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Latin American Art Dimensions of the Americas: Art and Social Change in Latin America and the United States by Shifra M. Goldman Review by: John Pitman Weber Art Journal, Vol. 54, No. 3, Rethinking the Introductory Art History Survey (Autumn, 1995), pp. 111-112 Published by: College Art Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/777613 . Accessed: 15/06/2014 09:27 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. . College Art Association is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Art Journal. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 185.2.32.36 on Sun, 15 Jun 2014 09:27:03 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

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Latin American ArtDimensions of the Americas: Art and Social Change in Latin America and the United States byShifra M. GoldmanReview by: John Pitman WeberArt Journal, Vol. 54, No. 3, Rethinking the Introductory Art History Survey (Autumn,1995), pp. 111-112Published by: College Art AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/777613 .

Accessed: 15/06/2014 09:27

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

College Art Association is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Art Journal.

http://www.jstor.org

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Page 2: Rethinking the Introductory Art History Survey || Latin American Art

Latin American Art JOHN PITMAN WEBER

Shifra M. Goldman. Dimensions of the Americas: Art and Social Change in Latin America and the United States. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994. 520 pp.; 97 b/w ills. $60.00; $23.95 paper

" T ntil a coherent, detailed, and socially framed history of modern Latin Ameri-

can, Brazilian and Caribbean art be- comes available in English," Shifra Goldman

states, "the very comprehension of a modern Latin American art history, except in fragments, was (and is) difficult" (pp. xxi, xv). Dimensions of the Americas is not, as the author takes pains to

underline, that missing comprehensive history; rather, it is an excellent "introduction to the prob- lems" (p. xvi). This wide-ranging collection of

writings is an important contribution to that nec-

essary construction of our still fragmentary pic- ture of Latin American and Latino art history. As

such, it stands alongside such catalogues as that

produced for the Bronx Museum's important 1989 exhibition The Latin American Spirit: Art and Artists in the United States 1920-1970 as a valuable addition to this slowly growing literature.

Dimensions of the Americas would be in-

dispensable for its extended introduction alone, worth reading more than once. The introduction is at once a sketch for a periodization of twentieth-

century Latin American art; a major essay on the intellectual history of social art history, both in the United States and in Latin America; and a fascinat-

ing intellectual autobiography. It provides a valu- able introduction to the writings of a dozen major Latin American social art historians and cul- ture theorists, some of them unavailable in

English, some only beginning to be published in translation.

Goldman writes "socially framed" art his-

tory, which she defines in her introduction:

If the social history of art has a specific field of

study it is to discover what concrete transactions

are hidden behind the mechanical image of "re-

flection," to know how "background" becomes

"foreground"; to discover the network of real,

complex relations between form and content rather than making vague analogies (p. 20).

In practice this means that Goldman provides con- textual information usually omitted by formal

analysis, and that her readings of specific works and specific artists emphasize "how background becomes foreground." Her catalogue essay on Juan Sanchez, "Living on the Fifth Floor of the Four-Floor Country" (1989), included here in the

final section on "Nationalism and Ethnic Identity," is a good example. It also means that Goldman has devoted major effort over the years to "mapping" and "naming" (p. 23), to providing a great deal of information necessary to form an overview, as for

instance, in her essay "Mujeres de California: Latin American Women Artists," one of five essays on "Women Speaking." The establishment of a

periodization is another recurring concern. Gold- man is hardly ever reductionist and never subordi- nates individuals to ideology. She does, however, link style and medium to historic conditions,

usefully I think. She not only rejects a mechanistic

reflexivity, she respects the (contingent) margin of

autonomy of both the artist and the specific con- ditions of art production and patronage. Her writ-

ing is informed by nuanced judgment and a wealth of concrete observation.

