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| This will be the most important showcase of Latin American art in the US in a decade. |
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| Emigdio Vasquez's El Proletariado de Aztlán (detail), 1979, acrylic on plaster, 8’ x 40’ (Chapman University Art Collections/Jessica Bocinski/pacificstandardtime.org/laweekly.com) |
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What is Latin American Art? Finding answers at Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA
The year was 1935. Fascism was on the rise throughout Europe, but the art world was
preoccupied with petty infighting between its abstract and figurative
camps. And Joaquín Torres-García had had enough.
That year the multifaceted artist left France to return to his
native Uruguay, eager to quash misguided
essentialist European delusions
of ethnic, cultural, and artistic purity by writing a manifesto that
initiated a new philosophy he called the "School of the South."
He
announced that his movement's guiding cardinal direction would be south
rather than north, articulating a new way of thinking about Latin
American art and the world.
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| Ken Gonzales-Day: Exploring Identity and the Construction of Race |
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| Kahlo as Campbell's soup can |
To further illustrate his point, he
irreverently flipped a map of South America on its head.
Torres-García's simple ink drawing, called
América Invertida ("American Inverted"),
captured the spirit of other iconic Latin American artists.
They, too, had
returned home from places like New York and Paris to forge an artistic
identity in a newfound pride in their cultural and aesthetic heritage.
They would become the pillars of Latin American art.
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| I love Frida Kahlo this much. She's a goddess. |
Torres-García
challenged U.S. and European dominance over Latin America.
He proposed
creating
a uniquely Latin American perspective and aesthetic that
honored the region's
indigenous roots while drawing connections between
pre-Columbian art [this land before the arrival of the genocidal colonial rapist Columbus and the
Conquistadors] and European modernism.
Refusing to grant privilege to
Western traditions, he proclaimed, "There should be no north for us.
From now on, the elongated tip of South America will point insistently
to the south, our north."
Eighty-two years later, as the world
rocks on its political and moral poles once again [due to Trump and his Republocrat backers], Los Angeles shifts
its attention to a dazzlingly expansive and interconnected series of
exhibitions.
These exhibits by Latin American artists are the latest and largest
iteration of
The Getty Museum's PST initiative. Over the
course of several months, at institutions from Santa Barbara to San
Diego,
Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA features art and artists from across Latin America.
They illuminate the region's historical legacies, from pre-Columbian [500+ years before the present] to
contemporary, across all mediums and disciplines.
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| "Hi, neighbor" (by Vincent Ramos) |
The scheduled shows, performances, and other events present the
possibility for adventure, but they also pose an impossible-to-answer
question: What is Latin American art? Better yet, What constitutes Latin
America?
- [WQ's proposed answer: All of the places that used to speak Nahuatl or a dialect of the Uto-Aztecan language that were then forced to speak only Spanish by the imperial invading colonial overlords.]
The idea of Latin America, according to renowned
Argentine semiotician
Walter Mignolo, is an outdated project of
nation-building that belonged to 19th-century Europe that
homogenizes as it subdivides
the Americas.
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| Visualizing Language: Oaxaca in L.A., Los Angeles Central Library (oaxaca.lfla.org) |
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| When we got to Ellis Island... Wait. We didn't cross the border. The border crossed us. |
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| Aztec eagle and serpent motif |
PST: LA/LA attempts to break up homogenizing notions of what Latin American art is and who Latin American artists are.
"One thing I've found after all these years, when you're looking at a
whole hemisphere, there is no way to sum it up. There are many things
that join us, but there are so many stories to tell. It's vast," says Director of the
Vincent Price Art Museum Pilar Tompkins-Rivas.
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| Detail of first figure ((left side) in El Proletariado de Aztlan by Emigdio Vasquez |
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| It's an enormous mural on the side of a SoCal building, "The Proletariat of Aztlan" |
