MALBA

COLLECTION
 Agustín Pérez Rubio

OPEN
HISTORY,
MULTIPLE
TIME.
A NEW TURN
ON THE MALBA
COLLECTION

33
 …we never had grammars, nor collections of old plants. And we never knew what
urban, suburban, frontier and continental were.
Oswald de Andrade1
…forget the stuff of the Old World, and put all of our hope, and our effort, into creating
this new culture right here. Forget artists and schools; forget that literature and philosophy;
be cleansed and renewed; think to the beat of this life that surrounds us ... Leave behind,
then, authors and teachers that are no longer of any use to us; they have nothing to tell
us about what we must discover in ourselves.
Joaquín Torres García2
…visual artifacts refuse to be confined by the interpretations placed on them in the
present. Objects of visual interest will persist in circulating through history, demanding
radically different forms of understanding and engendering compelling new narratives
as they wander.
Keith Moxey3
The crisis of discourses historically centered on the West has led to the
collapse of a model of knowledge and its Eurocentric way of conceiving the
world. Thanks to the growing number of academic studies on other traditions,
other modernities, and other concepts and categories with which to think
of time, the linear and theological direction of History with a capital H is no
longer hegemonic. Because of the relationship that we, as historians, critics,
and curators, have with this new turn, our practices have changed as we
address realities hidden or excluded from the dominant discourse. For that
reason, those practices should be understood as laboratories for the creation of
new ways of naming and of operating through the acquisition of a language
of our own (this is even more the case for those of us who operate in the
Latin American context). Inherited models and foreign vocabularies that have
constructed an amnesiac and aseptic history of exclusions are now useless to
us. We ourselves have to conceive ourselves.
It is important, in this context, to re-read history, to reflect on possible
ways of storing it, of calling it forth in order to learn from it. If history is a
construct, art history is also an artifice, one narrated through objects and
34
images selected and settled on according to the criteria of those who
articulate “authorized” discourses on art. Even today, we unwittingly find
ourselves exercising power in a practice that continues to be enmeshed in
that state of affairs. The historian “stains” history just as, in Lacan’s theory
of vision, the viewer stains the scopic field.4 And that is made manifest if
the field of action is that artifice called Latin America. While it is true that the
region is held together by certain common traits, its complex cultural reality
has been shaped entirely on the basis of a colonial logic driven by political
and economic powers. In this globalized age, we cannot situate ourselves on
a tabula rasa from which to look back at history and Latin American art as if
nothing had happened before.
The task of the art historian in general, but particularly of those of us
interested in the artistic practices of this region, must necessarily be
understood as political. That task is performed, in this case, in relation to
the narrative of an assemblage of artworks, a collection, conceived as the
backbone of a museum. If a collection is a space of representation, a staging
of symbolic realities, rather than a mere accumulation of pleasingly displayed
art objects (as conceived in the nineteenth century), the construction of
a collection, as well as the way it is placed on exhibit, means the creation
of new symbolic capital—a political task. The more experiences lived and
embodied by artists and their contemporaries that a collection offers us,
the more possible worlds it enables us to imagine or to remember, the more
important and interesting it is. In that sense, the museum institution, through
its holdings, projects a new reality both within its confines and beyond them.
As a new staging of MALBA’s permanent collection, Verboamérica is
neither fixed nor static, but performative and temporal; it evidences the
crisis of a single and linear notion of historical time that globalization has
witnessed. Heterochrony—multiple time—has become the crucial model
with which to understand a time marked by different timelines that coexist
in constant flux and motion—that is, the time in which we live. We take it for
granted that, at each place and at each moment, time is experienced and
felt differently—an idea that abolishes hegemonic modernity’s unidirectional
and linear notion of time to make way for the perception of multiple alliances.
The concept of heterochrony is central to contemporary cultural criticism
and one of the bases for current discourses on art.5 Albeit with different
35
formulations, renowned authors are pointing in the same direction when they
speak of “multiple modernism,” “alternative modernism,” and “postcolonial
constellation.”6 The notion of “simultaneous avant-gardes”7 is also useful to
grasping the processes of the avant-garde in Latin America. Not a single Latin
America, though, but a varied and multiple Latin America, one evidenced
not only in space as political and social territory, but also in time. Torres
García’s famous map América invertida [America Inverted] (1943) effected a
modification not only in the America’s geographic, spatial, preeminence, but
also in its time: the meridians—those marks that conventionally delimit time
zones as Cartesian and universal axes—are shifted when that territory and
its times are rethought. Indeed, that temporal multiplicity—as symbolic as it
is historic—evidences that time is not only multiple, but also anachronic and
discontinuous, never synchronic or successive.8
Our practice still partakes of the ancient Academy, and even though
our forms, tastes, and protocols reflect an acknowledged—though not
embraced—colonial history, our tasks consists of trying to establish new ways
of speaking. With Verboamérica, we have undertaken the exercise of creating
a new reality, one that constitutes us as it is constituted. Just as Lacan
transformed the Cartesian cogito ergo sum (I think, therefore I am) to shake it
out of its autism—no one thinks, at least not initially, from the place of his or
her ego or self, but rather on the basis of what is received, through tradition,
from the Other—we intend to present this narrative as something seen from
the place of the others that constitute us. From the place of the others of that
South—a South colonial, black, migrant, female, queer, political, indigenous,
censored, cannibal, disappeared, peripheral—that is all of us.
The exhibition sets out to extend beyond the specificity of an “art show.”
Indeed, it forms part of the broader context of the museum’s comprehensive
research into its collection. That research is particularly concerned with
the mechanisms of language as way of activating and recreating a reality
of our own on the basis of terms, nomenclatures, and definitions that can
be envisioned as a specifically Latin American vocabulary. In that sense,
Verboamérica proposes a possible rewriting of modern and contemporary
Latin American history. It recognizes the works and concepts that structured
the European avant-gardes to then swallow them up and add local ingredients
(terms). A crucial component of the project is, for us, the power of language

36 37
 to create realities and to construct worlds—and not only in order to represent
Joaquín Torres García them: anthropophagic and speaking America.
América invertida [Inverted America], 1943 One of the challenges this book sets out to tackle is putting together a sort
Ink on paper
of tool box that provides a broader vision of the context in which the works
22 x 16 cm
Museo Torres García Collection, Montevideo
and the exhibition arise and to which they make reference. The dynamic
glossary of terms that opens this publication attempts to provide a way into
the contents of that tool box. While other major volumes on avant-garde Latin
American art have reproduced documents, bibliographies, and glossaries
that operate in a like fashion, the compilation of terms we provide—in both
Spanish and English in this double edition—focuses on the relationship
between those terms and Latin American cultural and political processes.9
It is envisioned as a provisional glossary, a glossary in the making subject to
constant study and revision; an endless glossary and instrument with which
to approach artistic, social, and political processes, as well as theory and art
criticism from the region. The curators have chosen a set of key terms with
which to understand and to rewrite the region’s history, a lexicon that serves
as guide to this open map and companion on this journey.10 In tandem with
this project, MALBA’s website has generated an extended archive of terms
where users can send in new entries.11 The museum, as mediating agent, has
also formed a committee to select new terms for inclusion in an archive in a
constant state of construction. As a living entity, the museum is a generator
of a reality open to the future.
That openness is also reflected in this book. While it can be read in a
linear and correlative fashion, it can also be read in non-sequential blocks.
The exhibition’s museology—its layout, which accompanies the curatorial
conception—is designed to minimize the impositions that modern institutions
enact, impositions signaled paradigmatically by Foucault. The intention is
for the space formulated by the museum to be coherent with the concept
of open narrative. While the exhibition gallery inevitably brings with it some
imperatives, we have tried to empower viewers to decide for themselves,
turning the exhibition space into a Borgesian garden and offering different
possible paths. We have also hoped to make the past contemporary, to
project it onto the present, and vice versa. That means that the present
changes, and that the past is made available for reexamination pursuant
to self-investigation. With the supporting framework of visual and cultural

38 39
studies, we attempt to go beyond strictly historical discourse, to give
that discourse a new power that allows for a broader understanding of its
processes. We agree with Leonor Arfuch that

…a number of different coordinates intersect in the field of cultural

criticism in Latin America; the arts cannot be readily distinguished from
anthropology, and the persistence of ancient cultures interrogates the
present in aesthetic as well as ethical and political terms.12

Our intention is to empower viewers to take a stance, to assimilate critically

both what the past has imposed on us and the uncertain future.13 This
presentation takes place on the premises of a museum, a public institution
constituted as a structuring backbone of a local and regional reality; it is
being held fifteen years after MALBA opened its doors. Even though MALBA—
like many other museums and institutions in Latin America—is privately
funded, its operations are entirely public. As Paraguayan critic and curator
Ticio Escobar has pointed out:

…the public should not be mistaken for the state run: the first refers to a
broader sphere constituted by the intersection of diverse interests and
logics. And both meanings of the word “intersection” are at play here;
intersection in the sense of coincidence and also in the sense of collision.
A new utopia of the common good, understood as public interest and
collective benefit. A utopia grounded in the most conciliatory aspects of
culture without, of course, negating the contours of the social body.14

The intention to present, from within an institution like MALBA, a critical

vision could be seen as odd or even suspect. Any attempt to empower
alternative subjectivities in order to upset symbolic hierarchies might seem
sterile—and all the more so if undertaken in the context of a museum that is
an unquestionable point of reference around the region. We hold the opposite
position. Institutional spaces like MALBA have, in our view, enormous ability
to endow with new meanings the art scene’s symbolic capital, and to do so in
a way that exceeds the strictly artistic sphere, in a way that reaches a broader
and plural citizenry interested in processes of change in art and culture.

40 41
 Regarding institutionality in Latin America, cultural theorist Nelly Richard
Beatriz González suggests:
Decoración de interiores [Interior Decoration], 1981
Ink on canvas
Insofar as the borders of art have shifted, the opposition between the
220 x 600 cm
MALBA Collection
institutional and the counter-institutional has ceased to be absolute like
confrontations between homogenous territories (inside versus outside) in
which one set of affirmations or negations must be defended wholesale
(one versus the other). At play now, rather, are polemics and controversies
in which positions and oppositions shift according to how cultural systems
behave vis-à-vis their tendency to assimilate or to reject, to coincide or to
object, at stake in dealings at the very borders of institutions.15

The past and present of the MALBA Collection in its entirety underlie
Verboamérica, as does—in a sense—the museum as institution. Our vision
Teresa Burga
is composed of multiple layers of knowledge that have settled over the
Structures of Air, 1970
Ink on plotting paper years to give shape to today’s collection, the backbone of an institution
44, 5 x 56, 6 cm that operates transversally through its many programs and contents. The
MALBA Collection exhibition includes much of the body of work that formed the basis for the
museum’s founding, that is, works from the Costantini Collection, first shown
in 2001 as the launching of MALBA’s program of exhibitions.16 This view of the
collection contains a number of treasures of the Latin American avant-garde—
an important component of MALBA’s holdings and central to its mission to
conserve and communicate the region’s art. Emblematic works by Tarsila do
Amaral, Roberto Matta, Frida Kahlo, Pedro Figari, Joaquín Torres García, David
Alfaro Siqueiros, and others attest to the visionary nature of the museum as
well as its commitment to the South.17
In the fifteen years since MALBA’s opening—an anniversary that this
exhibition celebrates—those initial holdings have tripled in number, which
means that several readings have been made possible (readings we have
attempted to uphold, at least in part) and others suggested in this twentieth
exhibition of the collection.18 MALBA as a museum institution has changed and
grown stronger over time. A few years after the Asociación Amigos del
Museo was formed in 2012, the Acquisitions Committee, which is rooted in
the local community, was created; more recently, a group of professionals
was brought together to form the Scientific Artistic Committee whose aim is

42 43
to help integrate the museum into a network of diverse institutions in
order to consider joint policies and future dialogues between collections.19
The acquisitions for the MALBA Collection are bound to the museum’s broad
range of activities, some of them academic in nature, undertaken with a sense
of commitment and professionalism by the large team of individuals that
work in the areas of temporary exhibitions, film, literature, public programs,
outreach, publications, as well as conservation and research.
As a comprehensive project, Verboamérica brings together the results
of research that the museum’s Curatorial Department has been performing
constantly, if silently, for the last two years, a project that consists of the
exhaustive cataloguing of the collection’s contents. A team of eminent
researchers in the field of Latin American art was put together and assigned,
according to area of expertise, the task of compiling thorough technical
information and of writing academic texts on each of the works in the
collection. The idea is to rewrite the history of each work with new contents—
some of them from disciplines other than art history.20 The results of that
project are coming to light—specifically on the museum’s website—during
this fifteenth anniversary of the founding of MALBA. The wealth of knowledge
on the works, compiled thanks to this project, has proven extremely helpful
to preparing the show.21 The project has provided an enormous amount
of technical and historical information on the works and, as such, has
been crucial to expanding our vision of those works and even to detecting
and remedying errors that had been reproduced over the years. Bólide, a
major piece by Hélio Oiticica, had been exhibited with the wrong title and
positioned in the wrong fashion—another example of the importance of
permanent research.22
Given the connection between the research underway and the museum’s
political project, evident in its program of exhibitions, it is not surprising that
this new presentation of the collection contains a large number of works by
women artists. For the last several years, the Acquisitions Program has made
giving greater visibility to Latin American women artists a priority, which is
why a considerable number of works by Latin American women are on exhibit.
Recent acquisitions not featured in this exhibition include works by Kati
Horna, Beatriz González, and Teresa Burga; works by Annemarie Heinrich and
Claudia Andujar—the museum held temporary exhibitions for each during the

44 45

Osías Yanov
VI Sesión en el Parlamento
[VI Parliamentary Session]
Performance at MALBA
March – June 2015
Lecture by Paul B. Preciado
at MALBA auditorium
June 6, 2015
2015 and 2016 seasons—are featured. The most recent acquisitions adhere
to a policy of making visible the marginal and the hidden. While many of those
works may not be on display in this exhibition, they do form part of its context
and conceptual framework.23
Verboamérica acts as a mirror in which the institution and the exhibition
reflect one another. Much of the MALBA team has contributed to developing
the conceptual framework that structures the show or to broadening it
on the basis of concepts and definitions in the glossary, quotes from literary
texts, and excerpts of films, expressions from other disciplines exhibited
on the galleries’ outer walls to provide greater context. Similarly, a number
of activities to be held as part of the museum’s Public Programs are deeply
enmeshed in the issues that the exhibition addresses.24 The words spoken
by Paul Preciado at an event in the MALBA auditorium in 2015 resonate along
these lines:

We need to undertake a criticism of the languages that have, in the name

of science, excluded us from the techniques of government. The notion of
race is a scientific notion, an effect of the techniques of political
segregation. And the management of the economy that defines the body
as producer of capital also determines the moment when a body can
engage in a sex act.

Similarly productive when it comes to envisioning the art institution are

Juan Tessi the concepts developed by Walter Mignolo, another of our recent guests.
Cameo The art institution, along with universities, might hold the only hope for
Images taken by security cameras
decolonial thinking. Also pertinent are the concepts of social integration
MALBA exhibition
March – June 2016 developed by Maria Lind on the basis of her own experience at an institution
located in an immigrant community with high rates of unemployment on the
outskirts of Stockholm. As we have seen, language becomes performative,
actions take on new power, in the real space of the museum.
This new presentation of the MALBA Collection embraces its past to project
it into the future, with the hopes and risks that that entails. Verboamérica
is also an exploration of the state of art history in these times and of the
challenges it faces. What are the possible paths? What are the new goals?
Our work as curators is simply to launch questions, to question that which

46 47
we think we know, to take another look at an artist and see that he or she
can speak in two times and in two places at once, to interrogate a work once
again and listen to how what it has to say resonates with other works that
might have been produced as much as a century before or after.
In a way, Verboamérica contains MALBA and vice versa: they are a single
entity in which one is projected onto the other, both within the space of the
institution and beyond it. After all, in order to survive the institution-museum
needs more and more ties to the realities of the surrounding community.
The eight thematic clusters or non-consecutive episodes that the exhibition
formulates are rife with collective action insofar as they are the result of the
work of artists and their contemporaries, but also of the work of the museum
team. Our motto is to move into the future knowing that history is made
on the basis of us, of our common potential. Our proposal is grounded in
disagreement and in failure—both of which are fundamental and essential
to institutions and to those of us who work in them. Especially if that work
entails curatorial practice, since, as Jacques Rancière puts it,25 a curatorial
plan is always determined by an “aesthetic regime” that may come with
ethical obligations, but neither demands nor is capable of offering definitive
theoretical solutions.

