Abstraction in Reverse: The Reconfigured Spectator in Mid-Twentieth-Century Latin American Art

Abstraction in Reverse

Abstraction in Reverse

The Reconfigured Spectator in Mid-Twentieth-Century Latin American Art

Alexander Alberro

The University of Chicago Press

Chicago and London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2017 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637.

Published 2017.

Printed in China

26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17    1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-39395-7 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-39400-8 (e-book)

DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226394008.001.0001

Publication of this book has been aided by a grant from The Institute for Studies on Latin American Art (ISLAA).

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Alberro, Alexander, author.

Title: Abstraction in reverse : the reconfigured spectator in mid-twentieth-century Latin American art / Alexander Alberro.

Description: Chicago : The University of Chicago Press, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016030962 | ISBN 9780226393957 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226394008 (e-book)

Subjects: LCSH: Concrete art—Latin America—History—20th century. | Concrete art—Social aspects—Latin America—History—20th century. | Arts audiences—History—20th century.

Classification: LCC N6502.57.C6 A43 2017 | DDC 709.04/056—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016030962

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

To Ana Lizón

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Spectatorship after Abstract Art

1  Concrete Art and Invention

2  Time-Objects

3  Subjective Instability

4  The Instituting Subject

Conclusion

Notes

Index

Acknowledgments

The idea to write this book came to me in 2000 when I first discovered the enormous Latin American and Caribbean Collection in Smathers Library of the University of Florida in Gainesville. In this vast archive I came across pristine copies of many of the books, journals, newspapers, and leaflets that have become the cornerstones of this study. I want to begin by thanking that instution, as well as the following archives and estates that permitted me to study their material: Atelier Le Parc (Cachan), Atelier Soto (Paris), Atelier Cruz-Diez (Paris), Carlos Raúl Villanueva Archives (Caracas), Cecilia de Torres Archive (New York), Fundación Cisneros (New York), Fundación Espigas (Buenos Aires), Joaquín Torres-García Archive (Montevideo), Max Bill Archives (Zurich), Projeto Hélio Oiticica (Rio de Janeiro), Institute for Studies in Latin American Art (New York), Instituto Moreira Salles (Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo), Lygia Clark Art Center (Rio de Janeiro), and Raul Naon Archive (Buenos Aires). For granting me interviews and otherwise corresponding, I thank Carlos Cruz-Diez, Analivia Cordeiro, Ferreira Gullar, Roberto Jacoby, Julio Le Parc, Tomás Maldonado, Vera Molnar, Francois Morellet, Cesar Oiticica, and Denise René.

Along the way I incurred debts of various kinds, large and small, to many people who have invited me to discuss my research on the work of Latin American artists, posed challenging questions, sharpened my reasoning, and just kept the conversation going: Dawn Ades, Mónica Amor, Ricardo Basbaum, Carlos Basualdo, Karen Benezra, Barry Bergdoll, Sabeth Buchmann, Daniel Buren, Kaira Cabañas, Claudia Calirman, Luis Camnitzer, Ron Clark, Diedrich Diedrichsen, Edward Dimendberg, Helmut Draxler, Pedro Erber, Heloisa Espada, Jose Falconi, Hal Foster, María Amalia García, Lydia Goehr, Robin Greeley, Hans Haacke, Mauro Herlitzka, Max Jorge Hinderer Cruz, Ariel Jiménez, Kellie Jones, David Joselit, Ileen Kohn, Rosalind Krauss, Michael Leja, Arto Lindsay, Ana Longoni, Marta Minujin, Keith Moxey, Graciela Montaldo, Luis Pérez-Oramas, Isabel Plante, Jean-Marc Poinsot, Rachel Price, Gerald Prince, Daniel Quiles, John Rajchman, Gabriela Rangel, Elisabeth Sher, Irene Small, Nancy Troy, and Sergio Vega. Gabriel Pérez-Barreiro, Andrea Giunta, Nicolas Guagnini, and Adele Nelson improved drafts of sections of the manuscript and generously shared their vast knowledge of this subject, and Caroline Constant, Rosalyn Deutsche, Caroline Jones, James Meyer, and Terence Smith offered critical responses and invaluable advice on the argumentation, prose structure, and overall organization of the book.

