
<p><strong>R E V I E W A R T I C L E </strong></p><p>DISPLACED BOUNDARIES: GEOMETRIC ABSTRACTION FROM PICTURES TO OBJECTS </p><p>monica amor </p><p>suárez, osbel. cold america: geometric abstraction in latin america </p><p>(1934–1973). exhibition presented by the Fundación Juan march, madrid, Feb 11–may 15, 2011. </p><p>crispiani, alejandro. <em>Objetos para transformar el mundo: Trayectorias del arte concreto-invención, Argentina y Chile, 1940–1970 </em>[<em>Objects to Transform the World: Trajectories of Concrete-Invention Art, Argentina and Chile, 1940–1970</em>]. </p><p>buenos aires: universidad nacional de Quilmes, 2011. </p><p>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 reflection. The field 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 <em>Latin American </em></p><p></p><ul style="display: flex;"><li style="flex:1">© 2014 ARTMargins and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology </li><li style="flex:1">doi:10.1162/ARTM_a_00083 </li></ul><p></p><p>101 </p><p><em>Geometric Abstraction</em>, in many instances produced under the aegis of a particular collection, have lent greater visibility to this material and have made the market a key factor in the consolidation </p><p>1</p><p>of the field. <br>After the groundbreaking monographic catalogs of Neoconcrete artists Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticica, produced in the 1990s in </p><p>2</p><p>Europe, the late 1990s and early 2000s witnessed the appearance of a number of survey exhibitions in which the overarching notion of 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. <br>It is revealing that at a recent workshop of curators and historians </p><p>3</p><p>at the Getty Research Institute, where the topic of Latin American art exhibits was being discussed, almost every one of the eleven or so participants 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 </p><p></p><ul style="display: flex;"><li style="flex:1">1</li><li style="flex:1">Exhibitions of this work in commercial galleries have also proliferated, and it is worth </li></ul><p>noting that some of these galleries are major power brokers, such as Gagosian and Hauser & Wirth. </p><ul style="display: flex;"><li style="flex:1">2</li><li style="flex:1"><em>Lygia Clark </em>(Porto: Fundação Serralves, Museu de Arte Contemporânea, 1998; </li></ul><p>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; <em>Helio Oiticica </em>(Rotterdam: Witte de With; Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 1992), exhibition catalog. </p><ul style="display: flex;"><li style="flex:1">3</li><li style="flex:1">The summer workshop on Latin American/Latino art took place at the Getty Center on </li></ul><p>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 public programs in 2017. </p><p>102 </p><p>that the time has come to re-evaluate their panoramic pretenses and </p><p>4</p><p>expository form. 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 phenomenon that remains largely unanalyzed in the literature on the topic. Moreover, it seems crucial in this context to highlight that the unceasing iteration of exhibitions devoted to the trend has displaced the dominant tendency, during the 1980s and early 1990s, to portray Latin </p><p>5</p><p>American art as inherently “fantastic,” magical, or exotic. 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. <br>Two recent publications—one bilingual and one in Spanish—shed light on the current status of Latin American Geometric Abstraction. </p><p>The first, entitled <em>Cold America: Geometric Abstraction in Latin America </em></p><p><em>(1934–1973)</em>, is the catalog of an exhibition that took place at the Juan </p><p></p><ul style="display: flex;"><li style="flex:1">4</li><li style="flex:1">Exhibitions produced by the Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros are too many to list </li></ul><p></p><p>here. Its most comprehensive catalogs include <em>Geometric Abstraction: Latin American Art from the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Collection</em>, ed. Yve-Alain Bois, Paulo Herkenhoff, </p><p>Ariel Jiménez, Luis Pérez-Oramas, and Mary Schneider Enríquez (New Haven, CT: Yale </p><p>University Press, 2001), exhibition catalog; and <em>The Geometry of Hope: Latin American Art from the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Collection</em>, ed. Gabriel Pérez-Barreiro (Austin: Blanton </p><p>Museum of Art, University of Texas at Austin, 2007), exhibition catalog. Other important exhibition catalogs of Geometric Abstraction associated with private collections are </p><p>Juan Ledezma, <em>The Sites of Latin American Abstraction </em>(Miami: Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation, 2007); Aracy A. Amaral, <em>Arte construtiva no Brasil: Coleção Adolpho Leirner </em></p><p>(São Paulo: DBA Artes Gráficas, 1998); Mari Carmen Ramírez, <em>The Adolpho Leirner </em></p><p><em>Collection of Brazilian Constructive Art at the Museum of Fine Arts: Building on a Construct </em></p><p>(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009); and <em>Geometry Beyond Limits: Latin </em></p><p><em>American