Conference paper, Saturday, October 20th, 2007, 5:15 p.m.
Ángel Kalenberg: On the recent History of Museums in Latin America and their Problems
From Modern Art Museum to Contemporary Art Museum
With the 1960s came, in almost all Latin America, museums of modern art. They followed the museums that came out of the French Revolution, conservative museums, with static exhibitions and a sta_tic relation_ship with the public. They limited their action to choosing, organizing and showing, for those who wanted to see, and were imbued with the belief that their judgment was, like God’s, final. While they began having an active and sustained presence only as of the mid-eighteenth century, museums were always a product of certainties held to be universal and “natural,” but that were none other than “cultural” constructs, and as such subject to conditioning and change.Two decades later, and not in all the countries of the region, emerged museums of contemporary art, distinguished by, among other factors, their nature. To start, a majority of them depend directly on autonomous universities –not a minor detail– like those of Sao Paulo, Brazil (the continent’s first), Santiago, Chile, Argentina and Mexico City (the most recent). Others depend on public foundations, like the Anthropological and Contemporary Art Museum of Guayaquil (MAAC), a creation of the Central Bank of Ecuador, or the spaces opened by Fundación Telefónica (owned by the Spanish private telephone company by the same name) in various cities in the region (Buenos Aires, Argentina, Santiago, Chile, and Lima, Peru). A broad platform for contemporary art is also provided by the biennials that abound on the continent: the São Paulo Biennial; the Havana Biennial, geared to showing the artistic production of Third World countries; the MERCOSUR Biennial, in Porto Alegre, Brazil; and the World’s End Biennial in Usuahia, Argentina, among many others. Art fairs are also an efficient springboard for contemporary art: ARTEBA, in Buenos Aires, and those held in Sao Paulo, Caracas and Bogotá.
As museums transformed so did contemporary works of art (ceasing to be objects and becoming processes, while collaborative collectives took the place formerly reserved to the solitary artist), incommodating museums and galleries, along with curators, as they moved in a direction contrary to traditional ideas of the museum as sacred space, as a “white box”. Along with that came the immaterial works deriving from the new media, posing hitherto unheard of museographical problems. Where are they to be shown? In a (cinema) black box? What should be done with on-line works? How should they be conserved?
The move from modern art museums to contemporary art museums thus reflected a change in philosophy and in posture in response to social facts and the evolution of culture, a change accompanied by a series of others: the focus went from the physical work to the process and to immaterial works, and art began to break out of its physicality and to develop in the brain (via conceptual art) or to take possession of space in installations, or escape to nature (land art), or take refuge in technology (video, net.art, bioart). This makes it necessary to reconsider, redefine and transform the museum, from a multidisciplinary perspective. What is the context of such changes? They will be chalked up to the “tradition of the new”, to the progress of nominalism, to globalization, to the loss of the gold standard of aesthetic values, to the end of the sacred, to the fall of the high culture/low culture dichotomy, to the activism of the avant-gardes, to the new statute of the creator who wants to get into the museum at all costs in order to validate his primary identity, yet all of these “reasons” presuppose as their basis a more general diagnosis of the nature of industrial and newly technological and globalized societies.
Globalization arrived (to stay) five hundred years ago
Christopher Columbus was the first globalizer. After his 1492 voyage (thinking he was on his way to India he disembarked in Latin America) the planet took on another dimension. Can anyone today imagine the bewilderment of the “discoverers” and of the continents’ natives “discovered” in 1492?What has come to be called globalization is one of weightiest ingredients in today’s world, and has spawned, for example, the crisis (near disappearance) of Nation States, giving rise to the concept of a post-national age: as erosion of borders fosters the collapse of nations, their currencies disappear or are shared with other countries, and national legislation tends to adapt to international cannons. This process of internationalization yields perplexity and uncertainty.
In such a context, what can be expected for the future of museums? With the onslaught of globalization, societies cease to believe in eternity, and become anti-metaphysical. Museums stop believing that they represent absolute and immutable artistic values.