The main body of the book is a collection of thirty-three essays, selected from the many Goldman wrote between 1974 and 1992. The bulk of those selected for publication in this vol- ume were written during the late 1980s. They range from extended historical research pieces, to

catalogue essays and exhibition reviews, to theo- retical pieces. Two of them appear in print for the first time. Most of the pieces were written in re-

sponse to specific occasions, and they bear the marks of their origins. Since Goldman has chosen to leave the previously published work in its origi- nal form, one can see how her ideas have

changed, along with changing realities: "cultural

imperialism" being abandoned for a more com-

plex reading of domination by transnational capi- tal. Most of the essays have held up remarkably well, although their theses may have lost some of their original bite, as they have gained currency in

general discourse. The distribution of subjects reflects Gold-

man's early focus on Chicano and Mexican art and artists. Her two previous books were devoted re-

spectively to Mexican and Chicano art move- ments. Approximately one third of the book is devoted to each of these areas. Cuban and Puerto Rican art and artists get some thirty pages each, with as much again devoted to Latin Americans,

primarily Chileans and Central Americans. This

somewhat lopsided distribution in part reflects

Goldman's being based in Los Angeles, despite her years of travel to New York (a major center for artists from South America), to the Caribbean, and to South America. These travels as well as broad reading in Latin American sources have in- formed her viewpoint. Nonetheless, California appears in clearer and deeper focus than New York, with its complex dynamics of Latin American

refugees and expatriates, Cuban exiles, and

Nuyorican artists. Having said that, it is also evi- dent that Goldman is incomparably versatile, her breadth of information enormous and impressive.

If Dimensions of the Americas is neces-

sarily incomplete, unbalanced, and idiosyncratic, it is informed by a vision of hemispheric scope, by knowledge encyclopedic in ambition. The author reminds us of the incompletion of that knowledge even while revealing new perspectives. In reading these pieces we are constantly made aware of a

larger world of Latin American art, even in brief

catalogue essays. The twenty-four pages of bibli-

ography provide useful starting points for further

reading, in both Spanish and English (a great many of the sources are in Spanish). Goldman identifies herself as an "advocate critic," quoting Lucy Lippard's definition. She adds that

advocacy criticism should suggest broad endorse- ment and support . . without relinquishing the

right and responsibility to be critical, within that

advocacy, of individual works of art as well as of

ideological formulations. ... Our role is to assert and to reassert that the art of women and of

peoples of the Third World (women and men) are crucial elements in the construction of the history of art (p. 197).

Goldman has shown a sure instinct for identifying and addressing controversial questions facing both the artists and the writers of her field. Some of the problems addressed include the essential differentiation of Latino populations in the United States, in opposition to government category and institutional attempts at homogenizing Hispanic art (the topic of the book's closing essay). She examines the experiential differences and tensions between Latin American exiles or expatriates and United States-born "minorities"; the ambiguities and limits of "multiculturalism"; and the merits of mainstream versus alternative institutions, both in terms of access and possible co-optation. One of the consequences of Goldman's commitments, which I especially welcome, is the presence of artists' voices. There are two extended "conversa- tion" pieces: one with the Cuban poster makers Raul Martinez and Alfredo Rostgaard, and the

other "Portraying Ourselves: Contemporary Chi- cana Artists," featuring "testimonies" from eigh- teen artists. Beyond these two pieces, however, one finds direct quotes wherever work by living artists is discussed.

Four articles are devoted to the impact of

foreign policy contingencies, both military and economic, on exhibition policy. These articles focus on the sequence of major exhibitions of

ART JOURNAL

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Mexican art beginning in 1978 and culminating in the 1990 Mexico: Splendors of Thirty Centuries. Goldman was one of the first English-language writers to link these exhibitions to the politics of oil (and later to NAFTA). She was possibly the first to

identify the role of the Monterrey Group, which, typical of "postmodern" transnational capital, in- cludes dominant holdings in communications in- dustries. Typical of Goldman's large view, she pro- vides a history of the fluctuations of interest in Mexican art starting in 1930. These essays have been important to the developing discussion of the changing role of art in international financial, diplomatic, and ideological transactions. In the

early 1990s a number of Native American artists

expressed doubt that attention from media and institutions would extend past the quincentennial. Goldman asks the same question about the con- tinuation of institutional interest in Latin American and Mexican art not only after the quincentennial, but after the coinciding immediate policy inter-

ests, NAFTA and oil. The question remains open. Two of the essays have played a certain

historic role. "Siqueiros and Three Early Murals in Los Angeles" (Art Journal, Summer 1974) played a role in the campaign to restore the 1932 Olvera Street mural Tropical America. The campaign was

ultimately unsuccessful, but it contributed to the

rediscovery of Siqueiros by Chicano muralists. The

second, "Response: Another Opinion on the State of Chicano Art" (Metamorfosis: Northwest Chi- cano Magazine of Literature Art and Culture, 1980-81), directly entered the debate among Chi- cano cultural activists on the problem of co-

optation and assimilation of oppositional art and artists functioning within the larger (capitalist) so-

ciety and on the possibility or desirability of "sep- aratism." This essay, written as a reply to "A Criti- cal Perspective on the State of Chicano Art" by Malaquias Montoya and Lezlie Salkowitz-

