Meeting Margins International Conference
Transnational Art in Latin America and Europe 1950-1978
Conference Abstracts
Click on a panel title to read a panel description or a speaker name and paper title to read a paper abstract.
Aquiles Pantaleão, "Avant-Garde music, between science, identitarian politics and popular culture."
Panel 2: for example, Tucumán Arde
Jaime Vindel, "Struggling for Memory - The Case of Tucumán Arde"
Olga Fernandez, "Tucumá Arde - Ceci N'est Pas une Biennale"
Zanna Gilbert, "Mail Art's Expanded Exhibitions - Flux, Exposure and Multispatial Display"
Fernanda Nogueira, "The Emancipatory Program of Poema/Processo in 60s and 70s Brazil"
Panel 3: Shared Imaginaries - Art and Political Activism in Latin America and Europe 1950-1978
Jaime Vindel, "Forgetting the 60s: Art, revolution and political consensus."
Panel 1: The Popularisation of Scientific Thought and its Impact on Artistic Exchanges between Latin America and Europe
LTB 8, (time), Saturday 4th December
Chair: Michael Asbury
Respondent: Guy Brett
Previously misunderstood as inescapably derivative, modern art in Latin America underwent a significant transformation during the 1950s whereby a sense of parity with Europe appeared, perhaps for the first time, as a palpable reality.
This emancipatory drive can be partly understood, on the one hand, as a consequence of the rapid industrialisation of Latin American nations, the emergence of institutions such as museums of modern art and the first signs of a local professional art circuit, facilitated by the rise in private patronage, while on the other hand, across the Atlantic, the post-war period brought with it the demise of the cultural supremacy that European nations had until then taken for granted. These factors do not however account for the creative transformations within art production itself, nor do they explain the theoretical debates that nourished such practices or indeed that emerged from them.
Analysing the specific case of Brazil, and while keeping the distinct material conditions in mind, this session will discuss how events and exchanges beyond the specific field of art contributed towards a sense of transnational parity, with art practices and theory in Europe and elsewhere, arguing that not only did this shift the emphasis away from aesthetic derivation but in fact led to surprising concurrencies of concepts and practices while more recently serving to consolidate a sense of national canon within contemporary art.
Suzana Vaz
Nise da Silveira and Carl Gustav Jung: Don't fear the unconscious. Creative process: progression of the symbol towards an archaic knowledge.
As a result of her work with the analytical psychology of Carl Gustav Jung, Nise da Silveria published, in 1968, the short book "Jung", summarizing the basic concepts of his theory, now in its 20th edition. From 1946 to 1974, at the STOR (Seção de Terapêutica Ocupacional/Section of Occupational Therapy) of the National Psychiatric Centre D. Pedro II, Engenho de Dentro, Rio de Janeiro, Nise da Silveira lead a pioneering psychiatric practice centred on the component of occupational therapy, that she would call "the emotion of dealing", and which came to provide 17 different activities for the residents.
Silveira observed that her schizophrenic patients, when given the means for creative expression, would convey their inner trials under progressively more mythical and archaic imagery, through primordial images. In order to understand this inexorable "symbolic progression", Silveira used Jung's formulations regarding the psyche: his comprehensive conception of psychic energy; the collective unconscious and the archetypes; the dynamics of the process of individuation, with the archetype as the counterpart of instinct, defining the basic human psychic conflict; the formation of the symbol enabling the parity of the conflicting parts within psyche and the resulting emergence of primordial images; the symbol as a dynamo, a transformer of psychic energy, fundamental for the process of individuation.
Silveira's method of analysis of the creative production of her patients aimed at interpreting the stages of the psychic process that unfolds with the retrieval of the creative drive, and comprised two fundamental aspects: taking the creative labour as a whole and using the "language of mythology" to read it. She observed the patients' actions during their creative process at the studio in order to relate "the emotional situation lived" by the patient with the images, which should be taken as series and whose interpretation demanded the "knowledge of mythology, history of religions, philosophy and psychology of primitive peoples". The outstanding character of the work produced at STOR was noticed by Carl Gustav Jung, as he observed the paintings of Nise da Silveira's patients exhibited at the 2nd International Congress of Psychiatry, in Zurich, in 1957: "How is the environment in which these patients paint? I suppose they work surrounded by empathy and by people who don't fear the unconscious".
Sergio Martins
Gestalt and phenomenology: perception paradigms in the Brazilian constructive avant-garde.