The lively debates that took place at the series of colloquiums I organized at Columbia University between 2010 and 2016 with the magnanimous support of Ariel Aisiks and the Institute for Studies on Latin American Art (ISLAA) generated provocative discussions that greatly contributed to the material in this book. A grant from ISLAA, as well as funds from the Virginia Bloedel Wright research endowment at Barnard College, also helped to offset the cost of securing image rights. Let me also acknowledge the many scholarly audiences in venues as different as the Comité International d’Histoire de l’Art (Montreal), Cornell University (Ithaca), the Courtauld Institute of Art (London), the Fundación Proa (Buenos Aires), Harvard University (Cambridge), the Instituto Moreira Salles (Rio de Janeiro), the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Los Angeles), MACBA: Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (Barcelona), the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (Madrid), Princeton University (Princeton), Stanford University (Palo Alto), the University of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia), and the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York), who shifted the direction of some of my arguments in unexpected ways. I also owe a debt to the terrific editorial staff at the University of Chicago Press, Ruth Goring, James Toftness, and in particular Susan Bielstein, who was never reticent about offering criticisms, advice, and editorial suggestions. Rose Rittenhouse handled promotions deftly.

I am also grateful to my unfailing research assistant at Columbia University, Nicholas Morgan, whose efficiency was vital at crucial moments, and to the brilliant students in my seminars at Barnard College, Columbia University, and the Whitney Independent Study Program, from whom I have learned a great deal.

Most of all, my love and appreciation to Ana Lizón, whose Bogotá childhood is on every page of this book; to Nora Alter, my best friend; and to Arielle and Zoë, who kept things real by rolling their eyes every time their father talked about abstractions and reversals.

Introduction

Spectatorship after Abstract Art

During the mid-twentieth century, Latin American artists working in several different cities altered the nature of modern art in ways that have never been fully appreciated. In this critical transformation, art’s relation to its public was reimagined, and the spectator was granted a more significant role than ever before in the realization of the artwork. These developments unfolded in the context of a complicated mediation of the particular form of abstract art that European modernist artists Theo van Doesburg, Max Bill, and others referred to as Concrete art. This type of abstraction resonated in Latin America not only as a result of European modernism’s hegemony but also because it articulated an experience of modernity that, despite all cultural differentiation, was becoming increasingly global. Initially, in the 1940s, Latin American artists with modernist ambitions faithfully adopted Concretism, following their European predecessors in banishing all categories of description and imitation in favor of an emphasis on the sheer inventiveness of a simple operation generated entirely from the mind of the artist and communicated lucidly to the spectator. The task of the spectator in turn was to avoid any particularities that might obstruct her deindividualized gaze and to subordinate herself entirely and without interference to the logic of the art object, enabling the artwork’s import, its meaning, to be comprehended fully. Vision was the primary means for this model of spectatorship, and any phenomenological aspect of the experience was to be avoided.

But Latin American artists would soon push Concrete art considerably beyond its established boundaries. Indeed, most of the artists whose work is central to Abstraction in Reverse created their distinctive identity by rejecting the a priori generalizations of pictorial or sculptural Concretism and offering an alternative to it. In their effort to imagine art as an integral aspect of an intellectual life that responded to their own particular concerns, they put aside the Concretist notion that the meaning of an artwork is established prior to its experience by the spectator in favor of a concept of artistic signification (as much as of consciousness and subjectivity) that assumes that meaning can be produced only in the site where the art object and spectator meet, where subject and object come together. I call the site of this intersection the aesthetic field of the artwork, defining it first and foremost as an area of possibility through which the spectator constructs meaning, and I focus this study on the structuring of artistic signification according to the interrelationship of subject and object within this aesthetic field. Consistent with their negation of idealist aesthetics, Latin American post-Concrete artists interwove the specificities of the material object and the context of its exhibition and display with the spectator’s subjective experience within the aesthetic field in ways that thread the work of art back into the fabric of the world.

