In colonial times, the encounter of two worlds affected above all language. Colonizers had to face the challenge of describing landscapes and peoples for which they had neither words nor categories. Borrowing metaphors from marvellous medieval lore, travel accounts, such as Marco Polo’s description of China, as well as classic historiographies of Pliny and Herodotus, Europeans sought to create new referents to be articulated in speech, thus granting the ‘unidentified’ the status of ‘real’. The colonial times were baroque times, and as the Spanish historian Jose Antonio Maraval has suggested, the baroque was less a stylistic movement about the arts than it was the expression of a profound social crisis that major European centres underwent in the seventeenth century. The epistemological crisis of language then can be paralleled with necessary political adjustments that redefined European nations as agents of globalisation. For the first time in history, the baroque became a language that travelled the globe. The Latin American baroque, however, was an expression of resistance against the political and aesthetic program that European ideologies sought to reinforce. As a new cultural phenomena that carried in its signification ideas of acculturation and deculturation (= transculturarion), Latin American baroque has been termed a “counter conquest” movement with epistemological crisis of language of its own.

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Likewise, the curators and contributors of the exhibition Ultrabaroque: Aspects of Post-Latin American Art (Sept 24, 2000-Jan 7, 2001) also struggled to describe the ‘unidentifiable’. In the title, the need to have coined two terms, ‘ultrabaroque’ and ‘post-Latin America’, illustrates too the encounter between two ‘worlds’: remainders of modernism, and postmodernist pressures to include minorities that were excluded from the hegemonic dominant (art historical) discourse. The heyday of postmodernism became the threat to self-purifying modernisms, yielding discussions of ‘death of the author’, ‘crisis of the subject’, and ‘end of art’ due to linguistic elaborations as well as social movements that affirmed their recognition as a sine qua non condition for the discourse’s validation. However, in examining contemporary curatorial practices, it is revealed that the way art exhibitions of postcolonial cultures are carried out discloses subtleties in postmodernist tendencies that end up supporting the centrality of the Western discourse. North American and European museums have accommodated minorities in the(ir) margins while fulfilling their image of pluralism and openness. As Homi Bhabha has proposed, “postmodernism is at once a postmorten report on end(s) of modernity and a postpartum report on the origins of the present still struggling to be born.”  The struggle that impedes this present from being born lies on the lack of words to describe it. The power of curators to give names to this present involves the performative nature of articulating identities and meaning.

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The exhibition Ultrabaroque: Aspects of Post-Latin American Art, although alleging its proposition as one of inclusion, nevertheless protects its own centrality. The coining of a ‘Post-Latin American’ art reflects a differentiation against the dominant discourse as well as against itself. Depleting Latin America of a locus, the territory becomes vulnerable for neo-colonization. Yet, I would like to propose that the exhibition’s unilateral view is a sign of posthistory, and as such, I will argue that at the same time that the exhibition ‘tames’ the works of fifteen Latin American artists in order to protect its centeredness, it otherises itself. By evoking cultural differences, the exhibition becomes a sign of the West’s thirst for its own ethnicity.

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Ultrabaroque:

The necessary linguistic revolution that European languages underwent in order to ‘decipher’ the reality of the new world, led the scholar Eugenio d’Or to claim that the concept of America was invented. As Nelly Richard has suggested, colonial times were marked by a “rift between sign, the name established through coercion, and the referent, the refractory substance of enforced speech.” America became what Columbus’ eyes described and brought home to be displayed in curiosity cabinets, where ideas of the exotic and the marvellous real were born. Subsequent cycles of territorial and ideological colonisations imposed on Latin America concepts that had been conferred a priori. Enforced on nascent Latin American culture was a rhetoric of differentiation.

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The aftermath of colonialism produced an amalgamation and layering of ethnicity that compelled in the nascent continent the negotiation of modernity informed by the baroque culture. Assimilation and transformation became tools for articulation of identity as well as a manner to express self-doubt and ambiguity in the fractured realm of a destroyed Indian world and a new world that were both American and European. In retrospect, to name this period baroque with its connotation of imperfection, impurity, irregularity and irrationality, and to claim that it still informs contemporary Latin America negotiation of identity, is to arrest the continent in history and its stereotypes. In locating the ‘origins’ for Latin American art in the baroque, the exhibition sets a safe distance for the scrutiny of the culture’s issues of locality and globalisation, reinforcing dichotomies of us/them, real/fantastic, Euro/Latin.

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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.” Although conveying ideas of cultural ‘fusion’, this proposal reflects a post-modern image of the dominant culture’s maintenance of centrality. 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. Through the myth of origins that maintains intact the unfolding of the Hegelian narrative towards the Absolute, the model of Latin America as receptor of culture and the West as supplier is reinforced. The exhibition arrests Latin American artistic investigation as hybrid, transculturated, and mestizo in a rhetoric of ‘neo-counter conquest’ in a globalised world. According to current postcolonial theory, the triumph of hybridity is 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. However, as suggested by Zamudio-Taylor in the exhibition catalogue, the baroque resurfaces in contexts of crisis. To invoke it “to the second power” is to admit a crisis that consists of an explosion of the centre and proliferation of peripheries, which renders plausible the question: why is us the ‘other’ never them?

