheral strategies relativize the absolute truths of dominant discourse (be they of unlimited progress or ‘the end of history’). By deconstructing this discourse they can find the relevant parts and rebuild it in relation to a diverse object. Latin American culture has worked in this way since it first gained independence. To formulate strategies and tactics requires an intelligent use of arms and tools, in this case cultural. The Strategy of Swallowing

Few images are as successful as that of swallowing: eating the white man, devouring and digesting him. That which will nourish is selected and the negative parts are discarded. The swallowing metaphor was radically developed by the Brazilian avantgarde. Marked as an inaugural fact, it was also felt to be the start of a history that even required a new date-system, a chronological mark to vindicate the value of anthropophagy.10 The revolt against the past born of the ideology of the new - an uprising marked in Latin America by Futurist discourse and by its iconoclastic choice, which was simultaneously foundational - was mixed with other elements from the very outset. Inaugural utopia arose in Brazil with a local rhythm that sought to establish differences from the beginning. The cult of the machine had a coffee aroma. In ‘Atelier’, Oswald de Andrade ‘tropicalizes’ the urban scenery from the tropicalized image of a Tarsila do Amaral, ‘Caipirinha vestida por Poiret’ : Fords Viaducts Coffee aroma In a framed silence.11 From Amazonia to the big city, Macunaima’s migratory journey also superimposes

56 Beyond the Fantastic

scenes. Mario de Andrade also questions the belligerences of language that are now disputes translated into a bricolage of discourses, quotations and meta-narratives.12 It is a conflict that leaves Macunaima for a week ‘unable to eat, play or sleep just because he wanted to know the languages of the land’.13 Sao Paulo had a transformational impact that found montage to be the only way not to impoverish its description: . . . A new scale . . . A new form of industry, of aviation. Pylons. Petrol stations. Rails. Laboratories and technical workshops. Voices and clicking cables, and airwaves and flashing lights.14 It was a landscape ripe for Futurism that, in opposition to the substitutional break with the past beloved of the Italian movement, would propose a new image charged with localisms. It would vindicate invention and surprise from a culture that already existed ‘in fact’ ; a complex reality, superimposed and impossible to abandon. The shacks o f saffron and ochre among the greens of the hillside favelas, under cabraline blue, are aesthetic facts. The Carnival in Rio is the religious outpouring of our race. Pau-Brazil. Wagner yields to the samba school of Botafogo. Barbaric, but ours . . . The learned side. Fate of the first white colonizer, the political master of the virgin jungle. The graduate. We can’t stop being learned. Doctors. Country of anonymous pain, anonymous doctors. The Empire was like that. We are all erudite . . . Language free of archaisms, free of erudition. Natural and neological. The millionfold contribution of error. How we speak. How we are.15 The battle for the new, which in the 1922 Week of Modern Art still lacked a distinctive visual aesthetic, would vindicate the option of also starting from what is given.16 From this reality Pau-Brazil inverted values and launched its export plan for a culture that assimilates all it can in a new creation: One lone battle - the battle for the way forward. Let us distinguish: imported poetry. And Pau-Brazil Poetry, for export.17 Markets, letters, industrial and telegraph towers, hillsides, fruits, cubes, are all filtered through an aesthetic that mixes Art Deco with Legeresque Cubism; Tarsila do

57 Strategies of Modernity in Latin America

Amaral’s landscapes define the new in terms of the different. Nature is hot, rationalized, anthropomorphic and anthropophagite. In Abaporu (fig. 7) the whole painting is filled with a man, naked, whose giant size is greater than nature. The anamorphic body extracts its meaning from the land on which it rests. The maneating man is, for Oswald de Andrade, the Brazilian devourer o f cultures, the creator of an existent culture that refounds, through each appropriation, its own culture: Tupy, or not Tupy, that is the question. Down with all catechisms. And down with the mother of Gracchi. The only things that interest me are those that are not mine. The laws of men. The laws of the anthropophagite . . . Justice became a code of vengeance and Science was transformed into magic. Anthropophagy. The permanent transformation of taboo into totem.18 The Pau-Brazil Manifesto (1924) and Anthropophagite Manifesto (1928, fig. 6) proposed the revaluation of (primitive) elements of nationality. Through a radical inversion of values, they searched for a new synthesis. Haroldo de Campos defined the anthropophagy of Pau-Brazil as: ‘ . . . the theory of a critical swallowing of a universal cultural legacy, developed not from the passive and acceptable perspective of the “noble savage” . . . but rather from the uncompromising viewpoint of the “bad savage” , the one that eats white men, the cannibal . . . Any past that is for us “ other” should be ignored. In other words, it should be eaten and devoured. With this clarification: the cannibal is a “polemicist” (from the Greekpolemos: fight, combat), but also an “anthologist” : he only eats those enemies he considers to be brave, to eat their protein and marrow, to gain strength and renew their natural strengths.’ 19 The Inverted Map

In 1935 Joaquín Torres-García launched his text-manifesto La Escuela del Sur (‘The School of the South’). Forceful and didactic, Torres translated into images what he may have thought as he saw the port of Montevideo from the ship in which he returned after forty-three years of absence, on 30 April 1934: Montevideo is unique. It has a character so peculiarly its own that it is unmistakable. It is apparent when you see the Cerro; and then its port; and it is perfectly fulfilled in the plazas, Independencia and Matriz.20 With the foundation, with Michel Seuphor, of Cercle et Carré (1930), Torres-García

58 Beyond the Fantastic

Revista de A n tro po fa g ia

M AN IFESTO A N TR O P O FAG O Só a antropofagia nos une. Social­ mente. Económicamente. Philosophicamente. Unica lei do mundo. Expressáo mascarada de todos os individualis­ mos, de todos os collectivisino. De todas as religióes. De todos os trata­ dos de paz. Tupy, or not tupy that is the question. Contra toda as cathecheses. contra a máe^dos Gracchos.

E

Só me interessa o que nao é ineu. Lei do homem. Lei do antropófago. Estamos fatigados de todos os ma­ ridos catholicos suspeitosos postos em drama. Freud acabou com o enigma mulher e com outros sustos da psychologia impressa.

pobre declarado dos direitos do homem. A edade de ouro annunciada pela America. A edade de ouro. E todas as girls. Filiagáo. O contacto com o Brasil Caraliiba. Oú Villeganhon print ter­ re. Montaigne. O homem natural. Rousseau. Da R e v o lu to Francesa ao Romantismo, á R e v o lu to Bol­ chevista, á. R evoluto surrealista e ao barbaro technizado de Keyserl­ ing. Caminhamos. Nunca fomos cathechisados. Vive­ mos atravez de um direito sonam­ bulo. Fizemos Christo nascer na Ba­ hia. Ou em Belem do Parí. Mas nunca admittimos o nasci­ mento da logica entre nós.

Queremos a revolugáo Carahiha. Maior que a r ev olu to Francesa. A unificadlo de todas as revoltas efficazes na direcgáo do homem. Sem nós a Europa nao teria siquer a sua

Tinhamos a justiga codificado da vinganga A sciencia codificado da Magia. Antropofagia. A transfor­ m a d o permanente do Tabú em tó­ tem. Contra o mundo reversivel e as ideas objectivadas. Cadaverizadas. O stop do pensamento que é dynamico. O individuo victima do systema. Fonte das injustigas classicas. Das injustigas románticas. E o esquecimento das conquistas interio­ res. Roteiros. Roteiros. Roteiros. Roteiros. Roteiros. Roteiros. Roteiros. O instincto Carahiba.

Contra as elites vegetaes. Em eonununicado com o sólo. Nunca fomos cathechisados. Fizemos foi Carnaval. O indio vestido de senador do Imperio. Fingindo .de Pitt. Ou figuran­ do ñas operas de Alencar cheio de bons sentimentos portuguezes.

Filhos do s o l , máe dos viventes. Encontrados e ama­ dos ferozmente, com toda a hypocrisia da saudade, pelos im­ migrados, pelos tra­ ficados e pelos touristes. No paiz da cobra grande.

Contra todos os importadores de consciencia enlatada. A existencia palpavcl da vida. E a mentalidade prelogica para o Sr. Levy Bruhl estudar.

ittender ao mundo

Morte e vida das hypotheses. Da equagáo eu parte do Kosmos ao axioma Kosmos parte do eu. Subsistencia. Conhecimento. Antropofagia.

O que atropelava a verdade era a roupa, o impermeavel entre o mundo interior e o mundo exterior. A reacuño contra o homem vestido. O cinema americano informa­ rá.

Foi porque nun­ ca tivemos grammaticas, nem *colDcacuho de Turelln lecgóes de velhos vegetaes. E nunca soubemos o que era urbano, suburbano, fronteirigo e continental. Preguigosos no mappa mundi do Brasil. Urna consciencia participante, tuna rythmica religiosa.

Só podemos orecular.

1928 -

De

Contra o Padre Vieira. Autor do nosso primeiro emprestimo, para ganhar commissáo. O rei analphabeto dissera-lhe : ponha isso no pape! mas sem muita labia. Fez-se o em­ prestimo. Gravou-se o assucar brasileiro. Vieira deixou o dinheiro em Portugal e nos trouxe a labia,

O espirito recusa-se a conceber o espirito sem corpo. O antropomor­ fismo. Necessidade da vaccina antropofagica. Para o equilibrio contra as religióes de meridiano. E as inquisigóes exteriores.

cxposigáo de Junho

Já tinhamos o communismo. Já ti­ nhamos a lingua'1 surrealista. A eda­ de de ouro. Catiti Catiti Imara Notiá Notiá Imara

Ipejú

A magia e a vida. Tinhamos a relagáo e a distribuigáo dos bens physicos, dos bens moraes, dos bens dignarios. E sabíamos transpor o mysterio c a morte com o auxilio de algumas formas grammaticaes. Perguntei a um homem o que era o Direito. Elle me respondeu que era a garantía do exercicio da possibilidade. Esse homem chamava-se Galli Mathias. Comi-o Só nao ha determinismo - onde ha misterio. Mas que temos nós com isso? Continua na Pagina 7

59 Strategies of Modernity in Latin America

Ftg. 6

had been a protagonist of the avant-garde in Europe. The development of his

Anthropophagite

production connected successively to Mediterranean Classicism, Vibracionismo,

Manifesto in Revista de Antropofagia, 1928

Cubism, Fauvism; and the incorporation in his final Paris visit of the Golden Section and of a formal repertoire linked to pre-Columbian cultures had become by 1934 the form of a programme that Torres would redefine on arriving in M ontevideo/1 The journey was a break for him. It is significant that Historia de mi vida (the autobiography that Torres narrates in the third person, from outside, as though it were about another person) ends precisely with his arrival in Uruguay, where he started a task of, first of all, recognition: The steamship enters into the port, looks for a place and . . . over there a group of people. Torres-García has very fine eyesight and can already recognize them . . . He is among his own! Now he recognizes it well! He breathes. Then he recognizes the houses and the paving stones, with little pieces of grass between them! That’s them, the same ones! And for the rest about TorresGarcía, someone else will tell.22 What Torres did not find in the artistic field that he entered on his return he searched for in houses, colours, the air, the great River Plate, the special and different appearance of people (a type based simultaneously on the European, the Indian mestizo or the negro).23 It was a different city in which Torres denied precisely the distinguishing features of modernity visible in the new neighbourhoods, in as much as these traces of modernity were not his own ones. At this point Torres started to use his characteristic method of searching for a synthesis in opposed elements: dynamic syntheses that, in their contradictions, demonstrate the complex mixtures of a culture for which he wants to define a programme that is both sacrificial and integral. Torres’s concern is not with written or spoken language but with forms. His gesture takes on a graphic and visual form. To invert the map is a decontextualizing and resemanticizing operation. Once again it is the inaugural gesture of wanting to establish new parameters, which are now spatial: . . . Our north is the South. There should be no north for us, except in opposition to our South. That is why we now turn the map upside down, and now we know what our true position is, and it is not the way the rest of the world would like to have it. From now on, the elongated tip of South America will point insistently at the South, our North. Our compass as well; it will incline irremediably and