This paper seeks to explore the prominence theories of perception Gestalt theory and phenomenology had in the critical and artistic debates in the 1950s Brazilian constructive avant-garde. In order to question the usual view that Gestalt was unequivocally paired with the rationalist dogmatism of the São Paulo Concretists, I intend to go back a few steps and start from critic Mrio Pedrosa's strategic deployment of it in the context of the figuration vs. abstraction debates that preceded Concretism proper. With this in mind, it is also possible to appreciate how Pedrosa's interest in the art of psychiatric patients was not simply a passing interest and less yet a symptom of lack of rigour, being instead a fully consistent and strategically central move vis-à-vis the kind of legitimized terrain the critic (and others) were trying to carve for the abstract avant-garde at that time. Last, but not least, Ferreira Gullar's use of Merleau-Ponty in order to criticize Gestalt will be regarded not simply as an opposition to the São Paulo Concretists, but as an attempt to reclaim the initial impetus that had fuelled Pedrosa's interest in the psychology of perception.
German Alfonso Adaid
Translation, ideology and nationalism: Post-war readings of Norbert Wiener's Cybernetics
Following the end of the World War II and its' atomic climax, one could argue that the publication of a book optimistically aimed at uniting almost all disparate fields of scientific knowledge thought the adoption of insights and concepts taken from the very practical solution to problems posed by missiles and warplanes trajectories, as being rather untimely. Nevertheless, when Norbert Wiener published "Cybernetics or control and communication in the animal and the machine" in 1948, this is exactly what happens. Cybernetics, despite its' technical and military origins, would find its public not in America but almost everywhere else, from the Soviet Union to Brazil. Unsurprisingly perhaps, this adoption was not effortless and was usually achieved according to individual nations' contexts and agendas.
This presentation intends to emphasise these deviations in readings according to local principles and political contexts. Given Cybernetic's great scientific and historical importance, as well as its' artistic presence to this day, it is fair to question why and how this scientific discipline was adopted, discussed and translated by the artistic and intellectual fields of the time.
Aquiles Pantaleão
Avant-Garde music, between science, identitarian politics and popular culture.
While advances in the sciences gathered pace as the fifties unfolded, artists were just as quick to acquire and apply new knowledge to their creative output. By the early sixties the situation was already very different. Against the backdrop of strengthening European economy and institutions on the one hand, and the winding development of a Latin America hampered by financial deficit and political turmoil on the other, composers on opposing sides of the Atlantic experienced, reflected on, and reacted to science and technology in their own ways.
This paper aims at discussing the impact scientific thought and new technologies had on composers and practitioners of contemporary music living in two very different realities. Initially we see how fields as varied as quantum-physics, neuroscience, linguistics, and cognitive science informed the theory and practice of the music produced in Europe, arising often from within state-run laboratory setups. We then investigate the ambivalent relation the musical community in Latin America had towards these new ideas, characterised both by great interest limited by sparse access to resources as well as repudiation of further European ideology and influence - especially important for those nations seeking to "reclaim" their cultural identities and attain socio-economical autonomy. At one moment the very presence of science and technology is enough to divide opinions, polarizing composers' tendencies and contributing to a kind of partisan aesthetics - artistic practices orientated by political engagement and social responsibilities.
Panel 2: for example, Tucumán Arde
LTB 8, (time), Saturday 4th December
Chair: Isobel Whitelegg
Respondent: Pablo La Fuente
Exhibitions are - traditionally - predisposed to enhanced visibility and international mediation. For the processes favoured by transnational historiography - the formation of networks, the extension and differentiation of spheres of reception and influence, the production of imaginaries - they are presupposed to be generative events. In line with the "living contact" desired by the first São Paulo Bienal, they may provide excuse, platform and physical site for planned or accidental encounters between normally dispersed agents, creating localised affects while being projected towards or creating an international public sphere that is at once real and imagined.
Forming part of the research project "Meeting Margins, Transnational Art in Europe and Latin America 1950-78", this session establishes a focus on exhibitions as events that are privileged by the transnational approach to Latin America fostered by this project amongst others. The practices addressed here occurred at a historical moment characterised by both the expansion and dematerialisation of exhibition forms and the unsettling of possibilities for speech and action within Latin American countries. Our discussion also coincides with the recent and ongoing efforts that are establishing exhibition history as a distinct field of enquiry, consolidating a genealogy for contemporary curatorial practice and addressing the temporary exhibition as a distinct cultural formation. Emerging in a globalised present, informed by post-colonial criticism, these initiatives set out to transcend the canon. But the Latin American example most commonly returned remains the same, Tucumán Arde, an exhibition that was always already canonised by virtue of its contemporaneous influence on artists and critics in Europe and the USA, and that has since been successively revised, and re-presented.