48 49
 NOTES
1 De Andrade, Oswald, “Manifesto
Francis Alÿs
antropófago,” Revista de Antropofagia,
The Cut, 1993/2015
year 1, no. 1, São Paulo, May 1928.
Action performed at MALBA during the
2 Torres García, Joaquín, Universalismo
Francis Alÿs. A Story of Negotiation exhibition
constructivo, Buenos Aires, Poseidón, 1944.
Oil on canvas and video
3 Moxey, Keith, El tiempo de lo visual.
Collection of the artist
La imagen en la historia, Barcelona, Sans
Soleil Ediciones, 2015, p. 221 (English title:
Visual Time: The Image in History).
4 Hernández Navarro, Miguel Ángel,
“Prólogo,” in Moxey, Keith, op. cit., p. 11.
5 Cf. Alberro, Alexander (ed.), ¿Qué es arte
contemporáneo hoy?, Navarra, Cátedra
Jorge Oteiza, 2011. See as well Smith, Terry,
¿Qué es el arte contemporáneo?, Mexico,
Siglo XXI, 2012, and Contemporary Art:
World Currents, Upper Saddle River, NJ,
Pearson/Prentice Hall, 2011.
6 Moxey, Keith, “Is Modernity Multiple?” in
Visual Time. The Image in History, Duke
University Press, 2013, pp. 11–22; Bourriaud,
Nicolas, “Altermodern,” and Enwezor,
Okwui, “Modernity and Postcolonial
Ambivalence,” both in Bourriaud, Nicolas
(ed.), Altermodern: Tate Triennial, catalogue
to the exhibition held at Tate Britain,
London, Tate Publishing, 2009,
no page number.
7 Giunta, Andrea, “Adiós a la periferia.
Vanguardias y neo-vanguardias en el
arte de América Latina,” in La invención
concreta, Madrid, Museo Nacional Centro
de Arte Reina Sofía, 2013, pp. 104–117.
8 Cf. Didi-Huberman, Georges, Ante el
tiempo. Historia del arte y anacronismo
de las imágenes, Buenos Aires, Adriana
Hidalgo, 2006 (English title: Before the
Image, Before Time: The Sovereignty
of Anachronism).
9 The work of Dawn Ades, for instance, is
outstanding. She included an anthology
of documents on Latin American art in the
50 51
catalogue to the exhibition Latin America:
The Modern Era, 1820–1980, presented
at the Hayward Gallery in London in 1989
and at the Palacio Velázquez in Madrid
from 1989 to 1990; with editions in English,
Spanish, and Portuguese, the book made
those documents available to the public
at large. Mari Carmen Ramírez furthered
that initiative in the “Documents” section
of the catalogue that she edited with
Héctor Olea, Inverted Utopias: Avant-Garde
Art in Latin America, New Haven, Yale
University Press - Museum of Fine Arts,
Houston, 2004. That documentary idea
was later continued in a broader academic
and archival project, the ICAA (http://
icaadocs.mfah.org). Earlier precedents
include Aracy Amaral’s compilation Arte
y arquitectura del modernismo brasileño
(1917-1930), Caracas, Biblioteca Ayacucho,
1978, and Jorge Schwartz’s Las vanguardias
latinoamericanas. Textos problemáticos y
críticos, Madrid, Cátedra, 1991, which was
translated into Portuguese in 1995 and had
great impact throughout Latin America.
Significant as well are Paulo Herkenhoff’s
“Incomplete Glossary of Sources for Latin
American Art,” in Gillmor, Alison (ed.),
Cartographies: José Bedia, Germán Botero,
Marta María Pérez Bravo...) (exhib. cat.),
pp. 7–85, 160–191, Winnipeg, Winnipeg Art
Gallery, 1993; and Hoffman, Jens and León
de la Barra, Pablo, “An Incomplete Glossary
of Latin America,” in Hoffman, Jens (ed.),
United States of Latin America (exhib. cat.),
Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit
(MOCAD), 2016. Both were published solely
in English; the second includes as well texts
by a number of curators and critics.
10 Researcher Pablo Fasce wrote the texts
explaining the terms in the glossary
previously selected and reviewed by
the editor-curators.
11 To learn about the project, visit
www.glosario.malba.org.ar
12 Arfuch, Leonor, in Richard, Nelly (ed.),
Diálogos latinoamericanos en las fronteras
del arte, Santiago, Chile, Ediciones
Universidad Diego Portales, 2014, p. 39.
13 Cf. Didi-Huberman, Georges, Cuando las
imágenes toman posición. El ojo de la
historia, I, Madrid, Antonio Machado Libros,
2008 (English title: The Eye of History).
14 Escobar, Ticio, in Richard, Nelly (ed.),
op. cit., p. 90.
15 Richard, Nelly, “Introducción,” in Richard,
Nelly (ed.), op. cit., p. 14.
16 MALBA was formed as a museum pursuant
to the donation of an entire private collection
(223 works) belonging to Eduardo F.
Costantini. The museum’s inaugural
exhibition, Arte en América Latina, was
curated by Agustín Arteaga—MALBA’s first
director—and held from September 21, 2001
to December 2002. The exhibition occupied
all of the museum’s galleries.
17 A collector committed to the regional art
scene since the late eighties, Eduardo F.
Costantini is the founder of MALBA. His
interest in conserving major works obtained,
on occasion, pursuant to the counsel of his
friend, businessman and collector Ricardo
Estévez, has been unwavering.
18 The nineteen exhibitions of the collection
held thus far at MALBA and in other
institutions include Visiones, curated by
Victoria Noorthoorn (February 23 to May 26,
2006), and all later shows, conceived and
developed by Marcelo E. Pacheco over the
ten-year period when he was working with
the Collection and serving as the museum’s
curator-in-chief. Other outstanding
exhibitions of the collection include Modern
and Contemporary Masterworks from
MALBA - Fundación Costantini, curated
by Mari Carmen Ramírez and held at the
52
Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (April 22 to
August 5, 2012).
19 The members of this committee are Andrea
Giunta (professor at the Universidad de
Buenos Aires, researcher at the CONICET,
and co-curator of this show), Victoria
Giraudo (executive coordinator of MALBA’s
Curatorial Department), Inés Katzenstein
(director of the Art Department of the
Universidad Di Tella and former curator of
MALBA), Julieta González (director of Museo
Jumex, Mexico), Adriano Pedrosa (director of
MASP in São Paulo), Octavio Zaya (Spanish
curator, critic, and editor; co-curator of
Documenta XI; he has a longstanding
interest in Africa and Latin America), and
me (artistic director of MALBA).
20 The in-house team at MALBA consists of
Victoria Giraudo, Ángeles Devoto (manager
of the collection), Socorro Giménez Cubillos
(head of the Publications Department), and
me. The project has been possible thanks
to the invaluable contribution of Agustín
Díez Fischer, an external researcher who has
acted as the nexus between the authors,
and to the counsel of Andrea Giunta.
Essential as well is the financial support of
the Asociación de Amigos de MALBA and
of members of the Acquisitions Committee.
The project also entails a collaboration
agreement with the Centro Argentino de
Investigadores de Arte, CAIA.
21 Over 255 entries for a selection of 341
works from the collection have been
prepared thus far in what is an ongoing
project. Each entry includes documentary
and bibliographical information; complete
technical information on the work and its
exhibition history, background, and so
forth; and an academic text. More than
ninety researchers (fifty-five women and
thirty-five men) from twelve countries both
in the region and in the United States and
Spain—all of them experts in the field—have
contributed.
22 Gonzalo Aguilar, an Argentine professor
specialized in Brazilian art and literature, was
assigned the task of preparing the catalogue
entries for Hélio Oiticica’s work. He not only
provided information and multifaceted
assessments of Oiticica’s work, but also
remedied a major error: he discovered the
original title of the celebrated piece by
Oiticica hitherto known as Bólide. By delving
into the archives of the Fundación Oiticica in
Rio de Janeiro, Aguilar discovered an original
drawing by the artist and learned how the
work’s author intended it to be exhibited
(vertically, on a clear piece of glass resting
on a table with slender legs such that the
gravel can be seen in a mirror placed
on the lower portion of the work). Because
the documentation accompanying the
acquisition of this work—part of the museum
foundational donation—was insufficient, it
had always been displayed on its side like
a horizontal box. This finding also led to a
definitive change in the work’s title and date,
now catalogued at MALBA as B29 Bólide-
caixa 16 (variação do Bólide-caixa 1).
The work’s title had been confused with the
title of a similar piece belonging to the
Collection of the Contemporary Arts Museum
Houston, which must now change the name
as well. A sketch of the work belonging to
MALBA is reproduced in this book.
23 Estructuras de aire [Structures of Air] by
Teresa Burga was acquired by MALBA’s
Acquisition Committee in 2014; it was also
the title of the Burga exhibition curated
by Miguel López and myself as part of
the program dedicated to historical Latin
American women artists, a program housed
in MALBA’s third gallery. Other examples
of this commitment on the part of MALBA
include the exhibition of Osías Yanov’s
53
queer piece VI Sesión en el Parlamento
[VI Session of Parliament], 2014, and of
lovcnjmCiM1qfrvbmo1_500 by Juan Tessi,
2016. Verboamérica’s different clusters could
encompass as well Diego Bianchi’s Suspensión
de la incredulidad [Suspension of Disbelief]
with its staging of the obscene, 2014; Jorge
Macchi’s Diario íntimo [Intimate Diary], 2016 (an
artist’s book made from newspaper clippings);
and Chilean artist Voluspa Jarpa’s politically
informed exhibition En nuestra pequeña region
de por acá, on display now at MALBA.
24 The head of the Department of Public
Programs is Lucrecia Palacios, who works
with the coordinators of the different areas:
in the Literature Area, directed by Soledad
Costantini, a number of events (courses and
workshops) dedicated to women’s narratives
provide a means to deepen understanding
of the relationship between women and
letters; the programming of the Film Area,
under Fernando Martín Peña, takes into
account the relationships between the shows,
the collection’s proposals, and the Art and
Philosophy Program; the Education Area,
under Renata Cervetto, attempts to strengthen
ties to visitors to the museum by means of
pedagogical criticism.
25 For Rancière, the notion of aesthetic regime
consists of breaking consensus on the
construction of sensitive landscapes and ways
of perceiving. It’s a question of building new
things, making way for other possibilities on the
basis of presumed equality of intelligence and
defense of disagreement and heterogeneity—
consensus, for Rancière, entails a homogeneity-
inducing and spurious form of arriving at a
solution—through negotiation and arbitration
and antagonisms that are, by definition,
irresoluble. Cf. Rancière, Jacques, Aisthesis:
Escenas del régimen estético del arte, Buenos
Aires, Manantial, 2013 (English title: Aisthesis:
Scenes from the Aesthetic Regime of Art).
 Andrea Giunta

ALL
THE PARTS
OF THE
WORLD

55
Different maps attest to the cultural and political complexity that the
term “Latin America” contains. The denomination took hold in the mid-
nineteenth century1 to contest the Pan-Americanist idea of continental
unity. Latin America encompasses the map that Spanish and Portuguese
colonization drew from the south of the Río Grande to Cape Horn,
including the Spanish- and French-speaking Caribbean. A notion of
continental solidarity, as opposed to neo-colonial exploitation,
underlies the term as well.2 Language, religion, and institutions uphold
the framework for this particular map—which is not the only one.
Processes of independence mostly led by the sons of Spaniards born in
the New World begot processes of republics. Like the colonies, those
republics attempted to integrate or to eradicate indigenous populations.
The map of the diaspora through slavery brought Africa to the Americas.
Diaspora of another dimension also brought China over, starting in the
nineteenth century.
The poetics of modernism have activated representations that uphold
Latin America’s various components. Those representations incessantly
question and redefine possible maps that trigger multiple cultural
relationships—with Europe, with the pre-Hispanic past, with the colonial
era, with the feats of independence, with the indigenous and Afro-Latin
present, and even with Asia. This essay will address those complexities.
Representations and conceptualizations of Latin America brought about
rich pluridimensional programs that were not without contradiction,
programs that, in the words of Édouard Glissant, can only be understood
in relation.3 The specific words, the key terms, are important. Rather
than formulations that, from a Eurocentric perspective, have traditionally
organized Latin American productions (Impressionism, Cubism, Futurism,
Dada, Surrealism, and so forth), we will look to and invigorate the
formulations used by the artists themselves to name various aesthetic
agendas (Constructive Universalism, Muralism, Anthropophagy, Negritude,
Indigenism, Concrete Art, Madí, Perceptismo, Neo-Concretism, and others).
These terms refer to ideas, but also to ways of understanding how history
has been experienced in Latin America. And, for that reason, we are more
interested in the verbs than in the nouns. The words that speak of the flow
of the life of men and women: to work, to travel, to express, to write, to
imagine, to resist, to map, to create.
56
Inverted Maps, the Imaginary of Foundation
One year after moving back to Montevideo, Joaquín Torres García gave the
lecture La Escuela del Sur, which he illustrated with the first version of his
inverted map of South America. A cross lay over Uruguay in its entirety. While
projecting the image, he argued:
A great art academy must be built here, in our country. It is without
hesitation that I say here in our country, and I have my reasons for saying it.
I have called it Escuela del Sur because, in fact, our north is the South. … That
is why we will now put the map upside down. This gives us a true idea of our
position, not the position the rest of the world wants for us. … This correction
was necessary; we now know where we are.4
Torres García’s words proposed a change of paradigm affecting art from
Uruguay and from the continent where that country is located. He meddled
with the world map, understood as the design of a geopolitics of international
cultural power. In so doing, he repositioned the country and the city to
which he had returned after forty-three years in Europe, now seen as spaces
of outward expansion and emission. A new school meant influencing and
impacting other spaces. Starting in the sixties, that map and that text came
together as a metaphor for cultural emancipation at a number of contemporary
junctures. A metaphor, but also a slogan in a predicative and inaugural sense,
a cry to look at things differently. Mostly, to invert the power relations that
had placed Latin American art at the periphery in terms of the moment of
innovation formulated by the European avant-gardes.
By the time Torres García returned to Montevideo, poetics grounded in Latin
America that looked to innovation had been formulated. Manifestos had been
written that, from Latin America, addressed the intellectuals and artists of the
world: the Manifiesto estridentista (Mexico, 1921) spoke of an “actualist avant-
garde” whose advocates included over two hundred artists and intellectuals,
among them Jorge Luis Borges. A new state of affairs made itself felt in other
texts, texts that discussed aesthetic, but also political, issues. The Declaración
del Grupo Minorista (Havana, 1927); the Tres llamamientos de orientación actual
a los pintores y escultores de la nueva generación americana, signed by David
Alfaro Siqueiros and published in Vida Americana in Barcelona in May 1921;
57
and the Manifiesto del Sindicato de Obreros, Técnicos, Pintores y Escultores de
México, a “call for the revolutionary intellectuals of Mexico” to join “the social
and the aesthetic-educational struggle,” signed by Siqueiros, Diego Rivera,
Fermín Revueltas, José Clemente Orozco, Ramón Alva Guadarrama, Germán
Cueto, and Carlos Mérida (El Machete, Mexico, 1923). At the impetus of José
Vasconcelos as the secretary of Public Education from 1921 to 1924 in the post-
revolutionary administration of Álvaro Obregón, the artist was seen as a worker,
a wage earner whose mission was to cover public walls, to paint a lot and to do
so quickly. The Modern Art Week in São Paulo (1922); the actualism declared in
the first issue of Klaxon (São Paulo, 1922); the call for a high culture grounded
in the present and in all of Brazil’s cultural traditions voiced in the Manifesto
Pau-Brasil (Oswald de Andrade, 1924); the stunning cultural metaphor of
anthropophagy as key to understanding Brazilian culture (Oswald de Andrade,
Manifesto antropófago, 1928): these were the texts and actions that established
the agendas of aesthetic renovation both modern and Brazilian. That same call
to the present and to the autochthonous was also heard in Buenos Aires with
the Manifiesto Martín Fierro, attributed to Oliverio Girondo and published in the
journal of the same name and independently in 1924, and with the Grupo de
Boedo, which urged the production of social art.
With specific names, Latin American avant-gardes began taking shape
in images and in texts starting in the twenties. Situated avant-gardes whose
innovation developed, furthered—and also betrayed and reverted—the
postulates of the historical avant-gardes in function of their specific contexts
and debates.
In this landscape, World War II proved a horizon of redefinitions. The images
of the German army marching under the Arc de l’Étoile confronted the world’s
cosmopolitan intelligentsia that—for the time being—Paris, occupied, was
not the breeding ground of the avant-garde. The journey of enlightenment that
the avant-gardes of the twenties had taken to different European cities were,
in this context, difficult if not impossible. But by then the normative narrative of
modernism, which understood the transformation of artistic language in terms
of progress and evolution, could perfectly well be carried on in other cities.
When the Germans occupied Paris, Harold Rosenberg asked himself, in New York,
where the guiding torch of modern art would be lit.5 That question was being
asked in Latin American cities as well, where the artists envisioned their
avant-gardes as continuity but also as divergence in relation to the processes

58 59
 of transformation activated in the years before the war. Their reworkings,
Diego Rivera foundations, and proposals gave shape to the simultaneous avant-gardes for
Epopeya del pueblo mexicano. El México antiguo whom any future was imaginable.6 We interpret these avant-gardes in terms of
[Epic of Mexican People. Ancient Mexico], 1929–1935 their images and of the texts they composed alongside those images, not in
Fresco painting
terms of the traditional genealogy of European styles. We understand that their
Murals at the Palacio Nacional, Ciudad de México
(fragment, north wall) works were venues for the crystallization of intellectual networks, expectations,
experiences, desires, and affects. Works that, in many cases, were manifesto
images. Due to their specific visualities and to their ability to condense cultural,
spatial, and emotional experiences, these works are also ways of situating their
makers in time. They signal the eruption of new states of the world. The images
themselves bear that power, but it is activated in countless ways when those
images are intersected with an array of texts and contexts.
In the curatorial concept Agustín Pérez Rubio and I conceived, Verboamérica
ventures to consider the works in the collection as spaces of experiences that
the images themselves configure in a specific way.7 In the works, we sense ways
of understanding the modern world, cities and their outskirts, work, the crowd,
the Pampa, Patagonia, the jungle, the desolate spaces of industrialization.
In opposition to the discourse devised by the state to organize independent
republics, some of these works take us to the margins expulsed in the founding
narrative of the white and patriarchal nation. Outer limits of sexuality and
of race, latent archives brought to life in symbolic resurrections.8 Between
those two regions or opposing meanings, some images are, in atmosphere,
indeterminate, transformative, mutant.
Joaquín Torres García Manuel Maples Arce
Mapa de Sudamérica Actual Magazine,
invertido [Inverted Map Hoja de Vanguardia, In the Beginning
of South America], 1936 No. 1, 1921
Círculo y Cuadrado Print “The thing seeps in through your eyes, through your skin, through all of your
Magazine,
pores because it’s so bloated, because of its transpositions,” wrote Rubén
Montevideo, No. 1,
Segunda Época, Santantonín on October 28, 1961 in one of his handwritten notes organized as
May, 1936, p. 2 a diary.9 A term astir in the early Sartre, the Sartre of Nausea,10 “the thing”—or
things—consisted of forms that hung down from the ceiling. Strange, with no
precise referents, they looked like roots, like tubers from which indeterminate
forms budded, like somewhat shapeless cut arms or tentacles. The state of
transition pursued in that work was an attempt to trap the beat, the palpitation
of the present. “History drains culture. Only the present feeds it … I want to
exude existence.”11 In the art field in Buenos Aires, the present was steeped

