Eclipse

José Jiménez

The End of the Eclipse is not an exhibition of "Art from Latin America". For a rather basic reason: "Art from Latin America" as such, as a unit, does not exist. It does not exist beyond the pressures of the market and the management centers of the art world's institutional system, beyond that last bit of colonialist ideology that reduces diversity and plurality to a single unit through the violence of representation, as a way to handle and manage it.
1. Latin America and Spain Today.
The recently ended decade of the nineties brought about some notable changes in the presence and reception of Latin American cultures and art in the so-called "First World". In Europe, this particularly applies to Spain. The first signs of this change date back to 1992, with the "celebration" of a date that euphemistically went from being called a "Conquest" to an "Encounter" between two worlds.
Debates and criticism, from different positions in both Latin America and Spain, undoubtedly contributed to purging the remaining colonialist consciousness. There are some who, in spite of everything, still cling to ideas such as "Spain's historical mission" in establishing its language, religion and culture in Latin America. To speak of a "historical mission" implicitly turns the event into destiny, giving an idealist legitimization to a process of expansion that was originally military, political and economic in nature.
In any case, even if we consider the inevitable persistence of contradictory attitudes, Spain has gradually acquired an awareness of the vast richness and diversity of the autochthonous cultural traditions of Latin America, whose own development was so rudely interrupted by the Spanish conquest. The same is true of the experiences and achievements of the different Latin American republics once they became independent. This has progressively brought about a new climate of respect in the cultural relations between Spain and Latin America, overcoming the conservative and rhetorical image of the "Motherland" and her American "Children" to give rise to relationships among equals, between nations with the same claim to dignity, who share numerous and important aspects of their historical past.
Make no mistake, however; this new "climate" has been especially driven by Spain's new economic and geopolitical interests. Spain's final integration in Europe, through the structures of the European Union, and its increasing "modernization" and economic "takeoff" have made its relationship with Latin America a top priority national issue, understood as such by the different Spanish governments regardless of their particular political leanings.
The idea of making Spain and Portugal a "bridge" for relations between Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking nations in the Americas and the rest of Europe and the world, given their privileged historical relationships, have become one of the focal points of Spain's diplomacy. This has also become apparent in the periodic "summits" held by the chief executives of Latin American nations, which have included Portugal and Spain. Naturally, bridges always point in two directions. This has allowed for a truly spectacular development of Spain's economic and diplomatic presence in Latin America. Presumably, it won“t be too long before this brings about changes in the overall framework of the relationships between these countries.
So, what can we say about the arts and culture? As far as literature is concerned, as early as the transition from the nineteenth to the twentieth century, contact with Spanish American literature brought considerable impetus and enrichment to the literature of Spain. What is known in the history of literature as "Modernism", particularly the works of the great Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darķo, was especially relevant in bringing Spain's literature up to date at the time, helping it to finally face the esthetic problems of the twentieth century. Later, during the twenties and thirties, the role of another great poet, the Chilean Vicente Huidobro, was no less decisive when he served as a mediator between the avant-garde circles of Paris and Madrid's literary scene.
Contact and communication with the literature written in Spanish in the Americas remained a constant, even during extreme situations such as the Spanish Civil War; the later exile of writers and intellectuals (who did, however, greatly contribute to establishing new ties by settling mainly in the different nations of Latin America); Spain's harsh post-war period; and the long dictatorship of General Franco, with all the limitations of freedom of expression that it involved.
As early as the sixties, a new "wave" of great writers, labeled "the boom" of Latin American literature, burst onto the Spanish literary scene with spectacular force. Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel Garcķa Mįrquez, Mario Vargas Llosa, Julio Cortįzar, José Lezama Lima and other no less important authors (though perhaps with less intensity) became major literary figures in Spain.
However, the same cannot be said of other artistic manifestations, such as music or cinema, though the exodus of the generation of musicians from the Spanish Republic made it possible to establish some communication with Latin American nations. Nor did this occur in the case of the plastic arts. In spite of countless encounters, almost always through individual channels or favored institutionally during the Franco regime, mainly through the "Institute of Hispanic Culture", ignorance of and even open prejudices against the art of the different countries of Latin America were a constant that has only begun to break down during the nineties. It is at this point, within the new economic and political context described earlier, when the new institutional contemporary art network born in the eighties become more established, that Spain started looking not only to New York and Europe, but also to Latin America, stripped of any condescension and with genuine interest.
2. The Art of the Americas.
I have mentioned several times my belief that over the last few years, since the nineties, we have been living "the moment" of Latin American art at the international level. By this, I mean that a transition to a new kind of presence and recognition of such art is taking place, as an entire series of concomitant considerations would seem to indicate. After almost two centuries of being considered "marginal", appearing only in the appendices of academic art history books, we are now witnessing a generalized recognition of the importance of this diverse territory, so intensely linked to Spain from a cultural and historical standpoint.
It is true, however, that after an initial approximation, the issue continues to raise difficult questions. These start with the area's very name. The term "Latin America", of French origin, was meant to defend the links between France and the Spanish and Portuguese-speaking countries, as opposed to the terms "Iberian America" or "Spanish America", which stress the historical role of Spain and Portugal or Spain, respectively, in the creation of these communities.
In any case, the term "Latin America" has become the predominant one, having prevailed in the nations of Anglo-Saxon culture and is the term most commonly used in the countries it designates. Strangely enough, the term acquired certain "progressive" connotations, arguable in themselves. However, this might be at least partly explained by the use of the other two variations by the more conservative political sectors both in those nations and in Spain.
