Colombian Art

Este ensayo tiene como punto de partida la imagen bíblica del Jardín del Edén y su inserción en la producción de arte contemporáneo en Colombia. La serie de fotografías titulada Utopía (Milena Bonilla), la instalación Expulsión del Paraíso (Mario Opazo) y la exposición Machihembrao ( José Alejandro Restrepo)  son en su conjunto tres ejemplos de cómo una imagen tiene la capacidad de resignificarse en el tiempo en sus diferentes usos sociales, religiosos, culturales y por supuesto, artísticos; y de convertirse en testimonio de la cultura que lo produjo. Apelando a las más poderosas imágenes de la historia del arte del Renacimiento,  a las cartografías medievales y renacentistas, así como al discurso histórico y teórico que viene ligada a estas, y  también, a las figuras más esenciales del  propio sujeto histórico: el ángel de la historia con las alas extendidas, la ninfa estática y en movimiento, y el héroe trágico en ascenso y caída.

During the late 1950s and early 1960s, New York’s art world underwent a major transformation that took it from Abstract Expressionism to Minimalism. American artists, as well as international artists working in New York, redefined the concept of abstract painting and sculpture to accommodate a new way of understanding the possibilities of abstraction. This transformation was spear-headed by a new generation of artists known at the time as the New Classicists. Their geometric-inclined output distinguished them from the previous generation of Action Painters, but their belief in the art object as a receptacle of meaning also distanced them from the succeeding generation of Minimalists. Among the most visible figures of this group we find Colombian artists Edgar Negret (1920-2012) and Eduardo Ramirez-Villamizar (1922-2004) who between 1960 and 1964 participated in a series of exhibitions in New York and Bogotá centered around the concept of a “new classicism.” This paper studies the works produced by the Colombian artists during their sojourn in New York and their interpretation as part of the New Classicism both in the US and in Colombia. This close look at Negret’s Magic Machines and Ramírez-Villamizar’s White Reliefs reveals that these works were informed by the Colombians’ interactions with contemporary American artists and the extent to which this transnational dialogue influenced the reception of their work in New York and Bogotá as part of the New Classicism.

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.

From 1939 through the 1950s, every time the Colombian artists Débora Arango (1907-2005) exhibited her paintings, they ignited scathing criticism from conservative sectors: some of her work was censored; at least two exhibitions were closed.  Her imagery examines issues of the body, sexuality, class, politics, and religion. Her frank treatment of these themes provoked strong reactions in a traditional country that was undergoing rapid modernization.  The harshest criticism was aimed at her nudes, a genre that was still uncommon and controversial in Colombia in the early twentieth century.  Because Arango was a woman and depicted the body without hiding sexual attributes, the exhibition of her female nudes invariably set off scandals.

This paper examines the diverse factors that affected the critical reception of Arango’s work and traces her rise, marginalization, reemergence, and celebration as a key figure of Colombian culture.

El Primer Salón de Artistas Colombianos de 1931 es tomado como el único antecedente del Salón Nacional de Artistas fundado en 1940. Sin embargo, entre 1904 y 1931 se realizaron exposiciones nacionales anuales que deben ser consideradas como antecedentes. La indagación de las condiciones generales que propiciaron tales exposiciones, en contraste con la definición institucional de salón originada en Francia en el siglo XVIII, permite establecer los antecedentes del Salón Nacional y, de paso, comprender mejor el arte colombiano de las primeras décadas del siglo XX.

Resumen español:

En 1958, el artista colombiano Eduardo Ramírez-Villamizar (1922-2004) fue contratado para realizar la obra de arte público más ambiciosa de Colombia hasta el momento: El Dorado, un moderno mural monumental que se instalaría en el igualmente moderno rascacielos del Banco de Bogotá (hoy del Consejo de la Judicatura). El presente ensayo estudia en detalle este mural y, con ello, se constituye en el primer esfuerzo por contextualizar y analizar el primer relieve monumental de Ramírez-Villamizar. Este artículo discute a profundidad la manera como el artista integra motivos precolombinos en el lenguaje internacional de la abstracción geométrica y las implicaciones de esta yuxtaposición en su programa estético. Así mismo, examina las fuentes y el contexto en que la obra fue producida, argumentando que El Dorado marca la institucionalización de la abstracción geométrica como símbolo de modernidad y progreso en el arte colombiano, al mismo tiempo que revive tradiciones artísticas locales.

Palabras clave: Ramírez-Villamizar, El Dorado, mural, relieve, abstracción geométrica, arte precolombino, modernidad, modernización, arquitectura moderna, Estilo internacional.