By reshaping the aesthetic field to posit the spectator not as a disembodied receptor of optical stimuli but as an active subject engaged in a new kind of attentiveness and tactile encounter, post-Concrete artists opened the way for new modes of consciousness and experience, as well as new models of subject-object relations. My thesis, in brief, is that in breaking in various ways with the core dictums of Concrete art, Latin American artists in the mid-twentieth century reimagined the relationship of art to its public and produced artworks to challenge prevailing notions of the interconnection between subject and world, perceiver and perceived, objective reality and subjective experience. In this new conceptualization, art was no longer considered entirely autonomous and internally coherent but relationally dynamic, prompting the imaginative engagement of the spectator and producing meaning through this very relationality.¹ The rationales underlying the generation of this art varied, as did the degrees and conditions of subjective agency it actualized, but the new post-Concrete art in Latin America fundamentally reconfigured the aesthetic field and modernist spectatorship more generally, and the particular forms these new modes of sensibility took are the primary concern of this book.

Along with a realignment of the aesthetic field and the development of new conventions of spectatorship, ambitious mid-twentieth-century Latin American art manifested a new type of artistic subjectivity. For reasons that are as much political and cultural as they are aesthetic, these artists discarded the traditional, artisanlike exercise of manufacturing the artwork in favor of presenting catalytic objects or ensembles that encompass, and in fact require, the spectator for their completion. If, as noted a moment ago, Concrete art’s form of spectatorship closed the art object in upon itself, conveying an idea or act carried out by the artist at an earlier moment, then the importance of the new post-Concrete work lies in the context of spectatorship. Henceforth the artist performs no longer as a creator for contemplation, but as an instigator for creation.² In this new condition, the function of the artist is limited to the presentation of formal elements or situations to be constructed into artworks in the context of the aesthetic field. This process of configuration and the link between forms of artistic signification and forms of spectatorship are central theoretical concerns of this book. My argument is that meaning does not reside in the intent of the artist, nor in the essence of the art object, nor in its site of display, nor even in the consciousness of the spectator engaging with the work. Meaning is constructed in the aesthetic field, a space that includes all of these elements as well as writings and statements made by the artists and others about the work. In this respect, the aesthetic field differs from the logic of what philosopher Jacques Rancière refers to as an emancipatory practice of art in which the centered subject is fully capable of seizing hold of aesthetic experiences, and constitutes instead something similar to what philosopher Michel Foucault describes as an apparatus of a system of relations that is established among a set of components.³ My goal in what follows is to study the interplay of shifts of position and modifications of function among the elements that structure the work of mid-twentieth-century Latin American artists, keeping in mind that with each shift or modification the hierarchy of these constituent parts is readjusted or reworked.⁴ Moreover, insofar as the aesthetic field as an apparatus is always inscribed in what Foucault refers to as a play of power, it will be important to comprehend some of the reasons that led to this reconfiguration in the mid-twentieth century.⁵

Then, too, the aesthetic field as an apparatus implies a process of subjectification; that is to say, it produces its subject, it orients the gestures, behaviors, opinions, or discourses of living beings into subject positions.⁶ This is what separates it from sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s framework of a field of cultural production.⁷ Although both concepts theorize a field as hierarchical, the goal of Bourdieu’s analysis is to understand the ways in which the subjects and institutions that specialize in creating, displaying, distributing, and evaluating art interact, and in particular how the fully formed subject negotiates the social and economic context of art at a given time and in a particular place. The ensemble of relations that structure the aesthetic field that I propose includes the context singled out by Bourdieu. But I understand the spectatorial subject as a position that is itself formed in the aesthetic field. This approach requires paying greater attention than does Bourdieu to the way the dynamic system of relations established among the elements of the aesthetic field are configured, as well as to the spectator’s interaction with the formal or material techniques that actually make art.⁸

