VICTORMANUELRODRIGUEZDISS - Cold War Legacies Otherwise

Cold War Legacies Otherwise:
Latin American Art and Art History

in Colonial Times
by
Victor Manuel Rodriguez-Sarmiento
Submitted in Partial Fulfillment
of the
Requirements for the Degree
Doctor of Philosophy
Supervised by
Professor Douglas Crimp
Department of Art and Art History

Arts, Sciences and Enginnering
School of Art and Sciences
University of Rochester
Rochester, New York
2009
ii
Curriculum Vitae
Víctor Manuel Rodríguez-Sarmiento was born in Bogotá, Colombia, on
December 12, 1959. After attending the Universidad Pedagogica Nacional and
studying a joint major in History and Sociology, he graduated with a Bachelor of
Arts degree in 1981. He became an art practitioner and a professor of Art, Art
History and History at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia and the Universidad
Pedagógica Nacional. He received a British Council Fellowship to pursue graduate
studies in the History and Theory of Art (Twentieth Century) at Goldsmiths’
College, University of London, UK, where he was awarded a Master of Arts degree
in 1994. After returning to Colombia, he coordinated the Art Studio program at the
Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá, Colombia. In 1997, he received a Fulbright
Fellowship to undertake graduate studies in the Visual and Cultural Studies
Program of the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Rochester.
He pursued his research in Latin American artistic practices and cultural studies
under the direction of Professor Douglas Crimp and received the Master of Arts
Degree in 2000. He received the Celeste Heughes Bishop Award from the
department in 2000. The University of Rochester and University of Cornell
awarded him a fellowship to attend the School of Theory and Criticism in 2000. He
teaches courses in cultural studies at the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana and
participates in interdisciplinary cultural and artistic projects in Bogotá, Colombia.

iii
Acknowledgments
I would like to express my deepest gratitude to Douglas Crimp for his
friendship, guidance and support in pursuing this project. Throughout my studies at
the Program of Visual and Cultural Studies at the University of Rochester and the
development of this project, Douglas was always enthusiastic, challenging and
supportive. He encouraged me to take risks and to truly apprehend the academic
and political significance of a cultural studies project which combines intellectual
work and political activism. I also want to thank Joan Saab and Daniel Reichman
for their interest and kindness as readers and committee members. The Program of
Visual and Cultural Studies and the University of Rochester gave me the best
academic, personal and financial conditions for carrying out my studies. I would
like to name Janet Wolff, Michael Ann Holly, David Rodowick, Kamran Ali, Lisa
Cartwright and Trevor Hope for the opportunities both personal and intellectual
they gave me to undertake my studies. I am also grateful for receiving the Fulbright
Fellowship, the Celeste Heughes Bishop Award, and the University of Cornell’s
School of Theory and Criticism Fellowship.
Antonio Caro, Beatriz González, and the Projéto Hélio Oiticica were always
generous, providing me with information and material to expand my study of the
link between artistic practices and cultural studies. Catherine Walsh and Santiago
Castro-Gómez gave me the opportunity to present this work at various conferences
devoted to Latin American Cultural Studies and to give courses at the Universidad
iv
Andina Simón Bolívar (Quito, Ecuador) and Universidad Javeriana (Bogotá,
Colombia). They gave me invaluable feedback on my research and the opportunity
to share my concerns with students and colleagues. During my studies in Rochester
Ami Herzog, Matt Reynolds, Leesa Phaneuf, Jonathan Finn, Marc Leger and
Daniel Palmer offered me their friendship. Thanks to Jimmy Weiskopf for helping
with his editorial expertise. Juan David Giraldo, Carolina Castro, Santiago Monge,
Marcela Rozo, Sanjay Fernandes, Jaime Cerón, Nadia Moreno, Catalina Rodríguez,
Mónica Páez, and Nicolás Consuegra were always willing to collaborate and help,
offering me their friendship, patience and encouragement. Victor Manuel and Olga
María, my parents, have always given me all the support I have needed. I owe to all
my family more than I could ever express. Maria Claudia Angel-Solano
accompanied me in developing my interest in the cultural field and becoming an art
practitioner and cultural activist. This project is dedicated to her memory.

v
Abstract
Art historians and social scientists have understood the political and cultural
struggles in Latin America during the sixties and seventies as an expression of the
binary context of the Cold War and as mainly based on utopian, humanist and
leftist models of cultural production. Drawing on the work of Arturo Escobar, I
consider these struggles as part of developmentalism: a discursive formation that
colonized African, Asian and Latin American realities after World War II, and gave
shape to the invention of the Third World. This project explores the way in which
conflictive dialogues among artists, art historians, and critics are representative of
the emergence of other forms and scenarios of power and resistance in Latin
America, different from the either/or approach hitherto used to understand the
period.
Considering the consolidation of studies of Latin American art to be a
strategy of this discourse, I examine a group of artistic projects which, by using
strategies of appropriation, mimicry and cultural anthropophagy, among others,
resisted developmentalism and the modernist rhetoric of art history. In so doing,
they anticipated feminist, non-national, non-modern, and queer strategies and
explored other forms of subjectivity which enable the colonized to live in
conditions of adversity.
In particular, I study the use of American formalism in Latin America in the
work of Beatriz González (Colombia, 1938) and the local use of conceptual art in
vi
the work of Antonio Caro (Colombia, 1950). I also investigate the Parangolé of
Hélio Oiticica (Brazil, 1937-1980), his revision of the Brazilian anthropophagite
tradition and his critique of the avant-garde rhetoric about bringing together art and
life. I also explore Eroticica: the queer world of lust, solidarity and affection
Oiticica produced in New York through the creation of environments, installations
and film projects. Finally, I move to the present to investigate the recent
development of cultural studies in the Andean Region, calling attention to some
dangers this project may face with regard to its understanding of local cultural
struggles about the global condition of modernity.

vii
Table of Contents
Curriculum Vitae ii
Acknowledgments iii
Abstract v
Table of Contents vii
List of Illustrations viii
Introduction 1
Chapter 1 The Artifices of Marble: Beatriz González’s

Mirrors and the Politics of Erasure 24
Chapter 2 The National Mummy: Antonio Caro’s Un-Art

and the Politics of Conceptualism 78
Chapter 3 Covering the Land of the Present:

Hélio Oiticica’s Parangolé 133
Chapter 4 Eroiticica 200
Chapter 5 “Thinking otherwise” otherwise: Towards a Critical

(Re) thinking and (De)colonization of Latin American
Cultural Practices. 255
Bibliography 304
Appendix 1 Imaginaries of Revolution:

Interview with Antonio Caro 323
Appendix 2 Public Interview 343
Appendix 3 Manifesto Antropófago 368
Appendix 4 Anthropophagus Manifesto 374
Appendix 5 Illustrations 379

viii
List of Illustrations
0.1 Pedro Manrique-Figueroa. Exhibition Catalogue. 1996. 379
0.2 Pedro Manrique-Figueroa, La vaca sagrada, collage,

15 x 12 cm., 1973. 379
0.3 Joaquín Torres-García, Upside-down Map, ink on paper, 1943. 380
0.4 Pedro Manrique-Figueroa, San Benito o mame nene que yo ta

mame, collage, 15 x 12 cm., 1972. 380
0.5 Cover Prisma magazine. 1957. 381
0.6 Arnold Bode, Christian Sörenson, and Alfred Barr in the IKA
Offices during the jury deliberation for the Third Bienal
Americana de Arte (Kaiser), 1996, Córdoba published
in Andrea Giunta, Avant-garde, Internationalism, and Politics:
Argentine Art in the Sixties (Durham & London: Duke
University Press, 2007), p. 225. 381
1.1 Beatriz González, La última mesa [The Last Table], industrial

enamel on a metal surface assembled on a metal table,
105 205 x 75 cm., 1970. 382
1.2 Beatriz González, Naturaleza casi muerta

[Almost-Morte Nature], industrial enamel on a metal surface
assembled on a metal bed, 125 x 125 x 95 cm., 1970. 382
1.3 Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez, Rendition of Breda,

oil on canvas, 307 x 367 cm., 1634-1635. 383
1.4 Beatriz González, Rendición de Breda 4 (detail), oil on canvas,

1962. 383
1.5 Jan Vermeer, The Lacemaker, oil on canvas transferred to panel,

23.9 x 20.5 cm. 1669-1670. 384
1.6 Beatriz González, Encajera [The Lacemaker], oil on canvas,

100 x 70 cm., 1963. 384
1.7 Beatriz González, Encajera Almanaque Pielroja

[The Redskin Calendar Lacemaker], oil on canvas,
100 x 85 cm., 1964. 385
ix
1.8 Beatriz González, Encajera Negativa [The Inverted Encajera],

oil on canvas, 100 x 85 cm., 1964. 385
1.9 Pielroja [Redskin] Calendar. 386
1.10 Pielroja [Redskin] Calendar. 386
1.11 Beatriz González, Jackeline Oasis, serigraphy on paper,

50 x 50 cm., 1975. 387
1.12 Beatriz González, África Adiós [Africa, Goodbye], oil on canvas,

120 x 100 cm., 1968. 387
1.13 Beatriz González, La Reina Isabel se pasea por el Puente de

Boyacá [Queen Elizabeth on an outing to the Boyacá Bridge],
oil on canvas, 100 x 120 cm., 1968. 387
1.14 Beatriz González, Los suicidas del Sisga [The Sisga Suicides],
oil on canvas, 100 x 85 cm., 1965. 388
1.14a Newpaper picture, El Tiempo, 1965. 388
1.15 Beatriz González, Peinador Gracia Plena [Gratia Plena

Vanity Table], industrial enamel on a metal sheet assembled on a
wooden vanity table, 150 x 150 x 38 cm., 1971. 389
1.16 Raphael, The Virgin of the Chair, oil on panel, 71 cm. diameter.,
ca. 1513. 389
1.17 Beatriz González, El baño turco artífices del mármol [The Turkish
Bath Marble’s Artifices], industrial enamel on a metal sheet
assembled on a wooden table, 137 x 121 x 155 cm., 1974. 390
1.18 Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, The Turkish Bath,

oil on canvas on wood, 108 x 110 cm., 1862. 390
1.19 Beatriz González, Nací en Florencia y tenía veintiseis años

cuando mi retrato fue pintado: esta frase pronunciada en voz
dulce y baja [I was Born in Florence and I was 26 Years Old
when My Portrait was Painted: This Sentence Pronounced in a
Sweet and Low Voice], enamel on a metal sheet assembled on a
wooden coat-stand, 200 x 90 x 24 cm., 1974. 391
1.20 Leonardo Da Vinci, Mona Lisa, oil on poplar, 77 x 53 cm.,

ca. 1503-1506. 391
x
2.1 Bernardo Salcedo, Lo que Dante nunca supo (Beatriz amaba el

control de la natalidad) [What Dante Never Knew:
Beatrice Loved Birth Control], assemblage on a wooden box,
122 x 80 x 50 cm., 1966. 392
2.2 Espacios Ambientales Exhibition Invite. 393
2.3 Alvaro Barrios in a newspaper picture denouncing the attack

against the exhibition. 393
2.4 Antonio Caro, Amigos y Amigas: Homenaje tardío de sus

amigos y amigas de Zipaquirá, Manaure y Galerazamba
(Cabeza de sal) [Friends: Late Homage to Your Friends from
Zipaquirá, Manaure y Galerazamba (Head of Salt)],
assemblage, 1970. 394
2.5 Antonio Caro, Defienda su talento [Defend Your Talent], 1973. 395
2.6 Antonio Caro, Maíz, drawings on the gallery’s walls, 1973. 395
2.7 Antonio Caro, Maíz, serigraphy, 56,3 x 75,9 cm., from 1973. 395
2.8 Antonio Caro, Colombia-Cocacola, enamel on a metal sheet,

70 x 100 cm., 1976. 396
2.9 Antonio Caro, Todo está muy Caro [Everything is so Caro

(expensive)], poster, 102 x 81.5 cm., 1978. 396
2.10 Antonio Caro, Proyecto 500 [Project500], various formats, 1992. 396
2.11 Antonio Caro, Homenaje a Manuel Quintín Lame [Homage to

Manuel Quintín Lame], various formats, from 1972. 397
2.12 Antonio Caro, Homenaje a Manuel Quintín Lame [Homage to

Manuel Quintín Lame], various formats, from 1972. 397
3.1 Nildo de Mangueira with Parangolé P4, Cape 1, 1964. 398
3.2 Poster and album cover of Opinião 64. 399
3.3 Inauguration of the Parangolé in Opinião 65 showing Cape 1

(1964) at the Museu de Arte Moderna, Rio de Janeiro, 1965. 399
xi
3.4 Nildo de Malgueira with a component of P08 Parangolé,

Tenda 01during the exhibition Opinião 65 at Museu de Arte
Moderna, Rio de Janeiro, 1965. 400
3.5 Hélio Oiticica, P 03 Parangolé Tenda 01, 1964. 400
3.6 Hélio Oiticica, Cosmococa 4 NOCAGIONS, installation,

Centro de Arte Hélio Oiticica, Rio de Janeiro, 2002. 401
3.7 Hélio Oiticica, B 15 Bólide vidro 04 “Terra”

[B 15 Glass Bólide, 04 “Earth”], 1964. 402
3.8 Hélio Oiticica, B13 Bólide caixa 10 [B 13 Box Bólide 10], 1964. 402
3.9 Hélio Oiticica, Tropicália Penetrables PN2 e PN3, 1967. 403
3.10 Hélio Oiticica, Eden Penetrables, 1969. 403
3.11 Cover. Revista de Antropofagia, 1928. 404
3.12 Cover. Mario de Andrade, Macunaima, 1928. 404
3.13 Tarsila De Amaral, Abaporu, oil on canvas, 85 x 75 cm., 1928. 405
3.14 Hans Staden, Tupinamba portrayed in cannibalistic feast,

in Hans Staden's True History: An Account of Cannibal Captivity
in Brazil, trans. and ed. Neil L. Whitehead and Michael Harbsmeier
(Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2008). 405
3. 15 Peformances of the Parangolé in Opinião 65 at the Museo de

Arte Moderna. Rio de Janeiro, 1965. 406
3.15a Peformances of the Parangolé in Opinião 65 at the Museo de

Arte Moderna. Rio de Janeiro, 1965. 406
3.16 Hélio Oiticica, Parangolé, Nildo de Mangueira with P 15

Cape 11, I Embody Revolt, 1967. 407
3.17 Hélio Oiticica, Parangolé, Nildo de Mangueira with P 14

Cape 1, Of Adversity We Live! 1967. 408
3.18 Johan Froschauer, Amerikaner, in Mundus Novus,

Ausburgh, 1505. 409
4.1 Helio Oiticica, Grande Núcleo [Grand Nucleus], 1960-66. 410

xii
4.2 Hélio Oiticica, B 17 Bólide vidro 05 Homenagem a Mondrian

[B 17 Glass Bolide 05 Homage to Mondrian], 1965. 410
4.3 Hélio Oiticica, CC5 Hendrix-War (detail), installation, 1973. 411
4.4 Luis Fernando Guimarães with Parangolé Cape 2, M’Way Ke,

New York, 1972. 412
4.5 Romero with Parangolé, Cape 25, New York, 1972. 412
4.6 Exhibition Catalogue Cover of Information, New York, 1970. 413
4.7 Oiticica’s statement. Exhibition Catalogue Information,

New York, 1970. 413
4.8 Hélio Oiticica, Whitechapel Experience, Whitechapel Gallery,

London, 1969. 414
4.9 Tropicalist Album Covers. 415
4.10 Hélio Oiticica, Homenagem a Cara de Cavalo Bólide Caixa 18

[Homage to Horse-Face Box Bolide 18], 1966. 416
4.11 Hélio Oiticica, Seja marginal, seja herói

[Be marginal, be a heroe], 1968. 416
4.12 Helio Oiticica in his Babylonests, New York, 1973. 417
4.13 Hélio Oiticica, Babylonests, 1974. 417
4.14 Oiticica’s friends in his Babylonests, New York, 1971. 418
4.15 Hélio Oiticica, Babylonests, 1970-1974. 419
4.16 Hélio Oiticica’s notebook Nitro Benzol & Black Linoleum, 1969. 420
4.17 Hélio Oiticica’s notebook Boys and Men, 1970. 420
4.18 Hélio Oiticica’s notebook Babylonests, 1971. 421
4.19 Hélio Oiticica’s notebook Jorge Brasil [Brazil Jorge], 1971. 421
4.20 Hélio Oiticica’s notebook Neyrótika, 1973. 422
4.21 Hélio Oiticica, Neyrótika, 1973. 423

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4.25 Hélio Oiticica’s letter to Torquato Neto, 1971. 425
4.26 Mario Montez, Christiny Nazareth and Antonio Días in

Agrippina e Roma Manhattan, 1972. 425
4.27 Christiny Nazareth in Hélio Oiticica, Agrippina e

Roma-Manhattan, 1972. 426
4.28 Mario Montez and Antonio Días in Hélio Oiticica,

4.29 Mario Montez and Antonio Días in Hélio Oiticica,

4.30 Photography of Mario Montez as Carmen Miranda, 1971. 427
4.31 Back of photography of Mario Montez as

Carmen Miranda, 1971. 427
4.32 Hélio Oiticica, CC1 Trashicapes, installation, 1973. 428
4.33 Hélio Oiticica, CC3 Maileryn, installation, 1973. 428
5.1 Exhibition view of Un caballero no se sienta así

[A Knight Does Not Sit that Way], Galería Santa Fe,
Bogotá, Colombia, 2003. 429
5.2 Luis Caballero, untitled, charcoal on paper, 160x120 cm., 1978.430
5.5 Luis Caballero, Gran Telón [Great Curtain], oil on canvas,

470 x 580 cm., 1990. 431
5.6 Luis Caballero drawing sketches for the Gran Telón

[Great Curtain], 1990. 431
xiv
5.7 Video still from Luis Caballero’s personal videos.