60 61
in an incessant search for new materials that was evident even in new prizes
and institutions.12 Artists experienced the present as a border in time, a dividing
line that signaled the distance between the art of the past, understood as
repetitive and outdated, and an incipient art taking shape in the present.
The moment of a new beginning, when novel art, with no prior references, was
emerging. Of course, no art is really without references, not even the art of
Buenos Aires at that time. But what characterized that moment—from the late
fifties through the early sixties—in Buenos Aires was not European styles but the
organization of a laboratory in which artists explored commonplace materials
(cardboard sheets and tubing, pieces of children’s hats, wire, shoe polish, tar,
and industrial paint), materials they discovered together and shared13 in an
atmosphere of collective experimentation.
The Argentine case helps situate a way of understanding materials and
forms found or identified in other art scenes around the region at the
same time. A sense of beginning and of end (borders of time) in which the
experiences of the war, the postwar, and the Cold War (with its space race)
made themselves felt. A transformative experience expressed in forms circular
and centripetal, expansive and translucent, forms bound to the idea of origin,
of life, of bodily modification (belly, womb, vagina, anus, breasts, nipples).
Mutant forms whose ultimate structure depends on the viewer in, for instance,
Lygia Clark’s Bichos [Bugs].
The section of the exhibition we call En el principio [In the Beginning] brings
together works related to ideas of origin, creation, destruction, innovation.14
They condense an affective state of transformation, the moment when a thing
might be something else, a state of ambivalence.
With their translucent planes, Pettoruti’s subtle charcoals revolve around
a center. Like futurist works, they suggest movement, but also the tangible
tension of World War I. Pettoruti made them in 1914 in Florence, where he had
arrived one year before. These images allude to the edges of the order of things
(matter, time, space), a concern also at play in the irregular slashes with
which Lucio Fontana broke the surface (pink works like a fluorescent skin with
blemishes like wounds or a hymen). It lingers as well in Emilio Renart’s Dibujo
Nº 14 [Drawing No. 14] (1965), textures pierced by channels or transparencies,
and in the activation of the space itself, surrounded like an invisible body that
the metal lines are determined to explore in Enio Iommi’s Encuentros de líneas
en el espacio [Meeting of Lines in Space] or Curvas y líneas [Curves and Lines]
62
(1946). The forms evoke bodies, orifices in the case of Clorindo Testa’s vast
black circle. The body is even at play in Zilia Sánchez’s abstract and codified
aesthetic in what Octavio Zaya describes as an epidermic understanding of
sexuality.15 “A space of tactility” or of topology and what Severo Sarduy calls
“the voluptuousness [that invents] possibilities” is the basis on which Zaya
undertakes a reading informed by queer theory.16 In any case, what that image
conveys patently are bulges that render ambiguous that first abstract formal
assessment.
The oval is another form that contains energies that circulate endlessly
(Federico Peralta Ramos’s egg entitled Nosotros afuera [We, the Outsiders,
1965], on exhibit at MALBA from late 2015 to early 2016, could perfectly
well be placed at the center of this section). A zone of hyperconnectivities
fundamental to the new century, which Chus Martínez identified as “the
dawn of a metabolic age.”17 I underscore the idea of beginning, and of legend
of origin, superlative in the Bible, the holy book that León Ferrari rewrites
in Cuadro escrito [Written Painting] (1964). What Ferrari does, in a sense, is
veer that notion of origin to the origin of art and to his own birth as artist,
which depends on God granting him the ability to paint. After an elaborate
descriptive and narrative journey that the reader must undertake to decode
that crammed writing—almost a grisaille—we learn that God didn’t want
him to be an artist.18 In the end, the painting was never made; it remained a
hypothesis, a graphic texture on paper. Writing.
Oval, spherical, and suspended forms are also writing in the air. Slender
knotted wires (Gego, Esfera #3 [Sphere #3], 1976); acrylic cylinders, stacks
of planes that hold letters (Mira Schendel, Disco Zero, 1971); forms of slender
sheets of wood and suspended spheres (Arden Quin, Móvil [Mobile] or Esferas
[Spheres], ca. 1949); soldered wires with parallel and intersecting lines that
also make reference to the space race—one of the many tensions surrounding
the Cold War (León Ferrari, Gagarin, 1961). War as theme in, for instance, the
powerful mushroom explosion in the middle of the gallery, its blackness
the polar opposite of all the subtle forms surrounding it (León Ferrari, Hongo
nuclear [Mushroom Cloud], 2006). In Víctor Grippo’s Vida, muerte, resurrección
[Life, Death, Resurrection] (1980 and 1995), the life cycle resists death when
water is added to beans held in lead geometric shapes (pyramids, cylinders,
cones, cubes, joined in the later version by prisms with rectangular base); when
the volume expands, one of the rows of shapes explodes.19
63
 That dynamism—at once egg and explosion—brings about the almost
unbridled circulation of matter rendered rhythmic by transparencies in Roberto
Matta’s The Disasters of Mysticism (1942), painted during his exile in New York
during the war. That same expansive force makes itself felt in the emphatic
circle from which the material slips forth in Jorge de la Vega’s El día ilustrísimo
[The Illustrious Day] (1963), offshoots of which shape the faces of a strange
crowd made of chunks of materials, plastic tokens, pieces of cabinets stuck to
or imprinted on the canvas in an insistent use of frottage.
All of these representations make reference to the mutant, to the idea of
potential change, to the transmutation of matter at the basis of alchemy.
The transformation of common metals into gold—and gold itself—as symbol
of spirituality, in Mathias Goeritz’s circles and reliefs (1961), which make
reference as well to the gold leaf used in colonial religious art in Mexico.
Dazzling golden beauty stands in stark contrast to the texture that Franz
Krajcberg obtains by compressing materials (roots, paper, fibers, pigments)
that suggest the idea of destruction (Untitled, 1961). That same year, 1961,
Kenneth Kemble led the group that held the Arte destructivo exhibition in
Buenos Aires. The use of violence and destruction as artistic materials was
bound to the possibility of total global destruction in a third, and atomic, world
war—a latent threat felt internationally during the Cold War. Alongside that fear
was enthusiasm about technology and modernization in the gleaming sixties.

The Map and Gold

In The World Over / 1929 (2011), Fernando Bryce copies a map that captures a
world order, the one represented in the magazine of the same name published
in the United States in the first decades of the twentieth century. Order and
supervision, a diagnosis illustrated by small captions that connect the map to a
wide range of conflicts in the world.20 A geopolitical map where the register of
dispute attests to what, in the early twentieth century, Swedish thinker Rudolf
Kjellén called the “living condition” of borders (The State as Living Form, 1916).
Borders that move men. Maps of the present that Guillermo Kuitca also traces in
Orden global [Global Order] (2004).
Gold and silver were the metals that led to the crossing of the continent
starting in the colonial era in Latin America. They were, in a sense, what moved
the conquest. The metals were first looted, then removed from alluvial deposits,

64 65

Federico Manuel Peralta Ramos
Nosotros afuera [We the Outsiders], 1965/2015
Reconstruction after the original idea built
on iron styrofoam, plaster and tartalan
4,5 x 2,6 x 2,6 m
Installation view of La era metabólica exhibition, MALBA
Arte destructivo [Destructive Art], 1961
Group experience at Lirolay Gallery,
Buenos Aires
(Kenneth Kemble, Luis Alberto Wells,
Enrique Barilari, Silvia Torras, Jorge López
Anaya, Jorge Roiger and Antonio Seguí)
66
and then mined directly from the land. Quicksilver or mercury was needed to
hone the precious material. The death rates at the Huancavelica mercury deposit
meant that few came out with their lives. In 1572, the legendary Taki-Onqoy
uprising against the Spanish was put down. These topics reappear as word and
as color in Augusto de Campos’s Goldwater from the Popcretos series (1964),
stray and latent archives that surface as stamped coins at the two extremes of
this collage. The title also makes reference to Barry Goldwater, the conservative
candidate for president of the United States in 1964, who advocated the
elimination of the welfare policies Roosevelt had enacted in the thirties; a rabid
anti-Communist, he lost the elections to Lyndon Johnson, who in his campaign
presented Goldwater as a supporter of atomic war and the candidate of the Ku
Klux Klan. Gold/water—the name could be broken down into its latent meanings.
Gold forms part of the imaginary of power, but also of worship, meditation,
spirituality. It was that facet of gold that Mathias Goeritz addressed in his
interventions on churches where baroque altars had been replaced first by
neoclassical altars, in the nineteenth century, and then, in the sixties, by
modern altars at the hand of progressive priests. His combination of gold plate
and the blue and red panes of stained glass on which he had also intervened
yielded bare spaces with no trace of the baroque, places of abstract meditation
in keeping with the Second Vatican Council that supported the creation of new
forms of spirituality.21
Gold, as what drives man to exploit man, is what Alfredo Jaar shows in Gold
in the Morning I, II, III (1983), images rendered light of the open air mine at
Serra Pelada in the Brazilian Amazonia. In those small boxes, we see hordes of
partly undressed bodies. The image goes from a closeup that allows us to see
individuals to long shots in which the men look like lines. In its documentary
function, photography confronts us quite bluntly with places where life ensues
in a state of absolute vulnerability. Bodies that don’t matter as individuals with
lives and loves, but as a mass that constitutes the labor force. David Alfaro
Siqueiros’s Accidente en la mina [Accident in the Mine] (1931) depicts the risks
that the mine entails for bodies; the work is the sketch for the large-format
painting produced during the artist’s exile in Taxco, in the State of Guerrero,22
and now found at the Museo Nacional de Arte (MUNAL) in Mexico City. The
greatest difference between the sketch and the painting is the red cloth on
which, in the painting, the wounded body lies. Even in its fragility, the drawing
evidences the monumental power that the bodies bring to the scene.
67
 The relationship between the map of South America and exploitation runs
through this section of the exhibition on both macro and micro levels—a
concern that, in the contemporary era, also encompasses an environmentalist
political discourse. In 1968, Nicolás García Uriburu dyed the waters of Venice
green. The texts and photographic documentation related to that action
constitute the images in six silk screens that show as well the coloring of his
own sex. Political discourse implicates bodies as well.
The tension between the continental and the local, the Latin American and
the national, is reproduced in Cristina Piffer’s Patria [Homeland] (2011), which
juxtaposes maps and a minimalist block with the word patria engraved in it.
Despite appearances, the block is not made of marble, but of cow fat. In an act
of compression that opposes what we know about art materials, this work also
brings to the space a form that replicates the cattle-based model of a country
(Argentina) that joins natural resources, and the ideas of nation and of lineage.
The idea of the livestock—and agricultural—nation, that vision of the homeland,
is one of the cornerstones of the powers that, together, engine the country’s
economics and politics.
Work and Crowds
Cuban artist’s Amelia Peláez drawing La costurera [The Dressmaker] (1935)
deals with a very specific moment in the history of work. The image shows
a woman working at a sewing machine inside a home, her body and the
fabric merged in the enveloping curves of the lines. The sewing machine—an
invention attributed to Isaac Singer—brought a revolution; it both afforded
women a degree of independence since they could generate some income of
their own and, at the same time, meant they were still more confined to the
home. Sewing was also an honest job, one that did not entail exposing women
to the moral dangers that came with leaving home to work at the factory.
A perilous setting of hooks and chains, and the heat of furnaces, the factory
is the sphere of the male body. In the set that, in 1928, Abraham Vigo designed
for a production of Tsar Hunger, everything is tinted in a red that penetrates
an enormous iron structure that reduces the partly undressed bodies of men
working at the foundry, bodies on which threatening shards of iron fall. The
play was by Leonid Andreyev, a Russian writer who participated in the October
Revolution. In his work for the anarchist and socialist movements, Vigo not only
68
designed sets, but also made prints as instruments of struggle. During those
years, networks of leftist cultural initiatives encompassed publishing houses
and publications, as well as theaters (those initiatives included Los Pensadores,
the Editorial Claridad, the Grupo de Boedo, the Teatro Libre, the Teatro del
Pueblo, the Teatro Proletario, and the Artistas del Pueblo). Vigo’s factory was
akin to prints that Juan Antonio Ballester Peña made for the journal La Campana
de Palo (1925–1927). The entire composition is occupied by the body of man
exploited and gesturing his pain. With its opposing diagonals and sharp angles,
the structure allows us to see tools and other bodies, ones that most likely also
took part in the protest (Protesta, 1928). La Campana de Palo was the platform
of anarchist ideas about the mission of the intellectual and the limitations of
artistic innovation, about the relationships between art and politics. It was at
the Federación Libertaria Argentina (1551 Brasil Street, Buenos Aires) that,
in the year 2000, Magdalena Jitrik’s exhibition Ensayo de un museo libertario
was held—an installation with her paintings, texts written on the institution’s old
letterhead paper and stone sculptures. Her abstract paintings like O la utopía
o la guerra [Utopia or War] (1997) bring into the present the utopian and
political spirit of Suprematist abstraction in Soviet Russia from 1917 through
the early twenties. Jitrik revisits realism as well. In her portraits, Víctor Serge
and Leon Trotsky, and many others, come back to life.
The industrial worker and his labor were key to the developmentalist
Argentina of the sixties. The relationship between wage and work is laid bare
in Oscar Bony’s La familia obrera [The Working-Class Family], exhibited at the
Instituto Torcuato Di Tella in 1968. The work consisted of a real family seated
on a tiered platform; the factory worker would earn more for sitting at the
exhibition with his wife and son that he would for working at the factory. That
reflection on the situation of the industrial worker foretold, in a sense, what is
known as the Cordobazo—a protest of workers set off by the decision of the
Onganía military government to reduce wages and the origin of the toppling
of Onganía by another military government—as well as a deployment of the
bodies of others (a topic that Oscar Masotta was also exploring at the time).
While work and exploitation are at stake in these works, so is the act of
expressing resistance in the urban space. The bodies in the street that rise up
to voice their demands in Antonio Berni’s Manifestación [Public Demonstration]
(1934) are not the bodies suggested in the mass in Rubens Gerchman’s Estudo
para Não há vagas [Study for No Vacancies] (1965). In Berni’s work, the crowd
69
takes up almost the entire composition as it advances through the streets. In the
background is the factory that they appear to have come from. These bodies
walk close together, carrying only a sign that asks for “bread and work”—words
that associate this painting with Ernesto de la Cárcova’s emblematic Sin pan
y sin trabajo [No Bread and No Work] (1894, Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes
Collection). Berni goes from the desperation of the family that, powerless, looks
out on the factory from the window of their home to the occupation of the urban
scene. In the faces in the foreground advancing towards the confrontation, we
see not only the markings of age and fatigue, but also differences in features that
attest to a diverse society made up of immigrants, peasants, mulattos. This is
not a ranting and unruly mob, but rather workers joined in a cause who progress
carrying their children and a single sign. They are, in a sense, subjects of history
who use the instruments they have to effect change—a change expressed
allegorically in the red building-flag on the upper portion of the composition.
At stake as well are precarious workers, among whose ranks the artist is
a strange, if constant, presence. Without salary, pension, or contract, artists SACAR MARCO GRIS,
go from part-time job to part-time job, finding work linked to the many tasks FORMA RECORTADA
they can perform in the art world. In CV laboral [Résumé] (2009) Ana Gallardo EN BLANCO (CON
SOMBRA
recites, almost like a litany, her own trajectory of odd jobs; her experiences
evidence the power relations that regulate the art world, where the artist never
obtains the status of steady worker.
Modernity and the turn of the century brought with them growth in urban
populations and, in tandem, the sense of the crowd and the masses, of the mob
and the multitude, of the plebs and the menacing lower classes. According to
Graciela Montaldo, German author Elías Canetti’s dazzling Crowds and Power,
written in 1960, brilliantly defines the emergence of this new actor—the crowd—
as political factor and condition, as public ritual that stages social conflict.23
The order of the bodies in Berni’s Manifestación reconciles the crowd and the
people as political voice in a politics based on wage agreements, the opening
of factories, and feasible programs for the sake of which intermediary institutions
were formed. The demonstration organized the crowd in the modern city.
The difference between the masses and the people is that the latter is a
legitimate voice, whereas the former is a threat, the enemy of order. Luis Felipe
Noé’s Introducción a la esperanza [Introduction to Hope] (1963, Museo Nacional
de Bellas Artes Collection)—a work completely enmeshed in the cultural context
of the early sixties—depicts a more irrational and unbridled mass.

70 71
 In a context of uprising, leader and soldier organize the masses.
Luis Felipe Noé The uniformed soldiers represented by José Clemente Orozco in Mexican
Introducción a la esperanza [Introduction to Hope], 1963 Soldiers (1930) probably make reference to the Constitutional Army that
Oil on canvas fought under Venustiano Carranza during the Mexican Revolution (Orozco
201 x 214 cm
himself formed part of that army, as did Siqueiros, in 1913 and 1914).
Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes Collection,
Buenos Aires Orozco explains in his autobiography that he was in the Red Battalion under
Dr. Atl. But it is not entirely clear who the figures in the work represent; they
could also be members of the popular armies led by Villa and by Zapata, or
even fugitives. In any case, the work deals with violence and death—as is
evident in the nude body to the side of the composition.24
Mobilized and politicized in the sixties pursuant to the Cuban Revolution,
the invasion of the Dominican Republic, and the escalation of the North
American war in Vietnam, the masses became the basis for the organization
of urban and peasant guerrilla movements. The protesting crowd is central in
Claudio Tozzi’s O Público [The Public] (1968) and in Rubens Gerchman’s Estudo
para Não há vagas (1965).
Always about the cross borders, the crowd is part and parcel of that region
where the nation overflows its own limits. To control crowds—and to tabulate
and to order the mad, homosexuals, women, criminals—takes theories,
methodologies, institutions, and codes.25 What is feared is eruption of the
sort that took place on December 19 and 20, 2001 in the midst of one of the
greatest crises in Argentine history, the result of the neoliberal policies and
Ernesto de la Cárcova debt incurred by the government of Peronist President Carlos Saúl Menem
Sin pan y sin trabajo [No Bread and No Work], 1894
(1989–1999) and of the inability of President Fernando de la Rúa (1999–2001),
Oil on canvas
125,5 x 216 cm
a member of the Radical Party, to handle that crisis. On those nights, crowds
Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes Collection, flooded the streets of the country, breaking out in cacerolazos.26 The repression
Buenos Aires that ensued left over thirty dead.27 The social unrest also produced the
experience of popular assemblies organized in almost all the neighborhoods
of Buenos Aires and in other cities around the country. The Taller Popular de
Serigrafía (2002–2007) grew out of the popular assembly in the San Telmo
neighborhood; it produced specifically designed silkscreens on site at urban
marches and protests. Between and with the crowd and the people is the
individual, the hero embedded in the multitude (Antônio Dias’s América, o
herói nu [America, the Naked Hero], 1966) or the assassinated and immortalized
hero (Claudio Tozzi’s Guevara morto [Dead Guevara], 1967). The crowd and the
individual, the person—not necessarily a specific being, but the one in which