60 Beyond the Fantastic

forever towards the South, towards our pole. When ships sail from here travelling north, they will be travelling down, not up as before. Because the North is now below. And as we face our South, the East is to our left. This is a necessary rectification; so that now we know where we are.24 The act of inversion implies a fundamentally ideological replacing; it marks a new stage, aiming for independence, for Latin American art. Torres’s aesthetic programme, formed in a European context and led on by the interest in the exotic that fed the avant-garde of the central countries, would acquire a new dimension from its confrontation with a diverse reality in which currents of Latin Americanist thought circulated intensely.25 Neither Mondrian nor all the theories on geometry and abstraction born in the European context can explain Torres’s development in Montevideo. This development is not visible from a reading that interprets him as an epigonal figure. What is more, it was only in Montevideo that Torres could realize his original project. Thus these are the developments that follow a full understanding of his earlier itinerary in Europe and the USA.26 While it is true that Torres always expressed his rejection o f aestheticism, it was in the country to which he returned that his proposals to integrate art with life from the perspective of a retroactive utopia were received and accepted. It was also in Montevideo that Torres developed the corpus of his theories; it was there that he would launch a monumental didactic programme; and there, finally, that he would give form to his aspirations to create an anonymous, popular, monumental, metaphysical and ritual art. Torres’s intention was foundational. Thus he added a strategy of vacuum to the significant gesture o f inverting the map. Considering Uruguay to be lacking in a strong local tradition, he proposed to use the universal tradition of art as a starting point, a constructive tradition to which the ‘continental Inca civilization’ also belonged: . . . [for] we rioplatenses27, as regards local tradition, or one of our own, [it] is so short as not to warrant discussion. Habits and customs, folklore . . . should be forgotten before they are remembered . . . This is true as regards our immediate tradition because, on the other hand, can we not rely on the civilization o f our Continent? . . . if the ancient culture of this land can still be valid for us, it is because it is in line with the universal principles. For this reason, these cultures can

61 Strategies of Modernity in Latin America

incorporate themselves into the great tradition of knowledge of all ages.28 To not take a line or motif of Inca art, but instead to create with the ruler, with geometric order. The extreme austerity characteristic of Torres’s work in the years following his return can be understood as the most radical expression of an art that, overcoming all temptation (pictorial, vanguard, realist), allows him to create an anonymous and monumental art. The abandoning of all sensual elements would become the pictorial expression of that stony and monumental art that was his ultimate aspiration.29 Torres’s utopia, simultaneously retrospective and foundational, synthesized the most extreme aspirations of European modernity. With his return journey to Montevideo his original ideas would be submitted to a series of inversions that would allow him to reformulate his project and make America the measure of the Universe. Appropriation of Appropriation

When Wifredo Lam created The Jungle (1942-3, fig. 20) in Cuba he repeated an act that the European avant-garde had done previously and which he now charged with a subversive content. Lam took the forms and structures of Cubism, which had itself appropriated the forms and structures of primitive art, in a movement that he himself described as intentional: Since my stay in Paris I had a fixed idea: to take African art and to make it operate in its own world, in Cuba. I needed to express in a work combative energy, the protest of my ancestors.30 However, rather than repeating a form of operation, Lam wanted a rebellion based on a vindication of cultural mixture. This mix has much more to do with his own pictorial formation than with ethnicity. His development also allows one to reconstruct a double itinerary: the consolidation process of the Latin American artistic field and that of the European avant-gardes. On Lam’s biographical ‘journey’ he stopped over at the best ports offered by Western culture at the time. From Cuba, Lam constructed his first imaginary map of Europe: Paris, the Louvre, Catalonia, Chardin, Anglada Camarasa.31 He started his academic formation in San Alejandro, Havana, and completed it in the Prado with Fernando Alvarez de Sotomayor: José Ribera, Pedro Berruguete, Diego Velázquez, Goya, Zurbarán, knowing Klee and Brancusi (which would take on another dimension when he met Picasso in Paris). This journey was also the confrontation of the magical

62 Beyond the Fantastic

world of his birth town (Sagua la Grande) with Spain’s religious world."’ And it gave him experience of an event that cut across the intellectual world of the 1930s: the Spanish Civil Wait Subsequently, Paris, Picasso, Leiris, Marseille’s Surrealism with his images for Breton’s Fata Morgana, then the return to Cuba with a new starting point. European modernity’s appropriation of ‘primitive’ formal structures as food for a self-centred discourse was imitated and disarticulated as an operative system in Lam’s work after his return to Cuba. He made the mechanisms of the centre evident, repeated them and charged them with a new meaning. He fed from their usurped forms. He expressed his ‘otherness’ in the central discourse so as to insert it, alive, into the universalizing discourses of modernity. Thus it was discovered that what, in European discourse, was a horizon of desires or the object of a laboratory experiment, in the Caribbean was the latent everyday, hidden and suppressed since the Conquest and slavery. Lam, in common with other Latin American intellectuals, managed to establish an undoubtedly privileged position through his cultural travels. This was owing to his coexistence from childhood with America’s cultural mix and because he also shared and participated in the European cultural and social laboratory. Lam did not observe the West from outside, he rather recognized himself and learnt. It is all this heritage that allowed him to undertake new researches upon his return. A knowledge of the decontextualizing operations of the European avant-gardes allowed him in turn to decontextualize the forms of the avant-garde to charge them with revolutionary and prophetic contents. And not only with the forms, but also with the utopian telos of modernity, allowing him to conceive his programme as the start of a different time. Lam repeated the pillaging gesture he had learnt, using whatever served his purpose of giving form to a different culture for which he had, through his journeys, developed a new vision that he now proposed as a recontextualizing programme. In The Jungle, the revenge of a small Caribbean country, Cuba, against the colonizers is plotted. I used the scissors as a symbol of a necessary cut against all foreign imposition in Cuba, against all colonization . . . To paint The Jungle, I used to the maximum the lessons learned from a study of the classics . . . I did my work like a ritual, based on experiences acquired in Spain and France.33 This inverted appropriation of the strategies of the centre by the periphery allowed Lam to refound Afro-Caribbean culture, along with Cubism and Surrealism.

63 Strategies of Modernity in Latin America

As Gerardo Mosquera has said: ‘It is amazing how critics and art historians have not recognized Wifredo Lam as the first artist who presented a vision from the African in America in all the history of gallery visual arts.’34 Lam is a protagonist of the modern construction of Afro-American visuality. It is a construction in which, from the baroque aspects of Cubism, he discovered the sensual outlines of a nature that is simultaneously vegetable and religious. He wrote his own modern project taking advantage of the complex receptive constitution of European modernity and feeding it, in turn, with new components. Simultaneously, he interpreted' his rereading as a cut: in America, culture is both summary and project; it gives new forms from difference. To be Modern in America

The cultural responses artists made when faced with contexts that the transoceanic journey would necessarily redefine were, above all, visionary gazes towards the future. As an organizational discourse of experiences and expectations in which projective and reactive components germinated in a complex jumble of culture, modernity in the periphery was also an irritative, subversive and activist proposal. A response in which nationalism, cosmpolitanism, regionalism and internationalism coexisted and fought for hegemony. A proposal that was also articulated from research in existing lexicons and catalogues and which, when the conflict proposed by these doubts demanded a renunciation of all simulation, gave rise to a discourse that aimed at a rupture and subversion of the moral, spatial and temporal parameters in which it had initially moved. This travelling backwards through the tracks of the conquistador towards a brief voluntary exile undertaken by a sector of the enlightened intelligentsia was fed by the fantasies provided by reading and fragmentary images and was also, for this reason, a voyage of self-discovery. A construction guided by diverse data, deposited in diverse times, and to which that which came from European political history (especially regarding wars and revolutions) was not alien and which, when faced with the reality of this land until the moment of the long-awaited journey was inevitably modified. This was a modification that would also affect the vision of Latin America when it was time to come home.36 The strategies used by Torres-García, Lam, Tarsila do Amaral or the Andrades to meditate on the cultural map of America were born of a kaleidoscopic game. Europe and America were reconfigured from shattered images, the fragments of which declared a battle to impose a new order. Since the sixteenth century America had been an active element in the

64 Beyond the Fantastic

construction of European modernity: the ‘encounter of two worlds’ also forced a change in the conceptualization of the world.36 American modernity in turn absorbed differential characteristics that are not fully described by notions o f copy, addition or epigonal development. In the early twentieth century cultural proposals were born of strategies that implied, above all, an ideological inversion of values. To devour, mix, appropriate and reappropriate, invert, fragment and join, take central discourse, penetrate and cut through it until it becomes a useful tool for the search for and creation (plagued with achievements and failures) of our own subversive discourse: these are the exploratory ways in which some enlightened artists created their visual constructions as part of the programme of a liberational culture. NOTES 1

Encomienda: concession granted by the Spanish king for some Spanish colonists to receive tribute and labour from the Indians. The encomendero was supposed to look after the Indians financially and spiritually.

2

For an account o f the diverse white-Indian alliances, see S Stern, ‘The Rise and Fall of Indian-White Alliances: A Regional View o f “ Conquest” ’, The Hispanic American Historical Review, vol. 6, no. 3 (August 1981).

3

Although I do not totally agree, I am strategically adopting a unilateral view of the Conquest. I would like to point out, however, that there is another aspect at least as^important as that which I am discussing: the powerlessness o f the Indians when faced with the savage destructive power (psychological, economic, demographic) o f the European Conquest. On this subject, see N Wachtel, Los vencidos: los indios del Perú frente a la conquista española (1530-1570) (Madrid: Alianza, 1976).

4

M ita: the system (originally o f Indian origin) with which the Spanish controlled Indian labour. Indians were selected to work in the mines by drawing lots (translator’s note].

5

Taqui-Ongo: name o f the religious sect whose beliefs spread in the 1560s in the provinces o f Central Peru as a way o f confronting Christianity. See Wachtel, op. cit., pp. 285-9.

6

Alejo Carpentier, ‘Problemática del tiempo y del idioma en la moderna novela latinoamericana’, lecture given in Venezuela, 1975, in Razón de ser (Havana: Letras Cubanas, 1984), p. 81.

7

Alejo Carpentier, El siglo de las luces (Barcelona: Bruguera, 1980), p. 172.

8

See B Pastor, El discurso narrativo do la conquista de América (Havana: Casa de las Américas, 1984), p. 24.

9

The young Borges, influenced by Expressionism during his stay in Europe (1914-21), discovered his natal city of Buenos Aires when he returned. This can be seen in his books, Fervor de Buenos Aires (1923), Luna de enfrente (1925), Cuaderno de San Martín (1929) and in his collection o f essays Evaristo Carriego. In the 1930s César Vallejo also launched his attack on the avant-garde: El tungsteno (1931) and España, aparta de mí ese cáliz (1939) are in a very different vein from his most famous book Trilce (1922). As a compromise, Mariátegui also fought for an avant-garde that was not limited to formal issues. See Jorge Schwartz, Las vanguardias latinoamericanas: Textos programáticos y críticos (Madrid: Cátedra, 1991).

