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DISPLACED BOUNDARIES: GEOMETRIC ABSTRACTION from PICTURES to OBJECTS Monica Amor

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DISPLACED BOUNDARIES: GEOMETRIC ABSTRACTION from PICTURES to OBJECTS Monica Amor REVIEW ARTICLE Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/artm/article-pdf/3/2/101/720214/artm_r_00083.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 DISPLACED BOUNDARIES: GEOMETRIC ABSTRACTION FROM PICTURES TO OBJECTS monica amor suárez, osbel. cold america: geometric abstraction in latin america (1934–1973). exhibition presented by the Fundación Juan march, madrid, Feb 11–may 15, 2011. crispiani, alejandro. Objetos para transformar el mundo: Trayectorias del arte concreto-invención, Argentina y Chile, 1940–1970 [Objects to Transform the World: Trajectories of Concrete-Invention Art, Argentina and Chile, 1940–1970]. buenos aires: universidad nacional de Quilmes, 2011. The literature on what is generally called Latin American Geometric Abstraction has grown so rapidly in the past few years, there is no doubt that the moment calls for some refl ection. The fi eld has been enriched by publications devoted to Geometric Abstraction in Uruguay (mainly on Joaquín Torres García and his School of the South), Argentina (Concrete Invention Association of Art and Madí), Brazil (Concretism and Neoconcretism), and Venezuela (Geometric Abstraction and Kinetic Art). The bulk of the writing on these movements, and on a cadre of well-established artists, has been published in exhibition catalogs and not in academic monographs, marking the coincidence of this trend with the consolidation of major private collections and the steady increase in auction house prices. Indeed, exhibitions of what we can broadly term Latin American © 2014 ARTMargins and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology doi:10.1162/ARTM_a_00083 101 Geometric Abstraction, in many instances produced under the aegis of a par ticular collection, have lent greater visibility to this material and have made the market a key factor in the consolidation of the field.1 After the groundbreaking monographic catalogs of Neoconcrete artists Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticica, produced in the 1990s in Europe,2 the late 1990s and early 2000s witnessed the appearance of a number of survey exhibitions in which the overarching notion of Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/artm/article-pdf/3/2/101/720214/artm_r_00083.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 Latin American Geometric Abstraction, or the objects associated with this artistic current, were presented and organized mainly around national or regional references (Argentinean Concrete Art, Brazilian Concretism and Neoconcretism, Venezuelan Kinetic Art, etc.). The catalogs of such exhibitions tend to identify these artistic movements with local aspirations for progress and modernity and, more often than not, narrate their history according to teleological trajectories that move from Europe to Latin America. The general aim of such survey catalogs has been to insert local artistic production into canonical art historical frames, at times obscuring the contradictory projects that informed the different currents of Geometric Abstraction in question, along with the larger political, economic, and cultural contexts in which they occurred. It is revealing that at a recent workshop of curators and historians at the Getty Research Institute,3 where the topic of Latin American art exhibits was being discussed, almost every one of the eleven or so par- ticipants refuted the current relevance of such contemporary surveys of Geometric Abstraction. This concerted response speaks to the extent to which such exhibitions have tended to fulfill the function of presenting this material to new audiences at an introductory level; it also suggests 1 Exhibitions of this work in commercial galleries have also proliferated, and it is worth noting that some of these galleries are major power brokers, such as Gagosian and Hauser & Wirth. 2 Lygia Clark (Porto: Fundação Serralves, Museu de Arte Contemporânea, 1998; Barcelona: Fundació Antoni Tàpies, 1998; Marseille: MAC, Galeries contemporaines des Musées de Marseille, 1998; Paris: Réunion des Musées Nationaux, 1998; Brussels: Société des expositions du Palais des Beaux-Arts, 1998), exhibition catalog; Helio Oiticica (Rotterdam: Witte de With; Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 1992), exhibition catalog. 3 The summer workshop on Latin American/Latino art took place at the Getty Center on July 23, 2013, as part of the first phase of Pacific Standard Time: L.A./L.A. (Los Angeles/ Latin America), an initiative that will culminate in a city-wide series of exhibitions and artmargins 3:2 public programs in 2017. 