English

The recent Industry Act has wiped away all doubt: we are witnessing the awakening of a revolutionary spirit; we are headed toward socioeconomic justice, which will supposedly shape a new mentality. In view of this situation, a group of young artists has started to express—through mimeographed leaflets, events, and discussions—the need for a cultural revolution.

The fact is that even the most radical transformation of socioeconomic structures is not enough to change the basis of human mentality and, as such, of society. Any such change must necessarily be accompanied by a cultural and sexual revolution, as young people all over the world have been claiming for years. To condemn these young people, or to make their demonstrations a police matter, rather than to try to understand them, would be an error—lest we find ourselves having to hastily implement their values, under the imperative of another, more pressing revolution. 

As required by the industrial revolution that is already underway, and in keeping with the socioeconomic changes that have started among us, we now have an educational reform that will adequately train new generations for technological production. But we are not yet tackling the qualitative problems of consumption (the use of tools, art, and free time), which are closely tied to the cultural and sexual revolution.

The cultural revolution advocates a new mindset, that is, a society of free individuals who respect the freedom of others. (The sexual revolution concerns women’s liberation, as well as the desire to bring joy back into the practices of love). The new society would be free from discrimination and hierarchies, and have no fear of or mistrust institutions, civil servants, and laws. The shoemaker, doctor, laborer, and engineer would all be equal, individually and culturally (in the anthropological sense). 

If we accept the idea of culture as a necessary process of change (a characteristic of the West), one particular work of art may still be more valuable than another of the same kind, but this value would not be applicable to the overall profession as interest group (institutionalism) or to the individual as citizen (personal protagonism). Because the aim of the cultural revolution is precisely to come up with a new interpretation of the specific and circumstantial value of the artwork—or cultural rupture. To this end, young people are starting to attack the cultural values of the unjust bourgeois society.

For the bourgeoisie, culture—a set of free actions and works—is a value system that imposes ideas and a false consciousness (ideologies), with a strong tendency to fetishize cultural works. Culture thus becomes a form of worship or liturgy, and then a weapon of power and repression. It is a means for creating, dictating, and conserving values that separate humans rather than connect them. The “cultured” man and the artist are raised up and deified, and thus forced to look down upon and neutralize the critical spirit of others. All of this mystification prevents the development of mutual respect and even hinders the existence and survival of mankind.

Western culture carries the seeds of its own ongoing transmutation, which the bourgeoisie circumscribes to formal changes and young people are now identifying as radical mutations. Cultural values, the mainstay of the dominant class, are in decline—not man, not culture. The value of something—in the sense of both the quality of and value of acquiring and consuming a particular object—depends on the privilege and imposition of a dominant class. This applies equally to a chair, a painting, a club, a house, or a tradition. Can a new society uphold these values? It is certainly necessary to undertake a total transmutation of values, given that simply switching or replacing them would only give rise to the same bad habits. Young people do not wish to replace the values of the dominant class with those of the dominated middle or lower classes; nor do they want to replace the plutocracy with a bureaucracy, the oligarchy with a technocracy, or the aristocracy with a cultural elite. They want freedom.

If some artists are starting to mention the cultural revolution, they are being consistent with the path that art has taken over the past hundred years. Painters and sculptors have been destroying values and now find that they need to subvert the concepts of art and culture—imposed by the bourgeoisie and all systems of power—so as to adapt art to the new, wished-for society and, as such, counteract the adverse effects of the industrial revolution (the consumer society). Artistic values, and art itself, have lost cultural standing. These artists do not concede the existence of art or artists, only artistic acts as a faculty inherent to humans in general. Art, like morality, is not the profession or exclusive preserve of a few. In a new society, children will be taught to produce art without knowing what art is; in no event will they be tied to the consumption of Leonardos, Renoirs, Picassos, and Mondrians. Each person will produce art without expecting spectators, success, or sales.

Proponents of the cultural revolution believe that art schools, cultural centers, cultural outreach departments, cultural attachés, reviews, and museums simply spread bourgeois, or so-called traditional values. These institutions have turned their backs on the cultural revolution: they do not encourage individual production or deal with the problems of information, both of which are so important to any revolution; nor are they concerned with safeguarding against the repressive manipulations of the mass media (press, TV, film, comic strips). They simply disseminate bourgeois culture.

Cultural guerrilla fighters and revolutionaries do not just seek destruction. They seek what people fear most: the freedom of individual behavior within a climate of mutual respect. As such, it would be counterproductive to ask them for a cultural program or art system; it would go against freedom, which is a constant and “uncomfortable” circumstantial choice. We have become so used to thinking and working comfortably ensconced in systems, definitions, and values that we are no longer able to resist, and we no longer understand that others may be free or want to be so.

Juan Acha

Spanish

La Ley de Industrias última ha destruido toda duda: asistimos al despertar de un espíritu revolucionario: marchamos hacia una justicia socioeconómica que—se supone—debe moldear una nueva mentalidad. Ante esta situación, un grupo de artistas jóvenes ha principiado a manifestar, en hojas mimeografiadas, actos y discusiones, la necesidad de una revolución cultural.

Y es que la transformación de las estructuras socioeconómicas—aún la más radical—no es suficiente para cambiar las bases de la mentalidad humana y, por ende, de la sociedad. Indispensable la compañía de la revolución cultural y la sexual, tal como desde hace dos años postulan los jóvenes del mundo entero. Error sería, por lo tanto, condenarlos o hacer de sus manifestaciones una cuestión policial, en lugar de intentar comprenderlos. No vaya a suceder que a última hora y ante la presión de otra revolución más vigente, tengamos que poner en práctica sus ideales apresuradamente.

Según lo exige la actual revolución industrial y de acuerdo a los cambios socioeconómicos ya iniciados entre nosotros, tenemos una reforma de la educación que adiestrará idóneamente a las nuevas generaciones para la producción tecnológica. Pero todavía no se enfrentan los problemas cualitativos del consumo (uso de utensilios, arte y tiempo libre) en los que la revolución cultural y la sexual tienen mucho que ver.

La cultural propugna una nueva mentalidad, o sea, una sociedad de individuos libres y respetuosos de la libertad de otros. (La sexual concierne a la liberación de la mujer, además del propósito de devolverle alegría a las prácticas del amor). La nueva sociedad estaría exenta de discriminaciones y jerarquías, de temor y desconfianza hacia las instituciones, funcionarios y leyes. El zapatero, médico, obrero e ingeniero serían iguales individual y culturalmente (cultura en el sentido antropológico). 

Tomando la cultura como un obligado proceso de cambios (característica de Occidente) tal o cual obra puede ser más valiosa que otras de su mismo género, pero su valor no se hará extensivo a la profesión como gremio (institucionalismo) ni a la persona como ciudadano (vedetismo). Porque la revolución cultural consiste precisamente en dar una nueva interpretación a los valores específicos y circunstanciales de la obra o ruptura cultural. Para el efecto, los jóvenes comienzan atacando los valores culturales de una sociedad injusta como la burguesa.

La cultura—conjunto de actos y obras libres—es para la burguesía un sistema de valores que impone ideas y una falsa conciencia (ideologías) muy proclives a “fetichizar” las obras culturales. Así, la cultura se torna en culto o liturgia, y luego en arma de poder y represión. Se construyen, dictan y conservan valores que separan al hombre, en lugar de hermanarlo. El hombre “culto” y el artista son endiosados con el fin de hacerlos mirar desde arriba a los demás y esterilizar su espíritu crítico. Todo esta mistificación impide el desarrollo del mutuo respeto humano y obstaculiza hasta la misma existencia y subsistencia del hombre.

La cultural occidental lleva consigo el germen de su constante trasmutación, que la burguesía hace pasar por cambios formales y hoy los jóvenes identifican con mutaciones radicales. Los valores culturales—sostén de la clase dominante—se encuentran en decadencia; no el hombre ni la cultura. El valor, ya sea en el sentido de buena calidad o de adquisición y consumo de un objeto determinado, depende del privilegio e imposición de una clase dominante; no importa si es una silla, un cuadro, un club, una casa o una costumbre. ¿Puede una nueva sociedad conservar estos valores? Indudablemente urge emprender una completa trasmutación de valores, pues una inversión o sustitución acarrearía los mismos vicios. Los jóvenes no desean remplazar los valores de la clase dominante por los de la clase dominada—media o baja—; tampoco pretenden sustituir la plutocracia por una burocracia, la oligarquía por una tecnocracia o la aristocracia por una élite cultural. Ellos quieren libertad.

Si algunos artistas ya principian a mencionar la revolución cultural, es porque son consecuentes con la trayectoria que viene trazando su arte desde hace un siglo. La pintura y la escultura han venido destruyendo valores hasta encontrarse hoy en la necesidad de subvertir los conceptos de arte y cultura—impuestos por la burguesía y todo sistema de poder—con el fin de adecuar el arte a la nueva sociedad deseada y, así, poder contrarrestar los efectos nocivos de la revolución industrial (sociedad de consumo). Los valores artísticos, y el arte mismo, han perdido solvencia cultural. Para estos artistas no existe arte ni artistas, sino actos artísticos como facultad inherente al hombre en general. El arte—al igual que la moral—no es profesión ni exclusividad de unos cuantos. En una nueva sociedad se enseñará al niño a producir arte sin saber lo que es arte; en ningún caso se le amarrará al consumo de Leonardos, Renoires, Picassos y Mondrianes. Cada uno debe producir arte sin esperar espectadores, éxito o venta.

Los partidarios de la revolución cultural ven en las escuelas de arte, casas de cultura, departamentos de extensión cultural, “agregadurías” culturales, crítica y museos, simples difusores de los valores burgueses, denominados “tradicionales”. Estas instituciones dan la espalda a la revolución cultural: no fomentan la producción individual ni encaran los problemas de información, tan importantes para cualquier revolución; tampoco se preocupan por crear defensas contra las manipulaciones represivas de los medios de comunicación masiva (prensa, TV, cine, tiras cómicas). Simplemente difunden cultura burguesa.

Los revolucionarios o guerrilleros culturales no sólo quieren destruir. Ellos buscan lo que la gente más teme: la libertad de comportamientos individuales dentro del respeto humano. Consecuentemente, todo programa cultural o sistema artístico que les reclamemos, sería contraproducente: iría contra la libertad, que es continua e “incómoda” elección circunstancial. Estamos tan acostumbrados a pensar y obrar apoltronados en sistemas, definiciones y valores, que no podemos resistir ni comprendemos que otros sean libres o quieran serlo.

Juan Acha

The post Juan Acha: The Cultural Revolution | La Revolución Cultural appeared first on post.

This text was part of the theme “Conceiving a Theory for Latin America: Juan Acha’s Criticism.” developed in 2016 by Zanna Gilbert. The original content items are listed here.

English

There is a widespread notion that the artistic avant-garde is incompatible with the socioeconomic underdevelopment of countries that, like our own, belong to the so-called Third World. According to this view, new artistic trends originating in highly industrialized communities do not correspond to our reality. Following them would imply imitation, appropriation, or copying. Ultimately, it would mean inauthenticity, for they neither express nor reflect our identity.

This assertion—which is as old as nationalism and the substantialist fallacy of a collective identity—ignores the importance of the importation of modern tools, methods, doctrines, and ideas to the development of any community. We are forced, for example, to import ideas from the political vanguard and to uphold them as the most effective and even quickest solution to our underdevelopment, even though these ideas advocate the violent acceleration toward social justice known as revolution.

Many reject these rapid changes in favor of evolution. But nobody calls into question the vital need to end the lack of development. Not only politicians but also farmers turn to the city, laborers improve their means of livelihood, the middle class fights for better professional training for its children. Everybody wants to move forward. Both nations and individuals endeavor to improve their socioeconomic status. Everybody is en route to prosperity. They want to be other than they are, and so they take up, as their model, the way of life of more developed countries.

With progress in mind, individuals, institutions, and the state eagerly attend to the importation of objects and systems. The commodities of big foreign industry flood the Third World. These products are enjoyed by a minority and desired by the great majority, who rush to attain them in spite of having yet to resolve their own basic subsistence, housing, and education problems. Small circles adopt the lifestyle of consumer society, and everybody else emotionally, if not practically, embarks down the path that will enable them to do the same.

The importation of objects and systems widens the gap between the minority and the majority while simultaneously accelerating their convergence. Demographic growth rate and external communications increase as a result of imports. Demographic pressure increasingly shortens the time frame for socioeconomic solutions, while the speed of communication heightens the desire to consume, by instantly introducing us—visually or through direct contact—to the latest technological advances and newest habits of predominantly consumer societies.