65 Strategies of Modernity in Latin America

10 Oswald de Andrade’s Anthropophagite Manifesto is dated at the end ‘Piratininga [Indian name for the area on which Sáo Paulo was built in 1554, around a school founded by the Jesuits], the year 374 after the swallowing o f Bishop Sardinha’. The manifesto was published in 1928. 11 Quoted by J Schwartz, op. cit., p. 43. 12 See Raúl Antelo (ed.), Macunaíma o herói sem nenhum caráter (Brasilia: edn Crítica CNPq, 1988), pp. 255-65. 13 Mário de Andrade, Macunaíma o herói sem nenhum caráter, op. cit., p. 88. 14 Oswald de Andrade, lPau-Brazil Poetry: Manifesto’ , in Dawn Ades, Art in Latin America (London: South Bank Centre, 1989), p. 310. 15 Ades, op.cit. 16 For the Week o f 1922, see Aracy Amaral’s fundamental reconstruction, Artes plásticas na Semana de 22 (Sáo Paulo: BM&F, 1992). 17 Ades, op.cit. 18 Oswald de Andrade, ‘Anthropophagite Manifesto’, in Dawn Ades, op. cit., p. 312. 19 Haroldo de Campos, ‘Da razáo antropofágica: diálogo e diferenga na cultura brasileira’, Boletim Bibliográfico Biblioteca Mário de Andrade 44 (January-December 1983), p.107. Quoted by J Schwartz, op. cit., pp. 135-6. 20 Torres-García, The School o f the South, 1935. Reproduced in Mari Carmen Ramirez (ed.), El Taller Torres-García. The School o f the South and Its Legacy (Austin: University o f Texas Press, 1992), p. 53. 21 See Margit Rowell, ‘Ordre i simbol: les fonts europées i americanes del constructivisme de Torres-García’, in Torres-García: estructura-dibuix-simbol, exhibition catalogue (Barcelona: Fundado Joan Miró, 1986), pp. 15-16. The incidence and the protagonism o f this culture in Torres-Garcia’s work has been evaluated in different ways. Juan Fió says: ‘The influence o f pre-Columbian art in Torres-García is irrelevant. The Indoamerican art, as all primitive arts and that o f the main archaist cultures, are of interest to him if they are part o f the art paradigm with an aesthetic sense, but not linked with an imitative representation.’ See Juan Fió, Torres-García en (y desde) Montevideo (Montevideo: Arca, 1991), p. 48. I agree with this idea. However, I think Torres-García had an American programme. See Torres-García, Metafísica de la prehistoria indoamericana (Montevideo: Asociación Arte Constructivo, 1939) and many chapters of the Universalismo Constructivo: Contribución a la unificación del arte y la cultura de América (Buenos Aires: Poseidón, 1944). 22 Torres-García, Historia de mi vida (Barcelona: Paidós), p. 234. 23 An analysis o f the different tendencies in this field can be found in an unpublished lecture by Gabriel Peluffo Linari, ‘ Regionalismo cultural y la vanguardia: el Taller Torres-García’, presented in Austin, Texas, 1991. 24 Torres-García, The School o f the South, 1935. Reproduced in Mari Carmen Ramirez (ed.), op. cit., p. 53. 25 The studies o f the American Constructivist tradition started by Torres-García in 1938 were developed by the Asociación Arte Constructivo. This work was continued in the Taller Torres-García. 26 Juan Fió has written: ‘Torres’s Montevideo period is not only significant in itself, but also because it provides us with some important keys with which to understand his whole trajectory.’ See J Fió, op. cit., p. 9.

66 Beyond the Fantastic

27 Rioplatense: literally ‘o f the River Plate’, adjective used to characterize the shared culture o f Buenos Aires and Montevideo [translator’s note|. 28 Torres-García, Metafísica de la prehistoria indoamericana (Montevideo: Asociación de Arte Constructivo, 1939). Original emphases.

Fig. 7 Tarsila do Amaral Abaporu, 1928 Oil on canvas, 85 x 75 cms

29 Fió, op.cit., pp. 28-9. 30 In Antonio Nuñez Jimenez, Wifredo Lam (Havana: Editorial Letras Cubanas, 1982), p. 173.

Collection of Maria Anna and Raul de Souza Dantas Forbes,

31 Ibid., p. 71. 32 Ibid.t p. 83. 33 Ibid., pp. 173-5. 34 Gerardo Mosquera, ‘Modernismo desde afroamérica: Wifredo Lam cambia el sentido’, mimeograph, p. 6. 35 For an interpretation o f the transoceanic journey between Europe and America, see Nicolás Casullo’s article, ‘ La modernidad como destierro: la iluminación de los bordes’, in A A .W Imágenes desconocidas. La modernidad en la encrucijada postmoderna (Buenos Aires: CLACSO, 1988), pp. 31-5. 36

See Aníbal Quijano, ‘Modernidad, identidad y utopía en América Latina’, in A A .W , op. cit., pp.17-24.

Sao Paulo, Brazil

67 Strategies of Modernity in Latin America

The Void and the D ialogue in the W estern H em isphere Paulo Herkenhoff

In the Museum of Modern Art’s Information catalogue (1970) two Brazilians, Helio

a dialectical approach between critical theory and the analysis of form and signifiers would result in a much more challenging project - one that would allow us to theorize specificity and difference. The use of categories such as ‘Latin American’ art should be reduced to an instrumental level in institutionalized circuits such as the museum and the university. As cultural critics, though, we could expand and subvert the term to destabilize fixed notions about representation, to upset undefined pluralisms and shatter ossified polarizations between centre and periphery, mainstream and alternative, First and Third Worlds. That project of reconceptualization has already started, I think, and it is up to us to move it along by not considering pluralism as the final step in a never-ending process where through negotiation and contextualization representations become vulnerable events. With all its pitfalls, ‘Cartographies’, like similar exhibitions, contributed to this stage of re-evaluation in the sense that it was probably the best response to a Canadian request (undoubtedly well intentioned) for ‘Latin American Art’ . A paradigmatic shift in our approach to Latin American art can proceed from the new ‘positions of investigation’ proposed by exhibitions like ‘Cartographies’ but not completely deployed. Our next response to a request for Latin American art should reorient the investigation by defining our field of inquiry, by disrupting nationalistic discourses and boundaries and by exploring complexity through an intertextual approach that unveils specificities and singularities. This kind of enterprise would probably involve productive tensions and not mere solutions.

Francisco

256 Beyond the Fantastic

257 Cartographies: Exploring the Limitations of a Curatorial Paradigm

This should not be a problem, though, because the time for any kind of essentialist B Zenil

solution, of a concept or definition of Latin American art, has passed.

AJI Due Respect Todo Respeto), NOTES media on paper,

1 Non-numbered quotes are from the catalogue by Ivo Mezquita, Cartographies (Winnipeg Art Gallery, 1993).

42 cms Collection,

2

A step further in the articulation o f this pluralistic paradigm has been taken by other exhibitions such as ‘Americas’ (1992), presented at the Monasterio de Santa Cruz in Spain; ‘Regarding America’ (1992-3),

City

which toured Venezuela, Colombia and various cities in the USA and Costa Rica; ‘Space of Time’ (1993), presented at the Americas Society; and ‘About Place: recent art o f the Americas’ (1995) at the Art Institute o f Chicago. While these exhibitions counteracted the essentialist historical surveys o f Latin American art they were still predicated on geopolitical paradigms that emphasize the reconceptualization (geopolitical expansion) o f the name America, now encompassing a multicultural continent. 3 Vijay Mishra and Bob Hodge, ‘What is Postcolonialism?’ in Colonial Discourse and Postcolonial Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), p. 278. 4 Ibid., p. 285. 5

Louise Marcil-Lacoste, ‘The Paradoxes o f Pluralism’, in Chantal Mouffe (ed.), Dimensions o f Radical Democracy (London: Verso, 1992), pp. 130-1.

6

Mari Carmen Ramirez, ‘Beyond “the Fantastic” : Framing Identity in US Exhibitions of Latin American Art’, see p. 229.

7

The New Museum o f Contemporary Art and The Drawing Center in New York are among the institutions that in the past have articulated what I am calling here a ‘multicultural praxis’ . Namely, including in their exhibitions artists from very different cultural backgrounds in relation to contemporary issues like technology and globalization. See for example ‘The Last Frontier’ (1993) and ‘Trade Routes’ (1994) at the New Museum, and the recent autumn, winter and spring selections of drawings at The Drawing Center.

8

Gerardo Mosquera, ‘The Marco Polo Syndrome: A Few Problems Surrounding Art and Eurocentrism’, in The South Atlantic Quarterly, ‘Postmodernism: Center and Periphery’, Summer 1993, vol. 92, no. 3 (Duke University Press), p. 529.

R ealignm ents of Cultural P ow er

P ostm odern D ecentrednesses and Cultural Periphery: The D isalignm ents and R ealignm ents of Cultural P ow er Nelly Richard Ever since the Spanish Colony obliged the continent to speak through division in the

Fig. 41 (opposite

language of the conqueror, Latin America has known a rift between sign (the name

previous page)

established through coercion) and referent (the refractory substance of enforced

Uliana Porter Reconstruction Wit

speech). This founding fracture between sign and referent conditioned the way Latin

Mirror, 1988

America would thereafter distrust the categories of dominant-Western rationality,

Collage on paper

with the suspicion that its nominal pruning, by means o f words, exerted the primary colonizing violence of a superimposed nomenclature. When the intellectual and strategic programme of historical modernity patented its formula of reason and progress as a metropolitan formula, suspicion of the machinations of Logos was reoriented against the centre. This was not only because the centre presented itself as the origin of and foundation for the unfolding of the civilizatory process that universalized the dominant-Western paradigm, but also because it geographically controlled the international currency of exchanges of economic and cultural power. This function of control depended on the instrumentation of the centre as a place of hierarchy and dominion that established legitimacies, dictated guidelines of meaning and conduct, prescribed usages and regulated communications.1 One of the prerogatives of the centre was always that of ordaining conventions, achieving this through the modernity= progress equation that rendered absolute the value o f the New. The modernism of the New, as a metropolitan fantasy transferred to the Latin American periphery, carried with it a conflict of definitions and interests that was an inevitable result of the tensions within its origins and conveyance. Some of the gestures conceded in connection with the new data brought from abroad remained captive to a dependent reflection, through continued subservience to the Europeanizing model. Meanwhile, others denounced the treachery of mimetic reproduction, seeking immediately to indicate a position of resistance to the hegemonic scheme. The sociology of culture in Latin America highlights how literary aesthetics, artistic vanguards and movements of ideas have successively accommodated one or another gesture according to the oscillation o f identity of its creators and intellectuals (the educated elite) who served as enlightened guardians in the chain of transmission of the metropolitan paradigm; and also according to the type of energy (attraction or rejection) aroused by the context of the reception attending the arrival of the cosmopolitan data. The socioeconomic modernization that industrialized culture, and its ‘North Americanization’ of consumption under the grammar of the world economy of the capitalist market, proceeded to influence the debate about culture and identity in Latin America until such debate was significantly recast - in the 1960s - as an

