Gina McDaniel Tarver

During the 1960s and early 1970s, a handful of Young Colombian artists, including Feliza Bursztyn, Beatriz González, Bernardo Salcedo, Álvaro Barrios, and Antonio Caro, boldly transgressed artistic conventions to create art that critics labeled New Realism, Pop, Environments, and Conceptual Art. They achieved success with the crucial support of national and local art institutions. While critics and curators promoted this striking new work as international, it was firmly rooted in national artistic, social, and political reality. The New Iconoclasts: From Art of a New Reality to Conceptual Art in Colombia, 1961–1975 is a nuanced examination of this transgressive art with regard to its relationship with institutional goals and structures. Relying on extensive archival research and interviews with artists, autor Gina McDaniel Tarver reveals at the root of contemporary Colombian art an ambivalent, often contradictory, and highly productive relationship between artists and institutions and between local and international aesthetics and social concerns. [The attached file contains an image of the cover and the table of contents. The complete book is for sale via the publisher's website. See link below.]

Published on occasion of the exhibition "En Medellín todo está muy Caro," a retrospective of the Colombian conceptual artist Antonio Caro at the Museo de Arte Moderno de Medellín, December 2, 2015–March 28, 2016. The attached file does not include the entire book, only the portion I authored.

Catalog of the exhibition "The New York Graphic Workshop, 1964–1970," September 28, 2008–January 18, 2009. The New York Graphic Workshop was an innovative and experimental group of artists from Latin America working in New York to push the boundaries of printmaking. Its primary members were Luis Camnitzer (Uruguayan), José Guillermo Castillo (Venezuelan), and Liliana Porter (Argentine). This exhibition catalog provides the first in-depth look at the production of the workshop from its foundation in 1964 to its ending in 1970. The catalog details the history of the workshop, revealing it as a fascinating episode in printmaking and Conceptual art in both the United States and Latin America. [The attached file contains the catalog's table of contents, the catalog essay I wrote, and the chronology, which I co-authored. The entire book can be purchased through Amazon.com.]

In February 1968 at the Museum of Modern Art in Bogotá (MAMBo), Feliza Bursztyn became the first artist in Colombia to create an immersive environment as an art exhibition. It consisted darkened, black rooms with intermittent spotlights that led the viewer in and fell upon shiny kinetic sculptures. The sculptures, made of flexible metal strips attached to motors, wildly shook and loudly clattered, disturbing many visitors. She called the exhibition Las histéricas (The hysterics). Sixteen months later, in March 1969 and also at MAMBo, electronic musician Jacqueline Nova and visual artist Julia Acuña presented Luz, sonido, movimiento (Light, sound, movement), an even more elaborate series of immersive and multi-sensorial environments. It incorporated all manner of manual, electronic, light, and sound controls, gadgets, and moveable configurations for viewers to experience and manipulate, including objects evocative of aggression, such as a large metal cage and a knife grinder. Like Bursztyn, Nova and Acuña had made an environment that was cacophonous, disorienting, abrasive.

These female pioneers of spatial environments in Colombia are acknowledged as notable members of an avant-garde, their work celebrated for its formal radicalness: its incorporation of technology, movement, and sound. The socio-political implications of its expansion into space, however, have not yet been assessed, nor have the spatial experiences they created been considered as relating to gender and sexuality. Colombia is a country where women did not participate in a plebiscite until 1957. As elsewhere, the population experienced a sexual revolution in the 1960s that resulted in less constraint about bodies and sex, and at the same time women agitated for greater equality and opportunity. However, Colombia was extremely insulated and conservative, and women only slowly gained rights, the Catholic Church was still powerful, and the world of machines to which these artists allude was overwhelmingly dominated by men. In their personal lives as in their art, Bursztyn, Nova, and Acuña embodied radial changes in sexuality and in women’s public roles. Their spatial environments may be seen as recreating tensions generated and experienced as women moved into new social positions. The discomfort their spatial works generated raised questions about the place of the viewer’s body within social space as it was being remade.

