Vernacular readings of South American abstraction from the 50s

MARÍA AMALIA GARCÍA

New Yourk

Conferencia; Sur moderno: New Perspectives on South American Abstraction and Its Legacies; 2020

The Museum of Modern Art MoMA

This presentation offers a preliminary approach to something that, at first glance, may appear contradictory: the combination of high modernism, represented by abstract art, and vernacular South American culture. I am particularly interested in mapping out the ties between autonomous visualities and images deeply rooted in a local culture. Although this issue merits a more extensive approach, in the first instance I will take a cursory look at the magazines Habitat from Sao Paulo (edited by Lina Bo Bardi) and A. Hombre y expresión from Caracas (run by Carlos Raúl Villanueva) in order to identify the coexistence of modern art and local culture. Secondly, I will address Buenos Aires-based magazines Nueva Visión (edited by Tomás Maldonado) and Conjugación de Buenos Aires (run by Edgar Bayley and Juan Carlos La Madrid) in order to challenge established views of Argentine concrete art. My hypothesis is that these magazines read the aesthetic-constructive aspects of the vernacular from a modernist perspective focusing on procedures such as synthesis, formal values and material honesty. In the Argentine case, I argue that art history?s reading of concrete art from Buenos Aires and of Tomás Maldonado specifically has privileged the internationalist streak over vernacular concerns.