AGAINST LATIN AMERICAN ART GERARDO MOSQUERA

My text emanates from my practical experience as an international curator and will focus on the way in which the issues of identity and intercultural dynamics in contemporary Latin American art have evolved in a globalised art scene. I will begin with a Galician joke my mother used to tell, which I used in a catalogue essay in 1994 in the manner of an allegory about a possible strategy for confronting the Latin American predicament-and that of the post-colonial world-between, on the one hand, the hegemonic Western meta-culture and internationalisation and, on the other, the personalities of singular contexts, local traditions, irregular modernities, the non-West:

A peasant had to cross a bridge that was in very poor condition. He started onto it very attentively, and as he treaded warily he said:"God is good, the Devil is not bad; God is good, the Devil is not bad .... "The bridge squeaked and the peasant repeated the phrase,' until he finally reached the other side. Then he exclaimed:"Go to hell, both of you!" And continued on his way.1

That was where the fable concluded in that old text. But something unexpected happened next: the Devil appeared to the peasant and said to him:"Don't be afraid, I'm not resentful. I just want to make you a proposition: follow your own path, but let me accompany you, accept me, and I'll open the doors of the world for you." And the peasant, somewhat scared, pragmatic and ambitious, acceded. So, 14 years later we are witnessing .I'.( Latin American art" proceed along its course, but according to the strategies of the Devil, who, on the other hand (and Latin American art has always known this) is not so evil. Fortunately, the story still has a happy ending, though it is different from the first one: both the Devil and the peasant are pleased with a mutually beneficial pact, and proceed down the road together.

As a result, Latin American art has ceased to be so, and has instead become art from Latin America. From, and

12 CONTEMPORARY ART IN LATIN AMERICA

not so much of, in or here, is the key word today in the re­articulation of the increasingly permeable polarities local/ international, contextual/global, centres/peripheries, and West/non-West to which the fable referred. In the following pages I will try to give a view of the theoretical context of international artistic-cultural interaction (which always involves relations of power, positioning and marginality) previous to this mutation-focusing in Latin America-and the way in which it changed under globalisation.

The Brazilian modernists created the metaphor of J'J' anthropophagy" in order to legitimate their critical, selective, and metabolising appropriation of European artistic tendencies. This notion has been used extensively to characterise the paradoxical anti-colonial resistance of Latin American culture through its inclination to copy (only the Japanese beat us in this), as well as to allude to its relationship with the hegemonic West. The syncretic character of Latin American culture facilitates this operation, since the hegemonic cultural elements that are embraced are not completely alien, given Latin America's problematic relationship with the West and its centres. This relationship is founded on identity as well as difference, due to the specifics of the region's early colonial history, based on European settlement, the presence of important native populations that were subdued, massive slavery of Africans, creolisation and mixture. However, the metaphor goes beyond Latin America to point out a procedure characteristic of subaltern and post-colonial art in general.

Oswald de Andrade coined the term anthropophagy in 1928, not as a theoretical notion but as a provocative poetic manifesto.2 Its emphasis in the subaltern subject's aggressiveness by means of appropriating dominant culture is extraordinary, as well as its bold negation of a conservative, lethargic idea of identity. Andrade even dared to affirm:i.I'It only interests me what is not mine", reversing the fundamentalist politics of authenticity.3

CILDO MEIRELES Malhas da Liberdade (Meshes of Freedom), version Ill, 1977 Copyright Cildo Meireles, courtesy of Galerie Lelong

Contrary to Homi K Bhabha's notion ofi'mimicry", which outlines how colonialism imposes on the subordinate subjects an alien mask from which they negotiate their resistance amid ambivalence, anthropophagy supposes an attack: to voluntarily swallow the dominant culture to one's own benefit. We have to be aware that Latin American modernism built the notion already from a post-colonial situation. It also corresponded with the early international inclination in Brazilian culture, conditioned by the modernising impulse launched by a cultivated and cosmopolitan bourgeoisie.

Starting from its poetic beginning, the metaphor of anthropophagy has been developed further by Latin American critics as a key notion for the continent's cultural

dynamics. On the one hand, it describes a tendency of Latin American culture since the initial days of European colonisation; on the other, it proposes a strategy for action. It has not only survived the pugnacious modernism of its origins: it has been impelled by poststructuralist and postmodern ideas regarding appropriation, resigni.fying and the validation of the copy, as we can see in the work of most influent critics and scholars during the 1980s and 1990s. The concept was even the subject of the memorable 24th Sao Paulo Biennial, curated by Paulo Herkenhoff in 1998.