The turn to action and participation in the context of spectatorship in Latin American art also marks a shift to an entirely different mode of social engagement of the artwork. The model of spectatorship that develops as artists attempt to reintegrate art into the social realm by asserting its relationship with the viewing subject turns outward into the third and fourth dimensions. This, in essence, is at the core of what I refer to as abstraction in reverse. To quote a 1960 text by Ferreira Gullar, a Brazilian critic whose early writings are important to my investigation, post- (or neo-) Concrete artists, in their attempt to reconnect the picture plane with painting’s need for spatialization, invert traditional perspective and create "an outward three-dimensional virtual space powerful enough to break away from (even abstract) representation."⁹ The gap between the ostensible permanence of the art object and the ephemerality of the spectator’s interaction with it accordingly narrows and in some cases collapses altogether. The artwork ceases to be a stationary object accessible to immediate and exhaustive viewing (that is, seen in its entirety) and invites an embodied reception located in space and time. The artistic experience becomes a transitional phenomenon, prompting the spectator to relate with others and with an environment that surrounds and envelops her. But rather than rest in the moment of desublimation, the spectator is induced by some of the artworks produced in this manner to see herself both as an integral subject and as an object of the perception of others, creating new, liberating spaces of sociability. Gone is the myth of the singular artist in absolute control of her creative production. Gone too is the traditional understanding of the ontology of art in which the artwork and its conceptualized essence stand apart from the world and unchanging for all time. In place of these singularities, these artworks posit a relational identity and set of processual operations that are not atavistic but disjointed, having multiple roots, facets, and directions. The subjective agency and creativity of the spectator become paramount in the realization of the artwork.

How to describe this subjective agency, this sense of difference in spectatorship, without falling into a pure pluralism or relativity? Here philosopher Jacques Derrida’s theory of the play of signification is useful. Derrida’s well-known addition of an a when writing difference—différance—to establish a marker that disturbs the settled understanding or translation of the concept set the word difference in motion to new meanings without obscuring the trace of its conventional ones.¹⁰ As differ shades into defer, the idea emerges that meaning is always put off by the play of signification, perhaps to the point of an endless supplementarity. If the first sense of difference establishes fixed binaries that stabilize meaning, the second challenges those binaries and shows how signification is never finished or completed but keeps on moving to encompass other, additional or supplementary, meanings.

What, then, is the relationship between spectatorship and meaning in this context of an infinite postponement of meaning? If signification depends upon an endless repositioning of its differential terms, then meaning, in any specific instance of spectatorship, depends on a contingent and arbitrary stop—a necessary and temporary break in the infinite process of interpretation. This does not detract from the original insight; it threatens to do so only if the positioning of reception and spectatorship that makes meaning possible is considered to be natural and permanent rather than arbitrary and contingent. And I mean arbitrary in the sense that there is no permanent equivalence between a particular spectatorial response to an artwork and its true meaning. Spectatorial meaning continues to unfold, so to speak, beyond the arbitrary closure that makes it possible at any particular moment.

This notion of signification also helps to clarify the difference between the new paradigm of spectatorship that emerges in the work of mid-twentieth-century Latin American artists and what art critic Michael Fried in the mid-1960s called theatricality.¹¹ Fried linked his understanding of this concept to its opposite, which he termed absorption. The spectator, in the midst of the absorptive experience, is encouraged to let go of the coordinates of her selfhood in order to occupy a position in another world, another self, offered by the artwork, while at the same time continuing to be fully aware of the fact that she is outside the space of that framework. By contrast, the beholder of the theatrical artwork that Fried hypothesizes remains entirely within the bounds of her own selfhood as she compliantly accepts its operative structure. The artwork is there for her to acknowledge. It does not request that she imagine herself as something or someone else; rather, it offers the affirmation of her subject position as it establishes a relationship with it. Nevertheless, that relationship remains largely within the terms of the operative structure of the artwork to which the spectator submits. In contrast to theatricality’s spectator, who acknowledges and accepts the framework of the work of art, mid-twentieth-century Latin American artists mobilize a more active spectator, who becomes the primary force in generating the composition. This kind of spectatorship shares striking similarities with what film theorist Laura Mulvey describes as the possessive spectator that emerges with remote control and digital technology.¹² According to Mulvey, the ability to still the moving image and repeat sequences renders anachronistic the inherently passive modes of spectatorship put into place by film techniques and the cinematic setting.¹³ While the particulars may differ, the aesthetic field of art spectatorship that is the focus of this study shifts in a parallel way to that which Mulvey postulates. The spectator’s engaged role in the realization of the composition becomes central. That the work of mid-twentieth-century Latin American artists recalibrates the aesthetic field years before the phenomena both Fried and Mulvey theorize has as much to do with the dynamics of adopting and then breaking with Concrete art in the 1940s and 1950s as it does with the particular social and political history of Latin America following the Second World War.¹⁴

