A Questionnaire on Global Methods Coming to terms with global modernisms and global contemporary art calls for an understanding of the different histories, social functions, and aesthetic genealogies that inform art of the 20th and 21st centuries in different localities throughout the world. Is the “comparative” method (foundational in art history, elaborated in comparative literature) adequate anymore to the questions raised by global modernisms and contemporary art? Or are other critical categories or tools such as entanglement, assemblage, or intimacy more appropriate? Western art history’s primary tools—formal analysis, and nation-, community-, or subject-inflected historicization carry inherently imperial hierarchies that tend to inscribe value judgments and artificially consolidate categories like race and nation. To build a genuinely global art history thus requires more than addressing an expanded archive. It also demands new theoretical perspectives founded in diverse “local” values and functions of art as well as attending to the distortions that occur when they encounter one another in global circulation. What models for doing so have you developed in your work? What are their advantages and disadvantages? How can we expand our understanding the global condition by proposing multiple models of modernity and their complex inter-relationships? —George Baker and David Joselit for the Editors OCTOBER 180 Spring 2022, pp. 3–80. © 2022 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. https://doi.org/10.1162/octo_a_00453 A Questionnaire on Global Methods 57 JENNIFER JOSTEN An undergraduate course I offer at the University of Pittsburgh, “Art and Politics in Modern Latin America,” begins by taking note of some local markers of European colonialism and United States imperialism in that region. Just outside Pitt’s Fine Arts Building stands a cast of George Newman’s 1904 sculpture The Hiker, erected in 1925 to commemorate the Spanish-American War of 1898 (as a result of which Spain granted temporary control of Cuba and ceded its ownership of Guam, the Philippines, and Puerto Rico to the United States). A few blocks away sits Frank Vittor’s enormous 1955 monument to Christopher Columbus— which has been wrapped in plastic since October 2020, its fate tied up in court. [fig. 1] We also consider the “Mexican War Streets” neighborhood, several of whose street names celebrate the battles and generals of the US military intervention that resulted in the 1848 annexation of half of Mexico’s territory (home to Indigenous peoples, Spanish and Mexican settlers, their descendants, and others). To recognize that these markers of dominance and occupation remain embedded, and largely unquestioned, within the urban fabric of Pittsburgh and so many other US cities is a step toward recognizing that the United States and Latin America are mutually reinforcing constructs whose relationship reflects a continuing power imbalance. This exercise of reading the US built environment against the grain offers a framework for reading Euro-American histories of modern and contemporary art against the grain—to reveal biases, elisions, and omissions that are fundamentally rooted in, and reinforce, white settler-colonialist ideologies. To the best of my recollection, on entering Yale’s PhD program in the History of Art in 2005, I introduced myself as both a “modernist” and a “Latin Americanist,” framing my commitments in terms of chronology and region and inviting discussions about how the two subfields intersected. While the notion that one could be a “global modernist” was in circulation, it seemed flattening, unwieldy, and contrary to the area-studies model in which I was trained, which is predicated on deep knowledge of one’s research site(s) in terms of language, history, and contemporary context. This model, it should be noted, is rooted in colonial and imperial efforts, and specifically the United States’s rise as a global power in the Cold War era. I recognize now that in deciding to study modern Latin America via its art, I was exercising the white privilege of specializing in any place and time I chose—the basis of Anglo art history’s global claims. I was interested in integrating Latin American topics into conversations among “modernist” faculty and students, in which the twentieth-century European and North American artistic and theoretical perspectives that dominated the pages of October and October Books prevailed. Discussions among “Latin Americanists,” meanwhile, centered on exhibitions and their catalogs. There were structural reasons for this, including a lack of English-language academic publishing outlets (the subfield’s first peerreviewed journal, Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture, was founded only in 2019). It was also due to the fact that US cultural institutions have long found it 58 OCTOBER not only aesthetically but politically and economically advantageous to display— though not necessarily collect or study—works by Latin American modern and contemporary artists at key historical junctures. This phenomenon began during the Great Depression, with major commissions to Mexican muralists José Clemente Orozco and Diego Rivera. On the eve of the US’s entrance into World War II, some museums embraced a broader stylistic and geographic range of art from Latin America and the Caribbean, in the spirit of Pan-American unity. During the Cold War, anti-communist bias and political censorship in the US significantly limited the collecting, exhibiting, and teaching of artists from the region (including many who had been welcomed in previous decades), even as