Imported objects and systems may be computers or cancer detectors, industrial processes or TV sets, films or other forms of entertainment, transistor radios or books, commercial ads or haute couture. Or they may be Librium or psychotherapeutic methods, because we in the Third World are not exempt from the nervous disorders arising from the desire to consume more and always better than our neighbors—or from our failure to do so. Everybody accepts the legitimacy of these imports. They are material goods, and we equate progress and social justice with their circulation and enjoyment. In other words, we see modernization as simply addressing the quantitative problem of the equitable distribution of material goods. At the same time, we see the importation of entertainment as an inescapable obligation to bestow cultural and cosmopolitan prestige on our city. The benefits of the imports mentioned so far are accepted as indispensable. We may deem that the objects or methods in question are managed well or badly, but we will not speak disparagingly of them as imitations. It is the world of objects, in which changes are wrongly considered anodyne: supposedly, the use of the most modern objects would not seriously compromise our way of thinking and feeling. Give or take some aspects, this would be the psychosocial framework of the Third World with regard to lifestyles, desires, and imports.

The disparities arise when we are confronted with imported customs, which having left the nationalist arena, now concern the struggle between generations. In any case, the adoption of foreign ways of dressing, dancing, drinking and eating certain products, and of individual behavior are considered an inevitable consequence of global progress or communication.

The debate is exacerbated when it comes to imported forms of artistic expression. Both advocates of revolution and evolutionists protest against the presence of the international artistic avant-garde in our countries. They reproach imitation, even though it is inherent to humans and the main engine of development. Above all, they criticize inauthenticity. Why?

Because they unquestioningly believe in the existence of a fully fledged national identity, and they demand that artists take it into account—or bear in mind the basic problems of the majority at all times. Though they give free reign to the imports of physicists, technicians, or industrialists, they insist that artists confine themselves to inherited, traditional forms, disregarding the fact that these too were imported long time ago, albeit belatedly. Thus, they turn art into a real problem—the problem of whether or not it reflects the national reality or collective identity, which the individual defines dogmatically, usually based on a mindset rooted in the defense of the underdeveloped social system that is precisely what all of us want to overcome. Those with a romantic as opposed to nationalist bent call on artists to create works that are highly original or of great international significance. They consider artists to be like demiurges who create through “spontaneous generation,” without need of a favorable socioeconomic structure. Physicists and technicians, however, are not expected to make discoveries or come up with inventions, but instead to simply implement imports and manage them appropriately. Why are artistic imports censored, while the technological and/or scientific ones are not?

It is undoubtedly a matter of mindset or, strictly speaking, of ideologies. We want quantitative progress; we want the majority to participate in consumption. We resist any change in thinking beyond that required to use, handle, adopt, or imitate imported modern scientific and technological objects and systems.

We reject the need to make other qualitative or psychological adjustments beyond the generational and acculturational changes that are gradually leading us from a chiefly magical-feudal state (underdevelopment) to the mass consumer culture of industrialized societies. In other words, we do not accept the changes in thinking required for the good management of our current process of industrialization or progress. We settle for the superficial changes resulting from abusive consumption, the sinister cause of the so-called consumer society—or we prefer to live in the modern way and yet still think in the old way. This resistance to change weakens our cultural-creative force. Though all communities must go through a period focused on proper use of new imports, the psychological impact of the change their use represents must also be considered. It is essential to gradually embrace the psychological shifts required by technological invention, scientific discovery, intellectual hypothesis, and artistic creation, which are the true components of culture.

It would be pointless to inquire about the opinions of “indigenists,” whose contemptuous romantic anti-machinism leads them to believe that development is possible without abandoning the magical-feudal traditions and habits of mind that they consider to be the constituent elements of national identity. It would be similarly futile to examine the arguments of xenophobes, whose desire is to preserve traditions and keep mindsets intact, even at the expense of material progress, and of the immediate technological solutions required by population growth in the Third World today. We are instead interested in the possible behavior of our artists.

Until recently, the only option available to artists with a social conscience was to take part in the political revolution or, at the very least, to devote their efforts to the acculturation of the vast majority. There was no room for art or other spiritual expressions; these were considered premature expressions, whose true function would only begin once social justice had materialized—that is, once the basic needs of the majority had been met and this majority had been assimilated into cultural life. The national identity or reality was equated with the customs and mindset of the majority, as is typical of the magical-feudal state, which, as it happens, is in the process of disappearing.

Now a new possibility has been identified. Some artists and intellectuals refuse to devote their time and energy to integrating the majority into a system that they themselves reject. Instead, they feel obliged to caution against the errors of mass consumption and to instead provoke effects that are denounced or resisted by avant-garde trends practiced by artists in industrialized countries. In other words, they propose a cultural revolution. So, in the event of this true revolution—which is not simply about seizing power, or the socialist distribution of consumer goods, but is also more psychological in nature—ground-breaking artists would be as essential as propagators of cutting-edge political ideas or as armed guerrilla fighters are to advocates of violent revolution. Our national reality would thus become a dynamic concept reflecting a shift: the transition from the magical-feudal state that we wish to abandon to the consumer society that we aspire to. This is only right, given “the principle of reality” of the majority’s focus on mass consumption, present or future. Paradoxically, the psychological state of the majority allows us to identify the characteristics of the consumer society as the prevailing elements of our collective reality in the process of this change. That said, the political differences between the capitalist and communist methods, insofar as production and distribution go, do not matter, because today the substantial problems of mass consumption are the same everywhere.

By denouncing the errors of consumer society and suggesting certain rectifications through avant-garde practices, our artists would be taking a Third World reality as their point of departure, preventing past mistakes and promoting greater participation in technological advances. It is ultimately about the vanguard, about moving forward. In this case, collective identity would become the future result of development, or of the integration of the majority into consumption. Furthermore, just like the dominant class, which modernizes its methods by means of imports, artists will work toward achieving proposals that are truly effective for breaking away from the reality established by that class, and to counteract its modern methods of oppression and defense. Traditional artistic expressions would simply reinforce the psychological framework that the dominant class—by means of self-defense—inculcates in us.

In paternalist Third World communities, we usually find a demagogic taboo on using terms such as “consumption” and “masses.” We have been demanding the fair distribution of assets for so long that we find criticism of consumer culture disconcerting. Our quantitative concerns prevent us from seeing the qualitative aspects of so-called mass consumption, which is simply a stereotyped, prescriptive (mass) way of using material and spiritual assets to the detriment of individual freedom and imagination. It is the opposite of the cultural ideal: to generalize the individual use of cultural objects. Similarly, masses is a qualitative term, for it refers to the general frame of mind that—hiding anonymously behind the majority—demands that cultural works be accessible to common sense, to the mental framework that society inculcates in us so as to make us reject the radical changes of culture. They expect to learn to use art like one learns to use a refrigerator, by simply reading the instruction manual. Moreover, the majority that possesses the right to make political decisions—not necessarily based on reason (Nazism)—is and will continue to be against the artistic avant-garde. For as long as the majority remains blinded by the repressive and “massifying” indoctrination imposed by the state, and the problems of subsistence and pragmatic success continue to absorb people’s time and energy; for as long as the evolution of art continues to subvert the mental frameworks inculcated by those in power, and the work of art continues to spring from the rebellious fantasy of the individual; for as long as all of this continues, aversion and isolation will be the lot of the artistic avant-garde.

The big picture of the situation in the Third World today is clear: the majority seeks participation in a culture that is subverted by the artistic avant-garde. On the one hand, people aspire to or engage in the mass consumption of culture. On the other, young artists call for a cultural revolution that will transform the majority into individuals with a dynamic mentality, a profound sense of freedom, and a love of the imagination. In short, the presence of the avant-garde in the context of underdevelopment is not just legitimate, it is indispensable.

Of course, we are referring here to the artistic avant-garde as an adopted or imitated attitude—not to the actual avant-garde, which embraces new artistic approaches or trends in response to emerging social aspects that are in turn subsequently strengthened and internationalized. And the discovery of social aspects that are susceptible to internationalization, and thus able to trigger new artistic approaches of international interest, generally occurs in cities in more industrialized countries. This is where the avant-garde is born, hand in hand with aesthetic intensity. Artists in the Third World adopt and develop the avant-garde, which can also encompass aesthetic quality. It is always possible to advance the novelty of an adopted trend, or to imbue it with aesthetic quality. The odds of achieving this will obviously be greater for artists close to where the trend first took hold. This is not due to the proximity as such, but rather to the circumstances favorable to artistic development (the number of artists, a large and interested audience, good artistic level, etc.). During times of artistic upheaval such as our own, novelty and radical change become assets. However, in Munich or Milan, for example, we will find Pop and Op art of a different nature and quality to Pop and Op art in New York and London. We are also aware of the existence of Argentinean and Venezuelan “kinetic” artists of international renown. Only new information, intellectual curiosity, and a fresh mindset will make it possible for artists from the Third World to adopt avant-garde positions from the start. If our communities remain absorbed with imitating developed societies, our artists will have little opportunity to respond to internationally advanced social situations, and to embrace new attitudes of historical-artistic importance. Similarly, it would not be feasible to advocate an art that is not connected to sociological (ahistorical or native) aspects, or to expect to live in a society untouched by development, or in which development culturally values the activity of “asocial” individuals with out-of-date perspectives. The option remaining to our artists is to adopt avant-garde development at a faster pace than that of other cultural development in the Third World.

We could say that mass consumption is the psychosocial plane on which underdevelopment, as the desire to consume, converges with the avant-garde, as rectification. If so, we believe that the mechanics of this convergence would take the form of the demographic diversity that befits any nation. We would thus confirm that the supposedly contradictory coupling of socioeconomic underdevelopment and the artistic avant-garde arises from the artificial, simplified—almost abstract—world of generalizations and definitions. Underdevelopment is a characteristic of the Third World, but it does not exclude the coexistence of groups at varying levels of development (or underdevelopment), as a result of the greater or lesser circulation of imports at different regional or national levels—or, in other words, as a result of the different communication media available to each group.

We would observe differences between the city and the country; we would find small groups displaying all the typical signs of consumer culture, alongside others with partial but acute symptoms of doing so. In other words, we are convinced that the criteria of group sociology would give us a realistic perspective, avoiding the problems arising from the nationalist generalizations that are inevitable if we study the underdevelopment–avant-garde pairing indistinctly—and from the doctrinal definitions that are part and parcel of theoretical analysis of the relationship between the individual and society. Because it would quickly become clear that, often, greater levels of underdevelopment can be equated with more mass consumption than is generally believed. For instance, we would find that low economic status in shantytowns or favelas leads to the excessive use of radio, television, and mass media.

This urban group spends more time engaged with these media than other groups. But above all, group criteria would shed light on the fairly widespread belief in a collective or national identity that supposedly determines the way we think, feel, and make culture, and that urges us to reject avant-garde artistic imports.

National interests undeniably exist, and they should prevail in socioeconomic matters. But in the shadow of these particular interests, certain ideologies promote a model of national identity that also dictates cultural matters. Instead of waiting for the resultant sum of the modernizing free behavior of different groups dedicated to culture, they seek to predetermine the addends. Constructing the model is easy, given that the creation of groups—be they by families, occupations, regions, or nations—simply requires emphasizing intragroup similarities and differences, and minimizing the reverse (intergroup similarities and differences). This path leads to the definition of national identity as fixed, innate, and ethical (homeland). National similarities do exist in the form of communities of ideas and ideals, mores and customs. But these are variable similarities that, determined by fluctuating socioeconomic circumstances, are shared by the different groups that make up a nation.

In the complex, contradictory socioeconomic reality of Third World nations, the mores and customs of the most underdeveloped group (folklore) are usually considered to be the paradigms of nationality. In Peru, for instance, the “indigenous” group is the custodian of national identity, as the supposed perpetuator of “native”— which is to say pre-Hispanic—culture. However, we are discovering that almost all elements heretofore considered native are in fact imported. In this case, the matter of the relationship between the avant-garde and underdevelopment becomes a simple opposition of Western elements: the old versus the new. But proving that native culture does not exist will not make the problem of vernacular modes and behaviors go away.

We would certainly shed light on the problem if we were to assemble groups at different levels of development and study their mutual differences, past and present. Perhaps we would find varying levels of assimilation of Western culture or a cultural mix. We know that after the coexistence of pure Spanish and pure indigenous cultures at the dawn of the colony, cultural fusion occurred and criollo culture emerged. Assimilation continued over time, at the pace that each generation and group allowed, and cultural differences appeared. The criollo culture of the seventeenth century became the indigenous culture of the eighteenth century. The indigenous culture of the nineteenth century was the criollo culture of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and so on. This realization would lead us to regard national identity as a way of absorbing Western culture, or as the result of the varying rates of assimilation among different groups. Although variable and rooted in socioeconomics, national identity would continue to exist as a modal distinction.

Once we accept the existence of national identity as a variable modal distinction —it being impossible to prove the nonexistence of national similarities—we would have to find out the extent to which it is favorable to culture or development. We could argue that the notion of national identity is only favorable if it supports the most advanced imports, irrespective of whether it opposes their assimilation. Because the crucial point for the Third World is not preserving or merely importing, but rather updating and assimilating imports and hence modernizing and activating cultural activities. Consequently, we should review the bases of the institutions dedicated to disseminating culture (cultural centers, offices of cultural affairs, cultural attachés), with an emphasis on the need to support cutting-edge imports, for information purposes, and to promote activities that generate culture. Unfortunately, reviewing the bases of these institutions would amount to destroying the system that supports them.