Their environments may further be productively interpreted as abstracted, metaphorical materializations of the femme fatal. In each case the spatial environment simultaneously attracted and repelled visitors, luring them, through the manipulative presentation of expected difference, into perceptually threatening situations that challenged ideals of subjective control and ultimately wrenched conceptions of acceptable femininity while bringing repressed sexual tensions into the open. These environments fit somewhat into what Luis Pérez-Oramas has identified as “existential” spatial articulation that women artists were exploring in the 1960s, wherein “…the body, using its experience as the tactile receptor of its own physical reality and limitations, identifies the work as a habitable, penetrable … space,” except that the space, though penetrable, is inhospitable, antagonistic, like a vagina dentata. These artists can be seen as covertly harnessing conventionally male motifs, expressing fear of female power, to explore shifting spatial politics.

Aunque arte conceptual colombiano entre 1970 y 1975 depende de palabras—con la mayoría de los ejemplos del mismo basado en texto—surgió como un arte sin teoría. Dada el alto perfil hoy en día del arte conceptual de los años 70, inventar teorías sobre arte conceptual colombiano ahora es una necesidad apremiante. Enfoques teóricos existentes al conceptualismo en América Latina, especialmente aquellas desarrolladas por Luis Camnitzer y Mari Carmen Ramírez, pueden actuar como punto de partida para examinar las obras basadas en texto producidas en Colombia entre 1970 y 1975 con el objetivo de revelar cómo estas obras están vinculadas a un contexto específicamente colombiano y por qué texto surgió cuando lo hizo como un elemento significativo en el arte colombiano. Artistas conceptuales uso de texto revela la instrumentalidad del lenguaje y puede ser vistos como parte de un período esperanzador de activismo que incluía un fuerte componente intelectual.

Gina McDaniel Tarver and Erina Duganne conducted this interview with Juan David Laserna Montoya via Skype on 13 March 2017. It focuses on Extracción publicitaria (Advertisement Extraction), an ongoing series, currently comprising about 130 “extracted” magazine pages, that Laserna began in 2012. The artist alters the pages through a meticulous process of erasure, using sandpaper. The resulting artifacts are fragile, and the delicacy of the leaves contrasts with the boldness of their isolated images. Images of protest, political power, and the economy float free of their specific contexts, generating ambiguity and even mystery. The artist encourages viewers to engage with the pages as cultural objects, and to think about their force as symbols of our consumerism.

The hero’s house type of history museum faces the challenge of preserving architecture and artifacts related to a revered, often quasi-sacred cultural figure while proving relevance to a changing and diverse public. Temporary interventions into the space of the museum, for example in the form of contemporary art installations, can serve to expand what and who is represented in history, creating an atmosphere of openness that encourages visitors to see themselves as active agents in the creation of cultural heritage. Recent new museum practices at the Casa Museo Quinta de Bolívar, a former home of the South American independence leader Simón Bolívar in Bogotá, Colombia, illustrate the potential of creative intervention to open and reconstruct national history. Museum director Daniel Castro has collaborated with a wide range of civic institutions, schools, and universities to create programs allowing artists and others to re-vision the history of Colombian independence and the relationship of Bolívar to the present. This case study can help others both to evaluate the benefits and pitfalls of creative intervention as a practice and to think critically about ways to make history museums, in general, more inclusive.

This article analyzes the sculpture of Colombian artist Feliza Bursztyn (1933–1982) through the lens of decolonial theory. Bursztyn has entered the canon of Colombian art history as a key modern artist, but to place emphasis primarily on her formal innovations as they contributed to the development of modern, autonomous art in Colombia is to risk minimizing the ways in which her work challenged cultural hegemony and European-American discourses of modernity. Her art can be interpreted as problematizing the assumption that “development” is the answer to “underdevelopment,” that modernity can be universally beneficial. In their confrontations with dominant power structures in Colombia that sought to control class and gender relations and morality, Bursztyn’s work exposed modernity’s dark side, coloniality.