72 73
all bodies, all experiences, merge. Torres García’s constructive universalism is
re-enacted in José Gurvich’s Untitled or Composición constructiva [Constructive
Composition] (ca. 1964/1965) in which he put the universe in an abstract body,
a silhouette of a body that is all bodies.
The Modern, Lettered, Violent City
In 1917, Torres García made a small drawing of a city—probably Barcelona—on
paper. He used orthogonal lines to divide the page and, in the boxes, he placed
fragments of urban life. Carriages, buildings, wheels, persons, bottles. This
drawing evidences that the grid system already formed part of Torres García’s
poetics; before he met Mondrian, he had adopted the compartmentalized
structure. His human and urban universe would later organize a symbolic
system. The only thing in the Uruguayan artist’s work that can be seen as
coming directly from Mondrian—whom he met in 1929 and admired—was the
use, in some later works, of primary colors, although Torres García’s palette
was decidedly Spanish. Mondrian never made use of figurative elements.
Torres García was deeply drawn to cities. He depicted Barcelona, Paris,
New York, Montevideo. The fragmented structure allowed him to accumulate
the dazzling visual stimuli and wealth of information concentrated in streets
bustling with life: citizens, means of transportation, buildings, advertisements.
But the city was not, for Torres García, a theme. It was, rather, the laboratory
in which his own urban sensibility—one that heeded the many cultural signs in
a constant state of mutation—took shape. Understood as “contact zone”28 or
as “cultural arena,”29 it was a space he had always privileged in group projects
like magazines, exhibitions, and lectures. It was not until later, pursuant to his
contact with pre-Hispanic art while in Paris, that he—like Lam, whom we will
address later—would introduce the metaphor of roots and rootedness. That
contact mostly revolved around Nazca ceramics, which he first saw at the
Musée du Trocadéro—his son Augusto drew them for the museum’s archives.30
That palette and set of postulates on structure, the use of the golden proportion
and tone, make themselves felt in Composition symétrique universelle en
blanc et noir [Universal Symmetric Composition in Black and White], produced
in Paris in 1931. A symmetric constructivist painting with double line and a
great many swirls, the almost monochromatic piece—rendered rhythmic by
undertones that activate each section, each zone of the composition—is
74
organized on the basis of the golden ratio. Man, fish, clock, house, snail,
anchor, compass do not suggest a system of signs to be interpreted in a single
direction. It would be entirely mistaken to attempt to decode this work with a
dictionary of symbols. What the work—in its wholeness—is about is the idea
of the universe.
The city’s vibration is also at play in Rafael Barradas’s Quiosco de Canaletas
[Canaletas Kiosk] (1918) and in his Calle vibracionista [Vibrationist Street] (1920).
Men, women, and buildings stand out against the constricted composition
in Emiliano Di Cavalcanti’s Cena de rua [Street Scene] (1931). The painting is
dedicated to actress and reciter Berta Singerman, who appears in the middle
of the composition. Singerman, who lived in Buenos Aires, was showered with
praise by writers and poets.31
The nocturnal map of Buenos Aires that can be understood as the register
of an intense cultural life32 is shown in the photographs of the city and its
architectural splendor that Horacio Coppola took in the thirties. Avenues, cars,
signs in shop windows, theaters, window displays, corners, the Buenos Aires
Obelisk, cafés, long avenues, the Kavanagh building, the river, the subway,
the Boca neighborhood: the analog register shows the urban grid that Jorge
Macchi would hold onto after perforating the map of the city’s blocks (2003).
The city is its tumultuous streets and buildings, but it is also the geometry
that comes through after careful and close observation of the sort framed by
Geraldo de Barros in his images of the streets of São Paulo, Paris, Seville, or a
city in Germany. What he captures is the structure that is replicated in the order
of the streets, in the windows, in the forms of the buildings that act as the even
grid that we identify as the urban matrix. The abstract city.
The relationship between abstraction and architecture was the engine of
many of the agendas formulated in Latin America after World War II. Artists
in the region viewed themselves, at that time, as the agents of the modern
principle of innovation, as the ones responsible for it. “Simultaneous avant-
gardes” took shape in different cities around the world. This was when
the journal Arturo (1944) was published, bringing together on its pages
contributions from young artists in the Río de la Plata region like Lidy Prati,
Tomás Maldonado, Arden Quin, Rhod Rothfuss, Gyula Kosice, and Edgar Bayley,
but also texts and images by Torres García, Murilo Mendes, Vicente Huidobro,
and Viera da Silva. Arturo, then, can be understood as a regional artistic
formation. This dawning avant-garde spirit required differentiation from the
75
past in order to usher in an aesthetic based on wholly new ideas. That was
the spirit at play in the Arte Concreto-Invención, Madí, Perceptismo, Nueva
Visión groups and movements that emerged in Buenos Aires starting in the
mid-forties, and in Frente, Ruptura, and neo-concretism, which took shape in
Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo starting in the fifties.33 Forms were understood
as objects capable of transforming life and man himself. Concrete art rejected
the idea of abstraction as a honed version of the real. They upheld new forms
in no way dependent on any object from the external world—therein lay the
transformative power. These were the forms of a true art, argued Raúl Lozza,
an art that was not the re-presentation of another thing but the thing itself. That
observation of the truth served to integrate the individual—to make him part
of a whole—and to transform him. Many of the artists in those groups were not
only abstract, but also Marxists and members of the Communist Party.34 Their
concrete forms had a social purpose. Through architecture, they took part of
life itself. This is the case of Diyi Laañ’s perforated and playful form in the work
Pintura Madí sobre marco estructurado [Madi Painting on Structured Frame]
(1949). Viewers themselves were called on to activate the forms by means of
movement (Kosice, Röyi, 1944–1993).
Abstract art was on the rise in almost every city in Latin America. The
small colored rectangles and squares on white background in Lidy Prati’s
compositions from the late forties and early fifties, for instance, make the
pictorial support vibrate (Composición serial [Serial Composition], 1946
[c. 1948]); starting in the fifties, Cuban artist Carmen Herrera, who lived in Paris
and New York, made extremely bare works for which she gained no recognition
(West, 1965).35 María Freire, in Uruguay, produced, starting in the late forties,
abstract works that brought together the pre-Columbian abstract traditions
and modern art, a line of research she would deepen after seeing, in 1953,
original works by Mondrian, Theo van Doesburg, and Vordemberge-Gildewart.
Her reduced palette of pure colors (red, white, and black) and form-signs bore
a relationship to the past of the Americas (Sudamérica Nº 10 [South America
No. 10] (1958). Along with her husband, abstract painter José Pedro Costigliolo,
Herrera was key to articulating a dialogue between abstraction in Uruguay,
Argentina, and Brazil that differed from the line of work established by
Torres García.
Abstract art from Brazil incorporated space and the body. That entailed,
initially, a visual device, like the vibrating grid in Hélio Oiticica’s Metaesquemas

76 77
 [Meta-Schemes] (1958) or the lateral incision that allows the work to open
Madí-Nemsor up to the wall in Lygia Clark’s Unidade V and VI [Unit V and VI] (1958). Later,
Magazine cover for the the abstract forms unfolded in the space as viewers were asked to handle
Movimiento Madí Universal, and manipulate them (Lygia Clark’s Bichos [Bugs] and Hélio Oiticica’s B29
Buenos Aires, No. 0, 1947
Bólide-caixa 16, 1965–1966) or to engage them with their bodies (Hélio
Oiticica’s Parangolés).
The modern city was found not only on the street, in its invigorating
dynamism. It was also in culture, art, literature. La ciudad letrada, or the
lettered city, was the term Ángel Rama used to refer to the intellectual
history of Latin America from the colonial era through the twentieth century.36
He was speaking of the power of the written word, of men of letters, writers,
and thinkers, but also of literacy policies and all the ways that the printed word
in the form of newspapers and books affect the social and individual lives of
persons. The term also refers to the figure of the intellectual as the one who,
through writing, can influence public opinion, envision and discuss the city
and its configuration. Figures like the intellectual Ramón Gómez de la Serna,
whom Diego Rivera painted in 1915, in the Cubist style he adopted while living
in Europe, for the Exposición de los íntegros,37 the show that de la Serna himself
organized in Madrid that same year. In the painting, the writer, smoking, is
surrounded by his books (El libro mudo, El Rastro); like a chiseled portrait, the
phantasmal face of a woman lingers as does an enigmatic revolver. Perhaps
he is in the middle of writing one of the greguerías, statements with ingenious
Arte Concreto-Invención Perceptismo twist or metaphor, puns or philosophical notes, for which he was known.
Magazine cover, Magazine cover, De la Serna and Rivera—and others who frequented the intellectual circle that
Buenos Aires, No. 1, Buenos Aires, No. 7,
revolved around de la Serna—would often spend evenings together at Café
August 1946 July 1953
Pombo in Madrid.
Norah Borges painted on leather, as a dust jacket, an abstract composition
of semicircular forms in which we can make out banners, windows, rainbows,
and the letters of the word hélices (helixes), for the book Hélices. Poemas
(1918-1922), published in 1923 by Guillermo de Torre, whom Borges would marry
in 1928. Under Borges’s dust jacket is a cover, illustrated by Barradas, and inside
the book are three prints of her authorship. The publication, then, brought
together intellectual and artistic affinities and friendship.
The relationship between city and writing can also be traced in Xul Solar’s
shorthand graphic works (Grafia antica [Antique Spelling], 1939), which he
called a contribution to social and functional art bound as well to his pursuit of

78 79
a universal form of communication (he created the neocriollo and panlengua
languages, developed a chessboard based on astrology, and modified the
system of musical notation).38
The tie between city and writing can be shrouded in secrecy, driven by the
need to write even when what’s written may not be understandable. It may
be a simulacrum of writing (Mirta Dermisache, Libro Nº 6 [Book No. 6], 1971)
or an attempt to conceal words of the sort Margarita Paksa proposes in
Es tarde [It’s Late] (1976). In that work, Paksa makes reference to the danger of
writing and the way word and thought were conditioned and restricted during
the dictatorship. Censorship and self-censorship. Writing can take on many
other forms: letters suspended in space (Mira Schendel, Serie PQBD, 1972) or
writing from the body in the traces that a hand leaves on a wrinkled sheet of
paper (Liliana Porter, Wrinkle, 1968). The meaning of writing expands when it
is correspondence: Graciela Gutiérrez Marx, in the city of La Plata, Argentina,
devised international postal actions around her mother, whom she called
“Mamablanca,” thus establishing a line of matriarchal kinship based on the
“book as democratic multiple.”39
Many artists have embraced the task of imagining cities, architectures,
spaces. These surprising maps and architectures convey the sense of the
historical present. The architectures in Xul Solar’s Jol (1926) can be interpreted
in terms of their history, as a utopian and festive project; his Ciudá y abismos
[Ciudá and Abysses] (1946) shows a skeptical architecture in gray tones with
dejected characters, a city of domes or towers of Babel, of ascending paths and
bridges that can be understood as an allegory of the skepticism of the postwar
period. Others imagined the city as a space on which to act or to intervene
through the monument. Inspired by Mesopotamian architecture, Mathias
Goeritz envisaged a building-monument inserted in the landscape, with narrow
windows and terraces that take in the light (Laberinto de Jerusalén [Jerusalem
Labyrinth], 1973, and Jerusalén I [Jerusalem I], 1977)—an example of what, in
1954, Goeritz called emotional architecture, that sought to have an impact on
viewers by appealing to their senses. Imagine as well fantastic architectures like
the wheeled tower, lifted by the blades of two windmills and hanging from two
moons as Remedios Varo conceived in Mexico (Ícono [Icon], 1945), where she
and her husband, surrealist poet Benjamin Péret, arrived fleeing the war.
The city is also the place of different forms of violence. In 1980, León Ferrari
began producing planes with lines and typeface that he would print using the
80
heliographic technique. He would use the postal system to distribute those
folded prints in envelopes, ushering in a novel form of mural mail art. While
no one could possibly live in spaces like the ones he designed, they are not
entirely unlike the experience of São Paulo, the city where he would live as an
exile during the Argentine dictatorship. These are impossible architectures in
which center-less and unsettling spaces proliferate, in which life—if there were
any—would be determined by a restless mechanism. Roberto Jacoby wrote:
Nobody would dare imagine such a dire fate for the human species. …
a vast prison. A transplanted vision of Foucault’s theory of power.
A panoptic device where a sovereign eye surveys without being seen
while the observed only partly connect to one another.40
And yet, these planes convey as well the intense sense of humor often
characteristic of Ferrari’s art. There is none of that humor in the architectures of
floating or underground jails designed by Horacio Zabala in 1973 (Anteproyectos
de cárceles: sobre columna, flotante, subterránea [Draft for Prisons: Over
Column, Floating, Underground]). These drawings bound to the imaginary
of the architectural blueprint are tied to daily life in a country where, during
the dictatorship, violence was growing in an irrational crescendo. Indeed,
irrationality has been a recurring theme at different moments in the country’s
history. Santiago Porter’s photographic register of the decapitated sculpture of
Eva Perón (now situated at Quinta 17 de Octubre in San Vicente, Buenos Aires
province) is one of the many archives capable of documenting the iconoclastic
fury against the Peronist imaginary unleashed during the self-proclaimed
Revolución Libertadora.41 The mausoleum project passed by the legislature in
1952, a monument to be constructed by Italian artist Leone Tommasi, was never
finished. During the coup in 1955, a military commando mutilated the images
in the sculptor’s studio to then throw them into the Riachuelo River. They were
removed from the river during Menem’s administration and installed in Quinta
17 de Octubre, where Perón’s remains also lay. The decapitated statue of Eva is
holding in her hands the Peronist Party shield.
Drawing inspiration from spy and action films, David Lamelas mixes reality
and fiction (documentary fictions) in a series that appeals to the montage
of narrative sequences suggestive of the experience of urban violence (The
Violent Tapes of 1975, 1975–2005). These ten black-and-white photographs act
81
like stills from a documentary or lost register. The images allow us to follow or
to imagine the story of a chase in which two men and a woman try to grab hold
of a metal film canister. The last shot shows the woman, dead and in dramatic
stance, holding the film.

City and Country

The experience of modernity in Latin America ensued in the tension between

city and country, the polar figures of Roberto Arlt and Ricardo Güiraldes, and
Horacio Quiroga’s jungle that lay between them. The rapid growth of cities
gave rise to the topics of difference, contrast, distance, at play in how these
scenes change values and customs—indeed, life itself. The city is the opposite
of the country.42 Images constitute observatories of the vast contradictions
and representations of the margins of the city, of everything envisioned or
idealized outside its vague borders. The bodies with their backs turned and
facing a jumble of hills, houses, furrows, wheels, and work instruments in
Rafael Barradas’s Los migrantes [The Migrants] convey a sense of accelerated
displacement. This is not an image of vastness, of endless skies, or of
indetermination. All the details express how work gives nature meaning and
attest to the flight that turns that body into migrant.
The outskirts of the city are its margins, zones that hold its waste,
indefiniteness, illegality, abandonment and neglect. The faces of the women
in Antonio Berni’s La gran ilusión [The Great Illusion] or La gran tentación
[The Great Temptation] (1962) embody two opposing worlds. One of them—
the blond with taut skin—is an advertisement image that exhibits the values of
capitalism (she is holding French coins in one hand and a Buick in the other);
the other is the underside of that first image, the prostitute whose body is
composed by other bodies that make hers possible—“normal” couples and
men who structure a social logic that brings her into existence. Her skin is
not taut and her hair is a tangle like a scouring pad. Her lips do not mirror the
serene halfway smile that the advertisement blond wears on her face, but
rather assume a stiff gesture of what look to be false teeth. Her eyes are open
wide in astonishment, fright, outrage. She struts around with other vociferous
characters and with a dog whose metallic body is made of industrial waste.
They all move through trash while the blond lady lingers above on the other
side of the wall.

82 83

León Ferrari
Pasarela [Footbridge], 1981 (detail)
Heliographic copy on paper, x/∞
100 x 150 cm
MALBA Collection
Norah Borges
Woodcut reproduced in the book
Hélices. Poemas (1918-1922),
by Guillermo de Torre, 1923
MALBA Collection
Norah Borges
Woodcut reproduced in the book
Hélices. Poemas (1918-1922),
by Guillermo de Torre, 1923
MALBA Collection
Literature and film are enlisted as well in the allure of the big city and the
search for new horizons. In Lucas Demare’s film Detrás de un largo muro,
Teresa explains to Rosa—both of whom have migrated from the country to
the city—why she left the shantytown and, with it, her family, to live “in sin”
with a man. As Teresa explains ironically, she did not move in with a man
but with a bathroom. Morality, here, is replaced by comfort. She uses irony
and the absurd to express to what point the extreme poverty of the shantytown
undermines moral values. The moral register clashes with the social register.
What Teresa is after is comfort and cleanliness. The two women arrive at
Retiro train station in downtown Buenos Aires and set out to explore the
modern city in the convertible car that came for them. The modern city, with
its cars and the emblematic Kavanagh building, is a stopover on the way to the
place where they will live: the shantytown hidden behind the long wall. Rosa’s
face shows her disappointment, the same disappointment felt by Marcelo, the
child in Bernardo Verbitsky’s Villa miseria también es América (1957), who after
an all-night train ride to the city from the province of Misiones, takes in a heap
of tin cans and asks himself, “Is this Buenos Aires?”43 The same tin cans and
rusty metals appear in collages by Kenneth Kemble, like Paisaje suburbano II
[Landcape on the Outskirts II] (1958); Berni uses them as well in the saga
of vulnerability and injustice that revolves around his character Ramona, a
prostitute, and around Juanito Laguna, a boy who lives in the midst of industrial
waste, the trash that surrounds the outskirts of Buenos Aires. The wondrous
city with growing skyscrapers is the one he gazes at, almost always from the
other side of the wall. In opposition to moralist literature that represented
sexual abandon (Evaristo Carriego, La costurerita que dio aquel mal paso, 1913),
Berni’s Ramona finds herself in an ambiguous situation; she is at once victim
and woman who decides what to do with her body. Nonetheless, the social
discourse never disappears in these works or in Jean-Luc Godard’s film Vivre
sa vie (1962).44
Beyond the borders in which the city ventures a definition of itself in relation
to other spaces lie the representations of the Pampa and of Patagonia, of the
mountain and of the jungle—the other in relation to the cosmopolitan universe
of the metropolis. In nineteenth-century Argentine cultural history, the Pampa—
fertile and prosperous agricultural region—was assimilated into the desert,
understood as abyss, as hell. It is terra incognita beyond the border, territory
of barbarism as opposed to civilization. Encroaching on those spaces entails a