Contemporary Art from the Jean and Colette Cherqui Collection </em>(Paris: Maison </p><p>de L’Amerique Latine, 2010). </p><ul style="display: flex;"><li style="flex:1">5</li><li style="flex:1">The seminal text on this topic is curator Mari Carmen Ramírez’s “Beyond the Fantastic: </li></ul><p>Framing Identity in U.S. Exhibitions of Latin American Art,” <em>Art Journal </em>51, no. 4 (Winter 1992): 60–68. </p><p>103 </p><p>6</p><p>March Foundation in Madrid from February 11 to May 15, 2011. At 504 pages, <em>Cold America </em>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, illustrations, a chronology, a bibliography, and a selection of translated documents 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 <em>abstraction chaud </em>and <em>froid</em>), reverts Uruguayan artist Joaquín Torres García’s inverted map, as well as his famous proclamation that “our </p><p>7</p><p>North is the South,” to its original position. 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 countries in which Neo-plasticism, Concrete art, and various forms of Constructivism thrived. Indeed, the term <em>cold abstraction </em>was coined in Paris during the 1950s to refer to the Hard-Edge and Constructivistderived 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 Abstraction in some ways cultivated, and to which they aspired. The title <em>Cold America </em>implies that such qualities constitute the criteria against which the art included in the exhibition measured itself. <br>The introductory text by the curator of the exhibition, the Cuban critic Osbel Suárez, is organized chronologically and geographically, yet it moves away from familiar narratives. Indeed, it initially proposes a familiar trajectory, one that starts with Joaquín Torres García and ends with Venezuelan kinetic artist Jesús Soto, if only to thwart expectations by concluding with an episode dedicated to Cuba that occupies almost </p><p>67</p><p>Osbel Suárez, <em>Cold America: Geometric Abstraction in Latin America (1934–1973) </em>(Madrid: </p><p>Fundación Juan March, 2011), exhibition catalog. Joaquín Torres García, <em>Círculo y Cuadrado </em>(Montevideo), no. 1 (May 1936). </p><p>104 </p><p>half of the opening essay. The text is a fair summary of the propositions, events, exhibitions, and publications that fostered Geometric Abstract and Concrete/Constructivist tendencies in Argentina, Brazil, Venezuela, and Cuba. But in order to avoid repetition, in what has become a predictable introductory narrative in exhibition catalogs, Suárez bypasses well-known tales of origin regarding Concretist and Neoconcretist visual arts in Brazil and Geometric Abstract art in Venezuela, by focusing instead on Concrete poetry in the cities of Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo and on architect Carlos Raúl Villanueva’s City University in Caracas. One appreciates the effort to shed light on less familiar territory, but the result is diffusive and arbitrary, especially given that the last four (out of nine) sections of the introduction are devoted to what the author calls the “concrete brevity” of Havana. The history of the emergence of Geometric Abstraction in Cuba, which, according to the author, was forged by only a few individuals, is no doubt worth telling. However, the essay does not completely address the cultural significance of this artistic episode on the Caribbean island, since the material is treated at the introductory level alone. Other countries—Argentina, Brazil, and Venezuela—receive more careful attention in the catalog’s individual essays. <br>César Paternosto, another contributor to <em>Cold America</em>, provides a close reading of Uruguayan-Argentine artist Rhod Rothfuss’s proposition of the <em>marco recortado </em>(cutout frames). Paternosto is mostly concerned here with the pioneering gesture that the cutout frame signified in the 1940s, as well as its genesis and impact on subsequent artists. Rothfuss conceived of the cutout frame in opposition to pictorial illusionism and the window effect of naturalistic painting that orthogonal frames historically presupposed. The result was a series of pictorial propositions that bypassed rectangular formats in favor of irregularly shaped canvases and, later on, relief-like paintings that made real space a constitutive element of the work. Paternosto, an artist included in the show, carefully maps the genealogy and conceptual trajectory of this radical proposition through meticulous research. His essay suggests possible links between Rothfuss’s cutout frames and Torres García’s wood reliefs. This association is indeed the most interesting one between the older artist and the work of the Concrete Argentines coming of age in the mid-1940s. The author also alerts the reader to a relationship between these cutout frames and the shaped canvases of Ellsworth Kelly. He very precisely indicates the specific connections </p><p>105 </p><p>and encounters that occurred in postwar Paris between the American artist and the Argentines who practiced the cutout frame. <br>María Amalia García’s essay on the cultural exchanges between <br>Argentina and Brazil