The new conception of spectatorship fostered by Latin American post-Concrete artists is in important ways similar to various parallel developments in twentieth-century art that also questioned authorship and increased the part played by the spectator in the generation of meaning. The gist of Marcel Duchamp’s comments on the spectator as the one who completes the work of art finds its correlate in this new production, as do the contemporaneous aesthetics of John Cage, Happenings performances, and Fluxus events.¹⁵ Latin American post-Concrete art is also related to the participatory concepts that were key to the concerns of many artistic movements in the 1910s and 1920s, from Dada and Surrealism to the Russian Constructivist avant-garde. The artists in these earlier groupings produced a diverse array of artworks, performances, and exhibition designs that generated novel modes of spectatorial interaction and spatial and temporal contextuality. Some even recalibrated the category of the aesthetic to locate spectatorship in new kinds of what art historian Benjamin Buchloh has described as simultaneous collective reception.¹⁶

And yet, largely due to the renewed cultural forms of self-understanding in Latin America brought about by the demise of European imperialism following the Second World War and assisted by the slight delay in the establishment of US cultural hegemony in the region, the reconceptualization of the spectator that developed in the work of artists from Buenos Aires, Montevideo, Caracas, São Paulo, and Rio de Janeiro in the mid-twentieth century is in many ways unique. It pushes to its logical limit the dictums that a work of art cannot fix in advance the outcome of any of its encounters with contextual plurality and that an artwork cannot exist outside the circumstances in which the spectator views it. It also replaces the subject-object condition that structures traditional aesthetics with one that understands artworks to be actualized in a virtual partnership or dialogical relationship with the spectator.

By summoning the concept of dialogism within the context of spectatorship, I mean to signal what literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin described in the early twentieth century as the relationship between an utterance and its receiving other. According to Bakhtin, the meaning of an utterance exists in the response that it generates from the receiver. Yet this relationship is not one-directional, since the sender of the initial utterance always already anticipates the active response of the receiver other and therefore shapes the utterance accordingly. This inherently interactive nature of discourse and consciousness accounts for the constant generation of new meaning. All language and art is dynamic, relational, and engaged in a process of endless redescription of the world. As Bakhtin emphasizes, however, for one to make a connection between the self and language or the self and art, answerability is necessary.¹⁷ Accordingly, experience and understanding must be linked to activity in a life (without answering for life), and vice versa.¹⁸

This is, then, not a matter of desublimation but of the human subject coming together through a process of consistent response, or answerability. The reception of art is the subject’s shaping or interpretation of it, and that actualization or interpretation comes with a considerable degree of responsibility. The subject has to answer for what she realizes as art—or as life. In this sense answerability is coupled with accountability, and the two work together to produce subjectivity.

The novel forms of spectatorship developed by the work of mid-twentieth-century Latin American artists introduce several problems of considerable import. For one thing, the paradigm of the organic work of art that in literary critic Peter Bürger’s terms seeks to make unrecognizable the fact that it has been made had to be replaced by creations that undermine any sense of wholeness and focus attention on their own incompleteness and the decontextualized quality of their parts.¹⁹ For another thing, in order for the unique forms of spectatorship to be developed, a new type of relationship between art and its site of exhibition or realization had to be formulated. Furthermore new spectatorial subjects, many previously excluded from art, needed to be cultivated. Just exactly who constitutes the imagined public for the new art is a question that hovers throughout this study, as is the issue of the spaces these art objects, sculptural installations, and performance activities are meant to inhabit and be realized within. Then, too, the notion of spectacle arises, since some of the artworks explored in the following pages skip over the tensions between subject and object, spectator and material world, to produce a false sublation that results in what philosopher Theodor Adorno describes as an illusion of immediacy in the totally mediated world, of proximity between strangers, of warmth for those who come to feel the chill of the unmitigated struggle of all against all.²⁰ The problems accompanying the development of the new forms of spectatorship are complex, but they also present the framework of modernist aesthetics with crucial challenges and come to constitute some of the basic traits of contemporary art.

