From rakatá to rakatá
[21 de fevereiro de 2023]
Any book, exhibition, library, museum, or text that tries to organize visual arts production by geographical focus is a fallacy. Whether this artistic-geographical reflection be based on a neighborhood of a small town or an entire continent, this equation will always be open to question—what are the criteria? What is the historical frame? Why this artist and not that one?
Experienced in the field of publications of this comprehensive nature related to the visual arts, the British-American publisher of Austrian origin, Phaidon Press, commissioned the present book that brings together more than three hundred artists associated with Latin America. An organizational criterion is to dedicate this book to artists born or who spent a considerable part of their lives in countries that today have Portuguese and Spanish as their official languages. Artists from other territories whose history was impacted by colonialism from France, The Netherlands, and Britain—such as Haiti, Suriname, and Trinidad & Tobago—are excluded. Furthermore, it is essential to emphasize that another criterion adopted is chronological—all artists included here produced their work between the beginning of the nineteenth century and contemporary times. In this sense, artists who were producing work during the colonial period in the region are not in this book. Bearing in mind the dates of birth of the artists gathered here, we have names spanning almost two centuries: from the Peruvian José Gil de Castro born in 1785 to the Brazilian Paula Siebra born in 1998.
In a publication whose point of departure and arrival is Latin America, we must return to the history of the region’s name and remember that this word derives from Amerigo Vespucci, an Italian navigator who arrived on the coast of present-day Venezuela in 1499 on behalf of Spain. Since 1507, based on a map by the German cartographer Martin Waldseemüller, this land has been named “America.” More than five centuries after these invasions of this territory, we continue to refer to the region through the name of a white European man. As Argentine semiotician and professor Walter Mignolo says about the “idea of America”: “The territory already existed and so did its population, of course, but they gave their names to the place where they lived: Tawantinsuyu for the Andean region, Anáhuae for what is currently the valley of Mexico, and Abya-Yala for the region that today occupies Panama.”[i]If we listened and learned more from these different original cultures, we would conclude that any macro-narrative that defines a region by a single name contributes more to conflict than integration.
And what can we say about another invention, the “idea of Latin America”? There has yet to be a consensus on the first source that would have articulated this expression and connected it to the territories below the United States. Still, scholars agree that this expression originated during the nineteenth century, possibly at the turn of its first half to the second. The term was encouraged by Napoleon III to bring his young republic closer to the independent republics in South America and Mexico. Latin America, therefore, forged an idea of union and opposition to the Anglo-Saxon cultures represented by Germany and Britain. Different researchers, however, point out that intellectuals and literati born in the region, such as the Chilean Francisco Bilbao and the Colombian José María Torres Caicedo, had already used the expression for political purposes—anti-US interventions and as a critique of European imperialism—since 1856.[ii]
At the same time, in the landmass that became the United States, nationalism was nurtured, and the country started using “America,” the word that had designated the whole region between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. If the name of the country as we know it today was coined in 1776, with the Declaration of Independence of the United States, it was in the first annual message of President Theodore Roosevelt in 1901 that the country would be referred to solely as America.[iii]Little by little, an opposition is created in terms of name, economic and social realities, invasions, and support for military coups where Latin America and “America” are opposed. Fortunately, artists like Alfredo Jaar and his 1987 workThis is Not America continue to teach “Americans” (those born in the US) that the “American territory” —even if its name dives into European colonialism—lies beyond the borders of their country.