An emphasis on the resistance and affirmation of subaltern subjects is also present in the term ~'~'transculturation", coined by Fernando Ortiz in 1948

AGAINST LATIN AMERICAN ART 13

to point out the bilateral exchange implicit in any acculturation.4 Although the active role of the recipient of external elements--who selects, adapts and renews them-had been indicated time ago by anthropology, the new term proposed by Ortiz introduced an ideological element. It emphasised the energy of the subaltern cultures even under extreme conditions, as in the case of the African slaves in Brazil, Cuba and Haiti. The term established a cultural reaffirmation of the dominated at the level of the word itself, as well as a cultural strategy.

In reality, all cultures are hybrid both in anthropologic and-as Bhabha has pointed out-linguistic-Lacanian terms, due to the lack of unity of their signs. 5 All cultures always feed from each other, and cultural appropriation is not a passive phenomenon. The receivers always remodel the elements they appropriate according to their own cultural patterns, thus these appropriations are often not"correct".6 Receivers are usually interested in the productivity of the element seized toward their own ends, not the reproduction of its use in its original context. Such"incorrections" are usually situated at the base of the cultural efficacy of appropriation, and frequently constitute a process of originality, understood as a new creation of meaning. '

If appropriation is at work in all cultural relationships, it becomes more critical under subaltern and post-colonial conditions. It has been said that peripheries, due to their location on the maps of economic, political, cultural, and symbolic power, have developed a"culture of resignification" out of the repertoires imposed by the centres/ It is a transgressive strategy from positions of dependence, since it_ questions the canons and the authority of central paradigms. According to Nelly Richard, the authoritarian and colonising premises are in this way de-adjusted, re-elaborating meanings,"deforming the original (and therefore, questioning the dogma of its perfection), trafficking in reproductions and de-generating versions in the parodic trance of the copy".8 It is not only a question of dismantling totalisations in a postmodern spirit; it also carries an anti-Eurocentric deconstruction of the self­reference of dominant models and, more generally, of all cultural models.9

14 CONTEMPORARY ART IN lATIN AMERICA

Nevertheless, both anthropophagy and transculturation must be qualified to break with connotations that may prove too affirmative. In the case of anthropophagy, we need to make transparent the digestion battle that it implicitly carries. As Heloisa Buarque de Hollanda has warned, anthropophagy can stereotype a problematic concept of a carnavalising identity that always processes beneficially_ everything that" is not its own".10Although the notion refers to a'' critical swallowing", as critic Haroldo de Campos has put it, we must be alert before the difficulties of such a pre-postmodern programme, since it does not take place in a neutral territory but subjected to a praxis which tacitly assumes the contradictions of dependency. It is necessary also to examine if the transformations that "cannibals" experience when incorporating the dominant culture do not subsume them inside it. Also, appropriation, viewed from the other side, satisfies the desire of the dominant culture for a reformed, recognisable Other who possesses a difference in the likeness-which, in the case of Latin America, departs from its cultural kinship with Western meta-culture, creating perhaps its perfect alterity -facilitating the relation of domain without completely breaking the difference that allows the construction of a hegemonic identity by its contrast with an''inferior"Other. But this quasi-Other acts at the same time as a mirror that fractures the dominant subject's identity, rearticulating the subaltern presence in terms of their rejected otherness.11

If the tension of"who swallows whom?" 12 is more or less present in any intercultural relationship, it is also true that ''frequently one plagiarizes what one is ready to invent", as Ferguson has said emphasising the appropriating subject's agency through its volitional selectivity and its tactical catachrestic use of the appropriated element, as Gayatri Spivak has insisted.13 In this direction, it is important to underline that anthropophagy and transculturation articulate their discourses from their position in early neocolonial modernity and their indirect foundations on anthropology, diverging with similar notions in classic post-colonial theory, which departed from literary criticism and the colonial situation.