Colombian conceptual art of the early 1970s emerged at a time that, internationally, conceptual art seemed to be the new avant-garde, and it was considered within Colombia as forming part of that new avant-garde. Examining the ways in which Colombian conceptual artists created their work in critical dialogue with international conceptualism will complement recent studies that explain Latin American conceptualism as distinct from European and United States conceptual art due to its definitively political profile. Yet this art cannot be explained solely vis-à-vis international conceptualism. To understand why it emerged and how it differs from conceptualism elsewhere, it must be seen within political context of Colombia, which was an environment marked by the growth of left-wing guerrilla groups and social protest wherein intellectuals, especially within Colombia’s National University, were questioning their role in fostering political revolution.

Paper presented at the conference Penetrable / Traversable/ Habitable: Exploring spatial environments by women artists in the 1960s and 1970s. Held in Lisbon, Portugal, this conference was organized by AWARE (Archives of Women Artists, Researchers, and Exhibitions) and the Instituto de História da Arte, FCSH Universidade NOVA. Feliza Bursztyn, Jacqueline Nova, and Julia Acuña pioneered kinetic spatial environments in Colombia. Their work was celebrated for its formal radicalness: its incorporation of technology, movement, and sound. The socio-political implications of its expansion into space, however, have not yet been assessed, nor have the spatial experiences they created been considered as relating to gender and sexuality. In their personal lives as in their art, Bursztyn, Nova, and Acuña embodied radial changes in sexuality and in women’s public roles. Their spatial environments may be seen as recreating tensions generated and experienced as women moved into new social positions. The discomfort their spatial works generated raised questions about the place of the viewer’s body within social space as it was being remade.

In 1969, artist Bernardo Salcedo produced three numbers of a newspaper, a “poster to read,” that he called Art-pia.  My paper will examine Art-pia as a site where one artist (in conjunction with a small team) gave visible form to a transnational flow of words and images as he experienced it from a particular place (Bogotá) and time. In Art-pia, one sees the flow of culture between different places not as a network but as a dynamic process that is chaotic and often clashing. Ideas converge like flotsam and jetsam swept up in a powerful flood, temporarily caught in a whirlpool and deposited in one place, in this case on a printed page. This visualization of the relationship between various cultural products of different places—and their impact on or disjunction between one another—is most strikingly achieved through the innovative layout of the paper in a spiral, with some of the text and pictures set upside down or sideways. The flow is literally difficult to follow, disrupted and irregular. Reading the paper requires turning it, which is awkward due to the size (75 x 56 cm). Furthermore, one function of Art-pia (to be read as a paper) contradicts another, since on the opposite side of the text is an art poster, destined to be pinned on a wall. Art-pia presents a fleeting approach to the concretization of transnational ideas that offers, I argue, a fresh and compelling model for thinking about the way in which culture forms and changes under late capitalism with its push for globalization.

The hero’s house type of history museum faces the challenge of preserving architecture and artifacts related to a revered, often quasi-sacred cultural figure while proving relevance to a changing and diverse public. Temporary interventions into the space of the museum, for example in the form of contemporary art installations, can serve to expand what and who is represented in history, creating an atmosphere of openness that encourages visitors to see themselves as active agents in the creation of cultural heritage. Recent new museum practices at the Casa Museo Quinta de Bolívar, a former home of the South American independence leader Simón Bolívar in Bogotá, Colombia, illustrate the potential of creative intervention to open and reconstruct national history. Inspired by the artist Fred Wilson (Mining the Museum, Maryland Historical Society, 1992), curator Daniel Castro has collaborated with a wide range of civic institutions, schools, and universities to create programs allowing artists and others to re-vision the history of Colombian independence and the relationship of Bolívar to the present. This case study can help others both to evaluate the benefits and pitfalls of creative intervention as a practice and to think critically about ways to make history museums, in general, more inclusive.