Luis Caballero 1990, Galería Garcés Velázquez, Bogotá, 1990. 432
5.8 Photos of young men violently murdered in Bogotá. Published

in El Espacio, 1990. Luis Caballero’s personal archive. 432
5.9 Luis Caballero, untitled, charcoal on paper, 105 x 75 cm., 1986. 433
5.10 Reproduction of a Luis Caballero’s drawing. Offset print.

100 x 70 cm., 1986. 433
5.11 Poster within a domestic environment, Bogotá, 2003. 433
5.12 Elias Heim, Dotación para museos en vías de extinción

[Equipment for Museums in Extinction], sculpture,
120 x 70 x 50 cm., 2003. 434
5.13 Miguel Ángel Rojas, Toho, photography and semen,

21 x 25 cm., 1979. 434
5.14 Juan Mejia’s collection of works produced in collaboration

with Wilson Díaz. 434
5.15 Exhibition view from Yo no soy esa I am not she,

Galería Santa Fe, 2005. 435
5.16 Miguel Ángel Rojas Serie Faenza (detail), 1979-2003. 436
5.17 Miguel Ángel Rojas, Sobre porcelana [On porcelain] (detail)

0,5 x 0,5 cm., 1979-2003. 437
5.18 Pictures of the most famous drag queens from Bogotá,

exhibited in Yo no soy esa. 438
5.19 Costume and crown brought to the exhibition by a drag queen. 438
5.20 Exhibition view from Yo no soy esa I am not she,

Galería Santa Fe, 2005. 439
1
Introduction
In 1996, a group of Colombian artists organized an exhibition at the Santa Fé
Gallery in Bogotá to pay homage to Pedro Manrique-Figueroa, the precursor of
collage in Colombia.1 (Fig. 0.1) While none of Manrique-Figueroa’s work was
present, the exhibition showed artworks based on his collages as well as objects
and historical documents about his life and the intellectual atmosphere that
surrounded him. On display were some of his shoes, clothes, personal belongings,
and favorite books: The Communist Manifesto, Psychology of the Masses, The Joy
of Life, Sigmund Freud: His Work and His Mind, and How to Read Donald Duck:
Imperialist Ideology and the Disney Comic. Although Manrique-Figueroa’s name
and collages had already appeared in journals such as Historia Crítica2 and
Valdéz,3 he was relatively unknown and his name was all but forgotten by art
history.
In the absence of his work, his personal possessions and the local character
of his collages drew the attention of journalists, artists, and art historians who, in
turn, came up with contradictory interpretations of his work. For some, Manrique-
Figueroa was the quintessential Latin American artist. He seemed to be the solution
to the modernist concern with the originality and autochthonous character of Latin
1
Lucas Ospina, Bernardo Ortiz, and François Bucher initially organized the retrieval of Pedro
Manrique Figueroa from oblivion. Most of Pedro Manrique’s accounts are from Lucas Ospina,
Exposición Homenaje a Pedro Manrique Figueroa: El Precursor del Collage en Colombia (Bogotá:
Galería Santa Fé /IDCT, 1996).
2
Historia Crítica 11 (July-December 1995), 4, 19, 20, 36, 37, 38, 52, 62, 78, 80, 93.
3
Valdéz 1 (1995), 31-32.
2
American art. Proof of this was found in the fact that Manrique-Figueroa was
producing collages long before any other Latin American artist and reinventing
Surrealism in line with local concerns. In his collages, Manrique-Figueroa, in a
surrealist fashion, juxtaposed the beautiful and the ugly, the brilliant and the stupid,
the normal and the repugnant, the sacred and the pagan, while proclaiming “All
rubbish is writing,” an echo of Artaud’s famous saying: “All writing is rubbish.”4
(Fig. 0.2) He appeared to be one of the many sources of the fascination with Latin
America of Artaud, Bataille, Métraux, and Rivet. Manrique-Figueroa gives an
endless twist to Joaquín Torres-García’s inverted map of Latin America. (Fig. 03)
Art historians used Manrique-Figueroa as a pretext to apply their methods,
attempting to prove his existence and artistic originality and thereby secure a place
for him in the history of Latin American art. Were these works—"trimmings" as he
lovingly called them—his original collages? His work was found scattered among
his belongings and the places where he had lived and worked. Some were
mysteriously inserted into books in public and private libraries. Others were
mingled with his clothes, and some were found in the archives of galleries and
cultural institutions under the label of “plagiarism.” He never signed his work, but
his style was unmistakable. Further investigations discovered his unique technique
of cutting and pasting. Beyond his authorial originality, the question remained:
4
Antonin Artaud, The Peyote Dance (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1995), p. 105.
3
Were these collages stylistically original? Were they authentic avant-garde art and
autochthonous Latin American cultural expressions?
The issue of originality raised many questions and debates. Martina
Diatribhe, one of Latin America’s most important art historians, briefly quoted
Pedro Manrique-Figueroa in her series of lectures about Latin American and
Colombian art in The National Library in Bogotá between 1974 and 1978. She
mentioned him to explain the modernist distinctions between high art and popular
culture, avant-garde and kitsch, international and provincial culture. She argued
that, sadly, the old-fashioned European avant-garde and German kitsch had an
unfortunate influence on his work; therefore, he was not worthy of commentary.
She stated that he was a typical example of what the Argentinean critic Marta Traba
called the mistakes of the Colombian superstructure, which, “fascinated by
melodrama, baroque, excess and kitsch, was condemned to underdevelopment and
third world-ism.”5 Consequently, Manrique-Figueroa was doomed to anonymity by
the universalistic and formalist pretensions of modernist Latin American art
history.
His career as an artist was persistently marked by failure and frustration. His
work was rejected seven times by the Colombian National Artists’ Salon. He
participated in very few group exhibitions and, in fact, the homage paid to him in
1996 at the Santa Fe Gallery was his first solo exhibition, though, unfortunately,
5
Marta Traba, Los Muebles de Beatriz González (Bogotá: Museo de Arte Moderno, 1977), p. 40.
4
none of his work was shown. He provoked a scandal at the Salon of 1968 when, to
protest Manrique-Figueroa’s exclusion, Alvaro Barrios decided to cover his own
work. The most credible version of the reasons for his rejection came from Barrios
himself, who claimed that the person in charge of receiving submissions to the
Salon thought of Manrique-Figueroa’s work as an unfortunate joke. She filed it
under her desk and forgot about it. She only found it on the day the jury was
making its final decisions, but the jury categorically rejected his work.
Accounts of Manrique-Figueroa’s life are contradictory. They are the result
of recent investigations and interviews with people who knew him, shared his
political concerns, and witnessed his misfortunes. According to the parish records
of the church of Choachí, Cundinamarca, a small town close to Bogotá, Pedro
Manrique-Figueroa was born on February 27, 1929. We know, from the same
records, that he helped the priest with various tasks but was not a sacristan, as some
art historians state. We also know with absolute certainty that he appeared on the
list of “boys” working for the Trolley Company in Bogotá. One of his various jobs
was that of cutting and pasting timetables and public announcements at the station.
Some art historians now argue that this was the source of his formal and visual
concerns and may well explain his fascination with and accuracy in making
collages.
His reasons for going to Bogotá remain obscure. The assassination of Jorge
Eliécer Gaitán, a popular candidate for the Presidential elections of 1948, provoked
5
a riot in the city. People from lower-class barrios took to the streets, destroying
stores and stealing goods. Soon, downtown Bogotá was in flames. With the
destruction of the trolleys, Pedro Manrique-Figueroa lost his job and was forced to
find a new way to make a living. He set up a stand in San Victorino, a popular flea
market in downtown Bogotá, where he sold religious cards. During his free time,
he cut pieces of religious pictures out of the Bible. He placed everything in a
rectangular format, a format he would maintain throughout his career. He had to
abandon this job when his stand was set on fire. Some historians have argued that
the culprits were members of “Tradition, Family and Property,” an extreme right-
wing movement, who were offended by Manrique-Figueroa’s vernacular use of
religious images.
He also worked as a graphic designer for the Communist Party. He created a
promotional card for the National Congress in Cucuta in 1973, which juxtaposed a
swastika with a picture of the people attending the meeting. (Fig. 0.4) For this, he
was immediately fired. On lonely rambles through the streets, Manrique-Figueroa
realized that his “trimmings” were only causing him problems and did not relate to
any ideology. Like a jealous lover, they were isolating him from his time, place,
and friends. He was 44 years old and his sole possessions were a small group of
cards, just papers that any wind could blow away. To avoid additional political
problems and fit into the demands of art critics and historians, Manrique-Figueroa
decided to become an artist.

6
For some, Manrique-Figueroa was a fabrication, a montage of true and false
stories and images which mimicked art history and revealed its “facies
hippocratica.” As a fraud, an invention, Manrique-Figueroa provoked contradictory
responses. In Semana No. 726, April 1996, Eduardo Serrano, curator of the
Museum of Modern Art of Bogotá, attacked the Santa Fe Gallery homage by
stating: “Pedro Manrique-Figueroa is a fake, he is not an artist, and he did not
exist.” Almost everyone knew this. However, for those who knew it, the homage
was a collaborative project that mimicked the rhetoric of Latin American art
history, bringing to light its obsessive emphasis on connoisseurship, authorship,
and authenticity and its links to modernist discourse. Latin American art history
persistently insisted on linking Latin American art to national identity and culture,
turning art practices into forms of social and textual affiliation that attempted to
anchor them to the linear time of modernity. Yet, during the period there were also
artistic practices that challenged the emergence and consolidation of modernist
discourse by exploring other forms of linking art, politics, and local cultures.
Manrique-Figueroa was a performance which revealed how Latin American art
history participated in the creation of narratives for the Latin American nation and
art and the ways in which those narratives were simultaneously threatened by local
and disjunctive forms of cultural signification. It was a metaphor of the ways in
which national texts are continuously constructed and, at the same time, disrupted
by the repeated emergence of local/partial accounts which challenge the validity of

7
establishment notions of culture and modernity’s pretension of being truly
universal.
In the same way that the performance which featured Pedro Manrique-
Figueroa exposes concerns about the politics of modernist art history and vindicates
local strategies to resist it, this dissertation is about the poetics and politics of Latin
American art history and its role in the emergence and consolidation of the
developmentalist discourse that governed relations between the U.S. and Latin
America after World War II. Following in the footsteps of the Pedro Manrique-
Figueroa project, it will call attention to the configurations of power and knowledge
that gave shape to a specifically Latin American art history during the Cold War. I
will contrast it with local projects which, by mimicking the discourse of that
discipline and appropriating Western languages of art, created new forms of
struggle against developmentalism, modernist rhetoric, and the art institution in
Latin America.
During the Cold War, Latin American nations witnessed the emergence of
the field of art with its related institutions, professions, and practices. Latin
American art history took shape during the sixties and seventies in the bipolar
context of the Cold War. Gerardo Mosquera has argued that its rhetoric was marked
by the “key concepts of ‘resistance,’ ‘socialization,’ ‘anti-colonialism,’ and