Regarding transculturation, it must be pointed out that, as Angel Rama remarked a long time ago, the notion" does not sufficiently attend to the criteria of selectivity and those

of invention", 14 and therefore it does not include neological cultural transformations and creations in response to new, different milieus and historical situations in which cultures have to develop. These transmutations are crucial for the creolising processes-what Yulian Bromlei calls ethnogenetic separation, through which displaced cultures mutate in reaction to a conflicting new space.15

Anthropophagy, transculturation and, in general, appropriation and resignifying are related with another group of notions proposed to characterise cultural dynamics in Latin America. These notions have come to be stereotyped as epitomes for Latin American identity: mestizaje (miscegenation), syncretism and hybridisation. As with the concept of appropriation, these notions respond to relevant cultural processes taking place in such a complexly diverse milieu as Latin America-with its contrasts of all type, its cultural and racial variety and mixture, its multiple, coexisting temporalities, its wishy­washy modernities ... and have demonstrated to be very productive to analyse the region's culture and its routes. Nevertheless, it is problematic to use them as emblems to tag Latin America or the post-colonial world, because, in fact, there is no culture that is not hybrid. Thi~ does not mean that such notions do not possess a particular utility to analyse post-colonial culture, since hybridisation processes were especially important for its formation under a vast span of differences, asymmetries, contrasts and situations of power. There is no other region in the world where such a massive racial and cultural blend has taken place.

Yet, a problem with all notions based upon synthesis is that they tend to erase imbalances and conflicts. Even worse: they can be used to create the image of a fair and harmonious fusion, disguising not only differences, but also contradictions and flagrant inequalities under the myth of an integrated, omniparticipative nation, as one can see so clearly in the cases of Mexico and Cuba. Another difficulty is that the model of hybridisation leads to envisioning intercultural processes through a mathematical equation, by means of the division and sum of elements, the result of which is a tertium quid, the consequence of the mix, veiling cultural creation that is not necessarily the fruit of the merger. On the other hand, they tend to assume

all cultural components as being open to mixture, without considering those that are not dissolved, and the resistance to hybridisation due to asymmetries that remain difficult to integrate. More importantly, Wilson Harris has indicated that in all assimilation of contraries always remains a"void" that impedes a full synthesis, creating what Bhabha has called a ''Third Space" where cultures can meet in their differences.16

On the other hand, co-optation menaces all cultural action based on syncretism, even though this last has been a path to resistance and affirmation of the subaltern. The difficulty is that the fusion usually happens towards the central or more powerful component, in an operation that simultaneously contests andre-inscribes its authority. Today, in the global and post-colonial era, the syncretistic processes are defined as a basic negotiation of difference and cultural powerY But those processes are turbulent: it is not possible to assume that they sit as comfortably as if they were a harmonious solution to post-colonial contradictions. They have to maintain their critical edge. There is no active syncretism in the linking of non­contradicting antagonisms; syncretism, at its best, is a strategy of participation, resignifying and pluralisation against hegemony. Nestor Garda Canclini has pointed out that the concept of hybridisationi.lis not synonymous of fusion without contradictions; it rather can help to show peculiar forms of conflict generated in recent intercultural dynamics that have taken place in Latin America amid the decadence of national projects of modemization."18

Another problem is that the subordinate appropriating subjects re-inscribe the Western sovereign subject's model of illustration and modernity, without discussing the fallacy of these centered subjects and, even more, to what extent the subordinate ones are themselves an effect of dominant power and its discourses. This does not deny their possibility of agency, which the appropriation paradigms place at the forefront in a very valuable epistemological and political tum. But this capacity cannot be overstated as an accommodating figure that resolves subaltemity's cultural problems by means of a simple reversion. It is necessary to make transparent the subordinate subjects' constitution and actions, and to discuss appropriation in a more complexly ambivalent way.

AGAINST LATIN AMERICAN ART 15

Paradoxically, the appropriation paradigms, which are based on the incorporation of differences, underline the polar opposition between hegemonic and subordinate cultures. These days a dialogic relationship seems more plausible, in which the imposed language and culture are experienced as11own/alien", as Mijail Bakhtin stated it in his discussion of literary polyglossia. Hegemonic cultural elements are not only imposed but are also assumed, reverting the schema of power through the apprehending of the instruments of domination, while ambivalently mutating the appropriating subject toward what it appropriates, together with its meanings and discourses.19

In this way, for example, the syncretism in the Caribbean and Brazil of African deities with Catholic saints and virgins, practiced by forcibly Christianised slaves, was not only a strategy to disguise the former behind the latter: it implied the installation of all of them at once in an inclusive, multilayered system.

16 CONTEMPORARY ART IN LATIN AMERICA

The old Brazilian paradigm of anthropophagy and the cultural strategies of transculturation, appropriation and syncretism are increasingly being replaced by a new perspective that we could call the paradigm of" from here". Rather than appropriating and critically re-functionalising the imposed international culture, transforming it in their own behalf, the artists are actively making that meta­culture firsthand, unfettered, from their own imagery and perspectives. They are doing so without manifestos or conscious agendas, just by creating fresh work, by introducing new issues and meanings derived from their diverse experiences, and by infiltrating their differences in broader, somewhat more truly globalised art circuits. This epistemological transformation at the heart of the artistic discourse consists in changing from an operation of creative incorporation to another of direct international construction from a variety of subjects, experiences and cultures.