during the 1940s and 1950s is an exemplary piece of research. In contrast to other contributors who focus on formal and conceptual analysis within Latin American Geometric Abstraction, García attends to the institutional scaffolding that supported this movement at the second São Paulo Biennial of 1953. As García writes, “abstraction and internationalism” were new concepts that came to guide cultural regional hegemony during the period. García’s research is impeccable, and her focus on the institutional determinations of Geometric Abstraction redirects our attention from questions of form </p><p>8</p><p>and originality to questions of cultural politics and representation. <br>A short and previously published essay on Brazilian Concretism and Neoconcretism by the legendary critic and poet Ferreira Gullar (the spokesperson for Neoconcretism between 1959 and 1961, and the most famous commentator on these Brazilian movements) rehearses the author’s views on the accomplishments of the art of the period. Gullar emphasizes the role of his poetic experiments (book poems and spatial poems, also called <em>object-poems</em>) and the importance of the dialogue between poets and artists. <br>A much longer and in-depth analysis of the Venezuelan case is introduced by Luis Pérez-Oramas, who also ponders the phenomenon of Latin American Geometric Abstraction more broadly. The author warns his reader that these tendencies flourished and acquired symbolic force in only a few countries, and that in the present, as in the past, Geometric Abstraction sustains a universalist myth that occludes the political and anthropological implications of its form. He maps the regional desire for modernity embedded in these artistic developments and returns over and over again to the idea that these new artistic practices constitute “place,” the “place of the modern,” or “modernity as place”—a concept that allows him to focus on the local dynamics and motivations that inform the work of the artists under discussion. He elucidates the different phases of Venezuelan Geometric Abstraction, recapping a chronology introduced in his 2007 essay “Caracas: A </p><p></p><ul style="display: flex;"><li style="flex:1">8</li><li style="flex:1">For a thorough treatment of this subject, see María Amalia García, <em>El arte abstracto: </em></li></ul><p></p><p><em>Intercambios culturales entre Argentina y Brasil </em>(Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI Editores, 2011). </p><p>106 </p><p>9</p><p>Constructive Stage.” In the end, the main objective of Pérez-Oramas’s contribution to <em>Cold America </em>is to relativize the radicality of Kinetic Art through a nuanced critical account of Venezuelan Cinetismo (Kinetic </p><p>10 </p><p>Art), as embodied in the work of Jesús Soto and Carlos Cruz-Diez. In these artists’ drive to dematerialization and visual effects, PérezOramas sees inscribed “the humanistic logic of classical illusionism.” Understanding the work of these artists as “machines that produce </p><p>11 </p><p>optical mirages,” Pérez-Oramas posits them as “ideal visions” equivalent to the illusionism cherished by academic painting. In other words, in spite of their unconventional formal modalities, the vibrating picture plane of Soto’s and Cruz-Diez’s works remains the support of an ideal scene. This scene is not figuratively represented, but rather invoked through the techno-scientific symbolic universe that the works address through the picture plane’s optical vibrations and abstract rhythms. This in turn refers to the phantasmatic congruence between Venezuelan modernity and reality: the idealized realization in the work of art of that utmost efficiency with which modernity is associated. Ultimately, Pérez-Oramas’s aim is to link the chimera of this unblemished modernity in a Venezuela fraught with political, economic, and social contradictions to the transparency and dematerialization to which Cinetismo aspired—posing, in passing, fundamental questions about the politics of abstract forms. <br>The final essay in the catalog is by Gabriel Pérez-Barreiro, whose field of expertise is Argentine Concretism. Pérez-Barreiro ponders the relationship between context and form in two works by the Argen- </p><p>tine artist Alfredo Hlito, <em>Ritmos cromáticos </em>(1947) and <em>Ritmos </em></p><p><em>cromáticos </em>III (1949); one by Belgian artist Georges Vantongerloo, <em>Fonction-composition </em>(1937); and one by Swiss artist Richard Paul </p><p></p><ul style="display: flex;"><li style="flex:1">9</li><li style="flex:1">Luis Pérez-Oramas, “Caracas: A Constructive Stage,” in Pérez-Barreiro, <em>Geometry of </em></li></ul><p></p><p><em>Hope</em>. </p><p></p><ul style="display: flex;"><li style="flex:1">10 </li><li style="flex:1">See, for example, Luis Pérez-Oramas, “La hipoteca del ornato en las artes visuals venezo- </li></ul><p></p><p>lanas,” in <em>La Cocina de Jurassic Park y otros ensayos visuales </em>(Caracas: Fundación Polar, </p><p>1998), 253–77; “La poética del Penetrable y la escena Minimalista: Las paradojas de la absorción absoluta,” unpublished paper presented at the Fogg