8
‘revolution,’ and strongly influenced by the political climate of the Cold War.”6 It
amounted, he believes, to a “boom” of Latin American critics “that involved such
great names as Juan Acha, Aracy Amaral, Damián Bayón, Fermín Fèvre, Néstor
García Canclini, Mirko Lauer, Mario Pedrosa, Marta Traba, and others who
responded to Acha’s plea for the production of theories."7 This “boom” marked the
end of the literary or poetic approach which had dominated art criticism up to then
and the emergence of a new discipline. Mosquera considers Marta Traba’s La
Pintura Nueva en América Latina to be crucial, since it was the first book “to
approach Latin American art in a global manner, attempting to give the subject
some conceptual unity.”8
Latin American art history during the sixties and seventies, he argues, was
based on social theories and an affirmative notion of Latin American identity which
gave extreme importance to the ideological character of art. Its backbone was a
strong opposition to new forms of colonialism, based on Marxist theory, a social
approach to art, and an examination of the cultural and historical dependency of
Latin America. For him, the Cuban Revolution, American support for dictatorial
regimes, and doubts about developmentalism gave art history a radical character
6
Gerardo Mosquera, Beyond the Fantastic: Contemporary Art Criticism from Latin America
(London: INIVA, 1995), p. 10.
7
Mosquera, Beyond the Fantastic, p. 10.
8
9
and made it part of the “Sixties Spirit”: a utopian agenda that saw Latin America as
“the forum for every hope and every failure.”9
In the catalogue of the exhibition Conceptualism: Points of Origin: 1960-
1980, held at the Queens Museum of Art in 1999, Mari Carmen Ramírez refers to
this oppositional character when she speaks of conceptualism in Latin American art
during the sixties and seventies. Ramírez draws attention to the misunderstandings
of conceptualism caused by the "Cold War legacy, of which Marta Traba’s biased
‘thesis of resistance’ is representative,"10 that is, Traba’s opposition to foreign
influences, especially from the United States. She states: “From the very beginning,
Traba zealously denounced conceptual practices as ‘imported fads’ whose
emergence revealed the degree to which a sector of our artists had ‘surrendered’ to
North American cultural imperialism.”11 In the chapter “La Resistencia”
[Resistance] of her book Dos Décadas Vulnerables en la Artes Plásticas
Latinoamericanas [Two Vulnerable Decades in Latin American Art], Traba
denounced “American aesthetic colonialism,” which, during the sixties, annihilated
movements like Mexican Muralism. She argued that artists such as Oswaldo
Guayasamín (Ecuador, 1919), Fernando de Szyszlo (Peru, 1925), and Alejandro
Obregón (Colombia, 1928) “resisted” American cultural imperialism by creating
9
10
Mari Carmen Ramírez, “Tactics for Thriving on Adversity: Conceptualism in Latin America,
1960-1980,” in Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin: 1950s-1980s (New York: Queens Museum
of Art, 1999), p. 54.
11
Ramírez, p. 54. She refers to Marta Traba, Dos Décadas Vulnerables en las Artes Plásticas
Latinoamericanas (México: Siglo XXI Editores, 1973), p. 87-153.
10
indigenous images that reflected the cultural and social reality of Latin America.
She called for an authentic modern Latin American art that would resist bourgeois,
imperialist trends. Ramírez questions Traba’s “passionate claims for continental
autonomy,” in the light of the end of the Cold War and new trends in critical
thinking.
Shifra Goldman also gives importance to a group of Latin American
thinkers who, in the same period, combined rigorous social history with a Marxist
approach:
Marta Traba became the most important critic promoting modern art
in South America from the 1960s until her premature death in 1983 .
. . She vehemently attacked social realism, and opted to support a
uniquely Latin American art which would not mimic that of U.S.
materialism and false values. On the whole, however, her criticism,
while of high caliber and much respected in Latin America, was
definitely idiosyncratic.12
By stressing Traba’s rejection of socialist realism and her promotion of modern
art—in fact, Traba co-founded the Museum of Modern Art in Bogotá in 1964—
Goldman subtly suggests that, despite Traba’s support for an indigenous Latin
American art and her opposition to U.S. materialism, her criticism was somehow
contradictory. Both Ramírez and Goldman seem to identify a sort of contradiction
12
Shifra Goldman, Dimensions of the Americas (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1994),
p.11. She also refers to Dos Décadas Vulnerables en las Artes Plásticas Latinoamericanas.
11
in the bipolar approach used by Mosquera to understand the emergence of Latin
American art history as being fully aligned with the political left.
Arturo Escobar has argued that instead of approaching these cultural
struggles as the results of the bipolar context of the Cold War, with the political left
at one pole and the right at the other, we should understand them as conflicts that
constituted and were constituted by developmentalism: a discursive regime that
invented the “Third World” and colonized Asian, African, and Latin American
realities. Building on the ideas of Valentin Y. Mudimbe,13 Timothy Mitchell,14 and
James Clifford,15 Escobar argues that developmentalism was an academic,
economic and military investment which produced a world order divided into
developed and underdeveloped countries, leaving behind the European civilizing
mission and reflecting the divergences between the two power blocs led by the U.S.
and the U.S.S.R. He maintains that: “Through the creation of a domain of thought
and action, development achieved the status of certainty in the social imaginary and
made the invention of the Third World possible.”16 As developmentalism was
indisputable and at the very basis of the political and social goals of both power
blocs, for some being developed meant taking the route of socialism, while for
others it meant raising the level of the lower classes and consolidating a liberal
democracy.
13
Valentin Y. Mudimbe, The Invention of Africa (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988).
14
Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).
15
James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1988).
16
Arturo Escobar, Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World
(Princeton: PUP, 1995), p. 5, 10.
12
Developmentalism followed modernity’s regime of order and truth which
divided the world into two: “a realm of mere representations and a realm of the
‘real’; into exhibitions and an external reality; into an order of mere models,
descriptions or copies, and an order of the original.”17 In line with these precepts,
developmentalism depicted the Third World as a copy attempting to become an
original, thus justifying its own configuration of power and knowledge.
Developmentalism was based on the assumption that all the peoples of the world
could reach development. However, in order to exercise its disciplinary power, this
discourse needed to invent an “other;” that is, it had to explain why not everyone
was able to achieve it. Pervading the international affairs of the two power blocs
and all social sectors from the left to the right in the developed and underdeveloped
countries, its purpose “was quite ambitious: to duplicate the world based on the
image of the developed world at the time.”18 It had such an influence on the
collective imagination, Escobar agues, that people came to think of themselves as
“developed” or “underdeveloped.”19
In Latin America, while the left promoted socialism by organizing political
parties and labor unions, promoting intellectual and artistic trends, and supporting
armed movements diversely sponsored by the USSR, U.S. policies combined
diverse strategies grouped under the rubric of modernization policies. In 1948,
17
Clifford, The Predicament of Culture, p. 8.
18
Escobar, Encountering Development, p. 8.
19
Escobar, Encountering Development, p. 8.
13
during his inaugural speech as President of the United States, Harry Truman
announced what would be American international policy towards “poor countries:”
More than half the people of the world are living in conditions
approaching misery. Their food is inadequate; they are victims of
disease. Their economic life is primitive and stagnant. Their poverty
is a handicap and a threat both to them and to more prosperous
areas. For the first time in history, humanity possesses the
knowledge and skill to relieve the suffering of these people . . . I
believe that we should make available to peace-loving peoples the
benefits of our store of technical knowledge in order to help them
realize their aspirations for a better life . . . What we envisage is a
program of development based on concepts of democratic fair
dealing . . . Greater production is the key to prosperity and peace.
And the key to greater production is a wider and more vigorous
application of modern scientific and technical knowledge.20
Modernization policies focused on the need for an entire transformation that
would enable the Latin American countries to achieve development. In the social
and economic fields, U.S. developmentalism attempted to harmonize Latin
American economies with the demands of North-Atlantic economies, to raise the
educational level of the poor and establish the democratic values of American
20
Quoted by Arturo Escobar, Encountering Development, p. 3.
14
society, even if that included promotion of military dictatorships or populist
governments. A growing interest in “poor countries” after World War II resulted in
academic studies of underdevelopment, under the assumption that an understanding
of its causes would help to strengthen the economies of Latin America and check
the Communist threat. Like earlier approaches, modernization theory argued that a
preliminary period of tutelage was necessary, which would end with the
transformation of third-world countries into civilized and independent societies. As
history was regarded as linear, the underdevelopment of Latin America was
thought to be the result of traditional colonialism rather than indirect forms of it
which emerged during the Cold War. In particular, modernization emphasized the
establishment of local industries to provide pre-manufactured natural resources for
North-Atlantic industries and allow the expansion of the exchange of finished
goods provided by developed economies, while keeping an interdependent system
of international labor division with clear distinctions between developed and
underdeveloped economies. In the social field, it contemplated the establishment of
institutions and programs devoted to eradicating illiteracy and training a cheap
labor force, believing that education would transform a Latin American population
seen as handicapped by superstition, ignorance, and Catholicism.
The implementation of modernization theories in the economic and social
fields throughout Latin America was accompanied by the materialization of
modernist art institutions and practices. During the early Cold War period,
15
museums of modern art were enthusiastically founded in Latin America’s major
cities. To name a few, the Museum of Modern Art of Buenos Aires (MAMBA) was
established in 1956, the Museum of Modern Art of Rio de Janeiro in 1948, and the
Museum of Modern Art of Bogotá in 1958 (not inaugurated until 1964), among
others. Of particular interest, the Museum of Modern Art of São Paulo, founded in
1954, was inspired by the New York Museum of Modern Art and received
financial and technical support from Nelson Rockefeller.
In line with American universities, new art schools were actively created or
transformed in Brazil, Argentina, Colombia, and México, displacing the French
model of Beaux Arts academies which had dominated the practice of art education
since the nineteenth century. Among others, it is worth mentioning the creation of
the Art School of Universidad de los Andes in Bogota in 1955, the Art School of
Mexico in 1966, the integration of the Fine Arts School of Rio de Janeiro—
founded in 1931—with the University of Rio de Janeiro in 1965, and the creation
of the Art School of Chile in May 1959, under the sponsorship and guidance of
Yale University.
Art criticism became a priority within the field of art and a number of
publications devoted to art criticism emerged between 1955 and 1965. Among
others, there were Ver y estimar [See and Appraise] in Argentina, directed by Jorge
Romero Brest; Prisma [Prism] in Colombia, directed by Marta Traba; (Fig. 0.5)
and Plástica [Plastic], also in Colombia, directed by Judith Márquez. The

16
emergence of the field also included an abundant exchange among scholars and
critics from the U.S. and Latin American countries. Promising art critics from Latin
America paid several visits to major centers of art in the U.S., sponsored by the
Fulbright Program established in 1946. Likewise, important critics like Clement
Greenberg, Alfred Barr, and Harold Rosenberg, among other prominent American
scholars in the field of arts, were invited several times to lecture in Latin America
and to be judges at Salons or Biennales of visual arts in Latin America.21 (Fig. 0.6)
My main argument is that the consolidation of the field of art, with all its
institutions and practices, and the emergence of art history as a discipline in Latin
America during the Cold War, might be seen as an integral part of
developmentalism. The consolidation of the field of art based on modernist values
and practices was the cultural counterpart of modernization theories and practices
in the economic and social fields. Modernist Latin American art history reflected
the strategy of developmentalism insofar as it created representations that portrayed
Latin American culture as the utopia of an alternative modernity, but as an
underdeveloped one, relegating it to inferiority by the modernist polarities of
original and copy, avant-garde and kitsch, cultivated and primitive, universal and
local, international and provincial. For instance, Traba’s pleas for resisting foreign
influences and for promoting indigenous cultural values for Latin America to
21
Clement Greenberg participated as a judge of the IDTD (Institute Torcuato Di Tella) and
International Prize Competition in1964. Alfred Barr was member of a team of judges in 1966. The
debates surrounding Greenberg’s and Barr’s insights regarding the competitions are explored in
detail in Andrea Giunta, Avant-Garde, Internationalism and Politics (Durham & London: Duke
University Press, 2007).
17
become modern were combined with her appreciation of Latin America as a culture
fascinated with “the baroque, excess, melodrama and kitsch,” condemned to third-
worldism. Thus, modernist Latin American art history turned Latin America into
both the subject and object of a modernist discourse which helped art history both
define itself and create its cultural other. In other words, it facilitated the creation of
the cultural conditions for developmentalism to become a regime of truth which
determined colonial relations, cultural struggles, and subjectivities of both
developed and underdeveloped societies. It attempted to integrate Latin American
culture into the discourse of developmentalism, yet it excluded it by explicitly
laying down a clear distinction between modern culture and Latin American culture
and, more subtly, relied on representations of Latin America that attempted to
include the population in the dream of developmentalism and yet excluded them as
forms of class, sexual, ethnic, or gender difference.
In his article “On Mimicry and Man,” Homi K. Bhabha has explored this
ambivalent form of representation in colonial relations through the concept of
mimicry. He argues that mimicry is a discursive strategy that determines colonial
relations of power and resistance whereby the colonized is depicted as similar, that
is, almost the same. Yet, in order to be effective, the colonizer needs to portray the
colonized as its other, that is, to disavow it as almost but not quite an equal.
Although based on principles of resemblance and likeness, mimicry is a form of

18
appropriation of the colonized which is in itself a process of disavowal.22 However,
mimicry can also be a form of resistance in which the colonized deploy disguises,
appropriates and desecrates the official culture to disrupt the effects of the
discourse.
In line with these theoretical precepts, I will explore the cultural struggles
that surrounded the emergence of the field of art in Latin America and its links to
developmentalism. Instead of concentrating exclusively on texts produced by art
historians, I will examine them through the debates and interchanges between art
historians and creators regarding some artistic projects in the sixties and seventies. I
will argue that these projects did not deploy an oppositional politics which located
them on one of the political poles art historians have put them in order to apply
their binary theoretical framework. These projects did not oppose developmentalist
and modernist discourse head on or provide a dialectical, essentialist or utopian
alternative. I believe they undermined modernist and developmentalist discourses
by creating a rich scene of experimentation that appropriated and/or mimicked it,
anticipating forms of cultural struggle that expressed profound distrust in
modernity and modernism. They insinuated themselves into the discourse,
disrupting its formulations in order to free the way for “other” collective
statements, those denied by the dream of making Latin America developed, white,
heterosexual, and masculine. Although it is not my primary concern to argue
22
Homi K. Bhabha, “On Mimicry and Man,” in The Location of Culture, Homi Bhabha (London:
Routledge, 1994), p. 85-86.
19
against the specific battles fought by art critics and historians of the period, I would
like to bring to light other forms of cultural power and resistance that not only
challenged but also complemented the approaches used by Traba, Mosquera,
Ramírez, and Goldman.
In Chapter 1, I explore the work of Colombian artist Beatriz González,
specifically her versions of the icons of Western art painted on beds, tables, vanity
tables, and coat-trees. I am particularly interested in the connections between Marta
Traba, González’s work, and Clement Greenberg’s distinction between avant-garde
and kitsch. I will argue that Traba’s modernist interpretation of local cultures and
González’s work contradicted her alignment with the political left. On the one
hand, it linked her with the need for developmentalism to produce representations
of Latin America as a backward and underdeveloped other that needed a total
reconfiguration of its cultures in order to reach modernity. On the other hand, it
encouraged Latin America’s local governments to implement American
modernization theories in the field of art and culture.
Despite Traba’s attempt to put González’s work in the context of American
formalism, González seemed to perform a kind of formalism in reverse by
displaying local ways of living the universality of modernity. As González usurps
and appropriates Western art according to its local uses, she also discusses the ways
in which its imagery sets in motion representations of women, Latin American
women and women artists as underdeveloped. Following Judith Butler’s and Diana
20
Fuss’s works on mimicry and identification, I will consider the series of mirrors
González produced between 1970 and 1978 as profound reflections on identity
formation within colonial contexts whereby, I believe, she contests modernist and
masculine discourses on art and culture by producing an “under-painting” for
under-developed countries through the eyes of an under-artistic woman.23
In Chapter 2, I examine the reception of conceptualism in Colombia and
Latin America in general by discussing Mari Carmen Ramírez’s text, “Tactics for
Thriving on Adversity: Conceptualism in Latin America, 1960—1980” published
in the catalogue of the world-wide exhibition Global Conceptualism: Points of
Origin 1950s—1980s. I will argue that her valuable insight is trapped within the
multiculturalist claim for the insertion of Latin American conceptualist practices
within the general history of the movement. Instead, I will propose to see them as
practices that anticipated a profound critique of modernity but from a perspective
that investigated and contested the colonial condition of modernity.
I will explore the work of Colombian artist Antonio Caro as representative
of an approach that can be identified in a variety of Latin American individual and
collective projects. Luis Camnitzer has called Antonio Caro a visual guerrilla.24
Caro’s work took on the construction of narratives about the nation and his
strategies functioned in local environments, penetrating the institutional networks
23
Carolina Ponce de León, “Beatriz González in situ,” in Beatriz González: Una pintora de
provincia, ed. Marta Calderón (Bogotá: Carlos Valencia Editores, 1988), p. 18.
24
Luis Camnitzer, “Antonio Caro,” in Ante América (Bogotá: Biblioteca Luis Angel Arango, 1992),
p. 54.
21
and hiding behind their frames. Antonio Caro’s work, I believe, appropriated
conceptualist strategies to supplement the cultural construction of the Latin
American nation, which, in order to keep its unity and coherence, had to expel non-
national narratives and their social subjects. Caro, I will argue, reinserts those signs
of difference in the national grammar, challenging the dream of a homogeneous
and unitary nation.
In Chapter 3, I discuss the Brazilian notion of anthropophagy: the
cannibalism, deglutition, vomiting, and defecation of Western traditions. In
particular, I explore the line of dis/continuity that links Oswald de Andrade’s
Anthropophagite Manifesto of 1928 to Hélio Oiticica’s artwork and writings about
modernism in the seventies. I will also explore how these anthropophagite
strategies gave shape to Oiticica’s Parangolé, which employed banners, tents, and
capes worn and displayed by the people of Rio’s favelas. Oiticica discussed the
ways in which modernism depicted popular culture as non-modern, turning the
poor into subject and object of political projects from the left and the right.
Through appropriation and mimicry, the Parangolé as performance enabled
popular sectors to swallow the representation of their cultures as underdeveloped
and create new strategies of survival.
In Chapter 4, I explore Oiticica’s work on sexuality, produced in the
seventies while he was living in New York. The relationship between his sexuality
and artwork has been persistently ignored by art critics and historians, an omission
22
which I would like to correct. I will relate his sexuality to the environments he
created and his questioning of representations of Latin America, popular culture,
and sexuality. I will explore his Babylonests, the name Oiticica gave to the refuge
for friends and lovers he built in his apartment in New York. I will also examine his
Quasi-cinemas, room-size installations with slide-projections, music, and films.
Some of the latter were started but never finished or were just written outlines
inspired by the New York artistic underground scene. I will argue that during his
stay in New York, Oiticica integrated all these components—films, room-size
installations, and shelters—to create a world of pleasure, lust, affection,
experimentation, and solidarity, which I call Eroiticica.
Finally, in Chapter 5, I move to the present, giving an account of recent
cultural studies of colonialism, culture and politics in the Andean Region. I begin
with the emergence of Project Modernity/Coloniality, which brings together
scholars and social activists who analyze culture and politics from a Latin
American perspective. I will discuss some of its main assumptions through case
studies which I believe call attention to the political dangers the Project may face
regarding its representation of local cultures and its cultural and political agendas. I
will take into account the recent cultural policies of government agencies and the
responses to them by cultural studies practitioners, scholars, and members of social
movements who are concerned about the persistence of colonialism in the form of
23
globalization in the arts. In particular, I will deal with some community initiatives
which seek to take art out the hands of the art institution.
As Escobar put it, there is no inside or outside in the globalized world we
live in. The Modernity/Colonialism project attempts to heed the need for a Latin
American perspective which does not posit an ontological outside, but “refers to an
outside that is precisely constituted as difference by a hegemonic discourse.”25 In
this light, the field of Andean cultural studies is situated on the border of modernity
as its difference. It attempts to change the terms of the current geopolitics of
knowledge and decolonize our thinking, doing and being to “make the struggles
against colonialism visible.” 26 It aims to create a “de-colonial attitude” which
posits new perspectives of thought different from the colonialist paradigm, basing
its approach on the social, epistemological and political practices of the people.27
25
Arturo Escobar, “Worlds and Knowledges Otherwise,” Cultural Studies, 21, 2, (2001), p. 186.
26
Pensamiento crítico y matriz (de)colonial, ed. Catherine Walsh (Quito: Universidad Andina
Simón Bolívar, 2005), p. 24.
27
Walsh, Pensamiento crítico y matriz (de)colonial, p. 24.
24
CHAPTER 1
The Artifices of Marble: Beatriz González’s Mirrors and the Politics of