(acrylic, silkscreer charcoal), 101.6 x 76.2 cms Photograph cou of the artist

261 Postmodern Decentrednesses and Cultural Periphery

anti-imperialist declaration; as an appeal for protection against the effects of ideologico-cultural infiltration of the internationalization of capital and its North American monopoly of mass communications.2 That Third World critique of the 1960s, supported by the myth of the ‘New Man’ and its faith in the breakdown of capitalism, had to be revised under the historical pressure of many of the political fractures that convulsed Latin America, weakening the utopian-revolutionary credo of its left. However, several other changes in critical thinking produced convergent effects. The Latin American left always claimed for itself the defence of the ‘national-popular’, granting this particular category the premodern (anti-industrial) value of the representation o f ‘one’s own’, archaic symbolization of an identity predetermined as origin. The primitivist substratum of that mythical quest for a ‘Latin American identity’ gave rise to condemnation of the contaminating and alienating effects o f North American modernization in the name of a vernacular recovery of continental purity (the original, the autocthonous). This position must now respond to the challenge of the current discussion of modernity, traditions and the market, taking into account new insights concerning the ‘cultural heterogeneity’ of Latin American modernity: a heterodox modernity that juxtaposes dissimilar fragments of social temporality in a ‘collage’ of memories and experiences that shatter the uniform-standardization of programmed consumption by the North American hegemony.3 Several other points of conflict that supported antagonism between the North Americanization of consumption (capitalist alienation) and Third World ‘identity’ (resistance to the international market in defence of the integrity of ‘one’s own’) also underwent a process of rearticulation according to new codes of theoretical and cultural analysis. Some of the elements that have a bearing here, for instance, are the proposals for a new sociology of communicational discourse with respect to how an active - discriminating - consumption may locally resemanticize a message in senses that escape the determining control of mass-media power. All these new coordinates, linked to the transnationalization of the market that disseminates cultural power in segmented and mixed streams that intersect and redescribe identities (ownership) and frontiers (circulation), have redefined the tensions existing between metropolitan hegemony and peripheral subalternity: between centre and margins. Moreover, these are the circumstances of the Latin American debate into which is introduced the postmodern reference that today partially influences the positions taken up in the confrontation over marginality and decentredness. This notion brings into play new variables of power and discourse that meet at the

262 Beyond the Fantastic

crossroads of the Latin American problem of centre-periphery, through the theoretical-rhetorical-political ambivalence that surrounds the postmodern image of the centre: 1) The discourse of postmodernity is a discourse articulated within the bounds of an authority that continues to guarantee the predominance of the centre - a predominance that derives its force from the Euro-North American schema. However, at the same time it is a discourse that is distinguished for its theorization o f the explosion of the centre and the proliferation of the margins. 2) The so-called periphery is now one of these margins resemanticized by the postmodern lexicon of the crisis of the centre, and summoned to self-renewal as an example of its own theory of decentredness. This axial contortion undoubtedly forces the periphery to reflect on the new disalignments and realignments o f cultural power. The vital question, through linkage with the founding fracture between sign and referent, is: how to avail oneself of the international repertoire of terms - those terms whose convention of interchange secures the practicability of the dialogue between centre and periphery - knowing that these terms are manipulated by ‘the kitchen of the epistemological struggle of the centre’?4 How might it be possible to resignify the international topics of the postmodern register spanning margins and peripheries so that this register may serve the periphery as a decolonizing tool, applied - among other tasks - to denouncing the neo-colonialist pitfalls of postmodernist revaluation of the margins? The Image of the ‘Other’: Marginality and Difference

If we were to alter the boundaries of the academic debate and give postmodernism the dispersed meaning of an environmental register that combines modes and trends, it would be easy to recollect examples of how the street, museums, music, clothing, television, etc. incorporate into their decorations the signs of the ‘other’ that stage the mixing of cultures. And yet these mélanges often seem to sustain a horizontal dialogue between frontiers that is more apparent than real, since one of the currents at play (‘the mainstream’ ) continues to distribute the signs of variety that maintain the status quo. The most typical versions of the ‘Latinization of the United States’ show how the multiculturalist cliché works to dissolve conflicts between cultural traffic by reorganizing the signs of interacting traditions into mere exoticist fetishes of folk assimilation.5 However, it is on the international scene of postmodernist theory that the play o f the appropriation-expropriation discourses of the ‘marginal’ becomes provocatively more complex.6 What are the rhetorical, ideological and political implications of the postmodernist

263 Postmodern Decentrednesses and Cultural Periphery

play of the revaluation/devaluation of the ‘other’? Let us begin with the way in which postmodernity is interpreted by many as the register ‘of a crisis of cultural authority, specifically of the authority vested in western European culture and its institutions’ .' Modernity synthesized its rationalizing-standardizing pretensions in the image of the centre as total symbol of Truth and Power, which enhanced the superiority o f the First World. Today it is claimed that the postmodern rupture of the meta-stories based on foundations o f uniqueness-totality-centrality must serve to deregulate the governance of the centre as origin and determining force, delegitimizing the pretensions that supported the supremacy of the dominant-Western model. The collapse of absolutes and the breakdown of universals is supposed to have precipitated the end of the Eurocentric hierarchy, giving way to the new anti-totalitarian modulations of a way of thinking attracted to how ‘the notion of centre, order and hierarchy is pulverized, and how new work on margins, frontiers, peripheries and “minorities” is initiated’ .8 However, to what degree has this heterologous recuperation of the marginal (of the decentred) become anything more than a simple declarative position, or contributed effectively to modifying the institutional-discourse pact, endorsed by the official chain of powers and functions of the centre? It is a question - strictly speaking - of ascertaining whether or not the alleged fragmentation and dispersal of the centre modifies the categorization of power that established imbalances with regard to exchanges of value and meaning. What are these international imbalances in cultural power? First, there are those ties to the social and economic structure of distribution of resources and management that facilitate or inhibit the participation of its operators according to how close or distant they are from the Euro-North American pole that continues to dominate the means of exchange. Second, there are those involved in the international network of management of ‘symbolic capital’ who value or devalue certain discursive operations according to whether or not they have the symbolic-institutional credit granted by the centre as guarantor of legitimacy. It is this network, organized by the ‘universities, magazines, institutes, exhibitions, editorial series’9, that not only helps to circulate the metropolitan mentality but also consecrates its prestige (and thereby defends its exclusivity), which functions as a network o f authority. In order for the postmodern disposition towards the marginal to be materialized in new politico-discursive articulations, it would be necessary to subvert the discriminatory logic of the centre, refuting its canon of authority-authorization. In this sense the fact that, for instance, ‘several recent studies feel no hesitation at all in

264 Beyond the Fantastic

creating illustrations by means of numerous Latin American examples, and even paradigms of postmodernity’ ; or that ‘the discovery [is] made by Hans Robert Jauss of Borges as the founder of postmodernism’, does not signal any advance that might correct the second-grade category of the ‘Latin American’ within the international mould."’ It only reconfirms the founding (discovering) authority of the exponents of the culture of the First World, who continue to exercise the privilege of their tradition: that of establishing precedence. The Latin American ‘difference’ is called upon to illustrate how the mentality of the centre today finds itself ready to break out of its Eurocentric closure: shuffling eccentric references, but without allowing such references to destabilize the grammar of investments that continue to privilege the centre as endower o f meaning. In many postmodern theorizations the figure of the ‘other’ continues to be subordinated to an identity/difference dialectic whose management follows the same parameters as those that always favoured the dominion of a subject-of-discourse that operates as a subject-representative-of-power. To quote Edward Said, the discursive act of constitution of the ‘other’ assumes the violence implicit in the gesture of fixing it into a represented object, of subduing it as an image. Only ‘a representational system’ that is neither imposed nor coercive but ‘participative and collaborative’, one that allowed the subject of difference to discuss (and eventually to modify) the rules of enunciation, could respect the autonomy of the subject.11 For this to happen, it is necessary for the symbolic-institutional structure of the system of representation to become democratized, something that until now has held the unlawful privilege of homologizing a single vision: that which postulates ‘the subject of representations absolutely centred, unitary, masculine’ .12 Only when symbolic power is decentred within cultural representation, and its mechanisms of critical dialogue are pluralist, may its use be extended to include those agents situated at the outer limits of its concentration o f material and symbolic power, and those practitioners of the ‘other’ share in a more egalitarian manner in the socio-communicative structure that delivers resources in order to: 1) articulate their differences; and 2) negotiate the conditions of critical functioning of that difference inside the cultural system.13 The requisite condition is to give life to such a position so that the ‘other’ may remain benevolently confined to the circumscribed - and supervised - isolation of the margins but be able to interpellate the system, deploying formulae that implicate the institutionality of the centre as interactive addressee.

265 Postmodern Decentrednesses and Cultural Periphery

The Peripheric Quote of the Marginal

Modernity shored up its civilizing will in the scriptural order (‘laws, classifications, dispensations and hierarchies’) of the ‘learned city’ (Rama). The governing principle of a unifying truth was symbolized at the centre, which radiated the light of wisdom and knowledge towards a periphery shadowed in deficiency. The centre entrusted the intellectual periphery with the task of mediating the division between progress and underdevelopment through extolling the translated model: providing an elevated standard and reference-guide of metropolitan meaning. If the currency of that image of the centre were to be prolonged as conserver of Meaning, postmodernity would then be the new metropolitan reference to be translated. However, many changes have occurred that have inverted the scenario of the transgression and adaptation of the script of the metropolis. First, the postmodern ‘text’ itself refuted the monological belief that ‘texts’ are governed by a fixed (unique/definitive) code of meaning and interpretation. So there was already something within the contents of the postmodern text concerning the discontinuity and transitory character of meaning. This was something that the periphery could use as an anti-fundamentalist recourse to disalign itself from the Model; and in two respects, since the postmetaphysical economy of this recourse would equip it to denounce: 1) the universalization of Truth at the Centre; and 2) the substantialization of origin at the periphery.14 Postmodern fragmentation and dissemination may then be recovered as characteristics favouring an affirmation in which ‘postmodernity, for postcolonial societies, is an instrument of decolonization’ .1’ However, this would fail to acknowledge that the implementation of the fragment - its réinscription - is not an undetermined operation exercised independently o f the conditioning factors that regulate the circulation of cultural messages, making them more or less available to certain critical operations - among them, those destined to favour the deployment of non-coercive meaning.16 The postmodern text - like any international text - reaches the periphery patented by a metropolitan formula that generally recommends or promotes certain manipulations and inhibits others; the texts arrive already formatted according to the theoretical expediency of the centre. No matter how much the postmodern discourse of international culture may theorize the fragment and be at the same time itself fragmentable, this discourse still appears at the periphery mediated by the marks of authority that guarantee it the type-reference standing of the ‘American International’ (Huyssen). The categorical or demonstrative character of these marks in respect of the fragment recreates the image of a totality by