Regardless of the above, the main reasons for the increased use of the term Latin America, in my opinion, stem from the turbulent political history of these nations in the twentieth century, especially in contrast to the U.S. It is extremely useful for the political, economic and cultural expansion interests of the great North American power to reduce to a single unit the wide variety of diverse nations and cultural traditions located south of the Rķo Grande.
The term should not be used in an essentialist sense. It is not a matter of "being", but of "feeling", along the lines of what Jorge Luis Borges said during an interview in 1976: "I don“t even know if there is such a thing as a Latin America. I believe that countries and nationalities are acts of faith. I don“t know if anyone feels Latin American. I feel Argentinean; I also feel Oriental (...). But I don“t feel Latin American. And I don“t think a Colombian feels Latin American, or a Mexican either. I think it is a sort of geographical, political abstraction. And that someone from the U.S. could feel that we are Latin American, but we cannot." (Borges, 1976, 235).
This raises an interesting issue: The term Latin America has ended up inversely expressing, in my opinion perhaps mainly due to the political history of the Americas in the twentieth century, a way of "feeling" both different from what is expressed by the term in the U.S. and similar, in spite of all the differences, to all the nations located south of the great geopolitical border. This similarity is largely induced by this reduction to a single unit established and dictated from the U.S.
There is one final issue deriving from the above, of great interest today, in the era of "globalization". Through the intense flood of Latin Americans to the U.S., forced upon them by the harsh conditions in their countries of origin, the Latin American community is becoming broader and stronger in the very bosom of the great power. In this case, they do indeed have a growing "feeling" of unity, of sharing common identifying features and converging social and political objectives above all.
Thus, the "reduction to a single unit", as usually happens in political and social dialectics, has ended up having a "boomerang" effect. It has caused and is causing a group of communities to feel this unity, thus bringing about their consolidation as a political and cultural subject. Borges also said (1976, 236), in the same interview: "I think there will be Latin Americans the day someone feels Latin American." We are now witnessing an increasingly intense process of establishing and expanding upon this feeling; naturally, without rejecting any differentiating roots. There is a great diversity of ways of feeling "Latin American".
In any case, regardless of the name, the most complex issue is the very existence of "Latin America". At different times, and from diverse sensibilities and approaches, Latin Americans themselves have found it arguable that the great cultural and social diversity of those countries can be encompassed in a single unit. It is certainly true that the global, unifying view that made it possible to speak of "Latin America" was originally an external viewpoint, coming from "others": first the colonists, and later the centers of economic and political power.
Furthermore, in the long run, what was once meant to exclude or marginalize, has become a unifying label in the tortuous process of establishing an autonomous political, cultural and social identity for the nations located south of the Rķo Grande, with respect to Europe and the U.S.
The problem becomes even more complex if we speak of "art". The esthetic and cultural differences characterizing the different countries that make up what we call "Latin America" are so intense, in all their wealth and variety, that, as I mentioned earlier, to speak of "Art from Latin America" globally in a strict sense seems theoretically impossible.
In fact, existing publications and studies, particularly those by Latin Americans, tend to suggest reconstructions of the different national or regional traditions, without ever speaking of "a" homogeneous Latin American art. This has only happened from external and pseudo-colonialist positions, which have often tried to find such homogeneity in the supposed characteristics of "the primary", "the telluric" or "the fantastic", mere pseudo-categories that cannot withstand a truly contrastive analysis. It is not possible to find a common denominator in artistic traditions as rich and complex as those of Mexico, Cuba, Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Venezuela or Columbia, which are at the forefront of modern artistic creations, each with its own distinguishing features. Nor can it be done in the remaining countries of Latin America, though some may have had a lesser impact on the international scene.
The same idea of "Art from Latin America" has been used on many occasions, regardless of intentions, from Eurocentric positions, placing emphasis on its folkloric or exotic nature. For the traditional Anglo-Saxon and European mentalities, these are very picturesque, "backwards" countries, from both an economic and cultural point of view.
In other cases, from "progressive" approaches encumbered by a naļve Eurocentric attitude, the primary and primitive were seen in "Latin America" overall, compared to the cultural, rational constructions of European civilization. Based on this cliché, it was possible to build a close association of "Latin America" with surrealism or a magical spirit. This idea continues to prevail in a superficial yet generalized manner in many European and American approaches to the cultures of these countries.
Finally, it is also important to clarify that the label "Art from Latin America" also came about as a marketing tool, from the worldwide heart of the market: New York. It was a way of homogenizing an entire series of products in order to integrate them in a marketing circuit highly saturated by works from the U.S. and Europe.
Even taking into account all of the above, if we wanted to locate the roots of all the difficult issues surrounding the ideas of "Latin America" and "Art from Latin America", we would have to go back to 1492. This is the date that, as I mentioned towards the beginning of this document, people so absurdly wanted to "celebrate" in Spain just a few years ago, which saw the traumatic encounter between an entire series of autochthonous cultural traditions with European culture.
In some areas of the American continent, particularly Central America and the Andes, an extremely high level of culture had been achieved, including the creation of states, and in others there was a complex mosaic of forms of culture and civilization. All this was summarily destroyed during the Conquest and Colonization. The plurality and cultural riches of the Continent were reduced to the homogenizing stereotype of the "Indian", or "savage".Hence, the association, which endures insidiously to this day, of "Latin America" with the primitive and savage.