Erasure
I have been tracking the transformation suffered by universal

culture within a so-called underdeveloped country.1
Beatriz González
Modernism and the Colombian Cultural Climate
A wave of impassioned comments filled the columns of Colombian newspapers
and magazines when Colombian artist Beatriz González first exhibited some pieces
of her furniture at the 2nd Coltejer Biennale in 1971 in Medellín (Colombia).
González presented La última mesa [The Last Table] (Fig. 1.1) and Naturaleza casi
muerta [Almost-Morte Nature]. (Fig. 1.2) The former is a version of Leonardo Da
Vinci’s The Last Supper painted on the surface of a metal dining table, while the
latter is an image from a popular print of Christ dying, painted on a metal sheet and
installed as a mattress on a metal bed. Both the metal dining table and the bed were
originally made by Colombian artisans. Except for the surface of the dining table
and the “mattress” of the bed, González kept the original materials and decorations
1
Francisco Célis Albán, “Beatriz González: Creo que soy un pintor de la corte,” Vanguardia
Liberal (November 5, 1981), sec. B, p. 3.
25
made by artisans whose works are, in turn, imitations of wood or glass. Some
journalists, members of the Catholic Church and the Colombian Academy of
History felt outraged by her work: “The author failed entirely”; “for elemental
decorum, it is not worth commenting on” (regarding the representation of Christ);
“La última mesa is a monstrosity.”2 One of the best-known attacks was made by
Arturo Abella, a very well-known TV journalist, who accused González of
disrespecting the history of art, religious imagery, and Colombian history just for
the sake of irony and due to a misguided idea about the true meaning of art and
culture.3
Since 1962, González had been producing versions of Western art
masterpieces and religious imagery. Of particular note, she produced versions of
Diego Velázquez’s The Surrender of Breda (Fig. 1.3) while she was a student at the
Studio Art School of the Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá from1959 to 1962.
González’s versions of The Surrender of Breda consisted of a series of paintings
based on fragments of Velázquez’s work. (Fig. 1.4) After seeing a poster of an
exhibition of Velázquez, she decided to reproduce a part of it, adding spots and
drips to it, which were typical techniques of abstract expressionism. In a catalogue
of González’s exhibition in Caracas in 1994, Katherine Chacón argued that
2
Quoted by Marta Traba, Los Muebles de Beatriz González (Bogotá: Museo de Arte Moderno,
1977), p. 66. She refused to quote the sources.
3
Although Abella’s attack has been widely cited by art historians, the actual reference does not
exist. It only appears in Traba’s reference to González’s version of a portrait of Simón Bolívar by
Pedro José Figueroa in the nineteenth century. She said, “Every time I see González’s Bolívar, I feel
more and more satisfied with it. For me, Arturo Abella’s diatribe, coming from him, is exaltation.”
26
González’s choice of Velázquez during her studies can be seen as “a justified move
to demonstrate some sort of originality.”4 Chacón specifically refers to González’s
response to the changing atmosphere at the Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá. At
the time, the School counted among its professors the Catalan painter Juan Antonio
Roda, who came to Colombia in 1955 after a successful career in Barcelona and
Paris; the Colombian artist Carlos Rojas, who by that time was a promising local
artist and whose work was informed by cubism and abstractionism; and the
Argentinean art critic Marta Traba, who moved to Colombia in 1955. They brought
to the school new perspectives regarding not only the changing conditions of
artistic practice in the international scene but also contemporary ways for art to be
taught.
Before these new academic conditions came into being, the program was
given the designation “A School for Upper-Class Ladies” by some people from the
artistic milieu, as they thought of its students as a bunch of women who wanted to
take drawing and painting lessons for the sole purpose of finding a husband.
González remarked on the unequal number of women studying Studio Art School
at Los Andes at that time. There were almost ninety women enrolled, and the ratio
of women to men was ten to one, she said. Conversely, the number of women
practicing art and being recognized in the field of art as professional artists was
approximately the opposite. The artistic scene was dominated by the already
4
Katherine Chacón, “Beatriz González: Pintora Colombiana, Nacida en Bucaramanga en . . .,” in
Beatriz González Retrospectiva, ed. Katherine Chacón (Caracas: Museo de Bellas Artes, 1994), p. 5.
27
overwhelming figure of Fernando Botero, who by that time was the Colombian
artist most recognized on the international scene and quickly became a kind of role
model for young Colombian artists. As the National Salon of Colombian Artists
was perhaps the most important venue whereby the arts were made public, the list
of its participants during 1957-1964 is representative of the unbalanced relationship
between men and women in the field of arts in Colombia during that period. The
works presented in the Salon were in their majority produced by men and the prizes
were mostly given to their works. The presence of women was scant and only a few
were recognized as artists. Among them were Débora Arango, Beatriz Daza, Alicia
Tafur, Judith Márquez, and Lucy Tejada, whose work, Mujeres sin hacer nada
[Women Doing Nothing], was awarded a prize in 1957.
González was actively involved in changing this representation of both
women artists and the art school of Los Andes. During her studies and along with
her constant research on masterpieces of Western art, she and three other women
students created a group to challenge perceptions and to situate the works of
women artists within the artistic field in different terms. González said: “There
were four of us among ninety women who thought of art differently: Camila
Loboguerrero, who is today a very well-known filmmaker; Gloria Martínez, who
became an unrecognized painter, and Ligia Jiménez, of whom we never heard again
after school.”5 They opened their own atelier and promoted discussions about their
5
Chacón, Beatriz González Retrospectiva, p. 2.
28
works among their professors and art journalists. She says: “Having our own atelier
was a fundamental change in our careers . . . We tried to change the things we were
taught in class. We talked, researched and had important visitors like Marta
Traba.”6
The apparent contradiction between a school full of women being trained to
depict landscapes, fruits, and flowers and a field of mainly masculine art may have
been a sign of González’s interest in being part of the “movement” promoted by her
professors to change the school’s orientation. She became highly interested in
revisiting European painting from a modernist viewpoint according to the
framework brought to the School by the faculty. Particularly, in relation to her
experiment with Velázquez’s painting, she said:
I was not interested in Velázquez as such, but in the hats his
characters wore. The hats are very pictorial since they are usually
made with just one stroke . . . After graduation, I did Fragment of
the Surrender of Breda, which meant a lot to me since I
demonstrated that I was ready to work without any supervision . . .
That year [1963] I received a letter inviting me to exhibit at the
recently founded Museum of Modern Art of Bogotá as the young
artist of the year.7
6
7
29
After the credit she gained among her professors due to her experiment with
Velázquez’s work, she started to produce appropriations of Western art
masterpieces. The exhibition as the young artist of the year was entitled
Lacemakers and showed her versions of Jan Vermeer’s The Lacemaker (Fig. 1.5)
as it was the final project she presented for her BA in Fine Arts at the Universidad
de los Andes. (Fig. 1.6) Among others, there were her versions Encajera
Almanaque Pielroja [The Redskin Calendar Lacemaker] (1963), (Fig. 1.7)
Encajera negativa [Inverted Lacemaker](1963), (Fig. 1.8) Encajera roja [The Red
Lacemaker] (1963), Encajera dinámica [The Dynamic Lacemaker] (1963),
Encajera cinematográfica [The Cinematographic Lacemaker], and La última
vermeeriana [The Last Vermeerian] (1963). Using Vermeer’s piece as a motif,
González’s versions are constructed by flattened and contrasted colors that attempt
to reveal the pictorial structure of the character originally depicted by Vermeer.
Omitting the details of the background, González’s lace-makers seem to have been
created to mark a distinction between her work and abstractionism, widely
practiced by her male contemporaries, while exploring other forms of figuration.
González’s research on The Lacemaker progressively changed from an
interest in exploring color and painting as such—in accordance with her professors’
advice—to an examination of modern art as a cultural referent situated within other
symbolic and geographic coordinates. As the titles of her versions indicate, her
appropriations of Vermeer are combined with a poignant humor and mockery of