84 85
twofold challenge—defeating nature and defeating the indigenous population,
who vies for possession of the land.45 Ángel Della Valle’s La vuelta del malón
[The Return of the Indian Raid] (1892) is the work that brings to a close the
cycle of confrontation with the indigenous barbarian lavishly illustrated in the
painting’s details.46 We will later return to the problem of the Indian—the other
side of that modernity that encroached into his territories with fences, estates,
plantations, cattle, industry, trains, and highways.
Emeric Essex Vidal’s watercolors from the nineteenth century ushered in the
stable repertoire of representations of the Pampa: vast skies, wagons, trees
(the ombú), farms. Compared to the exuberance of the jungle or of the Andean
mountains, the Pampa holds little appeal for the artist’s eye. It lacks drama and
emotion. Humboldt recommended to Rugendas that he not depict regions like
Buenos Aires.47 Eduardo Sívori captured that landscape with great synthesis,
from distant perspectives where the sky and the almost unbroken horizon
line predominate. The ascetic Pampa, in striking contrast to José Cúneo’s
extremely dramatic representations of the Uruguayan countryside (Luna y
enramada [Moon and Arbor], 1940). Giant moons, backlighting, low and close
perspectives, intersecting centripetal and dynamic structures, imbue these
landscapes with emotion.
If, in the nineteenth century, it was imperative to conquer the desert, to
move beyond the incipient Buenos Aires into that vast nothingness, in the
twentieth the movement was in the opposite direction. The territory to be
conquered and redefined was the city. Migrants and immigrants—mostly from
Europe—began populating the cities. The foreigner was also a threat, especially
if that foreigner was classified as an anarchist.
And still further south, beyond the Pampa, lies Patagonia and its endless
plains. Steppe and seventh largest desert in the world. Francis Alÿs’s film Historia
de un desengaño. Patagonia 2004-2006 [A Story of Deception. Patagonia 2004–
2006] (2006) captures with precision the experience of exploring its roads,
so flat and straight that they create a mirage, the illusion of an unreachable
reflecting pool that alters the perception of distance. This monotony, which
Olivier Debroise describes as a “mercurial reflection,” might lull the driver to
sleep. A metaphor for the unreachable. Alÿs’s original project entailed replicating
the Tehuelche practice of chasing rheas and guanacos until they were worn out
in order to hunt them—a custom that ceased to exist not only as a result of the
Conquest of the Desert, but also due to the advance of cattle farming, and
86
the wire fencing and large ranches that came with it.48 Alÿs tells the story of
a failure that led him to observe the mirrored flight of the highway.
The sense of endlessness that the southern landscape incites is interrupted
by the poverty and neglect of the split house that Eduardo Gil found near
Río Grande in Tierra del Fuego. The image, which Gil associates with Gordon
Matta-Clark’s cut buildings, dedicating his photograph to that artist—Splitting
patagónico (a G.M.C.) [Patagonic Splitting (to G.M.C.)], 2006—, interrupts the
flat desolation of the landscape, of which we can only see fragments of other
precarious houses and bits of trash. The furthest point of the continent is the
image of extreme neglect.
María Teresa Ponce depicts the friction between nature, poverty, and
pollution. She looks to the conventions of scientific landscape painting—the
scenes represented by Rafael Troya, illustrator of German science expeditions,
in particular—in her photographs of the Ecuadorian oil pipeline (SOTE - OCP).
Like Troya, Ponce wants to capture all the details. María Fernanda Cartagena
points out the analogical and documentary power of the image: “If the
painting endorsed a Eurocentric vision, the photograph reveals postcolonial
conditions.”49 Ponce, like many Latin American artists, formulated—on the
occasion of Independence celebrations—dialogues between past and present,
the distance between the visions of independence and contemporary history.
The opposite of the Pampa and the desert would be the forest or the jungle
that the human eye cannot take in. They must be penetrated with the body.
Two opposing visions attest to this texture of tight-knit experiences: Pettoruti’s
vision that, in a faceted language that coordinated a tangle of perceptions,
ordered the forest surrounding Vallombrosa, a Benedictine abbey (Vallombrosa,
1916), and Miguel Covarrubias’s painting of the jungle of the island of Bali,
Indonesia, which he visited during his honeymoon with dancer Rosa Rolando in
1930 and where he returned in 1935 (Jungle Scene, ca. 1935).50 The imaginaries
of Latin American modernism did not, then, necessarily take shape in Latin
America. Artists from the region also looked for the markings of difference in
foreign zones they discovered in their modernist journeys.
In Chile, the Andean landscape is imposing. The shape of the mountains
can be made out in the background of Lotty Rosenfeld’s interventions on the
dividing lines of the streets of Santiago, lines that she turns into crosses—a
silent, rather than declamatory, shape used in a performance she did on her
own; a rhythmic ritual that makes reference to the state of Chilean society
87
under the dictatorship. The power of that landscape forms part of the specific
conditions in which Chilean culture ensues. The image of the mountain that
closes Rosenfeld’s work pinpoints the place where she performed her Una milla
de cruces sobre el pavimento [A Mile of Crosses on the Pavement] (1979).

Body and Affects

A strange body, with enormous lower extremities and tiny head; a nude body
with no biological markings of a specific sex; orange yellows, greens, and blues
that echo, if distantly, the Brazilian flag; a body like a piece of tender flesh
whose visual power is heightened by the title: Abaporu (1928), from the Tupi-
Guarani aba/poru—“man who eats man.” It was on the basis of this work by
Tarsila do Amaral that poet Oswald de Andrade—the artist’s partner—wrote the
Manifesto antropófago (1928); in 1924, he had signed the Manifesto Pau-Brasil.
The image and that second manifesto were published together. But the image
was produced before the text. Indeed, the image had provoked the text.

Anthropophagy only unites us. Socially. Economically. Philosophically.

The world’s single law. Disguised expression of all individualism, of all
collectivism. Of all religions. Of all peace treaties.
Tupi, or not tupi, that is the question.51

With the word “Tupi,” the text makes direct reference to Brazilian indigenous
peoples while also replicating, phonetically, the language of Shakespeare,
betraying the original. This is a powerful metaphor that ignites the imagination,
a metaphor of the man who eats men as foundational act in a specifically
Brazilian cultural chronology. A nude body, as opposed to the body converted
to Catholicism.52 The nudity displays a cultural frontier. A monumental body
of indeterminate sex. This was not the first time Tarsila’s work made reference
to race. In 1923, the year she took classes with Fernand Léger in París,53 Tarsila
painted A Negra [Black Woman], a nude woman with thick lips, her enormous
flat breast falling on her arm. Behind Oswald and Tarsila was Blaise Cendrars, a
figure central to Modern Art Week, considered the birthplace of modern art in
Brazil. Ambiguous bodies, mestizos bodies that Tarsila merged in her later work
Antropofagia [Anthropophagy] (1929). All three works are “image-manifestos”
that introduce the issue of race in Brazilian modern art.

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 New ways of experiencing and of representing the body. A more avid reader
Eduardo Sívori of Jung than of Freud, Juan Batlle Planas produced, in 1937, a series of radical
Pampa o Chacra La Porteña, Moreno collages that combine anatomical parts (hip bones, a baby in uterus, a coccyx)
[Pampa or La Porteña Farm, Moreno], 1899 with written phrases (“female sterility,” “victim of her ‘nerves’,” “treatment of
44,5 x 77,5 cm
women”) or images tied to the feminine (a crochet doily, a spool of thread or
Watercolor on paper
Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes Collection, wool, a woman in nineteenth-century attire, sewing patterns). The scientific
Buenos Aires language of anatomy the artist introduces could be envisioned in relation
to psychoanalysis—Batlle Planas read psychoanalyst Wilhem Reich, who
considered the biological energy of the orgasm crucial.54 The central question
seems to be woman and opposing forms of the masculine. Batlle Planas’s cut
and assembled images constitute a social map of genders, commonplaces in
thinking about the feminine and the masculine.
Woman as enigma. That is the sensation conveyed by the female figure in
Agustín Lazo’s El examen [The Examination] (1930). Covered in white fabric, she
is on a sofa, her back to us, and surrounded by men—one of whom looks at her.
While the work might make reference to Xavier Villaurrutia’s poem “Nocturno de
estatua,” which was dedicated to Lazo—his companion—or to the Toltec image
of Chacmool, Mayan goddess of rain,55 the scene is strange. The female figure
is “examined” like an other radically different from the group of men in suits.
We don’t know whether she is dressed or nude under that sheet or towel that
Ángel Della Valle envelops her restless form.
La vuelta del malón [The Return of the Indian Raid], 1892 In patriarchal society, any body, sensibility, affect, or appearance that upsets
Oil on canvas a sexual canon grounded in biology is vexing. Regardless of the sexual choices
186 x 292 cm
of an individual, the moral surveillance of society organizes that individual on
Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes Collection,
Buenos Aires
the basis of biology. Those admonitions are undermined by the photographs
of the Yeguas del Apocalipsis,56 a collective of Chilean artists Francisco Casas
and Pedro Lemebel active from 1987 to 1997, in the tense years of transition
from dictatorship to the incipient democracy. Yeguas del Apocalipsis turned
Frida Kahlo’s emblematic painting Las dos Fridas [The Two Fridas] (1939) into
a performance and photographic register. The blood in Kahlo’s painting here
makes reference to the threat of contagion, widespread in the eighties with
the onset of AIDS. Casas and Lemebel center on the body, on interdisciplinary
work, on criticism of mainstream art circuits, on the political formats of gay
activism, and on the patriarchal structures of the left. In 1986, Pedro Lemebel
read his text-manifesto Hablo por mi diferencia at a meeting of leftist groups
at Mapocho station in Santiago, Chile. Wearing high heels and with a hammer

90 91
and sickle painted in makeup on the left side of his face, Lemebel asked, “What
will they do with us, comrade? Will they tie us up by our braids to be sent to an
AIDS colony in Cuba? Will they put us in a train somewhere?”57
Images escape the past and take on present, and urgent, meaning in today’s
contexts: in Argentina and Mexico, the rates of femicide are strikingly high; in
February 2016, groups of neo-Nazis attacked gays in the Argentine city of Mar
del Plata; and in a gay club in Orlando, Florida, in the United States, in June of
that same year, a massacre was unleashed. The dark side of modernity. The
rejection of dissident sensibilities, sensibilities not in keeping with the canon
that has regulated the aesthetic of the West—even today, women represent
no more than 30% of artists in the mainstream art world—a canon that limits
and censors the possibility for citizens to come into contact with different
sensibilities, those outside the norm of dominant aesthetic values.
Starting in the sixties, when women began to question the moral formats
that determined their behavior, the historical marginalization of female
experience in the domestic sphere began to come undone. A fragmentation of
the body ensued as the social contract that bound it so tightly to motherhood
and the home, to the biological cycle, was dismantled, along with the idea of a
body rooted in biology. The second wave of feminism allowed for the formation
of a laboratory that denaturalized bodily formats and effected a radical shift
in iconography. New bodily knowledge not restrained by the indexation
or tabulation of social norms has been central to an ongoing process of
emancipation from correct bodies, from the social mandate that regulates
the opposing appearances and uses of female and male bodies.
Brazilian artist Wanda Pimentel’s Envolvimento [Involvement] series, which
was produced over the course of ten years (1966–1976), addresses a key issue
on the feminist artistic agenda, mainly the relationship between women and
the domestic space. Pimentel does not present traditional visions of a seated
woman sewing, for example, or full-body images of women walking. Alongside
the pots and pans, irons, and sewing machines, Pimentel places cigarettes,
items related to fashion, cosmetics, cars, telephones. These are objects used
by young female bodies that, because never shown in their entirety, convey a
carefree quality and sense of pleasure. The critical argument regarding these
new perceptions of women is articulated explicitly in María Luisa Bemberg’s first
feminist film El mundo de la mujer [Woman’s World] (1972). The work was shot
at a trade fair dedicated to products for women held at La Rural, a convention
92
center in Buenos Aires. In the film, Bemberg combines and contrasts images
and texts that mock the stereotypes projected by the market.
In the sixties, the place of woman in society and her right to dominion over
her own body became an issue. As stated above, the story of Berni’s Ramona
records the tension between the social condemnation of prostitution and the
right of a woman to use her body as she chooses. Though Ramona is stalked
by monsters (and, in that sense, punished), she is also a strong woman who
lifts weights. These works were produced at the same time Jean-Luc Godard
was making films like Vivre sa vie and La Chinoise, which attests to the fact that
these issues were on the international cultural agenda in the sixties.
Perhaps no work in this section of the exhibition is more explicit in its staging
of the confrontation between body and market than the one in which Liliana
Maresca announces: “Space available / Apt for all uses / Liliana Maresca /
[tel.] 23-5457 / from 12-3-92 to 12-24-92.” On two signs placed on the wall, she
insists: “Available / [tel.] 23-5457” and “Space available.”58 The pairing of the
signs and the object being advertised—the artist’s own body—underscores the
fact that she is the one in charge of how to administer herself within the logic
of the market. These were the years when AIDS was on the rise—the artist
herself had already been diagnosed. The social consequences of the virus
meant the freezing of affective ties and the mandates for hygiene meant
limiting and regulating contact between bodies. It was even thought, at that
time, that a kiss could be a source of contagion.
In 1991, Batato Barea—a key figure on the Buenos Aires underground cultural
scene of the eighties—died of AIDS. Clown-transvestite-man of letters was how
he described himself;59 Marcia Schvartz painted his portrait in 1989. Regardless
of the veil, the necklace, the furs, and the women’s clothing that shroud his
body, the figure’s neck, chin, hands, and feet indicate that—despite painted
nails—this is a man’s body. Schvartz portrays him with a clown, a teddy bear,
and a revolver in his left hand. Everything is rendered weightless or steeped
in transvestitism when the enormous roses come off the wall and move into
the space. The portrait makes reference to Café Einstein, the Parakultural, and
Cemento—the privileged venues of the underground scene that would soon
make its way into the visual arts as well.
Chile under dictatorship was similarly riddled by marginalization of
homosexuality. It was in that context that, in 1983, Paz Errázuriz photographed
La Palmera and La Jauja, brothels in Santiago and in Talca, respectively
93
(La manzana de Adán, Santiago, Chile, Editorial Zona 1990). The photographs
focus on the life, love, and transformation that takes place each night at a
transvestite brothel. Errázuriz, like Claudia Donoso—author of the text in the
aforementioned book of photographs—lived in those brothels and got to know
the networks of relations that, despite the repression, imprisonment, and
marginality that beset their lives, surround those who work there.
In the eighties, many Argentines traveled to Brazil in search of greater
freedom, especially in terms of the expression of their sexuality. While living in
São Paulo, Marcelo Pombo created a series of subtle drawings that “surrealize”
sex by means of explicit, exaggerated, impossible representations.60 In the
later drawings he made in the Argentine city of Puerto Madryn in 1995, he depicts
characters like the Niño mariposa [Butterfly Boy]; in other images, characters
with teddy bear or clown nose look at other characters or doze underwater.
The affective nature of these drawings differs from art with “serious” themes.
These images are bound to childhood feelings and to emotions experienced in
daily contact. Similar affective ties are at play in the work of Emiliano Centurión,
whose parents, like many Paraguayans, self-exiled to Argentina in 1974.
Centurión’s embroideries and blankets remind us of the way embroidering
connects women. The stitches used to write phrases like “I perfume your
memory” or “My interior blooms” become particularly emotional when
understood as legacy or reflection on life produced at the moment when he was
leaving it.61 Mechanical and repetitive practice, the quality of the thread, and the
pattern imposed by the fabric support make themselves felt in Fernanda Laguna’s
embroidery of two identical black cats (Dos gatos muy locos [Two Very Crazy
Cats], 2003). Neither the theme nor the material nor the technique partakes of
“serious” art. “I can make a painting as if I were making a cake, but it always turns
out to be a painting.”62 Starting in the late nineties and through the beginning
of the new century, Laguna’s poetry, artworks, and publications introduced a
feminine and queer aesthetic.63
Skin—that immediate territory of affect, that zone exposed to any and all
contact—is suggested in the bare feet walking amidst eggs in Anna Maria
Maiolino’s performance Entrevidas [Between Lives] (1981). The idea of proceeding
with caution in a delicate situation might be a reference to the fragile new
political space opening up in a Brazil still under dictatorship. One year later,
Hudinilson Jr. photocopied his body, enlarging fragments of his skin (folds, hairs,
orifices) to yield contrasts between black and white. In his book of collages

94 95
 (Caderno de Referências [Reference Book], 1980), skin mixes with faces and
Pedro Lemebel bodies suggestive of pornography, the homoerotic, the news.
Manifiesto [Manifesto], 1990 In the nineties, many Argentine artists heightened the domestic and the
110 x 70 cm manual components of their work, overriding or reformulating the conflict
Pedro Montes Collection
between the most traditional conception of art and handicrafts. Omar Schiliro
—who, like Liliana Maresca, died of AIDS in 1994—used cheap and readily
accessible materials to construct voluptuous sculptures of shiny forms.64 A new
sensibility was in the making, one that appealed to the feminine systematically
dismissed and devalued in the languages of canonical art. A community of
artists was designing a world with different circuits of legitimacy at the heart
of which was the Galería del Rojas, a branch of the Universidad de Buenos
Aires. This was a grammar of smallness originally geared to children or to the
development of non-intellectual forms of knowledge that did not enjoy the
status of serious expression. Cristina Schiavi’s stuffed animals, Benito Laren’s
painted panes of glass, the candies in Sebastián Gordín’s works, the woodwork
in Gumier Maier’s production, Fabio Kacero’s laminated reliefs, Beto de Volder’s
comic sexuality, Miguel Harte’s fantastic environments, Graciela Hasper’s playful
abstraction, and Alfredo Londaibere’s landscapes with squashed beer cans.
Together, these works constituted an operation that undermined the hierarchy
Paz Errázuriz of aesthetic principles that have determined dominant artistic values. They
Evelyn, 1982
also entail a radical violation of the conceptual canon of minimalism. Perhaps
From the La manzana de Adán [Adam’s Apple] series
Gelatin silver print on paper
that is why Argentine art from the nineties cannot readily find a place in the
Vintage print international art world. It is not about social unrest, but about everyday life
24.5 x 36 cm addressed in a “childlike” and feminine manner akin to a school crafts project—
Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía Collection which, in fact, was the proposal of the exhibition Escuelismo.65 This aesthetic
looked to domestic and feminine skill and to knowledge that turns one thing
into another. An unrecognized and ignored form of knowledge that operates
with what’s at hand, that creates illusion, and that produces happiness. The
art of children, of women, of the insane. On June 28—International Gay and
Lesbian Freedom Day—1984, GAG published a flier addressed to “that portion
of humanity—half and then some—whose behavior, feelings, and attitudes do
not align with the norms established by the dominant class. Epileptics, hippies,
single mothers, the insane, gays, criminals, prostitutes, gypsies, vagabonds,
drug addicts and alcoholics, deaf-mutes, dwarves, exhibitionists, the crippled,
lepers, albinos, syphilitics, anarchists, and women in general, as well as those
with secret stigmas: the option is neurosis or barricade.”66

