In 1994 Homi Bhabha stated that postmodernism is “at once a postmortem report on ends of modernity and a postpartum report on the origins of the present – our own epoch – still struggling to be born”[1]. Postcolonial theory resurfaces in this context of struggle, in that it reveals patterns of persisting neo-colonial relations within the world’s new order; it authenticates histories of exploitation; and discloses strategies of resistance. The globalisation of Euro-North American capital and consequent disappearing of “developing” nations’ markets, unutilised ‘human capital’ migrates towards shrinking basis of accumulating wealth establishing a scenario of neo-imperialist metropolis, or in its euphemised form, the global village. Postcoloniality reveals that the aphorism ceases to be global if nations (and corporations) carry disproportionate power, and ceases to be a village if it is divided between centre and periphery. 

​

​

Bhabha’s sentence reflects the state of spatial and temporal void that postmodern critiques introduced in contemporary culture. The move away from originary subjectivities meant the epistemological break with the Hegelian tradition of an unfolding narrative towards the Absolute[2]. The postmodern insistence on the inclusion of microhistories – those of gender, race, postcolonial- conveys the demise of evolutionary historical discourse, in that it reveals its fragmented totality. Postmodernist strategies such as “appropriation, site specificity, impermanence, accumulation, discursivity, hybridisation” have been important strategies of inclusion, and of decolonisation. However these strategies have been reclaimed under the umbrella of a new internationalism “that may well be multicultural but not necessarily anti-racial”.[3] The multicultural politics of Western museums and universities has been more useful to recognise difference than to articulate discourses of equality[4]. A celebration of difference in a discourse of openness and plurality of cultural diversity is given at the expanse of dangerous essentialism. As Coombes has suggested, the problems with essentialising difference lays on discriminatory ways in which it is constituted and operates as a mechanism of oppression[5].  The Family of Man exhibition of 1955 is an example of celebrating difference as a tool for Cold War ideological propaganda whereby the justification for capital globalisation is given[6].

​

​

Curator Edward Steichen writes in the catalogue that “[the show] was conceived as a mirror of the universal elements and emotions of everydayness of life – as a mirror of the essential oneness of mankind throughout the world”. Needless to say, the show’s premise itself consists of blatant essentialisms, in that it attempts to universalise humankind in a deeply divided, geographically and ideologically, Cold War scenario. Steichen continues, “the subject matter rang[es] from babies to philosopher, kindergarten to university, from  primitive peoples to the Council of the United States”. This sentence clearly identifies the hierarchic structure within which the show’s discourse operates: from the primitive peoples, the origin, to the government of the United States, the sovereign Hegelian Absolute[7]. Timothy Mitchell, when talking about nineteenth century curatorial practice states that the representation of reality was always an exhibit set up for the observer in its midst, an observing European, in this case American gaze, surrounded by and yet excluded from the exhibit’s careful order; the more the exhibit encircled the viewer, the more the gaze was set apart from it”[8]. In the Family of Man, the more the curator attempted to universalise human kind, the more it set the American gaze away from its origin, not only validating its purity but justifying acts to protect it.  This becomes clearer when one perceives the absence of the word hybrid. The rhetoric here is we are the same as long as we are different.

​

​

Difference is asserted for homogenising ends with clear reference to who is the Subject and who is its Other. The powerful message is conveyed by the show’s simple symbolism and appeal to sentimentality added to the veracity of the medium of photograph through which they are represented, what Sekula has termed “instrumental realism”[9]. The hierarchical structure of ‘American capital’ universalism is clearly shown in comparing photographs divided by themes of work, family, deliverance of knowledge…and who possesses atomic weaponry[10]. The Family of Man presents a body of knowledge on humankind as a will to appropriate it (or globalise it); in Foucaultian terms, the exhibition was mediated as a classical example of the will to power motivating the production of knowledge. In a postmodern reality is no different. The power to represent the cultural object is the power to dominate it, but the power to contest representation – or undermine logics of representation itself- is the power to pose the question: why is us always the other, never them? Postcoloniality poses this question as it faces the sign of hybridity as the triumph of neo-liberal multiculturalism, a part of global capitalism. It is not about the equality of all cultures but how minorities are accommodated in the dominant culture only through their passport of otherness.[11]  

​

​

Contemporary dominant culture’s protection of its centrality reveals our condition as posthistorical[12], the final chapter of evolutionary history revealing that there is nowhere to go; it is the end of modernity.  The prefix ‘post’ in post-modern, post-historical, post-colonial is not sequential. It reveals an epistemological crisis of language that usually takes place in moments of transformation (or mutation, or rapture). This model is precisely what the curators of Ultrabaroque: Aspects of Post-Latin American Art offered as the show’s proposition. The sixteenth century colonial encounter generated an epistemological crisis of language, which is then brought into contemporary culture under the sign of hybridity as paradigmatic to today’s crisis of language that reflects the encounter between the local and the global[13].