In order to approach the art of the Americas in a truly open, non-Eurocentric manner, we must start by acknowledging the wealth of the autochthonous cultural traditions, the intensity of the later process of mestization with European culture and, finally, its great diversity, the differences that distinguish the national traditions of the countries that formed during the decolonization process.
It would be much more appropriate to speak, stressing its plurality, of the "art of the Americas", of its wealth and the superimposition or interbreeding of different cultural sources, than of "Art from Latin America". Unfortunately, however, in this case as in so many others, the homogenizing forces of the market and the media can be insurmountable.
Nevertheless, while taking into account this plurality and the essential differences, it is also important to point out that artists from Latin America usually act without culturalist excuses, with a freedom that is poured into their works, into their very experiences. This applies not only to today's artists, but ever since the idea of "art" first traveled from Europe to the Americas. They are open to information from the whole wide world, but far from the historicist sickness and rapidly changing fashions that plague many creators in other latitudes.
3. A World and Art in Transition: Mestization and Universality.
Living and cultural conditions in today's world have become increasingly complex and problematic. The idea of a uniform, homogeneous course of "world history", expressed in the leading role afforded European culture and its expansion into North America, quite arguably called "Western culture", is becoming more and more unacceptable. However, at the same time, the worldwide trend towards economic, political and communication unification is undoubtedly one of the defining features of our time. These dynamics of "globalization" continue unstoppably, even when challenged by elements that question them.
The most important of these elements is the desire for ethnic or cultural specificity. Unfortunately, in the political sphere, this reactivates either instrumental use by elite or power groups or the resurgence of the particularistic nationalisms that so intensely shake up today's geopolitical scene, charged with violence and passion.
However, in a philosophical and moral sense, this desire for cultural specificity operates as a great dike against the destructive aspects of globalization. It acts as the crucial element for maintaining the plurality of the cultural traditions of our planet; in short, for preserving its anthropological diversity and wealth.
This issue is particularly relevant with regard to Latin America. In spite of the diversity of its ethnic and cultural traditions, for almost a century and a half, the idea of a Latin American cultural specificity has become a unifying political and cultural force, in contrast with the Anglo-Saxon culture of the U.S., the world's only hegemonic power since the fall of the Soviet block.
In this situation, perhaps art, and the arts in general, are the touchstone of the entire process, due to their ability to integrate tradition and innovation and their search for universality from the standpoint of the individual and particular. In the artistic universe, the dialectics of globalization and cultural specificity find one of their most relevant, decisive contrastive scenarios.
But is there a place for expressing cultural difference? The art of the twentieth century cannot be dissociated from a process of "discovery of the other", which was given the misleading name "primitive art". Faced with radical alternatives in the area of representation, the European mentality was only capable of resorting to the caricature of the barbarian, savage or primitive man as a way of accepting the difference.
This ethnocentric, assimilating attitude was, however, unable to prevent the artists themselves from using these radical alternatives to bring about the most profound transformation that ever occurred in western art. The so-called "black and oceanic art" allowed the classic Avant-Garde movement, with Picasso as an eminent example, to do away with academicist dogma and merge the classicist creative tradition with eternally diverse representation procedures. These, far from stemming from mere "spontaneity", involve an intense intellectual component, of mental preparation.
In my opinion, the attitude of the Avant-Garde artists toward fusion and mestization, which opened up the artistic horizon of the twentieth century, is the best standard for the future of art. It is the harbinger of a "promise" of anthropological enrichment and respect for cultural differences in the area of representation. Nonetheless, it must be taken into account that this promise is far from being fulfilled in the institutional arena, although in this area, as in so many others, artists are leading the way.
As Lucy Lippard pointed out (1990, 7), "the people who 'take care' of art are overwhelmingly white, middle class and - in the upper echelons - usually male", which implies a certain degree of exclusion and exclusivity in the way things are handled. Perhaps Lippard's statement should be partially corrected to point out that the presence of women in this institutional setting is increasingly important. In any case, it is true that artistic institutions tend to marginalize or exclude whatever they do not consider to be computable or integratable in terms of evaluation. Even so, in the long run, and mainly for economic or political reasons, artistic institutions are also capable of assimilating and digesting just about anything.
Lucy Lippard (1990, 7) also stated, and in this case I completely share her point of view, that "ethnocentricity in the arts is compensated for by a notion of quality that 'transcends limits'" and "has been the most effective truncheon" for homogeneity, for a globalizing configuration of artistic trends and practices on the international level, in spite of all attempts to suggest alternatives.
Herein lies one of the main reasons, along with the pressure of the market, that the art of our time often seems so unsatisfyingly alike, from one end of the planet to the other, at least in its most superficial aspects (fashions and current trends). To combat this, I find it necessary to promote an attitude of "ideological rescue". We must challenge this restrictive, homogenizing notion of quality, and show its distinctive configuration within the framework of the different cultural traditions.
Esthetic "quality" is not the same regardless of cultural contexts, the latter being understood in an anthropological sense. Neither do I believe it possible, in our era, to continue maintaining the illusion of a theoretical or philosophical basis of the limits of art, the distinction between what is and is not artistic, with merely formalistic criteria. In other words, idealist and essentialist. The formal, idealistic category of "Beauty", so important throughout the development of western cultural tradition, can no longer be considered valid as a foundation for artistic practices.