Latin American studies emerged as a major area of research. By the later 1980s, neoliberal privatization, globalization, and their cultural manifestations, including multiculturalism, contributed to a “boom” in exhibitions and sales of works by modern and contemporary Latin American artists.1 As Arlene Dávila notes, “Visibility is merely the first step to recognition, which in turn has very little to do with equity. Equity demands structural and lasting transformations in society, and in the context of the arts, in the makeup and functioning of all institutions that are part of the larger ecosystem of artistic evaluation.”2 Only in the twenty-first century did sporadic interest in Latin American art begin to translate into sustained institutional investment in museum collections, permanent curatorial and academic positions, and opportunities for undergraduate and graduate students. Backed by this infrastructure, modern and contemporary art of Latin America has been consolidated as a recognizable subfield within US art history in recent years. The same cannot be said of the history of US Latinx art.3 Indeed, Dávila convincingly argues that the “mainstream” art world’s embrace of Latin American art has served to reinforce the classist and racist biases and ignorance that continue to limit the representation of US Latinx art, artists, curators, and scholars within the discipline.4 In the neoliberal 1990s, for example, historically white US art institutions welcomed the often understated post-Conceptual interventions and photographs of contemporary Mexican artist Gabriel Orozco into their spaces as a way to expand their global purview while avoiding, in Cuauhtémoc Medina’s words, the “baroquizing, uproar-raising ‘bad taste’ of US 1. On these historical phenomena, and the Cold War–era decoupling of politics and art in the United States, see Shifra M. Goldman, Dimensions of the Americas: Art and Social Change in Latin America and the United States (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), pp. xv–xvi, 267–84, 317–25. On the relationship between exhibitions and the academic study of Latin American and US Latinx art, see Elena Shtromberg and C. Ondine Chavoya, “Lessons from Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA,” Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture 1, no. 2 (April 2, 2019), pp. 74–93. 2. Arlene Dávila, Latinx Art: Artists, Markets, and Politics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020), p. vii. 3. See Adriana Zavala, “Latin@ Art at the Intersection,” Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies 40, no. 1 (Spring 2015), pp. 125–40. 4. Specifically, she argues that the formula of linking “Latin American and Latinx,” as in the title of the Getty Foundation’s 2017 Pacific Standard Time initiative, has done a disservice to Latinx art. Dávila, Latinx Art, pp. 62–73. A Questionnaire on Global Methods 59 Latinos.”5 So-called bad taste, in this instance, encompasses directly addressing structural inequities and other uncomfortable realities. In retrospect, I began studying modern and contemporary art of Latin America at precisely the moment it was gaining currency within the Anglo art-history establishment. The notion that the terms “modernist” and “Latin Americanist” were, in fact, fully compatible was bolstered by the impact of Inverted Utopias: Avant-Garde Art in Latin America, Mari Carmen Ramírez’s watershed 2004 exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.6 This, the museum’s press release declared, was “the first exhibition in the United States devoted to the brilliant, innovative contributions of Latin American artists to the phenomenon that became the 20th-century avant-garde.”7 Ramírez’s intention was to avoid presenting a linear, teleological history in which Latin American examples had “traditionally been pigeonholed as derivative currents or, even worse, copies of central movements.”8 The alternative she offered was a framework of constellations in which disparate groups and tendencies are juxtaposed to emphasize cross-cutting preoccupations. The show’s catalog, with its extensive selection of primary-source documents, many translated into English for the first time, provided US-based scholars and students with a manifesto and road map for studying modern and contemporary art of Latin America with an emphasis on transnational exchanges. One impact of Inverted Utopias was to direct institutional and market focus away from figurative Mexican and Brazilian art of the 1920s and ’30s and toward abstract, geometric art made in the Southern Cone in the 1940s–1960s. Along with Ramírez, art collector Patricia Phelps de Cisneros rose to national and international prominence as a key agent of this paradigm shift. Given that Mexican and Mexico-based artists were quite prominent within regional and international histories of art of the interwar and neoliberal eras, I was struck by their total absence from the new emphasis on collecting and exhibiting “postwar” geometric abstract art. I began studying Mexican art and architecture of this period both to gain a better understanding of a diachronic national history of art and to argue for Mexico’s contributions to a global history of the early Cold War period. This led to my participation in a broad-based reassessment of Mexican art and culture of the 1940s–’60s.9 During these years, the ruling Partido Revolucionario Institucional 5. My translation of “‘mal gusto’ barroquizante y estruendoso del american latino.” Cuauhtémoc Medina, “El caso Orozco,” Reforma (Mexico City), October 25, 2000. 