The Austin Symposium: debates on dependency and identity in the mid 1970s

SERVIDDIO, LUISA FABIANA

Austin

Encuentro; First International Research Forum on Transnational Latin American Art; 2010

Center for Latin American Visual Studies (CLAVIS)

1970 marks the beginning of a numerous series of symposiums around the topic of the identity of Latin American art. This paper will explore into the most significant of the decade: the Symposium on Latin American Art and Literature, held at the University of Austin, Texas on October 1975.Three main issues were debated at Austin: a) The possibility for Latin American art to show a distinctive visual configuration; b) The need to abandon traditional methodologies of art analysis, based on the modern canon of the Western world, in order to advance new ones, that could respect the inner historical processes of the Latin American scene; c) the connection between art and context and the extent to which art should/could represent the contemporary social and political turmoil. Artists Rufino Tamayo, José Luis Cuevas, Manuel Félguerez, Fernando de Szyszlo, Alejandro Otero and Leonel Góngora, and art critics Marta Traba, Juan Acha, Damián Bayón, Frederico Morais, Jorge Alberto Manrique, Jacqueline Barnitz, Aracy Amaral and Dore Ashton participated in the meeting as panel presenters.Some journals, like Artes Visuales and Plural, picked up the debates and continued them through the publishing of articles on related subjects.The symposium unfolded all the numerous critical positions on the state of Latin American art, creating a platform of theoretical problems in the USA from which many subsequent publications, exhibitions and meetings that sought to spread Latin American art around the Western world departed.