​

​

As curator Elizabeth Armstrong suggests, “conscious of European cliché in reference to twentieth century Latin American art and culture, the baroque is investigated in terms of its validity as a paradigm for difference and hybridity that resists order and classification”. The validation that is given to the period is to reawaken it contemporarily in the proposal for an Ultrabaroque world, the “consciously playful and hybrid: the European baroque who met the Americans who were also baroque, baroque to the second power.”[14] The assumption is that Latin America still struggles with baroque and colonial legacies, which have been surpassed by Euro-North American evolutionary history of stylistic success. Again, the myth of origins that maintains intact the unfolding of the Hegelian narrative towards the Absolute, discloses Latin America’s hybridity as receptor of culture and the West as supplier. The hegemonic display of the continent’s works disregards the complex relationships of its varied political and historical organizations. The hybrid with which Latin Americans are left to articulate their identity is substituted by essentialisms of total heterogeneity. Latin America then becomes marvellous real, magic realism, hybrid, mestizage (miscegenation), revolutionary discourse, the baroque. These ideologies have over-constructed categories of totalising effect, so that they start functioning as stereotypical tools for the outside gaze to address Latin American art works. At this point, it is safe to say that strategies of stereotyping masks the fear of the West of not knowing its Other, fear of it not knowing itself.

The curators of Ultrabaroque suggest that the term ‘Post-Latin America’ conveys “artistic expressions driven by local and global tendencies that are grounded in historical specificities and yet seek to go beyond them”; and that it also defines Latin American art as a “conjunction of modernist concerns and social commentaries with a post-modern outlook”[15]. This paradoxical proposition enforces homogeneous overtones over a continent that is devoid of a locus in which to articulate and perform its identity. It has been given a resistance against its historical specificities but only granted the desire to go beyond them. In evoking the local and global, the show revels its agenda as multicultural as systematic tactic of oppression, in that it evokes Latin America as a deterritorialized neo-colony left with a discourse of validating its own existence. However, in doing so, the dominant discourse jeopardises the pillars that sustain its own centrality, that is, pluralism and openness.

​

​

To evoke the baroque has a dubious quality: it arrests the artists in intertextual formal narratives at the same time that admits its own crisis. To evoke it “to the second power” is to admit the antisystemic quality of representation of the margins: the Other ‘denied’ knowledge, enters the dominant discourse and estrange the basis of its authority.  

​

​

Jose Antonio Hernandez-Diez’s Kant and Marx (2000) are presented in the context of the rhetoric between international, the German and Russian intellectuals, and regional, sneakers. Both  “referents” are in their entirety part of Latin American vernaculars. They comment on the trivialization of academic knowledge as just another product to be consumed, as opposed to stand for universal Truths determining the course of humanity. At the same time that the premise of the show assumes hybridity as the origins of Latin American impulses, it denies them the articulation of foundational Western thought that embedded both Euro-North American and Latin American twentieth century avant-gardes. The same can be said about Ruben Ortiz Torres’ Bart Sanchez (1991). Armstrong arrests the piece in a proto-modernist formal discourse when she suggests that the work recalls the Mexican artist Diego Rivera’s cubist phase. Indeed, a formal analysis would not be discredited if the work’s content were not concealed in it. In a first reading, Bart Sanchez comments the threat to American high culture by virtue of massification of popular culture; to the trained eye however, it could be read as a witty appropriation of Picasso’s cubism thus claiming the centre of contemporary art for Latin America, paraphrasing the American ‘conquest’ of modern art in the figure of Pollock who appropriated ‘primitive’ cubism in the beginning of his career as one of the ‘origins’ for Abstract Expressionism. As such, Ortiz Torres hints at the North American’s own hibridity.

​

​

The Other within the internal structure of Western discourse is by virtue of its exteriority the blindspot of such a discourse. Postcolonial theory is antisystemic of Western dominant discourse. However, assuming its existence within this discourse, it becomes antisystemic of itself. Spivak admits that the postcolonial intellectual learns that this privilege is their loss. To speak for any dispossessed group is an “epistemic violence” since it asserts the subjective authority access over the experience and interest of that group.[16]To assume its loss is also to remove the cultural axis of dependence between Self and Other. Postcolonial theory does not want to claim an Absolute Subject for the non-west; without the conceit of otherness the West is left alone in articulating its own ethnicity. The struggle of our epoch to be born only embodies its restless and revisionary energy if it transforms the present into an expended and “ex-centric”[17] site of experience and empowerment.  