266 Beyond the Fantastic

relegating the fragment under international guarantee to a self-proving system, one that would seem to have explored all possible combinations even prior to the point where the periphery itself comes to question uses and objectives.1 It is as if the partial and the inconclusive - as anti-totalitarian potentialities of the postmodern text - had already been sanctioned by the theorizing and supervising authority of the centre, which voids them of every resistant character. Those very displacements of the fragment, susceptible to resignifying contexts at the periphery, would seem already to have been calculated by the deterritorializing/reterritorializing strategy of the centre. What behaviour, then, is to be adopted when confronted with these postmodern aesthetics of the fragment - of the indiscrimination of the fragment - to cause this fragment to betray, in spite of itself, the significations that are hierarchically constructed at the centre? If postmodern discontinuity is to be of any use to us, it should liberate new spaces of meaning that achieve an unravelling of the connections preordained by the semantics of the centre. By joining or disjoining certain networks of enunciation - those that place the fragment as part of a discursive constellation - the filiations of authority that articulate certain politico-intellectual connections are either favoured or contradicted. Not all postmodern formulations - no matter how demystifying they may sound in the poststructuralist code of a polemics of origin - are equally convenient or functional in situations of peripheral marginality. The feminists have already discussed this: to decree ‘the death of the author’ (Barthes, Foucault and co.) does not carry with it the same meaning for some (those who seek to reverse the authorship tradition that consecrates Eurocentrist prestige, being themselves endorsed by that same prestige) as for others (those who constitute the devalued part of this tradition, which continues to marginalize their institutional credentials). Perhaps, for the latter, the topic of the ‘death of the author’ could ‘prematurely close down the question of identity’ and its politics of the subject, by adjourning the issue of 'who talks to whom and under what conditions’ as a question directed to unveil the scheme of power or dominance that sustains a situational analysis of discourse.1“ And without doubt it is suspicious indeed that the ‘crisis of the subject’ is patented as a postmodern motto of international theory just at the moment when new positions of identity appear on the scene to confront hierarchies of power and cultural representations that have always favoured the exponents of the centre. ‘Death of the author’ and ‘crisis of the subject’ need, therefore, to be critically reassessed from a suitably detailed theoretico-political perspective, so that such slogans should not frustrate the achievements already gained in the conquest of a self-expression of difference - no less than as a counter-hegemonic reply to the discourses (of the centre) concerning difference.19

267 Postmodern Decentrednesses and Cultural Periphery

Another postmodern device - that of the parodic quote - also has diverse implications according to the contexts in which it is employed. It is not the same thing to parody codes by means of signs that possess an equal fluency of circulation (no matter how dissimilar the registers may be: from cult to popular, from private to public, etc.) because they all share the same horizon of interchangeability of values that characterize the ‘society of the spectacle’,-as to do this where each sign is traversed by the contradiction of belonging to completely heterogeneous registers of social identity that divide it between rite and progress, heritage and telecommunications, folklore and transnationalism, etc. Therefore, in contrast to what occurs in contexts where the parodied and the parodist are both playful components o f one and the same masquerade of signs, contemplatively transacted by a subject equidistant from its bonds of power, the Latin American parody always carries with it an implicit critical reference to the colonizing matrix (the dominant-Europeanizing belief in the superiority of the Originals) and to its inverted reflection: the simulacrum impulse that resolves the Latin theme of borrowed identities in the transference of the Copy. The ‘crisis of the model’ (another postmodern designation related to the end of meta-references) does not mean the same in post-auratic contexts, where the notion of the Model has been vulgarized in the Series, as it does in traditionally subordinate contexts, where even the theorizations concerning the loss of the Model - resublimatized as Model because of its metropolitan seal - are in danger. All of these ambivalences of meaning that arise from the ‘unequal and oppressive relation of metropolitan knowledge and its institutions’ to the ‘vital world’ o f the periphery reconfirm for us the urgency to subject the postmodern formula of ‘decentredness’ to a strict inspection of contexts.20 However, this obviously does not imply rejection or condemnation of all the postmodern formulations enunciated at the centre, considering them fatally guilty as representatives of its framework of power. Not only may the enunciations be refunctionalized in accordance with the theoretico-political interests of the periphery to the point of forcing them to betray the commitments of interests confirmed by their paths of origin; but, in addition, many of the positions defended by its intellectuals may reinforce shared connections with the strategies of a certain peripheral marginality. To strengthen the supporting network of this ‘alternative postmodernity’, one ‘that is not limited by geopolitical boundaries but rather crosses them and becomes conscious of their signification’21, would also permit the de-emblematization of the discourse of international theory concerning difference, by confronting it with the multiple-differential of marginalized practices, whose ‘situational specificity’ should inform the politics of the marginal.22

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NOTES That is, the centre never really exhausted its meaning in the simple geographical realism o f its metropolitan function. It operated - and operates - as centre, or rather as centre-function: a system of references that makes every axis rotate around its symbolics o f authority. The semiotized code o f this denunciation is formulated by its classic doctrinal text Para leer el Pato Donald (icomunicación de masas y colonialismo) [Guide to reading Donald Duck (mass communication and colonialism)!, by Dorfman and Mattelart (Mexico: Siglo Veintiuno Editores, 1972). For a new Latin American reflection on modernity and postmodernity, see particularly José Joaquín Brunner’s thesis Un espejo trizado [A cracked mirror! (Santiago de Chile: FLACSO, 1988); and Néstor García Canclini’s Culturas Híbridas [Hybrid Cultures] (Mexico City: Grijalbo, 1989). Alejandro Piscitelli, ‘Sur, post-modernidad y después’ [‘South, post-modernity and after’], in Imágenes desconocidas: la modernidad en la encrucijada postmoderna [Unknown images: modernity at the postmodern crossroads] (Buenos Aires: Clerics, 1988). Celeste Olalquiaga, ‘Tupinicopolis: la ciudad de los indios retrofuturistas’ [Tupinicopolis: the city of retro-futurist Indians] in Revista de Critica Cultural no. 3 (Santiago de Chile, 1990). Perhaps the most lucid formulation regarding the ambiguities and contradictions of that First Worldism-Third Worldism tension is theorized by Gayatry Spivak, when she asks herself about the folds of her own inscription as a postcolonial theorist. ‘As a postcolonia], I am concerned with the appropriation of alternative history or histories. I am not an historian by training. I cannot claim disciplinary expertise in remaking history in the sense o f rewriting it. But I can be used as an example of how historical narratives are negotiated.’ (‘Who claims alterity?’ in Barbara Kruger and Phil Mariani (eds.), Remaking History, New York: Dia Art Foundation [Discussions in contemporary culture, no. 4], Seattle Bay Press, 1989). And: ‘More and more people have found in me a very convenient marginal, capital M, and this of course I have myself found politically very troubling.’ (‘The new historicism’, in The post-colonial critic (New York and London: Routledge, 1990.) Craig Owens, ‘El discurso de los otros: las feministas y el posmodernismo’, in La posmodernidad (Barcelona: Editoria Kairos, 1985); and ‘The discourse o f others: Feminists and postmodernism’, in Hal Foster (ed.), Postmodern Culture (London: Pluto Press, 1985). 8

Jorge Ruffinelli, ‘Los 80: ingreso a la posmodernidad?’ [‘The 80s: Entry to postmodernity?’] in Modernidad y posmodernidad en América Latina (i), Nuevo Texto Crítico no. 6 (San Francisco: Stanford University, 1990).

9

Gayatry Spivak quoted by George Yúdice in ‘El conflicto de posmodernidades’ [‘The conflict of postmodernities’], Modernidad y posmodernidad en América Latina di), Nuevo Texto Crítico no. 7 (San Francisco: Stanford University, 1991).

10 Jorge Ruffinelli, op. cit. 11 ‘ What we must eliminate are systems o f representation that carry with them the kind o f authority that, to my mind, has been repressive because it does not permit or make room for interventions on the part of those represented . . . we must identify those social-cultural-political formations that would allow for a reduction o f authority and increased participation in the production o f representation, and proceed from there.’ Phil Mariani and Jonathan Crary, ‘In the shadow o f the West: an interview with Edward Said’, in Discourses: Conversations in postmodern art and culture (New York: The New Museum of Contemporary Art. 1990).

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12 Craig Owens, op. cit. 13 ‘It would be necessary to modify the institutions through which the public sphere is reproduced and in which this aestheticizing “ marginocentrality” is blinded when confronted with everyday experiences o f the great diversity o f social subjects and actors that constitute Latin America. To modify institutions implies the reconfiguration o f the discursive and behavioural types through which subjects are formed and thorough which - at a microphysical level - the distribution of value and of power is reproduced.’ George Yúdice, ‘El conflicto de posmodernidades’, op. cit. 14 ‘The postmodern contribution is useful . . . insofar as it reveals the constructed and dramatized character o f every tradition, including that o f modernity: it refutes the origination of traditions and the originality of innovation.’ Néstor García Canclini, Culturas Híbridas, op. cit. 15 Alberto Moreiras, ‘Transculturatión y pérdida del sentido' [Transculturation and the loss o f meaningj, Nuevo Texto Crítico no. 6 (San Francisco: Stanford University, 1990). 16 This knowledge learnt at the periphery, with regard to the determining materials and symbolics that condition the practice o f cultural transference, denies the naivety of believing that: ‘ Postmodernism is a sign o f the loss o f the colonial model o f a universal culture spread out to educate the world at large. It is rather a theory for a postcolonial world of products made and sold in different places without a centre. It is like the lingua franca o f this world: it can be made and consumed everywhere and nowhere.’ John Rajchman, ‘Postmodernism in a nominalist frame’, Flash Art no. 137 (Milan, 1987). 17 ‘Totalization proceeds from the factic discourse o f socioeconomic power and its ideological projections.’ Alberto Moreiras, op. cit. 18 Elisabeth Fox-Genovese, quoted by George Yúdice in ‘Marginality and the ethics of survival’, in Universal Abandon? The Politics o f Postmodernism (Minneapolis: Minnesota Press, 1989). 19 ‘For Americans are politically always already in a condition of postmodern fragmentation and heterogeneity in a way that Europeans have not been; and the revolt against the centre by those constituted as marginal is an oppositional difference in a way that poststructuralist notions o f difference are not. These American attacks on universality in the name o f difference, these “ postmodern” issues of Others (Afro-Americans, Native Americans, women, gays) are in fact an implicit critique of certain French postmodern discourses about Otherness that really serve to hide and conceal the power of the voices and movements o f Others.’ ‘Interview with Cornel West’, in Universal Abandon? The Politics o f Postmodernism, op. cit. 20 Neil Larne, ‘Posmodernismo e imperialismo’, Nuevo Texto Crítico no. 6 (San Francisco: Stanford University, 1990). 21 George Yúdice, Universal Abandon? The Politics o f Postmodernism, op. cit. 22 ‘What to me seems essential . . . is the need to convert the greedy and binary slogan o f difference into the quite different denomination o f situation-specificity, at a location that can always be concrete and reflective.’ Frederic Jameson, in ‘Prefacio a Calibán’ [‘Preface to Caliban’1, Nuevo Texto Critico no. 5 (San Francisco: Stanford University, 1989).

Holy Kitschen: C ollecting Religious Junk from the S treet Celeste Olalquiaga

‘Kitsch causes two tears to flow in quick succession. The first tear says: How nice to see children running on the grass! The second tear says: How nice to be moved, together with all mankind, by children running on the grass! It is the second tear that makes kitsch kitsch.’ Milan Kundera, 1984 Catholic imagery, once confined to sacred places such as church souvenir stands, cemeteries and botanicas, has recently invaded the market as a fad. In the past few years the realm of religious iconography in Manhattan has extended beyond its traditional Latino outlets on the Lower East Side, the Upper West Side and Fourteenth Street. The 1980s appropriation of an imagery that evokes transcendence illustrates the cannibalistic and vicarious characteristics o f postmodern culture. This melancholic arrogation also diffuses the boundaries of cultural identity and difference, producing a new and unsettling cultural persona. A walk along Fourteenth Street used to be enough to travel in the hyper-reality of kitsch iconography.1 Cutting across the map of Manhattan, Fourteenth Street sets the boundary for downtown, exploding into a frontier-like bazaar, a frantic place of trade and exchange, a truly inner-city port where, among cascades of plastic flowers, pelicans made with shells, rubber shoes, Rita Hayworth towels, $2 digital watches, and pink electric guitars with miniature microphones, an array of shrine furnishings is offered. Velvet hangings picturing the Last Supper are flanked on one side by bucolic landscapes where young couples kiss as the sun fizzles away in the ocean, and on the other by 1987’s ‘retro’ idol, Elvis Presley; while the Virgin Mary’s golden aura is framed by the sexy legs of a pin-up, and the Sacred Heart of Jesus desperately competes in glitter with barrages of brightly coloured glass-bead curtains.2 Nowadays the Catholic iconography brought to the United States by immigrants from Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Mexico and Cuba is displayed in places where the predominant attitude towards Latino culture is one of amused fascination. Religious images serve not only as memorabilia in fancy souvenir shops but also as decoration for nightclubs.3 The now-exorcized Voodoo, on Eighteenth Street, used to have a disco on its first floor and a bright green and pink tropical bar on the second. The bar’s ceiling was garnished with plastic fruits hanging from one end to the other, and in the centre of the room stood an altar complete with Virgin Mary, flowers and votive candles. Fourteenth Street’s Palladium, famous for a postmodern scenario in which golden Renaissance paintings emerge from behind a bare high-tech structure, celebrated All Saints’ Day in 1987 by sending out an invitation that unfolded to reveal images of and prayers to Saint Patrick, Saint Francis of Assisi and Saint Michael the Archangel.