FELIX GONZALEZ· TORRES Untitled (Passport) 1991, paper, endless supply, 10 em at ideal height x&O x 60 em (original paper size) Copyright Felix Gonzales-Torres Foundation, courtesy Andrea

Rosen Gallery, New York, photo: Peter Muscato

In general, the work of many artists-rather than naming, describing, analysing, expressing or building contexts-is made from their personal, historical, cultural and social contexts in international terms. The context thus ceases to be a''closed"locus, related to a reductive concept, in order to project itself as a space from which international culture is built naturally. This culture is not articulated in the manner of a mosaic of explicit differences engaging in a dialogue within a framework that gathers and projects them, but as a specific mode of recreating a set of codifications hegemonically established in the form of global meta-culture. In other words, cultural globalisation tends to configure an international code multilaterally, not a multifaceted structure of differentiated cells. That codification acts as an "English"that allows communication and that is forced, knocked about, and reinvented by a diversity of new subjects that gain access to international networks undergoing outright expansion. In a near sense, Charles Esche has mentioned a combination of sameness and non-self -conscious singularity in art today. 20 Many artists work, as Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari claimed regarding" minor literature"/'finding his own point of underdevelopment, his own patois, his own third world, his own desert", within the"major"language.21

Difference is increasingly constructed through specific plural modes of creating artistic texts within a set of international idioms and practices that are transformed in the process, and not by means of representing cultural or historical elements characteristic of particular contexts-it lies in action more than in representation. This inclination opens a different perspective that opposes the cliche of "universal" art in the centres, derivative expressions in the peripheries, and the multiple," authentic" realm of" otherness" in traditional culture. Obviously, the centre-periphery polarity has been strongly confronted in these porous times of migrations, communications, transcultural chemistries, and re-articulations of power.

Artists are less and less interested in showing their passports. And, if they were, their gallerists could probably prevent them from stating local references that might jeopardise their global potentials. As Kobena Mercer puts it," diversity is more visible than ever before, but the unspoken rule is

that you do not make an issue of it".22 Cultural components act more within the discourse of works than in relation to a strict visuality, even in cases in which these were based upon the vernacular.

This"walking with the devil" is a plausible strategy in the globalised, post-colonial, post-Cold War and pre­China-centric world of today. Naturally, it is not a matter of a path without obstacles, and many challenges and contradictions remain. More important than the fact that artists coming from every corner of the world are now exhibiting globally is the qualitative reach brought by the new situation: how artists, critics and curators are contributing to transform the previous hegemonic, restrictive and conservative situation towards active plurality, instead of being digested by it. Pluralism can work as a prison without walls. Jorge Luis Borges once told the story about the best labyrinth: the desert's incommensurable openness, from where it is difficult to escape. Abstract or controlled pluralism, as we see in some biennials and other" global" shows, can weave a labyrinth of indetermination confining the possibilities toward real, active diversification.

Although art benefits from the rise of artists from all over the world who circulate internationally and exercise influence, on the other hand it is simplified, since artists have to express themselves in a lingua franca that has been hegemonically constructed and established. In addition, all lingua franca, before being a language of' all' is a language of'somebody', whose power has allowed them to impose it. This makes possible intercontextual communication, but at the same time it indirectly consolidates established structures, while the authority of the histories, values, poetics, methodologies and codes that constituted the language are incorporated. The active, diversified construction and re-invention of contemporary art and its international language by a multitude of subjects who operate from their different contexts, cultures, experiences, subjectivities and agendas, as pointed out above, supposes not only an appropriation of that language, but its transformation from divergences in the convergence. Hence, art language pluralises within itself, although it has been broadly instituted by mainstream orientations. This is crucial,

AGAINST LATIN AMERICAN ART 17

because to control language and representation also entails the power to control meaning. 23 Of course, this dynamic takes place inside a porous strain between renovation and establishment, where the hegemonic structures show their weight.