On December 10, 1968, the Museo de Arte Moderno de Bogotá debuted a group show called Espacios ambientales, an exhibition of four large-scale works of art through which viewers could move, created by the young artists Santiago Cárdenas, Feliza Bursztyn, Ana Mercedes Hoyos, and Álvaro Barrios. Often cited as one of the most important events in the emergence of contemporary art in Colombia, Espacios ambientales was inspired by a European exhibition. The artist Álvaro Barrios proposed the concept of “environments” to the museum’s director, Marta Traba, after traveling to Italy the previous year, where he saw Lo spazio dell’immagine in Foligno. Traba’s enthusiastic embrace and quick realization of Barrios’s idea shows how keenly she wished to introduce the most contemporary, internationally recognized forms of art to the country, how strong the desire was to bring Colombian artistic production in line with that of Europe and the United States. At the same time, Traba and the participating artists believed increasing art’s accessibility to the public, and this exhibition represents an attempt to make art that was both relevant to contemporary society and more democratic. It set up a new relationship with the audience, one that was participatory or interactive in new ways. It is exemplary of how artists and curators in the “long sixties” in Colombia negotiated internationalism as well as the pressures of local social issues. It illustrates the role art institutions played in promoting a politically sensitive neo-avant-garde and the difficulties and contradictions their programs faced.

When practices that have been understood as neo-avantgarde began to emerge in Colombia in the mid-1960s, in the form of re-contextualization (particularly through assemblage), incorporation of elements of popular culture, and conceptualisms, national art critics consistently sought to explain the resulting artworks in terms of current “international” avant-gardes that originated and were flourishing in Europe and the United States. Therefore, these Colombian practices were quickly labeled and promoted as “art of the new reality” (after French Nouvelle Realisme) and “Pop,” “Earthworks,” and “Conceptual Art” (after U.S. movements), with emphasis consistently placed on formal similarity and little attention paid to contextual specificity. This paper seeks to interrogate the relationship between Colombian practices of the 1960s, local art institutions, and the international art scene through one close case study. I will examine Bernardo Salcedo’s Cajas elementales (1969–1973), a series of white, windowed boxes containing such elemental materials as soil, rocks, and hay, which critic Eduardo Serrano explained as an example of Earthworks. The comparison of Salcedo’s Cajas elementales to Earthworks relied on a comparative formalist approach to the work that occluded its relationship to the Colombian context. I will analyze Salcedo’s boxes in the context of Colombian art and society and juxtapose them with the work of Robert Smithson. Smithson’s constructions containing gravel, stones, and other natural material appeared in widely circulating international art journals and may be taken as one key model of Earthworks. My comparison reveals that the similarity between Salcedo’s and Smithson’s works—or other Earthworks from the U.S.— was only apparent, not going beyond the surface. I argue that, while artists like Salcedo were aware of international currents and took advantage of art institutions’ desire to promote internationalism, playing off this desire as a strategy for exposure, their artwork diverged in significant ways from the European and U.S. examples that were used as points of comparison. There was a marked disjunction between the generalized institutional presentation of the work and the works’ highly particular and potentially critical content. This disjunction arose from the essentially different aims of artists and art institutions at the time. While many of these artists, such as Salcedo, sought to address distinctly localized issues for a national or occasionally regional audience, the institutions that supported them were focused on internationalization as a developmentalist strategy. I further question whether the concept of “neo-avantgarde” is itself applicable to Colombian art of the 1960s, in which the historical avant-garde was not a strong point of reference, or whether it is another label emerging from a dominant discourse that, like earlier imposed terms, obscures more than clarifies significant historical differences.