Museum, Harvard University, March 3, 2001; “La Colección Cisneros: Del paisaje al lugar,” in Bois et al., <em>Geometric Abstraction</em>; and “Gego and the Analytic Context of Cinetismo,” in <em>Inverted Utopias: Avant-Garde in Latin America</em>, ed. Mari Carmen Ramirez and Hector Olea (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004). </p><ul style="display: flex;"><li style="flex:1">11 </li><li style="flex:1">Luis Pérez-Oramas, “Notes on the Venezuelan Constructive Scene 1950–1973,” in </li></ul><p></p><p>Suárez, <em>Cold America</em>, 59. </p><p>107 </p><p>Lohse, <em>Konkretion I </em>(1945–46). The author addresses the stylistic similarities of these works while also presenting and analyzing the different artistic milieus and political contexts in which the works were produced. But the two paintings by Hlito, which are strikingly similar to those of Lohse and Vantongerloo, are actually never formally analyzed. The works function as a springboard for a discussion of the contextual and ideological differences between Concretism in Argentina and Europe. According to Pérez-Barreiro, these contextual differences translate into formal differences; he thus contrasts the interest in chromatic variation found in Lohse’s <em>Konkretion I </em>with the more structured compositionality of Hlito’s works. This observation, which leads the author to associate Hlito’s pictorial organization with the more politi- </p><p>12 </p><p>cized discourse of the Argentine Concrete artists, is suggestive, but it requires more argumentative force. A broader sampling of works might have made Pérez-Barreiro’s argument more convincing. Indeed, while the author’s account of the Swiss and Argentine contexts in which these works emerged is precise, a corresponding analysis of form does not follow. Pérez-Barreiro raises important questions about meaning and context, but the rapport between form and content remains vague in his account. How, in other words, are the formal differences between Lohse’s and Hlito’s works related to their different social contexts? Why did the Europeans privilege color (if indeed they did), while Hlito favored structured composition? <br>Pérez-Barreiro ends his essay with a summary of Rhod Rothfuss’s important essay “The Frame, a Problem in Contemporary Art,” published in the seminal <em>Arturo </em>magazine in 1944, to highlight issues of (mis)interpretation instead of context. Pérez-Barreiro points to Alfredo Hlito’s misplaced perception that an unidentified Mondrian painting, which illustrates Rothfuss’s essay, lacked painterly texture and was instead made of smooth planes of color. This misperception, which may have been the result of poor photographic reproduction, led Hlito to construct his paintings through even and flat color. But why, asks Pérez-Barreiro, would Lohse and Vantongerloo, who had actually seen Mondrian’s work in the flesh, pursue seamless surfaces just as Hlito </p><p></p><ul style="display: flex;"><li style="flex:1">12 </li><li style="flex:1">Alfredo Hlito was a member of the Asociación de Arte Concreto Invención (AACI), which </li></ul><p>in 1946 embraced what Hlito called a “materialist aesthetic.” Influenced by the early writings of Karl Marx, several member of the AACI also became members of the Argentine Communist Party. See Alfredo Hlito,“Notas para una estética materialista,” <em>Arte Concreto Invención</em>, no. 1 (August 1946): 12. </p><p>108 </p><p>did? Relinquishing the contextual question that guided the beginning of his essay, the author concludes by stressing the subjectivity of inter- </p><p>13 </p><p>pretation, “the prism of what one wants to see.” <br><em>Cold America </em>certainly benefits from the more thematic and focused essays by García, Pérez-Oramas, and Pérez-Barreiro, who avoid introductory accounts of Concretism and Kinetic Art in Argentina, Brazil, and Venezuela, and instead provide more detailed explorations of specific works, events, and theories, as well as formal and political analyses. However, as the exhibition catalog for a regional survey of Geometric Abstraction, the book would have benefited from a more consistent introduction that tackled the significant exhibition history on this topic, as well as its own position within that growing field. Moreover, Suárez’s discussion of Cuba in his introductory text—a first in a series of catalogs that have mostly dealt with Uruguay, Argentina, Brazil, and Venezuela—feels arbitrary, especially in view of the fact that although the catalog devotes a section to Mexico (which only includes the work of Germán Cueto) and a section to Colombia (which only includes photographs by Leo Matiz), there are no substantive discussions of either Mexican or Colombian Geometric Abstraction, or of Cueto’s or Matiz’s works, in any of its texts. <br>The <em>Cold America </em>catalog, then, begs certain questions: What is the relationship between this unaccounted for material and the various Geometric Abstract trends that emerged in postwar Latin America? Why does its introduction not allude to the catalog of the 2007 exhibi- </p>
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