Another difficulty is that the use and legitimation by artists worldwide of an international language set up by the Western mainstream implies a discrimination of other languages. Accordingly, artistic manifestations that do not speak the prevalent codes are excluded beyond their contexts, marginalised in ghetto circuits and markets. This exclusion is even more radical if we think that the international language of art has confiscated for itself the condition of being contemporary, and of acting as a vehicle for artistic contemporaneousness. This canon thus relegates art that does not fit into it, when better, to the sphere of tradition, and, when worse, does not consider it current, or just deems it as being definitively bad. It is true that there is a lot of redundant art that does not create meaning, as so much epigonal nationalist modernism, so many superficial derivative works and, in short, so much purely commercial art. But the problem remains of the possible exclusion or undervaluation of significant poetics simply for not responding to the codes legitimated at an international scale.

The paradigms based on appropriation reproduced the situation of domain as they depended on an imposed culture: cannibals are only such if they have somebody

18 CONTEMPORARY ART IN LATIN AMERICA

to devour. The"from here" paradigm, although not indicating a rebellion or an emancipation and confirming the hegemonic authority, has simultaneously mutated the ping-pong of oppositions and appropriations and the alienation of the subaltern subject toward a new artistic­cultural biology where this subject is inside the central production from outside.

The identity neurosis suffered by Latin American culture is not completely cured, and this text is a part of it, albeit in opposition. Nevertheless, already at the end of the 1970s Brazilian critic Frederico Morais linked our identity obsession with colonialism, and proposed a "plural, diverse, and multifaceted" idea of the continent, a product of its multiplicity of origin.24 Indeed, the very notion of Latin America has always been very problematic. Does it include the Dutch and Anglo Caribbean? Chicanos? Does it embrace indigenous peoples who often do not speak European languages? If we recognise the latter as Latin Americans, why do we not do so with indigenous peoples north of the Rio Grande? Is what we call Latin America part of the West or the non-West? Does it contradict both, emphasising the schematisation of such notions? In any case, today the United States, with 40 million inhabitants of 'Hispanic' origin, is without doubt one of the most actively Latin American countries, and in a not so distant future will come to have the third largest Spanish speaking population, after Mexico and Spain. In some stores in downtown Miami there are signs that say "English Spoken".

ERNESTO NETO Celu/a Nave. It happens in the body of time, where truth dances 2004

Even so, the idea of Latin America has not been discarded, as is the case with the idea of Africa, deemed by some African intellectuals to be a colonial invention.25 As early as in 1965, Chinua Achebe considered that notions used by African authors to construct an "African personality" were''props we have fashioned at different times to help us get on our feet again. Once we are up we shall not need any of them any more".26 Probably as a result of the indirect rule system applied in British colonies, English-writing African intellectuals in general have never been keen on focusing on identity issues, or have used notions of African identity pragmatically, in what Gayatri Spivak has called "strategic essentialism". In Latin America, on the contrary, the self-consciousness of belonging to a historical-cultural entity misnamed Latin America is maintained, but problematised. This may appear strange, since we Latin Americans have always asked ourselves who we really are. It is difficult to know given the multiplicity of components in our ethno-genesis, the complex processes of creolisation and hybridisation, and the presence of large groups of indigenous peoples who are excluded or only partially integrated into post-colonial nationalities. As a result of the independence process the region was subdivided into multiple national states that responded to ~he political greediness and the nationalist caudillismo typical of Latin America, fostered by the absence of feasible integrative projects. Opposite to what happened in North America, in Latin America the colonial divisions were Balkanised. We have to add the impact of vast immigrations of Europeans and Asians throughout the twentieth century, and the strong migrations within the continent and toward the United States and Europe, mainly in the final part of that century and until today. Such intricacies are further complicated by a very early colonial history beginning in the late 1400s, with a permanent and massive settlement of Iberians and Africans, and a post-colonial history that began early in the nineteenth century. Nevertheless, the aforementioned complexities have set shared linguistic, historical, social and cultural foundations within a geographic framework that has made us Latin Americans continue identifying ourselves as such beyond our diversity.

By the same token, and as a result of the pressure to enhance or build identities of resistance vis-a-vis Europe

and the United States, we have been inclined to define a Latin American self by means of all-encompassing generalisations-a tendency that we have already seen regarding cultural dynamics-which have coexisted with the fragmentation imposed by nationalisms. Precisely, they were also perhaps a reaction to Latin America's cacophony of diverse times and realities, which are parallel and juxtaposed in a contradictory and simultaneous manner. Some of these generalisations seemed as if they were trying to build consistency out of chaos itself. Artistic and literary categories such as magic realism, the marvellous, mestizaje, the baroque, the constructive impulse, and revolutionary discourse had a notable rise in the 60s, within a militant Latin Americanism characteristic of the historical period marked by the Cuban Revolution and guerrilla movements. However, these categories were ideologically over-constructed with a totalising effect, to the point of being considered nowadays as attractive stereotypes for the outside gaze. This is also so because some of these generalisations responded to the self­exotist, encomiastic inclinations of many Latin American intellectuals at the time.

