Conspiracy & Conceptualism in Latin American Art. Imageries of institutional destabilization

ANDREA GIUNTA (AUTOR)

Chicago

Conferencia; Department of Art History, University of Chicago; 2010

Universiad de Chicago

Narratives of the sixties shed light on the moment when a fact that was hardly new, but that had reached such levels of generalization as to became unavoidable finally came into plain sight: art institutions were not only attractive spaces where equally attractive works were displayed, they were the arenas for the administration of values. Faced with the fact, artists neither held still nor held their tongues. A radical awareness of institutions’ power to organize everything expanded creative imaginations in a filigree of different strategies that ranged from playing with the dynamics that ruled the architecture of their power in order to control them, to employing their authority and public prestige as a platform in order to make manifest the state of the world. This does not differ widely from the Latin American register of artistic thought in terms of an exaggerated, even paranoid, consideration of institutional power. It was as though everything could be revealed by way of this logic and then used for a specific aim, contrary to the power administered by these same institutions. The conspiracy methodology, which would even give rise to a theory—it is no coincidence that Ricardo Piglia would write a essay on the topic—is based on the counter-factual hypothesis that things could be different if only their logic could be anticipated. As such, it was connected to maximum creativity, since verifying its effectiveness didn’t matter as much as planning and describing its strategies. With post-Ford work organization edited with post-production logic, artists have divided, expanded and reorganized the scheme of power in every institutional articulation. We do not refer here to the potent conspiracies of the sixties and seventies, but to moderate conspiracies where institutions are not taken by storm, but accede, contributing their resources toward a flexible dialogue in which they willingly accept the test of their authority and modifications to their exhibition standards. This paper builds upon these hypotheses through the presentation of several cases that both challenge and demonstrate.