The art of our time is increasingly confronted with the need to provide an answer to the problem of the unity and diversity of human cultures. Since the mestization of representation brought about by the impact of "primitivism" on the historical Avant-Garde movements, the need to redefine the meaning of universal and particular where art is concerned has become increasingly obvious.
This is even more apparent if we consider the impact of the other great element modifying modern arts: the expansion of technology, which emancipates the processes of artistic creation from the need to do things manually, opening up a wide range of new media and manifestations.
The convergence of both factors, the mestization of representation and the expansion of technology, allows for an understanding of an essential dimension of the expressive characteristics of the art of this period of transition to a new century. There are no longer "pure" categories, clearly defined media that can be differentiated from a semiotic standpoint, as proposed in the classic approach described by G. E. Lessing in his Laocoonte (1766). The artists of our time integrate a wide variety of media and materials in their works, along with traditional, manual creative possibilities and diverse technological procedures.
It is important to point out that at this point, today's art can no longer ignore the esthetic peculiarities of non-western cultures. Just as negative as the above would be a mere institutional and mercantile assimilation of such cultures. The era of the global village, of the universalization of communications, is concurrent with cultural differences. The alternatives are homogeneity and homogenization, or mestization and the acknowledgement of anthropological diversity.
Although a prevailingly "linear", historicist view still persists, based on the cultural and artistic traditions of the West, the new historical porosity, along with the instantaneousness and accessibility of communications that characterize our era, allows for access by "the others" or "the excluded" to the global channels for communicating and transmitting culture, making it possible for that which is different to enjoy an active presence.
It is necessary to redesign what we consider art in light of cultural differences and specificity, if we choose to progress towards a process of anthropological mestization, of mixture and superimposition. Nevertheless, I do believe that progress in that direction should also involve taking great pains to avoid mere particularistic self-affirmation. I find the mechanical application of the center/periphery conflict in the artistic and cultural universe, even when intended from a critical perspective, to be extremely negative.
We certainly have plenty of reasons to establish analogies between the processes of political and economic centralization and the universal circulation of capital with the centralization and circulation "of art", which also has its neural power centers, with the associated phenomena of integration and standardization. I find rejection of this last aspect philosophically and morally indispensable.
However, this is not enough. Nor is it enough to assume a self-restricting attitude in order to defend ones own "identity", thus marginalizing and excluding even more. The "center/periphery" chain must be broken right at the core, by intensely aspiring to universality from one's own cultural particularism.
I believe that affirming cultural difference in art is only enriching when presented with this tension, tending to broaden and reformulate that which we consider "universal". This is what we can find in certain great writers from the Americas: Jorge Luis Borges, José Lezama Lima or Derek Walcott, to name a few. It is difficult to separate their works from the cultural traditions from which they sprang. At the same time, nothing found in humanity's different cultural traditions is foreign to them.
This is also the case of the greatest plastic artists of the Latin American Avant-Garde, which already has its "modern classics". Today, their names are sufficiently well-known and recognized, such as Joaquķn Torres-Garcķa, the Mexican muralists, Tarsila do Amaral, Xul Solar, Armando Reverón, Tina Modotti, Rufino Tamayo, Wifredo Lam, Manuel Įlvarez Bravo, Antonio Berni, Roberto Matta, Lygia Clark, Jesśs Soto and Hélio Oiticica, among many others. These are exemplary artists, whose creative universe is configured through the juxtaposition of different memories and realities, from the synthesis of ethnic traditions and western artistic forms. Through this synthesis, both are transformed, but in an enriching anthropological sense, truly universalist. Perhaps this can only be achieved through art, with its intense capacity to articulate that which is different without canceling it out.
4. The impossible fatherland.
The very "culture of the West" is the result of a long process of synthesis and superimpositions, of acts of syncretism that crystallized over time. "Ethnic or cultural purity" is a racist illusion, which has never existed. Ethnic differences are not related to any crucial biological factor, beyond merely superficial aspects such as stature, skin color and certain facial features. The ethnic identity of a human group is always the result of a cultural, symbolic process.
What happens in art is actually deeply linked to the transformation of human cultures in our world. We are experiencing a process in which homogenizing nationalisms are compensated for by multiculturalism, which has unfortunately often been viewed in terms of mere integration or standardization. The exclusion of all that is not homogeneous is just as unacceptable as "the distribution" of cultural quotas. In both cases, everything becomes equivalent, everything is reduced to the same level.
Right in Europe, the return of nationalisms, apparently so anachronistic, is largely linked to the disappearance of the Soviet Union and its supranational power system. The breakdown of the Soviet network of satellite countries in Europe paved the way for German reunification and democratic transitions in Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia, which took place in an atmosphere of nationalistic sentiment. The same must be said of the later peaceful division of the Czech and Slovak republics, the different nationalistic conflicts in the former USSR, and the outbreak in Yugoslavia, with its terrible, endless war and the application of that monstrous practice called "ethnic cleansing" by Serbs and Croats. All this in the supposedly "homogeneous" and "civilized" setting of Europe!
This is "the return to the fatherlands". This situation reflects the constant upheaval, wars and conflicts so characteristic of European history, which culminated in the experience of the two world wars during the century that just ended.
Nationalistic policies are actually the expression of an imbalance. Ideologically, nationalism involves the crystallization of anthropological identifying characteristics that do not always correspond harmoniously to economic or political structures.
Based on the biological unity of our species, I understand our human identity as a cultural, symbolic process, in which one can differentiate a series of superimposed planes or levels (Jiménez, 1984, 152-166). First of all, let's define the individual identity, that which is based on the process of developing the "self" (this is not a "natural" fact, nor a spiritual "substance"), in a specific cultural context.