Since the beginning of the nineteenth century, different agents of the visual arts system have emerged in the form of artists, critics, historians, curators, museum directors, gallerists, and auctioneers, among many other activities. They invented dynamically different notions of what we could consider “Latin American art.” The discussions certainly bring us more questions than answers: should we call “Latin American” all the art that takes place in the current territories of South America, Central America, Mexico, and part of the Caribbean? What would be the characteristics of this production? What are the boundaries between identities based on the idea of a nation and others that deal with the larger region? Would it only include artists who explicitly demonstrate elements of belonging to the region’s cultures through representation? Would there be room for artists born in the area whose works do not explicitly state their affiliation with Latin America due to their “abstract” character? What could we say about the immigrant artists who went into exile in the region? And what about artists born in Latin America but whose production matured in other parts of the globe? How do the artists born in the United States who are first or second-generation children of immigrants fit within this conceptual-geographical umbrella? Is every “Latinx” artist also a “Latin American” artist? How far can you stretch the texture of an identity?
As stated earlier in this text, the only certainty when circumscribing the identity of any place is that something will always be missing. On the other hand, the discussions of more than a century that led to the solidification of the idea of Latin American art were essential in forging a notion of collectivity that made possible encounters, publications (such as this one), exhibitions, and institutions of the most varied types. Trying to understand each other between Portuguese and Spanish—creating the good old “Portuñol”—a community became an image, and several generations of artists were able to empower themselves and demonstrate to the hegemonic North that, yes, there is an art production in this region. If the notion of Latin American art can often bring a hurried art market thirsty for safe places, it also makes noise; it disturbs the certainties of an art system that is still very Eurocentric and US-centric.
To respond to the challenges of this transhistorical book, Phaidon contacted a group of advisors related to the region. These researchers come from different generations, work from opposite perspectives, and live in contrasting places. This diversity certainly contributes to the inclusion of not only the most prominent names when we think about “Latin America”, but also very young artists in an initial process of institutionalization or even those considered “B-side” in the historic-artistic narratives of the region. Including at least one artist from each of the twenty countries and territories that compose this Latin America, speaking hundreds of languages of the original peoples, as well as Portuguese and Spanish, the following pages are a kaleidoscopic introduction to art in the region.
Considering that these artists appear in the book in alphabetical order, it is an exciting exercise to approach their research in this introduction in a more chronological manner, bearing in mind the historical moment in which they lived and practiced. Like four songs, the following short texts bring political, language, and existential challenges to articulating the echoes between these artists.
***
In 1816, Argentina declared independence from Spanish rule. From that moment until the beginning of the twentieth century—with Panama’s independence in 1903—all countries, except for Puerto Rico (which remains an unincorporated US territory)—that were Spanish and Portuguese colonies in the Americas became independent. This new political statute led to many reflections on the visual arts: how to create a “national art” if, from the first art school and museum in Latin America—the Academia de San Carlos, in Mexico City, in 1781—its education and systems were based on Eurocentric models?
Discussing modern art, several artists experimented, wrote, taught, organized, and traveled, trying to define what art could and should be. José Gil de Castro, born in the colonial period and accompanying the Latin American independencies, is an essential early artist example. He traveled through different countries in the region and based his research on State portraits with a republican nature. Meanwhile, a later generation, represented by José María Velasco and Francisco Oller y Cestero, artists born in independent republics, explored landscape painting and the so-called costumbrismo (everyday life and customs) to, little by little, impregnate the imagination of the young republics.
For a younger generation of modern artists whose careers began in the first half of the twentieth century, the questions posed were different—at a time when the historical vanguards erupted in Europe stimulated by the political and existential crises of the world wars, what should a Latin American artist stand for? Should their production delve into experimentation that later could be seen as alienated? Should their images take the pedagogical mission of “teaching” the “people” on a large scale through mural painting? Should the gaze of these artists—not infrequently coming from privileged social classes, white and with roots in colonial traumas—turn to ethnic-social groups seen as “minorities”?
If many artists were able to travel from Latin America to the United States and Europe because of cultural capital or travel awards from art academies, others landed as refugees in Latin America. In this flow of images and intentions, networks were established especially among Spanish-speaking countries, modern art museums were inaugurated,[iv]and, perhaps crowning the desire to insert the region in a global discussion, the São Paulo Biennial, the second oldest visual arts biennial in the world, debuted in 1951.
