2023-10-13 22:21:30
“No culture should be repeated, but it should be continued.” This maxim by the painter and professor Joaquín Torres García perfectly defines Before America, the exhibition in which the Madrid headquarters of the Juan March Foundation reveals the traces of ancient American civilizations in modern and contemporary culture. His more than 600 works, which include sculptures, drawings, documents, photographs and designs, reflect the richness of a legacy that, as the director of the institution Manuel Fontán del Junco explained in his presentation, “is more present than what we believe.”
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The exhibition opened its doors last week and can be visited until March 10. It will also have an educational program, a digital repository of contemporary Latin American art and a film series that will screen films at the Foundation’s three headquarters (Madrid, Cuenca and Palma de Mallorca). The cycle is made up of seven films that cover five decades of cinema in America and reflect the interaction with artistic modernity and its original sources. After After (1930), by José María Velasco, and Estate (1953), by Benito Alazraki, are two of the titles selected by the person responsible for the selection, which also includes works by Jodorowsky, Eisenstein and Chano Urueta.
“It is an international project because it covers several countries, intercontinental because it deals with an entire continent, transatlantic because of how it connects two continents by crossing the ocean that separates and unites them, multicultural because of the places and times it connects; and interdisciplinary, since it combines the theory and history of art with aesthetics, archaeology, ethnography and museography,” described the person in charge at the press conference.
Another of the commissioners indicated that, beyond reconstructing a historical process that dates back to long before an entire continent was baptized as America by Europe; Another objective of the exhibition is to function as a starting point for future investigations and exhibitions.
Rodrigo Gutiérrez Viñuales, professor of Latin American Art at the University of Granada, also belongs to the curatorial team and was in charge of explaining the journey of the exhibition that spans from the beginning of the 19th century to the present. It offers a journey to the public that leaves a mark because of how familiar the motifs of its pieces are, the closeness of its designs and colors; and by how its elements resonate within a colonialist imaginary that, as such, is not always accustomed to reconsidering where the culture and its contemporary exponents that surround us in all possible formats draw from.
Chained stages
The first of the four parts that make up the exhibition, titled Registration and reinterpretation (1790–1910), takes as a reference the period in which there was a commitment from Europe to scientific expeditions – typical of the Enlightenment era –, enriched by the romantic sublimation of the conception of travel as an experience, for which they found On the American continent, a fertile territory to explore.
“The beginning of the 20th century marked the consolidation of schools of arts and crafts in Latin America, which took pre-Columbian and in some cases colonial repertoire,” shared Gutiérrez Viñuales. Hence there are samples of applied arts, engravings, drawings, some oil pieces and archaeological groups: “There are a series of projects from the second half of the 19th century, records that began to be used mainly in pavilions, which were built to house the shipments from certain countries to world exhibitions [la primera se celebró en Londres en 1851]”.
The tour continues with Reinterpretation and Identity (1910-1940), which focuses on the first decades of the 20th century, in which the return to ‘the primitive’ as a paradigm of modernity defined new scenarios. The outbreak of World War I provoked the questioning of the European as the canonical and unique unit of reference; which in turn generated the reinforcement of the dimension of American identities. This situation manifested itself in the desire to create a ‘new art’ for the continent based on forms and languages of the past, crossed by a modern look.
That is why in this context there was the rise of arts and crafts schools that acted as laboratories of modernity that connected the ‘artisanal’ with the so-called ‘fine arts’. The result was the reinterpretation of pre-Columbian and indigenous languages in furniture, theatrical and cinematographic sets. The archaeological record was also developed, in many cases by initiatives of institutions that housed pieces of pre-Columbian art that served for the gradual achievement of their own avant-garde.
Move towards Identity and invention (1940-1970) means reaching the moment of symbiosis between pre-Columbian geometric forms and avant-garde languages. The work of the Uruguayan Joaquín Torres García, to whom the phrase that opens this article belongs, was emblematic here. With the help of his disciples from the Workshop in Montevideo, he set out to recover the symbolic background of the pre-Columbian to rediscover the attitude of the creators of the past, but going beyond the formalism that had marked the 1920s.
“He not only tried to recover the forms, but also recover the art of these cultures. Something difficult because we don’t know what they wanted to communicate through that type of work. That is where the interest of artists comes in to give them a new flight, modern and with a high level of inventiveness,” the co-curator commented on Torres García.
Production in all artistic disciplines was characterized by greater creative freedom, which materialized in the preference for direct stone carving in sculpture and geometric abstraction in painting. Furthermore, in the 1950s and 1960s, the arrival of ‘pop culture’ was key so that posters, comics, album covers, books and other printed matter facilitated the insertion of pre-Columbian culture into popular culture. Precisely a selection of vinyl covers is one of the most striking pieces.
This section belongs Rescue, the sculpture made of polychrome bronze that illustrates this article. This work by Colombian Nadín Ospina fuses a pre-Columbian sculpture with a Martian from the film Toy Story, and is part of a collection in which the extraterrestrial became a metaphor for the foreigner, the stranger, the mysterious and the hidden. Other of the most curious examples are a set of cards whose backs have paintings ranging from maps to recreations of the figures of the deck; and Frame crosswordfrom the series Dominoes (2011) by Carlos Zerpa. A structure assembled on wood and acrylic paint that uses dominoes as a base.
Finally, the section Invention and conceptualisms (1970-2023) reflects how the last half century has served for the survival and transformation of proposals developed in the preceding decades. If there is something that characterizes the works of this time, it is the variety and richness of projects in painting, sculpture, drawing, graphic work, architecture, cinema, photography, ceramics, installations, video art, textiles and other objects; among which unbridled kitsch also flourishes.
The culmination of the exhibition is a return to the beginning, to the expeditions of the 19th century, to the collection of objects, their diaspora beyond their own borders and their decontextualization. To do this, they have combined ceramics and other contemporary objects with objects that were part of that process. Some of the current ones question and denounce those practices, seeking to reconnect the message inherent in the exhibition: “Today’s artists ensure the future of the past.”
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