Beyond the symbolic configuration of the individual, the mirror of culture forges another level of identity, the particular identity. This covers a group of individuals whose identity is established as a cultural difference with respect to the group, as a particularism. Some examples are the sexes (men/women), age groups or family groups, through which the lives and activities of so many human cultures are structured. In the modern world, there are also particularisms deriving from inclusion in the different stages of the production process, such as the industrial proletariat, bourgeoisie, etc. or the different sexual orientations (heterosexuals, gays, lesbians).
In addition to these two planes, human beings forge other more general identifying features during their life experiences, due to their inclusion in a specific cultural tradition and certain social relationships. These are what I call ethnic and political identities, which rarely coincide in the modern world, causing the imbalance of the nationalisms mentioned earlier.
The Norwegian anthropologist Fredrik Barth stressed the central role of identity in configuring "ethnic groups". According to Barth (1970, 11), the ethnic group "features members that identify themselves and are identified by others". While they may have their own territory, the boundaries of ethnic groups are social, and their critical feature is the fact that individuals are linked by their ethnic identity. This is generated in a particular ecosystem, based on the production and adaptation processes developed by the group, and the language and set of beliefs that represent the cultural tradition.
Now, this theoretical concept of ethnicity coincides with what we commonly understand as the "fatherland". This, in turn, is reformulated in the political sense when it aspires to be or become a "nation". However, "fatherland" and "nation" do not always coincide. Actually, on the ethnic identity plane, the processes of social division and stratification give rise to an even more general level of identity, which I propose characterizing as political. This is an abstract attribution of identity, which implies the existence of political inequality or hierarchization, and its symbolic reference is a center of authority or domination which has achieved its most intense effectiveness in the modern state.
The individual, particular and ethnic dimensions are integrated, made subordinate and to some extent denied (in almost the same sense as in Hegel's dialectics) in this abstract level of identity. This, in its aspiration to universality, allows for the highest degree of covering up of social divisions, and of attributing a homogeneous, purely referential identity to human beings. This process reaches its maximum degree of expression in modern-day national states, where we can find a mosaic of differentiated ethnic groups, historically integrated by a political and military centralizing force.
The generalizing abstraction of the law of the state establishes the legal "equality" of citizens in order to break away from the class privileges of the old regime. However, this step, so decisive for the development of our modern-day economic and political systems, also involves a denial of ethnic particularisms.
Furthermore, the trend towards abstract homogeneity that, in addition to its political crystallization in the state, is strongly driven by the abstraction which also characterizes capitalism as the prevailing production system, gives rise to the formation of supranational political units. These further reinforce the centralization of the political system, while also favoring the circulation of capital.
The current resurgence of nationalisms could be seen, from this point of view, as a movement to defend ethnic identity from a superimposed political, national or supranational identity. For some groups, the coercive abstraction of the state is experienced as a "loss of the fatherland". Hence their demands. Politically speaking, the root of independence movements is the desire of "nations with no country" to form their own state.
These issues are all highly relevant in the case of Latin America. On the one hand, "indigenous ethnic minorities" are still denied recognition as political subjects. On the other, state institutions are often greatly lacking in soundness. This means that, rather than guaranteeing the rule of law, of a pact between equals to live together, they act more as a nucleus in defense of a dependent power system and the local social groups that operate as subordinate managers of this system.
Let's make sure we understand this well. I mean to suggest that these claims to "the fatherland" to which I alluded earlier are a reactive process which reveals the desire to give a political configuration to the ethnic identity, as a way to respond to economic and political pressures. Beyond the ethnic features that form it, the fatherland is actually an ideal image; a universe from which modern man feels cast out, to which he wants to return, overcoming pain and sacrifice. This is valid for both Europe and the Americas and is, in fact, a human trait.
The opposite of this image, its negative counterpart, is the lack of a fatherland, something which encompassed the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in diverse incarnations as a constant. Even today, it lives on intensely in the formation of new nations and the movements of people produced by wars, migrations and all kinds of displacements. It is the image of itinerant death, the suffering, famine, constriction of nature and illnesses of those who did not even possess their own land. This is the image of those who have no fatherland. The displaced. The "refugees" that nobody wants.
A recent example could be the exodus of Kurds from Iraq. This is another example of the devastating effects of the technical and military leadership of the West on the nations of the Earth, specifically on those euphemistically referred to as the "Third World".
The stability of the West, according to the hegemonic design of the so-called "New International Order", cannot allow the modification of borders in the sensitive centers of its system of domain, as shown in the Gulf War. However, it responds with only a distant look or, at the most, a compassionate gesture motivated by remorse, to the tragedy of economically and politically nonexistent nations, such as the Kurds and certain African ethnic groups and nations. Without decisive geopolitical clout, we could almost say that Africa has been abandoned to its fate, relegated to oblivion, almost in its entirety.
The rationalist ideal of learned thought in the eighteenth century, historically at the time when modern culture was being created, had set as the horizon the decline of fatherlands, a "cosmopolitan" view of history. In this vision, man, as a "citizen of the world", would overcome any particularistic atavisms. The individual could "reencounter" the species. Immanuel Kant (1784, 20), for example, formulated "the hope that after several restructuring revolutions, in the end nature's supreme intention would prevail: a universal cosmopolitan state, in which all the original aptitudes of the human species would be developed."