6. Mari Carmen Ramírez and Héctor Olea, Inverted Utopias: Avant-Garde Art in Latin America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004). 7. “Inverted Utopias: Avant-Garde Art in Latin America (June 20–September 12, 2004),” Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, https://www.mfah.org/exhibitions/inverted-utopias-avant-garde-artlatin-america. 8. Mari Carmen Ramírez and Héctor Olea, “Prologue,” in Inverted Utopias, pp. xvi–xvii. 9. See, for example, Rita Eder, ed., Desafío a la estabilidad: Procesos artísticos en México / Defying Stability: Artistic Processes in Mexico, 1952–1967 (Mexico City: Turner/Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo [MUAC], Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México [UNAM], 2014). This exhibition followed the model of the watershed 2007 exhibition La era de la discrepancia, curated by Olivier 60 OCTOBER (Institutional Revolutionary Party, PRI) supported new cultural forms ranging from massive public institutions to international exhibitions that asserted Mexico’s economic and political development. And yet, with the exception of Rufino Tamayo, the nation’s artists failed to attract international attention on anywhere near the level of its interwar muralists. A relevant factor that has gone largely undiscussed within art-historical circles is that, after 1940 and throughout the Cold War, Mexican and Mexico-based artists who were perceived as potential political instigators—including Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, and David Alfaro Siqueiros, as well as African American artist Elizabeth Catlett—were unable to travel to the United States, significantly limiting their contacts and exposure.10 Cold War politics were thus a major factor in Mexico’s omission from multinational histories of art from 1940 until the collapse of the Soviet Bloc in 1991—at which point the works of Mexican and Mexico-based artists such as Francis Alÿs, Teresa Margolles, Gabriel Orozco, and Santiago Sierra began to be hailed by international critics for their insights into local manifestations and experiences of neoliberalism in the Global South.11 The methodology I employ to address Mexico’s contributions to global modern and contemporary art during the Cold War follows Nestor García Canclini’s proposal that modernism in Latin America must be understood not as “the expression of socioeconomic modernization” but as “the way in which the elite takes charge of an intersection of different historical timescales and uses them to try to forge a global project.”12 The artworks, publications, and international correspondence network of Mathias Goeritz (1915–1990), a German citizen who emigrated to Mexico via Spain in 1949, offered a case study of such a global project rooted in Latin America—one promulgated by a postwar settler who forged an artistic strategy premised on, and benefiting from, his adopted nation’s status as a developing one. In marked contrast to the European Zero and Nouveau Réaliste artists with whom he was in contact, Goeritz took advantage of Mexico’s inexpensive manual labor, available land, and local materials to impose monumental, nonrepresentaDebroise, Cuauhtémoc Medina, Pilar García, and Álvaro Vázquez Mantecón, which took advantage of commercial and institutional interest in post-1990 art in Mexico City to shine a light on its historical antecedents of the 1960s–80s. See Olivier Debroise, ed., La era de la discrepancia: Arte y cultura visual en México / The Age of Discrepancies: Art and Visual Culture in Mexico, 1968–1997 (Mexico City: Turner/Museo Universitario de Ciencias y Arte [MUCA], UNAM, 2006). 10. Catlett relocated to Mexico in 1947 and became a Mexican citizen in 1962. As Dalila Scruggs has demonstrated, the US State Department then deemed Catlett an “undesirable alien” and refused her visa requests until 1971. See Dalila Scruggs, “Activism in Exile: Elizabeth Catlett’s Mask for Whites,” American Art 32, no. 3 (September 1, 2018), pp. 4–5. 11. On the historical parameters of the international embrace of this 1990s generation, see Jennifer Josten, “Book Review: Abuso mutuo by Cuauhtémoc Medina and El arte de mostrar el arte mexicano by Olivier Debroise,” Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture 1, no. 3 (July 2019), pp. 105–09. 12. Néstor García Canclini, “Modernity after Postmodernity,” in Beyond the Fantastic: Contemporary Art Criticism from Latin America, ed. Gerardo Mosquera (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), p. 27, quoted in Jennifer Josten, Mathias Goeritz: Modernist Art and Architecture in Cold War Mexico (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018), p. 278, note 5. A Questionnaire on Global Methods 61 tional painted concrete forms onto public spaces. Works such as Goeritz’s iconic Torres de Ciudad Satélite, designed with Luis Barragán in 1957, were strikingly distinct from the nation’s dominant modernist figurative and abstract painting currents, while simultaneously—and knowingly—registering Mexican art’s difference from the kinetic and geometric abstract works then on view in Dusseldorf, New York, Paris, and São Paulo. The systematic study of the circulation of these and other projects by Goeritz, including his assemblage Messages, gilded wood Mensajes monocromáticos, and Concrete poems, served to refute the (internal and external) supposition that artists in Mexico did not participate in or contribute to international art currents between 1940 and 1990. And yet, these contributions were generated by a white European male artist who at times exploited the economic and political power imbalances of his Mexican context in the interest of self-promotion, and who gave