Mudimbe's question"What is Africa?"is also pertinent in our area: what is Latin America?27 It is, among other things, an invention that we can reinvent, and which creates grounds for both provincialism and solidarity. We are now situating ourselves more within the fragment, juxtaposition and collage, accepting our diversity as well as our contradictions. The danger is in the coining, against modernist totalisations, of a postmodern cliche of Latin America as a realm of total heterogeneity.28

During the 1980s and part of the 1990s, art from Latin America was often asked to explicitly manifest difference or satisfy expectations of exoticism. Frequently the artworks were not even properly looked at: passports were requested beforehand, and baggage was checked under the suspicion of contraband from New York or London. Often the passports were not in order, because they responded, as we have discussed, to processes of hybridisation and appropriation, the result of a long and multifaceted post-colonial situation. Their pages appeared full of re-significations, re-inventions,' contaminations'

AGAINST LATIN AMERICAN ART 19

WILFREDO PRIETO Apolitical (below)

2001 Courtesy the artist

DORIS SALCEDO Shibboleth (opposite)

2007 Courtesy Alexander and Bonin, New York

and 'inaccuracies' already evident from the times of early colonial art.29

Consequently, some artists were inclined toward' otherising' themselves, in a paradox of self-exoticism. This paradox was still more apparent because the Other is always us, never them. This situation has also been motivated by nationalist mythologies where a traditionalist cult of'the roots' was expressed, and by the romantic idealisation of conventions about history and the values of the nation. Frequently, power employs or manipulates nationalistic folklorism as rhetoric for a so-called integrated, participative nation, disguising the real exclusion of popular strata, especially that of indigenous peoples. At the end of the day,

20 CONTEMPORARY ART IN LATIN AMERICA

the cult of difference circumscribes art within ghettoised parameters of circulation, publication and consumption, which immediately limit its possibilities of diffusion and legitimation, both along 'South-North' as 'South-South' circuits, reducing it to predetermined fields.

However, we can observe two new routes now in the continent. On the one hand, there is the internal process of overcoming the neurosis of identity among artists, critics, and curators. This brings with it a tranquility that permits greater internalising in artistic practice. On the other hand, Latin American art is being valued more as an art without surnames. Instead of demanding that it declares its identity, art from this region is now being recognised more and more as a participant in a general practice that does not by necessity show its context, and that on occasion refers to art itself. Artists from Latin America, like those of Africa or Asia, have begun, slowly and yet increasingly, to exhibit, publish, and exercise influence outside of ghettoised circuits.

Latin American culture, especially in the visual arts, has frequently played on the rebound. Artists have returned the balls thrown from the'North', appropriating hegemonic tendencies and thus turning them into their own individual creativities within the complexity of their context. Critical discourses have emphasised such strategies of re-signification, transformation, and syncretism in order to confront the constant accusation of being copycats and derivatives, which, not without reason, we have suffered from.30 Postmodemity, with its discrediting of originality and its valorisation of the copy has been of great help. Equally plausible would be the displacements of focus that would recognise how Latin American art has enriched the framework of the 'international' from within, as part of a process of plural, interplaying modernisms.

When in 1996 I stated that the best thing happening to Latin American art was that it was ceasing to be Latin American art, I was also referring to the problematic totalisation that the term carries. 31 Some writers prefer to speak of" art in Latin America" instead of "Latin American art'', as a de-emphasising convention that tries to underline, on the very level of language, its rejection of the suspicious construction of an integral, emblematic Latin America, and beyond this,

of any globalising generalisation. To stop being a"Latin American art" means to distance oneself from a simplified notion of art in Latin America and to highlight the variety of artistic production in the continent.

