Patrick Frank - Readings in Latin American Modern Art

Edited by Patrick Frank

Readings in Latin American Modern Art

Copyright 2004 by Yale University.
All rights reserved.
This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers.

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Printed in the United States of America by Vail Ballou Press, Binghamton, NY

Library of Congress
Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Readings in Latin American modern art/edited by Patrick Frank.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-300-10255-0 (paperbound: alk. paper)

1. Art, Latin American20th century.

I. Frank, Patrick, 1953

N 6502.5 .R 43 2004
709.80904dc22
2003023857

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Patrick Frank

Jacinto Quirarte

MacKinley Helm

Armando Revern

Ricardo Giraldes

Pedro Figari

Xul Solar

Emilio Pettoruti

Oswald de Andrade

Rafael ngel Herreras

Jos Clemente Orozco

Tata Jesucristo Hayden Herrera

Enrique Lpez Albjar

Fred Murphy

DeWitt Peters

Selden Rodman

Edited by Donald Cosentino

Martha Zamora

Marie-Pierre Colle

Marta Traba

Lowery S. Sims

Paulina Villanueva

Paulina Villanueva

Celia Ester Arredando Zambrano

Valerie Fraser

Joaqun Torres-Garca

Gyula Kosice

Gyula Kosice

lvaro Medina

Marta Traba

Carlos Cruz-Diez

Carlos Cruz-Diez

Alejandro Otero

Jess Rafael Soto

Jess Rafael Soto

Ferreira Gullar

Lygia Clark

Hlio Oiticica

Caetano Veloso

Henry John Drewal

Jos Luis Cuevas

Luis Felipe No

Jacqueline Barnitz

Cristina Carrillo de Albornoz

Eva Cockcroft

Friedhelm Mennekes

Ricardo Pau-Llosa

Lawrence Wechsler

Leandro Katz

Susan Valds-Dapena

Frederick Ted Castle

Cecilia Vicuna

Eduardo de Jess Douglas

Patrick Frank

Latin American modern art still does not get its due. Even after two decades of postmodernist deconstruction of grand narratives, efforts to institute multicultural inclusiveness, and mostly business-oriented globalization, the canon of modern art history is still heavily tilted toward the art of Europe and North America. Students all across the United States still learn that most of the important innovations in art prior to about 1940 took place in Europe, and that after that date the center of the art world shifted to New York, preparing the ground on which the nascent New York School would almost immediately seize the leadership of the avantgarde. I have created this book in the hope that it will help to change that emphasis.

The criteria for inclusion in this canon of acceptable modern expressions have been too narrow. As one African-born curator recently noted, While strong revolutionary claims have been made for the avant-garde within Westernism, its vision of modernity remains surprisingly conservative and formal.

The basic problem that gives rise to the neglect of Latin American modern art is structural. The wealth and resources that support research and education about art are concentrated in Europe and the United States, but the human characteristics necessary for the creation of vital, compelling, and innovative art are much more widely dispersed. The countries with the greatest critical mass of infrastructure arrogate to themselves the rubric mainstream, and relegate areas of lower strategic importance or thinner art culture to the periphery. This imbalance of resources and creativity leads to strange lacunae. To mention just a few examples, there are many books about Georgia OKeefe, as there probably should be, but there are far fewer about Tarsila do Amaral, an equally passionate but probably more audacious artist. The dolls of Hans Bellmer have been much studied and even imitated, but the contemporaneous and equally multivalent dolls of Armando Revern have received very little attention. It is easy to find information about Dan Flavin and Frank Stella, innovators in the use of neon and the shaped canvas, but Gyula Kosice and Ral Lozza, who anticipated these developments by about fifteen years, are nearly invisible. Even postcolonial critics have not yet gotten around to studying the series of sixty paintings by Oswaldo Guayasamn on the theme of Frantz Fanons The Wretched of the Earth.

To be sure, there has been some progress in recent years, often in the form of museum exhibitions and their accompanying catalogues. I believe, perhaps naively, that education can also help to solve this problem. If we continue to broaden and deepen the amount of information available, then more people will begin to sense the beauty, diversity, and searching urgency, not to say the quality, of a wide spectrum of Latin American modern art.

In gathering and presenting new information about this underrecognized area, I believe it important to let Latin Americans speak for themselves. Where important source writings existed only in Spanish or Portuguese, I have attempted to render them in English. Latin American art tends to be connected to other cultural expressions such as music and literature in a more integral way than in North America, so I have also included a few documents that show this affinity, most of them new translations. In general, this book favors primary sources, artists statements, manifestoes, interviews, and other types of documents that give principal emphasis to the actual voices of Latin American artists and writers. This immediately raises the difficult question of who is a Latin American. The most obvious answer is a person who was born in or did most of his or her work in a Latin American country, but even this simple formulation is debatable. For example, I have left out Marisol, Roberto Matta, and Lucio Fontana, believing that they are sufficiently represented in the mainstream. At the same time, perhaps arbitrarily, I have included Julio Le Parc, Leonora Carrington, and Alfredo Jaar. There is even some disagreement about which countries constitute Latin America. I have omitted Anglophone Jamaica and included Francophone Haiti. On both of these questions, I have tried to choose a middle path from among the answers available in the present literature.

The novels of Severo Sarduy provide some of the best answers to the problem of Latin American identity, if indeed it is one. The protagonist of one of these postmodern antinarratives is Louis Leng, a Cuban-Chinese who was born to the accompaniment of Afro-Cuban