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- Convenor:
-
Ignacio Aguilo
(University of Manchester)
Send message to Convenor
- Location:
- UP 4.212
- Start time:
- 12 April, 2013 at
Time zone: Europe/London
- Session slots:
- 2
Short Abstract:
This panel aims to examine the intersections between ethics and aesthetics in Latin American visual arts from the 1950s until present day, and how these intersections relate to issues such as the politics of representation, coloniality of power and/or political economy of art.
Long Abstract:
In the last two decades Latin American Art history has experienced profound changes and revisions. The development of new paradigms for the analysis of historical avant-garde movements has been entwined with the emergence of perspectives and themes that benefit from contributions from disciplines such as cultural studies and gender and postcolonial studies.
This panel draws on these theoretical and methodological approaches in order to propose critical reflections on Latin American artistic modes and expressions from the 1950s until present day, focusing on the intersections between aesthetics and ethics, and its political implications. In that regard, the panel welcomes papers that address ethical issues related to the following aspects of Latin American visual arts:
- modes of representation of the peripheral, the marginal and the subaltern,
- affect, sensation and artistic productions,
- the location of Latin American art in relation to European and North American art circuits,
- museums, galleries and art institutions, and the coloniality of power.
Accepted papers:
Session 1Gonzalo Aguilar (Universidad de Buenos Aires)
Paper short abstract:
En este trabajo, se encara la figura del hombre en harapos a través de diferentes manifestaciones artísticas y literarias. La pregunta es si, a lo largo del siglo XX, esta figura llegó a configurar una articulación de la estética y la ética.
Paper long abstract:
¿Qué cosas son las que se llevan los traperos y los hombres en harapos? ¿Tan poco valor tienen que las consideramos restos y desechos? ¿Tan despreciables que las deseñamos y no nos importa lo que después harán con ellas? ¿O hay algo allí, pese a las apariencias, que es valioso y vale la pena rescatar de la basura? A través de diferentes tipos de obras del campo de la literatura, el cine y las artes plásticas, el trabajo se propone recorrer la figura del hombre en harapos en las obras de Euclides da Cunha, Clarice Lispector, Flávio de Carvalho, Hélio Oiticica y Glauber Rocha.
Karl Posso (University of Manchester)
Paper short abstract:
This paper examines how Cildo Meireles draws on his early, nationally contingent and politically explicit, oeuvre in order to distil alarm as an artistic means of intervening ethically in the world. It studies alarm’s relationship with beauty in the artist’s phenomenologically oriented ethics.
Paper long abstract:
Cildo Meireles (b. 1948), one of Brazil's best known contemporary artists, is celebrated internationally for his pioneering work with installations. His witty indictments of Brazil's military regime and social inequalities during the 1970s and early 1980s have been the subject of considerable academic reflection, as has his ongoing commitment to making unsettling art 'seductive'. This paper will examine how Meireles draws on his earlier, nationally contingent and politically explicit, oeuvre in order to harness or distil alarm as an artistic means of intruding equivocally but ethically on others. In particular, the paper will look at how alarm's relationship with beauty informs the artist's peculiar brand of phenomenologically oriented ethics.
Julia Banwell (University of Sheffield)
Paper short abstract:
This paper will discuss ethical issues around the performance of dead and living bodies, spectatorship and agency in the work of the Mexican artist Teresa Margolles (b. 1963).
Paper long abstract:
The Mexican artist Teresa Margolles (b. 1963) has devoted her career to exposing the effects of trauma on the individual and the social body, examining the relationship between violence and absence and confronting the viewer with uncomfortable realities via a focus on marginalised bodies. The interplay between a globally accessible visual language, the artist's comments on both specifically Mexican circumstances and traumatic events occurring elsewhere in the world, and her refusal of cultural stereotypes, locate her at an intersection between the international and the local. Underlying all of her work is an interest in remains and traces, and she has worked directly with human body parts and residues, and also with other materials that have been used as carriers to transport these materials between sites of collection and exhibition, and debris collected from sites where violent incidents have occurred (for example, the London riots during the summer of 2011). The material memories of the past lives of these bodies and objects are visually explored, with dead and living bodies standing as sites of memory, trauma and reflection.
However, her artistic project at times operates within an ethical grey area, and its potential to connect these traumatised bodies and spaces is complicated by the at times uneasy power relations implicit in her engagement with marginalised dead and living bodies. The performance of the bodies of others is key to her work, and this will be examined from an ethical perspective also taking into account issues around agency and spectatorship.
Patricia Tierney
Paper short abstract:
This study of recent works by Doris Salcedo uses Derrida’s trope of the ghost to suggest a way to address their political and ethical but also the aesthetic and affective dimensions. It considers their culturally and geographically specific concerns but refuses to impose interpretative segregation.
Paper long abstract:
Rejecting the language of memory and of Freud in particular, this study of two recent works by Doris Salcedo turns to various texts by the philosopher, Jacques Derrida. It explores how his concept of spectrality, its blurring of the distinction between past and present, fact and fiction, and the haunting of one by the other may be used to provide an art historical framework and language that is sensitive to the political and ethical dimensions of these works but also to their aesthetic and affective power.
