Gerardo Mosquera, 'Modernism from Afro-America: William Lam'
In: Beyond the Fantastic: Contemporary Art Criticism from Latin America. Edited by Gerardo Mosquera. London: Institute of International Visual Arts, 1995,
pp. 121-136.
Everything is gonna be all right (Bob Marley)
The history of art has, to a large extent, been a Eurocentric story. It is a construction 'made in the West' that excludes, diminishes, decontextualises and banishes to bantustans a good part of the aesthetic-symbolic production of the world. It is becoming increasingly urgent - especially for Latin Americans - to deconstruct it in search of more decentralised, integrative, contextualised and multidisciplinary discourses, based on dialogue, hybridisation and transformation, open to an intercultural understanding of the functions, meanings and aesthetics of that production and its processes. Some time ago Etiemble invalidated 'any theory which is based exclusively on European phenomena', and his remark has a tinge of urgency in our field. [1]
This article follows the above guidelines. It tries to interpret the work of Wilfredo Lam from Africa in the Americas. Since Lam was a paradigmatic artist of Latin American modernism, such an analysis could be extended to a reading of modern art in Latin America from Latin America.
I want to look at the work of this Cuban painter less as a product of Surrealism or in terms of the presence of 'primitive', African or Afro-American elements in modern art, than as a result of Cuban and Caribbean culture and as a pioneering contribution to the role of the Third World in the contemporary world. [2] It is a change of viewpoint rather than a different reading. Lam's cultural sources have been fully recognised, although they have always been subordinated to Western avant-garde art; they have never been examined from the point of view of their own effect on that art, in terms of their own particular construction of contemporary 'high' culture.
[...]
The intercultural dialogue implicit in Lam's work is an example of the advantageous use of 'ontological' diversity in the ethnogenesis of the new Latin American nationalities, of which the Caribbean is paradigmatic. [9] Born as a result of Creole-oriented, hybridising processes, these nationalities are part of the Western trunk, although they are also modulated from within by very active non-Western ingredients. European culture lies at their origins and is not something foreign, as it might be in Africa or Asia, divided as their countries are between their old traditional culture and that imposed by colonialism. Lam could paint in the academic, Cubist or Surrealistic style within a familiar tradition, even as 'second mark'. His contribution was to make a qualitative turn and base his art on those elements of African heritage that are alive in Cuban culture. To some extent his work reproduces the plurality characteristic of the Caribbean, centring it on the African component, which determines the profile of the region. He constructs identity by assuming what is diverse from the non- Western angle, providing a rich response to the endemic problems of identity in Latin America, so often lost between Euro-North American mimesis, repudiation of the West, the utopia of a 'cosmic race', or the nihilism of finding itself in the midst of chaos.
[...]
When Lam left Cuba in 1923 he was not seeking the Paris of the avant-garde movement, but the Spain of the Academy. There he acquired a classical training and earned his living with portraits. Towards the end of the 1920s he produced some works within the trend of Spanish Surrealism, tinged with academicism. In Paris, where he arrived in 1938 because of the Spanish Civil War he consolidated himself as a late modernist, with the support of Picasso. His painting from 1938 to 1940, although based to a large extent on African masks and geometry, was reminiscent of the style of the artist from Malága and, in general, of the School of Paris: as a formal resource in the first place, within a 'brew' already developed by the latter, an epigonal language made up of a combination of ingredients (synthetic Cubism, Matisse, Klee, etc.). [13] At that time he also began to develop a passion for the traditional art of Africa and of other 'primitive' peoples.
[...]
From 1942 - when he returned to Cuba - his works became the vehicle for his own, definitive kind of expression, the first vision ever of modern art from the standpoint of Africa within Latin America. There were formal changes in these works, with the prevalence of a figuration that, although indebted to Cubism, distanced itself from the analytical breaking down of forms, or their synthetic reduction, and moved towards invention, with the objective of communicating, rather than strictly representing, a mythology of the Caribbean.
[...]
Lam's painting is a 'primitive' modern cosmogony, a recreation of the world centred in the Caribbean, although it uses the devices of Western art and the space opened up by it. It is a story of genesis, of the proliferation of life, of universal energy. Ortiz speaks of 'living natures': the term alludes to a genre established by the Western pictorial tradition (still life), which Lam uses as a reference or artistic structure and at the same time transforms, because in the world view implicit in his art nothing is dead but only in metamorphosis, because everything is full of an energetic spiritual presence. [20]
[1] On the origins of the word 'Creole' see, in particular, Robert Chaudenson, Les Créoles français (Paris, 1979), pp. 9ff.
[2] Lambert Felix Prudent, 'La Pub, le zouk et l'album', in Prudent, Antilles: Espoirs et déchirements de l'âme créole (Paris: Autrement, 1990), pp. 212ff.
[9] The Concise Oxford Dictionary (London: Oxford University Press, 1971), p. 288.
[13] Antonio BenÃtez Rojo, La isla que se repite: El Caribe y la perspectiva postmoderna (Hanover, N.H.: Ediciones del Norte, 1989).
[20] Pierre Gaudibert, 'Métissages artistiques', in Métissages: Nouvelle Revue d'ethnopsychiatrie, no. 17, 'La Pensée auvage' (1991), p. 181.