Carmen Miranda, a modern icon of media dissemination and pastiche of Latin Americanness, sang in 1939: “Ai, ai, ai, ai / have you ever danced / in the tropics? / with that hazy lazy / like, kind of crazy / like South American way.” Performed in the 1940 film Down Argentine way, Carmen’s voice is accompanied by the Brazilian group Bando da Lua and the song was written by two US composers. This is an excellent example of the mirror game around creating a “Latin American way”—and a particular “Latin American art”—that wanted to be modern and cosmopolitan but at the same time anchored in a national identity discourse that appropriates popular non-white traditions like samba.
***
Almost 30 years later, in 1968, the Brazilian singer Caetano Veloso released the song “Soy loco por ti América.” Composed by fellow Brazilians Gilberto Gil and José Carlos Capinam, its composition is a tribute to Che Guevara, murdered in October 1967 in Bolivia. The revolutionary was famous for his role in the Cuban Revolution and eager to articulate greater Latin American integration in opposition to authoritarian regimes. The song responded not only to the military dictatorship established in Brazil since 1964 but also to other Latin American dictatorial regimes; most of the countries that had not yet gone through the trauma of militarism were subject to it during the 1960s and 1970s, and each one deals with the negotiations around history, memory, and forgetting.
Written in Portuguese and Spanish, its verses create semantic fields that move like a pendulum: the voice that says, “I’m passing through here / I know that one day I’m going to die / of fright, bullets or addiction” is the same one that, seconds before, romantically proclaims, “Crazy for you with love / and that has as colors / the white foam of Latin America / and the sky as a flag.” If at times, “America” can relate to love and pleasure, at other times, the continent is synonymous with fear, violence, and death. The lush beaches still featured on postcards and attracting millions of tourists are the same ones where a lot of blood was (and continues to be) shed through violence.
Like Caetano Veloso, the visual artists whose careers developed in these decades of repression by different military governments had to negotiate the limits of their freedom. In a historical moment where artistic experimentation led to the possibility of exploding traditional media related to fine arts, many artists researched mail art, video art, performance, installation, sound, appropriated objects, and any other materiality that moved their desire.
When observing a panorama of art production between the end of the 1950s and the mid-1980s, we find several iconographic and semantic coincidences between artists. In times of hunger and misery, Anna Bella Geiger and Victor Grippo looked to the absence of our daily bread. Claudia Andujar, Graciela Iturbide, and Paz Errázuriz looked at marginalized bodies and narratives through the photographic lens. Margarita Azurdia and Marta Minujín looked to the human body as the key to play with color and pleasure. Juan Downey and Sonia Andrade looked at video and digital images as pivotal elements of contemporary culture. Lotty Rosenfeld, Luis Camnitzer, and Ulises Carrión looked at written words and how they can trigger a particular ghost of so-called conceptual art.
Between the explicit representation of violence and the desire to sublimate it and create an alternative to daily barbarism, the artists of this generation seem to echo some of the final lines of “Soy loco por ti, América”: “A poem still exists / with palm trees, with trenches / songs of war / perhaps songs of the sea.”
***
With the end of the military dictatorships that spread throughout Latin America, the 1980s saw a re-democratization in the region. What is the creative horizon of a visual artist who, for the first time in decades, did not face the agenda of a repressive federal power? This and the following decades are commonly related to globalization—a term leveraged by technological developments that led to the popularization of color television, the arrival of satellite transmissions, and home video cassette players.
It is a historical moment associated with even more extensive use of radio and the appearance of MTV with its music video visual culture. Regarding Latin America, it is the moment of the first albums of Chayanne, Gloria Estefan, Luis Miguel, Selena, and Thalía. At the end of the 1990s, at the turn of the millennium, a series of Latino singers became huge in the United States, Europe, and beyond, releasing their first albums in English—Jennifer Lopez, Marc Anthony, and Ricky Martin, all from Puerto Rican families, made their debuts in 1999. Two years later, the Colombian Shakira released her first English language album. From “María” to “Livin’ La Vida Loca,” from “Pies Descalzos, Sueños Blancos” to “Wherever, Whenever”—Spanglish became a global and commercial success. If nowadays, Anitta, Bad Bunny, and Maluma have impressive success due to their association between music and the internet, they owe it partially to this MTV generation.
