Mari Carmen RamÃrez, 'Beyond "the Fantastic": Framing Identity in US Exhibitions of Latin American Art'
In: Beyond the Fantastic: Contemporary Art Criticism from Latin America. Edited by Gerardo Mosquera. London: Institute of international Visual Arts, 1995, pp. 229-246.
Art exhibitions are privileged vehicles for the representation of individual and collective identities, whether they consciously set out to be so or not. By bringing together works produced by artists, as individuals or as members of a specific community, they allow insights into the ways those artists visually construct their self-image. This identity-projecting role of exhibitions has been at the heart of controversies surrounding the unprecedented number of shows of Latin American/Latino art organized and funded by US institutions (museums, galleries, alternative spaces) over the past decade or so. The exhibition boom has taken place at a time when the heightened visibility of the more than thirty million Latinos in the USA (as well as that of other Third World peoples and ethnic minorities) is forcing a series unresolved problems on museums throughout the country. The denunciation by artists, art critics and supporters of the Latin American/Latino community of the stereotypes presented by these exhibitions has brought the issue of the representation of this marginal culture directly into the heart of US mainstream. [3] At stake is not only the question of whether the image of the Latin American or Latino 'other' that emerges from these shows truly engages the cultural constituencies it aims to represent, but also how museums and art establishments at large respond to the cultural demands of an increasingly influential community.
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Despite the variety of themes and exhibition formats, it is possible to identify at least one pervasive exhibition model exemplified by the historical or contemporary surveys organized by large mainstream museums in the mid 1980s in response to demographic and art market trends. This model reflects the ideological framework of Euro-American (i.e. First World) modernism that constitutes the conceptual model of the North American art museum network. Predicated on the tenets of a rational society, progress, universality and the autonomy of the aesthetic, this ideology, however, is revealed to be inherently flawed when it engages the concept of cultural or racial difference embodied in peripheral societies. There modernity has at best been delayed or incomplete, and artistic developments have frequently evolved in tension with the prevailing models of Western modernism. Curatorial practices tends to mask this intrinsic limitation by proceeding on the assumption that artistic production can be separated from its sociopolitical context (i.e. the notion that an 'aesthetic will' exists over and above the parameters of culture), and that the role of museums exhibitions is to provide contexts for the presentation and complementation of the 'more purely artistic and poetic impulses of the individual'. [10] Such practices rely on a teleological view of art based on a sequences of formal changes that privileges the concept of the aesthetic innovation developed by the early twentieth-century avant-garde. They also subscribe to an absolute notion of 'aesthetic quality' that transcends cultural boundaries. In this way they select, elevate or exclude works to their own preordained and preconceived standards.
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The construction of identity in the terms laid out by these exhibitions expose the predicament of Latin American/Latino artists and intellectuals: it forces them to stage 'authenticity', and to insist on the configuration of a particular cultural image, as a means of opposing external, often dominating, alternatives. Yet this is in every way a no-win situation, for modernism's claim to the representation of authenticity exclusively in terms of formal innovation over and above the particularities of content has led Latin American/Latino artist's contribution to the expressive content of his or her images. Confronted with the more developed institutions and cultural structures of the West, the 'difference' that marks the art of the Latin American/Latino groups is cited as having no potential or capacity for formal aesthetic innovation, remaining tied to inherent systems of artistic conventions.
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It is precisely the process of homogenization at work in the modernist model that needs to be called into question if we want to arrive at an understanding of the fundamental logic implicit in the production of the many societies that make up Latin America and their counterparts in the USA. To attempt to reduce the complexity of these cultural groups to models of representation predicated on categories of Euro-American aesthetic development is to continue to perpetrate the legacy of exclusion, incorporation and domination. From this point of view, the principle issue at stake for the post-1992 agenda is not so much that of denouncing the self-centred authority of Europe or North America as that of engaging the specificity of Latin American/Latino realities. In order to understand the overall implications of the project we must approach it from the perspective of the artists themselves and their traditions. From this vantage point it is the USA and Europe that constitute the 'other'. This condition suggests a dual role for modern art in Latin America, one that is never recognized on account of the hegemonic nature of Western discourse but that is clearly manifest in the attitude of Latin American artists and intellectuals towards the cultural legacy of the West.
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Within this framework, a more accurate approach towards the representation of Latin America/Latino art implies a thorough questioning of the centrality of prevailing curatorial practices and the development of exhibition criteria from within the traditions and conventions of the many countries that make up Latin America or the different groups that make up the Latino population of the USA. It implies, as Gerardo Mosquera has suggested, shifting the vertical axis of neo-colonialism to a horizontal one based on intercultural dialogue and exchange. It also calls for developing new exhibition formats. [32] This task, however, requires an interdisciplinary framework of analysis that current curatorial practices are unable to provide. The new framework would allow for the adequate analysis of the works of art within the structural web of meanings in which they are inscribed in the community for which they were generated. Such an approach, in turn, involves expanding the expertise of museums by the incorporation of professionals versed in the Latin American/Latino heritage, experimenting with innovative exhibition formats and installations that will allow for the presentation of the points of view of those being represented, and ultimately revising the role and function of curators to turn them into mediators of cultural exchange. If demographic trends continue, pressuring US museums to respond to specific constituencies, the role of the curators and exhibition organizers will have to change from one of exclusive arbiters of taste and quality to one closer to that of 'cultural brokers', whose function will be to mediate between the groups whose works they exhibit and audiences unfamiliar with the cultural traditions they represented.
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[3] For in-depth reviews of these shows as well as critiques of the myths of cultural stereotypes that they projected, see Shifra M Goldman, ‘Latino Visions and Revision’, Art in America 76, no. 5 (May 1988), pp. 138-47, 198-9; Edward Sullivan, ‘Mito y realidad: Arte latinoamericano en los Estados Unidos’, Arte en Columbia 41 (September 1989), pp. 60-6; Charles Merewether, ‘The Phantasm of Origins: New York and the Art of Latin America’, Art and Text 30, (1989), pp. 55-6; and Coco Fusco, ‘Hispanic Artists and Other Slurs’, Village Voice, August 9, 1988, pp. 6-7.
[10] Jane Livingston and John Beardsley, ‘The Poetics and Politics of Hispanic Art: A New Perspective’, in Karp and Lavine (eds.), Exhibiting Cultures, op. cit., pp. 108-9.
[32] Gerardo Mosquera, paper presented at the international symposium ‘Art and Identity in Latin America’, Memorial de Americán Latine, São Paulo, September 1991.