Abstract inglés:

In 1958, Colombian artist Eduardo Ramírez-Villamizar was hired to execute the most ambitious public artwork to date in modern Colombia: El Dorado, an entirely golden monumental mural for the new International Style headquarters of the Banco de Bogotá (today the Consejo de la Judicatura). This paper studies in detail Ramírez-Villamizar’s mural and, with this, it constitutes the first effort to contextualize and analyze the artist’s first monumental relief. I discuss the strategies used in the mural to integrate pre-Columbian motifs within international geometric art and I address the implications of this juxtaposition within the artist’s aesthetic program. At the same time, I examine the sources and context in which the work was produced, arguing that El Dorado marked the institutionalization of geometric abstraction as a symbol of modernization and progress in Colombian art, while at the same time reviving local artistic traditions.

Key words: Ramírez-Villamizar, El Dorado, mural, relief, geometric abstraction, pre-Columbian art, modernity, modernization, modern architecture, International Style.

The first Colombian Artists’ Salon (1931) is commonly considered as the only antecedent to the official National Artists’ Salon founded in 1940. Nevertheless, annual national exhibitions where held between 1904 and 1931, that should be considered as forerunners. The inquiry into the general conditions that embodied those exhibits, in contrast with the institutional definition of an art salon (provided by the 18th century French Academy), allows the author to provide new antecedents for the National Salon and a better understanding of Colombian art during the first decades of the 20th century.

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.

El taller del artista ha sido un tema poco explorado por la investigación en Colombia, por lo tanto, este texto busca aproximarse al espacio creativo por excelencia de los artistas plásticos, pero en particular al taller de las artistas mujeres con el fin de problematizar la relación entre lo público y lo privado en la obra de la pintora antioqueña Dora Ramírez nacida en los años veinte del siglo pasado.

This paper looks at Colombian artist Feliza Bursztyn's work in relation to women artists in the Europe, Japan, and the United States who, like Bursztyn, made feminist-inflected art in the 1960s and early 70s, shortly before the Women's Movement had fully emerged. They worked at a time when there was little in the way of an established theoretical basis to support them.  .

This work is a deep reflexion over the development of newgranadine sculpture from the end of XVI century to the first quarter of XVII century. We provide new documentals sources and add severals sculptures to the sevillian workshops.

Published on: "La Escultura del primer naturalismo en Andalucía e Hispanoamérica (1580-1625)", Arco Libros, Madrid, 2010, págs. 501-562.

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.

Este artículo constituye un ejercicio de lectura interpretativa alrededor de uno de los aspectos más relevantes en la producción artística de Adolfo Bernal (1954-2008): la apropiación de procesos propios de los campos de la literatura, el lenguaje, la comunicación y el diseño con fines artísticos. A lo largo del texto se busca poner de presente las circunstancias que originaron sus experimentaciones gráficas y conceptuales con la imagen y la palabra, las cuales guardan una estrecha relación con las transformaciones del campo artístico local en la década del setenta y una sugestiva producción poética, aún en proceso de descubrimiento. Para llevar a cabo este análisis, se proponen tres acciones: el esbozo de una caracterización de Bernal y su obra que permita situar su trabajo en un horizonte de comprensión; la revisión de los principales giros y acontecimientos en la escena artística local a partir de los años setenta; y, finalmente, el exploración de aspectos relacionales de su ejer...

Resumen: En estos videos predominan los planos cerrados, y se refuerza esta sensación que aprisiona al espectador de la mano de sonidos, música y voces extradiegéticas que aumentan nuestra ansiedad. Otro elemento común es la presencia de un cuerpo que trasgrede un espacio determinado, pero no resignificándolo, sino cuestionándolo en medio de un esfuerzo por desubicar al espectador. Al mismo tiempo, también es constante la certeza de la fragilidad del cuerpo —de los cuerpos— y los gestos eróticos dejan de serlo. Además, hay una preocupación latente por las texturas o elementos —el agua, la sangre, el líquido seminal—. Por último, y acaso este sea uno de los focos principales: muchos signos —tatuajes, crucifijos, estrellas, fotografías, entre otros— aparecen no para ser codificados, sino para contribuir, al parecer, a ese descolocamiento de la mirada.

Abstract: In these videos, closed shots predominate, and this feeling that imprisons the viewer is reinforced by the hand of extradiegetic sounds, music and voices that increase our anxiety. Another common element is the presence of a body that transgresses a certain space, not resignifying it, but questioning it in the midst of an effort to misplace the viewer. At the same time, the certainty of the fragility of the body —of bodies— is also constant and erotic gestures cease to be so. In addition, there is a latent preoccupation with textures or elements —water, blood, seminal fluid—. Finally, and perhaps this is one of the main focuses: many signs —tattoos, crucifixes, stars, photographs, among others— appear not to be encoded, but to contribute, apparently, to this dislocation of the gaze.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.