As a collective political project, Tucumán Arde was not strictly an exhibition, yet it placed itself within the corollary of the major international exhibition by announcing itself, with irony, via a poster campaign, as a biennale - "the First Avant-garde Art Biennale". It became international in reception as a consequence of visits to Argentina by Lucy Lippard (New York) and Jean Clay (Paris), which took place while Tucumán was in its planning stages. As such it may be an indicative example of an exhibition whose local political intent was quickly translated via its reception in New York and Paris - into differently localised affects, a process that has arguably accumulated into the construction of Tucumán Arde as "the" paradigm of political practice or ideological conceptualism in Latin America.
This session begins by addressing Tucumán Arde as paradigm, considering how it may be addressed constructively, but also the ways in which its present status may be problematic does it obscure alternative paradigms, or contribute to a simplistic understanding of critical practices within Latin America? To what extent is its status contingent to its early international visibility?
The three papers presented following this initial discussion open up a consideration of different practices, strategies and devices for presentation and circulation that, like Tucumán, may also be considered under the rubric of the expanded exhibition, those that allowed for the formation of different networks, publics and counter-publics, and that may offer alternative paradigms for the understanding of art in Latin America, both in terms of political action and affect, and in more formal terms as other examples within the genealogy of contemporary exhibition practice.
Jaime Vindel
Struggling for Memory - The Case of Tucumán Arde
This presentation will focus on four exhibitions that - over the last decade - have built the global reception of Tucumán Arde as the best-known incidence of so-called "latin american conceptualism". Tucumán Arde was used as a reference to write a new historiography of conceptual art in "Global conceptualism" (1999). This exhibition pointed out that while American and European conceptual art was concerned with the limits of art language, Latin American conceptualism developed a social and ideological impulse. Some years later, the project "Ex-Argentina" (2004) recovered Tucumán Arde as the symbolic origin of current activist art practices. This point of view contributed to transforming the experience into an established myth. Finally, the most recent "documenta" (XII/2007) presented the documents of Tucumán Ardes archive as pure aesthetic images. All of these curatorial operations have contributed to a forgetting of the historical dimension of the experience. More recently the museographic experiment "Inventario 1965-1975: Archivo Graciela Carnevale" (Centro Cultural Parque de España, 2008) proposed an analytical perspective concerning the history of the archive. This exhibition tried to reactivate the archives potential, and this is a philosophical and political issue that this presentation will critically address.
Olga Fernandez
Tucumán Arde - Ceci N'est Pas une Biennale
Tucumán Arde has usually been described in relation to an itinerary that looks at the contextual factors that conditioned its discursive possibilities. This point of view highlights its historical and geographical specificities in the framework of the Argentinean art of the second half of the 20th century. Alongside this perspective, we can examine Tucumán Arde in relation to another framework, that of exhibition history - running through the 20th century, supplementing and challenging traditional art history. Such an approach emphasizes the way in which exhibitions produce meaning through specific formal means. This combination of such means with discourse allows a constellation of exhibitions and artworks to be drawn that at the same time reflects and produces a visual imaginary. In the presentation I will address Tucumán Ardes materialization as "exhibition", focusing on how that medium was used to convey a distinct sensibility.
Zanna Gilbert
Mail Art's Expanded Exhibitions - Flux, Exposure and Multispatial Display
Mail arts proposition that the artwork is "informatic" unsettles and expands upon conventional notions of display. Since the 1960s, mail arts engagement in process, flux and circulation has exposed the limitations of the mainstream exhibition and led to the development of new ideas about display as communication and publication literally a "making public" of information. The promotion of new spaces of display engendered a proliferation of sites where work could be exhibited. These expanded exhibitions develop the highways of communication and circulatory systems as exhibitionary spaces in themselves. In this sense the display of systems exposes the ideological structuring of society, constituting a poetics of visibility. Thus the exhibition is not only a means of informational communication, but also makes perceptible precisely those structures that are critiqued by mail art practice.