Colombian people have suffered decades of extreme levels of violence stoked by the drug trade and guerrilla warfare. Contemporary Colombian art, exemplified by the production of such artists as Doris Salcedo and Miguel Angel Rojas, has been stereotyped as an art of social trauma. There emerges, however, a young generation of artists who rebel against such a limiting formula. That is not to say that they ignore social problems. In fact, their art explores ways of engaging the public in artistic practice as a means of re-imagining the possibilities of communal existence beyond stagnating brutality. Two artists who exemplify the trend are Mateo López (b. 1978) and Nicolas Paris (b. 1977). Drawing to them is more than an artistic technique, it’s a basic communication tool. In 2007 López embarked upon the project Diario de Motocicleta, riding his Vespa across Colombia. En route, he sketched in public, spontaneously meeting people, enchanting them with his three-dimensional paper copies of everyday objects, using drawing to spark conversation and conversation as stimulation for further work. Diario embraced the freedom to journey and accept hospitality in a country where that has been restricted by violence and suspicion. Paris, trained as an architect and elementary school teacher, creates elegant “dialog environments” using simple elements like stools, clipboards, and paper. In these environments he stages open-ended, organically developing workshops in which participants talk, draw, and rehearse small solutions to small problems. Going back to the drawing board, these artists build creative collaborative paths to new possibilities.

Propelled by the theory of desarrollismo, Colombia undertook a period of rapid modernization in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Architecture played a crucial symbolic role in development, serving as a visible promise of the nation’s progress toward a more complete and equitable modernity. There emerged a nationally rooted form of modern architecture whose foremost representative was Rogelio Salmona. Salmona’s use of the modest red brick to create clean-lined, unified buildings based upon natural shapes became synonymous with Colombian modernism. Several contemporary Colombian artists have focused on the ubiquitous brick, so closely associated with Salmona, to counter the ideas of permanence, strength, solidity, stability, and naturalness embedded in Colombian modern architecture. Alluding instead to ephemerality, fragility, hollowness, and constructedness, artists such as Efraín Arreita, Jaime Ávila, and Felipe Arturo reference brick architecture in artworks employing a diverse range of materials in order to question and counter easy notions of progress.

In 1972, Colombian artist Antonio Caro exhibited an artwork titled Manuel Quintín Lame información y variación visual. As its title suggests, it featured information about Quintín Lame (1883–1967), a self-taught indigenous lawyer who fought for the rights of Colombia’s native population in the early twentieth century. Quintín Lame was not well known in 1972, although just the previous year a group of scholars called La Rosca had published the deceased lawyer’s memoirs. This publication was part of La Rosca’s program of estudio–acción, an approach to research advocated by the Universidad Nacional de Colombia’s young sociology department under the direction of Orlando Fals-Borda (a member of La Rosca). Estudio–acción included among its techniques “critical recuperation,” by which political consciousness and effectiveness of the working class base is built up through the awareness of the exploited classes’ successful past efforts in their struggle against the oligarchy. I argue that Caro was harnessing art as a tool for critical recuperation, a new way of confronting, with a counter-narrative, official versions of Colombian history, which had drawn the veil of amnesia over the corpse of Quintín Lame. The links between estudio–acción and Caro’s work are invisible within art history, as the tendency to view art in terms of artistic movements such as conceptualism has led to an overshadowing emphasis on Caro’s artwork’s experimental formal qualities. My paper seeks to recuperate the intellectual context of the work, and in doing so to insert a counter-narrative into Colombian art history.

Aunque arte conceptual colombiano entre 1970 y 1975 depende de palabras—con la mayoría de los ejemplos del mismo basado en texto—surgió como un arte sin teoría. Dada el alto perfil hoy en día del arte conceptual de los años 70, inventar teorías sobre arte conceptual colombiano ahora es una necesidad apremiante. Enfoques teóricos existentes al conceptualismo en América Latina, especialmente aquellas desarrolladas por Luis Camnitzer y Mari Carmen Ramírez, pueden actuar como punto de partida para examinar las obras basadas en texto producidas en Colombia entre 1970 y 1975 con el objetivo de revelar cómo estas obras están vinculadas a un contexto específicamente colombiano y por qué texto surgió cuando lo hizo como un elemento significativo en el arte colombiano. Artistas conceptuales uso de texto revela la instrumentalidad del lenguaje y puede ser vistos como parte de un período esperanzador de activismo que incluía un fuerte componente intelectual.