Until very recently, it was reasonable to claim that “artists are inspired by great works, not by nature.” Now visual artists respond directly to a highly technological visual environment. Moreover, as has rightly been argued, artists are not in true contact with their entire nation, but rather with its cities. In a city, the artist has the most technological objects within his visual field. And the artistic climate of an entire nation develops in the streets, squares, cafés and classrooms, studios and exhibitions, lectures and round tables, in response to the world of utilitarian objects. These objects and works of visual art are correlated and contrasted, like questions and responses, maladies and remedies. Visual-artistic works are also objects, and they must visually compete with utilitarian objects, and particularly with the mass information and entertainment media (TV, film, glossy magazines, etc.). In other words, the relationship between the avant-garde and underdevelopment takes on real characteristics in the city. In an urban setting, a group of artists exists alongside an interested audience that introduces local models of cultural behavior to groups beyond its own, whose cultural advancement primarily depends on the socioeconomic structure and its flexibility. This is yet another reason to adopt a group-sociology methodology to study the problem that concerns us here.

In the city—in the most populated urban centers within each country—we find the world of modern objects and of information and entertainment media, and we perceive huge gaps between artistic generations. Also, given the far-reaching changes in the world of modern objects and mass media, visual artists are forced to confront and make greater changes in their work than, for example, writers, who are engaged in the relatively unchanging affective world.

At the same time, the enormous influx of visual entertainment and information in the urban sphere widens the generation gap. For the past five years or so, young visual artists from the Third World have been working at a different pace and in a different spirit. They ignore the established values of their own environment and imitate their contemporaries at work in New York, London, or Paris. The objects and information and entertainment media that these Western artists employ from a young age arouse the modernizing desire in Third World artists. Modern objects and information are accompanied by certain practices grounded in the idea of individual freedom, advocated by the extremist tendencies in the visual arts that demand immaterial, unsellable works, and defended by those cultural guerrillas known as “hippies,” who subvert the mores and customs of consumer society through a loving, libertarian passive resistance. The paradox deepens: cultural and artistic “guerrillas,” the byproducts of highly developed societies, share the same field of underdevelopment. Better still, the “seriousness” of material development and the counterproductive “uselessness” of the artistic avant-garde have to walk hand in hand. The idea of waiting—allowing for development first, and then avant-garde incursions—would stifle art and annul the effects of the avant-garde’s denunciation and prevention of the maladies of consumer society that are upon us.

In comparing groups at different cultural levels, we will find there to be wide variation, given that the extremes in the Third World are so far apart. As such, there will be a greater diversity in terms of artistic expression and application, and of sensory balance, than elsewhere. We will find works based on rural or urban folklore, avant- garde works, and works that are suspended in the past. Each group artistically expresses itself in its own way, in keeping with its cultural norms and its concept of reality. No other time period has favored the development of human diversity as much as our own, or allowed so many cultural levels to coexist—in this case, as a consequence of the path down which the individual embarks to advance socioeconomically, and of the different possibilities for cultural ascent and communication within each region, and among different groups.

While this cultural inequality is regrettable from the point of view of social justice, the existence of a wide range of artistic expressions within a single group is not bad in itself. What is reprehensible is their hierarchization, particularly that by conservatives blocking the activities of the avant-garde. We are nevertheless used to hierarchization. So when a critic positions a work within the historical-artistic timeline or sequence, and praises its supposed alignment to a new reality, we think that he is placing contradictory or superior value on it over the work of a cubist, impressionist, or renaissance artist in his respective time.

The antiquity complex, imbued with historicism and transmuted into misoneism, and the novelty complex, overrated by mass evolutionism, are constantly pitting themselves against each other. And people choose one of the two: the value of precedence, or the value of the latest trend. Few manage to appreciate the steps taken by creators of culture as reactions to new sociological realities, and to the dispassionate desire to transform them in a progressive sense, without aspiring to objectives or to perpetuation, concepts invented by humans to establish dogmas, dictate rules, and impose a stability that make us feel safe. Those who are able to appreciate this will accept the legitimacy of the artistic expressions of different groups. Because just as each period has its own advanced art and diverse artistic considerations, so do coexisting cultural positions. It would be wrong to undervalue these expressions at the human or social level, even though it is admissible to point out their lack of topicality or to reproach those who create them for the pretensions of modernity. It would also be wrong to expect groups at a cultural level of the past to accept avant-garde works. Though the ideal would be for everybody to be at the same cultural level, human diversity is inevitable: not everybody shares the same interest in each of the arts, and in any case, different art forms prevail in each age.

The desire to eradicate hierarchization, for art to dissolve into life and for artworks to be seen as simple visual exercises with strong spectator participation, is the banner of the artistic-visual avant-garde. What would be the point of showing a Primary Structure, for example, to someone with a pre–typographic sensory frequency, a gaze unsullied by preconceptions? If education were truly functional, this fresh gaze would be good raw material for teaching Third World groups how to look at avant- garde work. But this education would fall flat among groups not yet subjected to the maladies of consumer society. The avant-garde addresses groups that dictate cultural models from an earlier cultural state. As such, artistic communication among different groups only works if it moves gradually from the latest to the oldest, or most backward. The avant-garde moves forward, but it does not gentrify. Avant-garde artists and the groups interested in their work generally value the folklore and works of the past. But the rural man is indifferent to the avant-garde, just as a group that did not move beyond a renaissance or abstract aesthetic disparages works from later movements. This will continue to be the case for as long as cultural and socioeconomic inequalities exist, and for as long as the modes of communication are not negated. In any case, an indisputable fact remains: film and TV—the arts of our time—capture the visual appetites of the majority, in spite of the cultural differences of the groups that constitute it.

The post Juan Acha: The Avant-garde and Underdevelopment | Vanguardismo y subdesarrollo appeared first on post.

This text was part of the theme “Conceiving a Theory for Latin America: Juan Acha’s Criticism.” developed in 2016 by Zanna Gilbert. The original content items are listed here. The original text in Spanish is also on this page.

English

Non-Objectualist Theory and Practice in Latin America

Year: 1981

Publication: First Latin American Conference on Non-Objectualist Art

Publisher: Museo de Arte Moderno de Medellín

The aim of this text is to analyze non-objectualisms in the framework of two concentric artistic realities: those of Latin America and the world. These two analyses will allow us to derive the foundations to, firstly, determine the postmodernist nature of non-objectualisms (which interest us, and which are the most radical), and then outline their possibilities in Latin America. Accordingly, we will proceed in four stages.

Firstly, we will conceptually position non-objectualisms within the struggle that gave rise to them: the ongoing dispute between advocates of “pure” art and those in favor of “applied” art who do not accept the label because of their belief that artistic or sensory “purity” does not exist. By framing non-objectualism within this controversy, we will establish what we understand it to mean in general terms, and identify its different categories. This will lead us to the designs, to the trends of creating environmental propositions, to the attempts to merge art and everyday life, and to the postmodernisms, among them non-objectualisms: in other words, to the different means of repudiating the “pure,” portable, marketable object of art.¹ The first two of these anti-things rely on the Renaissance aesthetic, the third disregards it, and the fourth attacks it.

Secondly, we will insert non-objectualism into the Latin American artistic context, having first considered and described it realistically as it is today. In other words, we won’t assume it is a mere succession of exceptional works and of the geniuses who create them, as dictated by Western art history and instilled by family and public education. Instead, we will approach it as a process that involves us all, a sociocultural phenomenon that consists of the succession, combination, and coexistence of the three existing types of artistic production: crafts, arts, and design. Because these systems do not merely spring from differences between major and minor, “pure” and “applied” arts, as thus far has been mistakenly assumed. They are historical variants of a single sociocultural phenomenon, namely art. They belong to different periods or old (precapitalist) modes of artistic production, which persist today and coexist with newer ones, and they are extensions of the means of material production. In short, in our artistic reality, non-objectualisms are radical enemies of the mass media and of the most current, realist, and thus progressive forms of artistic expression.

Thirdly, we will ascertain the main characteristics underlying the postmodernist spirit of the non-objectualisms that interest us, insofar as they are anti mass media. At this point, their anti-narrative and anti-entertainment nature will become evident, given that they include boredom, the serial simultaneity of images, conceptualism, and radical expressionism among their strategies. Aside from attacking the Renaissance aesthetic, they also engage with time in the more human starkness of the here and now, freeing it from humanistic burdens.

Fourthly, we will deduce the problems and possibilities of postmodernist non-objectualisms. First of all, their advantages in general terms: a closer alignment with the theory-practice binomial through conceptualisms, which due to their somewhat cryptic nature can more easily adapt to political and countercultural protest in more repressed countries. Secondly and lastly, we will review the non-objectualist exhibition that is part of this colloquium, so as to draw conclusions from the actual practices of our non-objectual artists.

Toward Non-Objectualisms

Humans have been making art for thousands of years, and in all this time it has always been useful or had practical applications, with the exception of the last four centuries of Renaissance aesthetics. Earlier, there was just one kind of art, which we would now call “applied art”—a term that had no meaning at the time, given the absence of purist aspirations. Crafts are intrinsically and unwittingly the producers of this art that puts its best efforts in the service of religion and that joins forces with technology, which is to say with practical uses. Even jewelry and adornments are useful as objects of self-signification and social prestige. Art was inherent to the courtly, religious, ornamental world. Popular and profane art existed, but it was not known as art.

By contrast, from the Renaissance to the twentieth century, we have seen the arduous quest of Western culture—read capitalism—to establish the concept of pure, free, autonomous art: the work of art as sole repository of the artistic realm. To be more precise, only the object-things produced by means of painting, sculpture, printmaking, and drawing were said to contain art in its purity. Anything else that involves artistic work was considered applied—and thus minor—art. Incidentally, as a result, artists became aware of their freedom and rejected any imposition from political, religious, and official institutions. But artistic purity remained no more than an aspiration, and the profane aims of art dissolved into intellectualism. These aims end up being similar to those of the functional purity of the object, which industry institutes in its own favor.

From 1950 onward, unexpectedly, we saw the spread of design—which brings together art and technology as its reason for being—throughout the world, and beheld other non-objectualisms: forms of expression that seek to merge art and the everyday life of ordinary people, environmental overtures, and [specialist] realisms, postmodernisms that attack the Renaissance aesthetic.² There was a clear tendency to reject the pure, portable, marketable object, or in other words, a tendency toward non-objectualism, either to rejuvenate the Renaissance aesthetic or to strike the final blow.

At this point, there was a clash between “pure” art and “applied” art. Process or action took precedence over the predetermined product. And process meant inserting artistic experiences into each human work or action. This gave rise to the need for a process-based, relational notion of artistic structure: that which arises between the material structure of any human product and the meaningful structure that the consumer produces. Pure art became like a kind of speculative theory without practical possibilities, proclaiming its purity in vain. At best, the work of art was an object in which sensitive relations prevail, with the “happy ending” of art being the pleasurable experience of these relations. In short, art ceased to be an end in itself and instead became a medium for both political and countercultural concerns. It was then that non-objectualisms made their entrance with their “anti-things,” which paradoxically followed in the wake of an object: Duchamp’s readymade.

There is actually no such thing that is “purely artistic,” either as relation or essence. There has never been a purely artistic, scientific, or technological object. Every human product reflects the mind, the sensibility, and the basic needs of its maker. As such, structures of different kinds coexist within each product and it is immaterial whether the artistic structure or a different structure prevails over the others. We often turn to the reductionism of the specific, which is never fully known, and which we usually identify with an imagined uniqueness of the object. Because the object does not exist artistically until it is consumed by somebody. The specific thing about art (about the art species) lies in the realm of sensory perception, which is naturally common to all the arts. If uniqueness does exist, it must be variable insofar as it forms part of the object-subject relationship, or in other words, part of the artistic structure as such. It is understandable that in pre-photographic times the act of manually producing images of visible reality, and of fixing them in the form of an object, should have been considered art. But with the advent of mechanical means of producing images (photography, film, and television), we now know that manual means such as drawing, printmaking, and painting are essentially technological processes of communication, and as such often have artistic applications or derivatives.

Capitalism was largely behind the dual game of promoting the pure art of geometrism on the one hand, and the applied art of design on the other. After all, it is crucial for capitalism to turn every product into a commodity and to replace individual manual labor with industrial-mechanical, waged labor in order to produce surplus value. Technology thus focused on developing mechanical processes that displaced crafts, and as a result, artisans lost social status and were proletarianized. Artistic crafts were, in turn, replaced by high art. Artists came from the middle social strata and owned their products and means of production, as artisans had in the past. And then artists began to be displaced by designers from industry in general, and from mass art or the cultural industry. By this means, capitalism materialized what it had not even remotely imagined: it turned art into productive, waged labor, hence turning the work of art into a product of capital and a commodity. Today, mass-media information and audiovisual and iconic-verbal entertainment create and satisfy the spurious, mass artistic needs of contemporary man, while design seeks to turn industrial commodities into works of art. Along the way, modern utensils merged with geometrist sculptures. In short, in the hands of the industrialists, art became good business and an efficient instrument for the control of the mind and the senses.