While the changing role of the spectator in the context of mid-twentieth-century Latin American art is the primary concern of this study, it is also attentive to several other issues. One of these relates to the pictorial plane. All of the artists central to Abstraction in Reverse challenge the limits of the picture plane, bringing it to a point where it cannot be extended any further. To move beyond this impasse, they find it necessary to abandon the classic geometrical space of representation that has conventionally accompanied the production of painting on flat surfaces and develop a topological space of relations in their attempts to visualize a new dimension. Some of these artists explore the parameters of that virtual space, while others go on to build directly in space.²¹ Accordingly, while the new space of relations emerges from the techniques of painting, it cannot properly be delimited as painting; rather, this new space of relations encompasses a variety of non-art objects, often objects that either can be manipulated or are integrated with the architectural context and ultimately with the spaces of social life. The extent of that integration is critical for an understanding of the nature of this art.

A second issue concerns national identity. The artists upon whose work this study focuses imagine for the most part a transnational problematic rather than a specifically regional or national one. In their work, the cult of what writer Jorge Luis Borges has referred to as local color—part of a process of national affirmation that in early-twentieth-century Latin America tends to be associated with a figurative style of painting and sculpture—is set aside in favor of a modernist aesthetic that transcends the artistic traditions of the nation-state and operates in what I refer to as an art world.²² This is an abstract or Concrete art that claims neutrality and universal legibility, a cosmopolitan art that purports to be free of particularist localism, nationalist populism, and foundational elitist and essentialist conceptions of cultural identity.²³ But at the same time these artists also questioned and largely dismissed the idea of art as something pure and autonomous. According to the standard mid-twentieth-century view, the world of art was one of free and equal access in which artistic recognition was available to all artists, an enchanted realm that existed outside time and space. This fiction was advanced by many artists and critics in the most powerful countries of world artistic space—those of Western Europe and the United States, where the belief in an art that is nonnational, nonpartisan, and unmarked by political or cultural divisions was the strongest.²⁴ The discontinuity between the modernist art world and its margins was much more perceptible to artists on the periphery, such as Latin American artists, who, having to struggle in very tangible ways in order to find their place in the art world and then to gain admission to its central precincts, were more clear-sighted than others about the nature and the form of the artistic balance of power. For these artists, the modernist art world was "simultaneously one, and unequal, with powerful artistic forms moving from the centers of cultural authority outward to peripheral and semiperipheral regions.²⁵ It is by no means a paradox, then, that these artists emerging from the edges of the modernist art world, who as a result had learned to confront the laws and forces that sustained the unequal structure of this world, should be among the most sensitive to the newest aesthetic inventions in modernist art. This lucidity and the impulse to contest the existing artistic order in the form of what literary scholar Mariano Siskind has described as an antagonistic cosmopolitanism" is at the very heart of their identity as artists.²⁶

At the same time, while the Latin American artists that are the central focus of this study emerge from and belong to the marginal, the underdeveloped, the periphery, in relation to the developed West, they do not all stand in the same relation of otherness to the metropolitan centers. Each negotiated his or her economic, political, and cultural dependency differently. This difference is already inscribed in their cultural/national identities. This negotiation of identity in turn differentiates these artists from other Latin Americans with a very similar history. Indeed, some of the artists in question reimagine a nationalist community, theorizing new mechanisms of cultural exchange between center and periphery, new strategies of integrating modernism with local conventions and experiences, while trying at the same time to transform the latter and impart greater autonomy to them.²⁷

A related line of inquiry takes up issues pertaining to the appropriation and readaptation of artistic ideas and models from one space and time to another, a process that raises issues of representation and institutionalization specific to the host culture. Such assimilations are not passive but actively transformative, based on a blending of adaptation and resistance. All art develops through translation and transposition produced through intercultural encounters. As critic Edward Said puts it in reference to traveling theory, which is not entirely unlike traveling artistic ideas and models, Such movement into a new environment is never unimpeded. It necessarily involves processes of representation and institutionalization different from those at the point of origin. This complicates any account of the transplantation, transference, circulation, and commerce of theories and ideas.²⁸ Over time, Said concludes, the now fully (or partly) accommodated (or incorporated) idea is to some extent transformed by its new uses, its new position in a new time and place.²⁹ This is largely what happens to the European models of Concrete art in the work of mid-twentieth-century Latin American artists. The transformation in question is more than merely a case of creative misreading; the transfer of artistic ideas from one setting to another, with their differing histories and cultural contexts, plays a determining role in changing European notions of Concrete art into Latin American ones. Thus, for reasons that are elucidated when the specific social and historical situations in Europe and Latin America in the mid-twentieth century are compared, idealist aesthetics in one instance become materialist aesthetics in another. I do not wish to suggest that Europe and Latin America determined the kinds of artistic models produced by, say, Theo Van Doesburg and Max Bill or Tomás Maldonado and Waldemar Cordeiro. I do mean, however, that Europe and Latin America are irreducibly first conditions, and they provide limits and apply pressures to which each artist, given his or her own predilections and interests, responds.