Some of the visual artists who started their careers in these decades are part of a first generation who achieved worldwide recognition before they turned forty, participating not only in the big narrative exhibitions circuit, such as the Venice Biennale and Documenta exhibitions[v], but also having their work acquired by museums both within the region and, more significantly here, those beyond. Such museums were actively amplifying their collections by looking at the Global South. Often seen as a generation returning to the object, these artists dealt with appealing and sensory images. Some of them—like Abraham Cruzvillegas, Carlos Garaicoa, Damián Ortega, Gabriel Orozco, Guillermo Kuitca, and Jac Leirner — became international flagbearers for the Latin American art scene and played an essential role in the recent internationalization of Latin American galleries through their participation in international art fairs, but also in opening their venues in different regions of the world.
A significant part of this generation explored the notion of intimacy in their research. It is interesting, for example, to look at queer poetics with a diaristic nature by artists such as Feliciano Centurión, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Leonilson, Giuseppe Campuzano, Julio Galán, and Hudnilson Jr. Meanwhile, other artists including Ayrson Heráclito, Belkis Ayón, María Magdalena Campos-Pons, and Rosana Paulino researched the historical, existential, and traumatic relationship between image and Blackness—although unlike their white peers, they only received proper international institutional recognition in the twenty-first century. Finally, other artists follow the interest of previous generations in the weight of violence, unfolding it in identity intersections that subtly point to the wounds of colonization and militarization. Aníbal López, Patricia Belli, Priscila Monge, Regina José Galindo, Tania Bruguera, and Teresa Margolles are essential names in thinking about these topics in the region.
***
After decades of institutionalization of Latin American art in institutions in the big cities that rule capitalism globally—with the creation of collections, departments, and curatorial positions—it is interesting to note how some of the artists present in this book nowadays attract crowds to museums. Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo can certainly be seen as pioneers in occupying this prominent space in the art scene, while modern artists like Carlos Cruz-Diez, Julio Le Parc, Leonora Carrington, and Tarsila do Amaral, besides younger names like Beatriz Milhazes, Ernesto Neto, and Tomás Saraceno, have a recognition that goes beyond national and regional borders.
In the twenty-first century, this recognition is due, as we have seen in this text, to the efforts of people who, with different intentions, nurtured relationships that made possible the movement of artists, works, and ideas about Latin America for at least two centuries. There is another factor, however, that contributes to this dissemination: the presence of the Internet in our daily lives, at least since the 1990s. In the nearly three decades that constitute its popularization—from home computers to smartphones—artists connected with the world. Awards, residencies, fairs, biennials, and triennials proliferated. Even though it is not the most ecological option, air travel has become cheaper. Studying at international visual arts schools and immigrating is a reality for many artists in this book. Conducting studio visits online—especially since the COVID-19 pandemic—is now routine.
The Internet has made possible a fascinating phenomenon, especially in the last ten years: the possibility of self-institutionalization by artists. Through social networks such as Facebook and Instagram—and it is essential to remember that these platforms are wildly used in Latin America, a region where cell phone usage time is high compared to other parts of the globe[vi]—artists manage not only to share their works but to network, and even commercialize artworks. This important regime of self-visibility allows artists—especially the economically and socially underprivileged ones—to fight for their own space and, consequently, to write new pages for the narratives around Latin America.