Montoya, stands as one of the most lucid, concise, and reasonable discussions of these problems, which are still actively debated by "minority" eth- nic and oppositional groups of all kinds. It would be a service to reprint the Montoya and Goldman

essays together.

I want to comment on a few more essays, four that I especially enjoyed, and one that I found

disappointing. Two deal with the origins and de-

velopment of major poster movements. The first, "A Public Voice: Fifteen Years of Chicano Posters"

(Art Journal, Spring 1984), is simply the best and most thorough treatment I have read. The second, "Under the Sign of the Pava: Puerto Rican Art and

Populism in International Context" (Plastica, 1988), traces the origins of the nationalist print- making tradition, which flowered in the 1950s and continues today, to populist government pro- grams of the 1940s. This essay provides a highly convincing argument as to how and why Puerto Rican artists of the 1940s and 1950s adopted so- cial realism "at a time when this mode was almost defunct in the modern world" (p. 430).

Two essays advance examples of the use of various modes of Pop and Conceptual art as vehicles for social and political statements in situa- tions that foreclosed other options. "Elite Artists and Popular Audiences: The Mexican Front of Cultural Workers" (Studies in Latin American

Popular Culture, 1985) deals with the emergence of politicized installation and performance art in the late 1970s. Goldman points out that several of the Front's theoreticians linked this shift away from muralism to modes we would retrospectively call "postmodernist" to the situation following the defeat of the student movement of 1968. They recognized that "the battleground had shifted" when "culture on a mass scale has become a

commodity in its own right" and when the "con- sciousness industry" has become central to the maintenance of a national and transnational structure of domination (p. 136). "Dissidence and Resistance: Art in Chile under the Dictatorship" (previously unpublished, based on a 1983 paper) develops a similar thesis in relation to Chile. Gold- man describes the development of politicized in-

stallation, performance, Conceptual, and mail art under conditions that restricted access to a broader audience. In the Chilean case, those re- strictions involved overt censorship and exile. Goldman discusses the development of a genera- tion gap between practicing artists who went into

exile early (Guillermo NuNez, Jose Balmes, Gracia Barrios) and those who developed their visual lan-

guage under the dictatorship (Catalina Parra, Al- fredo Jaar).

The final essay in the book, "The Mani- fested Destinies of Chicano, Puerto Rican and Cuban Artists in the United States," disappoin- tingly obscures the emergence of influential Con-

ceptual, installation, and performance art in all three groups (but not synchronously with each

other)--developments that are discussed and

championed elsewhere by Goldman. It is perhaps inevitable that any attempt to describe the art of these three major groups in relation to their struc- tural place in United States society would fall into excessive schematicism. The very attempt leads the writer into contrasts and parallels that blur the real complexity of the situation. It is possible to discuss the characteristics of Chicano art as a

movement, 1968-75, but it is not so clear that the art activity of New York-based Puerto Ricans dur-

ing the same years can best be described in paral- lel terms (despite the creation of Puerto Rican arts institutions and the participation of Puerto Rican artists in mural making).

For serious students of Latino and Latin American art who will already be familiar with

Goldman's writings, this collection makes avail- able many essays originally published in small,

specialized, or foreign journals that are unlikely to be found in most libraries. For other readers, this

collection, providing a broad and varied sampling of twenty years of socially engaged Latino and Latin American art, is a good place to begin an

exploration. Goldman's is a distinctive voice, sol-

idly grounded in research and alert to significant cultural shifts. Her book is full of information and

ideas.

JOH N PITMAN WE B E R teaches at Elmhurst College. A founding member of the Chicago Public Art Group, he

co-authored Toward a People's Art, to be reissued next year

by University of New Mexico Press.

FALL 1995

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