Questions of human subjectivity and of subject-object relations more generally speaking are also fundamental to this discussion. What can the art of mid-twentieth-century Latin American artists tell us about the conditions of human identity, about the nature of subjectivity, in this period? What concepts of experience of the world does it mobilize? To what extent is the notion of the expressive subject, the self-made ego of the humanist tradition, troubled or repositioned by the logic of this art? What might be the underlying reasons for that shift? And how does this phenomenon play out in spectatorship? These are not easy questions, and the answers necessarily remain tentative, but developments in Latin American art in the mid-twentieth century appear to parallel the more wide-ranging transformation of the concept of the subject brought on by challenges to humanist values during these years.³⁰ Accordingly, notions of what art historian Hal Foster has in a different context referred to as the contemplative subject of the traditional tableau or the transcendental subject of modernist painting are destabilized and cannot be assumed to be fully operative in many of the artworks and modes of spectatorship discussed below.³¹ In place of these categories of universal subjectivity, notions of spectatorship begin to emerge that do not abstract the subject from history, society, and the body, and that posit the conscious subject as a series of effects arrived at independent of the mind itself. These notions are anchored in perception but also put it into question, opening up a rift between how things are and how the subject experiences them. Since this is a rift inherent in spectatorship itself, the subject’s experience of a given artwork is bound to be as much a matter of misrecognition as of knowledge.

Methodologically, I consider art to perform representational and not just critical functions. More specifically, I have sought to develop an analytical narrative—one that advances through its telling, showing the history while bolstering the claims made. In the process, I study not just visual art objects and ensembles but also the manifestos and artists’ writings that often accompanied them, seeing these materials as structural components of the artworks in the aesthetic field. This is in no way to suggest that the art objects are illustrations of these writings. Rather, the artworks are ideas, inventions, and things themselves. The writings serve not only as manifestations of philosophical expression but also as documented information that supports the conceptual integrity of the art produced.

Artworks become socially meaningful only within the discourses and contexts, explicit or implicit, in which they appear. These contexts change through time, and every society has conflicting arenas wherein the preferred, negotiated, or oppositional interpretations of artworks are fought out. Art history has the role of analyzing this process of conflict and describing the assumptions, opinions, and concepts on which the meaning of artworks is based. It also has the historical task of uncovering the discursive resources from which that meaning has been constructed, asking not only why the artworks were produced and what function they served, but also how they were made to signify, for whom, and where. Toward this end, I have tried, as much as possible, to stake the central claims of Abstraction in Reverse on the bedrock of primary sources, seeking history first of all in artworks and their mechanisms of production and exhibition (including the spectator’s place in relation to it), but also in manifestos, reviews, manuscripts, photographic documents, and artists’ writings and interviews. I have also determined, however, to strike a balance between empirical and theoretical knowledge. This has entailed mobilizing modes of interpretation necessary to pry open the issues that arise. Sometimes the theoretical tools are the same as those marshaled by the artists in the context of production or by the spectators (including critics) in the initial moment of reception. At other times they are more remote from the historical context in question yet powerful enough to produce insight. In these cases I have been careful to adapt the theories to the new circumstances and contexts.

This study’s movement between decades and nations runs the risk of glossing over the particularity or uniqueness of each context and, more importantly, the distinct content of each artwork, which is often inseparable from its aesthetic and discursive features. Yet my commitment to an international art history that reaches across borders and boundaries has led me to make the study of Latin American art relevant beyond its own geographical and disciplinary boundaries. In that respect the benefits of the comparative approach I adopt outweigh the pitfalls, and the cross-pollinating effect that arises by traversing distinct historical moments, national borders, and languages with an overarching theme or set of problems and questions is hermeneutically rich.