Nowadays artists tend more to participate 'from here' in the dynamics of an 'international art language' that we have discussed, expanding its capacity for dense and refined meaning in order to deal with the complexities of societies and cultures where multiplicity, hybridisation, contrasts and chaos have introduced contradictions as well as subtleties. Such orientation operates with greater clarity on the plane of the signifieds than on its signifiers, and is in keeping with contemporary practices in other peripheral areas. This is one of the changes enacted with respect to the totalising paradigms mentioned above, given that these paradigms procured a characteristically Latin American language right from the start. New artists have broken away from the marriage between art and national or regional IDs that has so much affected art in Latin America. This does not mean that there is no Latin American 'look' in the work of numerous artists, or even that one cannot point to certain identifying traits of some countries or areas. The crucial distinction lays in the fact that these identities begin to manifest themselves more by their features as an artistic practice than by their use of identifying elements taken from folklore, religion, the physical environment or history. This implies the presence of the context and of culture understood in its broadest meaning, and interiorised in the very manner of constructing works or discourses. But it also involves a praxis of art itself, insofar as art, which establishes identifiable constants by delineating cultural typologies in the very process of making art, rather than merely accentuating cultural factors interjected into it. Thus, for instance, contemporary Brazilian art is identifiable more by the manner in which it refers to ways of making art than by the mere projection of contexts.

To emphasise the very practice of art itself as creator of cultural difference confronts the orientation of modernist discourses in Latin America. These tended to accentuate an opposite direction: the manner in which art corresponded to an already given national culture, which it contributed

22 CONTEMPORARY ART IN lATIN AMERICA

to build and reproduce. Artists did so, to a certain extent, to legitimate themselves within the framework of a prevailing nationalism to which they add. Now, artists are, on the contrary, more than representing contexts, constructing their works from within them. Identities and physical, cultural and social environments are operated more than being merely represented, contradicting expectations of exoticism. They are in fact identities and contexts that participate in the construction of the international art language and in the discussion of contemporary'global' themes. Their intervention brings with it anti-homogenising differences that build the global from positions of difference, underlining the emergence of new cultural subjects in an international arena.

The art world has changed a lot since 1986 when the 2nd Havana Biennial held the first truly international exhibition, gathering 690 artists from 57 countries and pioneering the extraordinary internationalisation of art that we witness today.32 The multiculturalist discourses and practices of the 90s, which involved policies of correctness, quotas and neo-exoticism, are no longer current, to the extreme that they are used now as debarring adjectives, which connote a simplistic programmatism. Until recently, a balanced national plurality was sought at the shows and events. Now the problem is the opposite: curators and institutions have to respond to contemporary global vastness. The challenge is to be able to stay up-to-date in the face of the appearance of new cultural subjects, energies and information bursting forth from all sides.

Has the Devil been useful? Or have we sold our souls? Whatever the answer may be, artists from all over the world have broken away from their confinement into specific circuits and markets thanks to the galloping expansion of the international circulation of art as well as to the artists' turn to fully international practices and projections. Perhaps we are now the Devil.

1 Mosquera, Gerardo, "Cooking Identity", in 12 Nunes, Zita, "Os males do Brasil: 20 Esche, Charles, "Making Sameness", 30 Critical works by Ticio Escobar, Nestor Garcfa

Cooked and Raw, curated by Dan Cameron, Antropofagia e questao da ra\;a", Papeles in Arjan van Helmond & Stani Michiels, Canclini and Nelly Richard have been very

Madrid: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Avulsos Series, No. 22, CIEC/UFRJ, Rio de Jakarta Megalopolis. Horizontal and Vertical important for this debate.

Reina Soffa, 1994, pp. 32-37, 309-313. Janeiro, 1990. Observations, Amsterdam, 2007, p. 27. 31 Mosquera, Gerardo, "Latin American Art

2 de Andrade, Oswald, "Manifesto Antropofago", 13 Quoted by Paul Mercier, Historia de 21 Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix, "What is a Ceases to be Latin American Art", ARGO

Revista de Antropofagia, Sao Paulo, year 1, Ia antropologfa, Barcelona: Ediciones Minor Literature?", in Russell Ferguson, Martha Latino, Madrid, 1996, pp. 7-10, and

No.1: May 1928. Peninsula, 1969, p. 170. Gever, Trinh T. Minh-ha and Cornel West eds, "From Latin American Art to Art from Latin

3 de Andrade, Oswald, "Manifesto Antropofago" 14 Rama, Angel, Transculturaci6n narrativa y Out There. Marginalization and Contemporary America", Art Nexus, Bogota, No. 48, v. 2,

4 Ortiz, Fernando, Contrapunteo Cubano del nove/a latinoamericana, Mexico City, 1982, Cultures, New York, Cambridge (MAl, London: April-June 2003, pp. 70-74.

Tabacoye/Azucar, Havana, 1940 (English p. 38. The New Museum of Contemporary Art and 32 Segunda Bienal de La Habana '86, Cata!ogo

edition New York: Alfred Knopf, 1947l. 15 Bromlei, Yulian, Etnograffa te6rica, Moscow: MIT Press, 1990, p. 61. general, Wifredo Lam Center, Havana, 1986.