This is genuine "philosophical faith". It not only assumes that "nature" has a final purpose, or "supreme intention", but also that the philosophical mind has been capable of identifying it as "a universal cosmopolitan state". This dream of unity and harmony, however, has been crushed time and time again in profound upheavals: the resurgence of nationalisms, wars, genocides, that dotted the inflamed course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
The philosophical dream has a tragic side. The elimination of the fatherlands did not happen as the "natural" culmination of the destiny of human civilization, but through an unstoppable process of globalization and expansion of the economy and technology, which has gradually destroyed the natural areas and cultural traditions that stood in its way.
Technological development and economic "progress" have gone hand-in-hand, acting as the main forces bringing about the type of homogenization towards which the world is moving. The "planetarization" of the worldwide economic system has continually sought support in the expansion of technology, as an expression of the will to dominate nature. Thanks to anthropology, we know that when there is contact between different cultures, with differing degrees of conflict, more powerful production systems and superior technology result in relationships of predominance. Through colonialism, with its economics and technology, the West has deprived all of the nations on earth, to a greater or lesser extent, of their "fatherland", of their cultural roots and traditional relationship with their natural environments.
Experience: The personal, detailed transmission of the vital knowledge accumulated over generations has become impoverished. And the silence of modern generations no longer stems from encounters with truth, from reflective quietness, but from the loss or absence or words, of language and of the authentic "fatherland of mankind", as Fernando Pessoa used to say.
For example, in what terms can we describe a war of mass destruction? The first application of industrial technology to war from 1914-1918 took to an extreme what Walter Benjamin (1933, 168) called man's defenselessness "in a landscape where everything but the clouds had changed". "At that point", said Benjamin, "one could see that people returned speechless from the battlefield. Not enriched, but poorer as far as communicable experience is concerned."
Today, the coercion and expansionism of this economic and technological (and therefore political) system of dominance have been so intense that the strongest, most opaque homogeneity characterizes the different human cultures, integrating and subordinating their particularisms. At the service of "communication", technology has paradoxically made the world smaller and narrower. Instead of progressing towards a universal fatherland, we increasingly live in a "global village" (McLuhan and Powers, 1984), with no respect for differences. Where everything is moving toward uniformity.
We also know that there is no way back from the living conditions established by economic structures and technological development. A melancholy attitude would only lead to passivity and helplessness. Therefore, the best thing to do is to try to promote an emancipatory turn in the human condition, supported by the very possibility of creative uses of technology and the growing possibilities of accessing information channels, which is now made viable by digital technology and worldwide communications networks. That's why art, all arts, are so important, with their strength to integrate the general and the particular, establishing an authentic anthropological model of non-coercive universalization.
However, once again, these are still only possibilities. The decisive issue, from both a political and moral standpoint, is who is in control of the decision-making centers: economic, technological, political, communications-related, etc. The fight for a better world is now on a new frontier, faced with an elusive, supranational, opaque and globalizing sphere of power.
Economics, technology and mass communications have become planetary instances. The international transformation of nature into a uniform article is clearly indicated by the expression "natural resources". Contemporary man lives without roots; he has been exiled from himself. The "universal fatherland" of the present is the homogeneity imposed upon the different forms of experience and cultural traditions. Neither individuals nor human societies can live through such a process without traumas. Man is a creature of differences. And his self-affirmation demands particularism, emphasis on what is his own.
For this reason, the feeling of being a foreigner, a new and radical condition of our profound and generalized nomadism, defines the situation of contemporary life, also intensely imbuing the universe of the arts. From deep inside us stems the search for roots. The image of our native land. The fatherland, from which we always feel absent and far away.
The truth is that it is unreachable. As Ernst Bloch (1959, III, 501) wrote, it is "something which has shone before us all during childhood, but where nobody has been: the homeland." That's why, when attempts are made to reactively transform it into a "nation", an abstract political unit, it becomes something coercive and destructive. We know quite a bit about this in the turbulent histories of Spain and Latin America.
The real "fatherland" is nowhere; it is nonexistent. It is the ideal image of a happy universe, which lives on like a radiant myth in our imagination and in our memory. But its existence is not real. Friedrich Hölderlin grieved for it in his Hyperion: "Alas! For the savage heart of man there is no possible homeland."
We never reach this luminous territory. Like Moses, we are not allowed access to the promised land. In addition, in these modern times of secular culture, imbued by the decline of the sacred, of the experience of "the death of God", it would also seem illusory to nurture the eschatological hope of a fatherland away from the earth, identified with the kingdom of heaven.
The fatherland is in the search, and also in the yearning for rest that stems from our solitary, wandering hearts. Because human life is, above all, itinerant. Being always on the move. That's why all human beings, deep down, are like Kurds without a fatherland. Deep inside, we all feel like foreigners anywhere on earth. For this reason, the authentic alternative to nationalisms, with their implicit destructiveness, or abstract cosmopolitanism, which conceals homogenization and globalization, is to claim a dynamic cultural specificity, rather than an essentialist one.
I find the romantic criticism of the abstract rationalism of the Enlightenment extraordinarily current. Man's real fatherland has no geographic profiles or borders. The philosophical, cosmopolitan dream of a universal, homogeneous fatherland is a destructive illusion. The real fatherland is the image of human differences, the diversity of feelings, languages and cultures. The plurality of itineraries that we trace with our ceaseless wandering. Towards the fatherland.