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Post-Latin America:

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”. The way Latin America is presented still carries strong modernist overtones. The hegemonic display of the continent’s works disregards the complex relationships of Latin American avant-gardes with its varied political and historical organizations. As already discussed in relation to the historical framework of the show in question, such a strategy maintains intact the vertical axis of cultural dependency. Curatorial practices of the 1980’s use of totalising essentialisms such as ‘primal’, ‘authentic’, and ‘ahistorical’ were challenged by the allegorical nature of post-modern discourse. However, the risk lies on substituting hegemonic essentialism for Latin America cliché of total heterogeneity.

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As Craig Owens has suggested, postmodernist strategies such as "appropriation, site specificity, impermanence, accumulation, discursivity, hybridisation" are linked by means of their relation to allegory. Owens based his idea of postmodernist impulses on Benjamin's analysis of allegory (from the Greek allos [other] and agnoreiei [to speak]), which conveys the idea that anything can mean anything else. Also, its character as both a literary device and a way of reading, grants allegory the ability to express diverse versions of history as lived experiences, as fragmented, non-linear that resists a self-referential mode of analysis. Similarly, post-modern art insistence on including microhistoires - those of gender, race, postcolonial- in its scope renders the viewer-reader able to activate and add to the works. In this respect, art, like history, is unfinished and fragmented.

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 As post-modern theories mature, the danger of accepting a fragmented identity remains one of coining against modernist universalism, a post-modern formula of total heterogeneity as a mere derivative trend from the centre. A postmodernist centeredness then substitutes the modernist conception of the other as ‘primitive’ for new essentialisms of Latin America as “marvellous real, magic realism (both related to Surrealist proclamations about the southern continent by Breton while in Mexico) hybrid, mestizage (miscegenation), revolutionary discourse, the baroque, etc.” 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. The Ultrabaroque show designates as the artists’ passport into the North American curatorial context the rooting of their work on the allegorical baroque as the exhibition’s paradigm; Latin America becomes then the “harmonious melting pot” where “the strange is a common place”.

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The subjectivity involved in the protection of post-modern centrality in contemporary curatorial practice produces misinformed ideas of Latin America culture. Jose Antonio Hernandez-Diez’s Kant and Marx (2000)(fig. 1) 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 (and many other European ‘colonies’ for that matter) twentieth century avant-gardes. The same can be said about Ruben Ortiz Torres’ Bart Sanchez (1991) (fig. 2). 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 on the threat to formalism by American 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 cubism in the beginning of his career as one of the ‘origins’ for Abstract Expressionism. Again, access to the Euro-North American mainstream is denied. Artists are ‘allowed’ entrance into the Western canon only if they present ‘otherising’ credentials that satisfy Western hegemony. The post-modern image of the centre is articulated within the boundaries of its authority. At the same time, as Nelly Richard has pointed out, an explosion of the centre and a proliferation of margins mark its theorization.

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The evoking of the baroque has a dubious quality: it arrests the artists in intertextual formal narratives at the same time that admits its own crisis. The problematic representation of the margins, the Other ‘denied’ knowledge, enters  the dominant discourse and estrange the basis of its authority. The problem reoccurs when the term ‘Post-Latin American art’ is coined. Not only does it make claims about the break of geographical boundaries of the continent’s art making and circulation, but also evokes Latin America as a neo-colony tamed under the umbrella of American global capitalism. In doing so, the dominant discourse has jeopardised the pillars that sustain its own centrality, that is, pluralism and openness. Aporia*.

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Ultrabaroque: Aspects of Post-Latin American Art

When Gerardo Mosquera published an article entitled “Latin American Art Ceases to be Latin American Art,” it provoked numerous negative reactions. What the author proposed in this text was the end of hyphenated identities that continues to permeate analysis and presentation of Latin American art. Moreover, he demanded distance from over-simplified notions of art in Latin America in face of its variety of avant-gardes and historical and political backgrounds. These hyphenated identities are produced when there exists an identity articulating itself through differentiations against the ‘other’, while to the ‘other’ is relegated mimetic strategies of identification and appropriation. But then one might ask: what is the function of such a discourse? Maria Carmen Ramirez has suggested that it can be either about the transformation of the art object into the ultimate financial instrument, the final neutralisation of ideas of art as a mediating force for social change; or, a postmodernist denouncing of the West’s misappropriation and misinterpretation of other peoples’ cultures. What Mosquera and Ramirez call for is the shifting of reference frame: instead of insisting on the rhetoric of protecting/denouncing the West’s centrality, curators should focus on specificities about the culture that is being shown so that “the ‘other’ becomes them not us”.

