The Future of Latin American Art in the Us
An unlikely but revelatory pair of exhibitions, one on each side of Central Park, is showcasing the long and sometimes idiosyncratic history of design in Latin America. Moderno: Blueprint for Living in Brazil, United mexican states, and Venezuela, 1940–1978, at the Americas Society (on view February xi to May 16, 2015), is the more than historically-minded of the 2, concerned with the apogee of the modernist moment equally it played out in three markedly distinct countries. New Territories: Laboratories for Design, Craft and Art in Latin America, at the Museum of Arts and Design (on view November 4, 2014 to April 5, 2015), more loosely surveys contemporary trends from the past 15 years, uniting fashion, article of furniture, textiles, and ceramics, to proper name a few of the categories it seeks to dismantle. Indeed, design in both shows seems to know no boundaries and remains nearly impossible to ascertain. Rather than enforcing a taxonomy or otherwise attempting to regulate the objects, withal, the curators use this ontological slipperiness every bit an opportunity to complicate what could be adequately standard narratives of formal experimentation or technological innovation. Beyond their shared subject of Latin American design, the two shows diverge sharply in terms of scope, chronology, and curatorial approach, merely taken together they tell the complex, often contradictory story of how design sought—and continues to seek—to shape the identity and the destiny of the region.
The titles of both shows emphasize the new, the modern, and the cutting-edge. "Moderno," equally the introductory wall text of that exhibition explains, signified "ideas of novelty and accelerated development, rather than [beingness] associated with a particular style or fine art movement." It'due south an ideological rather than artful framework, and ane that pertains specifically to mid-century Brazil, Mexico, and Venezuela, all of which experienced sudden industrial development and urbanization from the 1940s to the 1960s. Guest curators María Cecilia Loschiavo dos Santos, Ana Elena Mallet, and Jorge F. Rivas Pérez are smart to historicize and localize the terms of modernism by tethering information technology to burgeoning senses of nationalism that accompanied, and bolstered, this period of development. This context begins to explain why the exhibition at the Museum of Arts and Pattern, focusing exclusively on the twenty-first century, dispenses altogether with the terminology of "modernism." The term comes from Italian designer Gaetano Pesce—whose work comprises kinetic art, compages, and furniture design—and refers to the "new territory" in which boundaries of art, craft, and design are blurred in contemporary global practice. Similar "moderno," the phrase is deployed in a somewhat counterintuitive mode, describing procedure instead of geography, but it is likewise not a stretch to draw the line one step farther, from "new territory" to "new world."
That notion of the "new globe"—of the Americas as a country of possibility—is the unstated link between these ii exhibitions. Utopian overtones are more than obvious throughout Moderno, which situates its nearly lxxx objects within a hemispheric context of mid-century developmentalist ambitions, but the very fact that it looks at this moment through the lens of design is noteworthy. Art and architecture ordinarily become the lion's share of the glory when it comes to visual manifestations of Latin American modernity—call back of the immensely photogenic Brasília, the iconic geometry of a Carlos Cruz-Diez Fisicromía, or the time to come-past architectonics of a Gunther Gerzso abstraction—just pattern is a crucial and oft-disregarded component of the modernist project in Latin America. In the broader effort to shut the gap between art and life, arguably the almost successful imbrication of these two realms was realized through pattern itself: through objects created for utilitarian purposes, their formal rhythms and concrete contours structuring and even transforming lived experience.
Moderno incorporates maquettes, plans, photographs, and publications, just information technology virtually successfully conveys the affective power of design in its striking installation of the objects themselves. These are placed in surprising juxtapositions and evocative tableaus. The exhibition opens with a smattering of home furnishings, simply information technology is a grouping of three chairs in the first gallery that immediately sets the tone: the Alacrán [Scorpion] chaise (1940) by Michael van Beuren, Klaus Grabe, and Morley Webb, founders of the Mexican-based design company Domus; Joaquim Tenreiro'south iconic Cadeira de três pés [Three-Legged Chair] (c. 1947); and a paradigm of the Butaque Pampatar (1953) by Miguel Arroyo. By virtue of their status as objects that imply and construction the physical presence of a human body in spaces both public and private, chairs distill many of the issues regarding the social implications of pattern. These particular examples, though, grab the centre because of their undeniable formal similarities. A shared interest in the organic link all three, most apparent in their undulating curves and their nearly fetishized use of wood, which is bent, stained, and varnished to foreground its materiality. But a closer look at the wall texts reveals that these chairs hail from the three dissimilar countries that are the focus of this exhibition: Mexico, Brazil, and Venezuela, respectively. What'due south more, the Alacrán chaise was produced by former members of the Bauhaus specifically for the exhibition Organic Design in Domicile Furnishings, held at the Museum of Modern Art in 1941. It is, and then, but one instance of not merely continental but too trans-Atlantic exchange, an object lesson in how the developments of the Bauhaus and other European blueprint cooperatives dispersed and mutated throughout the Americas. This approach characterizes the show as a whole, which freely mixes objects (and protagonists) from various countries and leans towards big-picture themes such every bit "The Past as a Source for National Identity" and "Projecting the Modern Interior."
Information technology is a risky motion that could very easily flatten the history of design into a hemispheric monolith, merely the curators avoid this fate by paying equal attending to local, individualized narratives. To return to the three chairs, the Butaque Pampatar tin can exist seen in dialogue with its Mexican and Brazilian cousins in the same gallery, but it is also the focal point of a wall defended to the more than specifically Venezuelan history of its designer, Arroyo. An artist, pedagogue, and museum director, Approach had traveled broadly and come into contact with a number of figures who shared his proclivities for abstraction, an integration of the arts, and a reconciliation of by and nowadays. His chair, created for the domicile of the critic Alfredo Boulton, was a modernist update of the colonial butaque chair, and information technology constituted part of a bigger push button to dissolve the boundaries between art and pattern. This comes beyond quite clearly in the nearby Model for the Door of Miguel Arroyo's House (1953) past Arroyo'south friend and colleague Alejandro Otero, which non simply visually rhymes with the wooden slats of the butaque but is also reminiscent of the creative person'southward own Ortogonales from the aforementioned catamenia.