96 97
 Starting in the forties, artists like Grete Stern, Maria Martins, and Annemarie
Heinrich provided a more explicit way into a female imaginary in the
representation of bodies and desire. One example are the dreams that women
readers sent in to the magazine Idilio (1948–1961)67 which, from 1948 to 1951,
Stern illustrated with some one hundred and fifty photomontages produced
using photographs from her own archives. Images of women trapped in
books, women turned into the base of a lamp, women climbing desperately
on washing boards, or pushing an enormous rock up a hill, or standing fearful
before a snake-man, or enclosed in a bottle or floating, alone, in a sphere in the
middle of a desolate landscape; the faces of these women are reminiscent of
the faces in Hitchcock films. What they express, above all, is fear and despair.
An archive of expressions that would veer towards the satirical some thirty
years later in Mónica Mayer’s Lo normal [Normal] (1978), in which the artist
photographed herself wearing different expressions. An archive that served
as the basis for a fake survey in which, following the instructions, respondents
would assess the normalcy of their sexual preferences. Though the survey was
geared to women, the options for answers could apply, in almost all cases, to
anyone, regardless of biological status or sexual orientation.68
Starting in the thirties, photographer Annemarie Heinrich explored the face
(both in self-portraits and in portraits of Argentine intellectuals and artists) and,
particularly starting in the forties, the body. It was not common for a woman
photographer to photograph a nude body, male or female, or to consider it in
fragments and as surface, delving into its visual power and its sensuality.
As such, her images convey an emancipating vision, one that not only liberates
the body as theme, but also—because the eye framing the image belongs to a
woman—puts forth an alternative and different perspective.69 While, as far as
we know, Heinrich did not participate in any feminist organizations, many of
her photographs—such as La mano [The Hand] (1953)—can be interpreted as a
criticism of the patriarchal order that regulates society. Her work, then, foretells
the agenda of the second wave of feminism, which largely revolved around
women’s power over their own bodies.
The work of Marisol—an artist known only by that name, since she stopped
using her last name, Escobar—incisively examines society’s stereotypes. Her
groups of sculptures expose and mock the normative patterns of marriage and
family in North American society. Couple 2 (1966) consists of two parallelepipeds;
the artist paints a female body on one and a male body on the other in a
98
representation that destroys any possible idea of domestic love. They are wearing
helmets; he is carrying a gun. This is a portrait of the bellicosity that riddles social
life—not only in North American society, but in Latin America as well.
Ricardo Garabito’s sculptures display mutant and menacing sexualities
(Supulata and Virgata, 1990), which binds them to the forms that undo the
faces in Maria Martins’s sculpture O impossível [The Impossible] (1945). Her
work is also tied to the power of nature in the Amazon and of its myths (the
Great Cobra or the Great Serpent, the myth of man-eating Iara). It alludes to
the indeterminate, the state of transformation, to the conflict between two
bodies. The power of eroticism intermingled with violence. Bodies for whom
antagonism is erotic friction—a sensation that makes itself felt in the struggle
between two nude men in Submarino amarillo [Yellow Submarine], the film that
Oscar Bony made on the dunes of Villa Gesell, Argentina, in 1965.70
Indeterminacy of tissue or of fluid connects Martins’s work with Anna Maria
Maiolino’s series Codificações matéricas (Sin título) [Material Codifications
(Untitled, 1995)]. What we see is a long organic form that crosses the surface of
the paper and explodes before reaching the lower edge. It is, in fact, the register
of the artist’s intentional movements as she moves the material over the sheet of
paper: the shape of that descending blotch is the indexical marking of her body.
The body as space to abolish norms and to redefine the patterns that
regulate the social order took center stage in the art scene in the sixties and
seventies. A few examples selected from so many include Jorge de la Vega’s
Rompecabezas [Puzzle], produced between 1968 and 1970, in which the
different modules are connected by what looks like an immense intestine.
Many associations are possible: hands touching one another and the Pop art-
like heads of men and women laughing can be seen in that visceral tangle.
These are forms that upset patterns for the identification of bodies. Out of that
mass, individuals emerge. Alternative bodies and alternative faces that question
identity in, for instance, Marta Minujín’s film Autogeografía (con máscaras)
[Self-Geography (with masks)] (1976).
Indigenism and Negritude
One thing that the conquest, the colony, and the new republics that shattered
the colonial order during the nineteenth century had in common was the
determination to erase both the indigenous cultures of the Americas and
99
the cultures that took shape in the colony under slavery. Extermination and
subjugation are the words that best describe this violence, and mestizaje
and syncretism the ones that capture the result of the many “contact zones”
that arose in the Americas, zones where indigenous, African, and European
cultures—but also Asian culture, mostly pursuant to Chinese immigration
starting in the mid-nineteenth century and Japanese immigration beginning in
the early twentieth—intersected. When we speak of the dark side of modernity,
however, we are speaking of the silenced contribution to universal culture
made by indigenous and African diaspora cultures.71 Zones that have been
occluded in mainstream and official narratives surface as “zones of disturbance”72
in the poetics of modern artists, many of whom had traveled to Europe to
study73 or had been educated in Latin American academies whose curricula
were modeled on European schools.74 Starting in colonial times, images
activated these banished and obscured—but not cowering—areas in different
ways. In the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries, they are astir as
visual/conceptual materials that upset the narrative of evolution and progress
put forth in the languages of modern art. It is not a question of contents that
provide European forms with a new theme. Why is it possible to represent
forms of African culture within European modernism, as the established
narrative of Cubism formulated by Picasso and Braque maintains, but not
understand, according to the same logic of influences, forms of European
culture within Latin American modernism? Granted that the word “modern”
is at the crux of European Enlightenment thought, my question is an attempt
to invert the mechanisms imposed by models that make the new disappear
for the sake of genealogy. Brazilian modernism’s call to anthropophagy was a
response of sorts. Indigenism and negritude have been absorbed into the logic
of styles. But the works themselves trigger much more than an arrangement of
styles that attempts to contain them.
Indigenism, as resistant Latin American modernism, is voiced mightily in the
works of the Mexican muralists. That movement advocated by Vasconcelos,
who believed in the educational power of the image, aimed to cover miles of
walls with works produced in post-revolution Mexico.75 The work Accidente
en la mina [Accident in the Mine] can be interpreted in relation to bodies
exposed and made vulnerable by the Mexican mining system. Violence against
the indigenous body. The first murals by Rivera, Siqueiros, José Clemente
Orozco, and others show the history of the conquest and the destruction SACAR MARCO GRIS,
FORMA RECORTADA
EN BLANCO (CON
SOMBRA
100 101
 of civilizations, exploitation, and revolutionary struggle. They also show the
Gachi Hasper celebration of indigenous life in, for instance, the upright, powerful, and serene
Untitled, 2009 stance of the women and men dancing in Diego Rivera’s Baile en Tehuantepec
Acrylic [Dance in Tehuantepec] (1928) and in the Tehuana woman painted by Miguel
198 x 207 cm
Covarrubias (Mujer de Tehuantepec o Tehuana [Tehuantepec Woman], 1945).
MALBA Collection
The monumental body also makes itself felt in Luis Ortiz Monasterio’s sculpture
El viento [The Wind] (1932), a work that approaches the Aztec sculpture
tradition with modernist synthesis. That work’s proportions and angles intercept
European styles to undermine them.
The basis of Indigenism is demand for land and for the right to cultural self-
determination. Rivera seems more concerned with the injustice endured by
indigenous peoples in the past than in the present insofar as he focuses on the
positive effects of the revolution such as agrarian reform and improvements
in education.
While the post-revolutionary state deployed Indigenism to further the
national discourse,76 exploitation and abuse persisted—as is evident in the
Zapatista uprising that broke out in Chiapas on January 1, 1994 under the
leadership of Subcomandante Marcos. The indigenous demands and uprising
circulated around the world thanks to the use of communication networks.77
Cristina Schiavi Popular art is central to both Peruvian and Mexican Indigenism. Rivera
Desagüe [Drainage], 2001 collected pre-Hispanic and contemporary objects and Frida Kahlo dressed
MDF, digital images, —or cross-dressed—in the blouses and skirts used by women on the Isthmus
tiles and light
of Tehuantepec. Monkeys, cats, parrots, and other birds served as affective ties
200 x 120 x 18 cm
MALBA Collection to that culture in transition. Animals with human faces attest to the mobility
of social life. Animals as political places.78 At the same time, Rivera and Kahlo’s
representations supported a generic vision of indigenous peoples that looked
to the past rather than to their contemporary circumstances. Siqueiros, on
Jorge Gumier Maier the other hand, more staunchly refused to separate Indigenism from current
Untitled, 2002 exploitation and social protest—a tendency he shared with Indigenists like
Wood and acrylic ink Camilo Egas and Oswaldo Guayasamín in Ecuador. Nor does the work of
61 x 88,5 x 15 cm
Venezuelan artist Héctor Poleo adhere to a heroic or uncritical vision. In the
MALBA Collection
tempered, almost classic and careful, realism that characterized his production,
he portrayed three Andean peasants in Tres figuras en marcha [Three Figures
Walking] (1943). Barefoot and monumental, those figures—wearing common,
as opposed to typically indigenous, attire—are migrating. The painting can be
seen as an allegory for uprootedness due to dispossession of the land.

102 103
 While the pre-Hispanic past may not have had the same presence in the
Río de la Plata region as it did in Mexico and in Peru, it was in Montevideo
and in Buenos Aires that three abstract re-readings of the visual and symbolic
repertoires of Mesoamerican and Incan cultures were produced. Xul Solar
painted Troncos [Tree Trunks] in 1919, the same year he moved to London,
where he saw the British Museum’s pre-Hispanic collections. That work can be
seen as a modern reading of the legend of the god-man and feathered snake
Quetzacoatl as he ventures into the underworld or when, after transgressing,
he throws himself into fire to emerge in the form of a bird and to turn into the
morning star, the morning Venus. If European artists mostly looked at African
art and art from Asia and Oceania, Xul Solar revisited pre-Hispanic beliefs in
works like Tlaloc, dedicated to the god of rain, and Nana Watzin.79 He studied
cabbala, astrology, the occult, and tarot as he devised a pan-religion parallel
to neocriollo, that language he invented as the fusion of many languages.
Works like Cuatro cholas [Four Cholas] (1923) make reference not only in their
titles to the generic word used for mestiza women from Andean countries like
Peru or Bolivia. Similarly, it was at the Musée du Trocadéro that Joaquín Torres
García discovered Nazca ceramics. From the Río de la Plata region, these artists
formulated the repertoire of an abstract Indigenism that the colonial vision
understood as an outgrowth of European modernism. An abstraction in which
the forms of a pre-Hispanic past pulsate and glow.
The situation in the territories that formed part of the Inca Empire was
different. Though the destruction of the indigenous culture and the exploitation
and systematic impoverishment of its people were as radical in Peru as they
were in Mexico, no revolution of the sort unleashed against Porfiriato in 1910
ensued there. In 1928, Juan Carlos Mariátegui argued that the greatest struggle
was the struggle for the eight-hour workday—and it was limited to the country’s
capital. In 1928, Mariátegui founded the Peruvian Socialist Party. Though a
Marxist, he looked to the model of the Ayllu—the social structures in place
before conquest—which he advocated from the pages of Amauta (1926–1930).
In the nineteenth century, painter Francisco Laso heeded the indigenous
past in his emblematic El indio alfarero [The Indian Potter] (1855),80 bestowing
it a dignity that could also be understood as a negation of the Andean past
and present. In the process of the consolidation of nation-states, the figure
of the noble Indian was also dignified as martyr.81 Those visions were part of
an ideological apparatus that attempted to leave the problem of the Indian
104
in the past in order to move forward into a white future based on European
immigration. Mariátegui pointed out that the solution to the indigenous
problem did not lie in racial integration, but rather in eradicating the system
of exploitation:
The concept of inferior races was useful to the white Western project of
expansion and conquest. To hope that the Indian will be emancipated
through actively mixing the aboriginal race and white immigrants is an
ingenuous and anti-sociological conception only possible in the rudimentary
mind of an importer of merino rams…82
The Indian problem was the problem of land.
The series of posters that Peruvian artist Jesús Ruiz Durand produced
from 1968 to 1973 in a style that he called “Pop-achorado” (Pop works with
solarization or Sabattier effect) makes reference to the context and political
agenda of the self-proclaimed Revolutionary Government of the Armed Forces
of Peru (1968–1975), which enacted agrarian reform. Ruiz Durand worked for the
Sistema Nacional de Apoyo a la Movilización Social (SINAMOS), an outreach
and communications office of the Peruvian military government. He explains
how he assessed the extent to which the colors he used would be acceptable
to the cultural universe of the “Quechua-speaking peasant ethnicity.”83 The
posters partook of comics, Pop art, and references to the political context in
which they operated. Túpac Amaru, the agrarian reform, the call for popular
participation and for revolution in Velasco Alvarado’s Peru were expressed in
posters printed in red, blue, yellow, white, and black on newspaper-quality
paper. The characters in the images came from photographs taken by the artist.
The place of woman in the revolution—which, in the posters, is the present
time—is no different from her place under the patriarchal order: the home. The
peasant woman with red flag waving on her back states, “Women of the Andes
support the revolution, and you should too by running a revolutionary home.”
Those images, Durand explains, never reached the peasant population, but
were used as propaganda at urban rallies. In 1972, Durand found his posters on
sale at high prices in a shop in Amsterdam.
Peruvian artist José Carlos Martinat most certainly manages to capture
the relevance of ancestral symbols to contemporary culture when he takes
them from the city walls on which they were placed. Untitled (2013), an
105
over 4000-year-old Andean geometric form, the Incan cross or chacana,84
is an enduring symbol that signals the disturbing presence of that past in
contemporary cities. The age-old symbolism of this abstract Indigenism
becomes current on the street and in the museum, where it is exhibited like
a skin removed from the wall.
The only surviving mural with Indigenist theme by Antonio Berni is Mercado
colla [Colla Market] or Mercado del altiplano [Andean Mountain Market]
(c. 1936–1943). Produced in the thirties and forties, the work is tied to the
journeys that Berni took, first to northeastern Argentina in 1936 and then to
the Puna grassland in 1943, with stops in Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, and Colombia.
That trip, made possible with a grant from the Comisión Nacional de Bellas
Artes, was geared to studying the typologies of colonial and pre-Columbian
cultures. Unlike Manifestación [Public Demonstration], this painting does not
dwell on the faces, but rather on the ties between nature and the architecture
and customs of the indigenous people.
The normalization and integration to which the modern state aspired in the
Latin American republics is encoded in the series of photographs that Claudia
Andujar produced in Brazil (Marcados [Marked], 1981–1984). One decade before
she took those photos, the invasion of the indigenous territory introduced
diseases that decimated the Yanomami population. Andujar took part in a
prevention and vaccination campaign that made use of multiple identification
techniques. Since in the Yanomami culture individuals do not have names in the
Western sense of the word, they were identified with numbers—which were, for
the artist, steeped in painful memories of the extreme violence of World War II,
since many of her relatives and friends were “marked” for extermination at Nazi
concentration camps.85 But, in the case of the Yanomami, these individuals
were “marked” to survive.86
Alongside this story of European domination of indigenous culture is the
story of black America. One of the largest traffic of persons in the history
of humanity yielded a cultural kaleidoscope of mestizaje. From 1650 to
1860, approximately fifteen million persons were transported from West
Africa to the Americas.87 Over the course of the nineteenth century, artists
and photographers, some of whom formed part of scientific missions, took
generally anonymous portraits of men and women from Africa or of African
descent. Their presence was embedded in the modern consciousness and
transformed its repertoires.

106 107
 The same country where Torres García founded his new art school—
Jesús Ruiz Durand Francisco Laso the country he placed at the center of a rotated world map—was where
Reforma agraria El Indio alfarero [The Indian Potter], 1855 Pedro Figari had produced work that attempted to forge a new tradition, an
[Agrarian Reform], Oil on canvas American art that included representations of the African culture in the Rio de
1968-1973 135 x 86 cm
la Plata region or of Afro-Uruguayan culture.88 Figari did not place emphasis
Poster Museo de Arte de Lima - MALI
100 x 70 cm Collection on marginalization, but rather made use of modern language in festive
MALBA Collection representations based on non-descriptive brushstrokes that absorb the bodies’
movement. The faces are not detailed, but rather a synthesis in which dark skin
contrasts with white clothes. The bodies move like a frieze in a theatrical space.
Candombe—a dance with short steps to the rhythm of drums—emerged around
the ceremonies of the “Kings of the Congo” during the time of slavery. It is
bound to the vestiges of Bantu culture reactivated in Carnival. Music and dance
were the forms of expression tolerated under slavery, not only because they
mitigated exhaustion from work performed in conditions of extreme violence,
but also because Europeans considered them exotic and appealing.
Carnival is an urban expression that brings together Spanish, Portuguese,
Amauta
and African traditions. It is also one of the arenas in which the crowd is
Magazine cover organized in the modern city. The beginning of the twentieth century witnessed
Lima, year I, No. 1, the expansion of cities and the growth of the urban population thanks, in part,
September 1926 to the influx of immigrants. As Austrian artist Hans Nöbauer’s art deco-style
Museo de Arte de Lima,
diorama from 1933 shows, in Rio de Janeiro Carnival represents a synthesis
Biblioteca Manuel Solari
of bodies, nature, and city. Between Sugarloaf Mountain and the skyscrapers of
Swayne
the modern city are bodies dancing on the beach, an image akin in certain ways
to the beaches drawn by Ensor. The vivid pulse of the scene is captured in the
different layers of the composition, because what we see here is performance,
real time, experience lived to a samba rhythm or felt in the sound of the
serenata—another form of urban music.89 In Di Cavalcanti’s Seresta (ca. 1930),
for instance, a mulatto plays for two young mulattas. The color black that
structures the composition echoes the colors of the figures’ skin. Di Cavalcanti
conveys a break in the rhythm of the city through an allegorical crack in the
wall, a vision that differs from the positive and conciliatory narrative deployed
in the rhetoric of the founding of Brazil in imperial times and in the formation
of the republic. As Lilia Moritz Schwarcz points out, at stake was a politics of
forgetting that would leave behind a history of exploitation and extermination
that formed part of the present as well. Forgetting and racial Darwinism,
eugenics and anthropological criminology, were the notions on which an