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Suddenly, holiness is all over the place. For $3.25 one can buy a Holiest Water Fountain in the shape of the Virgin, while plastic fans engraved with the images of your favourite holy people go for $1.95 - as do Catholic identification tags: ‘I’m a Catholic. In case of accident or illness please call a priest.’ Glowing rosary beads can be found for $1.25 and, for those in search of verbal illustration, a series of ‘Miniature Stories of the Saints’ is available for only $1.45. In the wake of punk crucifix earrings comes designer Henry Auvil’s Sacred Heart of Jesus sweatshirt, yours for a modest $80, while scapularies, sometimes brought all the way from South America, adorn black leather jackets.4 Even John Paul II has something to contribute: on his travels the Holy Father leaves behind a trail o f images, and one can buy his smiling face in a variety of Pope gadgets including alarm clocks, pins, picture frames, T-shirts and snowstorm globes.5 This holy invasion has gone so far as to intrude into the sacred space of galleries and museums, as a growing number of artists incorporate Catholic religious imagery in their work. Some recent examples are Amalia Mesa-Bains’s recasting of personal altares, Dana Salvo’s photographs o f Mexican home altars and Audrey Flack’s baroque re-representations of Spanish virgins.8 Can the objects found in botanicas and on Fourteenth Street, the ones sold in souvenir shops and those exhibited in galleries, be considered one and the same? I will argue for their synchronized difference, that is, for contemporary urban culture’s ability to circulate and support distinct, and often contradictory, discourses. Religious Iconography as Kitsch: Developing a Vicarious Sensibility

I will begin by describing the peculiar aesthetics and philosophy underlying the circulation of the iconography of home altars. A popular Latin American tradition, home altars or altares are domestic spaces dedicated to deities and holy figures. In them statuettes or images of virgins and saints are allocated space together with candles and other votive objects. Triangular in analogy to the Holy Trinity, altares are characterized by a cluttered juxtaposition of all types of paraphernalia; they are a personal pastiche. Illustrating a history of wishes, laments, and prayers, they are built over time, each personal incident leaving its mark. Altares embody familiar or individual histories in the way photo albums do for some people. Consequently a home altar is not only unique and unrepeatable, it is coded by the personal experience that composed it, and the code is unreadable to foreign eyes. This mode of elaboration explains the variety of artifacts to be found in home altars and why there are no set rules as to what they might be made up of, except that everything must have a particular value. In altares value is measured both sentimentally and as an offering.

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Since most of the people who make them have low incomes their economic worth is

Fig. 42

symbolic, conveyed by glitter and shine, mirrors and glass, a profusion of golden and

Audrey Flack

silvery objects, and sheer abundance. This symbolic richness accounts for the artificial look of altares, as well as for the ‘magical kingdom’ feeling they evoke. Fundamentally syncretic, altares are raised or dedicated to figures who are public in some way, usually taken from the Catholic tradition, a local miraculous event or national politics. Instead of following a formal chronology, home altars rearticulate history in relation to events relevant to the believer. To symbolize personal history they transgress boundaries of time, space, class and race. This is well illustrated in the Venezuelan cult of Maria Lionza, a deity who is revered with heroes of the Independence and contemporary presidents - such as Carlos Andrés Pérez - on the gigantic altar o f Sorte, a ritual hill dedicated to her worship. In both their elaboration and their meaning altares are emblematic o f the mechanics of popular culture: they familiarize transcendental experience by constituting the creation of a personal universe from mainly domestic resources. In so doing they stand in direct opposition to the impersonal politics of high and mass culture, although they steal motifs and objects from both. That the altares tradition is being appropriated by artists both in the USA and abroad (the Cuban artist Leandro Soto’s home altars to revolutionary heroes, for example) at the same time that their components are being heavily circulated in the marketplace is no coincidence. This phenomenon is based on the stealing of elements that are foreign or removed from the absorbing culture’s direct sensory realm, shaping itself into a vicarious experience particularly attracted to the intensity of feeling provided by monographic universes like that of Latin American Catholicism. Vicariousness - to live through another’s experience - is a fundamental trait of postmodern culture. Ethnicity and cultural difference have exchanged their intrinsic values for the more extrinsic ones of market interchangeability: gone are the times when people could make a persuasive claim to a culture of their own, a set of meaningful practices that might be considered the product of unique thought or lifestyle. The new sense of time and space generated by telecommunications - the substitution of instantaneousness and ubiquity for continuity and distance - has transformed the perception of things so that they are no longer lived directly but through their representations. Experience is mainly available through signs: things are not lived directly but rather through the agency of a medium, in the consumption of images and objects that replace what they stand for. Such rootlessness accounts for the high volatility and ultimate transferability of culture in postmodern times. The imaginary participation that occurs in vicarious experience is often despised

Macarena Espe 1971 Oil on canvas, 116.8 x 167.6 ci Courtesy the H Collection

273 Holy Kitschen

274 Beyond the Fantastic

275 Holy Kitschen

for its lack of pertinence to what is tacitly agreed upon to be reality, for example in the generalized notion that mass entertainment is dumbfounding. Ironically enough, vicariousness is in fact similar to the classical understanding of aesthetic enjoyment, which is founded on a symbolically distanced relationship to phenomena. This symbolic connection, which used to protect the exclusivity of aesthetic experience by basing it on the prerequisites of trained sensibility and knowledge, has given way to the more ordinary and accessible passageway provided by popular culture. Therefore it is not against living others’ experiences - or living like another - that high-culture criticisms are directed, but rather against the popular level at which this vicariousness is acted out and the repercussions it has on other cultural projects. Vicariousness is acceptable so long as it involves a high-level project (stimulating the intellect) but unacceptable when limited to the sensory (stimulating the senses). Acceptance of vicariousness enables an understanding of how, as the result of a long cultural process, simulation has come to occupy the place of a traditional, indexical referentiality. For this process is not, as many would have it, the sole responsibility of progressively sophisticated media and market devices, but is rather a radicalization of the ways in which culture has always mediated our experience. The difference in postmodernity is both quantitative and qualitative, since it lies in the extent to which experience is lived vicariously as well as in the centrality of emotion to contemporary vicariousness. The ‘waning of affect’ in contemporary culture is intrinsically related to a distance from immediate experience caused in part by the current emphasis on signs.7 Attempting to compensate for emotional detachment, this sensibility continually searches for intense thrills and for the acute emotionality attributed to other times and peoples. The homogenization of signs and the wide circulation of marketable goods make all cultures susceptible to this appropriation, and the more imbued with emotional intensity they are perceived to be, the better. It is in this appeal to emotion that religious imagery and kitsch converge. The connection proves particularly relevant because kitsch permits the articulation of the polemics of high and low culture in a context broader than that of religious imagery, smoothing the way for a better understanding of its attraction and importance for vicarious experience. Known as the domain of ‘bad taste’ , kitsch stands for artistic endeavour gone sour as well as for anything that is considered too obvious, dramatic, repetitive, artificial or exaggerated. The link between religious imagery and kitsch is based on the dramatic character of their styles, whose function is to evoke unambiguously, dispelling ambivalence and abstraction. After all, besides providing a meaningful frame for existence and allocating emotions and feelings, Catholicism facilitates

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through its imagery the materialization o f one o f the most ungraspable of all experiences, that of the transcendence of spiritual attributes. Because of the spiritual nature of religious faith, however, iconolatry (the worship of images or icons) is often seen as sacrilegious, as the vulgarization of an experience that should remain fundamentally immaterial and ascetic. In this respect not only Catholic iconography but the whole of Christian theology has been accused of lacking substance, and therefore of being irredeemably kitsch.8 Like kitsch, religious imagery is a mise-en-scene, a visual glossolalia that embodies otherwise impalpable qualities: mystic fervour is translated into upturned eyes, a gaping mouth, and levitation; goodness always feeds white sheep; virginity is surrounded by auras, clouds, and smiling cherubim; passion is a bleeding heart; evil is snakes, horns and flames. In kitsch this dramatic quality is intensified by an overtly sentimental, melodramatic tone and by primary colours and bright, glossy surfaces. The interchange between the spheres o f the celestial and kitsch is truly fitting. Religious imagery is considered kitsch because of its desacralization, while kitsch is called evil and the ‘anti-Christ in art’ because of its artistic profanities.9 Kitsch steals motifs and materials at random, regardless of the original ascription of the sources. It takes from classic, modernist and popular art and mixes all together, becoming in this way the first and foremost recycler. This irreverent eclecticism has brought both glory and doom upon kitsch, for its unbridled voraciousness transgresses boundaries and undermines hierarchies. Religious kitsch is then doubly irreverent, displaying an impious overdetermination that accounts, perhaps, for its secular seduction. Kitsch is one of the constitutive phenomena of postmodernism. The qualities I have attributed to kitsch so far - eclectic cannibalism, recycling, rejoicing in surface or allegorical values - are those that distinguish contemporary sensibility from the previous belief in authenticity, originality and symbolic depth.10 Furthermore, the postmodern broadening of the notion of reality, whereby vicariousness is no longer felt as false or second-hand but rather as an autonomous - however incredible dimension of the real, facilitates the current circulation and revalorization of this aesthetic form. Likewise, in its chaotic juxtaposition of images and times, contemporary urban culture is comparable to an altar-like reality, where the logic of organization is anything but homogeneous, visual saturation is obligatory, and the personal is lived as a pastiche of fragmented images from popular culture. Fourteenth Street and First-Degree Kitsch

One of the most conspicuous features of postmodernity is its ability to entertain conflicting discourses simultaneously. Rather than erasing previous practices, it

