Entre documento y obra de arte: criterios curatoriales en la selección latinoamericana del MoMA

SERVIDDIO, LUISA FABIANA

San Juan

Congreso; Precariedades, exclusiones, emergencias. XXXIII International Congress of the Latin American Studies Association; 2015

Latin American Studies Association

On the edge of its engagement in World War II, United States? government set out a program of cultural and commercial interchanges with Latin America in order to protect its interests in the hemisphere and to counterattack the influence exerted by the Axis. The agency responsible for this mission was the Office of the Coordinator of Inter American Affairs, leaded by Nelson Rockefeller. To meet this goal, OCIIA engaged, as advisers or members of staff, representative and influential citizens from a variety of spheres, as well as specialized agencies to handle the programs. Art museums and organizations with sufficient expertise in the field of Latin American art responded positively to the patriotic call. A strong Pan-American net expanded towards Latin America and established ties with artists, intellectuals and politicians that shared the same common enemy: Nazism and fascism, their values of ethnic superiority and a political system based on dictatorship. In the visual arts section, OCIIA?s surrogates dedicated mostly to organize and circulate exhibitions in the States and in Latin America. The political mandate to sponsor all kind of Inter American exchanges also prompted new collections of Latin American artworks as part of the curatorial agenda. The Latin American Collection of the Museum of Modern Art, the most significant one dedicated to modern South American art in the hemisphere, was born in this context. The paper will look into the esthetic and ideological criteria put in play by Lincoln Kirstein, one of the designated curators sent on a trip through some Latin American countries by Nelson Rockefeller to purchase the artworks. Argentine new realism and abstraction will be discussed in order to reveal how a Eurocentric perspective still worked underneath the selections. The paper also seeks to explore the cultural criteria that underlied the curatorial scripts, as exhibitions and collections aimed to inspire a sympathetic understanding of Latin America to the locales, but also to create a feeling of continental fraternity based on shared experiences to the Latin Americans. These two-sided objectives were part of the unsolved conflicts between catalogues and assemblies, discourse and visuality, in the latin American collection.