Historical Materialism 20.3 (2012) 116–134 brill.com/hima Marxism, Art and the Histories of Latin America: An Interview with David Craven* Angela Dimitrakaki University of Edinburgh [email protected] AD: David, as a Marxist art historian your engagement with Latin-American art and theory, stretching over at least thirty years, has been realised across multiple ‘fronts’. You have published several books, as well as many articles and interviews, on the historical development of art from Latin America (above all Central America) in relation to social movements, translated key texts into English from Spanish, written extensively about theoretical approaches to art, and deployed a dialogical framework for encompassing Western and Latin-American Marxism. How did it all start for you? And why? DC: As a university student in the US during the deeply unsettling and often militant 1970s, I was forced to face some sobering facts about the nature of US government intervention in ‘las Américas’. The ‘fijirst’ 9/11, September 11 1973, is etched permanently in my mind. I distinctly recall leaving class at Vanderbilt University and learning of the military coup in Chile, which had overthrown the democratically elected socialist government of President Salvador Allende (whom I admired deeply, however naively). I learned subsequently about the insidious involvement by Nixon and Kissinger with Pinochet and company. I had been working for the McGovern campaign as well as the civil rights movement in Mississippi during the early 1970s and my young man’s anger soon turned into a permanently * David Craven was a Marxist art historian I deeply admired. When I suggested to him in 2010 to do an interview for Historical Materialism, partly motivated by my desire to get to know more about his extraordinary work, I never imagined that the interview would appear posthumously. At the time of David’s death, the interview required editing by someone with greater expertise in the subject than myself. I am immensely grateful to art historian and Historical Materialism Editor Steve Edwards for his commitment to this and for ensuring that the interview would reach the public. © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2012 DOI: 10.1163/1569206X-12341243 A. Dimitrakaki / Historical Materialism 20.3 (2012) 116–134 117 disturbed sense of the world-order everywhere. This pursued me throughout my graduate studies at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill – a rather leftist place by US standards. There I was fortunate enough to study with a famous student of Theodor Adorno, namely, Donald Kuspit. This was when ‘critical theory’ was only fijirst beginning to re-emerge in North-American universities or the US artworld, and I owe a deep debt to Kuspit, who has a PhD in art history and also a PhD in philosophy. He mentored me in understanding the complex interrelationship of art theory to artistic practice, as well as to broader social concerns.1 I was awarded my PhD in December of 1979, just months after the Sandinista Revolution in Nicaragua ( July 1979) and felt that I needed to see fijirst hand what revolutionary and anti-imperialist policies in the arts were actually like in ‘nuestra América’. So, after earning a tenure-track position in the State University of New York system in 1978 and thus also the fijinancial means to cover the trip, I went. This was when the Reagan administration (beginning in 1981) tried to stop all travel to that part of the world. Nevertheless, I flew to Nicaragua in the summer of 1982 – along with a young SUNY Professor of Philosophy named John Ryder (now President of Khazar University in Baku, Azerbaijan). The research that we did that summer yielded the very fijirst monograph on the subject of cultural policies promoted by the FSLN, Art in the New Nicaragua, funded by the New York Council for the Humanities with the express support of key authors on its board such as Edward Said and Toni Morrison. Though I can boast of this fact now, I was defijinitely intimidated at the time when the Reagan administration denounced the New York Council that funded us and then audited my taxes, as well as tapped my telephone, in an openly aggressive manner for several years afterward. After returning from Nicaragua in August 1982, I studied in Cuba at the University of Havana during the summer of 1984 before living in Spain in 1984/5 and then returning to Nicaragua in the summer of 1986, along with visiting Mexico City for the fijirst time in that period. I went back to Nicaragua in January 1990 shortly before the elections in February of that same year, to observe the contentious situation leading up to them. Many articles and books resulted from the research that I did in those years, beginning with Art of the New Nicaragua in 1983 which I co-authored with John Ryder; my lengthy monograph a few years later, The New Concept of Art and Popular Culture in Nicaragua since the Revolution in 1979, and more recently Art and Revolution in Latin America, 1910–1990.2 And there was also the solidarity work in which I engaged daily for 1. See Craven and Winkenweder (eds.) 2010. 2. Craven and Ryder 1983; Craven 1989; Craven 2002; Craven 2006. .