Beyond the Fantastic: Contemporary Art Criticism from Latin America - Review

Gerardo Mosquera, ed. London: Institute of International Visual Arts and Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996. Essays by Nestor Garcia Canclini, Andrea Giunta, Paulo Herkenhoff, Mirko Lauer, Ticio Escobar, Pierre E. Bocquet, Mosquera, Nelly Richard, Luis Camnitzer, Tomas Ybarra-Frausto, Guillermo Gomez-Pena, George Yudice, Carolina Ponce de Leon, Mari Carmen Ramirez, Monica Amor, Celeste Olalquiaga, Gabriel Peluffo Linari, and Gustavo Buntix. 343 pp., 15 color ills, 31 b/w. $ 25 paper.

Everyone who teaches, conducts research, and curates exhibitions of modern Latin American art knows what a pressing need exists for art historical scholarship and contemporary art criticism within the field. Professors also require access to writings by Latin American critics and scholars in English translation for many of our students. Over the past several years, beginning in the late eighties, there has been a proliferation of substantial (if often controversial) exhibitions accompanied by hefty catalogues that provide the most readily available source of scholarship on Latin American art in English. Journals such as Third Text and Art Nexus present other venues for current writing, and the Winter 1992 issue of Art Journal devoted itself to Latin American art history and criticism. However, so far no one has published a single comprehensive text on the history of modern Latin American art that could be used in survey, upper-division, or graduate-level courses. Just such a comprehensive history by Jacqueline Barnitz, professor of Latin American art history at the University of Texas, Austin, is forthcoming from the University of Texas Press.

Granted, this is a young field, and there are few university programs in this country where modern Latin American art history is taught in any systematic fashion. However, more universities and colleges are at least providing introductory courses, and now a handful offer graduate programs in the study of modern and contemporary Latin American art. In other words, there is a real academic market for both general and more specialized publications in the field.

Precisely because this is a relatively new area of study, much basic research has yet to be undertaken on the history of art in many countries in Central and South America and the Caribbean. There are substantial gaps in our knowledge, particularly of the nineteenth century. However, in the late nineties there is also the more general question of whether a survey of Latin American art would, in fact, be desirable. We have wrestled in our discipline for the last two decades with the usefulness, or lack thereof, of the classic survey texts such as Janson and Gardner, as well as more recent additions to that genre. Are mono-vocal metahistories valid any longer? The proliferating anthologies of historically significant critical, theoretical, historical, and analytical readings in European and U.S. art history seem to be filling a pedagogical need to provide students (and scholars) with writings that cover the breadth and depth of our discipline. This is especially necessary when we confront the variety of discourses embedded in any discussion of modernism and postmodernism in Latin America. Multiculturalism, postcolonialism, the Third World, and center vs. periphery, all of which represent significant aspects of the debates on Latin American art, are perhaps better approached by a number of scholars and critics rather than by any single individual.

Yet another factor must be considered when thinking about Latin American art history. It is the relationship between artistic practice in Mexico, Central and South America, and the Caribbean, as well as the work of emigre artists in the United States, Europe, or elsewhere and the work of Latino artists in the United States. The very category "Latino" is heavily overdetermined, politically loaded, and not necessarily generally accepted, although it is less problematic than "Hispanic." Latino brings together a highly disparate group of Mexican Americans, Chicanos, Puertorique. The very category "Latino" is heavily overdetermined, politically loaded, and not necessarily generally accepted, although it is less problematic than "Hispforeigners or exiles. They are from the United States, and their outlooks are substantially different from those who are emigres or those who work in their countries of origin in Latin America. How do we bring these artists together for pedagogical, curatorial, or scholarly purposes. And should we?

Connected to, and yet distinct from, these not yet well researched or understood relationships is the fundamental, and much debated, question of whether there is a Latin American art beyond any obvious geographical designation. Is there a sensibility or set of parameters by which we can define what is Latin American in the visual arts? What are the shared values and practices of Mexico, Cuba, Nicaragua, Argentina, Colombia, Venezuela, Brazil, Chile, etc., beside that which is part of the international discourses of modernism and postmodernism? Are there entirely distinct sets of problematic issues about which we can write, such as the phenomenon of Indigenismo, the complex relationships between fine art, folk art, and popular culture, or the continuing engagement in art with colonial and postcolonial constructs? And this is to cite but three issues shared by a number of Latin American countries. In fact, does each country even embrace or function within those international discourses of modernism and postmodernism in the same manner? Or to put it another way, what is the impact of Latin American art on our understanding(s) of those discourses? These are some of the critical issues that presently engage historians and critics as we work to create and define our field. This area of study is not yet rigidly fixed, with no firm canon (so far) that must be broken open or completely shattered. But there is certainly a body of known artists from each country whose innovative works have already made a significant mark. Their contributions have substantially affected international developments in the arts or our understanding of those histories, and their works are widely known, in some cases, because of the burgeoning art market of the eighties and the proliferation of international exhibitions. However, scholars, historians, and critics still possess the remarkable potential to create a noncanonical art history if we so choose.