New iconic technologies appeared along with design, and in some cases developed into new arts (photography, film, television). Design does not produce objects. It consists of conception and management processes, which is to say processes that are non-objectualist, even if they are at the service of the object (generally the industrial object). Graphic and industrial design, architectural and urban design, account for almost all production of objects. There are also another two types of design that currently exist and are not yet recognized as such, in relation to information and entertainment: the iconic-verbal design of publications and the audiovisual designs of film and television, both linked to the mass media. It is clear that all these types of design are based on the Renaissance aesthetic, that they are a further division of industrial labor, and that they take art into the everyday lives of demographic majorities.

Under the influence of design and in compliance with the spirit of our time, the importance of manual labor in the visual arts declined, and the intellectual, conceptual work of the artist was overrated. Spatial realism emerged—by contagion from urban and architectural design, and in solidarity with environmental concerns—with works such as Jesús Soto’s Penetrables, walk-in sculptures, light environments, and so on. These non-objectualisms maintained the Renaissance period and focused on the hitherto neglected relationship between humans and their environment.

Others who sought to merge art and everyday life, driven by a somewhat nihilistic and solipsistic pan-aestheticism, also turned to non-objectualism. These non-objectualists were not thinking of inserting art into everyday life, as Friedrich Schiller and Herbert Read dreamed—they claimed that the world abounds with spontaneous art, and that we have to learn to notice and enjoy it. Their exaltation of spontaneous cultural production is of interest to us here, insofar as we can find it in the poverty belts of major Latin American cities, as forms of behavior, “resignifications,” scales of values, customs, and other non-objectualisms. Taken as a whole, this popular creation can become a cultural alternative that will, in the long term, influence the course of the mass media.

Lastly came non-objectualisms that adopted challenging attitudes and a postmodernist or anti-Renaissance spirit in order to establish themselves as “anti-designs.” These are the very conceptualisms, body actions, videos, multiple projections, environments, and readymades that have brought us together for this symposium.

The Artistic Reality of Latin America

We believe there is a pressing need to develop the concept of artistic reality as an effective tool for any study of art today. Such a concept requires a sociohistorical view of reality and broadens the idea of art, which has been limited by art history to a mere succession of works and of geniuses. It broadens it by encompassing the idea of art as a sociocultural phenomenon, with crafts, arts, and design as its systems of production, each with its own forms of distribution and consumption as vital extensions of its production. There is nothing new or arbitrary about our interest in the three systems of artistic production. We have become accustomed to scholars addressing only traditional high art, but there is no shortage of studies on the individual existence of these systems: it is irrelevant if they are described as mass media instead of design, and popular art instead of crafts. In reality, we are simply proposing these three systems as integral parts of the one artistic reality, in order to study them together within the Latin American context.

The three above-mentioned systems are historical variants. Firstly, because crafts date back to remote, precapitalist (or pre-bourgeois) times, they link art and technology, they are are produced by hand and custom-made, they comply with traditional and cosmological rules, and they are intuitive and eminently empirical. Secondly, because designs spread among us after 1950, as the products and tools of a monopoly-based, transnational capitalism. They also merge art and technology—in this case machinist technology—and they do so rationally, as another technical division of industrial labor. Thirdly, because so-called high art is older than design and much younger than the high art of Europe, the continent in which it was created by a rising, commercial capitalism and from where we imported it. High art is barely 130 years old in Latin America (1850–1980), and for the first seventy of these (1850–1920), it was confined to the most segregated, epigonal academicism. Over the thirty years that followed (1920–1950), high art began a quest for our own collective identity, and when it seemed as if it was finally on the verge of mastering it and completing the path to artistic independence, we were invaded by design, including mass media, and the chains of our cultural dependence were pulled tighter in other parts. We then had to rethink our artistic independence and resume its conquest.

Given that our artistic reality involves all of us, we must ensure that its protagonist is the set of sensorial relations between us as members of society—or better still, our different social classes—and the reality around us. After all, this set of relations, which can also be called collective aesthetic subjectivity, is the source and the purpose of the systems described above. That is the crux of the concept of artistic reality, a reality that is also linked to social languages, originators of new artistic expressions and of the perceptive changes that characterize contemporary man. Because the arts are essentially sensorial applications of social languages or of technologies (language was not created to produce literature, it existed before it). Also, given that craft existed before art, and art existed before design, their succession in time will become the diachronic axis of our artistic reality, while their coexistence and mixing will embody its synchronic side.

The idea of uniting the three systems into a single reality or phenomenon is not an attempt to place them on the same level, nullifying their mutual differences along with their succession, mixing, and coexistence. We are after all dealing with three modes of artistic production from different historical and economic stages, which have always involved clashes between upper-class and popular forms of expression. Not only are some crafts, arts, and designs upper class or popular by nature, also many crafts, arts, and designs have both upper-class and popular versions. In addition, some upper-class forms become popular over time, disappear with the class (or group) of people who created them, or are replaced by other, more prestigious forms. Thus, artisans were replaced by artists, and now designers replace artists. So the class struggle takes place at both the synchronic and the diachronic levels in the artistic reality of Latin America, and we should accordingly note the dominated arts and dominant arts at all times.

To put it in different terms, slightly off our subject, we advocate situating our artistic reality within the process of the economic and social, political, and cultural formations of each Latin American country. After situating the succession, mixing, and coexistence of the three different modes of artistic production—crafts, arts and designs—we can ascertain the simple tasks and the social processes of their production, distribution, and consumption. In other words, we will look at how the development of the forces of production, distribution, and consumption—and their social relations—brought about changes in the products or producers, distributors, and consumers. In the case of Latin America, the only one of these changes to gain international importance was Mexican muralism. Nonetheless, we must recognize the importance, to us, of the changes in consumption that affect the Latin American people in particular, with regard to the evolution of their sensibility in the course of history.

We are not aiming for a heterodox or unique concept of artistic reality. In other words, it does not require a clean slate. We value the work that has been done by our historians so far, from the perspective of the Western history of art that they practiced. They have given us their studies of the artistic strengths of many works from our past. We just want to provide solid, realistic foundations for these formalist results. Nevertheless, in general terms, we aim to establish a Latin American socio-history of our art or of our artistic reality, to replace the Western history of our art that we have been using. If it is to be our socio-history of our art, we must redefine art in accordance with our collective or popular interests.

An unbiased look at our artistic reality reveals the predominance of precapitalist upper-class art—that is, the art of the pre-Hispanic and colonial world—in terms of both quantity and quality. Then, in the Republic, there is irrefutable evidence of the popular music, of African and indigenous roots, that has triumphed around the world. Its quality is much higher than that of meager, dependent Latin American highbrow music. Artistic crafts—the only independent form of our arts—with their cosmological visions, are also flourishing. We can safely say that our sacred art has always achieved greater things. We still do not understand profane art. For better or for worse, we are still immersed in the worlds of myth. Lastly, we need to consider the non-objectualisms that are now arising from the new urban popular culture of the poverty belts.

Given this overview of our artistic reality, we have to acknowledge that postmodernist non-objectualism and anti-design make up the most progressive stances in today’s art, and also are the most favorable to our artistic independence. And these non-objectualisms are already practiced by many of our artists.

Incidentally, it is no misfortune that postmodernist non-objectualisms can only reach minorities, and only progressive minorities at that, which are an even smaller group. Because in prerevolutionary times (or times before major changes), the radicalization of artistic, scientific, technological, and political minorities is always a good policy. Popularization is important in post-revolutionary times, when major changes are consolidated. Minorities, and even individuals, can still propose, become agents of change, and work for the benefit of majorities. Moreover, we are talking about ephemeral manifestations in response to specific situations that will arise. Because we should bear in mind that art is a historical product. Post-modernist non-objectualisms will disappear or be transfigured. But their reason for being is to make us aware of the evils of the mass media and of the goodness of the ephemeral, which is life and the process of change.

The Postmodernist Spirit

By postmodernist we mean the counter-humanism that now operates in cultural production in general, and in some non-objectualisms in particular. The postmodernist spirit thus subverts the ideals of the Renaissance and its aesthetic, which are identified with the idea of man—always abstract, ideal man—as “the measure of all things,” and which spread the modern ideas of space and time, art and reality, bound up with the fetishization of the object and its now-antiquated subjectivist and objectivist idealisms.

There is an inherent anti-illusionism in non-objectualisms that not only forces them to renounce the representation of visible reality, but also conditions all presentations of reality, so as to produce the greatest conceptual effects. Whenever representations or figures are used, they deny the importance of the representation (or of whatever is iconized) and become established in conceptual iconic realities.

The use of the starkest and most concrete realities of space and matter, movement and time, light and color, is another of the goals of postmodernism. Because anti-illusionism is anti-formalist by nature, and as such, non-objectualisms renounce presenting realities in terms of their forms. They renounce this in order to highlight the human actions and concepts of the reality that is presented, referred to, or signified. Art therefore takes a stance on the mechanisms of knowledge, it questions them, and it challenges the relationship between perception and language. The need to move toward more concrete realities in order to grasp their conceptual and ideological effects means transcending mimesis as an artistic motive and result. Then realism takes the helm of artistic transformations. But it is a realism that does not address the materic or objectual aspects, but rather the social practices that objectify counter-Renaissance artistic actions and concepts.

If we go a little deeper into postmodernism, we will find the exaltation of simultaneity as a component of reality, the importance of which has been overlooked. This exaltation of simultaneity implies denying that processes are linear (a mere relationship of cause and effect), and it is also a consequence of conceiving time as a reality that is cyclical (round) and multifocal like space.³

In practical terms, simultaneity allows non-objectualisms to take an anti-narrative and anti-entertainment stance, given that narrative and entertainment are the usual, persuasive strategies of the Renaissance aesthetic and therefore of the mass media. The anti-narrative stance, with its simultaneities and its information rarefaction, is precisely what helps non-objectualist works to be open or pansemic, by force of tedium.

As Gene Youngblood tells us, by assuming that every process or event is linear, we assume that it is a chain that breaks at its weakest link, and that all its components are predictable on the basis of seeing a few.⁴ Postmodernism, he says, prefers the concept of the alloy, in which the properties of the whole are unpredictable and different to those of its parts, irrespective of whether they are taken separately or together. There is clearly an extensive artistic use of the simultaneity of images and actions, spaces and materials, that merges with the succession and the changes of these same elements. This “synergetic” or “synesthetic” combination of elements now generates new ways of perceiving and conceptualizing reality.⁵

Lastly, postmodernism breaks free of humanist anthropocentrism and acts with an eye on the concrete, relational aspects of “things-time-space,” of the collective and the individual as a form of generative and social self-criticism.⁶

Turning to postminimalism, we find a series of artistic criteria that validates the more coherent forms of expressionism and conceptualism, following the geometrist and minimalist euphoria of the mid-sixties.⁷ Eva Hesse and Sol Lewitt were the best exponents. Here the most violent expressionism meets the most rigorous and conceptualist serial geometrism. The object is reformulated so that painting and sculpture merge with anti-formalist violence, emphasizing the epistemological (or conceptual) and ontological (actions) aspects. It is, in a sense, a kind of return to individual subjectivity, in which actions and concepts are often steeped in an orientalism that counterbalances Western materialism. It may be another primitivism of contemporary art, which seeks to elevate the magical-religious aspects of ritual, often combining it with existentialism—an updated existentialism that can nevertheless easily fall prey to unwitting idealism. Be that as it may, postmodernist non-objectualisms can tend toward the most radical expressionism or the most cryptic conceptualism.

The postmodernist denials and postminimalist objectives mentioned so far are the immediate, social, and external causes of the non-objectualisms we are dealing with here.

They are social insofar as they stem from design, which forced traditional visual arts to change course as a result of its technological nature, and which ultimately arises from the mode of material production—a mode that also operates through the analytical and internal reasons of art. Because internal causes linked to the inescapable questioning of art by its progressive producers operate behind the external causes.

These internal causes—if they do in fact exist—would prove that artistic change does not necessarily have its own, private, social, political, and economic causes, given that the succession of artistic changes may have a common, preexisting cause of a social nature. In this way, changes would occur with little external intervention. We are supposedly talking about changes that share the same nature, even if they take different forms, and that we are referring to the relative independence of art.

These analytical reasons, originally proposed by the Italian art critic Filiberto Menna, still motivate artists to question art and to bring about one artistic change after another.⁸ On the one hand, analytical reason comes down to the fact that art has become self-reflexive, or in other words, that the discourse of art has become the work of art. In other words, it is a matter of trying to find “the object that names itself” and the “identity of signs with themselves” so as to subvert the accepted ideas of art.⁹ Accordingly, analytical reasons revolve around the following relationships, which are very closely linked to knowledge: reality and image, words and things, identity and context. On the other hand, the successive changes range from the tableau-object and collage in Cubism, to the painting-object, the Dada readymade, and the conceptualists who abolished sensitive media and replaced them with rational (or verbal) media that directly effect sensibility or, in other words, that have sensitive ends. And the readymade is just a step away from bodily actions and video.