5. The incorporative protoplasm of the Latin American.
There are features in the cultural traditions of Latin America that make this great plural, diverse universe an especially favorable sphere for adopting the great transformations of art and culture that I just mentioned. Latin American nations provide their artists with an environment where the mestization of representation can be taken to its final consequences without embarrassment; it is an inborn trait. This, in addition to the growing availability of access to new technologies, makes it reasonable to assume that the arts and cultural dynamics of Latin America are ready to play a leading creative role in the historical scenario we are living now, during the transition to a new century.
The cultures of Latin America are the result of a prolonged and complex pattern of synthesis, intertwining and mestization. The same can be said of its music, literature and plastic arts. I quite agree with the viewpoint of Įngel Kalenberg, who maintains that the dynamics of art in Latin America are characterized by the ability to adopt all the "forms" generated in other cultural contexts, while changing and subverting their "meanings".
These dynamics, of subversive adoptions, mark a unique defining characteristic of Latin American art, an aspect of its cultural specificity, in general terms. What could superficially be considered a "copy", "emulation" or, more often, "backwardness", is actually a multifaceted process of reabsorption and dialog with cultural phenomena from all over the planet.
Coming and going. A nomadic, displaced sense of culture. This explains the fertilizing force of the journey: mental and physical, there and back, between the Americas and Europe, and then between Anglo-Saxon America and Latin America. This is a recurring feature in the very different aspects of art from Latin America. This is something that intensifies its power of hybridization, the strength of its mestization, its capacity for universal integration. This is what the great poet José Lezama Lima (1957, 183) called "that voracity, that incorporative protoplasm of the Latin American."
During the twentieth century, that "incorporative protoplasm", through a long process of assimilation of forms and subversion of meanings, would result in an artistic style differentiated from both European and U.S. traditions, but in dialog with them from the standpoint of the social and cultural specificity of the different Latin American countries. Thus, its unique plastic voice is a contemporary conquest, consolidated throughout the twentieth century in a bold process of cultural and esthetic appropriationism, which not only took place in the plastic arts, but also in literature and music, and in all the arts in general.
However, a series of signs seems to indicate that during this next century, the art of Latin America will finally achieve the rank it deserves on the international scene due to its quality and cultural specificity. The End of the Eclipse is an attempt to progress in that direction, establishing a critical, open dialog in the art now being produced by this great community of countries and cultures. That's dialog "in" rather than "with" in that it aspires to form part, be on the inside, and act as an accomplice. By so doing, its goal is also to provide a meeting place, a platform for communication and dialog between the artists and the different situations of art in the Americas where, unfortunately, there is not a sufficient amount of exchange and mutual knowledge.
It has now been five centuries since European artistic forms and traditions came on the scene in the Americas, in the traumatic process of the encounter between two entirely different worlds. Since then, the different nations of the Americas have shown an intense capacity to assimilate European cultural traditions, to which they do, however, add their own style, a different slant.
It is quite likely that only their constitutive framework, deeply anchored in cultural mestization, can explain this ability to absorb the diverse, so characteristic of Latin Americans; this "cannibal" or "anthropophagous" power, in order to make reference at this point to Oswald de Andrade. Outside Latin America, it is difficult to find such an intense degree of fusion between native, European and Creole elements, in a synthesis that is also heterogeneous and pluralistic, diverse among the different cultural areas of the Continent.
Neither Europe nor the U.S. have been able to understand and accept, in a spirit of equality, these distinctive features of the Latin American identity. On the contrary, they have usually sought a relationship of political, economic and cultural leadership, which set the dynamics for the colonial and neocolonial periods that the nations of Latin America have been forced to endure.
In the specifically artistic sphere, the most advanced element of European and U.S. sensibility consisted in evaluating Latin America as a territory where culture "originated". In other words, it was viewed as a virgin place, not subject to the censorship of rationality, where "imagination" became the dominant human faculty. This view was undoubtedly held with the utmost good faith, but also with quite a bit of naļveté.
Obviously, such a paternalistic attitude implied a new displacement toward the people of Latin America of the stereotype of the "good savage", ignoring the importance and density of the autochthonous cultures and civilizations of the Americas. Unfortunately, this stereotype lives on in our era, and has even been adopted by some Latin American writers, artists and theoreticians with the banal and limiting formula of "magical realism", which introduces a division between fantasy and the historical process, implicitly legitimizing the denial of a leading role for Latin America on the international scene.
Things are changing, however. In my opinion, the main issue determining the fate of the nations of Latin America today is an authentic consolidation of democracy, in its political, social, economic and cultural aspects. It is true that the convulsive history of these nations includes an entire series of features, such as totalitarianism, abuse of power, bureaucracy and political and social fragmentation, which cast doubt on the possibility of progressing towards democracy, while also reflecting the history of the colonial powers, Spain and Portugal.
However, with the changes in the geopolitical framework, such as the disappearance of the "Soviet block" as an alternative and the growing international questioning of the politics of hegemony and domination, conditions seem to finally be right for a genuine political, social, economic and cultural emancipation. For true independence for the people of Latin America, overcoming the colonial and neocolonial ties once and for all.
Obviously, all of this must be specifically reflected in the culture and arts of Latin America. With the arrival of the new century and the new millennium, prospects are good that they will no longer be perceived as "marginal", "exotic" or, generally speaking, "dependent", but will be perceived and conceptualized with all their distinctive specificity and characteristics.