30
Western art’s pretensions to universality, enlightenment, and refinement. In her
Encajera Almanaque Pielroja, for instance, González departed from Vermeer and
transformed his work by using local cultural referents, like the colorful images used
to advertise Pielroja—a very traditional brand of Colombian cigarettes.
As a marketing strategy during that period—which is still used today—
every year a calendar promoting Pielroja cigarettes was given away and gradually
became part of the visual atmosphere of Colombian homes. (Fig. 1.9) In the upper
part, the calendar depicted a woman smoking, while the lower part contained the
actual calendar with sayings such as “Light a Pielroja” or “Pielroja is so pleasant.”
(Fig. 1.10) About the choice of Vermeer as the subject of her series and the relation
of his versions to the local atmosphere, she said: “I do not know why I chose The
Lacemaker. I always liked it very much . . . I think it had to do with the fact that we
had framed posters of artworks at home. My mom had posters of artworks she
liked, and The Lacemaker was there.”8 Playing with universal cultural icons,
González took them out of their original context and placed them in other cultural
practices of signification and visual atmospheres. She says: “Owing to my
obsession with Vermeer’s accents, his defined yet sfumato shapes, which remind
me of Pielroja [Redskin] calendars, I transformed The Lacemaker, severing her
from Vermeer, from her ambience, from herself.”9
8
9
Quoted by Marta Traba, Los Muebles de Beatriz González, p. 20.
31
González said that her appropriations of Western cultural icons and their
local uses were part of an effort to measure the “temperature” of the Colombian
cultural climate. During the sixties, this study of the local conditions that gave
shape to the uses of Western heritage took form on the basis of two main sources:
Western art masterpieces and popular imagery (which in Latin America indicates
both mass culture and popular culture coming from the lower classes). González re-
used images that were published in art books, newspapers, magazines, postcards
and posters. These images depicted artworks, religious imagery or simply
photographs illustrating ironic situations reported in the newspapers. Always using
sarcastic titles in a tone of mockery, González, for instance, transformed newspaper
pictures of important members of the international jet-set. There are her versions of
a picture of Jackie Onassis visiting Cairo, which González entitled Jackeline Oasis
(1975), (Fig. 1.11) and her version of Queen Elizabeth posing for the camera in her
full royal costume, which she entitled Adiós África [Goodbye Africa] (1968). (Fig.
1.12) But there are also versions of these international figures inserted into local
landscapes, such as the picture of Queen Elizabeth riding a horse across the Boyacá
Bridge, where the final battle for Colombian independence took place in 1819. She
entitled her work La Reina Isabel se pasea por el Puente de Boyacá [Queen
Elizabeth on an outing to the Boyacá Bridge]. (Fig. 1.13)
In 1966, she was awarded a prize in the National Salon for her work Los
suicidas del Sisga [The Sisga Suicides], (Fig. 1.14) inspired by a photograph
32
published in national newspapers of a couple who decided to take their picture just
before they committed suicide. (Fig. 1.14a) González recalls: “One day I opened
the newspaper and I found the picture. The story was about a gardener who went
crazy and told his girlfriend, who happened to be a maid, that the world was full of
sin and that it would be better to cease to exist. They decided to jump into the icy
waters of Sisga Lake.”10 Regarding the importance of Los Suicidas in defining her
approach to the uses of universal cultures by local cultures, she stated:
Since Los Suicidas, I knew I had to work on taste and that it was
going to be one of my most important subjects. It was not about
good or bad taste. It was about the reasons people chose particular
themes, why people decorated their homes with certain kinds of
images. It was then that I made the link between art and sociology. I
was not as interested in formalist explorations as I was in taste, in
part because I always rejected refinement. Colombian art critic
Germán Rubiano had written an article about my work and stated
that I sacrificed the formal, the pictorial, the good school. He was
right: I rejected pictorial qualities in the search for visual effects and
coherent accounts.11
Returning to the two pieces shown at the Biennale Coltejer in 1971, they can be
understood as a continuation of González’s exploration of the uses of Western
10
11
33
cultural imagery by local cultures, an interest she was pursuing during the sixties.
Naturaleza casi muerta is a metal bed in which she conflates a popular image of
Christ based on a European pictorial tradition with furniture decoration reflecting
popular taste, which includes simulated wood and glass. Of her choice of a bed to
frame her painting of Christ, she commented: “The use of beds in my work may
have emerged from a resistance to my mother’s inclination to see bad taste
everywhere.”12 Accordingly, she stated: “Whenever I saw a popular bed made of
fake materials, I thought: ‘I have to have one of those.’ When I finally got one, I
went home and realized that the painting [of Christ dying] would fit in perfectly. I
put it on the bed and it was then that my whole period of beds and furniture
started.”13And she adds: “If I see Da Vinci’s The Last Supper, I cannot see
anything but a table. If I find a towel rack made of a fake shell, I cannot help
thinking of Botticelli’s Venus.”14 The Last Supper image, in turn, has been
extensively transformed by Colombians, who use it on greeting cards, posters, and
magnetized images stuck on their front doors to magically ward off attacks by
burglars or demons. Regarding this transformation, González said:
I was interested in exploring a cultural phenomenon whereby the
values of a culture are radically changed when its icons or products
are inserted into new cultural contexts. It is a sort of transmutation.
12
13
Chacón, Beatriz González Retrospectiva,p. 15.
14
Célis, “Beatriz González: Creo que soy un pintor de la corte,” p. 3.
34
All I have done is to look at European culture from a provincial
viewpoint, through images in books, illustrations, museum
catalogues and tourist guides. For me nature itself is nothing else but
a large background curtain for that culture.”15
The transformation of the European art heritage into goods used for practical
purposes by Colombians is converted back into art by González in an attempt to
situate her work within the debates and cultural struggles that were taking place in
Colombia and Latin America during the Cold War, owing to the implementation of
educational and cultural programs that aimed at putting traditional Latin American
cultures at the service of progress.
Marta Traba, who at the time had written one of the most influential studies
of González’s work, opposed the attacks on Gonzalez’s Naturaleza casi muerta and
La última mesa at the Coltejer Biennale, arguing that it was a response ‘polluted’
by ideological considerations and therefore unable to approach art with the
disinterest appropriate to an aesthetic object. Discarding González’s contempt for
formalist readings of her work, Traba said:
Those who are incapable of reading the true significance of this
meta-language, which proposes a semiotics of semiotics, have
already been corrupted by the first fundamental desecration of art,
by which consumer society transformed art into mere ideology, and
15
Beatriz González, “Letter to the Reader,” in XVIII Venice Bienal (Exh. Cat), 1978.
35
have lost the capacity to read its message . . . art criticism aids the
comprehension of artistic expressions; this is indisputable, so long
as the work can be analyzed according to its operating
mechanisms.16
Born in Buenos Aires (Argentina) in 1923, Marta Traba played a very
important role in the dissemination of modernism in Latin American art and art
history in the fifties and sixties. She studied literature at the University of Buenos
Aires and began her career as an art critic there under the influence of Jorge
Romero-Brest, who was a highly-regarded Latin American art historian during the
fifties and sixties and recognized as a promoter of modern European art. In 1948,
Traba moved to Paris and occasionally attended courses in art history given by
Pierre Francastel and Giulio Carlo Argan, among others. During her stay in Paris,
she published articles and exhibition reviews in Ver y Estimar [See and Appraise],
a journal founded in 1948 and edited by Romero Brest. In 1954, after she met and
married the Colombian intellectual and writer Alberto Zalamea, she moved to
Colombia, where she quickly became a prominent figure in the Colombian artistic
milieu. Deeply interested in stimulating the activity of art criticism in Colombia,
she gave courses on art criticism at the Universidad de America and organized a
group of promising young professionals who were interested in art criticism. She
also founded Prisma [Prism], a publication devoted to art criticism that disappeared
16
Traba, Los Muebles de Beatriz González, p. 66.
36
after eleven issues. Along with her activities as a TV journalist, novelist, lecturer,
and writer of books and articles on Latin American and Colombian art, she co-
founded the Museum of Modern Art of Bogotá in 1964, known today as the
MAMBO.17
Traba participated in the formation of this cultural and political atmosphere
through her writings on art. These were mostly published in the magazine La nueva
prensa [The New Press], which was founded by her husband, who publicly
criticized the political and economic context that governed Colombia at the time.
Always threatened by bankruptcy and by boycotts orchestrated by right-wing
cultural movements, La nueva prensa periodically published chronicles and articles
about the Cuban Revolution and became an important opponent of the Alliance for
Progress, the United States foreign policy initiative for Latin America during the
Cold War.
Traba progressively radicalized her political opposition to American
economic and military intervention in Latin America as well as the spread of
American cultural and artistic modes of production. In 1966, she visited Cuba and
became a public defender of the Cuban Revolution, giving lectures and writing
articles promoting socialism. Noting that she was a foreigner, right-wing politicians
and intellectuals increasingly accused her of interfering in domestic concerns and
17
In particular, she was the author of books such as La pintura nueva en Latinoamerica (1961), Seis
artistas contemporáneos colombianos (1963), Los cuatro monstruos cardinales (1965), Historia
abierta del arte colombiano (1974), Art of Latin America 1900-1980 (1994), among other books and
articles.
37
promoting revolts and leftist movements in the universities where she was a
professor. The public debate that dominated media attention reached a scandalous
point when, in 1966, Colombian president Carlos Lleras Restrepo issued an
ultimatum for her to leave Colombia. Traba stayed, however, but resigned all her
public positions and almost completely retired. She became deeply involved in her
literary writing, for which she won several prizes, including the Casa de las
Americas prize given by the Cuban government.
In 1973, her book Dos décadas vulnerables de las artes plásticas
latinoamericanas, 1950-1970 [Two Vulnerable Decades in Latin American Art,
1950-1970] was published. It is a revision of her previous writings and considered
to be Traba’s definitive statement against American cultural imperialism. For her,
Latin America was divided into open and closed cultural areas. Open areas, like
Venezuela and Argentina, were those which had received important European
immigration and where the influence of native cultures was low. By contrast,
closed areas, like Colombia and Peru, had seen insignificant immigration and their
native cultures had had remarkable effects on their daily life. Open areas, according
to her, were condemned to imitate foreign cultures, while the closed ones had the
responsibility of promoting an authentic Latin American modernity by encouraging
and enhancing native values. When Traba called attention to Latin America’s
helplessness in her book Two Vulnerable Decades, she felt that not even the closed
areas escaped the growing influence of American culture, since artists and
38
intellectuals had already assimilated artistic trends coming from New York and had
abandoned a critical viewpoint. She perceived that the possibility of modernity
growing from Latin America’s native roots was being discarded.
Cuban art critic Gerardo Mosquera has recognized Traba as a pioneer of
Latin American art history, arguing that she “published the first book to approach
Latin American art in a global manner, attempting to give the subject some
conceptual unity.”18 Although Traba herself related her work to French sociology
of art and social art history,19 Mosquera situates her work in the confrontational
political climate arising from the bipolar nature of international affairs during the
Cold War. At that time, according to Mosquera, Latin American art and art history
were mainly informed by leftist modes of cultural critique and opposed to
American cultural, military, and political intervention. In particular, the Cuban
Revolution, the emergence of local guerrillas, and social movements of various
kinds caught the attention of intellectuals and artists, who, in turn, were under
surveillance by the U.S and local governments. However, when analyzing
González’s artwork, Traba stated:
Wherever it goes, her work will be read as a great work of art,
without considerations of its national or provincial background
18
Gerardo Mosquera, ed. Beyond the Fantastic: Contemporary Art Criticism from Latin America
(London: INIVA, 1995), p. 10. He refers to Marta Traba’s La pintura nueva en Latinoamerica
(Bogotá: Ediciones Librería Central, 1961).
19
In fact, when asked about her approach, she answered, “Sociology of art, exactly the way Pierre
Francastel thought of it: A sociology that is interdisciplinary, that investigates the profound
structures of both the art object and the social context, without abandoning the visual field.” Quoted
in Emma Araujo de Vallejo, Marta Traba (Bogotá: Planeta Editores, 1984), p. 340.
39
affecting its standing . . . To suppose that her work’s close relation
to local idiosyncrasies might diminish its importance and condemn it
to anonymity is to ignore that a work of art triumphs solely to the
degree in which it is supported by a sufficiently valid formal
structure.20
When carefully read, however, Traba’s approach to González’s work seems to be
mainly guided by the principles of American formalism which Traba had
supposedly rejected. By considering the purpose of art to be the achievement of a
valid formal structure, Traba seemed to echo American formalism’s central
argument that art is a formal practice that takes its own methods and rationale as its
subject matter and whose relevance lies almost exclusively in its relation to an
autonomous artistic tradition of visual and formal issues. Even more, when
exploring the local character of González’s work, Traba paralleled formalist
arguments—proposing that a successful artwork must avoid any local or national
reference and achieve the level of the universal. Finally, when opposing responses
to González’s work “polluted” by ideological considerations, Traba seemed to
follow the modernist demand for an objective and neutral art history whose main
concern was to maintain the disinterest appropriate to aesthetic objects, apart from
ideology and politics.
20
Traba, Los Muebles de Beatriz González, p. 9-10.
40
Traba’s reading of González’s work raises important questions about the
ways in which the politics of art and art criticism was framed and understood
during the Cold War period in Latin America. For example, how, I wonder, are we
to reconcile Gonzalez’s interest in drawing attention to local uses of Western art
and Traba’s attempt to displace her work from the local to the universal, using a
formalist and modernist rationale? Furthermore, how are we to link Traba’s leftist
activism and her public disavowal of what she perceived as the American cultural
project with her enthusiastic use of American high modernism? It seems to me that
the oppositional framework that has been used to understand these issues—with
socialism situated at one pole and capitalism at the other—is not sufficient. Despite
the politically-charged public responses by art critics and historians on both the
right and the left, all seem to stem from the very same origin: Art is above all a
formal and universal matter and it has to be read and talked about from and through
modernism. It is as if those involved in the cultural sphere had placed the politics of
art in a realm beyond what is considered to be properly artistic—a formal
proposition—where the modernist reading of art is taken for granted and is not
political. Clearly, during the Cold War there was a mode of thought, a regime of
truth, in which everyone operated but could not give an account of it in terms
different from those of the binary rationale that dominated the period. Within the
context of growing American hegemony, a new order of things emerged, insofar as

41
the distinctions between the Latin American left and the right no longer described
the positions in which their very practitioners were placing themselves.
In this chapter, I will explore the conflicting dialogue that took place
between Traba and González regarding the appropriation of modernism in Latin
America within the context of the implementation of modernization theories and
practices during the Cold War period. I will analyze Traba’s book Los muebles de
Beatriz González [The Furniture of Beatriz González], which is strongly influenced
by Traba’s reading of Clement Greenberg’s approach to kitsch and folklore. Just as
Traba attempted to discredit local cultures in order to fit González’s work into the
dictates of American formalism, I will place her uses of Greenberg within the
context of the U.S. search for cultural hegemony after World War II. I will argue
that Traba’s interpretation of local cultures and González’s work linked her with
the construction of representations of Latin America as a backward and
underdeveloped other that needed a total reconfiguration of its cultures in order to
reach modernity. In spite of Traba’s alignment with the political left, her use of
high modernism achieved the opposite: It helped create representations of Latin
America as an underdeveloped culture and encouraged its local governments to
implement American modernization theories in the field of art and culture.
In order to discuss Traba’s formalist reading of González work, I will argue
that González’s appropriations of the local uses of Western cultural heritage should
be understood as a reflection of her interest in being part of the cultural struggles

42
about the implementation of modernizing theories in the field of art that took place
between non-modern cultures and modern culture during the Cold War. In other
words, González was exploring and contesting the colonial condition of modernity
within the context of developmentalism. Instead of being an artistic and universal
reflection on popular culture—as Traba interpreted it—I will argue that González’s
work performs an American formalism in reverse. That is to say, instead of
universalizing local cultures, her work localizes the universal pretension of
modernity. Through the exploration of the dissemination of Western traditions
across different signifying systems, she explores local ways of experiencing the
universality of cultural modernity.
Furthermore, when revising González’s interest in the struggles over the
cultural translation of the Western heritage into non-Western local cultural
contexts, one cannot help noticing that González gave special emphasis to the ways
in which that imagery could construct representations of Latin American women.
González appropriated not only the local appropriations of Western art
masterpieces that use women as their subject—Vermeer’s The Lacemaker, Da
Vinci’s Mona Lisa or Raphael’s The Virgin of the Chair, for instance—but also
pictures taken out of newspapers and magazines that were about popular and mass
culture’s references and constructed representations of the Latin American woman.
Along with the works I referred to above—her Jackeline Oasis or Queen Elizabeth
being portrayed in Africa, Goodbye —her investigation also included, among