This text only addresses general characteristics, but we should bear in mind the importance of the difference between various kinds of postmodernism, insofar as they avoid the perils of monolithism and thus prove the effectiveness and soundness of postmodernism (few movements withstand internal differences). We should also bear in mind that while a readymade simply involves choosing an object, environments organize materials, and land art and arte povera transform them. All of these non-objectualisms respond to questions of space but they also reinforce the conceptualism that later permeated all arts, which was a revolutionary step in art. Namely, the eradication of materially perceptible media in the work of art, in favor of intellectual or conceptual media, always with sensory artistic aims.

Meanwhile, bodily actions and videos focus on the chain of successions, that is, on questions of time. And time is new to visual artists, who have spent so many centuries absorbed in spatial illusions. Bodily actions peel back time through actions, gesticulation, and gestures that do not seek to represent, to present, or to express. Instead their information is rarefied in order to bring about tedium, which will take us into the raw real-time present.

Even so, the most important aspect of postmodernist non-objectualisms is the fact that it destroys our Renaissance and humanist legacy and induces us to see and value the world in a more realistic and human manner.

Spanish

Teoría y práctica no-objetualistas en América Latina

Year: 1981

Publication: Primer Coloquio Latinoamericano Sobre Arte No Objetual

Publisher: Museo de Arte Moderno de Medellin

Aquí nos proponemos analizar los no-objetualismos dentro de dos realidades artísticas concéntricas: la mundial y la latinoamericana. De ambos análisis extraeremos las bases para, primero, definir la naturaleza posmodernista de los no-objetualismos, que nos interesan y que son los más radicales, y para después delinear sus posibilidades en América Latina. Son, pues, cuatro los pasos que vamos a emprender.

Primero, situaremos conceptualmente los no-objetualismos en la pugna de la cual son prácticamente originarios: la que desde hace un tiempo sostienen los partidarios de un arte «puro» y los de un arte «aplicado» que no aceptan la etiqueta por considerar inexistente la «pureza» sensitiva o artística. Situarla en esta colisión, equivale a establecer lo que debemos entender por no-objetualismo en general y a señalar sus diferentes clases. Así llegaremos a los diseños, las tendencias ambientalistas, los intentos de fundir arte y vida cotidiana y los posmodernismos, como los no-objetualismos; esto es, las diferentes formas de dar la espalda al objeto «puro», portable y venal de arte. Las dos primeras de estas anticosas, se apoyan en la estética renacentista, la tercera no la diferencia y la cuarta la ataca.

Segundo, interpolaremos el no-objetualismo en la realidad artística de América Latina, una vez que la hayamos conceptuado y descrito con actualidad y realismo. Es decir, no la tomaremos por la mera sucesión de obras de calidad y de genios, sus autores, como acostumbra la historia occidental del arte e inculca la educación familiar y la pública. La conceptuaremos más bien como un proceso que nos involucra a todos, dado que es un fenómeno sociocultural que, como tal, consta de la sucesión, mezcla y coexistencia de los tres sistemas de producción artística que existen: las artesanías, las artes y los diseños. Porque tales sistemas no nacen por mera cuestión de diferencias entre artes mayores y menores, «puras» y «aplicadas», como equivocadamente hemos supuesto hasta ahora. Son variantes históricas de un mismo fenómeno sociocultural que es el arte. Pertenecen, pues, a distintas épocas o modos viejos (precapitalistas) de producción artística que aún subsisten, que coexisten con nuevos y que son prolongaciones de los modos de producción material. En síntesis, los no-objetualismos serían, en nuestra realidad artística, los enemigos radicales de los medios masivos y las manifestaciones artísticas más actuales, realistas y, por ende, las más progresistas.

Tercero, estableceremos las características principales del espíritu posmodernista que anima a los no-objetualismos, que nos interesan por ser antimedios masivos. Aquí saltará a la vista su carácter antinarrativo y antientretenimiento. Es decir, tienen como recursos el aburrimiento y la simultaneidad serial de imágenes, el conceptualismo o el expresionismo radical. Aparte de arremeter contra la estética renacentista, persiguen el tiempo en su desnudez más humana del aquí y el ahora, librándolo de lastres humanistas.

Cuarto, deduciremos los problemas y posibilidades, en nuestra América, de los no-objetualismos posmodernistas. Primero sus ventajas generales: mayor acercamiento al binomio teoría-práctica a través de los conceptualismos que, gracias a su carácter un tanto críptico, se adaptan a denuncias políticas y contraculturales en países de mayor represión. Como segunda y última parte, criticaremos la exposición no-objetualista de este coloquio, con el fin de sacar conclusiones de las prácticas mismas de nuestros artistas no-objetualistas.

Hacia los no-objetualismos

En los milenios que el hombre viene haciendo arte, siempre produjo un arte de utilidad o aplicación práctica, salvo los cuatro siglos que llevamos de estética renacentista. Antes hubo tan solo un arte que hoy denominaríamos «aplicado»; epíteto sin sentido en aquel entonces, dada la ausencia de pretensiones puristas. Las artesanías son por naturaleza las productoras, sin saberlo, de este arte que pone sus mejores esfuerzos al servicio de la religión y que se hermana con la tecnología o, lo que es lo mismo, con utilidades prácticas. Incluso joyas y ornamentos son útiles como objetos de autosignificación y de prestigio social. El arte era inherente al mundo ornamental, áulico y religioso. Existía el popular y profano, pero se le ignora como arte.

Del Renacimiento a nuestro siglo, en cambio, registramos las afanosas búsquedas que emprende la cultura occidental, vale decir el capitalismo, para instituir el concepto de arte puro, libre y autónomo: la obra de arte como única depositaria de lo artístico. Más exactamente, solo los objetos-cosa que producen la pintura y escultura, el grabado y dibujo, contienen el arte en su pureza. Todo lo demás en que intervenga el trabajo artístico será considerado arte aplicado y, por ende, menor. Se logra, por cierto, que el artista tome conciencia de su libertad y que rechace toda imposición de instituciones políticas, religiosas y oficiales. Pero queda en mera aspiración la pureza artística y se diluyen en intelectualismos los fines profanos del arte; fines que, dicho sea de paso, terminan siendo similares a los de la pureza funcional del objeto que, en su propio favor, instaura la industria.

A partir de 1950 sucede lo inesperado y vemos difundirse por el mundo los diseños que unen arte y tecnología como su razón de ser, y somos testigos de los otros no-objetualismos: el de las manifestaciones que proponen fusionar el arte y la vida diaria del hombre común y corriente, el de las proposiciones ambientales o realismos espacialistas, el de los posmodernismos que arremeten contra la estética renacentista.¹⁰ Se desarrolla una marcada inclinación a darle la espalda al objeto puro, portable y venal. Se tiende, pues, al no-objetualismo, sea para renovar la estética renacentista o para ir en contra de ella y darle el golpe de gracia.

Entran entonces en pugna el arte «puro» y el «aplicado». Lo importante es ahora el procedimiento o acción y no el producto de formato predeterminado. Y el procedimiento consiste en insertar experiencias artísticas en toda obra o acto humano. Como consecuencia, surge la necesidad de un concepto procesal y relacional de estructura artística: de aquella que se suscita entre la estructura material de cualquier producto humano y la estructura significativa que produce el consumidor. El arte puro queda como una suerte de teoría especulativa sin posibilidades prácticas, que en vano vocea su pureza. La obra de arte sería, a lo sumo, un objeto en el que predominan las relaciones sensitivas, cuya vivencia placentera es el happy end del arte. En síntesis, el arte deja de ser un fin en sí mismo y se instaura como un medio, sea de las preocupaciones políticas como de las contraculturales. Es cuando brotan los no-objetualismos con sus anticosas, cuyo camino fue paradójicamente abierto por un objeto: el ready made duchampiano.

En realidad no existe lo puramente artístico, ni como relación ni como sustancia. Nunca hubo un objeto puramente artístico, científico o tecnológico. Todo producto humano refleja la mente, la sensibilidad y la necesidad de subsistencia de su autor y consecuentemente coexisten estructuras de distinta naturaleza en el producto, no importa si la artística u otra predomina sobre las demás. Con frecuencia echamos mano del reduccionismo de lo específico, que nadie conoce a ciencia cierta, y que solemos identificar con una imaginada unicidad del objeto. Porque este no existe artísticamente, sino cuando una persona lo consume. Lo específico del arte (de la especie arte), reside en lo sensitivo, lo cual es obviamente común a todas las artes. La unicidad, si existe, será cambiante por pertenecer a la relación objeto-sujeto o, lo que es igual, a la estructura artística propiamente dicha. Nos explicamos que en épocas prefotográficas se haya tomado por arte el hecho de producir manualmente imágenes de la realidad visible, para fijarlas en un objeto. Pero ahora con la presencia de las técnicas mecánicas de producir imágenes (foto, cine y televisión), sabemos que las manuales del dibujo, grabado y pintura son ante todo procedimientos tecnológicos de tipo comunicacional, que por eso suelen tener aplicaciones o derivaciones artísticas.

El capitalismo, en buena cuenta, es el autor de ese doble juego de fomentar el arte puro de los geometrismos, por un lado, y el aplicado de los diseños por el otro. Después de todo, al capitalismo le es vital convertir todo producto en mercancía y reemplazar el trabajo manual e individual por el mecánico, asalariado e industrial, con el fin de producir plusvalía. La tecnología se aboca, consiguientemente, a desarrollar procedimientos mecánicos que desalojan a las artesanías. Los artesanos, como resultado, descienden socialmente y se proletarizan. Las artesanías artísticas, a su turno, son reemplazadas por las artes cultas. El artista sale de posiciones sociales medias y es dueño de sus productos y medios de producción, como antes los artesanos. Luego comienza a ser desalojado por los diseñadores, tanto por los de la industria en general, como por los de la industria cultural o arte masivo. El capitalismo materializa, por este camino lo que ni remotamente pensó: hace del arte un trabajo productivo y asalariado, vale decir, convierte la obra de arte en producto del capital y la hace mercancía. Son los medios masivos de la información y de los entretenimientos audiovisuales e icónico-verbales los que ahora crean y satisfacen las necesidades artísticas espurias y masivas del hombre actual, mientras los diseños pretenden tornar las mercancías industriales en obras de arte. En el camino se confunden los utensilios modernos con las esculturas geometristas. El arte deviene, en fin, un buen negocio y un eficaz instrumento de dominio mental y sensitivo, en manos de los industriales.

Los diseños aparecen, y con ellos las nuevas tecnologías icónicas que en parte devienen artes nuevas (foto, cine, televisión). Los diseños no producen objetos. Constituyen procedimientos proyectuales y directorales, esto es, no-objetualistas, aunque estén al servicio del objeto, en su mayoría industrial. El diseño gráfico y el industrial, el arquitectural y el urbano, cubren casi toda la producción de los objetos. Se suman dos diseños que existen de facto, a los que todavía no se reconoce como tales, y que cubren las informaciones y los entretenimientos: el diseño icónico-verbal de las publicaciones y el diseño audiovisual de la televisión y el cine, propios ambos de los medios masivos. Los diseños se apoyan, sin duda, en la estética renacentista, constituyen una división más del trabajo industrial y llevan el arte a la vida diaria de las mayorías demográficas.

Por influencias de los diseños y como una manera de contemporizar con el espíritu de nuestro tiempo, pierde importancia el trabajo manual en las artes visuales y se sobrevalora el intelectual o conceptivo del artista. Por contagio de los diseños urbano y arquitectural, y por solidaridad con las preocupaciones ecológicas, surge el realismo espacial de obras, tales como los Penetrables de Soto, las esculturas transitables, las ambientaciones lumínicas, etcétera. Estos no-objetualismos conservan el espíritu renacentista y enfocan la hasta ahora descuidada relación hombre-ambiente.

También recurren al no-objetualismo los que, animados por un panesteticismo un tanto nihilista y solipsista, proponen diluir el arte en la vida diaria. Ellos no piensan en la inserción del arte en la vida diaria, como soñaran Schiller y Herbert Read. Estos no-objetualistas aseveran que el mundo hállase colmado de arte espontáneo, y que hemos de aprender a percibirlo y a disfrutarlo. Su exaltación de la producción cultural espontánea nos interesa, por cuanto la podemos encontrar en los cinturones de miseria de nuestras ciudades principales, en forma de comportamientos, «resemantizaciones», escalas de valores, costumbres y otros no-objetualismos, cuya totalidad de creación popular puede ser una alternativa cultural que a la larga influirá en el curso de los medios masivos.

Por último, brotan los no-objetualismos que, adoptando actitudes impugnadoras, adquieren un espíritu posmodernista o antirenacentista, con el fin de instituirse en antidiseños. Nos referimos a los conceptualismos, las acciones corporales, los videos, las proyecciones múltiples, las ambientaciones y ready made, que precisamente nos tienen reunidos en este simposio.