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 An exhibition is a proposition. Works are meticulously chosen in order to be part of a selective context. The object has been isolated from its surrounding matrix of things and positioned with deliberation to project a certain assertion at it. What is at stake is the self of the viewer, more so than that of the artist, for it is s/he that will articulate or give meaning to the proposition. The Ultrabaroque proposition uses the principle of economy when displaying the art works. The wall writing is reduced to a minimum with little explanation on the artists’ intentions. The stereotypes used in the catalogue to locate the show into the Western art historical canon are obfuscated by the power of the works’ messages. The museum then becomes a site of enunciation to be animated by the viewer in a process of mitotic assimilation of the show’s proposition.  In an effort to avoid the obvious, the curators have set the baroque as the paradigm; but the ‘ultra’ prefix, history’s immediate significance is dismantled, granting the viewer the ability to re-situate its meaning. There is no doubt that the curators had good intentions when presenting ‘patterns’ of enunciation with which one is ‘guided’ to read the show. But they forgot to clarify that this ‘guidance’ is part of a subjective narrative that yields the power of taxonomy.

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Having let pass such a contrversial title can be seen as denouncing its own centrality, being the anti-posthistorical, the ultimate post-modern, challenging its own competence as Western curatorial practice. In this sense, through the eyes of the viewer facing Latin American contemporary art practice, the show examines its own validity, it becomes allegorical and fragmented in its own right. As Bhabha has suggested, a postcolonial perspective proposes that in presentation of cultures, Western and non-Western, one adopts the position of the ‘paralax’, a word that has entered language circa 1594: “the apparent displacement, or difference in the apparent, of an object, caused by actual change or difference of position of the point of observation (OED).” Perhaps, had Elizabeth Armstrong been familiar with the term that was originated in baroque times, she would have chosen the parallax as the concept for the exhibition.

Finally, I would like to suggest that, having chosen the baroque as a paradigm for the analysis of Latin American art with its derogatory connotations and declaration of crisis, the convex mirror of Parmigianino has been placed in front of these artists’ works. The curators stand behind it, seeing their reflection on the concave part. As such, enough distance is created so their identity can be analysed. Better yet, the Parmigianino’s mirror is more like a reflecting glass that allows the subject to look both through it and at its reflection. Gazing at themselves, through the eyes of Latin American artists, the curators face their own differentiation, in search of their own ethnicity. 

Artists featured in Ultrabaroque:

Miguel Calderon

Maria Fernanda Cardoso

Rochelle Costi

Arturo Duclos

Jose Antonio Hernandez Diez

Yiashai Jusidman

Inigo Manglano-Ovalle

Lia Menna Barreto

Franco Mondini Ruiz

Ruben Ortis Torres

Numo Ramos

Valeska Soares

Einar and Jamex de la Torre

Meyer Vaisman

Adriana Varejao

Bibliography:

Exhibition Catalogues:

Ultrabaroque: Aspects of Post-Latin American Art, organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego (September 24, 200-January 7, 2001)

Books:

Beyond the Fantastic: Art Criticism from Latin America, ed. Gerardo Mosquera (London: Institute of International Visual Arts, 1995) p. 260

Unpacking Culture: Art and Commodity in Colonial and Postcolonial Worlds, ed. Ruth Philips and Christopher Steiner (LA: University of California Press, 1999)

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

Greg Dimitriadis and Cameron McCarthy, Reading and Teaching the Postcolonial (New York and London: Teachers College Press)

Thomas McEvilley, Art & Otherness: Crisis in Cultural Identity (NY: McPherson & Company, 1992

Craig Owens, “The Allegorical Impulse: Towards a Theory of Postmodernism”, in The Art of Art History: A Critical Anthology, ed. Donald Preziosi (NY and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998)

Periodicals:

Rasheed Araeen, “A New Beginning: Beyond Postcolonial Cultural Theory and Identity Politics”, Third Text no. 50 (Spring 2000)

David Craven, “Latin American Origins of ‘Alternative Modernism’”, Third Text no. 36 (Autumn 1996) p. 29-44

Christine Frerot, “Da adversidade Vivemos”, Art Nexus no. 42 (November 2001) p. 137-139

Gerardo Mosquera, “Good Bye Identity, Welcome Difference: From Latin American Art to Art From Latin America”, Third Text no. 56 (Autumn 2001

_____________,  “El arte latinoamericano deja de serlo”, ARCO Latino, Madrid, 1996

Magarita Sanchez Prieto, “Eurocentrism and Critical Latin American Thought: Notes on the Theme of Evaluation”, Third Text no. 41 (Winter 1997-98) p. 25-28

Anthony Vidler’s “Art History Posthistoire”, Art Bulletin, vol. 76, no. 3 (September, 1994) p. 407-410.

Newspaper articles:

Peter Goddard, “Latino Talks Turkey”, The Toronto Star, Thursday, January 31, 2002

Sarah Milroy, “Painting the World Latino”, The Globe and Mail, Wednesday, January 30, 2002.