In this sense, I think it is appropriate to say that we are now at the end of the eclipse that has previously kept us from seeing, without filters to distort it, the true situation of Latin America. The end of the eclipse is a conceptual metaphor, by which I mean to indicate that historical and political conditions are right for an approximation to the cultures and art of Latin America, beyond clichés, repeating worn-out stereotypes and reducing it to the exotic. This concept-metaphor is the basis for the exhibition we are presenting.
As mentioned at the beginning of this text, this is not a sample of "Latin American" art, which does not exist as such, with a purported homogeneity, beyond the pretensions of the market, or the management and power centers of the international art system. Nor do we intend to present a selection of works and artists based on geographic or diplomatic criteria, where the whole group of cultures and countries making up Latin America would be present, one way or another.
Nor is it my goal to establish a catalog, or a more or less exhaustive list of practices and trends, and certainly not to set such a thing as a "canon". What I do seek, and consider important, is conceptual consistency and favoring the legibility of the sample by the highly diverse audiences that could access it, whose lines of meaning are accessible.
The purpose of the exhibit is quite specific: to provide an open, rigorous image of art from Latin America, focusing on a significant group of artists who, with their ideas, open up new working routes or prospects which are universally significant when looking towards the new century now beginning.
The idea is also to point out that on the horizon of the new century, art from the Americas is just art, removed from the issues and concerns that obsessed, and perhaps limited, its projection, such as those related to "identity", "center/periphery", "magical realism", "the savage", "the exotic", etc. This is something that even Latin American art theoreticians have clearly pointed out, as shown in the collection of essays Mįs allį de lo fantįstico (Beyond the fantastic), edited by Gerardo Mosquera (1995), as well as in a recent text from this collection "Good-bye identidad, welcome diferencia" (Mosquera, ?).
My proposal goes beyond "identity" as an obsessive fixation, as a determining factor and final curtain for art work. However, with a concept of identity as a background, anthropological roots, like the underlying structure of a scale (in the musical sense) of movements and integrations, of mestization and cultural hybridization, are characteristic of the history of Latin America but even more profound, if this is possible, within the transition from the twentieth to the twenty-first century. This is a concept whose theoretical and philosophical bases I have described in this document.
Another important nuance: this sample in no way points to an idea of "new art" from Latin America. In no way does it aspire to offer a "discovery" of the other; it is intended much more as an "innovation". On the contrary, it attempts to establish a contrast, an explanatory, conceptual dialog with sufficiently solid, structured artistic trajectories. Capable in themselves of configuring and setting forth keys and dimensions of the intense transformation and metamorphosis that the arts and culture are experiencing during this period of transition.
My selection of works and artists was guided, above all, by the idea of privileging those with a universalistic scope, whose modulation is on the last esthetic frontier. This is an art that anyone can claim as their own, directed at one and all audiences, at a spectator without a fatherland, in the sense defined earlier. The idea is also to show through art to what extent it is anthropologically inappropriate to distinguish between the "first" and the "third" world. At least in the area of ideas and feelings, where the deepest roots of art lie, there is only a "first world"; that which is human has only one measure. And art is the best seismograph of anthropological needs and their oscillations.
I speak of a "universalistic scope", of universalization, and try to contrast this idea with those regarding the "globalization" of art as a mere hierarchical integration of the difference. The category universalization, so latently utopical, expresses the dynamics of transformation of the unique in universal, the consubstantial in art. I suggest a philosophical use of the category, as a formulation of the aspiration to universality upon which esthetic judgement is based; esthetic production and reception make up a specifically human circle, able to go beyond the specific determining factors of situations and experiences, and to transcend them.
The exhibit is also meant to serve as a channel for taking into consideration, through a set of artistic practices and proposals, the intensification of the role as a historical subject of the different communities of Latin America. Focusing on art, this particularly means what could be called a transformation of our view of Latin America, so that it ceases to be merely an "object" to be viewed to increasingly become a way of viewing, a central figure, a subject to be viewed. This, is spite of the diversity of accents and registers that characterizes the selected group of artists and pieces, is a feature shared by all of them.
The End of the Eclipse: the term eclipse designates the disappearance of a heavenly body due to the interposition of another body between it and the eye of the observer, or between the body and the sun that illuminates it. That's why it so accurately expresses what I would like to point out. It's not that the cultures and art of Latin America have not possessed their own quality and value for centuries. The "body" of colonial and neocolonial ideology simply did not let us "see it", when it could be glimpsed in an undistorted, direct manner.
An eclipse can be total or partial, and thanks to this the cultures and art of Latin America have gradually gained recognition, though always in a fragmented or exceptional manner. However, it is now possible to attempt a direct approximation to this art without the interposition of any foreign body blocking or altering our view. Such an approximation is essential in order to appreciate the current state of art in today's world.
Obviously, we don't aspire to dogmatically claim to offer "absolute visibility". I speak of a direct approximation in the hermeneutic sense, of faithful, rigorous interpretation, avoiding prejudices and previous positions, of the artistic reality of Latin America.
And I speak, reciprocally, of the emergence of a new, more active role for the cultures of the Americas. With their "incorporative voracity", they give us the best advance image of the final intertwining of ethnic groups and cultures, of truly consummated mestization, differential and not globalizing, holding the most intense civilizing hope on the planet, the most demanding from an ethic and moral standpoint. Although this is all, obviously, an open possibility, and therefore subject to being frustrated.
The End of the Eclipse is a bridge between that territory not yet constituted, towards that immaterial human "fatherland" caused by our irremissibly nomadic, itinerant nature.
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