102 that the time has come to re-evaluate their panoramic pretenses and expository form.4 The fact that so many of these exhibitions and catalogs are linked to a limited number of private collections is also an important consideration in the study of the field, and a phenom- enon that remains largely unanalyzed in the literature on the topic. Moreover, it seems crucial in this context to highlight that the unceas- ing iteration of exhibitions devoted to the trend has displaced the domi- nant tendency, during the 1980s and early 1990s, to portray Latin Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/artm/article-pdf/3/2/101/720214/artm_r_00083.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 American art as inherently “fantastic,” magical, or exotic.5 Such earlier curatorial proposals focused almost exclusively on figurative art, to the detriment of abstraction and the more experimental practices of the postwar period. By contrast, it seems as if the subsequent emphasis on Geometric Abstraction could afford to promote a more sanitized, modern, and optimistic vision of Latin America—as if Geometric Abstraction could wipe clean the messiness of the unfashionable other. That is, it would appear as though the play of lines and rectilinear forms, permutations and orderly configurations that populate many of these works, as well as the monochromatic surfaces from which all traces of figuration are absent, could be more suitable representatives of Latin America in the era of postidentity politics. Two recent publications—one bilingual and one in Spanish—shed light on the current status of Latin American Geometric Abstraction. The first, entitled Cold America: Geometric Abstraction in Latin America (1934–1973), is the catalog of an exhibition that took place at the Juan 4 Exhibitions produced by the Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros are too many to list here. Its most comprehensive catalogs include Geometric Abstraction: Latin American Art from the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Collection, ed. Yve-Alain Bois, Paulo Herkenhoff, Ariel Jiménez, Luis Pérez-Oramas, and Mary Schneider Enríquez (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), exhibition catalog; and The Geometry of Hope: Latin American Art from the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Collection, ed. Gabriel Pérez-Barreiro (Austin: Blanton Museum of Art, University of Texas at Austin, 2007), exhibition catalog. Other important exhibition catalogs of Geometric Abstraction associated with private collections are Juan Ledezma, The Sites of Latin American Abstraction (Miami: Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation, 2007); Aracy A. Amaral, Arte construtiva no Brasil: Coleção Adolpho Leirner (São Paulo: DBA Artes Gráficas, 1998); Mari Carmen Ramírez, The Adolpho Leirner Collection of Brazilian Constructive Art at the Museum of Fine Arts: Building on a Construct (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009); and Geometry Beyond Limits: Latin American Contemporary Art from the Jean and Colette Cherqui Collection (Paris: Maison de L’Amerique Latine, 2010). 5 The seminal text on this topic is curator Mari Carmen Ramírez’s “Beyond the Fantastic: Framing Identity in U.S. Exhibitions of Latin American Art,” Art Journal 51, no. 4 (Winter 1992): 60–68. amor | displaced boundaries 103 March Foundation in Madrid from February 11 to May 15, 2011.6 At 504 pages, Cold America is the longest catalog on the topic, and one of the few not directly connected to a private collection. It follows the same regional-survey format as the catalogs mentioned above, although it includes material from Cuba, Colombia, and Mexico, in addition to Uruguay, Argentina, Brazil, and Venezuela. In this publication, the reader finds essays by experts from different geographical areas, illus- trations, a chronology, a bibliography, and a selection of translated doc- Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/artm/article-pdf/3/2/101/720214/artm_r_00083.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 uments from the period (1934–73). The title of the exhibition and catalog, which one cannot avoid associating with the cold temperatures and the (arguably) cold-minded cerebral behavior and efficiency of northern Protestant societies (as well as the Parisian debates about abstraction chaud and froid), reverts Uruguayan artist Joaquín Torres García’s inverted map, as well as his famous proclamation that “our North is the South,” to its original position.7 One wonders if this is symptomatic of the institutional success that Latin American Geometric Abstraction has accrued over the last decade, for now our North is the North; that is, we celebrate Latin America’s closeness to the sensible social and cultural modes of those European coun- tries in which Neo-plasticism, Concrete art, and various forms of Constructivism thrived. Indeed, the term cold abstraction was coined in Paris during the 1950s to refer to the Hard-Edge and Constructivist- derived work advocated by Denise René Gallery after the war; it was an art meant to restore order and measurement in a world of chaos. Rationalism, objectivity, and precision were all qualities that the various branches of Constructivism, Concretism, and Geometric
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