La realidad artística latinoamericana

Consideramos urgente el desarrollo de un concepto de realidad artística, como instrumento eficaz de cualquier estudio actual del arte. Tal concepto presupone una visión sociohistórica de la realidad y amplía la idea de arte, constreñida por la historia del arte a la mera sucesión de obras o de genios. La amplía, abarcando el fenómeno sociocultural que es el arte, cuyos sistemas de producción son las artesanías, las artes y los diseños; cada sistema con su distribución y su consumo como prolongaciones vitales de su producción. No implica ninguna novedad ni arbitrariedad nuestro interés por los tres sistemas de producción artística. Estamos acostumbrados a que los estudiosos se atengan tan solo al arte culto tradicional, pero no faltan estudios sobre la existencia individual de tales sistemas: no importa si utilizan el nombre de medios masivos en lugar de diseños y el de arte popular en vez de artesanías. Lo que en verdad hacemos aquí es proponer, simplemente, los tres sistemas como partes integrantes de una misma realidad artística, con el propósito de estudiarlos en conjunto dentro del contexto latinoamericano.

Los tres sistemas mencionados son variantes históricas. Primero, porque las artesanías datan de tiempos remotos y precapitalistas (o preburgueses), unen arte y tecnología, trabajan a mano y por encargo, se ajustan a normas tradicionales y cosmológicas, y son intuitivas y eminentemente empíricas. Segundo, porque los diseños se difunden entre nosotros después de 1950, como productos e instrumentos de un capitalismo monopólico y transnacional. También fusionan arte y tecnología, pero la maquinista; lo hacen racionalmente y como una división técnica más del trabajo industrial. Tercero, porque las artes denominadas cultas son más viejas que los diseños y muchos más jóvenes que las de Europa, continente en donde las crea un capitalismo –ascendente y mercantil y desde donde nosotros las importamos–. Tienen apenas 130 años en Latinoamérica (1850-1980), de los cuales los setenta primeros (1850-1920) transcurren en el academicismo más epigonal y cerrado. En los treinta años siguientes (1920-1950) entran a la búsqueda de lo nuestro colectivo, y cuando ya parecía que iban, al fin, a dominar lo nuestro y a terminar de correr el camino que conduce a la independencia artística, nos invaden los diseños, medios masivos incluidos, y aprietan en otras partes las amarras de nuestra dependencia cultural. Tuvimos entonces que reformular nuestra independencia artística y reanudar su conquista.

Como nuestra realidad artística nos involucra a todos, estamos obligados a postular como su protagonista al conjunto de relaciones sensitivas que predominantemente mantenemos con la realidad circundante los miembros de la sociedad o, si se prefiere, nuestras diferentes clases sociales. Al fin y al cabo, tal conjunto de relaciones sensitivas, denominado también subjetividad estética colectiva, es la fuente y el destino de los mencionados sistemas. He aquí lo esencial del concepto de realidad artística. Realidad ligada, por lo demás, a los lenguajes sociales, matrices de nuevas manifestaciones artísticas y de los cambios sensitivos que tipifican al hombre actual. Porque las artes son aplicaciones sensitivas de lenguajes sociales o de tecnologías (el idioma no fue creado para hacer literatura; existió antes que esta). Además, como las artesanías existieron antes que las artes y éstas antes que los diseños, su sucesión en el tiempo constituirá el eje diacrónico de nuestra realidad artística, mientras su mezcla y coexistencia corporizan el eje sincrónico de la misma.

Al juntar en una sola realidad o fenómeno los tres citados sistemas, no pretendemos igualarlos, anulando así la lucha de clases que entrañan sus diferencias mutuas, así como su sucesión, mezcla y coexistencia. No en vano estamos lidiando con tres modos de producción artística de distintas etapas históricas y económicas, en las que siempre hubo manifestaciones señoriales y populares en pugna. No solo existen artesanías, artes y diseños que, por naturaleza, son populares o señoriales, sino que muchas artesanías, artes y diseños poseen versiones populares junto con señoriales. Aparte de esto, unas manifestaciones devienen populares con el tiempo, desaparecen junto con la clase (o grupos) de hombres que las promovieron o son reemplazadas por otras nuevas de mayor prestigio social. Así, los artistas desplazan a los artesanos, y hoy los diseñadores a los artistas. La lucha de clases se da, pues, en el plano sincrónico y en el diacrónico de la realidad artística latinoamericana. Cabe señalar, por consiguiente, artes dominadas y artes dominantes en todo momento de nuestra realidad artística.

Dicho en otros términos, y un poco al margen de nuestro tema, somos partidarios de situar nuestra realidad artística en el proceso de las formaciones económica y social, política y cultural de cada uno de los países latinoamericanos. Una vez situada la sucesión, mezcla y coexistencia de los tres distintos modos de producción artística que son las artesanías, las artes y los diseños, estableceremos los trabajos simples y los procesos sociales de su respectiva producción, distribución y consumo. Si se quiere, veremos cómo el desarrollo de las fuerzas productivas, distributivas y consuntivas, más sus relaciones sociales, determinan los cambios en los productos o productores, los distribuidores o consumidores; en el caso de América Latina, ninguno de estos cambios adquiere importancia mundial, salvo el muralismo mexicano. Pero habrá que admitir la importancia, para nosotros, de los cambios consuntivos que son los que dan cuenta cabal del hombre latinoamericano en concreto, en cuanto a la evolución de su sensibilidad a lo largo de la historia.

Nuestro concepto de realidad artística no pretende ser ni heterodoxo ni único. Es decir, no pide borrón y cuenta nueva. Apreciamos lo hecho hasta ahora por nuestros historiadores, desde el ángulo de la historia occidental del arte que practicaron. Ahí están sus análisis de las virtudes artísticas de muchas obras de nuestro pasado. Solamente buscamos dotar a estos resultados formalistas, de bases sólidas y realistas. Con todo, y en buena cuenta, buscamos instituir una sociohistoria latinoamericana de nuestro arte o realidad artística, como reemplazo de la historia occidental de nuestro arte que hemos venido utilizando. Que sea nuestra sociohistoria de nuestro arte equivale a redefinir el arte de acuerdo con nuestros intereses colectivos o populares.

Si miramos libres de prejuicios nuestra realidad artística, se evidenciará el predominio en cantidad y calidad de las artes señoriales precapitalistas, esto es, las del mundo prehispánico y de la Colonia. Luego, en la República, saltará como prueba irrefutable la música popular que, de raíces africanas o indígenas, ha conquistado éxitos mundiales. Su nivel es muy superior a la música culta latinoamericana, magra y dependiente. También son vigorosas las artesanías artísticas –lo único independiente en nuestro arte– con sus visiones cosmológicas. Sin temor a equivocarnos, podemos afirmar que nuestro arte sacro siempre tuvo mayores logros. El profano todavía no lo entendemos. Para bien o para mal, todavía andamos inmersos en mundos míticos. Para terminar, hemos de reparar en los no-objetualismos que actualmente produce la nueva cultura popular urbana de los cinturones de miseria.

Dentro de este panorama de nuestra realidad artística, hemos de admitir que los no-objetualismos posmodernistas y antidiseños se nos presentan como la actitud más progresista del artista actual y la más favorable a nuestra independencia artística. Y estos no-objetualismos son ya practicados por muchos de nuestros artistas.

No constituye ninguna desgracia, por cierto, que los no-objetualismos posmodernistas solo puedan llegar a minorías, y a minorías progresistas que son aún las más reducidas. Y es que siempre será buena política en épocas prerrevolucionarias (o precambios sustanciales), la radicalización de minorías artísticas y científicas, tecnológicas y políticas, etcétera. La popularización es importante en tiempos posrevolucionarios, o sea, durante la consolidación de los cambios sustanciales. Las minorías e incluso los individuos todavía pueden proponer, ser agentes de cambio y trabajar en beneficio de las mayorías. Por añadidura, se trata aquí de manifestaciones efímeras que responden a situaciones concretas que pasarán. Porque hemos de tener presente que el arte es un producto histórico. Los no-objetualismos posmodernistas desaparecerán o se transfigurarán. Pero su razón de ser está en hacernos tomar conciencia de los males de los medios masivos y de la bondad de lo efímero que es vida y proceso de cambio.

El espíritu posmodernista

Por posmodernista entendemos el conjunto de contrahumanismos que hoy operan en la producción cultural en general y en algunos no-objetualismos en particular. Subvierte, pues, los ideales renacentistas y los de su estética, identificados con eso de que el hombre –caso siempre el hombre abstracto e ideal–«es la medida de todas las cosas» y que propagan las ideas modernas de espacio y de tiempo, arte y realidad, adheridas a la fetichización del objeto con sus idealismos subjetivistas y objetivistas, hoy periclitados.

Sucede que a los no-objetualismos les es inherente un anti-ilusionismo que no sólo los obliga a renunciar a la representación de la realidad visible, sino que también condiciona toda presentación de la realidad para que produzca los mayores efectos conceptuales. En el caso de utilizar representaciones o figuras, estas negarán la importancia de la representación (o de lo iconizado) y se instituirán en realidades icónicas de tipo conceptual.

La utilización de las realidades más desnudas y concretas de espacio o materia, movimiento o tiempo, luz y color, sería también una de las metas del posmodernismo. Porque el anti-ilusionismo es por naturaleza antiformalista y en consecuencia los no-objetualismos renuncian a la presentación de realidades por sus formas. Renuncian, con la intención de acentuar los conceptos y acciones humanas de la realidad presentada, denominada o significada. Como resultado, el arte se pronuncia sobre los mecanismos del conocimiento, los cuestiona, así como pone en tela de juicio las relaciones de la percepción con el lenguaje o idioma. La necesidad de ir hacia las realidades más concretas, para asirlas en sus efectos conceptuales e ideológicos, deja atrás la mímesis como móvil y resultado artístico. El realismo se instituye entonces en timonel de las transformaciones artísticas. Pero este realismo no se dirige a lo matérico ni a lo objetual, sino a las prácticas sociales que objetivan los conceptos y comportamientos artísticos contrarenacentistas.

Penetrando un poco más en el posmodernismo, advertiremos la exaltación de la simultaneidad como un componente de la realidad, cuya importancia se ha ignorado hasta ahora. Tal exaltación implica, desde luego, negar que los procesos sean lineales (mera relación de una causa y un efecto). Esto de exaltar la simultaneidad, además, es consecuencia de conceptuar el tiempo como una realidad cíclica (redonda) e igualmente polifocal como el espacio.¹¹

Como resultado práctico, la simultaneidad servirá a los no-objetualismos para tomar actitudes antinarrativas y antientretenimiento, puesto que la narración y el entretenimiento son los recursos habituales y persuasivos de la estética renacentista y por consiguiente de los medios masivos. La antinarración es la que precisamente contribuye, con sus simultaneidades y sus rarificaciones de información, a que las obras no-objetualistas sean abiertas o pansémicas, a fuerza de tedio.

El hecho de tomar por lineal todo proceso o acontecimiento equivale a tomarlo por una cadena, la cual se rompe por el eslabón más débil, y son predecibles sus componentes después de ver algunos, nos dice G. Youngblood.¹² Y agrega que el posmodernismo prefiere el concepto de aleación: que el todo tenga propiedades imprevisibles y distintas a las de las partes, tanto separadas como juntas. Lo evidente es que registramos una profusa utilización artística de la simultaneidad de imágenes y acciones, espacios y materiales, que se fusionan con la sucesión y los cambios de estos mismos elementos. Esta combinación de elementos denominada «synergética» o «synestética», genera ahora nuevos modos de percibir y de conceptuar la realidad.¹³

El posmodernismo, por último, se libera del antropocentrismo humanista y actúa con la mirada puesta en lo concreto y relacional de la realidad «cosas-tiempo-espacio», de lo colectivo y de lo individual como autocrítica generativa y social.¹⁴

Si ahora nos ajustamos al posminimalismo, tendremos unos criterios artísticos que vienen a revalidar al expresionismo más consecuente y al conceptualismo, después de la euforia geometrista y minimalista de mediados de los años sesenta.¹⁵ Eva Hesse y Sol Lewitt serían los mejores exponentes. Aquí se dan cita, pues, el expresionismo más violento y el geometrismo serial más riguroso y conceptualista. El objeto es reformulado para fusionar lo pictórico y lo escultórico con violencia antiformalista y acentuar los aspectos epistemológicos (o conceptuales) y ontológicos (acciones). En cierto sentido, tenemos aquí una suerte de retorno a la subjetividad individual, cuyas acciones y conceptos suelen venir impregnadas de orientalismos que equilibran al materialismo occidental. Tal ez se trata de otro primitivismo más del arte contemporáneo, el cual busca exaltar lo mágico-religioso del rito para mezclarlo muchas veces con el existencialismo, el que pese a venir renovado, puede ser presa fácil de idealismos inadvertidos. Sea como fuere, los no-objetualismos posmodernistas pueden tender al expresionismo más radical o al conceptualismo más críptico.