With so many centuries of consolidation around the notion of “Latin American art,” where were and are the artists born as native peoples in the region? Where were and are those coming from the different Black cultures of Latin America that connect with Afro-Atlantic histories and the traumatic continuing legacies of the transatlantic slave trade? In societies with traditions of machismo and caballerismo as strong as those in Latin America, where were and are the artists interested in rethinking the notion of heteronormativity and cisnormativity? Where were and are the Latin American artists that are not born in wealth? The answer is: these artists have always been here, but the agents of artistic institutionalization in the region constantly turned a blind eye to them.
Setting aside their different contexts and historical specificities, this decolonial turn in Latin American art is recent; artists, critics, and curators grew tired of being subject to images that exoticized and sometimes profited from their bodies, and decided to join forces to become authors of their own narratives. With different research results in terms of form but united in their desire for freedom, artists such as Ad Minoliti, Carlos Martiel, Edgar Calel, Naomi Rincón Gallardo, Paulo Nazareth, and Seba Calfuqueo seem to have made a pact where, echoing a performance by Jota Mombaça whose title quotes the great Brazilian writer Conceição Evaristo, “A gente combinamos de não morrer” (“Us agreed not to die.”)[vii]
In 2021, the Venezuelan singer Arca, one of the most recognized contemporary electronic music producers, released “Rakatá,” a song soaked in the mesmerizing drums of reggaeton. An anthem to sexual freedom and anthropophagy as a metaphor, right at the song’s beginning, she says, “Mira, te lanzo a rakatá / pa’ ver si tú me mira” (Look, I’ll throw you a rakatá / to see if you look at me). The word was popularized with a song of the same name by the pioneering Puerto Rican duo of reggaeton, Wisin & Yandel, from 2004. The term is usually associated with a sudden body movement that can refer to both a dance step and a sexual act. An anagram of the verb “atakar” (attack), the word is also an onomatopoeia that refers to violence and the sounds of guns.
Between the memory of violence and the pleasures of the body, between the abruptness of a movement and the necessary subtlety to compose the texture of reggaeton, Latin American art also throws its rakatás and is noticed in the international visual arts scene. May the readers look at the artists of this publication and throw their rakatás back at the images here gathered. From rakatá to rakatá, the notion of Latin American art will continue to be complex, diverse, asymmetrical, elastic, and, why not, fictional.
[i] Walter Mignolo, La idea de América Latina, Gedisa Editorial: Barcelona, 2007, p.28.
[ii] Michel Gobat, “The invention of Latin America: a transnational history of anti-imperialism, democracy, and race,” in The American Historical Review, vol.118, issue 5, 2013, pp.1345–75.
[iii] Daniel Immerwahr, How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States, Picador, New York, 2020.
[iv] In 1948, the museums of modern art in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo in Brazil were founded. In 1953 the one in Bogotá was founded; in 1956, the one in Buenos Aires; and, in 1964, the one in Mexico City.
[v] Besides these two important projects in Europe, it is essential to remember that, in 1984, the Havana Biennial had its first edition. Initially an event dedicated to the Caribbean and Latin America, already in its following edition, in 1986, it became a place for Global South artists to experiment. Many Latin American artists that are nowadays considered important reference points for art practice participated in these first editions when they were young.
[vi] In, for example, a 2015 article in El País titled “The miracle of the multiplication of mobile phones in America Latina” by Óscar Granados, there was an expectation that the region could become the second largest global market for smartphones.
[vii] This is one of the short stories from Evaristo’s book Olhos D’água, published in 2014. Note: in Portuguese, the title "A gente combinamos de não morrer” has a deliberate grammatical mistake. The subject is written in a singular way to refer to the plural—“a gente” which, in Portuguese, can be translated as “we”, but also as “the people. The verb then is written for the plural: “combinamos de não morrer.” It is a text that deals with violence against the poor population in Brazil, and thus she is consciously articulating a mismatched subject/verb agreement to echo a coloquial manner of speech associated with uneducated people living in poverty, hence the English translation.
(ensaio introdutório do livro “Latin American artists: from 1785 to now”, da editora Phaidon, lançado em 2023)