43
others, representations of women participating in beauty pageants eagerly reported
in all the media. It seems then that González’s appropriation and deliberate
falsifying of the Western canon of art and culture is a critique of the colonial
condition of modernity and of high modernism as a primarily masculine condition.
In other words, González seemed to localize the universal pretension of modernity
through an examination of the construction of both Latin America and women as
underdeveloped or, better, Latin America as an underdeveloped woman.
In order to explain this affirmation I will explore her series of mirrors
produced between 1970 and 1977. In this series, González appropriated the
imagery of women produced by Western art and re-framed it by using popular
furniture made by local artisans. For this analysis, I will also take into account
Diana Fuss’s important work on identification. I will also borrow the figure of
catachresis deployed by Judith Butler to interpret Luce Irigaray’s attack on the
masculine discourse that has dominated Western philosophy. By convention,
catachresis designates the wrong or improper use of a word to create a paradoxical
figure of speech. Just as Traba interpreted local cultures catachrestically, that is to
say, Latin America as an improper modernity, I will likewise argue that González’s
work usurps and re-uses this approach through a catachrestic representation of
women, women artists, and Latin America, that is to say, as figures representing the
improper and the property-less. Paraphrasing González, I would say she produced
44
an under-painting for under-developed countries through the eyes of an under-
artistic woman.21
Avant-garde and Kitsch: The Vital [Modernist] Center
Journalists, artists, critics, and art historians have called González’s artwork pop
and populist, modernist and kitsch, local and universal, in good taste and in bad,
false and real art, too Colombian and not Colombian enough. Although one of the
most frequent descriptions applied to González’s artwork has been that of “cursi”
or kitsch, González herself has said, “I do not believe that the Colombian society
on which I work is kitsch, but a society ‘without measure,’ in all proportions and
senses of the word.” 22 In his definition of kitsch, Clement Greenberg states:
The precondition for kitsch, a condition without which kitsch would
be impossible, is the availability close at hand of a fully matured
cultural tradition, whose discoveries, acquisitions, and perfected
self-consciousness kitsch can take advantage of for its own ends. It
borrows from it devices, tricks, stratagems, rules of thumb, themes,
converts them into a system, and discards the rest. It draws its life
blood, so to speak, from this reservoir of accumulated experience.”23
21
Carolina Ponce de León, “Beatriz González in situ,” in Beatriz González: Una pintora de
provincia, ed. Marta Calderón (Bogotá: Carlos Valencia Editores, 1988), p. 18.
22
Quoted by Marta Traba, Los Muebles de Beatriz González, p. 13. In Spanish, the use of “cursi”
and kitsch is undifferentiated.
23
Clement Greenberg, “Avant Garde and Kistch,” in Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and
Criticism, ed. John O’Brian (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. 1955), I, p. 12.
45
As Serge Guilbaut has pointed out, Greenberg’s concern with kitsch was part of the
realignment of the intellectual left in the United States. In particular, the U.S.
intellectual left perceived the Soviet Union’s socialism as being as totalitarian as
fascism. As has been widely noted, the invasion of Finland by the Soviet Union and
the German-Soviet pact between Hitler and Stalin provoked a strong feeling of
disillusionment among members of the American left, including writers, critics, and
artists.24 Within this context, some intellectuals found in Trotsky’s ideas a defense
of a critical art that should remain independent of any authority other than its own
rules and principles, which was a precept that would facilitate the transition of
artists from figurative to abstract art and from a committed art to art for art’s sake.
As Trotsky said:
Art, like science, not only does not seek orders but also by its very
essence cannot tolerate them. Artistic creation has its own laws—
even when it consciously serves as a social movement. Truly
intellectual creation is incompatible with lies, hypocrisy, and the
spirit of conformity. Art can become a strong ally of the revolution
only insofar as it remains faithful to itself.25
Greenberg’s rejection of kitsch helped establish a formalist theory of modern art
that lacked the revolutionary principles that informed classical Marxism: “We no
24
Serge Guilbaut, “The New Adventures of the Avant-garde in America: Greenberg, Pollock, or
from Trotskyism to the New Liberalism of the ‘Vital Center,’” in Art in Modern Culture: An
Anthology of Critical Texts, ed. Francis Frascina and Jonathan Harris (New York: Phaidon Press
Ltd., 1992), p. 239.
25
Leon Trotsky, “Art and Politics,” Partisan Review, 5, 3, (August-September 1938), 3.
46
longer look toward socialism for a new culture—as inevitable as one will appear
once we do have socialism. Today we look to socialism simply for the preservation
of whatever living culture we have right now.”26 For Greenberg, modernist avant-
garde culture had the task of preserving the innovative spirit of modern culture
from the growing influence of the culture industry and intimidating fascist and
communist forces: He said: “Kitsch is mechanical and operates by formulas. Kitsch
is vicarious experience and faked sensations. Kitsch changes according to style but
always remains the same. Kitsch is the epitome of all that is spurious in the life of
our times.”27
Articulated by the principles of free artistic expression and the universalism
of human aesthetic experience, American formalism conceived of art as a field
whose main concern was the practice of art itself. Its canon of creative freedom was
intended to differentiate American art from both European avant-garde—which
was then regarded as an exhausted academicism still interested in the representation
of reality—and Socialist Realism and Kitsch, the latter considered to be a complex
product of the culture industry and fascism as well as a degeneration of high art and
culture. American formalism achieved this ideal of universalism through a
transition, on the part of critics and artists, from nationalism to internationalism to
universalism; that is to say, from a national art to a socialist art to a universal art, a
26
Clement Greenberg, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” in Clement Greenberg: the Collected Essays and
Criticism, ed. John O’Brian (Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 1993), I, 22.
27
Greenberg, “Avant-Garde and Kistch,” p. 12.
47
process which “illustrates how the American avant-garde rid itself of the idea of
any claims to be local or political.”28
The disenchantment of leftist intellectuals, artists, and critics and the
emergence of formalism need to be seen, in turn, within the climate created by the
“new liberalism” that gave shape to American foreign affairs after World War II.
Guilbaut states that this “new liberalism” was mostly grounded on the book The
Vital Center by Arthur Schlesinger Jr., which created an agenda for American
hegemony where liberal democracy and ceaseless technological, social, and
political innovation were fundamental priorities. As Guilbaut states, it was this
context that led to a peculiar alliance among American intellectuals, artists, and
politicians: “It was a slow process by which the emerging avant-garde elaborated,
in 1947 and 1948, a new ideology in tandem with a new mode of cultural
production. Fluid at first, ideology and style solidified quickly.”29 Art as a formal
practice expressing the “universal” was a reconciliation of avant-garde ideology
and the ideology of postwar liberalism. It was an agreement that combined
American ideals of freedom with the idea of an art that surpassed national
boundaries and expressed the universally “human.” As Robert Motherwell put it:
“Art is not national; to be merely an American or French artist is to be nothing; to
fail to overcome one’s initial environment is never to reach the human.”30
28
Serge Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1985), p. 174.
29
Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art, p. 2.
30
14 Americans, ed. Dorothy Miller (New York: MoMA, 1946), p. 36.
48
Although Traba recognized González’s rejection of kitsch as useful to
explain her artwork, Traba stated:
From the many explanations of kitsch, I prefer to use that of
Clement Greenberg to describe González’s work as a product of
kitsch. A careful examination of this [Greenberg’s] statement shows
that it may be applied, point by point, to the tendencies of Beatriz
González. It is not applicable in its negative sense, in the way that
Broch, Adorno, Macdonald and Greenberg himself, among others,
have used it when they refer to kitsch as the alteration of values
explicitly promoted by the culture industry.31
In order to apply Greenberg’s definition of kitsch to González’s artwork, Traba
characterized González’s work as a formalist reflection of kitsch, using kitsch
merely as a source and, therefore, transforming it into a universal artwork. She
wanted to avoid regarding González’s work as non-art or, at least, as a vulgar
expression of culture, precisely the sort of expression criticized by American
formalism. Thus, Traba invoked two Greenbergs: First, the early Greenberg who in
1939 defined, formalized, and launched an ideological project for American art by
establishing distinctions between it and European avant-garde, kitsch, and socialist
realism, which in turn, were seen as the cultural expressions of regions threatening
American hegemony. Also, the early Greenberg provided an agenda for artists,
31
Traba, Los Muebles de Beatriz González, p. 13-14.
49
based on a notion of art detached from any political commitment. She also invoked
the late Greenberg of 1948, when he promoted Abstract Expressionism and the
principles of freedom of expression and universal art. As Guilbaut states: “In this
respect, postwar American culture was placed on the same footing as American
military strength: In other words, it was made responsible for the survival of
democratic liberties in the “free” world.”32
Traba considered González’s meditations to be part of the artistic
movements of the sixties and seventies that were deeply concerned with art’s loss
of meaning as well as with the growing fetishization of the artist with the
emergence of post-World War II consumerism. By reinterpreting Western artistic
representation, Traba argued, those movements sought to re-consecrate the work of
art while avoiding ideology by “assigning art a specific and differentiated field of
action,” that is, differentiated from other cultural expressions.33 Following
Adorno’s rejection of an idealist rehabilitation of the artistic theme, Traba preferred
to define art as a “settled social content” situated between social and autonomous
facts: art is a concrete mediation between the structure of the work and that of
society.
Within this context, she distinctly linked González’s work to the values of
flatness and the optical, the very terms with which American formalism defined the
32
Serge Guilbaut, “The New Adventures of the Avant-garde in America: Greenberg, Pollock, or
from Trotskyism to the New Liberalism of the ‘Vital Center’,” October 15 (Winter 1980), 177.
33
50
nature and rationale of painting, in order to place it within the modernist mode of
cultural production. Traba writes:
In Last Table and Nature Almost Morte, Beatriz González paints
“traditionally” on metal sheets. The term “traditional” can only be
permitted in relation to the technique of applying enamel with a
brush. For the rest, her painting as a visual proposition is strictly
modern: The space only refers to the surface, as opposed to the
traditional concept of illusionistic painting.”34
Traba seems to reject some of the results of the American cultural ideal which
surfaced in the artistic trends of the sixties, and yet she does not seem to reject
modernism itself nor its rationale. One difficulty with her use of modernist
formalism to explain González’s work is that González explicitly dealt with mostly
modern Western artistic iconography. González made versions of Picasso,
Gauguin, and Renoir, among others, installing them on beds, tables, coat-stands
and dressing tables. Of particular note, she produced a version of Renoir’s Dance at
the Moulin de la Gaulette, reproducing a detail of the Renoir painting on ten meters
of paper. She named this work Diez metros de Renoir [Ten Meters of Renoir] and
sold it by centimeters or meters, according to the buyer. She signed the work on the
edge of the canvas, similar to industrial trademarks stamped on the borders of
fabrics.
34
51
González’s versions of Western art forced Traba to revise her use of the
term kitsch in relation to González’s work by establishing a distinction between the
appropriation of high culture by kitsch (which, according to Greenberg,
irremediably falls into repetition) and by avant-garde artists whose aim is to
produce something new. Employing Greenberg’s definition of an autonomous
avant-garde that regards art itself as its main object, she considered González to be
an avant-garde artist, since her procedures, her methods, and her reflections on the
practices of art enabled her to make art progress. Traba wrote:
In the face of past cultural production, an artist has two choices: to
revise culture and take any cultural production in order to rework it,
as Picasso or [Mexican artist] José Luis Cuevas did, for instance, or
to use a past cultural product, taking it out of its context and giving a
place to the anachronism of kitsch . . . In the first case artists use the
cultural fact in the same way as reality, dreams, or geometry: as a
starting point to produce something new.35
Traba shifted kitsch from its early associations with art to popular cultures of the
underdeveloped world which appropriates high art, while at the same time, and in
an opposite direction, she attempted to shift González’s work from the category of
kitsch and popular culture to that of avant-garde art, in line with the aims of
American formalism. Traba argued that González’s work illustrated “the mistakes
35
52
of the Colombian superstructure, which, fascinated by melodrama, baroque, excess
and kitsch, was condemned to underdevelopment and third world-ism.”36
Traba’s continuous substitutions and displacements of the meanings of
formalism, kitsch, González’s work, and popular culture mean that her ideas
persistently overlap, slip into another and redefine themselves. In this respect,
consider this statement by Traba:
The importance of . . . kitsch is to locate it as a cultural
epiphenomenon . . . It feeds on something that culture has already
produced, representing it once without regard for temporality. While
identifying itself with repetition by putting the past into the present,
it necessarily falls into the category of parody. The problem of
kitsch is above all a temporal one.37
By convention, epi is a prefix meaning: “upon,” “on,” “near,” “at,” “before,”
“after,” “in addition to.” “Epiphenomenon” means, for example, “a secondary or
additional symptom or complication arising during the course of a disease.” As a
prefix, epi might mean something that is constituent and additional, fundamental
and yet menacing. Latin America and all non-modern cultures, as epiphenomena,
define modern culture and yet threaten it to the extent that they call into question all
disciplinary traditions that naturalize Western culture.
36
37
53
The Ignorant [Latin American] Peasant
Along with the distinction between avant-garde culture and kitsch, Greenberg
presented an important analysis of folk culture and its role within modern societies.
For him “Kitsch has been not only confined to the cities in which it was born, but
has flowed out over the countryside, wiping out folk culture.”38 Greenberg
considered kitsch to be the only universal culture and showed how it could attack
both high culture and folk culture. However, what seemed to interest Greenberg
was not to protect folk culture from the threat of kitsch but to mark a distinction
between avant-garde and folk cultures.
Greenberg perceived important differences between two cultural
expressions in pre-urbanized social life: formal culture and folk culture. Formal
culture is the culture of those who are able to read and write and who “could
command the leisure and comfort that always goes hand in hand with cultivation of
some sort.”39 Although the advent of universal literacy and urbanization blurred the
distinction between those who did and did not have access to high culture,
Greenberg emphasized a new distinction: It was not enough to read and write but to
experience culture in a particular way. Since the new proletarian and urban middle
classes “did not win the leisure and comfort necessary for the enjoyment of the
city’s traditional culture,”40 a new social distinction appeared: The upper class,
38
Greenberg, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” p. 13.
39
40
54
middle class and lower class “could” gain access to high art and culture, but they
did so in very different ways.
Traba established the same distinction in order to apply the categories of
folk and kitsch to Latin America, acknowledging the difficulties of using a notion
of the popular in Latin America societies, as the word “popular” does not refer to
mass culture, but to the culture of the poor:
The variety of resources deployed by González allows us to group
them into two “families,” one constituted by autochthonous
expressions of the people and the other by those imposed on them . .
. It is necessary then to distinguish between what a community has
produced, ever more mediated and deteriorated, and what mass
culture has imposed on it, ever more imperative and alienating.41
The two meanings of the popular are used by Traba as an attempt to distinguish
mass culture from folk culture. The social sciences and political parties,
acknowledging the absence of proper proletarian and urban masses in the social
history of Latin America, have validated an undifferentiated use of the term
“popular.” Like Greenberg, Traba recognized “the experience of culture” as a way
of creating and enhancing social differences. For her, the situation was different
from that of Greenberg’s society since the expansion of literacy was, and still is, a
41
Traba, Los Muebles de Beatriz González, pp. 32-33.
55
major problem in Latin America. Nevertheless, she used the notion of “taste” to
mark a distinction between the upper and middle classes:
In this middle-class furniture, themes vary and respond to a
fetishism of beauty . . . They are epidermal cultural preferences that
ennoble the middle class and attempt to accentuate them. That is
why [González] works on dressing tables and coat-stands, because
they are superficial and ridiculous, with an undefined function for
the furniture, especially made for giving “status.”42
To establish these distinctions, Traba also used the same allusion to taste, but she
provided an analysis of the character of popular artisanship, giving it the same
character as kitsch: a cultural product that falls into repetition and lacks the critical
character of an artwork:
The beds and tables chosen as frames for González’s paintings in the
seventies expressed another popular choice: furniture. In them, the
Colombian people fully deploy their preference for colorful things
and, above all, their inclination for shiny fabrics, false textures, and
adornments . . . people who purchase this kind of furniture are the
only authors of such products: Their taste has determined their
existence, which is promoted by small factories of popular origin.43
42
43
56
In his famous example of the ignorant Russian peasant, Greenberg differentiated
folk culture from formal culture, privileging avant-garde culture as a movement
inspired by “a superior consciousness of history.” Although folk culture existed, it
could not be a model for the kind of culture he had in mind. He said: “There has
been an agreement then, and this agreement rests, I believe, on a fairly constant
distinction made between those values only to be found in art and those values
which can be found elsewhere.”44
Along with the distinctions between formal and folk culture in terms of
each culture’s character and ways of experiencing culture, Greenberg considered
the universalization of literacy to be an important condition for kitsch to be born.
Kitsch thus found its origins in the pressure exerted upon society by the urban and
proletarian masses who “having lost their taste for folk culture from the
countryside, demanded a kind of culture fit for their own consumption.”45 Kitsch
found its way not only through fascism and red totalitarianism but also through the
proletarian and urban classes. Here Greenberg seems to perform a theoretical and
political leap which defines the popular as a cultural expression that needs to be
contained. Greenberg’s account of folk culture and the role of the proletarian
“masses” facilitated policies and cultural practices that tended to replace traditional
“cultures” with modern and avant-garde culture. As Andrew Ross notes, containing
culture in the Cold War had two different meanings:
44
Greenberg, “Avant Garde and Kistch,” p. 152.
45
Greenberg, “Avant Garde and Kistch,” p. 153.
57
The first speaks to a threat outside of the social body, a threat that
therefore has to be excluded, or isolated in quarantine, and kept at
bay from the domestic body. The second meaning of containment,
which speaks to the domestic contents of the social body, concerns a
threat internal to the host which must then be neutralized by being
fully absorbed and thereby neutralized.46
Traba explained González’s uses of popular culture as a formalist source as an
effort to “convert into art what is a spontaneous manifestation of the collective
imaginary.”47 She considered González to be an artist who lucidly developed an
understanding of the popular, giving revealing accounts of the backward character
of the Colombian cultural superstructure. She stated: “Popular art does not give any
data about popular creativity, which is generally spoken by using a romantic
exaltation of the collective soul, but does give information about the level of
underdevelopment suffered by that community.”48
The disenchantment of the American left, the intellectuals’ inclination
towards Trotsky’s ideas of art as an autonomous fact, Greenberg’s formalism, and
Traba’s radical leftism informed by modernism are all symptoms not so much of a
bipolar struggle between diametrically opposed ideas as the emergence of new
forms of struggle within a new order of things. While American uses of the avant-
46
Andrew Ross, No Respect: Intellectuals & Popular Culture (New York & London: Routledge,
1989), p. 46.
47
48
58
garde need to be understood as an ideological tool that favored a new hegemony,
Traba’s leftist activism and her modernist interpretation of Latin American art and
culture should be framed within that hegemony’s need for Latin America to be its
other. In spite of Traba’s public repudiation of the American cultural mode of
production, high modernism as a tool for understanding art remained intact in her
approach. Traba’s ideas about the relationship between art and politics seem to
echo the statement by Trotsky I quoted earlier: “Art can become a strong ally of the
revolution only insofar as it remains faithful to itself.”49 Art in itself is then
understood through the principles of American high modernism. While high
modernism became the regime of truth which organized the field of art and linked it
to politics, modernization was its counterpart in the social and economic fields.
Both helped construct American hegemony and its other.
The Specular Feminine
As I have already stated, González’s exploration of the cultural transformation
suffered by Western traditions when they are appropriated by non-modern cultures
intersects with her concerns about the representations of Latin American women or
Latin America as a woman. In this light, her series of assemblages produced
between 1970 and 1977 are of particular interest. Dressing tables and coat-trees are
transformed into altars, and mirrors are decorated with her versions of Raphael’s
49
Trotsky, “Art and Politics,” pp. 3-10.
59
The Virgin of the Chair, Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, and Ingres’s The Turkish Bath.
González has said that her use of this kind of furniture might have been influenced
by the big frames used during the Latin America’s colonial period for pictures of
the Madonna. She pointed out:
The furniture I produce begins with a painting, which is nothing
other than a representation of something already given: pictures or
reproductions of artworks . . . That is to say, it is a representation of
a representation . . . Then I frame those using huge frames, like
altar-frames. What else would Rafael like for his Madonna but a
cubist dressing-table which reflects on her beauty?50
At first glance, González’s mirrors seem to call attention to the cultural struggles
taking place as a result of the complex and conflictual processes of identification
within the colonial context of Latin America. Aníbal Quijano has insisted that, in
contrast to Asia and Africa, where the indigenous populations survived and were
converted by the Eurocentric look as “exotic,” Latin America suffered one of the
biggest genocides known until today. Not only were its indigenous people almost
extinguished but its territories were reduced to small resguardos.51 Consequently,
its native populations were turned into an uneducated peasant labor force and lost
their original cultures, economies, and languages, which were replaced by Western
50
Quoted by Marta Traba, “Beatriz González,” in Beatriz González: Una pintora de provincia, p.
35.
51
Resguardos: Strongholds where Native American people have been confined by the government
as their lands have been expropriated by colonizers.
60
patterns of social organization and power. In regard to their cultural traditions,
Quijano adds: “The survivors would have had no other modes of intellectual and
formalized, objectified artistic or visual expressions but the cultural patterns of the
rulers, even if they subverted them in certain cases to express other needs.”52 As
has been argued by scholars working on coloniality, Europe’s colonial enterprise
led to a primordial encounter with the other and the emergence of modernity as a
colonial regime. Although the point is sometimes overlooked, colonialism was the
basis from which modernity emerged and its illusion of universality and pretension
to be the origin of all cultures was built. In other words, colonialism is not an
unintended and accidental accessory of modernity. Since the construction of the
Western self was closely related to the colonial encounter with America,
colonialism should be seen as the dark side modernity.
From the outset, the replacement of the mirrors by González enacts a simple
yet categorical rejection of the Western metaphysical tradition of identity which
considers mirrors to be surfaces that authentically reflect a focused image of the so-
called universal human subject. Within that tradition, the reflection of light proper
to mirrors has been the basis of metaphors about self-reflection, introspection, and
discovery, which speak of a true image of identity or of true identity as an image. It
seems unnecessary to quote the multitude of references to mirrors in Western
philosophy, literature, and art, which have used them to call attention to the process
52
Aníbal Quijano, “Coloniality and Modernity Rationality,” Cultural Studies, 21, 2-3 (March 2007),
170.
61
of forming a sense of a total and secure identity, not to mention the strong
association between the very act of painting and mirroring. Mirrors have been used
as metaphors to create the fantasy of a centered subject and a unitary identity and
underline the fascination of self-reflection, the process in which an image of the
self endlessly repeats itself.
In his explanation of the formation of the self, Jacques Lacan pointed out
that the process of identification that takes place in the mirror-phase inaugurates a
dramatic cycle in which the self that emerges from the reflection of his/her image in
the mirror will forever move between the need to secure that ideal form of the self
and the alienating assumption of that image. As opposed to revealing the true self
of human nature, the mirror-phase produces an idealized identity, which is
perceived by the viewer as a unitary and self-completed entity. The “jubilant
assumption” of that image, as he called that experience, “will mark with its rigid
structure the subject’s entire development.”53
Instead of depicting mirrors as glassy and transparent surfaces for the
subject to be reflected and discovered, González’s assemblages display scenarios
where seductive effigies and silhouettes insist on being appropriated or followed. In
Peinador Gracia Plena [Gratia Plena Vanity Table] (1971) (Fig. 1.15) González
appropriated Raphael’s The Virgin of the Chair. (Fig. 1.16) Gratia Plena Vanity
53
Jacques Lacan, “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I,” in Jacques Lacan.
Ecrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York and London: W.W. Norton & Company, 1977),
p. 4.
62
Table is an art-deco vanity table whose mirror has been covered with a circular
metal sheet on which González has painted, in industrial enamel, her version of
Raphael’s painting of the Virgin Mary, Jesus, and John the Baptist. Raphael’s
original sfumato has been transformed into flat primary colors, thus losing, through
that transformation, all the facial expressions and classical perspective of the
original. The virtuous, angelical and, at the same time, universal features of the
original are transformed into something found in the reservoir of images which
express Latin American notions of the feminine: pictures in fashion magazines, the
faces of top models, and popular depictions of the Virgin. As the Colombian
feminist writer Penelope Rodríguez-Shek has pointed out, the strategies behind the
representation of Latin American women are widely determined by a discourse that
she calls "Marianismo" [Marianism].54 It combines traditional Western
representations of women, discourses about motherhood by the Catholic Church,
and the projection of desire by the masculine gaze.
González’s mirrors, however, do not seem to depict the discovery of an
image of identity through a reflected self. Latin America’s “jubilant assumption” of
an identity is not the result of a reflection in the mirror which allows the subject to
recognize him/herself, but of an image previously constructed by Western
colonialism. For Latin American women or Latin America as a woman, the fictive
image of self-recognition is replaced by a predetermined colonial one, which
54
Penélope Rodríguez-Shek, “La Virgen-Madre: Símbolo de la feminidad latinoamericana,” Texto y
Contexto 7 (Enero-Abril 1986), 73-90.
63
prevents Latin America from coming to terms with itself and inhabiting a feigned
identity. The image of the Latin American self has already been constructed from
without.
Before Europe encountered its distant other, its ideas of otherness were
shaped by fantastic stories and anecdotes about its close mysterious other. As Peter
Hulme and Peter Mason, among other authors, have pointed out, before its
encounter with the New World, the European self had taken shape through stories
about extraordinary creatures and unspeakable customs found in southern Europe.55
In particular, there were prolific tales about the supposed cannibalism, sodomy, and
bizarre appearance of the people of southern Italy, Spain, and Greece. This fictive
image of an other within Europe influenced Europe’s encounter with the other
which lived outside it. Or to put it differently, America was invented before its
discovery and became the repository of Western fantasies, fears, and desires.
Successive waves of colonial domination produced their particular forms of
economic, military and cultural occupation. However, the physical and cultural
extermination of the natives was always accompanied by Western representations
of Latin America as a disavowed other which justified Western claims to cultural
superiority. Instead of a reflection of a true image of Latin America, the
impossibility of self-reflection and self-recognition in González’s mirrors “reflects”
instead the colonial experience of being constructed from without. As Franz Fanon
55
See Peter Mason, Deconstructing America (New York: Routledge, 1990) and Peter Hulme,
Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean 1942 – 1797 (New York: Routledge, 1992).
64
has said in Black Skins, White Masks: “The elements I used [to construct my
corporal schema] had been provided . . . by the other, the white man, who had
woven me out of a thousand details, anecdotes, stories.”56
Through a close reading of Fanon, Diana Fuss has developed an important
analysis of the process of identification within colonial contexts or, even more
significant, the colonial condition of identification. She states that it is not possible
to think of the relational identities produced by the interplay of cultural differences
without taking into account “their historical genealogies, including colonial
imperialism.”57 The jubilant assumption of an image of the self, that is to say, the
assumption of a fictional identity, is followed by the continuous play of differences
that not only challenges that identity but also transforms it through its permanent
encounter with the other. As Lacan stated, after the mirror-phase—when the subject
enters the dynamics of identification with the other and language assigns it its
function as a subject—the ephemeral image of a total self becomes fragmented by
the threatening and unexpected presence of the gaze of the other. This splitting, he
said: “Enables us to apprehend the real, in its dialectical effects, as originally
unwelcome.”58 In other words, the emergence of an image of the self prefigures the
subject’s play of identification with the other as well as his/her entering as a subject
into the symbolic.
56
Franz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove Press, 1967), p. 111.
57
Diana Fuss, Identification Papers (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 143.
58
Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-analysis, trans. Alain Sheridan and
ed. Jacques Alain-Miller (New York and London: W.W. Norton & Company, 1973), p. 69.
65
According to Fuss, in colonial contexts the denial of the colonized’s right
to, as it were, a fictive sense of self in the mirror-phase denies alterity and prevents
the colonized from using that detour through the other which produces
subjectivity.59 That is, the system of differences which turned Latin America into
the Western other does not work the other way around. As Western culture held on
to its cultural supremacy by excluding and exterminating Latin American forms of
signification and modes of cultural production, it prevented Latin America, which
was already a Western construct, from thinking of Western culture as its other.
While Latin American culture has to define itself as a non-Western culture,
Western culture does not define itself as a non-Latin American culture.
Paraphrasing Fuss, Western culture operates as its own other, freed from any
dependency upon the sign “Latin America” from its symbolic constitution. As
Western culture occupied all possible spaces of signification and “other” ways of
thinking and living were impossible, the Western became both the self and its own
other. As the mirror-phase that allows for the emergence of a sense of self is
denied, the interplay with the other that produces subjectivity becomes almost
impossible, and the consequent objectification of the colonial other is inevitable.
Fanon expressed this experience by stating that this over-determination left him as
“an object in the midst of other objects.”60 As Fuss noticed, Fanon concludes, in
opposition to Lacan, that the colonized as a subject begins and ends in a violently
59
Fuss, Identification Papers, p. 141.
60
Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 109.
66
fragmented state.61 The impossibility of a fictive unity of the self becomes the
impossibility of subjectivity.
Luce Irigaray explored this genealogy of identification in the construction of
women, arguing that the Western metaphysical tradition of the human subject is
deeply related to the supremacy assumed by masculine representations of women.
For her, the specular image of the feminine that emerges in the mirror, which
represents an ontological search for the universally “human,” is always the
masculine construction of women. As she stated: “The subject, fascinated with his
own image, with the illusion of a mirror that catches his reflection, is already faced
by another specularization: the inability to represent what he is not.”62 For her, in
mirrors:
The quest for the “object” becomes a game of Chinese boxes.
Infinitely receding. The most amorphous with regard to ideas, the
most obviously a “thing,” if you like, the most opaque matter, opens
up a mirror as being all the purer because it knows and is known to
have no reflections. Except those which man has reflected there but
which, in the movement of that concave speculum, pirouetting upon
itself, will rapidly, deceptively fade.63
61
Fuss, Identification Papers, p. 143.
62
Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), p.
134.
63
Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, p. 135.
67
Irigaray considers mirroring to be trapped within the notion of a subject who is
always masculine. Therefore, the search for a feminine subject is considered for her
to be a useless task, as it is already inscribed within masculine discourse. Irigaray
stated:
Any theory of the subject has always been appropriated by the
“masculine” . . . The “subject” plays at multiplying himself, even
deforming himself, in this process. He is father, mother, and
child(ren) and the relationships between them. He is masculine and
feminine and the relationships between them. What a mockery of
generation, parody of copulation and genealogy, drawing its strength
from the same model of the same: the subject.64
In El baño turco artífices del mármol [The Turkish Bath Marble’s Artifices]
(1974), (Fig. 1.17) based on Ingres’s The Turkish Bath, (Fig. 1.18) González used a
dressing table often found in the bathrooms of middle-class Colombian homes. On
top of the table there is a sink made of fake marble, and the actual furniture is
painted in red and white triangles. The mirror is replaced by a circular plate painted
with industrial enamel. It is covered by images that have been extensively used on
calendars, magazines, and reproductions which Colombians frame and use to
decorate their bathrooms. Only four odalisques remain of the crowd depicted in the
original Ingres’s painting. Their skin color has been changed from the sensual and
64
68
warm tones of Ingres to a flat, cold violet and green. The background of Ingres’s
painting has been replaced by a flat black surface.
González’s appropriation of Ingres’s women emphasizes the connection
between colonialism, sexual desire, and representations of Latin America. Ingres’s
The Turkish Bath is an image in which sensuality is unquestionable, but the desire
to see, to penetrate, seems to be postponed, deferred: The bathers’ senses, perfectly
attuned to their environment, are attentive to silences and sounds that our senses
cannot share. Ingres’s painting expresses the masculine power to see and penetrate,
yet it also expresses the impossibility of achieving either, since the object desired
by the masculine gaze is only a metaphorical representation.
González’s appropriation of Ingres’s painting calls attention to the Western
construction of Latin American women or Latin America as a woman as a desirable
other. What seems to appear in her work on Ingres’s painting is the masculine look
that erases the feminine and converts it into the subject of his desire; that is to say,
it depicts the construction of the feminine from without. However, her cold and
distant representation exacerbates the metaphorical character of representation,
reminding the spectator of the impossibility of his desire. González’s representation
of a representation, as she called the ways in which her work operates, produces a
metaphorical representation of representation as a metaphor. This metaphorical
representation depicts the erasure of the feminine, yet by representing the
representation, she erases that erasure, that is to say, she erases the very system by
69
which Latin America becomes an object of desire. The impossibility of desire
implicit in all identifications becomes the total impossibility of the whole system of
representation that creates the other as an object of desire. The mirror that formerly
acted for the viewer as a speculum “to dilate the lips, the orifices, and the walls,”65
becomes a barrier that prevents one from penetrating to the interior of the object
and its representation.
In Nací en Florencia y tenía veintiseis años cuando mi retrato fue pintado:
esta frase pronunciada en voz dulce y baja [I was Born in Florence and I was 26
Years Old when My Portrait was Painted: This Sentence Pronounced in a Sweet
and Low Voice], (Fig. 1.19) González appropriates Leonardo Da Vinci’s Mona
Lisa. (Fig. 1.20) To frame the work, she used a heavily ornamented art-nouveau
wooden coat-stand that combines different kinds of artisanal woodwork. In the
upper part, in place of the mirror, there is a painted sheet of metal which fits its
original shape. As in the other dressing tables, all naturalistic depiction has been
replaced by flat colors and delineated shapes. Details have been abolished. The
original darkened atmosphere has been changed by the use of bright colors,
creating a kind of tropical Caribbean landscape. The legendary and enigmatic smile
of La Gioconda has disappeared. The accentuation of disturbing racial and cultural
differences situates the West’s pretension to a universal human subject within
65
70
tropical zones. The pale skin of Leonardo’s original La Gioconda has been
transformed into that of a mestizo.
González’s colored La Gioconda appears to be nearly but not quite a
Western woman, to paraphrase Homi Bhabha’s famous saying. As I have said, in
all identifications, self-recognition is produced by a reflected image that will be
permanently negotiated in the play of cultural differences. In colonial contexts,
however, as the image of the self is imposed from without and the West claims for
itself the right to be self and other at once, resemblance and likeness become the
only place for the play of subjectivity. “You can be like me” is an expression
whereby the dream of recognition becomes the cultural condition which makes
colonialism possible, yet it is also its disavowal, since it implies that you never will.
In other words, for colonialism to function, it needs the other to identify with the
image the colonizer has narcissistically constructed, sanctioning the other so that it
may become the self. However, it is a disavowal of the other, as a bad copy of the
original, perpetuating colonial discourse’s power, because the disavowed other has
to keep working to improve resemblance and likeness.
As Fuss points out, while mimicry is a deliberate exaggeration of a cultural
role, mimesis is the unconscious assumption of a role. Both are intrinsically related
to power relations and produce forms of resistance when mimicry and mimesis get
beyond the control of the existing power structure. González’s representation of La
Gioconda as almost Western and not Western enough visually translates the very
71
title of the piece that has to be pronounced in a sweet and low voice: I was born in
Florence and I was 26 years old when my portrait was painted. González’s title
functions as an enticement: “You can be like me” which is transformed into “You
look like me,” “I look like you,” and “We are alike.” In doing so, she lets us know
that power produces both resemblance in order to be exercised and strategies of
disguise that shatter the system of identification and subjectivity the West uses to
control the other. The system of vision and surveillance that identifies and keeps
apart notions of self and other is now in danger. The missing part which the other
needs to be perceived as a total self becomes what the self needs to keep its fictive
and unitary narrative of identity since it confirms that the other is a disavowed
other different from the self. Yet, since the other resembles the self, s/he becomes
the excess or supplement which threatens and deconstructs the self’s pretension of
supremacy and originality.
In her discussion of Irigaray’s work on the role of mimesis and mimicry in
the construction of a Western philosophy of feminism, Judith Butler has stressed
Irigaray’s attention to the outlines of a phallocentric economy which defines the
meaning of the feminine.66 For Irigaray, Butler writes, the feminine always appears
in catachresis, that is to say, as a figure of impropriety, the improper, and the
property-less.67 In turn, Butler argues that it is precisely through the “radical
66
Judith Butler, “Bodies that Matter,” in Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex,”
Judith Butler (London, New York: Routledge, 1993), p. 37.
67
Butler, “Bodies that Matter,” p. 37.
72
citational practice” of Western philosophy that Irigaray herself performs a
catachrestic usurpation of the “proper” for fully improper uses: “to haunt the very
language from which the feminine is excluded.”68 The politics of this strategy of
mimicry is paraphrased by Butler in these terms:
Irigaray’s response to this exclusion of the feminine from the
economy of representation is effectively to say: Fine, I don’t want to
be in your economy anyway, and I’ll show you what this
unintelligible receptacle can do to your system; I will not be a poor
copy in your system, but I will resemble you nevertheless by miming
the textual [and visual] passages through which you construct your
system and showing that what cannot enter it is already inside it (as
its necessary outside), and I will mime and repeat the gestures of
your operation until this emergence of the outside within the system
calls into question its systematic closure and its pretension to be
self-grounding.69
Borrowing and expanding on Butler’s use of the term, I understand González’s
appropriation of Western art to be a “radical citational practice” of the Western
system which depicted Latin America women or Latina America as a woman as
underdeveloped and backward during the Cold War. As Irigaray does, González
practices a mimesis and mimicry of the system from which Latin America has been
68
69
73
both included and excluded in order “to haunt” its very language. Whereas Traba
interpreted González’s work as an artistic representation of Latin American
cultures, supposedly full of figures of impropriety, the improper, and the property-
less and therefore condemned to underdevelopment and backwardness, González
undertook a catachrestic usurpation of the “proper” Western artistic and cultural
tradition for fully improper uses.
González’s catachrestic usurpation of Western traditions is manifold: First,
González appropriates the appropriations of Western art made by local cultures,
miming their depiction as under-cultures that aim to be original but are nevertheless
just a bad copy of modernity; that is to say, Latin American under-cultures are
almost modern and yet not modern enough. Second, her representation of Latin
America as a woman establishes a parallel between masculine domination of
women and Western domination of Latin America. Her colorful tropical
appropriations of the women depicted by Western art call attention to the
representation of Latin American women or of Latin America as a woman as man’s
other or under-woman, that is to say, Latin American women who are not yet
universal Western men or women where the category of race prevents them from
being totally Western. Finally, she usurps the system of art that has treated her as
an under-artist by miming the achievements of the Great Masters. Her painting
resembles a child’s painting-by-numbers game where colors are filled in
accordance with a fixed format in order to repeat the representation. González is a