With regard to Plegaria Muda (2008-2010), the study suggests that although it can be read with reference to the Colombian army's massacres of civilian youth, what is at stake is not the past as such but the viewer's engagement with it and ethical responsibility towards it. Secondly, it considers A Flor de Piel (2011-2012) as a visual metaphor for mourning and the way in which the work takes up Derrida's insistence that to do justice on behalf of those who are dead, mourning cannot be an act in and of itself but must recognize that "they are always there, specters." The study concludes by considering the implications of spectral survival for art history's approach to context in general and, in particular, for art history's search for alternatives to the interpretative segregation of imposed on art from outside the western centres.
Ignacio Aguilo (University of Manchester)
Paper short abstract:
This presentation analyses Chaco (2001), Guadalupe Miles's series of photographs of indigenous people from north-west Argentina in order to demonstrate how through the perversion of the gaze it introduces a change in the representational politics of race in Argentinian visual arts.
Paper long abstract:
Chaco (2001), Guadalupe Miles's series of photographs of a Wichí community from Salta's Chaco region in north-west Argentina introduces a series of ruptures with previous forms of representation of indigenous people in Argentinian art photography. Through the analysis of the transgressive figures of the sensualised child and the effeminate man in Miles's photos from a perspective of race, this presentation argues that these photographs pervert and subvert the modes of reception, producing a disturbing effect in the spectator that exposes the arbitrary dimension of constructions of racial difference.
Sophie Halart (UCL)
Paper short abstract:
This paper considers how the historiographic categorisation of Chilean and Argentine artists who worked with the body under the term ‘Conceptualism’ contributed to overshadow the work of more peripheral artists whose approach of the body raises just as valid political and ethical stakes.
Paper long abstract:
The emergence of Happenings on the Argentine artistic scene of the 1960s and of performance art in the 1970s Chilean avant-garde illustrate the advent of practices positing the dematerialisation of the art object as a necessary condition to articulate a political critique of the military regimes in place at the time. Using the artist's body as raw material, zone of mediation and conceptual tool to perturb official discourses, these works articulated an aesthetics of precariousness that became a recognisable feature of avant-garde movements in the region and one subsequently centralised under the banner of Conceptualism.
This paper bears testimony to the saliency of such practices and engages with the precariousness of the body as a valid strategy to articulate political and ethical modes of dissent in the Southern Cone. However, it also seeks to reveal how historiographic leanings toward periodicity contributed to overshadow the work of artists working on the margins of Conceptualism. Engaging with George Bataille's discourse on the Informe as "a term that serves to bring things down in the world", this paper examines the production of Chilean painter Roser Bru and Argentine sculptress Lydia Galego whose works consider the body not so much as a conceptual given but as a zone of shifting surfaces on the perpetual brink of collapse. As such, it argues that these artists' rejection of fixed forms puts in crisis not only established discourses on the avant-garde and the body but also historiographic attempts to unify Latin American artistic practices into linear and coherent narratives.
Dominika Gasiorowski (Queen Mary University of London)
Paper short abstract:
This paper analyses Maya Goded’s album 'Good Girls', which contains images of prostitutes working in Mexico City. It focuses on ethical tensions involved in socially engaged documentaries using Good Girls as an example in the context of Mexican photography and its representations of marginality.
Paper long abstract:
Maya Goded is one of the most renowned contemporary Mexican photographers. The subject of this paper will be her album entitled Good Girls (2006), which contains images of prostitutes working in the oldest red-light-district of Mexico City. After briefly situating Goded in the context of Mexican photography and its relationship with representing marginality, I will focus on the ethical tensions involved in socially engaged visual production using the Good Girls as an example. I will analyse the role of photography in highlighting the marginal situation of its deprived subjects and forging a cultural space for otherwise unrepresented or underrepresented people, while taking into consideration the risks of fetishizing and commercialising the suffering of others. To that end, recent theoretical debates about ethical ambiguities in documentary photography will be considered. My close analysis of a selection of photographs from the album will exemplify different representations of women within the frame of their internal displacement. The images' potential for empowerment as well as exploitation will be considered. The main goal of this examination is not to determine the moral value of Goded's engagement with the people she photographs, but to focus on teasing out the ethical intricacies of representing and looking at images of subaltern subjects.
Erin McCutcheon (Tulane University)
Paper short abstract:
Current trends in feminist, contemporary and Latin American art history do not account for the position of Mexican women artists working in the 1970s. Through an examination of three exhibitions where these artists are included, I venture a nuanced critique of this historic and concurrent inconsistency.
Paper long abstract:
"No men in uniform, no children, no dogs, no women" read the signs posted outside cantinas at Mexico's most prestigious art school, the Academy of San Carlos, in 1975. Although seemingly living during a dawning age of feminist activism, Mexican women found themselves last on the list as women artists. Historically these artists perilously negotiated between an active local feminist movement that dismissed their art as bourgeois, and an art world that rejected their feminist politics as irrelevant - a problem that remains present to this day. Current trends in feminist, contemporary and Latin American exhibitions and art historical scholarship do not account for the unique position of these women artists. Why does not only the international art world, but also the international feminist arts movement, continue to ignore these histories?
Through an examination of three separate retrospective exhibitions where some of these artists are included, I will venture a nuanced critique of this historic and concurrent inconsistency. When included, what identities are being ascribed to these artists? What effect do the mis/non/re/presentations perpetuated by these recent exhibitions have on collective future knowledge of their histories? What does this speak to regarding the decolonization of "marginal" histories of Latin America in general? This project is not merely an unearthing of these artists and their socio-political and cultural environment, but an examination of the complex problematics involved in negotiating ghettoisation/assimilation and the developing of a transnational feminist discourse.