Las hasta aquí mencionadas negaciones posmodernistas y objetivos posminimalistas serían las causas inmediatas, sociales y externas de los no-objetualismos que nos interesan.

Son sociales, en cuanto provienen de los diseños, cuya naturaleza tecnológica obliga a las artes visuales tradicionales a cambiar de rumbo; diseños que obedecen, en última instancia, al modo de producción material; modo que actúa también a través de las razones analíticas e internas del arte. Porque detrás de las causas externas, actúan las internas del obligado cuestionamiento del arte, por parte de sus productores progresistas.

Estas causas internas–si existen–estarían evidenciándonos que no necesariamente todo cambio artístico posee su propia y privada causa social, política y económica, ya que la sucesión de cambios artísticos puede tener una causa común y pretérita de naturaleza social. De tal manera que los cambios se sucederán sin mayor intervención externa; se supone que hablamos de cambios de la misma naturaleza, aunque posean diferente forma, y que aludimos a la independencia relativa del arte.

Las razones analíticas aludidas son aquellas propuestas por el italiano Filiberto Menna, que siguen impeliendo a los artistas a poner en entredicho el arte y a realizar cambios artísticos sucesivos.¹⁶ Por un lado, la razón analítica se reduce al hecho de que el arte se ha tornado autorreflexivo, vale decir, que el discurso del arte ha devenido obra de arte. Dicho en otros términos, se trata de buscar «el objeto que se denomine a sí mismo» y la «identidad de los signos consigo mismos», para así subvertir las ideas establecidas de arte.¹⁷ Las razones analíticas giran, entonces, en torno a las siguientes relaciones muy ligadas al conocimiento: realidad e imagen, palabras y cosas, identidad y contexto. Por otro lado, la sucesión de cambios incluye lo que va del tableau-objet y el collage del cubismo a la pintura objeto y de aquí al ready made dadaísta y los conceptualistas que suprimen los medios sensitivos, para reemplazarlos por medios racionales (o verbales) que inciden directamente en la sensibilidad, esto es, que tienen fines sensitivos. Y del ready made a las acciones corporales y a los videos, hay un paso.

Aquí tenemos que ver solamente con características generales. Sin embargo, permítasenos recordarles la importancia de las diferencias entre los posmodernismos, en tanto estas obvian los peligros del monolitismo y por tanto comprueban la operatividad y solidez del posmodernismo (pocos movimientos soportan diferencias internas). Recordemos también que si el ready made se limita a elegir un objeto, las ambientaciones organizan materiales y el arte térreo y el pobre los transforman. Todos estos no-objetualismos hacen frente a cuestiones de espacio. Pero–eso sí–acentúan el conceptualismo que impregnará luego a todas las artes y que es un paso revolucionario en el arte. Nos referimos a la supresión en la obra de arte de los medios sensitivos, reemplazándolos por medios mentales o conceptuales con fines siempre sensitivos, artísticos.

Las acciones corporales y los videos, mientras tanto, se abocan a la concatenación de sucesiones, o sea, enfocan cuestiones de tiempo. Y el tiempo es nuevo para los artistas visuales, tantos siglos absortos en ilusiones espaciales. Las acciones corporales desnudan el tiempo, cuando sus actos, gestos y ademanes no están destinados a representar ni a presentar, tampoco a expresar, sino que son rarificadas sus informaciones con el objeto de producir el tedio; tedio que nos llevará al presente más crudo del tiempo real.

Con todo, lo más importante de los no-objetualismos posmodernistas consiste en destruir en nosotros la herencia renacentista y humanista, para inducirnos a ver y a tasar el mundo de manera más realista y humana.

The post Juan Acha: Teoría y práctica no-objetualistas en América Latina / Non-Objectualist Theory and Practice in Latin America appeared first on post.

In 1973, critic and theorist Juan Acha published the text Por una nueva problemática artística en Latinoamérica in Artes Visuales. The critical essay is available here in the original Spanish as well as translated into English for the first time.

In this text, Juan Acha underlines some central issues for art in Latin America in relation to “high” and “popular” art. He argues that the circulation of developmentalist aesthetics within third-world and more developed nations blurs the capacity of the former to properly conceptualize the emerging artistic problems of the region. He further posits that Latin American artistic production has always been based upon two modes—intellectualism and emotionalism—and that only by merging and dialectically superseding these dual approaches can a new aesthetic be attained. Acha argues that the new artistic problematic needs to be one of a sociological nature.

Por una nueva problemática artística en Latinoamérica

Publication Artes Visuales
Publisher Museo de Arte Moderno (MAM), Mexico City

Language Spanish

El principal problema artístico de nuestra América estriba –a mi juicio– en la no-formulación de problemas oriundos; de aquellos susceptibles de brotar de nuestra más íntima realidad tercermundista que, de suyo, implica mutación y transitoriedad. Es decir, precisamos una nueva problemática latinoamericanista que, como tal, posea doble articulación: que haga frente a las cuestiones de la estética desarrollista que hoy practicamos y que, al mismo tiempo, dé cara a las que originaría la formulación de una nueva o, lo que es lo mismo, de una manera diferente y realista de conceptuar el arte, y ayude a encauzar nuestra mutación tercermundista en lo sensitivo y contrarreste los excesos y defectos del desarrollismo.

La estética desarrollista comprende los problemas cuyas soluciones están encaminadas a posesionarnos del arte culto y a practicarlo según las normas de los países avanzados y en sus mismos niveles. A estos problemas se agregan consecuentemente los que todavía no hemos planteado a causa de nuestro atraso con relación a las naciones que, precisamente, ya los tienen aclarados y, en gran parte, solucionados. Impelidos por el desarrollismo, por esa ansia de seguir los pasos que nos trazan los países ricos, tarde o temprano tendremos estos problemas en nuestras manos.

Esta estética, como sabemos, transcurre según modelos foráneos, reduciéndose a la mera consecución del arte culto existente en otros mundos para difundirlo en el nuestro. Ella, en fin, está ya programada y dista mucho de agotar nuestras posibilidades artísticas y de cubrir todas las actividades de nuestra sensibilidad. Sobre todo, si nos atenemos a lo que hoy postulan algunos artistas jóvenes en casi todos los países. Porque, en tal caso, estaremos forzados a convenir que nuestro desarrollismo persigue un arte impugnado ya de cabo a rabo; un arte considerado insuficiente, si no inapropiado, para los tiempos que corren y sus fuerzas precoces; un arte que ha resultado espurio para un Tercer Mundo ávido de cambios de toda índole.

La necesidad de darle a nuestros países un nuevo giro social y cultural trae consigo la obligación de preguntarse hasta qué punto podemos y debemos darle un nuevo curso al arte. No se trata, desde luego, de pormenorizar en frío una nueva estética para que la ejecuten nuestros artistas, sino de establecer simplemente los porqué de la necesidad que tenemos de ella. A lo sumo, nos tocaría delinear las bases sobre las cuales los artistas deben actuar –o han comenzado a moverse– con el fin de forjar una estética que, diferente, comprenda tanto nuestras solicitaciones y prácticas cuya naturaleza artística es hoy reconocida, así como nuestras otras apetencias y actos sensitivos de los cuales no tomamos conciencia ni están considerados dentro del arte.

Las bases de una estética así se encuentran latentes o en cierne en nuestra realidad, y es cuestión de descubrirlas, para luego establecer sus ventajas y desventajas y poder encauzarlas. Su delineamiento constituye, por lo demás, la finalidad de estas notas de carácter preliminar y limitadas a las artes visuales.

América Latina tuvo siempre dos maneras contrapuestas y predominantes de conceptuar el arte, que pueden servir de punto de partida para revisar nuestras posibilidades y prácticas artísticas. Una, la intelectualista, que se atiene exclusivamente a las razones ontológico-estéticas e histórico-artísticas para determinar el curso del arte culto o bien negarlo. La otra, la subjetivista o psicologista, que opta por una emotividad adversa a las ideas como la mejor y más eficaz guía del arte, puesto que confunde la espontaneidad y el narcisismo con la libertad de criterio, de por sí racional.

Ambas maneras han existido siempre en nuestro Tercer Mundo, como dije. Son antagónicas entre sí. Pero coinciden en la creencia de que existe una esencia que determina los cambios artísticos y humanos, por lo general leves, así como coinciden en llevar el arte por caminos equivocados, alejados de nuestra legítima realidad y de nuestra autodeterminación. Sin embargo, son necesarias cuando se corrigen mutuamente y, en especial, cuando entran en interacción con una manera sociológica de mirar las cuestiones artísticas.

El intelectualismo artístico propugna el predominio del hombre pensante que, conocedor de historia y teoría del arte, sea hábil para el manejo y expresión de las ideas. El historicismo y el esencialismo –u ontologismo– son, en cambio, sus proclividades, tornando las ideas en imperativos artísticos. Con desaforada vehemencia axiológica quiere establecer lo que es el arte para, a renglón seguido, prescribir lo que ha de ser el hombre y la sociedad que desea producirlo o consumirlo. Como resultado, las actividades artísticas se convierten en ejercicios intelectuales y en un obrar dentro de la problemática occidental de la historia y teoría del arte; como si el arte de América Latina fuese una rezagada continuación del de los países adelantados.

Para esta manera de conceptuar el arte, todos los problemas artísticos radicarían en la mera autorización, tanto de las manifestaciones del arte culto ya oficializadas afuera, como de las tendencias que niegan este arte. En este último caso, los intelectualistas se limitarán a los argumentos que conciernen a la superestructura y a la periclitación del arte culto y objetual y se atendrán a imitar los hechos o tendencias foráneas, ya que carecen de metas propias y no parten del hecho real de la periclitación para buscar razones y ventajas sociológicas, tercermundistas. La necesidad de una nueva estética será para ellos intelectual y no vivencial; de imitación superficial más que existencial.

Con todo, ellos han logrado lo que se proponían. Porque sucede que es en las ciudades latinoamericanas con mayor tráfico de ideas donde se han dado nuestras mejores obras de arte visual en términos occidentales, colmando así nuestras aspiraciones desarrollistas. Pero se han dado en el terreno cualitativo de tendencias conocidas y/o en el de la creación de nuevas. Podemos registrar, incluso, la introducción de innovaciones importantes en la obra de arte, pero sin que esto haya dado lugar al desarrollo de nuevas tendencias de importancia occidental. Una cosa es alcanzar la mera calidad estética y otra crear una tendencia.

La razón del fenómeno es clara y eminentemente desarrollista: en una constelación cultural como la occidental, a la que pertenecemos, es imposible que los artistas del Tercer Mundo respondan a situaciones sociales nuevas y avanzadas, hoy producto de la alta industrialización, de la prosperidad económica y de los medios masivos; situaciones que posteriormente aparecerán en el resto del mundo junto con el arte que responde a ellas, a medida que se desarrolle. El hecho de existir algunas ciudades latinoamericanas de elevados niveles culturales no altera el mecanismo de la creación de tendencias artísticas, aunque mejora el proceso de la calidad artística.

Como es de suponer, no es cuestión de echar por la borda al intelectualismo, sino de librarlo de vicios y encauzarlo. No es materia de desterrar las ideas ni los conocimientos; al contrario: posesionarnos de ellos, pero tomándolos como valiosas e indispensables herramientas para estudiar nuestra realidad tercermundista en sus mutaciones infraestructurales, psicosociales y sensitivas, para lo cual nos es menester mayor movilidad fuera de la historia y teoría del arte, ambas por lo regular limitadas a las cuestiones de la superestructura del arte.

Con nuestro subjetivismo artístico sucede lo contrario: ahoga toda curiosidad intelectual con el propósito de dejar el arte a merced de nuestro irracionalismo emocional. Si bien esta posición no ha generado nuestras mejores obras artísticas en la escala occidental de valores, ha opuesto la idea de un “ser” latinoamericano –o nacional– de una identidad colectiva basada, ora en el indigenismo (autoctonismo), ora en nuestro mestizaje cultural o en el racial, creando de esta manera la necesidad de operar fuera del arte culto occidental y produciendo nuestras obras más contrapuestas a los gustos y dictados artísticos de Europa y Norteamérica.

No podemos negar la importancia de los impulsos que contiene este modo de mirar el arte. Ellos son útiles para comenzar a transitar por los caminos inhollados del arte. Pero se irán de bruces al no estar acompañados de ideas. Sus errores son también conocidos: el arqueologismo raya en el anacronismo; el nacionalismo toma ribetes xenofóbicos; el popularismo se reviste de paternalismo y demagogia con el pretexto de obrar con sentimientos socialistas. Se exalta el arte prehispánico como fuente de inspiración obligada del arte culto o, como reemplazo de éste, se ensalza el folclore. Como alternativa se llega al distribucionismo: producir arte culto para el pueblo o difundir el existente en su nombre.