Fernando Davis
La Poesía Fuera de Sí - Poetic and Politics Strategies of the "New Poetry" Networks (1966-1972)
In the Latin American scene during the sixties and seventies several experimental publishing initiatives focused on the dissemination and conceptualization of "new poetry" practices. These projects many overflowing the institutional channels of art - aimed to articulate a set of alternative and collaborative networks in order to intervene in the collective dynamics of social change that spanned this period. This interest in constructing other spaces did not, however, necessarily entail a radical, definitive break with the art institution. On the contrary, a range of projects sought to tactically intervene from inside the institution in an attempt to subvert or dismantle its regimes of power. In this sense, several institutions hosted exhibitions of these experiences. Magazines and exhibitions did not therefore constitute mutually exclusive alternatives; on the contrary they designed, in their simultaneous development, a double circuit - a strategic device by which these practices aimed to critically affect their context. This paper proposes a discussion of certain moments and episodes within this map, and will consider a series of projects driven by the Argentine artist Edgardo Antonio Vigo and the Uruguayan artist Clemente Padin from 1966 to 1972. The first part focuses on projects of the experimental magazines "Diagonal Cero" and "OVUM 10" (directed by Vigo and Padn respectively) and their links to a series of exhibitions organized by these two artists in this period. A second part focuses in the radical proposals of a poetry in action ("poesía para y/o a realizar" in Vigo, "poesía inobjetal" in Padin), understood as an open project to trigger a collective and potentially transformative aesthetic experience, with "the street" conceived as the privileged space of poetic and political activation.
Fernanda Nogueira
The Emancipatory Program of Poema/Processo in 60s and 70s Brazil
This presentation focuses on the movement "Poema/Processo" (1967-1972). Fernanda Nogueira will discuss aspects of their collective creative experiences - which collapsed the concept of authorship and confronted the military regime in Brazil (1964-1985) with non-official political action. The participants strategically affirmed that intellectual production is always "in process". They understood knowledge as a common wealth ("bem comum"), encouraging everyone to become participant. Ignored by traditional literary and artistic circles, the "Poema/Processo" network which expanded into different regions of the country consolidated an open platform of critical production, in friction with restrictive and excluding aesthetic policies. Although repressive circumstances forced the group to declare an official ending just one year before it became part of the mail art network, they continued working independently towards the possibility of a mass critical use of their production. What is the implication of "Poema/Processo's" absence from the historiography of both art and literature? What could be the potential contribution of the "Poema/Processo" project for current theoretical reflection and practice?
Panel 3: Shared Imaginaries - Art and Political Activism in Latin America and Europe 1950-1978
LTB 8, (time), Sunday 5th December
Panel Chair: Valerie Fraser and María Iñigo Clavo
Respondents: Andrea Giunta and Taína Caragol
During the 1960s, in the aftermath of the Cuban Revolution, when a majority of countries in Latin America experienced periods of dictatorship and repression, several overlapping elements youth culture, left-wing political activism, liberation theology helped to generate shared ideals of regional and continental solidarity. Artists were in the vanguard, debating the role of art and of the artist in the Revolution, organising meetings and exhibitions at which to exchange ideas and images. Examples include the meetings of artists in Chile in 1972 and Havana in 1972 and 1973 and the Puerto Rico biennials of the same era. The session will also address the transatlantic traffic in images and ideas during this period: Europe remained an important point of reference for many Latin Americans, but at the same time in Europe, where the left was increasingly dissatisfied with Soviet-style communism, Latin Americas distinctive combination of political activism and artistic creativity offered an attractive alternative model.
Miguel A. López
Social Shifts and Political Dematerializations Juan Acha and the 'revolutionary awakening' in the late 60s
This presentation focuses on the shifts in the critical thinking of the Peruvian-Mexican Marxist art critic and theoretician Juan Acha in late 60s. Of particular importance is the political turning point in his writings after 1968: his proximity to May '68 in France and his theoretical approach to a new political thought (Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault, Louis Althusser, and Herbert Marcuse, among others), but also the oblique impact of the anti-colonial liberations movements and the 'Cultural Revolution' in China. For Acha, 1968 means not only a radical change in the general forms of conceiving the relations between vanguard, politics and aesthetics, but it also the "revolutionary awakening" of a new political subject in the artistic field. Acha, who supported enthusiastically the eruption of Pop Art, of ephemeral environments and of happenings in mid 60's Peru, begins to questions radically his previous perspectives and boundaries, promoting a critique of ideology, a different model of insurgency and the redefinition of cultural production in friction with the so-called Revolutionary Government of the Armed Forces ruled by General Juan Velasco, which took power -in a coup d'état- in October 1968, until 1975. For the Peruvian critic, in that context it was urgent to encourage an all-encompassing transformation in which aesthetics should perform all their utopian, libertarian and emancipatory potential.
Jaime Vindel
Forgetting the 60s: Art, revolution and political consensus.