277 Holy Kitschen

enables and even seeks their subsistence. This peculiar coexistence of divergent visions is made possible by the space left by the vertical displacement of depth by surface, which implies a gathering on the horizontal level. Fragmentary but ubiquitous, discontinuous and instantaneous, this new altar-like reality is the arena for a Byzantine struggle in which different iconographies fight for hegemony. In this manner cultural specificity has given way to the internationalization of its signs, losing uniqueness but gaining exposure and circulation. Within this context it is possible to distinguish, according to their means of production and cultural function, three degrees of kitsch that have recently come to overlap in time and space. In what I will call first-degree kitsch, representation is based on an indexical referent. Here, the difference between reality and representation is explicit and hierarchical, since only what is perceived as reality matters. Acting as a mere substitute, the kitsch object has no validity in and of itself.11 This is the case with the imagery available at church entrances and botánicas, sold for its straightforward iconic value. Statuettes, images and scapularies embody the spirits they represent, making them palpable. Consequently this imagery belongs in sacred places, such as home altars, and must be treated with utmost respect. In first-degree kitsch the relationship between object and user is immediate, one of genuine belief. Technically its production is simple and cheap, a serial artisanship devoid of that perfectly finished look attained with a more sophisticated technology.12 In fact, these objects exhibit a certain rawness that is, or appears to be, handmade. This quality reflects their ‘honesty’ , as lack of sophistication is usually taken as a sign of authenticity. On the other hand, this rawness adds to first-degree kitsch’s status as ‘low’ art, when it is considered art at all: usually, if not marginalized as folklore, it is condemned as gaudy.13 Almost a century old, first-degree kitsch is what is usually referred to in discussions of kitsch. It is not, however, inherently kitsch. It is understood as such from a more distanced perspective, one that does not enjoy the same emotional attachment that believers have to these objects. For them, kitsch objects are meaningful, even when they are used ornamentally. Yet for those who have the distanced perspective, whom I will call kitsch aficionados, it is precisely this unintentionality that is attractive, since it speaks of a naive immediacy of feeling that they have lost.14 Aficionados’ nostalgia leads them to a vicarious pleasure that gratifies their desire for immediacy. They achieve this pleasure by collecting kitsch objects and even admiring their inherent qualities: bright colours, glossy surfaces and figuration. By elaborating a scenario for their vicarious pleasure, kitsch aficionados paradoxically reproduce the practice o f believers, since this scenario is meant to

278 Beyond the Fantastic

provide an otherwise unattainable experience - that of immediate feeling for the aficionados and of reverence for the believers. Aficionados’ sensibility cannot be dismissed as secondary or intellectual because their attachment to these objects is as strong and vital as that of first-degree believers. Yet what is relevant here is that first-degree believers’ attachment is directly related to the devotional meaning of the iconography, while for aficionados this meaning is secondary: what matters is not what the images represent but the intense feelings - hope, fear, awe - that they inspire. Aficionados’ connection is to these emotions, their appreciation one step removed from first-degree kitsch itself. These different relationships to first-degree kitsch may be illustrated by a Fourteenth Street fad of the past few years: the Christ clocks. Rectangular or circular, these clocks narrate various moments of Christ’s life in three dimensions. We see Christ gently blessing a blonde girl while a few small, fluffy white sheep watch reverently; Christ bleeding on the cross or delivering the Sermon on the Mount; or all of these scenes together with a fourth in the special ‘quarter-hour’ versions, where, in the narrative logic of the Stations o f the Cross, each quarter-hour has its own episode. True to Fourteenth Street and home-altar aesthetics, Christ clocks eschew the boredom of bareness, naturalness and discretion to exploit the prurience of loudness, dramatics and sentimentality. The profusion of these clocks bears witness to their popularity. Selling for $12-$ 14, they have become a dominant part of the Fourteenth Street scene. For most Christ-clock buyers there is no contradiction in using Christ’s life as a backdrop for time. In kitchens or living rooms these clocks are used as extensions of the home altar, conveying a comfortable familiarity with a figure that represents cherished values. This relationship to Christ is loving and quotidian, totally ordinary. For kitsch aficionados, however, these clocks are a source of endless amazement and wonder. Lacking a religious attachment to them, aficionados are fascinated by the directness of the feelings these clocks represent and evoke: there is something definitely moving about Christ’s sorrow as - on his knees on the Mount of Olives, hands dramatically clasped - he implores his Father’s compassion for the sinful human race. For an aficionado it is the intensity of this drama - heightened by an artificial aura created by the picture’s lack of depth and bright colours - that is attractive. This aesthetic experience is radically different from the highly conceptualized one of modern art. Little Rickie and Second-Degree Kitsch

First-degree kitsch familiarizes the ungraspable - eternity, goodness, evil - while

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tacitly maintaining a hierarchical distinction between reality and representation. The opposite is true of second-degree kitsch, or neo-kitsch, which breaks down this difference by making representation the only possible referent.15 In so doing, it distorts our notion of reality because representation itself becomes the real. Neo-kitsch is inspired by first-degree kitsch and is therefore second-generation. Sold as kitsch, it lacks the devotional relation present in first-degree kitsch. Its absence of feeling leaves us with an empty icon, or rather an icon whose value lies precisely in its iconicity, its quality as a sign rather than as an object. This kitsch is self-referential - a sort of kitsch-kitsch - and has lost all the innocence and charm of the first-degree experience. Whereas first-degree kitsch is sold in general stores, among articles of domestic use, second-degree kitsch is found in more specialized shops, such as those that sell souvenirs. Among the most interesting of these is New York’s Little Rickie where, in the midst of all types of memorabilia, religious imagery reigns supreme. In its dizzying clutteredness Little Rickie is a sophisticated microcosm of Fourteenth Street and home-altar aesthetics. As such it succeeds in creating a total disorientation that engulfs the viewer inside the store. But although it offers all the religious kitsch one could ever hope to find, the catch for aficionados lies in the given or prefabricated quality of the objects. Take, for instance, the holy water bottles, transparent plastic bottles in the shape of the Virgin Mary. These bottles stand obliquely to the original iconography - which does not include them - and rely exclusively on concept for their existence. Lacking in visual and signifying exuberance, they profit from the religious-imagery fad and from the idea of a bottle for holy water being funny. Never having established a first degree of affection, these bottles are devoid of the intensity aficionados seek. They are simply toys, curiosities bought to show or give to somebody else. Second-degree kitsch exists only for transaction, to pass from hand to hand, and in this lack of subject lies its ultimate alienation and perishability. Neo-kitsch is intentional, and it capitalizes on an acquired taste for tackiness. It is a popularization of the camp sensibility, a perspective wherein appreciation of the ‘ugly’ conveys to the spectator an aura of refined decadence, an ironic enjoyment from a position of enlightened superiority.115This attitude allows a safe release into sentimentality. Neo-kitsch’s exchange value is intensified by the interchangeability of religious imagery with the rest of the memorabilia in the store. For consumers of second-degree kitsch, the choice between, say, a sample of holy soil and a plastic eye with two feet that winks as it walks around is totally arbitrary, decided only by last-minute caprice or a vague idea of which would be more hilarious. For ‘authentic’ aficionados, half the pleasure of acquisition is lost when kitsch is a given and not a

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discovery. Hence, like first-degree believers, they are not among the store’s customers, though it is located in the East Village, home to a substantial Latino community. Mass-marketed, these products involve a more elaborate technology and often come from mass-culture production centres like Hong Kong. First-degree homeliness is replaced by the mechanical look of serial reproduction. Designed as a commodity for exchange and commerce, second-degree kitsch has no trace of use-value, no longer being ‘the real thing’ for connoisseurs. The passing over of kitsch to mass culture is similar to the desacralization of high art occasioned by mechanical reproduction.17 In both cases the loss of authenticity derives from the shift from manufactured or low-technology production to a more sophisticated industrial one, with its consequent displacement of a referent for a copy. To consider second-degree kitsch less authentic than first-degree kitsch because of its predigested character would be contradictory, since kitsch is by definition predigested. The difference lies in how intentional, or self-conscious, this predigestion is. The mass marketing of religious imagery as kitsch is only possible once the icon has been stripped o f its signifying value. The religious kitsch that was available before the 1980s was first-degree kitsch, albeit mechanically reproduced. The change to a fad, something fun to play with, is a recent phenomenon. What matters now is iconicity itself; worth is measured by the icon’s traits - the formal, technical aspects like narrative, colour and texture. Void, except in a nostalgic way, of the systemic meaning granted by religious belief, these traits are easily isolated and fragmented, becoming totally interchangeable and metonymical. As floating signs, they can adhere to any object and impart to it their full value, ‘kitschifying’ it. This lack of specificity accounts for the suitability of neo-kitsch objects’ for random consumption. Third-Degree Kitsch and the Advantages of Recycling

Religious imagery reached its highest level of commodification when it lost specificity to market interchangeability. It has gained a new social place, however, thanks to a simultaneous and related process: the legitimization of its signifying and visual attributes by the institutionally authorized agency of artists. This revaluation takes place through the multifarious recycling of Catholic religious iconography, constituting what I will distinguish as third-degree kitsch. Here, the iconography is invested with either a new or a foreign set o f meanings, generating a hybrid product. This phenomenon is the outcome of the blending of Latin and North American cultures and includes both Chicano and Nuyorrican artists’ recovery o f their heritage as well as white American artists working with elements of this tradition. Since individual altares represent personal histories of memories and wishes, the

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tradition of home altars as a whole can be taken to represent collective remembrance and desire. In varying degrees o f nostalgia and transformation, several Chicano and Nuyorrican artists are using the altares format to reaffirm a precarious sense of belonging. Second-generation altarmaking is complicated by the currency of its iconography; in more ways than one, the fashionable home altars’ aesthetic benefits from such timely recirculation. Yet any consideration of these artists as the authentic bearers of the altares tradition assures Chicano and Nuyorrican artists’ marginality by stating that they are the most suited to carry on their forebears’ work, since cultural continuity conveniently eliminates them from participating in other creative endeavours. In their home-altar recycling, therefore, Chicano and Nuyorrican artists tread a very fine line between re-elaborating a tradition whose exclusive rights are questionable and being artistically identified solely with that task. Some of the edge can be taken off this discussion by acknowledging the differences between this kind of artistic recovery and first-degree home-altar elaboration. As a recent exhibition title suggests, the recasting of altares is often meant as a ‘ceremony of memory’ that invests them with a new political signification and awareness. This artistic legitimization implies formalizing home altars to fit them into a system of meaning where they represent the culture that once was; they are changed, once again, from referents to signs. This loss of innocence, however, allows altares to be re-elaborated into new sets of meanings, many of which were inconceivable to the original bearers of this tradition but are certainly fundamental to more recent Chicano and Nuyorrican generations.18 One such example of home-altar recycling may be found in Amalia Mesa-Bains’s work, which is both a recovery o f and a challenge to her family tradition and cultural identity. Mesa-Bains is a Chicana who began making altares after earning several college degrees. Her revival of this tradition is therefore not spontaneous but calculated, a conscious gesture o f political reaffirmation of Chicano cultural values. One of her recent shows, ‘Grotto of the Virgin’, consisted of altares raised to such unhallowed figures as the Mexican painter Frida Kahlo, the Mexican superstar Dolores del Rio, and her own grandmother. What is specific to Mesa-Bains’s altars is that the personal is not subordinated to a particular holy person. Rather, a secular person is made sacred by the altar format, the offerings consisting mainly of images and gadgets that serve to reconstruct that person’s imagined life. The Dolores del Rio altar, for example, is raised on several steps made with mirrors, bringing to mind the image cults that grow up around Hollywood actors and actresses. This altar is stacked with feminine paraphernalia such as perfume bottles, lipsticks and jewellery, as well as letters, pictures and other souvenirs of her life. In this way the image of Dolores