Aunque ya quedó muy atrás el imperio del rabioso nacionalismo, autor de todos estos errores garrafales, el subjetivismo artístico subsiste aún y nos urge despojar su problemática de simplismos. Porque el arte de un mundo en constante y brusca mutación, como el tercero a que pertenecemos, no puede reducirse a una simple cuestión de oponer lo existente en nuestro pasado y en nuestras mayorías demográficas, ni sus problemas pueden resolverse con la idea de inamovilidad que implica la creencia en una identidad colectiva hecha y derecha, fija e inmutable, receptora y motor del arte. Siendo ineficaces por separado las dos actitudes hasta aquí descritas, lógico sería proponer su unión intercorrectora. Pero esto no basta, pues les hace falta enfocar de lleno el mecanismo de nuestras actuales mutaciones. Necesitan, por consiguiente, un elemento que las mantenga unidas hasta lograr su interdependencia y, a la vez, las guíe hacia las causas y consecuencias psicosociales, sensitivas, de tales mutaciones. Y este elemento no puede ser sino el criterio sociológico, propiamente tercermundista. La solución no es nueva, por cierto. Ella flota en el ambiente y los artistas de todas partes la ponen hoy en práctica: parten de lo sociológico, y lo estético se da como subproducto. Al fin y al cabo, el arte es un producto social y si en el pasado sucedía al revés, era a causa de la quietud social y cultural.

Al impartirle una dirección sociológica a nuestra problemática artística, tendremos que situar nuestras manifestaciones estéticas en la realidad de unas sociedades heterogéneas que los efectos de la revolución tecnológica han puesto en constante y radical transformación mental y sensitiva. Como resultado de los cambios ecológicos causados por los objetos y los medios masivos, en cuyo manejo interviene el imperialismo cultural que sobre nosotros ejercen los países desarrollados, aumenta la diversidad de nuestras situaciones sociales, culturales y artísticas que van de lo feudal a lo industrial, del analfabetismo a la cultura de masas.

En una situación así, tan movida y transitoria en lo sensitivo y lo mental, ya no es posible pensar en una solución artística única y fija, ni mantener separadas, por jerarquías, las diferentes manifestaciones de nuestra sensibilidad. La mejor solución consistirá, por lo tanto, en promover el pluralismo estético, que no es otra cosa que darle personalidad “jurídica” a la diversidad de manifestaciones que de facto existen en toda colectividad, para que se conjuguen sin jerarquizaciones previas.

Los problemas se ampliarán y variarán al entrar las diferentes proposiciones artísticas en el libre juego de la oferta y la demanda, en los tan poco estudiados mecanismos de producción y consumo, flujo e intermediarios, que el fenómeno artístico tiene en cada sector de la colectividad. Surgirá el problema de la necesidad del arte culto, cuya importancia depende de la ascendencia que en la colectividad poseen las minorías, sobre todo la cultural, la única que puede evitar que este arte pierda sus virtudes subversivas, se convierta en arma de represión y sea dócil a los dictados foráneos y desarrollistas. Ella es su único usuario, pues la mayoría por naturaleza sólo puede ser su beneficiaria a través de ese uso. Aparecerá también el problema de la insuficiencia de este arte y de sus búsquedas de manifestaciones de igual radio de acción y potencialidad artística que tienen los medios masivos. Porque sólo así podrá contrarrestar los efectos sensitivos y culturales de éstos. Lo cual le significará dejar de ser “culto”.

Igual derecho a solución tendrán los problemas de enfocar la sensibilidad, la cual incluye nuestras reacciones diarias de agrado y desagrado, productos de la educación y ecología, además de los medios masivos. Su solución será muy afín a la “pedagogía del oprimido” que propone Paulo Freire. La nueva problemática se caracterizará, pues, por su amplitud sociológica.

Toward a New Artistic Problematic in Latin America

By Juan Acha | Winter 1973

Publication Artes Visuales
Publisher Museo de Arte Moderno (MAM), Mexico City

Language Spanish

The main artistic problem in Latin America, in my view, is the non-formulation of concerns specific to us, those arising from our innermost third-world reality, which inherently implies mutation and transience. We therefore need a new Latin Americanist problematic that would accordingly be twofold: contest the developmentalist aesthetic governing our current practices and, at the same time, embrace the implications springing from the formulation of native ones. In other words, we need to formulate a new and realistic way of conceptualizing art that would help to channel the transformation of our third-world sensorium and also curtail the excesses and weaknesses of developmentalism.

The developmentalist aesthetic responds to problems whose solutions lead us to embrace high art and to practice it according to the standards of advanced countries and at their levels. To these questions, we therefore add those that we have not yet considered due to our backwardness vis-à-vis the countries that have already analyzed and, to a great extent, solved them. Under the influence of developmentalism—the eagerness to follow in the footsteps of rich countries—we will have to deal sooner or later with these problems ourselves.

As we know, the developmentalist aesthetic follows foreign models and essentially boils down to merely attaining the high art of other worlds and popularizing it in our own. It is an aesthetic that has already been designed and does not by any means either exhaust all of our artistic possibilities or broach all aspects of our sensorial activities—particularly if we accept what young artists in almost all countries are proposing, in which case, we would have to acknowledge that our current developmentalist trend aspires to a form of art that is already intensely disputed, a kind of art that is considered inadequate if not inappropriate for our time and its precocious forces, a kind of art that has proven spurious for a third world that is hungry for all manner of change.

The need for a social and cultural turnaround in our countries compels us to reflect on the extent to which we can and should chart a new course for art. This certainly does not mean coolly describing a new aesthetic for our artists to follow, but rather simply setting out the reasons that make one necessary. At most we would have to outline the bases that artists should act upon—or have already begun to act upon—in order to create a new, different aesthetic, one that encompasses our inquiries and practices, whose artistic nature is now acknowledged, and our other sensory actions and urges, of which we are unaware and that are not considered art.

The bases for an aesthetic of this kind are already latent, if not in progress in our reality. It is just a matter of discovering them, of determining their pros and cons, and then guiding them. The purpose of these preliminary and limited notes is in fact to identify and define these bases.

In Latin America there have always been two competing ways of conceptualizing art, and they can serve as starting points for reviewing our artistic possibilities and practices. One is the intellectualist perspective, which hews strictly to ontological-aesthetic and historical-artistic criteria to determine the course of high art or to reject it. The other is a subjectivist or psychological perspective that opts for an emotionalism that is opposed to ideas as the best and most effective guide for art, mistaking spontaneity and narcissism for freedom of opinion, which is in itself rational.

Both perspectives have always existed in the third world, as I said. They are pitted against each other. But they are at one in their belief in the existence of an essence that brings about artistic and human changes, which are usually slight. Despite the fact that both impel art down the wrong paths, away from our legitimate reality and our self-determination, they are nonetheless necessary insofar as they correct each other, particularly when they begin to interact with a sociological approach to artistic matters.

Artistic intellectualism advocates the predominance of the thinking man, conversant in the history and theory of art and thus skilled in the handling and expression of ideas. Historicism and essentialism—or ontologism—are its proclivities, however, and they turn ideas into artistic imperatives. With unbridled axiological fervor, it wants to establish what art is and, in the very next breath, to stipulate the kind of man and society that wish to produce or consume it. As a result, artistic activities become intellectual exercises that remain within the bounds of the problems of Western art history and theory—as if Latin American art were simply a lagging sequel to the art produced by advanced countries.

According to this approach to conceptualizing art, all artistic problems lie in merely approving either the expressions of high art that are already formalized elsewhere, or the trends that reject this kind of art. In the latter case, the intellectualists would confine themselves to arguments concerning the superstructure and the decline of both high art and objectual art, and simply imitate foreign actions or trends, given that they have no goals of their own and are not seeking sociological, third-world reasons and advantages based on the real fact of decline. For them, the need for a new aesthetic would be intellectual rather than experiential, a question of superficial imitation rather than of existentialism.

Nonetheless, they have achieved what they intended. Because, as it turns out, our best works of visual art, in Western terms, have been produced in the Latin American cities with the most intense circulation of ideas, thus fulfilling our developmentalist aspirations. But qualitatively speaking, these works were produced in the field of existing trends rather than the creation of new ones. There are even cases of significant innovation in works of art, without the development of new trends of international importance. Attaining mere aesthetic quality is one thing; creating a new trend is something else altogether.

The reason for the phenomenon is clear and eminently developmentalist: in a cultural constellation such as the Western one to which we belong, it is impossible for third-world artists to respond to the new, advanced social situations currently emerging as a result of sophisticated industrialization, economic prosperity, and the mass media; these are situations that will eventually appear in the rest of the world, together with the art that will respond to them as they develop. The fact that there are Latin American cities with a high cultural level does not alter the mechanism by which artistic trends are created, although it does improve the process of artistic quality.

As might be imagined, it is not a question of jettisoning intellectualism, but rather of ridding it of its flaws and channeling it appropriately. The goal is not to banish ideas or knowledge. On the contrary we should embrace both, as valuable and indispensable tools for studying the infrastructural, psychosocial, and sensory mutations of our third-world reality, a task that requires us to move more freely beyond the history and theory of art, both of which are generally confined to matters pertaining to the superstructure of art.

The reverse is true of our artistic subjectivism, which stifles all intellectual curiosity, leaving art at the mercy of our emotional irrationalism. Although this subjectivist perspective has not produced our best artistic works according to the scale of values of the West, it did advance the idea of a Latin American—or national—“being” with a collective identity based either on indigenism (nativism) or on our cultural or racial hybridization. As such, it sparked the need to operate outside Western high art and produced the works that are most contrary to European and North American tastes and dictates.

We cannot negate the importance of the forces driving this view of art. They push us to embark upon the untrodden paths of art. But they will get us nowhere because they are not accompanied by ideas. The failings of subjectivism are also known: archaeologism verges on anachronism; nationalism takes on xenophobic overtones; popularism is cloaked in paternalism and demagogy with the pretext of acting with socialist sentiments. Subjectivism elevates pre-Hispanic art as a mandatory source of inspiration for high art, or glorifies folklore as its replacement. The alternative at which it arrives is distributionism: to produce high art for the people, or to popularize existing art in its name.

Although we have moved well beyond the empire of rabid nationalism—perpetrator of all those terrible mistakes—artistic subjectivism remains alive, and we must rid it of its simplistic aspects. Because the art produced in a world like our own third world, which is characterized by constant, sudden changes, cannot be reduced to a mere opposition between the art of our past and that of our demographic majorities—just as its problems cannot be solved by the refusal to budge based on a belief in a full-fledged collective identity, fixed and immutable as both a receptor and an engine of art. Seeing as how both approaches are ineffective on their own, it would make sense to consider joining them in a mutually corrective fusion. But this would not suffice, because it fails to focus squarely on the mechanics of our current mutations. They therefore need something to keep them together until they attain interdependence and, at the same time, direct them toward the psychosocial, sensitive consequences of these mutations. And the only thing that can fulfill this role is a uniquely third-world, sociological perspective. This solution is by no means a new one. It is in the air we breathe, and artists everywhere are practicing it: they begin with sociological material, and the aesthetic result is a by-product. Art is a social product after all, and if the reverse was true in the past, it was due to the social and cultural calm of the times.

Once we add a sociological angle to our artistic problem, we will have to position our aesthetic expressions within the framework of the heterogeneous societies that are subject to constant, radical change at the mental and sensorial levels due to the effects of the technological revolution. The ecological changes triggered by mass media and objects—the handling of which is influenced by the cultural imperialism imposed on us by developed countries—have increased the diversity of our social, cultural, and artistic situations, which range from the feudal to the industrial, from illiteracy to mass culture.

In a situation such as this one, which is so turbulent and transitory with regard to our sensorial activities and our minds, we can no longer entertain the idea of a single, fixed, artistic solution—or continue to hierarchically divide the various expressions of our sensorium. The best solution would therefore be to promote aesthetic pluralism, which simply means to bestow a “legal” personality upon the myriad expressions that are a de facto part of any community, so that they can be mixed without predefined hierarchical criteria.

The problems will increase and change as different artistic endeavors become part of the free dynamics of supply and demand—of the poorly understood mechanisms of production and consumption, flow and intermediaries—that the artistic phenomenon has in each sector of the community. We will have to face the problem of the need for high art, the importance of which depends on the influence of minorities within a community, in particular the cultural minority, which is the only sector that can prevent art from losing its subversive value, from becoming a weapon of repression and obedient to foreign and developmentalist dictates. The cultural minority is the only user of high art, because the majority, by its nature, can only benefit through that use. We will also have to face the problem of the shortcomings of high art and its attempts to be a form of expression that is equal to that of the mass media in terms of scope of action and artistic potential. Because only thus will high art be able to counteract the effects of the mass media on our senses and our minds—which would mean it would cease to be “high.”

There will be other problems just as worthy of solving, such as that of approaching our sensorial activities, an aspect of which includes our habitual likes and dislikes, which are the products of our education and ecology as well as of the mass media. The solution to this problem will resemble the “pedagogy of the oppressed” that Paulo Freire proposed. The new artistic problematic will thus be characterized by its sociological range.

The post Juan Acha: Por una nueva problemática artística en Latinoamérica / Toward a New Artistic Problematic in Latin America appeared first on post.