5 Bhabha, Homi K, "Cultural Diversity and Nauta, 1986.

Cultural Differences" (1988l, in Bill Ashcroft, 16 Harris, Wilson, Tradition, the Writer and

Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin eds,

The Post-Colonial Studies Reader,

London and New York: Routledge, 1997,

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8 Lowie, RH, An Introduction to Cultural

Anthropology, New York, 1940; Bernstein,

Boris, "Aigunas consideraciones en relaci6n

con el problema 'arte y etnos"', Criterios,

Havana, No. 5-12, January 1983-December

1984, p. 267.

Society, London and Port of Spain: 1973,

New Beacon, pp. 60-63; Bhabha, Homi K.,

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Helen Tiffin eds, The Post-Colonial Studies

Reader, London and New York: Routledge,

1997, pp. 208-209.

17 Gatti, Jose, "Elements of Vogue", Third

Text, London, No. 16-17, Winter 1991, pp.

65-81. For a thorough discussion of the idea

of syncretism regarding Brazilian religions

and culture, see Sergio Figueiredo Ferreti,

Repensando o sincretismo, Sao Paulo:

22 Mercer, Kobena, "Intermezzo Worlds," Art

Journal, New York, vol. 57, No.4, Winter

1998, p. 43.

23 Fisher, Jean and Mosquera, Gerardo,

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Perspectives on Art and Culture, New York,

Cambridge (MAl and London: New Museum

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24 Morais, Frederico, Las Artes P!asticas en Ia

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25 Oguibe, Olu, "In the 'Heart of Darkness"',

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7 Richard, Nelly, "Latinoamerica y Ia

postmodernidad: Ia crisis de los originales y

Ia revancha de Ia copia", La estratificaci6n

de los margenes, editor, Francisco Zegers, Editora da Universidade de Sao Paolo, 1995. 26 Achebe, Chinua, "The Novelist as Teacher",

Santiago, 1989, p. 55. 18 Canclini, Nestor Garcfa, Cu!turas hfbridas. 1965, quoted by Bart Moore-Gilbert,

8 Richard, Nelly, "Latinoamerica y Ia Estrategias para entrar y sa fir de Ia Postcolonial Theory. Contexts, Practices,

postrnodernidad: Ia crisis de los originales y modernidad, Mexico City: Editorial Grijalbo, Politics, London and New York: Verso, 1997,

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9 Richard, Nelly "Latinoamerica y Ia 19 Bakhtin, Mikhail M, "De Ia prehistoria de Ia 27 Mudimbe, VY, The Invention of Africa,

postmodernidad", Revista de Crftica Cultural, palabra de Ia nove Ia," Problemas literarios y Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana

Santiago, No.3, April1991, p. 18. esteticos, Havana: Editorial Arte y Literatura, University Press, 1988.

10 de Hollanda, Helofsa Buarque, "Feminism: 1986, pp. 490-491. On all this issue see: 28 Amor, M6nica, "Cartographies: Exploring

Constructing Identity and the Cultural Mosquera, Gerardo, "Global Islands", in the Limitations of a Curatorial Paradigm",

Condition", in Noreen Tomassi, Mary Jane Okwui Enwezor, Carlos Basualdo, Ute Meta in Gerardo Mosquera ed, Beyond the

Jacob and lvo Mesquita eds, American Bauer, Susanne Ghez, Sa rat Maharaj, Mark Fantastic. Contemporary Art Criticism from

Visions. Artistic and Cultural Identity in the Nash and Octavia Zaya eds, Creolite and Latin America, London and Cambridge (MAl:

Western Hemisphere, New York: ACA Books, Creo/ization, Documenta 11_Piatform3, Institute of International Visual Arts and MIT

1994, p. 129. Ostfildern-Ruit, Museum Fridericianum and Press, 1995.

11 Bhabha, Homi K, "Of Mimicry and Men. Hatje Cantz Publishers, 2003, pp. 87-92; 29 Fisher, Jean, "Editorial: Some Thoughts on

The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse", in Escobar, Ticio, El mito del arte y e/ mito del 'Contaminations"', Third Text, London, No.

October, New York: No. 28, 1984, p. 85. pueblo, Asuncion: Museo del Barra, 1987, p. 76. 32, Autumn 1995, pp. 3-7.

AGAINST LATIN AMERICAN ART 23