I am not suggesting that there is a singular meaning to ambitious Latin American art in the mid-twentieth century. Despite the variety of ideas and positions taken by the artists I examine in this volume, they do share a mode of expression derived complexly from a linked cultural heritage, including its ways of formulating concepts and questions and kinds of artistic strategies. This idea does not mean that there was some larger unity or consensus that artists were striving to reach in this period. Rather, in tracing the pattern of recurring themes, concepts, and artistic strategies of mid-twentieth-century post-Concrete art by Latin Americans, I map the geography of the conceptual borders wherein this art said all that was possible for it to say. Some of this relation was explicit, representing social contradictions, while much of it was imaginary, inventing formal solutions to unresolvable antinomies. Within this theoretical/artistic horizon, post-Concrete art was challenging for artists and spectators alike and productive of new ideas. At the same time, intransigent blindspots were created around questions of the subject and spectatorship that remain with us. While I hope to introduce readers to some of the more provocative and difficult concepts of mid-twentieth-century Latin American art, the larger goal of this book is to understand what limits were reached in post-Concrete artistic practices and how those limits might still challenge us, although in new ways, today.

My choice of particular artists and artworks singled out for discussion calls for some explanation. The goal is not to supply a complete overview of the manifestations of spectatorship in the mid-twentieth century. Clearly this would be impossible. My purpose, rather, is to present a perspective on the Latin American art of this period that elucidates the shift in spectatorship that I see driving artistic experimentation. This standpoint is designed to foreground the pervasiveness of political and cultural resonances of such work that has not been appreciated fully because of the positivist orientation of much existing scholarship on the subject. Although most of the artists whose production I discuss were well informed of what the others were doing (or had done) and several were in direct dialogue, I am acutely aware of a certain arbitrariness that remains in my choice of artists. My aim has been to take account of a few key figures, such as Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticica, who have become central to the discussion of art in the period, while including a number of less mainstream artists, artists’ groups, and poet-critics whose work would not necessarily be familiar to an English-speaking audience, such as Lidy Prati, Edgar Bayley, Los Disidentes, Madí, and Ferreira Gullar.

The study probes the economy of power relations negotiated by the artists in question. This entails an analysis of various forms of struggle. Some of these struggles, such as those of the Concrete artists in the first chapter or the kinetic artists in the third, were against what the artists perceived to be their chief enemy: an administered form of capitalism regimented by the ruling political order (with the help of the military and the economic elites). These artists saw themselves as part of a larger movement that would at a future date culminate in liberation, revolution, and an end to class struggle. Other artists, such as those in chapter 4, focused on the immediate enemy, on the administration of the ways people live. These were anarchist struggles. They were what Foucault describes in The Subject and Power as struggles which question the status of the individual: on the one hand, they assert the right to be different, and they underline everything which makes individuals truly individual. On the other hand, they attack everything which separates the individual, breaks his links with others, splits up community life, forces the individual back on himself, and ties him to his own identity in a constraining way.³² In short, these were struggles against the regimentation of individualization carried out by instituting subjects capable of creating meaning actively through their intentional acts. In my conclusion I touch on some of the ways in which the next generation of Latin American artists developed an altogether different concept of the subject’s relation to power.

A final word about the way the book is structured. It is organized chronologically spanning from 1944 to 1968, the period during which the reception of Concrete art by Latin American artists had the greatest impact. Each of the four chapters examines in detail a small body of artworks and writings by Latin American post-Concrete artists and relates these to the context in which the artworks were first made and exhibited and to the development of spectatorship and the vicissitudes of the subject in Latin American art of the mid-twentieth century. In the first chapter I explore the adoption of Concrete art by artists working in Buenos Aires and Montevideo in the 1940s and the theorization of the artwork as an immediately present material entity providing access to a reality beyond fiction, beyond metaphor—an art that does not signify anything other than itself and provides an unmediated experience of truth. I show how the artists foregrounded the materiality of the artwork, disrupting the unity and transparency of its form, to compel the spectator to reflect on how meaning is achieved in art. Rather than innate, natural, or given, meaning is inferred as