After-Images of Argentinean Surrealism

ANDREA GIUNTA (AUTOR)

Los Angeles

Simposio; Vivísimo muerto: Debates on Surrealism in Latin America; 2010

The Getty Fundation

In 1992 the dissemination of Surrealism in Latin American circuits provided a platform of images that served to facilitate a different approach, from a perspective that was at odds with traditional colonial models of assimilation. That year the Surrealismo Nuevo Mundo (New World Surrealism) show took place at Argentina’s National Library. The title emulated that of the exhibition organized in the Canary Islands in 1990, which took its title from the book published by Juan Larrea in 1944. Mounted in the context of the conquest’s fifth Centennial, the exhibition recalled that the post-war Surrealist diaspora responded to a movement quite contrary to that which first brought Europeans to America: instead of pillaging and conquest, European Surrealists arrived on the new continent seeking refuge; instead of feeding on the “other” to nourish the canon of their own modernity, they were amazed by finding Surrealist attitudes in a pure state. Aside from the rich chapter that Surrealism and Fantastic Art had written in Mexico, various sub-tropical episodes had been excluded from the geography when the map of Surrealism was being drawn up. In Buenos Aires, in particular, there was a chapter written on the basis of a platform of a group of publications. There was a group established very early on in Buenos Aires that recognized itself as the local headquarters of the Surrealist movement. It wasn’t because they had received the blessing of its alma mater or its European pater familae André Breton, but because early Surrealist texts had motivated publications, launched with the aim of setting up a local headquarters. The history of images for Argentina’s Surrealism was woven based on two simultaneous versions. On the one hand it came from the groups who identified with Surrealism: basically, the Orion group, and later, the Phases movement during the fifties. Along with them, there was the most inclusive constellation, which wove Aldo Pellegrini, fundamentally on account of the exhibition he organized at the ITDT in 1967. The works that predominated in this exhibition were those that represented Surrealism’s visual phraseology, along with all its clichés. It was a series of metaphysical landscapes and imaginary characters that was more focused on a vulgarization of Surrrealist imagery than on the potential of its techniques. When we peruse the body of images found in the catalog, the dominant aesthetic is one that served to identify Latin American art for years: magic realism, fantastic, surreal images that were adequate for the “other” who had come halfway in the process of modernization, still primitive, exotic and irrational. During many years, a folk-surrealist representation of Latin American art prevailed. Against this stereotype, curatorial discourse on Latin American art was developed during the nineties. No more transparencies, tortuous figurative work or magical atmospheres, which were clichés that had been promoted and commercialized to death. No more authentic spirit or models that reduced Latin America’s complexity to a unified, romantic aesthetic canon that erased the commitment to form and experimentation with visual language that had been developed by Latin American artists. The offensive launched against this byproduct that overshadowed other facets of Latin American visual culture made sense, and it was made productive from the standpoint of the curator as broker, as he or she who delineated new territory. Fifteen years later, Geometric Abstraction and Conceptualism have been consolidated as the solid core of a new Academy in universities as well as in the curatorial realm, and the steamroller effect of geometry, minimalism’s reductionism and the conceptualist canon’s ordering of politics begins to be perceived, shutting off any possibility of enunciating thought that hinges on Surrealist parameters of production. It isn’t a question of evocative spaces, transparencies or surreal atmospheres, it is a question of identifying those moments when Surrealism’s devices operated to activate imagery that was, on occasion, non-conformist or irritating. It is also a question of surveying other inflections of abstraction that broke away from hard edge geometry as well as from drip painting’s expressivity. These episodes lay outside the already canonic history organized on the basis of norms that arrange strong nuclei of Latin American visual discourse in order according to political Conceptualism or abstraction.