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del Río as a ‘cinema goddess’ becomes literal. This secularization o f the altares is probably a result of the importance Mesa-Bains assigns to personal experience. In traditional altar-raising the personal was always secondary to the deity, and ultimately religious sensibility informed the whole altar. By privileging what were previously only coding elements so that they become the main objective of her altares, Mesa-Bains has inverted the traditional formula. As a result women and mass culture are invested with a new power that emanates from the sacredness of altares. In postmodern culture, Mesa-Bains’s work would seem to contend, old patriarchal deities are no longer satisfactory. What she has done is to profit from an established tradition in order to convey new values. Beyond mere formal changes, her altares replace the transcendental with the political. In them the affirmation of feminist and Chicano experiences is more relevant than a pious communication with the celestial sphere. Such a secularization of home altars is evidence of their adaptability as well as their visual versatility.19 Chicano and Nuyorrican artists are not alone in exploring home-altar aesthetics. The Boston photographer Dana Salvo has exalted the tradition of Mexican home altars by uprooting them from their private context and presenting them as sites both of unorthodox beauty and of first-hand religious experience. Salvo transforms altares into objects of aesthetic contemplation: in elegant Cibachrome prints the colours, textures and arrangements of altares stand out in all their splendour. For Salvo, an artist who has also focused on the recovery of lost or ruined textures (some of his other work consists of uncovering the debris and capturing the layers of time and decay in ruined mansions), the seduction of home altars is primarily visual. The absence of some contextualization to help decode home altars underlines their value as objects as well as their ultimate otherness: they represent a reality that speaks a different language. Still, even if the appreciation of altares is limited to an aesthetic discovery of their iconic attributes, this remains a relevant connection to a hitherto-ignored cultural manifestation. Furthermore, the participatory process in which Salvo and the creators of the altars engaged when they rearranged the altares for the photographs speaks for the reciprocal benefits of active cultural exchange.20 Finally, religious iconography is used as a format for modern experience in the work of Audrey Flack, who explores her own feelings through images of the Virgin Mary. For more than a decade Flack has drawn from the Spanish Marian cult as a source of inspiration. Her choice of imagery is based on an identification with what she feels are analogous experiences of motherhood. Flack overdramatizes her Virgins, making them hyper-real by accentuating colour, giving the paintings a glossy quality, and even adding glittery tears. It is this overdramatization that, together with the

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baroqueness of the imagery, makes her work ‘popular kitsch’, a kitsch that takes itself seriously and is sentimental and Romantic. Flack distinguishes this kitsch from ‘art-world kitsch’, which in her opinion covers sentiment with humour. Emotional identification is the basis for her claim to a more valid relationship with religious imagery than that of other artists.21 Flack’s emotional affinity with the Virgins notwithstanding, her use of them is mainly functional and isolated from the Marian tradition as a whole. A syncretist, she takes elements from any religion that suits her needs, in an interchangeability that renders the specificity of religious traditions secondary. Third-degree religious kitsch consists of a revalorization of Catholic iconography and the accentuation of those traits that make its aesthetics unique: figurativeness, dramatization, eclecticism, visual saturation - all those attributes for which kitsch was banned from the realm of art. In providing an aesthetic experience that transcends the object, kitsch is finally legitimized as art, an issue that has been of more concern to art critics than to kitsch artists. Consequently it has been argued that the recirculation of kitsch is but a co-optation by the late avant-garde, a formal gesture of usurpation stemming from its desperate attempt to remain alive.22 There is little difference between the use of kitsch as a motif by the market and its use by avant-garde art, since for both the value of the icon lies in its exotic otherness, its ornamental ability to cover the empty landscape of postindustrial reality with a universe of images. Such pilfering of religious imagery is limited to reproduction, displacing and subordinating its social function but not altering the material in any significant way. But what is happening in the third-degree revaluation of kitsch is more than the avant-garde’s swan song. It is the collapse of the hierarchical distinction between the avant-garde and kitsch - and, by extension, between high and popular art - a collapsing of what modernity considered a polar opposition. According to that view, sustained principally by Clement Greenberg, the avant-garde revolution transferred the value of art from its sacred function (providing access to religious transcendence) to its innovative capabilities (leading to a newly discovered future via experimentation and disruption). Since kitsch is based on imitation and copy, countering novelty with fakeness and artificiality, it was consequently understood as the opposite of the avant-garde and considered reactionary and unartistic.23 The current crisis of representation, however, implies not only disillusionment with progress, originality and formal experimentation, but also a reconsideration of all they excluded. It follows that copy, simulation and quotation are raised to a new level of interest, representing a different experience of art and creativity. In

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postmodern culture, artifice, rather than commenting on reality, has become the most immediately accessible reality. Fakery and simulation were present in modernism as aesthetic means; they had a function, as in the reproduction of consumer society’s alienation in Andy Warhol’s work. In postmodernity there is no space for such distances: fake and simulation are no longer distinguishable from quotidian life. The boundaries between reality and representation, themselves artificial, have been temporarily and perhaps permanently suspended. Moreover, these boundaries are questioned not only by third-degree kitsch, but also by the current recirculation of all kitsch. Anticipating this postmodern taste, Walter Benjamin wrote in a brief essay that kitsch is what remains after the world of things becomes extinct. Comparing it to a layer of dust that covers things and allows for a nostalgic recreation o f reality, Benjamin believes kitsch - the banal - to be more accurate than immediate perception (thus favouring intertextuality over indexicality). For him immediacy is just a notion of reality, and only the distance left by the loss of this immediacy permits a true apprehension of things. He therefore trusts dreams, rhythm, poetry and distraction. Because of its repetitiveness - worn by habit and decorated by cheap sensory statements - kitsch is most suitable for this nostalgic resurrection, making for an easier and more pleasurable perception.24 In discussing the Iconoclastes and their fury against the power of religious images, Baudrillard ascribes to simulacra a similar nostalgic function. Yet in his characteristic neutralization of signs, Baudrillard fails to assign them any discursive power.25 Such empowerment is precisely the issue at stake in third-degree kitsch. Besides imploding the boundaries o f art and reality, the third-degree type carries out an active transformation of kitsch. Taking religious imagery both for its kitsch value and its signifying and iconic strength, it absorbs the icon in full and recycles it into new meanings. These meanings are related to personal spiritual experiences, recalling believers’ relationships to first-degree imagery, except that the first-degree images are part of a given cultural heritage and as such they are readily available and their usage is automatic. Third-degree kitsch, on the other hand, appropriates this tradition from ‘outside’ , searching for an imagery that will be adequate to its expressive needs. Its cannibalization of imagery, however, stands in sharp contrast to previous appropriations. In the early avant-garde, for instance in Picasso’s use of African masks, the break with Western imagery had a symbolic function. Similarly, in Surrealism and the release of the unconscious, exploring difference meant disrupting a cultural heritage perceived as limited and oppressive. Venerated for its ability to offer an experience in otherness, difference stood as the necessary counterpart of Western culture. Its function was to illuminate. Yet this assigned purposefulness

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tamed the perception of those cultures, ultimately erasing difference from the Western imaginary landscape. In the work of the artists mentioned earlier, Catholic religious imagery provides access to a variety o f intense emotions that seem otherwise culturally unattainable. In Salvo’s photography the pleasure seems to come from the intimacy of the home altars, where family history is revered in a colourful clutter of figures and personal objects. This affectionate and ingenuous assortment stands in contrast to the photographic gaze through which it is perceived. For their viewers the beauty of altares lies in their direct connection to reality, a connection that succeeds in stirring the capacity for amazement. A similar pleasure is found in Flack’s Virgins, whose melodramatic intensity becomes almost sublime, following the tradition of Catholic hagiography. Meanwhile, Mesa-Bains and other Chicano and Nuyorrican artists are moving towards a radical transformation of tradition by imposing their will on the material they work with, as in Mesa-Bains’s use of altares to sanctify contemporary femininity. This colonization of religious imagery, in which it is occupied by alien feelings and intentions, can be said to work in both directions. After all, the exotic, colonized imagery has now become part and parcel of the appropriator’s imagination - it is part of the cannibal’s system. Instead of appropriation annihilating what it absorbs, the absorbed invades the appropriating system and begins to constitute and transform it. The unsettling qualities of such crosscultural integration are underscored by kitsch’s syncretic tradition of mixture and pastiche. Since kitsch can readily exist in a state of upheaval and transformation, there is no eventual settlement o f the absorbed. Previously this reverse colonization has been minimized by adverse historical conditions. Yet the vast Latin American immigration to cosmopolitan urban centres in the past few decades is forcing a redefinition of traditional cultural boundaries, one that both shapes and is shaped by the circulation of images. If at one time exotic images were domesticated, they now seem to have lost their tameness to a newly found space: the one left by the exit of traditional referentiality. It isn’t surprising, then, that third-degree kitsch in the USA is coming mainly from the East and West Coasts, since it is in these places that a new culture, deeply affected by Latinos, is being formed. Religious imagery in third-degree kitsch surpasses the distance implied in second-degree kitsch. Instead of consuming arbitrarily, third-degree kitsch constitutes a new sensibility whose main characteristic is the displacement of exchange by use. The consumption of images has been qualitatively altered: images are not chosen at random; they must convey a particular feeling, they must simulate emotion.

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Third-degree kitsch is the result of that search. Whether its potential destabilization will have a concrete social result before it is annihilated by a systematic assimilation that hurries to institutionalize it - making it into second-degree kitsch, for example is debatable. Still, it is not a question of this assimilation seeping down into the depths of culture and carrying out some radical change there. After all, American culture is basically one of images, so that changes effected at the level of imagery should not be underestimated. Since commodification is one of the main modes of integration in the USA, it can certainly be used as a vehicle of symbolic intervention. Third-degree kitsch may therefore be considered a meeting point between different cultures. It is where the iconography of a culture, instead of ceasing to exist, is transformed by absorbing new elements. Rather than speaking of active or passive cultures, one can now speak of mutual appropriation. Even if an iconography is stolen, it remains active, and the artists’ work discussed here illustrates how this iconography can occupy the appropriator’s imagination by providing a simulation of experiences the native culture has become unable to produce. It can be said that each degree of religious imagery satisfies the desire for intensity in a different way: in the first degree through an osmotic process resulting from the collection and possession of objects still infused with use-value; in the second degree by the consumption of commodified nostalgia; and in the third degree by cannibalizing both the first and second degrees then recycling them into a hybrid product that allows for a simulation of the lost experience. Even though they are produced at different moments, these three degrees inhabit the same contemporary space. Their synchronicity accentuates the erasure of cultural boundaries already present in third-degree kitsch, throwing together and mixing different types of production and perception. This reflects the situation of the urban cosmopolis, where myriad cultures live side by side, producing the postmodern pastiche. Such an anarchic condition destabilizes traditional hegemony, forcing it to negotiate with those cultural discourses it could once oppress. The ability of cultural imagery to travel and adapt itself to new requirements and desires can no longer be mourned as a loss of cultural specificity in the name of exhausted notions of personal or collective identities. Instead, it must be welcomed as a sign of opening to and enjoyment of all that traditional culture worked so hard at leaving out.

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NOTES 1

For a description o f contemporary hyper-reality see Umberto Eco, Travels in Hyperreality: Essays, translated by William Weaver (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Janovich, 1986); and Jean Baudrillard, Simulations, translated by Paul Foss, Paul Patton and John Johnston (New York: Semiotextle], 1983).

2

I should like to thank the following people for allowing me to photograph repeatedly in their stores: Sam and Silvia at Sasson Bazaar, 108 W. Fourteenth Street; Maurice and David at Esco Discount Store, 138 W. Fourteenth Street; and Jamal at Sharon Bazaar, 112 W. Fourteenth Street. Fourteenth Street’s internationality can be fully appreciated in these people’s polyglotism: most of them speak four or five languages, including English, Spanish, Hebrew, Arabic and French.

3 Little Rickie is located at 49 V