108 109
ontological conception of race was based.90 Brazil represented itself as a
dazzling laboratory of races mixing peacefully, the auspicious foundation for a
bright future. With modernization, the ideal of progress was steeped in theories
of racial whitening. At a symposium held in Rio de Janeiro in 1911, Professor
João Batista Lacerda—the director of the Museu Nacional in that city—argued
that, with the help of immigration and biology, Brazil could be white in three
generations.91 At that point, a healthy coexistence, a “racial democracy” would
set in. Modernism and discourses of progress silenced black culture.92 But the
official version was a far cry from daily reality: in 1970, the Black Movement of
Brazil was born.
The representations of the Afro-Latin beliefs of the Caribbean that
Wifredo Lam, a Cuban of mixed race, activates in his work are unabashedly
concerned with resistance and emancipation. Kobena Mercer argues that Lam
attempts to remove Africa from the place of otherness it is consigned under
Eurocentrism.93 Significantly, it was not in Cuba that Lam came into contact
with the visual representations of Africa: slaves did not take objects with
them on the journey across the Atlantic nor were they allowed to reproduce
images.94 It was in Paris, at the Musée de l’Homme (the Musée d’Ethnographie
du Trocadéro until 1937), and at the Louvre, that Lam first saw African objects
and the exchange with those objects in the work of Picasso, Michel Leiris, and
Breton. He investigated those objects and ideas in that “contact zone” that
was Paris before the German occupation and continued to do so in Marseilles,
where he made drawings for Breton’s Fata Morgana, printed in Buenos Aires in
1942. It was not until he returned to Havana, after twenty years abroad, that he
painted La jungla [The Jungle], a work of epic structure in which eyes, hands,
and bodies—crossings of the animal, the human, and the vegetable—appear in
the dense mass of sugar cane and tobacco leaves. Works like La mañana verde
[The Green Morning] (1943) and Untitled (1944) from the early forties suggest
bodies in the shape of reeds, bodies with wings and horse hooves, offerings
of fruit, breasts, swollen bellies, heads with eyes and mouths from which
testicles and long heads of hair hang. A vision of nature suggestive of the
plantation and of the colonial period. The main character is carrying a knife
reminiscent of the scissors that emerge amidst the cane in La jungla. There are
a number of different interpretations of the relationship between these images
and Yoruba saints.95 Though he considered himself an agnostic, Lam had had,
as a child, contact with the Yoruba universe of beliefs through his godmother,
110
Ma’Antoñica Wilson. His work is more concerned with the colonial condition
that has erased that repertoire of images than with those images themselves.
In an interview with Gerardo Mosquera, Lam stated, “My painting is an act
of decolonization not in a physical sense, but in a mental one.”96 What’s
emancipating about these paintings is not that they provide an anthropological
reconstruction of a world that had been snatched away and enclosed in
European museums. It is not a question of ethnic restoration. If it were, Lam
could have identified with the culture of his father, who came to Cuba from
Canton, China, as part of the mid-nineteenth-century immigration wave.
Lam Yan was a proud and active participant in that age-old culture. But Lam
identified with the subjugated culture of his mother, Ana Serafina Castilla.
In the seventies, Ana Mendieta—who was sent to the United States at the age
of twelve as part of Operation Peter Pan, a program enacted by the Catholic
Church to help dissidents get out of Cuba—made images with figures from
Afro-Cuban Santeria. She had not been brought up with those beliefs, though.
She had come into contact with them through the mulatta women who did
domestic work in her home. In Iowa, where Mendieta was perceived as a
woman of color, she began to deepen her knowledge of beliefs of African
origin and to deploy them as instrument of resistance. Blood and fire in works
like Alma. Silueta en fuego [Soul, Silhouette on Fire] (1975) make reference to
elements of Santeria rituals.
The complexity of mestizaje cannot be grasped through a model of
coexistence in which the particularities of distinct elements are erased. On the
contrary, those specificities can be activated at unlikely junctures—eruptions
that evidence different modernities or counter-modernities that are obscured
by Eurocentric discourses. In his study of the Haitian Revolution, Eduardo
Grüner points out that the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen
signed in 1789 in France did not include slaves. It was the outbreak of the
Haitian Revolution in 1791 that caused the French Revolution to decree the
abolition of slavery in 1794. The Haitian Revolution—Grüner argues—was what
forced the French Revolution to be truly coherent with its tenets.97 At the same
time, slavery was key to the French economy and Bonaparte reinstituted it
in 1802. It was not re-abolished until 1848. The Haitian Revolution was then
instrumental to bringing about the declaration of total freedom in France.
Susan Buck-Morss supports that thesis in her analysis of the impact of the
Haitian Revolution on the master-slave dialectic in Hegel.98 Both writers
111
reexamine the historical process that led to the Declaration of Independence
in Haiti in 1804 and to the enactment, in 1805, of article fourteen of its
Constitution: “All acception of color among the children of one and the same
family … being necessarily to cease, the Haitians shall hence forward be known
only by the generic appellation of Blacks.” While that article can be interpreted
in relation to different histories, its text is, in and of itself, startling.
The echoes of that statement make themselves felt in recent works. Identity
is not demonstrable. It resides in forms of perception and of action. In 2010,
Argentine artist Juan Carlos Romero did an urban graphic intervention with the
phrase “Now we are all black.” An enormous black circle in charcoal on paper,
Matías Duville’s Black Nation (2013) could be understood, allegorically, as an
ode to negritude. Adriana Varejão’s Tintas polvo [Octopus Pigments] (2012) is
a critical comment on the results of the 1976 census in Brazil. In it, the artist
selected thirty-three of the one hundred and thirty-six words that people used
to identify the color of their skin to create her own palette. For her performance
mtChondrial Eve, mother of thread (2008), Cecilia Vicuña drew inspiration
from the results of a genetic study that revealed her indigenous heritage.99
As systems with open meaning, these works activate latent senses of the
subaltern. They in no way constitute reparation. What they do, rather, is put
before us a repertoire of resistant and constantly fleeting signs that, despite
all efforts, no form that aspires to integration has erased.

