Abstraction in Reverse: The Reconfigured Spectator in Mid-Twentieth-Century Latin American Art (Emersion: Emergent Village resources for communities of faith) - Hardcover

Alberro, Alexander

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 022639395X ISBN 13: 9780226393957

Verlag: UNIV OF CHICAGO PR, 2017

Inhaltsangabe

During the mid-twentieth century, Latin American artists working in several different cities radically altered the nature of modern art. Reimagining the relationship of art to its public, these artists granted the spectator an unprecedented role in the realization of the artwork. The first book to explore this phenomenon on an international scale, Abstraction in Reverse traces the movement as it evolved across South America and parts of Europe.

Alexander Alberro demonstrates that artists such as Tomás Maldonado, Jesús Soto, Julio Le Parc, and Lygia Clark, in breaking with the core tenets of the form of abstract art known as Concrete art, redefined the role of both the artist and the spectator. Instead of manufacturing autonomous art, these artists produced artworks that required the presence of the spectator to be complete. Alberro also shows the various ways these artists strategically demoted regionalism in favor of a new modernist voice that transcended the traditions of the nation-state and contributed to a nascent globalization of the art world. 

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Alexander Alberro is the Virginia Wright Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art History at Barnard College and Columbia University.

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Abstraction in Reverse

The Reconfigured Spectator in Mid-Twentieth-Century Latin American Art

By Alexander Alberro

The University of Chicago Press

Copyright © 2017 The University of Chicago
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-226-39395-7

Contents

Acknowledgments, 
Introduction: Spectatorship after Abstract Art, 
1 Concrete Art and Invention, 
2 Time-Objects, 
3 Subjective Instability, 
4 The Instituting Subject, 
Conclusion, 
Notes, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

Concrete Art and Invention

Concrete art acquaints humans with things rather than with the fiction of things.

Arte Concreto Invención, 1946

The world of dialectical materialism, which is at the heart of the philosophy of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin, guides and confirms our attempts to formulate a materialist and concrete aesthetics.

Tomás Maldonado, 1946

Art world inequality and its relations of dominance provoke their own forms of struggle, rivalry, and competition. But the subjugated here have also developed specific strategies that can be understood only in an art framework, although they may have political consequences. Forms, innovations, movements, and stylistic developments may be diverted, captured, or annexed in attempts to overturn existing art power relations, especially by artists and critics who view their art systems as confined and impoverished in their particularity. For this reason, to speak of European or North American modernism as a colonial or imperial inheritance imposed on artists within subordinated regions is to overlook the fact that modernism itself, as a common value of the spaces of modernity, is also an instrument which, if taken possession of, can enable artists — especially those with the fewest resources — to disrupt the naturalization of the local, the particular, and the national, and to attain a type of freedom, recognition, and existence within it.

It is in these terms that I will analyze the advent of Concrete art in Latin America in the mid-twentieth century. How to explain the fact that this movement, which was appropriated by a handful of young artists who began their careers in Buenos Aires, Montevideo, Caracas, São Paulo, and Rio de Janeiro, could have turned the entire tradition of Latin American art on its head? Enthused by Concrete art well after it had made its mark in Europe, these artists carried out an astonishing operation, which can only be called a commandeering of artistic power and prestige: they imported into Latin American art itself the very procedures, themes, vocabulary, and forms developed by the Europe-based Concrete artists. This usurpation was asserted quite explicitly. The diversion of this power and prestige toward inextricably artistic and political ends was not, then, carried out in the passive mode of reception, and still less of influence, as traditional art-historical analysis would have it. On the contrary, this capture was the active form and instrument of a complex struggle. To combat the largely parochial attitudes of the local ruling oligarchy in their homelands, these young Latin Americans openly asserted the artistic domination exercised by European modernism at the time. Concrete art in particular was used by the artists that are the focus of this chapter as the weapon in their art world struggles.

The initial concepts and terminology of Concrete art were the products of discussions among artists in Paris in the late 1920s and early 1930s. The regular meetings of painters, sculptors, and musicians such as Piet Mondrian, Georges Vantongerloo, Luigi Russolo, Jean Arp, Sophie Täuber-Arp, and Antoine Pevsner prompted Uruguayan painter Joachín Torrés-García to cofound the Cercle et Carré (Circle and Square) group in 1929. It was under this programmatic name that in April 1930 the association presented a large exhibition of nonfigurative art in Paris, featuring paintings, sculptures, and architectural models by an international array of artists. The exhibition and the review of the same name published by Belgian writer Michel Seuphor created a context whereby the plastic elements of geometric abstract art could be self-reflexively interrogated. But the chronicle ran for only three issues, and with its termination the movement also fell apart.

In May 1930, artist and theorist Theo Van Doesburg, who had maintained distance from the Cercle et Carré group and did not participate in its defining exhibition, launched yet another periodical: Art Concret. The journal functioned as the official organ of a constellation of geometric painters and sculptors who identified themselves as Concrete artists. The group did not amount to much, and the run of Art Concret ended with the first issue. But with it Van Doesburg introduced the notion of Concrete art.

The "Concrete Art Manifesto" (1930), and particularly the short essay, "Comments on the Basis of Concrete Painting," that Van Doesburg wrote to supplement it (both are published in Art Concret), pointedly differentiate the term concrete from abstract (fig.1.1). The manifesto consists of six numbered points. The first proclaims art's universality. The second and third call for the priority of the cognitive over the sensual and declare all traces of the natural world to be outside of art's purview. The artwork is to be constructed only from material elements, "purely plastic elements," such as planes, lines, and colors. A pictorial element has "no other meaning than what it is by 'itself.'" The last three points call for a simple and precise art characterized by clarity.

In his outline of the basis of Concrete painting, Van Doesburg elaborated on these points: "In their search for purity artists were obliged to abstract from natural forms in which the plastic elements were hidden, in order to eliminate natural forms and to replace them with artistic forms. Today the idea of artistic form is as obsolete as the idea of natural form. We establish the period of pure painting by constructing spiritual form." Van Doesburg used the term spiritual to mean "mental" or "ideational," to signify invention, the conception of entirely new forms: "Creative spirit becomes concrete. We speak of concrete and not abstract painting because nothing is more concrete, more real than a line, a color, a surface." Whereas abstraction, for Van Doesburg, is negation, a withdrawal from reality, Concrete art assumes that reality eludes adequate representation and therefore must be constructed.

Van Doesburg also sharply distinguished between representation of the natural world and the presentation of plastic forms and colors, highlighting the gap that exists between the two: "A woman, a tree, a cow; are these concrete elements in painting? No. A woman, a tree and a cow are concrete only in nature; in painting they are abstract, illusionistic, vague and speculative. However, a plane is a plane, a line is a line, and no more or no less than that." In other words, pictorial elements — lines, colors, forms — have less to do with a cow, a tree, or a figure in the natural world than with building a language of form, which is the language of the picture itself. Rather than referring to some overt subject matter, even if that reference is cast in the mode of abstracting a motif of some kind in the world down to its component parts or its basic elements, the idea is that the basic elements are in place and they can now be built into something else. The...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: UNIV OF CHICAGO PR
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2017
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 022639395X
• ISBN 13: 9780226393957
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 368
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Buchbär; info@buchbaer.de; ; Weberstr. 67; Osnabrück; 49084; Deutschland