art likewise changed dramatically over the course of the historical period covered by this book. A wholesale postwar reevaluation of the notions of painting, sculpture, drawing, and architecture gave rise to a widespread view of art not as a discrete object, but as what the influential critics Ferreira Gullar and Juan Acha termed the “nonobject” – a concept whose profoundly innovative notions of subjectivity and collectivity brought together aesthetics, politics, and psychoanalytic theories of subjectivity and affect. The upheavals of art and society in the 1960s and 1970s are addressed through a variety of topics in the third part: the breakdown of medium specificity and the dematerialization of the art object; the rise of participatory propositions; the growing internationalization of Latin American art and the contingent rise of institutions, museums, and events such as the São Paulo Biennial. The post‐World War II sections thus trace a decisive shift not only in the look and form of art objects but also in the concept of political subjectivity itself – a change in the nature of political agency that was often actively facilitated by and through artistic practice. These are read against the political and social turmoil of the Cuban Revolution and the Cold War, the rise of new guerrilla movements throughout the 1960s and 1970s, the 1968 student protests, and polarization of the political spectrum across Latin America.
The fourth group of texts examines the rise of conceptual strategies and new media in the 1970s and 1980s in relation to both the repressive right‐wing dictatorships and the retreat of democracy throughout the region. Essays explore a variety of conceptualisms that reach back not to the ontological crisis of modernism prompted by World War II, but to 1959, the rise of dependency theory, and Latin America's colonial past as historically generative markers, aimed at producing aesthetic gestures with the capacity to disrupt dominant discourses in order to open them to dialogical modes of exchange.
The final two parts deal with the most recent work in Latin American and Latina/o art, focusing on the rise of identity politics, the problematic repercussions of globalization on this art, the burgeoning art market (dealers, auctions, art fairs, and collectors), and exhibitions under the economic effects of neoliberalism. Essays in the latter sections of the book argue for the exponential growth in recent decades of what Peruvian‐US scholar José Falconi here calls the “cartography of contemporaneity” (p. 528), in which Latin America's current assertiveness on the geopolitical stage has broken down previous tendencies to marginalize the region as peripheral and never‐quite‐modern. Now identified in temporal terms as part of the contemporary world, Latin America participates in – and often guides – a new space–time system of cultural production under late capitalism that promises inclusion beyond the traditional canon of (Western) modernism. This central and active role has also opened up the commercialization and commodification of Latin American cultural goods in the market at large. Yet although Latin American and Latina/o cultural production have thus been afforded a higher level of prestige than they have ever enjoyed, this situation has also complicated efforts to define the categories of “Latina/o” and “Latin American art.” Inasmuch as globalization has succeeded in establishing a predominant artistic lingua franca – that of postminimalist and postconceptual art – any traces of nationalism, localism, or identity art have been deemed increasingly outmoded within that global panorama. Indeed, it may now be more productive to understand “Latin America” less as a unified geopolitical entity than as a methodological category for organizing information, and art stemming from the region not as an expression of an essential identity but as a means of generating distinctive insight into current aesthetic practices worldwide.
Underlying this book's conception and organization, therefore, is the conviction that exploring Latin America's role in the global and contemporary worlds from multiple transnational perspectives is fundamental to rethinking the reciprocal if asymmetrical encounters, appropriations, and translations produced out of the contemporary's global correspondences and interconnections. Our critique of modernity's geographies and temporalities does not, however, seek simply to replace the Western universalizing model with one of “alternative modernities.” To do so would not only threaten to essentialize “Latin America” as a privileged epistemological viewpoint; it would also dangerously underestimate modernity's prodigious capacity to reproduce and extend itself, even as that universalizing impetus is continually marked by its own instability, unevenness, and incompleteness. A principal aim, therefore, is to consider what the study of modern and contemporary art from Latin America can tell us about the dialectic between modernity's claim to universalism and the necessary impossibility of that claim. Through elucidating the region's inextricable entanglement with modernity's universalizing logic and the consequences of globalization, this book puts on display the heterogeneity of Latin American and Latina/o artistic production and their potential for exposing the constitutive ambivalence inherent in the modern.
References
1 András, E. (2012). Provincializing the West: Interview with Piotr Piotrowski. Art Margins (9 October). https://artmargins.com/provincializing‐the‐west/ (accessed 8 January 2019).
2 Avelar, I. (1997). Toward a genealogy of Latin Americanism. Dispositio 49: 121–134.
3 Eder, R. (2012 [1979]). Why a Latin American art? In: Resisting Categories: Latin American and/or Latino (ed. H. Olea and M. Kervandjian), 684. Houston: Museum Fine Arts Houston, International Center for the Arts of the Americas.
4 García Canclini, N. (1995). Modernity after postmodernity. In: Beyond the Fantastic. Contemporary Art Criticism from Latin America (ed. G. Mosquera), 20–52. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
5 Grobat, M. (2013). The invention of Latin America: A transnational history of anti‐imperialism, democracy, and race. American Historical Review 118 (December): 1345–1375.
6 Lauer, M. and Oquendo, A. (2004). Presentación. Hueso Húmero 44 (May): 1.
7 Miller, N. and Hart, S. (eds.) (2007). When Was Latin America Modern? New York: Palgrave.
8 Sánchez, L.A. (2012). Does Latin America exist? In: Resisting Categories: Latin American and/or Latino (ed. H. Olea and M. Kervandjian), 132–140. Houston: Museum Fine Arts Houston, International Center for the Arts of the Americas.
9 Traba, M. (1979). Artes plásticas latinoamericanas: La tradición de lo nacional. Hispamérica 8 (23–24) (August–December): 43–69.
10 Traba, M. (2012 [1975]). We are Latin Americans: The war of Resistance. In: Resisting Categories: Latin American and/or Latino (ed. H. Olea and M. Kervandjian), 749–751. Houston: Museum Fine Arts Houston, International Center for the Arts of the Americas.
Note
1 1 José Gómez Sicre, interviewed by Alejandro Anreus, 15 November 1990. Translation from the Spanish by Anreus.
Part I
1910–1945
Cosmopolitanisms and Nationalisms
This section focuses on the origins and development of avant‐garde art movements based in the major urban centers of Latin America. It addresses the rising tensions between social and aesthetic agendas (especially around issues of race and class), redefinitions of national identities, and the confrontation between cosmopolitanism and nationalism. This set of essays explores various movements and critical voices in relation to relevant aspects of the international avant‐garde and key moments of social and political history.
1