This paper will examine Salcedo’s relationship to internationalism, especially as supported in Colombia by institutions such as the Museo de Arte Moderno de Bogotá and the Bienal de Arte Coltejer in Medellín. I argue that, particularly in cases of artists such as Salcedo, who so adroitly mined international artistic languages, it is impossible to approach Latin American art and its history without careful consideration of external points of contact. For many artists, the international art circuit—as established through museum and biennial exhibitions and specialized journals that were vehicles of art criticism—was an unavoidable frame of reference and a potentially powerful tool. Salcedo, among other artists, took advantage of the circuit whenever possible, presenting a kind of coded double-speak with works that flouted their international look while addressing specifically local concerns. Because local concerns are central to these works, however, approaching them through the lens of internationalism can only be a beginning; international terms, and especially international reception, can never sufficiently explain their potential meaning.

In 1964 the printmakers Luis Camnitzer, José Guillermo Castillo, and Liliana Porter—Latin Americans residing in New York—established the New York Graphic Workshop (NYGW). Under this name, from 1964–1970, the three worked in close collaboration and promoted their art through exhibitions and manifestos. One of their primary goals was to redefine printmaking as it was understood in the 1960s. In their manifesto of 1964, they asserted that the importance of printmaking has nothing to do with materials and techniques and everything to do with the repetitive act that produces multiples. By shifting their focus away from established techniques to the creation of serial objects, they freed printmaking from its traditional boundaries in terms of both skills and materials. A print could be made on any surface, with anything that leaves a trace, as long as it is reproducible; it could also occupy space in new ways, expanding to become an environment or installation. Taking their ideas to an extreme, they proposed that even casting a shadow on a wall can be considered printmaking. In the 1960s they were, in many ways, outside of the mainstream: peripheral as Latin American artists in New York, as printmakers focusing on concepts, and as artists who developed a form of conceptualism through printmaking. Today, they remain on the margins of U.S. art history, nearly invisible despite the enduring freshness of their proposals. My presentation will explore why the works of the NYGW are unseen in U.S. art history and suggest how their contributions—and those of other “eccentric” artists—might be made visible once again.

In 1970, Bernardo Salcedo, Antonio Caro, Jorge Posada, and a scant handful of other iconoclasts introduced a new kind of anti-aesthetic, text-based work in Colombia. Critics quickly hailed their art as conceptual and explained it as belonging to the latest international avant-garde. For the most part, the young iconoclasts accepted and even embraced the label “conceptual,” yet their work is against internationalism, and they rarely framed their art in terms of the avant-garde. In fact, I argue that they rejected the avant-garde as a model for artistic production as being too elitist. This paper examines that rejection and explains their art as the product of an un-vanguard conception. In envisioning of a new type of art, they were influenced by the revolutionary culture of the day in Colombia. Their intellectual formation was marked by such revolutionary ideas as those expressed by the Catholic priest turned Marxist guerrilla, Camilo Torres, an important forerunner of liberation theology. These artists sought to revise art from the roots up, aiming at enhancing communication regarding the social and economic problems of the popular classes. Toward this end, they created text-based works, such as Caro’s AQUINOCABEELARTE, that have an immediate and intense visual impact despite being made up primarily of words. Caro, in particular, drew heavily from the aesthetics of popular protest, that is, from the look of the inexpensive posters and banners, often created quickly, that express an urgent need in order to mobilize a public to meet that need. Caro and others proposed art making as a form of activism, as a way to educate, to create a community, and ultimately, to shape society in a manner consistent with grass-roots social movements.