[1] Homi Bhabha, “Postmodernism/Postcolonialism”, in Critical Terms for Art History, ed. Robert S. Nelson and Richard Shiff (London: University of Chicago Press, 1996) p. 310

​

[2] Thomas McEviley states that Western history has been marked by three major breaks: one when the population of Europe was changed by the so-called barbaric invasions in the late Roman Empire, which led to the transition between Greco-Roman to Christian art; the second was the Renaissance, the transition from Christian to European art; and the third in the beginning of the twentieth century, with the shift from European to modern art. Each of these breaks was informed by a deep infusion of foreign influence, respectively, Germanic, Byzantine, and African/Oceanic (colonies). In order to protect the discourse’s purity, it has appropriated the ‘other’ as the original and authentic, which in turn validates the West’s isolation in its purity; in Thomas McEvilley, Art & Otherness: Crisis in Cultural Identity (NY: McPherson & Company, 1992) p.58

​

[3] Annie E. Coombes, “Inventing the ‘Postcolonial’: Hybridity and Constituency in Contemporary Curating”, in The Art of Art History: A Critical Anthology, ed. Donald Preziosi (NY: Oxford University Press, 1998) p. 488. Craig Owens basis his idea of postmodernist impulses on Benjamin’s analysis of allegory (from the Greek allos [other] and agnoreiei [to speak]), which, in its palimpsest paradigm, conveys the idea that anything can mean anything else, as well as the ability to express diverse versions of history as lived experiences, as fragmented, non-linear that resists a self-referential mode of analysis. For Owens, postmodernist strategies such as “appropriation, site specificity, impermanence, accumulation, discursivity, hybridisation” are linked by means of their relation to allegory; in Craig Owens, “The Allegorical Impulse: Towards a Theory of Postmodernism”, ibid p. 317. 

​

[4] Nestor Garcia Canclini, “Remaking Passports: Visual Thought in the Debate of Multiculturalism”, ibid p.506

​

[5] Coombes, p. 489

​

[6] This show took place at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and travelled thirty-seven countries in six continents for eight years. All throughout the United States Information Service (USIS), the federal information agency responsible for the spread of capitalist ideology around the world, was the main sponsor. Along with it, highly selective reports about the show’s international success reached the United States; in Africa and Asia, episodes of resistance to the show’s premise took place: pictures were removed and a man ‘stabbed’ one of the photographs.

​

[7] Timothy Mitchell, when talking about XIX century curatorial practice states that the representation of reality was always an exhibit set up for the observer in its midst, an observing European, in this case American gaze, surrounded by and yet excluded from the exhibit’s careful order; the more the exhibit encircled the viewer, the more the gaze was set apart from it”; in Timothy Mitchell, “Orientalism and the Exhibitionary Order”, in The Art of Art History, p.460. In the Family of Man, the more the curator attempt to universalise human kind, the more it set the American gaze away from its origin thud validating its purity.  This becomes clearer when one perceives the absence of the word hybrid. The rhetoric here is we are the same as long as we are different.

​

[8] Timothy Mitchell, “Orientalism and the Exhibitionary Order”, in The Art of Art History, p.460.

​

[9] Sekula states that the powerful symbolism of the show is devoted to techniques of social control and diagnosis to the systemic naming, categorisation and isolation of an otherness by biology. Theory of photography, he continues, gives imaginary flesh to the abstract regime of commodity exchange; in Allan Sekula, “The Traffic in Photographs”, Art Journal, Spring 1981, p. 15-25: 16.

​

[10] Please refer to slide images.

​

[11] Rasheed Araeen, “A New Beginning: Beyond Postcolonial Cultural Theory and Identity Politics”, Third Text no. 50 (Spring 2000) p. 3-20: 5. The Euro-North American artist can investigate other cultures and enrich their own work and perspective, while it is expected that artists of non-western cultures only work in the background and artistic traditions connected with his or her place of origin. If the foreign artist doesn’t conform to this tradition, he or she is considered inauthentic, westernised and copyist of “what we do”. The universal is ours, the local is yours; Canclini, p.506.

​

[12] As construed by the mathematician Antoine Cournot, the concept of posthistory is the moment in which a cultural stage is reached where there is no possibility of further development, when all that can be done is nothing but its endless perfectioning. Thinking history in terms of the Hegelian linear evolution towards the Absolute, the term is a natural and inevitable outcome of its narrative, for following a “fulfilment of sense”, this model has become “devoid of sense”. The alternative then, in biological terms applied in this cultural phase, is either death or mutation. In Anthony Vidler’s “Art History Posthistoire”, Art Bulletin, vol. 76, no. 3 (September, 1994) p. 407-410.

​

[13] This show deals with the ‘other within’ of whom Coombes talks about as being far more politically disquieting to Western hegemonic culture (p. 495). It was proposed by the San Diego Museum of Modern Art and the majority of the artists shown live in the United States. The pattern of its ‘accommodation’ in the peripheries of Western centrality is given by a much sophisticated yet aggressive cultural historical discourse.

​

[14] Elizabeth Armstrong, “Impure Beauty”, Ultrabaroque exhibition catalogue, p. 1-5.

​

[15] Armstrong, p. 10.

​

[16] Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988) p.271

​

[17] Bhabha, Location of Culture, p.7