74
female artist who “paints” women depicted by men and mimes the discursive
operation whereby Latin America, Latin America as a woman, and Latin American
women are constructed as under-developed, under-women, and under-artists. She
has given her artwork the name of under-painting, presenting it as a prototype of
Colombian art, “a provincial art that cannot circulate universally except as a
curiosity.”70
The dialogue I have been exploring reveals the disjunctive forms of cultural
representation which arise from the dissemination of modernity among non-modern
cultures within the context of the developmentalist dream of creating a world of
progress. Traba’s explanation of González’s artwork was a theoretical formulation
strongly related to American formalism and the discursive strategies of
developmentalism. While Traba publicly rejected the American mode of cultural
production, she also used high modernism to explain what she called the pre-
modern and underdeveloped character of Latin American art and culture. By
deploying Greenberg’s distinctions between avant-garde and kitsch as well as
formal and folk culture, she participated in the American modernist project for
Latin American culture. Her interpretation of art as an autonomous, self-reflexive,
and universal practice followed American formalism’s agenda and its relation to
the search for American hegemony after World War II. Similarly, by representing
Latin American culture as backward, pre-modern, and underdeveloped, Traba’s
70
Quoted by Marta Traba “Beatriz González,” in Beatriz González: Una pintora de provincia, p. 36.
75
reading of González’s work also fitted into the dominant discourse of
developmentalism that gave shape to the notion of the Third World.
As Guilbaut has stated, artistic and art historical practices are political not
necessarily because they intentionally support a dominant ideology but because
they systematically produce representations which both emerge from the
hegemonic values of any given period and, by the same token, help support the
construction of that hegemony.71 However, if there was a link between high
modernism and American hegemony during the Cold War, there was also a
difference, which depended on whether formalism and modernism were promoted
from the U.S. or from Latin America. Traba was not intentionally “tied” to
American imperialism, and yet her use of formalism connected her to the American
search for hegemony, insofar as her writing helped construct representations of
Latin America as the third-world other of the American hegemony. In other words,
Traba’s modernism helped construct notions of both hegemony and subalternity
that were used by American cultural imperialism. Thus, her interpretation of Latin
American art was not so much related to the fascist or communist threat as it was to
her view of the traditional cultures of Latin America as the expressions of “poor
countries” which needed to be developed. However, I believe Traba’s continuous
shift between recognition of and contempt for Latin American culture was partly a
result of the issues of identification and colonialism González herself was
71
Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art, p. 3.
76
exploring. As she defined Latin America as composed of open and closed areas in
relation to the American mode of cultural production, Traba, coming from an open
area like Argentina, moved to a closed area like Colombia. Her perception of the
relationship between universal and local cultures is caught in the middle of a
battlefield where she perceived Latin America as both: the Western’s other that can
put the culture of the closed areas at the service of an alternative modernity and the
Western other condemned to backwardness and underdevelopment. González’s
recurrent re-framing, displacement, and combination of modern and local traditions
localize the universal pretensions of modernity and display the continuous struggle
by local cultures to critically dialogue with the cultural strength of
developmentalism.
To conclude, I would like to return to González’s Gratia Plena Vanity
Table. In this assemblage, what once was an image is now a scenario where the
struggle of identification takes place. By replacing the mirror with “clumsy” and
“childish” representations of the Western heritage, González hits back at
modernity’s illusion of universality, because what it reflects is not a fulfillment of
the Western desire for grasping the other and making it its own but a fragmented
and split image of the Western self.
As Freud explained, identification reveals the workings of mourning
whereby the subject tries to deal with the loss of its love-object. For Lacan, this
process takes the form not so much of an object as of a spectral image one keeps
77
inside oneself, to replace the one that is no longer outside. Once again, González’s
mirrors seem to reverse the usual depiction of identification, where the mirror
reflects the fictive image of the self. What seems to appear in the mirror is not the
image of a Latin America that recognizes itself as a bad copy of modernity, but the
spectral image modernity keeps inside itself in order to deal with the impossibility
of its being universal. González’s appropriation of the local cultures’ appropriations
of Western heritage does not reflect the under-development suffered by Latin
America but the ghostly images which modernity keeps to itself in order to deal
with the loss of its illusion of being self-grounded.
The “universality” of modern culture was based on the fantasy that its
spread would change cultures everywhere and yet remain “true to itself.” However,
the very proclamation that modernity is the only truly universal culture worthy of
dissemination also becomes a threat to it. Its local uses remind us of the fact that all
cultures are permanently subjected to translation. Local uses of modernism would
prove the impossibility of its remaining “true to itself.” González’s work reminds
us that cultural difference is not so much that which almost looks like the self but
the fragments and patches that hang from the hegemonic borders of modernity and,
precisely because of their adjacency and “untranslatability,” operate as a critique of
progress, homogeneity, and cultural organicism.