112 113

Wifredo Lam
La jungla [The Jungle], 1943
Watercolor on paper mounted on canvas
239,4 x 229,9 cm
MoMA Collection, Nueva York
João Goston
Retrato de ama com criança
[Portrait of a Nurse with Child], 1870
Black-and-white photograph
Acervo do Instituto Moreira Salles,
Rio de Janeiro
114
NOTES
1 In 1836, Michel Chevalier contrasted
Protestant and Anglo-Saxon North America
to Catholic and Latin South America, an
opposition found as well in Uruguayan
José Enrique Rodó’s Ariel (1900). Pan-
Americanism comes from the term Pan
America; it was formulated in the United
States in 1889 on the occasion of the First
International Conference of American States
held in Washington. Both terms were wielded
politically as areas of influence starting in
the nineteenth century. See Ardao, Arturo,
“Panamericanismo y latinoamericanismo,”
in Zea, Leopoldo (coord.), América Latina en
sus ideas, Mexico, UNESCO-Siglo XXI, 1986,
pp. 157–171.
2 Ades, Dawn, Arte en Iberoamérica, Madrid,
Centro de Arte Reina Sofía - Palacio
Velázquez - Turner, 1990, pp. 1–2.
3 Regarding, for instance, Eurocentric and
Latin American poetics, Édouard Glissant
uses the term “poetics of relation” to define
“that possibility of the imaginary that moves
us to conceive the ungraspable globality
Tarsila do Amaral of a chaos-world like this one, while also
A negra [The Black Woman], 1923 allowing us to make a certain detail stand
Oil on canvas out and, very particularly, to celebrate our
100 x 80 cm specific—unfathomable and irreversible—
Museu de Arte Contemporânea da place.” Glissant, Édouard, Tratado del Todo-
Universidade de São Paulo Collection Mundo, Barcelona, El Cobre ediciones, 2006
(1st edition 1997), pp. 25–26.
4 Torres García gave this celebrated lecture on
February 8, 1935 at the Young Men’s Christian
Association of Montevideo. There were a
number of versions of the inverted map and
it is likely that, at this lecture, he showed
the first one—a version more schematic
than the ones more widely known, since he
undoubtedly turned the map upside down
while he talked (Gabriel Peluffo Linari tells
how Torres García used a magic lantern in
his lectures). That first map might be in his
115
personal archives stuck to the notepad with
the manuscript of the lecture, just as Peluffo
Linari recalls having seen it while doing
research in 1988. The second version is from
1936; it was reproduced in the first issue of
the journal Círculo y Cuadrado, published
in May 1936. In 1938, Torres García made a
version in oil on cardboard and, in 1941, on
cow hide. In 1943, he drew it again, this time
to illustrate Escuela del Sur. Claves del arte
de nuestra América, published in Montevideo
that same year. Peluffo Linari, Gabriel, e-mail
exchange with the author, April 5 and 6,
2016, and López, Sebastián, “Breve lección
de geografía artística moderna,” in Debroise,
Olivier (ed.), Otras rutas hacia Siqueiros,
Mexico City, Instituto de Investigaciones
Estéticas, UNAM, 1996, pp. 249–270.
5 Rosenberg, Harold, “On the Fall of Paris,”
Partisan Review, vol. 7, no. 6, December
1940, pp. 440–448.
6 I develop the notion of simultaneous
avant-gardes in the article “Farewell to
the Periphery. Avant-Gardes and Neo-
Avant-Gardes in the Art of Latin America,”
in Concrete Invention, Madrid, Museo
Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, 2013,
pp. 104–117, and in the book ¿Cuándo
empieza el arte contemporáneo? When
Does Contemporary Art Begin?, Buenos
Aires, arteBA, 2014, pp. 5–6 (http://www.
arteba.org/dixit2014/Libro-Dixit-2014.pdf
[last consulted 6/16/2016]).
7 Verbo América is also the title of the text that
Chilean artist Roberto Matta wrote in 1983
and of the mural he made in 1996, currently
located at the Quinta Normal subway station
in Santiago. His text brings together literature
and history. In this exhibition, the central
argument lies in images.
8 Botey, Mariana, Zonas de disturbio.
Espectros del México indígena en la
modernidad, Mexico, Siglo XXI, 2014.
9 Rubén Santantonín’s archives, Buenos Aires.
10 Jean-Paul Sartre’s first philosophical novel
was published by Gallimard in 1946; the
Spanish translation was published by
Losada in Buenos Aires in 1947, that is,
one year later.
11 Santantonín, Rubén, notes dated
November 19, 1961. Rubén Santantonín’s
archives, Buenos Aires.
12 Ver y Estimar, Braque, and the prizes
organized by the Instituto Torcuato
Di Tella, the Bienales Americanas de
Arte de Córdoba, and the Artistas con
Acrílicopaolini—which was launched a
few years later.
13 What artists like Kenneth Kemble, Luis
Felipe Noé, Jorge de la Vega, Alberto
Greco, Luis Wells, Marta Minujín, Olga
López, Noemí Di Benedetto, Silvia
Torras, Rubén Santantonín, and—with
a more narrative bend—Antonio Berni
pursued were novel forms that emerged
through materials taken from life itself.
The cardboard tubes used in the textile
industry, for instance, appeared in the work
of Wells and of Santantonín.
14 While the phrase is, of course, biblical—and
that is clearly at stake in some works in this
section, like León Ferrari’s Cuadro escrito
[Written Painting]—at least as pertinent
here is the phrase’s connotation in relation
to artistic or even technical innovation.
See Vidal, Sebastián, En el principio. Arte,
archivos y tecnologías durante la dictadura
en Chile, Santiago, Chile, Metales Pesados,
2012. Al principio existía la vida [In the
Beginning There Was Life] is the title of
a play that Oscar Castro premiered in
1975—and that the Pinochet dictatorship
censored, imprisoning the playwright; Juan
Downey looked to that play in his video
In the Beginning, produced that same year.
15 Zaya, Octavio, “Una aproximación a las
116
topografías del deseo,” Arte al Día,
no. 144, Miami, October–December, 2013,
pp. 24–31 (English title: An Approach to the
Topographies of Desire) (http://es.artealdia.
com/International/Contenidos/Artistas/
Zilia_Sanchez_Una_aproximacion_a_las_
topografias_del_deseo [last consulted on
6/16/2016]).
16 Sarduy, Severo, “Las ‘topologías eróticas’ de
Zilia Sánchez,” in Estructuras en secuencias,
catalogue to the Zilia Sánchez exhibition at
the Museo Universidad de Puerto Rico, three
pages, no page numbers, 1970. Cited by
Zaya, Octavio, art. cit.
17 Martínez, Chus, “El pulpo enamorado,”
curator’s essay for La era metabólica
exhibition, MALBA, September–October,
2015 (http://www.malba.org.ar/laera
metabolica [last consulted on 7/16/2016]).
18 For the transcription of Cuadro escrito in
its entirety, see Giunta, Andrea (ed.), León
Ferrari. Retrospectiva, 1954-2004, Buenos
Aires, Centro Cultural Recoleta / MALBA -
Fundación Costantini, 2004, pp. 291–292.
19 This work was exhibited for the first time at
Artemúltiple gallery in 1980, after which the
original version was destroyed. In 1995, Víctor
Grippo made four new versions of the work,
one of which forms part of the Eduardo F.
Costantini Collection. The origin of the work,
according to Ricardo Martín-Crosa in the
text to the 1980 exhibition, was a newspaper
article about fifty whales that had committed
suicide off the coast of Australia. Víctor
Grippo was with Gabriel Levinas and Martín-
Crosa when, Martín-Crosa reports, he saw
the article. See Víctor Grippo, Artemúltiple,
exp. no. 56, August 19 – September 13, 1980,
Buenos Aires, and Grippo. Una retrospectiva.
Obras 1971-2001 (exhib. cat.), MALBA -
Colección Costantini, 2004.
20 Cuevas, Tatiana and Majluf, Natalia (eds.),
Fernando Bryce. Dibujando la historia
moderna / Drawing Modern History, Lima,
MALI-Telefónica, 2011, p. 193.
21 Vargas, Luis, “Imágenes, teología y
guerrilla,” symposium Genealogías del arte
contemporáneo en México, 1952-1967,
Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas y
Museo de Arte Contemporáneo, Universidad
Nacional Autónoma de México, 2012.
22 A period of exile that followed
imprisonment at the Lecumberri jail; in
Taxco at the same time was the Russian
filmmaker Eisenstein, who was shooting
the film ¡Que viva México!, which he
dedicated to the painter. Olivier Debroise’s
film Un banquete en Tetlapayac (2000)
revisits Siqueiros’s time in Taxco.
23 Montaldo, Graciela, “De la mano del caos:
sujetos y prácticas culturales,” Cuadernos
de Literatura, year 8, no. 15, Bogotá,
January–June, 2002, pp. 21–29.
24 Vargas, Luis, e-mail with the author,
November 4, 2015. Orozco, José Clemente,
Autobiografía, Mexico City, Ediciones Era,
1985 (1st edition, 1945), pp. 40–46.
25 Ibid.
26 A form of popular protest in which citizens
bang pots and pans together.—Trans.
27 “Los muertos que dejó el estallido social,”
La Nación newspaper, November 18, 2011
(http://www.lanacion.com.ar/1433346-los-
muertos-que-dejo-el-estallido-social [last
consulted: 6/20/2016]).
28 Mary Louise Pratt uses the notion of
“contact zone” to envision the relationship
between subjects who cross paths due to
historical circumstances. She replaces the
idea of colonial frontier with the idea of
spaces of coexistence. Pratt, Mary Louise,
Ojos imperiales. Literatura de viajes y
transculturación, Buenos Aires, Universidad
Nacional de Quilmes, 1997 (1st edition in
English, 1992; English title: Imperial Eyes:
Travel Writing and Transculturation).
117
29 On the basis of the term that Richard Morse
proposed in 1985, Fernanda Arêas Peixoto
and Adrián Gorelik compiled Ciudades
sudamericanas como arenas culturales.
Artes y medios, barrios de élite y villas
miseria, intelectuales y urbanistas: cómo
ciudad y cultura se activan mutuamente,
Buenos Aires, Siglo XXI, 2016, with essays
on Bogotá, Brasilia, Buenos Aires, Caracas,
Córdoba, La Plata, Lima, Montevideo,
Quito, Recife, Rio de Janeiro, Salvador,
São Paulo, and Santiago (Chile).
30 Rowell, Margit, Joaquín Torres-García,
Barcelona, Polígrafa, 2009, p. 40.
31 Singerman was also photographed by
Annemarie Heinrich in 1939. Cf. Annemarie
Heinrich. Intenciones secretas (exhib. cat.),
Buenos Aires, MALBA, 2015, p. 74. She
can be heard singing and reciting in an
interview with Antonio Carrizo at https://
www.youtube.com/watch?v=2q6BOT37FPc,
and reciting Alfonsina Storni at https://
www.youtube.com/watch?v=2nwxEsJtN3U
[last consulted: 7/12/2016].
32 “Adrián Gorelik: ‘La arena pública de la
ciudad es insustituible para crear cultura’,”
interview by Ana María Vara, La Nación
newspaper, June 19, 2016 (http://www.
lanacion.com.ar/1909736-adrian-gorelik-la-
arena-publica-de-la-ciudad-es-insustituible-
para-crear-cultura [last consulted:
7/10/2016]).
33 For a comparison of abstraction in
Argentina and Brazil, see García, María
Amalia, El arte abstracto. Intercambios
culturales entre Argentina y Brasil, Buenos
Aires, Siglo XXI, 2011.
34 “Artistas adhieren al comunismo,”
announcement in the periodical
Orientación, órgano central del Partido
Comunista, Buenos Aires, 1945. The new
members of the Communist Party were
Edgar Bayley, Manuel Espinosa, Claudio
 Girola, Alfredo Hlito, Tomás Maldonado,
and Aldo Prior. Lucena, Daniela,
Contaminación artística: vanguardia
concreta, comunismo y peronismo en los
años 40, Buenos Aires, Biblos, 2015.
35 Born in Havana in 1915, Carmen Herrera
began making art in the fifties, but it was
only after the year 2000 that her work
gained recognition.
36 Rama, Ángel, La ciudad letrada,
Montevideo, Fundación Internacional
Ángel Rama, 1984.
37 On Diego Rivera in Paris, see Debroise,
Olivier, Diego de Montparnasse, Mexico
City, Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1979.
38 Artundo, Patricia, “Alejandro Xul Solar,”
in MALBA. Colección Costantini, Mexico,
Landuci Editores, 2001, p. 110.
39 Gutiérrez Marx, Graciela, Arte correo:
Artistas invisibles en la red postal, Buenos
Aires, Luna Verde Ediciones, 2010.
40 Jacoby, Roberto, “Las herejías de León
Ferrari,” Crisis, Buenos Aires, 1987.
41 And not only during the Revolución
Libertadora. The sculpture of Eva Perón
that Sesostris Vitullo made in Paris in 1952
was also mutilated. In keeping with the
abstract nature of the portrait, the phrase
that made it possible to associate Eva with
the sculpture was removed from the stone.
42 Williams, Raymond, El campo y la ciudad,
Buenos Aires, Paidós, 2001 (English title:
The Country and the City).
43 Verbitsky, Bernardo, Villa miseria también
es América, Buenos Aires, Kraft, 1957.
44 For an analysis of the Ramona series in
relation to Jean-Luc Godard’s film and from
a gender perspective, see Giunta, Andrea,
“Ramona Lives Her Life,” in Ramírez, Mari
Carmen and Pacheco, Marcelo (eds.),
Antonio Berni. Juanito and Ramona, MFAH-
Yale University Press, New Haven and
London, 2014, pp. 69–81. Published as well
118
in Alter/nativas. Latin American Cultural
Journal Studies, no. 4, The Ohio State
University Press, 2015, pp. 1–22 (http://
alternativas.osu.edu/assets/files/Issue4/
Visual/giunta-espanol.pdf [last consulted:
7/15/2016]). On Berni’s prints, see Dolinko,
Silvia, Arte plural. El grabado entre la
tradición y la experimentación, 1955-1973,
Buenos Aires, Edhasa, 2012, p. 248.
45 Malosetti Costa, Laura and Penhos, Marta,
“Imágenes para el desierto argentino.
Apuntes para una iconografía de la pampa,”
III Jornadas de Teoría e Historia de las Artes
“Ciudad / Campo en las Artes en Argentina
y Latinoamérica,” Buenos Aires, CAIA,
pp. 195–204 (http://www.caia.org.ar/
docs/21-Malosetti%20Costa_Penhos.pdf
[last consulted: 7/15/2016]).
46 The severed head, the body of the white
woman passed out in the arms of the
Indian, the challis astir like a boleadora,
the cross acting as spear—all of these
things represented, for the citizen of
Buenos Aires, the horror with which
General Julio A. Roca’s Desert Campaign
had ended in 1879. The painting forms
part of the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes
Collection, Buenos Aires, Argentina.
47 Malosetti Costa, Laura and Penhos, Marta,
art. cit., p. 199.
48 In the chronicle of that failed hunt, Olivier
Debroise cites Ramón Lista’s book
Los indios tehuelches. Una raza que
desaparece. Estudio etnológico sobre los
tehuelches, según observaciones propias,
in Obras, vol. II, Buenos Aires, Confluencia,
1998, p. 51. Debroise, Olivier, “Mancha
blanca” [White Spot], in Alÿs, Francis, A Story
of Deception / Historia de un desengaño.
Patagonia 2003–2006, Buenos Aires, MALBA -
Colección Costantini, 2006, pp. 71-80
49 Cartagena, María Fernanda, Fantasmas en
la máquina, Guayaquil, Galería dpm, 2007.
The trans-Ecuadorian oil pipeline, which
was inaugurated in 1972, covers some 497.7
kilometers under Lake Agrio to extend
further in underwater pipes from the Balao
Oil Terminal.
50 In 1937, Miguel Covarrubias published
Island of Bali, which included 114
photographs by the artist, 5 paintings, and
90 drawings, as well as other photographs
taken by his wife, Rosa.
51 De Andrade, Oswald, “Manifesto
antropófago,” Revista de Antropofagia,
year 1, no. 1, May 1928.
52 Jesuit missionary Florian Paucke, an
evangelist who was in the Río de la Plata
region and at the San Xavier Mission from
1749 to 1768, “strove tirelessly to cover
the indigenous bodies but, as he himself
admitted, never managed to do so fully:
the women insisted on leaving their torsos
uncovered and very few Mocoví agreed
to stop using the ‘small piece of hide’ that
covered them under the belly,” explains
Marta Penhos in “El cuerpo como frontera:
límites y porosidades en una misión jesuita
en el Chaco del siglo XVIII,” in Merluzzi,
Manfredi (ed.), Fronteras: procesos y
prácticas de integración y conflicto,
Madrid, FCE (forthcoming).
53 Amaral, Aracy, Tarsila: Sua obra e seu
tempo, São Paulo, Perspectiva, Editora da
Universidade de São Paulo, 1975, pp. 247–251.
54 Adriana Lauria observes this in her analysis
of the work Tratos de mujeres [Treatment of
Women] (1937), in MALBA. Colección
Costantini, Buenos Aires, Landucci
Editores, 2001, p. 185.
55 Deity to whom Carlos Fuentes dedicated a
story, apparently in response to the intense
storms that arose in Latin America when a
major exhibition of Mexican art held in Paris
in 1952 included a statue of Chacmool (the
show was curated by Fernando Gamboa and
119
held at the Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris.
In Fuentes’s story, the statue is shipped,
comes to life, and causes a flood in Filiberto’s
basement (he drowns while escaping in
a train to Acapulco). The power of the
indigenous past has not been deactivated;
it can actually act in the present.
56 On the Yeguas del Apocalipsis, see the
archive housed on the website http://www.
yeguasdelapocalipsis.cl/ [last consulted:
6/10/2016].
57 See the manifestos and other texts at
http://www.memoriachilena.cl/602/
w3-article-96700.html [last consulted:
6/24/2016].
58 This work, like many others, was exhibited
at the Centro Cultural Recoleta in 1992.
Maresca furthered her proposal in this
work in a photo performance from 1993
in which she displayed her own nude
body, along with a stuffed animal, in
the magazine El Libertino. Photograph
by Alejandro Kuropatwa, wardrobe and
makeup by Sergio De Loof and Sergio
Avello, and production by the Fabulous
Nobodies (Roberto Jacoby and Kiwi
Sanz). On Liliana Maresca, see Lauria,
Adriana, Liliana Maresca. Transmutaciones,
Buenos Aires, Centro Cultural Recoleta /
Castagnino+macro / MALBA - Fundación
Costantini, 2008.
59 In collaboration with artists like Alejandro
Urdapilleta, Humberto Tortonese, and
Guillermo Angelelli, he engaged in
spontaneous actions that questioned the
normative aesthetic. He did performances
based on texts by Néstor Perlongher,
Alejandra Pizarnik, Alfonsina Storni, Juana
de Ibarbourou, and Marosa Di Giorgio,
often paying tribute to those writers.
60 When he returned to Buenos Aires in 1983,
Pombo met Gumier Maier and, through
him, got involved in the Grupo de Acción
 Gay (GAG, active from 1984 to 1987). He
did illustrations for the magazine Sodoma.
See Katzenstein, Inés et al., Pombo, Buenos
Aires, Adriana Hidalgo, 2006, and Marcelo
Pombo. Un artista del pueblo, Buenos Aires,
Fundación Amalia Lacroze de Fortabat, 2015.
61 Centurión died of AIDS in November
1996. See Davis, Fernando, “Feliciano
Centurión,” November 1, 2013, Museo del
Barro, Asuncion, Paraguay (http://www.
museodelbarro.org/articulo/feliciano-
centurion [last consulted: 7/12/2016]).
62 Fernanda Laguna in an interview by Walter
Lezcano, “No es tan fácil conmover en
arteBA,” La Nación newspaper, May 14,
2016 (http://www.lanacion.com.ar/1898551-
fernanda-laguna-no-es-tan-facil-conmover-
en-arteba [last consulted: 7/12/2016]).
63 On these topics and the creative
relationship between Fernanda Laguna
and Cecilia Pavón, see Francica, Cynthia,
“‘Belleza y Felicidad’: La amistad entre
chicas como modo de producción literaria,”
IV Congreso Internacional Cuestiones
Críticas, Rosario, September 30 – October 2,
2015 (http://www.celarg.org/int/arch_publi/
francicacc2015.pdf [last consulted:
12/7/2016]).
64 Pursuant to the economic measures
enacted during the administration of
President Carlos S. Menem—specifically
opening Argentina up to imports—many
cheap products made in China were
suddenly available; they left their mark on
the works of many artists (Pombo used
glitter and stickers, and León Ferrari toy
birds and animals). Art and economics are
tied not only through the art market, but
also through the materials that artists use.
65 That was the name of an exhibition curated
by Valeria González and Máximo Jacoby
held at MALBA in 2009. On the basis of
a text written by Ricardo Martín-Crosa in
120
1978 that analyzed formal resources taken
from the rhetoric of elementary-school
instruction, the show included mostly art
from the nineties. In my discussion, I speak
of a form of knowledge devalued in relation
to the form of knowledge imparted by the
state in the education of future citizens,
a form of knowledge communicated on
television programs like Utilísima (created
as a program in 1984 and later turned into a
channel), which appropriated the teaching
of domestic inventiveness in the kitchen
and in do-it-yourself domestic tasks.
66 Marcelo Pombo’s archives, cited in Qualina,
Florencia, “Cronología,” in Un artista del
pueblo, op. cit., p. 165. Italics mine.
67 The letters, Luis Priamo explains, were
answered by Enrique Butelman and Gino
Germani in the “Psychoanalysis will help
you” section signed under the pseudonym
Richard Rest, undoubtedly because of the
discredit that would come to a “serious”
intellectual for writing for a popular
women’s magazine; they did it for the
money (Germani had been removed from
his academic post by Perón’s government).
Priamo, Luis, “Los sueños de Grete Stern,” in
Grete Stern, Valencia, Instituto Valenciano
de Arte Moderno, 1995, pp. 27–38.
68 The options for answers almost always
worked for both sexes. “I would like to make
love WITH MY LOVER / WITH A CHILD / WITH
AN ANIMAL / AND TO BE PAID / BEFORE
GETTING MARRIED / WITH A RAPIST / IN A
CROWDED THEATER / WITH MYSELF / WITH
MY FATHER / WITH A WOMAN.
69 Pérez Rubio, Agustín, “Annemarie Heinrich.
Liberación visionaria de los cuerpos,”
in Annemarie Heinrich. Intenciones
secretas, Buenos Aires, MALBA, 2015,
pp. 9–27.
70 Cf. Giunta, Andrea, “Una estética de la
discontinuidad,” in Oscar Bony, el mago.
Obras 1965-2001 (exhib. cat.),
Buenos Aires, MALBA, 2007.
71 Mignolo, Walter D., The Darker Side of
the Renaissance. Literacy, Territoriality &
Colonization, Ann Harbor, The University
of Michigan Press, 1995. The book
discusses the colonization of languages,
memories, and spaces in the sixteenth
century, when one quarter of the world was
implicated in the process of globalization
under European expansion. See as well
Gruzinski, Serge, Las cuatro partes del
mundo. Historia de una mundialización,
Buenos Aires, FCE, 2019; The Modern
World-System, Immanuel Wallerstein’s
three-volume series (The Modern World-
System, vol. I: Capitalist Agriculture and the
Origins of the European World-Economy
in the Sixteenth Century, New York/
London, Academic Press, 1974; The Modern
World-System, vol. II: Mercantilism and
the Consolidation of the European World-
Economy, 1600–1750, New York, Academic
Press, 1982; The Modern World-System,
vol. III: The Second Great Expansion of
the Capitalist World-Economy, 1730–1840,
San Diego, Academic Press, 1989), and
his World-Systems Analysis: Theory and
Methodology, Beverly Hills, Sage, 1982.
72 Botey, Mariana, op. cit.
73 The journey to Europe was undertaken
by a great many modern artists until the
outbreak of World War II: Pettoruti, Xul
Solar, Tarsila do Amaral, Torres García,
Diego Rivera, Wifredo Lam, among others.
On Latin American artists in Paris during
the interwar period, see the website
coordinated by Michelle Greet, http://
chnm.gmu.edu/transatlanticencounters/
about [last consulted: 7/14/2016].
74 Wifredo Lam, for instance, was educated
at the Academia de San Alejandro, Havana.
75 While, during the nineteenth century,
121
Indigenism was a powerful discourse, it was
deployed in the context of the formation
and consolidation of Latin American states.
There is an extensive body of literature on
Indigenism in the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries; outstanding researchers in that
field include Laura Malosetti Costa, Marta
Penhos, Natalia Majluf, Roberto Amigo,
Jorge Coli, Maraliz Christo, and Stacie
Widdifield.
76 The newfound interest was based
on the book by Manuel Gamio—who
was responsible for the restoration of
Teotihuacan—entitled Forjando Patria,
published in 1916. Regarding the Indian
problem, Gamio proposes that the Indian
population be brought into the fold
of forward-looking ideas for the sake of
a modern Mexican nation. This liberal-
progressive solution came to be known as
induced assimilation. See Ades, Dawn,
op. cit., p. 200.
77 Rovira, Guiomar, “El zapatismo y la red
internacional,” in Razón y Palabra. Primera
revista electrónica en América Latina
especializada en comunicación, no. 47,
Mexico, October–November 2005 (http://
www.razonypalabra.org.mx/anteriores/n47/
grovira.html [last consulted: 7/12/2016]).
78 On the relationships between animality
and biopolitics, see Giorgi, Gabriel, Formas
comunes: animalidad, cultura, biopolítica,
Buenos Aires, Eterna Cadencia, 2014.
79 On the relationship to the pre-Hispanic
world and the interest in it manifested in
exhibitions held in London and in Paris
(in 1920 at the Burlington Fine Art Club
in London, and in 1928 the exhibition
Les Arts anciens de l’Amérique at the Musée
des Arts Décoratifs of the Louvre), as well
as in Germany, see studies by Adriana B.
Armando and Guillermo Fantoni, “Dioses
y códices prehispánicos en la obra de Xul
 Solar,” in Ciencia Hoy, no. 37, 1/30/1997
(http://cienciahoy.org.ar/1997/01/dioses-y-
codices-prehispanicos-en-la-obra-de-xul-
solar/ [last consulted: 6/12/2016]).
80 Majluf, Natalia, “Ambigüedad racial /
ambigüedad visual,” in Eder, Rita (dir.),
Los estudios del arte desde América latina,
Zacatecas (http://www.esteticas.unam.mx/
edartedal/PDF/Veracruz2000/complets/
MajlufAmbiguedadVeracruz.pdf [last
consulted: 7/12/2016]).
81 Paradigmatic works along these lines—
many of them produced in the second
half of the nineteenth century—include
Luis Montero’s Los funerales de Atahualpa
[Atahualpa’s Funeral] (1864–1867) at the
Museo de Arte de Lima, Peru, and Leandro
Izaguire’s El suplicio de Cuauhtémoc [The
Torture of Cuauhtémoc], 1893 at the Museo
Nacional de Arte, Mexico City.
82 Mariátegui, José Carlos, “El problema del
indio. Su nuevo planteamiento,” in 7 Ensayos
de interpretación de la realidad peruana,
Lima, Biblioteca Amauta, 1974, p. 40.
83 See Ruiz Durand, Jesús, “Afiches de la
Reforma Agraria: otra experiencia trunca,”
in U-tópicos: entornoalovisual, Lima, No. 4–5,
December 1984, p. 17, and Documents of
20th-century Latin American and Latino
Art, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (http://
icaadocs.mfah.org/icaadocs/ELARCHIVO/
RegistroCompleto/tabid/99/doc/1139386/
language/es-MX/Default.aspx [last
consulted: 7/11/2016]).
84 Representation of a mathematically
regulated structure, the word chacana
in Quechua has to do with the joining of
separate things, the relationship between
night and day, and the stairway that leads
to the highest point. The form comes from
astronomical observation and implies
bringing heaven to earth. It is also a
122
reference to the four seasons of the year
and to the Inca road system.
85 The 2016 exhibition at MALBA included
this series along with the medical records
made for each individual and a photocopy
of “Informe 82” (1982) produced by the
Comisión Pro Yanomami (CPY). Pérez
Rubio, Agustín, “Sobre la serie Marcados”,
en Claudia Andujar. Marcados (exhib. cat.),
Buenos Aires, MALBA-UNA, 2016.
86 Pedrosa, Adriano and Moritz Schwarcz,
Lilia, “Encontros e desencontros,” in
Pedrosa, Adriano and Moritz Schwarcz,
Lilia, Histórias mestiças, São Paulo, Instituto
Tomie Ohtake, 2015, p. 110.
87 Slaves were mostly brought over from
Senegal and Angola, chiefly the region to
the north of the Congo River. At the boards
of trade on the coast, families would be
separated (parents from children and other
relatives, or from friends) to accomodate
the choices of the merchants. This was also
where they were branded with iron. In ships
with a capacity of almost five hundred, they
were transported in conditions of intense
overcrowding, hunger, heat, disease, and
absolute lack of hygiene. From 30 to 50%
died during the crossing. The working and
health conditions, as well as the violence
they faced in the Americas were extreme.
Many escaped (runaways), and those that
survived were organized into stockades—
enclosures also known as quilombos (in
Brazil) or cumbés (in Venezuela). These
hard-to-reach areas (cliffs or jungles) were
also where those who supported the cause
of freedom were trained or took shelter.
They had bladed weapons. Life in these
enclosures was communal and based on
equality, but also isolated and impoverished.
88 The first Africans arrived in Uruguay
with the founding of the Colonia del
Sacramento (1680) and of Montevideo
(1726). Slavery was abolished with
Uruguayan Independence, and many slaves
escaped to Uruguay from Brazil. Candombe
contributed to the culture of the Uruguayan
carnival. Most of the Afro-Uruguayan
population lives beneath the poverty line.
89 On the relationship between samba, tango,
and modernity, see Garramuño, Florencia,
Modernidades primitivas: tango, samba y
nación, Buenos Aires, Fondo de Cultura
Económica, 2009.
90 The moral justification of slavery was a
racist ideology that considered blacks
subhuman, lacking in a soul, legally
equivalent to objects or things. It was even
believed that they endured slavery for
having sinned. Brazil was the last country in
Latin America to abolish slavery (in 1888),
pursuant to imperial law (Lei Áurea).
91 Moritz Schwarcz, Lilia, “Mistura combina
como separação,” in Pedrosa, Adriano and
Moritz Schwarcz, Lilia, op. cit., p. 48.
92 This was not the case of Mário de Andrade,
for whom being mestizo was an element
of resistance. He was also a homosexual,
though he didn’t identify as such due to
the conservatism of the modernist group of
which he formed part. His homosexuality is
proven in a letter addressed to poet Manuel
Bandeira housed at the Fundação Casa de
Rui Barbosa (FCRB) that was outside the
public domain until 2015, when journalist
Marcelo Bortoloti of Época magazine
requested the letter and—pursuant to the
approval of the Controladoria Geral da
União (CGU)—published it (http://zh.clicrbs.
com.br/rs/entretenimento/noticia/2015/06/
carta-em-que-mario-de-andrade-comenta-
sua-tao-falada-homossexualidade-e-
divulgada-4784104.html [last consulted:
7/13/2016]).
123
93 Mercer, Kobena, “Les routes afro-
atlantiques de Wifredo Lam,” in David,
Catherine (dir.), Wifredo Lam, Paris, Centre
Pompidou, 2015, p. 26.
94 De Juan, Adelaida, “Las artes plásticas en
las Antillas, México y América Central,” in
Moreno Frajinals, Manuel (coord.), África en
América Latina, Mexico, UNESCO-Siglo XXI,
2006 (1st edition 1977), pp. 304–324.
95 For an iconographic analysis that identifies
a Yoruba saint in each of Lam’s figures,
see Medina, Álvaro, “Wifredo Lam: De
París a Marsella y La Habana y de Picasso y
Breton a Changó,” project presented at the
International Conference on Wifredo Lam,
Havana, May 1984, reproduced in Arte Sur,
no. 2, Buenos Aires, 1st quarter of 1985, pp.
3–17. While the paper also points out that
Lam did not, generally speaking, make use
of a precise symbology, he did on occasion
represent saints like Shango, the god of
war. See Núñez Jiménez, Antonio, Wifredo
Lam, Havana, Editorial Letras Cubanas,
1982, p. 68.
96 Wifredo Lam in Mosquera, Gerardo,
“Mi pintura es un acto de descolonización,”
interview published in Bohemia, Havana,
June 20, 1980, pp. 10–13.
97 Grüner, Eduardo, La oscuridad y las luces:
capitalismo, cultura y revolución, Edhasa,
2010.
98 Buck-Morss, Susan, Hegel y Haiti. La
dialéctica amo-esclavo: una interpretación
revolucionaria, Buenos Aires, Norma, 2005.
99 DNA studies she did at Oxford Ancestors
(www.oxfordancestors.com). The
performance, presented at PS1 in the
framework of the exhibition Wack! Art and
the Feminist Revolution, can be heard at
http://clocktower.org/show/cecilia-vicuna-
mtchondrial-eve-mother-of-threads [last
consulted: 7/9/2016].