León Ferrari and Ricardo Carpani were key in the Argentinian political art scene of the 60s. Ferrari's work La civilización occidental y cristiana is a reference in the analysis of the process of politization that affected the avant-garde of the Instituto Di Tella. That process finished with the "itinerario del 68" and the political art project Tucumán Arde. It made artists leave the avant-garde institutions and locate their practice in a new context: the union CGT de los Argentinos, where artists tried to increase social effectiveness of their activity. After this experience, many of these artists left the artistic practice because they did not know how to articulate art and politics in the revolutionary context. Carpani, on his side, collaborated with unions from the late 50s, producing political images much closer to the demands of socialist realism. Not long before his death, Carpani said in an interview that the conclusion of the avant-garde of the 60s revealed that he, as a political artist, was already in the right place at the beginning of that decade. Certainly, this was an attempt to discredit the particular artistic methodology of Tucumán Arde, but it helps to understand in which way the relationship between art and politics was reformulated after 1968. This presentation will focus on the contributions that both artists (Ferrari and Carpani) read in the Encuentro de Artistas Plásticos del Cono Sur, celebrated in Santiago de Chile in 1972. During those years, the success of Salvador Allende in Chile and the Comunist government in Cuba encouraged Latinamerican artists meetings to discuss the new social function of art. In a context where revolutionary art was a previous step to socialist art, at times art lost its status of political singularity.
Eduardo Grüner
European Intellectuals' Fascination with the Third World in the 1960s - The Cases of Sartre and Pasolini
In the aftermath of WWII, and most particularly in the sixties, left-oriented European intellectuals felt a growing fascination for Third World culture and politics. This was due partly to the fact that it was an era of vibrant anti-colonial insurgence (Vietnam war, Cuban revolution, Algerian and general African liberation movements, Chinese "cultural revolution", and so on) and partly to the sense of an exhaustion of Leftist politics in Europe (Stalinist bureaucratization of the Communist parties, integration of the traditional working class into late capitalism). Arguably the two most important and representative of these new Left intellectual wave-makers were French philosopher, playwright and novelist Jean-Paul Sartre and Italian filmmaker, poet and narrator Pier Paolo Pasolini. This paper will try to show that, although these two great thinkers / artists were quite different in theoretical perspective and aesthetic sensibility, from their distinct points of view they strived and managed to "let the Other speak for themselves", instead of merely constructing an ethnocentric and "orientalized" imaginary of such "Others". Each in their own way, therefore, anticipated by at least two decades (and with stronger radicalism, we might add) today's fashionable debates in the fields of postcolonial theory or subaltern studies. And they did this not only "In Theory" (to paraphrase Aijaz Ahmad) but also in the very logic of their artistic praxis , in which the presence of a variously represented "excluded Other" allegorizes a tragic conflict within western Reason itself, much in the vein of Adorno's "negative dialectic", as we shall also try to prove. Nowadays, in the context of what seems a nearly apocalyptic crisis of "late capitalism" and "Globalization", and the concomitant demise of so-called "Postmodern thought", a return to such precedents could prove to be a stimulating "anachronism", a modest but decided way "to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger", to quote Walter Benjamin's famous dictum.
Oriana Baddeleley
A People United - Latin America and the Visualising of the Political in 1970s Britain
"The making of Che Guevara posters or Che Guevara paintings or Che Guevara exhibitions would be no reliable testimony to radical intention." [i]
When Charles Harrison critiqued the referencing of the figure of Che Guevara in his introduction to the exhibition he organised in New York of British artists in 1971, he was ostensibly attacking the Institute of Contemporary Art's decline into what he described as "failure and frivolity" after its move to premises in the Mall in 1968. He was also revealing a wider set of associations around the use of "Latin American" imagery and references to connote the political, which underpinned many aspects of British debates as to the nature of art and politics in the 1970s. This paper will attempt to trace the impact of both Latin American political events such as the coup in Chile of 1973 and debates as to the nature of political art such as the British publication of David Alfaro Siqueiros' "Art & Revolution" [ii] in 1975 on the vexed question, posed by Richard Cork by the end of the decade in his Serpentine show of "Art for Whom?" [iii]. In what ways did ideas about audience and ownership affect the work of British artists? And in what ways did the idea of a new British political art relate to the continuing anxieties over the role of the popular and the avant-garde that emerged in the 1960s?
[i] Charles Harrison "Virgin Soils and Old Lands" in "The British Avant Garde", Catalogue for exhibition at the New York Cultural Center and the May 1971 edition of Studio International.
[ii] David Alfaro Siqueiros "Art & Revolution", Lawrence and Wishart, 1975.
[iii] "Art for whom?", 1978, organised by Richard Cork, Arts Council of Great Britain, Serpentine Gallery.