relatively little attention to creating pathways to success for Mexican artists who lacked his access and contacts. While a careful analysis of Goeritz’s projects of the 1950s and ’60s demonstrates that the Mexican state had coopted the abstract, internationalist art and visual culture he promoted by the pivotal year of 1968, it does not provide a cohesive genealogy for works such as Eduardo Abaroa’s and Santiago Sierra’s ephemeral interventions into Mexico City’s urban fabric in the 1990s. Unlike Goeritz and his peers, the elites of this neoliberal generation, including artists, curators, and critics, forged a modernist project at the intersection of local and global timescales that largely bypassed the national.13 My ongoing research on both generations is motivated by two convictions, which are bolstered by a growing familiarity with the descriptive, corrective, and prescriptive functions of ethnic studies. The first is that publicly debated discrepancies in art, exhibition practice, and criticism are crucial to the construction of democratic societies; the second is that “Mexican art” is an inherently transnational phenomenon, generated via border-crossing artists, artworks, and exhibitions.14 Studies on Mathias Goeritz, Gabriel Orozco, and their transnational critical contexts allowed me, like several of my generational peers, to ride a wave of interest in modern and contemporary Latin American art into a tenure-stream position in the 2010s, bringing this area of study into undergraduate and graduate art-history curricula. Current job listings indicate that Latin America continues to be an attractive growth area for art-history departments and museums seeking to expand their global purview. In observing this, I return to Dávila’s insistence that we acknowledge the roles that classism and racism play in the privileging of art from 13. According to Medina, during this period, “writing about and making contemporary art in places like Mexico meant one had to carry out a particular de-nationalization and re-localization, which depended on an unequal network of exchanges (in both the North and the South) based on the risk and use of misunderstanding.” Cuauhtémoc Medina, “Mutual Abuse,” in Mexico City: An Exhibition about the Exchange Rates of Bodies and Values: A Thematic Exhibition of International Artists Based in Mexico City, ed. Klaus Biesenbach (Long Island City, NY: PS1, 2002), p. 38. 14. See Jennifer Josten, Rubén Ortiz-Torres, Clara Bargellini, Kim N. Richter, Xóchitl M. FloresMarcial, and Luis Vargas-Santiago, “Dialogues: Displaying Greater Mexico: Border-Crossing Exhibitions, 1990–2020,” Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture 3, no. 1 (January 1, 2021), pp. 60–119. 62 OCTOBER Latin America—and particularly its geometric abstract works, which arguably register as more “tasteful” (that is, elite and white)—over that of other areas, most prominently US Latinx and AfroLatinx art. I further note that colonial and imperial power imbalances are perpetuated when the relative worth of an artistic practice continues to be measured by the level of interest it attracts within historically white European and US institutions (including this journal), and acknowledge my role in this as a white non-Latinx US citizen who has situated her work within the established structures of EuroAmerican modernist validation by focusing on white male artists who have sought that same validation for Frank Vittor, Christopher Columbus: Discoverer of their Mexico-based practices. Ananda Cohen-Aponte America, 1955, installed in and Elena Fitzpatrick Sifford have pointed out that Pittsburgh’s Schenley Park in while many historians of Latin American art are 1958 and wrapped in plasprimed to discuss the subfield’s systematic exclusion tic in October 2020. from canons and institutions (as I have done here, Photograph by Sylvia Rhor Samaniego. and as I do with my students), we have shown far more reticence to discuss the notable lack of ethnic and racial diversity among our own ranks, at least until recently.15 This lack of diversity is consistent with art history’s global foundations, laid by scholars who, like me, exercised the privilege of studying art from any place and time they chose. As Eddie Chambers writes, “It is time to share that privilege and to make it more widely known to aspiring and emerging art historians of color that they have every right to pursue whatever branch of art history interests them.”16 Sharing the privilege means confronting and dismantling the biases, ignorance, and “possessive investment in whiteness” (George Lipsitz’s term) that have restricted Anglo art history along racial, ethnic, class-based, gendered, and ideological lines. JENNIFER JOSTEN is an associate professor in the Department of History of Art and Architecture at the University of Pittsburgh. 15. Ananda Cohen-Aponte and Elena Fitzpatrick Sifford, “Dialogues: Addressing Diversity and Inclusion in Latin American and Latinx Art History,” Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture 1, no. 3 (July 3, 2019), p. 61. Both the reticence and the broader phenomenon are gradually changing, thanks in large part to new institutions including Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture and the US Latinx Art Forum. See Rose Salseda, “Creating Equity in Academia for Latinx Art History,” Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture 1, no. 3 (July 3, 2019), pp. 87–91. 16. Eddie Chambers, “It’s Time to Share,” Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art 6, no. 2 (Fall 2020), https://editions.lib.umn.edu/panorama/article/self-criticality/itstime-to-share/.