Art and globalization
After Columbus came European art. What did the art of conquering Europe do for the art of the conquered peoples? Violate it, subdue it.The Europeans encrusted in Latin America the Renaissance, Mannerism, the Baroque, the art of the Counter-Reformation. And from the latter, the emotional aspect of Tenebrism. In Europe the Renaissance fulfilled a mediating function, whereby Dürer was able to come to terms with classical form and movement. His stamp on the Latin American continent has so enduring that much of the Mannerism of Michelangelo’s continuers (Vasari, among them) is evidenced repeatedly in the work of Siqueiros, Botero, the Chilean sculptor Ricardo Yrarrázaval, and the Argentine painter Hugo Sbernini. All of them deform. The Mannerists do so using anamorphosis. Siqueiros by using a projector. For the first group, the paraphernalia of musculature was a Herculean translation of the Renaissance. For the latter, an appropriate translation for the industrial era. From each of those types of painting came the most archaic and conservative that was being produced in Europe and, what’s more, subjected to the severe filter of the Church. The art of the Colony, in Latin America, also fulfilled a religious function, but different from that of the mythical art of the pre-Hispanic Americas: it was evangelizing, missionary and catechist. Deviating from the norms meant setting oneself up as a subject for the Inquisition, for the Holy See.
The native renderers copied devout European paintings (not very varied: Murillo, Zurbarán) and European religious images. Transculturation. To paint church and convent walls, they translated the graphic code to the mural pictorial code. Transcodification. But this copying was not so innocent. Was there really a fusion of the Indian’s art and the imposed art? More than a fusion, a transfusion. A mixing of bloods, perhaps? Maybe the so-called inability to render the Renaissance perspective for which the natives (who came out of a tradition where two-dimensionality prevailed) were censured was a form of resistance: Franz Boas holds that “the mental processes of human beings are the same everywhere, regardless of race or culture.” Perhaps they only adopted from the transported language those elements of plastic grammar that they felt connected to. And, perhaps, from this dialectic of acceptance and rejection came the set of forms that tends to be called Mestizo Baroque, which manages to set itself apart from the alien sources nurturing it and which, ultimately, returns to Europe as an influence on the metropolises1. Le Corbusier, for example, adopted for the church at Ronchamp the same criterion of the open chapels in Puebla, Mexico. What is the origin of the iconography in Aleijadinho’s Prophets? The characters who inspired him were absurd for the Americas. And yet he produces Latin American art, revealing an originality infinitely superior to the Peninsular or Flemish models. The afterglow of mythical times that survived in the imagery of popular art is also present in this mestizo appearance, in Latin American sculpture and architecture.
But how did the natives react to the arrival of European art? In his formidable book Images at War: Mexico from Columbus to Blade Runner (1492-2019), Serge Gruzinski writes:
“As image constitutes, along with writing, one of the main instruments of European culture, the gigantic enterprise of Westernization that came down upon the Americas took –at least in part – the form of a war of images, waged over centuries, and that today in no way seems to have ended. […] From the moment that Christopher Columbus set foot on the shores of the New World the question of images was posed. Quickly, the newcomers inquired into the nature of those of the indigenous peoples. Very soon, the image became an instrument of reference, and then of acculturation and domination, when the Church resolved to Christianize the natives from Florida to Tierra del Fuego. European colonization snared the continent in a trap of images that expanded, spread and changed in pace with the styles, politics, reactions and oppositions encountered.”
1 Finis Terrae Or Terra Nova? Almost seventy years ago, José Ortega y Gasset maintained that the Spanish plastic arts before Goya could be understood only as excrescences of Italian painting (and the assertion was valid for the arts of other nations as well). In that text he affirms that:
He asserted, moreover, that:
“As a consequence of that slowness in the territorial expansion of cultural principles, the cultural flowering of the periphery is always belated.”
In other words, in the Spanish philosopher’s view there was a center (today called the mainstream, the dominant culture) and peripheries; and when the life of a stream, of a movement, is depleted at its center, it continues on its periphery. Ortega, with his customary acuity, raised a proposition still valid today, but failed to see that the finis terrae could turn into a terra nova, since it was in a position to return heterodox, renewed, own versions of imported products, to the metropolises.