It is this shifting, surprising interplay of contexts, this telescoping between macro- and micro-histories, that makes Moderno such a rewarding evidence, all the more than so because these histories take been all but ignored, especially in U.Due south. exhibitions. Of particular note is the attention paid to women artists such as Tecla Tofano, whose ceramic works fuse surrealist symbolism, mordant humor, and an uncompromising feminist sensibility; and Clara Porset, a pioneer of furniture blueprint and interior design who drew upon local Mexican materials and processes. But if Moderno is committed—in challenging medium-specific, Eurocentric, nationalist, and masculinist narratives—to breaking open up the history of modernism in Latin America and beyond, there may be no improve instance than Lina Bo Bardi's Cadeira de Beira de Estrada [Roadside Chair] (1967). Lashing together tree branches into a pyramidal form, Bo Bardi finds the strictest geometry in the rawest of materials. In one fell swoop she takes the presumptions of the 3 chairs that open the exhibition, namely the fusion of the organic and the geometric, to their logical extreme. The apotheosis of modernist design, Bo Bardi seems to suggest, may also entail its deconstruction.
That experience of discovery is bound up in New Territories simply by virtue of its premise. It is the second of the Museum of Art and Design's Global Makers Initiative, defended to promoting work "from parts of the globe often under-represented in traditional museum settings." Curator Lowery Stokes Sims and an advisory team traveled throughout Latin America to become familiar with the current state of pattern, and the results of this reconnaissance mission are installed across iii floors of the museum. There is an open up-concluded experience in almost every sense: the option, the organization, and the nature of the works resist easy categorization. In this respect, the emphasis on "Laboratories" in the subtitle is most appropriate, and information technology is to the show's credit that information technology opts for complexity, fifty-fifty confusion, rather than cut-and-dry out narratives.
That is not to say that the exhibition lacks whatever kind of framework; quite the contrary. New Territories employs not one but two overlapping organizational schema, of "hubs" and "themes." The hubs consist of urban center centers or city pairings: United mexican states City and Oaxaca, Caracas, São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, Santiago and Buenos Aires, San Salvador and San Juan, and Havana. Each hub is viewed predominantly, simply non exclusively, through the lens of a specific upshot, strategy, or fabric. These themes are, respectively, Crafts, Legacy, Repurposing, Experimentation, New Markets, and Space. In theory, the themes chosen for each hub announced to brand perfect sense. As the site of then much modernist ambition, Caracas would exist a natural fit for a section on the Legacy of fine art and design. Pepe López's Geometria blanda [Soft Geometry] (2010) fashions a version of Cruz-Diez's recognizable Fisicromías out of used shopping bags, a literal deflation of the ambitions of Venezuelan modernism that gently but pointedly exposes its commodification. And São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro would seemingly be the logical selection to find trends of "upcycling" and Repurposing quotidian materials. This plays out in Mana Bernardes'south Môbiluz (2011), which transforms industrial scraps into an airy mobile, and—to return to the theme of the chair—the U-Rock Chair (2012–14), designed by a team led by Davi Deusdara for use in public spaces. The latter, created from recycled PET bottles, exemplifies the curatorial preference for work that proposes solutions to urban bug. An adjustable, lightweight image, it is but the latest in a history of pattern as harbinger of the future, even if that future is an imagined one: passed over by the Battery Conservancy, the U-Rock Chair has notwithstanding to go into widespread production.
Within the Repurposing portion of the show we too find improve-known artists such equally the Venezuelan Rolando Peña and the Mexican Abraham Cruzvillegas. While Peña's gilded oil-drum chairs (2013–xiv) and Cruzvillegas'southward Low Budget Passenger assemblage (2009) certainly merit inclusion, their presence scrambles the system of the exhibition. Such welcome intrusions are frequent. The effect is greatly, almost distressingly disorienting at first, just equally hubs and themes bleed into i another, the feel becomes playful—and instructive. There is a payoff to this gutsy strategy: frameworks and narratives, the testify cleverly insists, never seem to work in practise besides equally they might on newspaper. In New Territories this extends from the works on display, which intentionally question divisions between art and craft, to the exhibition format itself.
Given the unruly status of design, encompassing of everything from art to fashion to furniture, information technology is appropriate that both shows boldly resist the pitfalls of the hegemonic narrative. Moderno draws upon a variety of histories to navigate between multiple narrative registers, while New Territories actively undermines its own chiselled construction even equally it is being applied. In that sense, the exhibitions fully embrace the utopian possibilities afforded by design even as they are wary of the attraction of utopia itself. This ambiguity is best seen in the about affecting, most painful pieces in New Territories, which belong to Lucia Cuba'due south series Artículo 6: Narratives of Gender, Strength and Politics (2012–14). Created in response to the forced sterilization of women nether the Fujimori regime in the creative person'southward native Peru, the series envisions article of clothing as a medium for political activism. Cuba prints testimonies, names, and legal text upon Andean polleras [skirts] in a securely critical simply tentatively hopeful project, one that melds tradition and the very contempo past in an attempt to point a way forward. Its inclusion is a sobering reminder that the thought of progress, however enthralling or glamorous, can ultimately be blinding. As much every bit the designs in both shows may look to the future, and so likewise can they reveal what has been forgotten.
Source: http://ifacontemporary.org/design-for-the-future-in-latin-america-both-past-and-present/
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