78
CHAPTER 2
The National Mummy: Antonio Caro’s Un-Art and the Politics of

Conceptualism
Anti-discursive Strategies
In her article “Tactics for Thriving on Adversity: Conceptualism in Latin America,
1960-1980,” Mari Carmen Ramirez explores the routes taken by conceptual art in
Latin America. She summarizes her interest in this matter by formulating three
central questions: How are we to understand a group of Latin American artworks as
“conceptualist” when even their original authors do not designate them as such? Is
it possible to argue for regional, autonomous versions of conceptualism, which
could be or has been perceived as a global movement? If so, what are their
specificities and characteristics?1
Ramirez suggests that in order to answer these questions one should
approach Latin American conceptualist projects as a group of heterogeneous
collective and individual works whose particularity is framed by two main features:
their ideological and local references and their critical relationship to global
conceptualism. These two main boundaries, Ramirez argues, may well explain how
1
Mari Carmen Ramirez, “Tactics for Thriving on Adversity: Conceptualism in Latin America,
1960-1980,” in Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin 1950s—1980s (New York: Queens
Museum of Art, 1999), p. 53-70.
79
Latin American conceptualism not only paralleled the global conceptualist
questioning of the “preciousness of the autonomous art object inherited from the
Renaissance but also transcended” those North Atlantic trends that gave shape to
such a questioning.2 She states that “it is from the shifting boundaries of this
utopian search that the eclectic practices constituting conceptualism [in Latin
America] should be approached.”3
She considers it crucial, however, to discuss two common trends of thought
in the interpretation of conceptualism which, according to her, have obstructed such
an analysis:
On the one hand, there is the prevalence of an extremely reductive
and self-serving art historical framework that . . . continues to
privilege a small, iconoclastic group of North American and British
artists . . . On the other hand, there are the misunderstandings
generated within our own countries by the Cold War legacy, of
which Marta Traba’s biased “thesis of resistance” is representative.
Traba zealously denounced conceptual practices as “imported fads”
whose emergence revealed the degree to which a sector of our artists
had “surrendered” to North American cultural imperialism.4
2
Ramirez, “Tactics for Thriving on Adversity,” p. 53.
3
4
80
Ramírez suggests then that conceptualism, more than a style or artistic movement,
should be seen as a “strategy of anti-discourses whose evasive tactics call into
question both the fetishization of art and its system of production and distribution
in late capitalist society.”5 Understanding conceptual art in these terms, she argues,
would allow for an accurate examination of the specific condition of Latin
American conceptual practices in a way that such an assessment would go beyond
the crass reductionism of metropolitan accounts, as well as the
commonplace dichotomies of the center/periphery model. That is, it
will enable me to engage the work of these [Latin American] artists
not as reflections, derivations, or even replicas of center-based
conceptual art but, instead, as local responses to the contradictions
posed by the failure of post-World War II modernization projects
and the artistic models they fostered in the region.6
The specific condition of Latin American conceptualist projects were a result of
implementing a pattern of assimilation/conversion largely guided by the internal
dynamics and contradictions of the local context.7 It would be precisely this pattern
or dialectic exchange, as she calls it, that helped Latin American conceptualist
practices anticipate important developments of center-based conceptual art. By
taking ideology and politics as their starting point, Latin American conceptualists
5
6
7
81
“produced some of the most creative responses of our century to the question of
art’s function first raised by Marcel Duchamp.”8
Ramirez’s project of re-writing the history of Latin American conceptualism
is part of a broader attempt made by scholars, critics, and art curators from the
“Third World,” and U.S. academics working on Latin American art and cultures, to
confront the Eurocentric perspective from which the global history of art and
culture has been written. Back in the early nineties, this group began a critique of
exhibitions and texts about Latin American art in the U.S. and Europe. Art of the
Fantastic: Latin America, 1920-1987, an exhibition organized by the Indianapolis
Museum of Art and curated by Hollyday Day and Hollister Sturges, initiated this
debate. The exhibition summarized, according to its critics, the typical
reductionisms and homogenizations that have constructed representations of the
Latin American other as the real maravilloso (marvelous realism), the exotic, and
the tropical. “Beyond the Fantastic” is the title of Ramirez’s pioneering article, in
which she states the most important issues surrounding this debate:
At stake is not only the question of whether the image of the Latin
American or Latino “other” that emerges from these shows truly
engages the cultural constituencies it aims to represent, but also how
museums and the art establishment at large respond to the cultural
demands of an increasingly influential community . . . The
8
82
elaboration of an effective agenda for the nineties, however, requires
that we step beyond denunciation of the neocolonial politics at work
in Latin America/Latino exhibitions boom and focus more precisely
on the ideological and conceptual premises that guided the
organization of these art shows.9
One of the most comprehensive attempts to develop this viewpoint has been
Gerardo Mosquera’s work on the Cuban artist Wifredo Lam and his relationship to
surrealism, which has been presented in various international meetings and
published in several versions.10 Mosquera questions the ways in which Lam’s
artwork has been represented in art history and world collections as an “exotic”
quotation of international surrealism. He argues that a better understanding of
Lam’s Cuban context and his African roots may well explain how his use of
surrealism functions as an appropriation whereby surrealism has been devoured and
spit out again, producing profound questionings of modernism and modernity.
Beyond the Fantastic was also the title of a collection of essays edited by Gerardo
Mosquera, in which artists, critics, and curators attempted to approach Latin
American art from this new political position. Mosquera writes in the introduction:
New criticism puts forward particular strategies, working on the
margins, deconstructing power mechanisms and rhetoric,

9
Mari Carmen Ramírez, “Beyond ‘The Fantastic:’ Framing Identity in U.S. Exhibitions of Latin
American Art,” Art Journal 51, 4 (Winter 1992), 60-61.
10
See for instance, Gerardo Mosquera, “Modernism from Afro-America: Wifredo Lam,” in Beyond
the Fantastic: Contemporary Art Criticism from Latin America, ed. Gerardo Mosquera (London:
INIVA, 1995), p. 121-132.
83
appropriating and resignifying. This agenda is related to the
development of a socially, politically and culturally aware
conceptualism that has sophisticated the symbolic resources of this
type of art in order to discuss the complexity of Latin American
societies. It is also related to artistic tendencies that cynically
proclaim their customary Latin American freedom to take from the
centre and freely and often “incorrectly” readapt. The complex of
being “derivative” has been transformed into pride in the particular
skill of appropriating and transforming things to one’s own benefit,
encouraged by a postmodern breaking-down of the hierarchies
between the original and the copy.11
I would like to point out the ways in which Latin American stories of
cultural struggle and resistance are represented through the figures used by Ramirez
and Mosquera. I am interested, for instance, in pondering the former’s attempt to
re-write the history of conceptualism in Latin America within a broader framework
such as the need for an “image of the Latin American or Latino ‘other’ that . . .
truly engages the cultural constituencies it aims to represent” or, as Mosquera puts
it, the urgent need to transform “the complex of being derivative . . . into pride in
11
84
the particular skill of appropriating and transforming things to one’s own
benefit.”12
In my exploration of the politics that mobilizes Ramirez’s art historical
explanation, I would like to propose an approach—neither dialectical nor utopian—
to some conceptualist practices in Latin America, with a different reading of both
the regional political context and the politics of these conceptualist artistic
practices. In respect to the former, I wonder to what extent Ramirez’s interpretation
of Latin American conceptualism continues, as much as it attempts to rupture, the
legacy of modernist art history during the Cold War which she seeks to criticize.
Her model of assimilation/conversion remains within the dichotomies and
oppositions that have framed our interpretation of cultural dialogues between the
First and Third Worlds. These do not allow us to explore the ways in which
modernist art history and academic practices took part in the political and cultural
context they attempted to criticize. In respect to the latter, I propose to approach
Latin American conceptualism within the context of new forms of colonialism that
emerged during the Cold War that radically changed both the old cartographies of
power based on a center/periphery model and the ethics and aesthetics of cultural
struggles taking place in both center and periphery.
Ramirez’s reaction to Traba’s interpretation of conceptualism as “imported
fads” is to discard it in order to propose an alternative model of
12
85
assimilation/conversion that overcomes the reductionisms and dichotomies of the
center/periphery model. Nonetheless, her approach seems to differ from that of
Traba not so much in actually overcoming those dichotomies and oppositions as in
displacing Latin American conceptualism from the political right—where she
assumes Traba put it—to the left. She interprets conceptualism as a strategy of anti-
discourses that criticized and transcended North Atlantic conceptualism. She also
argues for a real representation of the Latin American other and for the insertion of
those anti-discourses within the leftist critique of the “fetishization of art and its
system of production and distribution in late capitalist society.”13 However, she
seems to echo the interpretations North Atlantic critics and historians have made of
conceptualism. Benjamin Buchloh, for instance, has argued:
What Conceptual Art achieved, at least temporarily, however, was
to subject the last residues of artistic aspiration toward
transcendence (by means of traditional studio skills and privileged
modes of experience) to a rigorous and relentless order of the
vernacular of administration. Furthermore, it managed to purge
artistic production of the aspiration toward an affirmative
collaboration with the forces of industrial production and
consumption . . . Paradoxically, then, it would appear that
Conceptual Art truly became the most significant paradigmatic
13
Ramírez, “Tactics for Thriving on Adversity,” p. 54.
86
change of postwar artistic production at the very moment that it
mimed the operating logic of late capitalism and its positivist
instrumentality in an effort to place its auto-critical investigations at
the service of liquidating even the last remnants of traditional
aesthetic experience.14
Buchloh also locates the politics of conceptualism within the leftist critique, despite
the fact that he seems to be disturbed by the conceptualists’ abandonment of the
left. He does state, however, that such a critique was made by confronting the ways
in which conceptual art, by “purging art of any collaboration with the forces of
industrial production and consumption,” linked the art institution with late capitalist
society. Thus, conceptualism was political in the sense that it carried out a profound
critique of the art institution and its role in “the operating logic of late capitalism
and its positivist instrumentality.”15 For Ramirez, by contrast, Latin American
conceptualism was political because:
From its earliest manifestations, conceptualism in our countries
extended the self-referential principle of North American conceptual
art to a reinterpretation of the social and political structures in which
it was inscribed . . . Thus, while North American artists . . .
addressed their criticism to the institutionalized world of art, Latin
14
Benjamin Buchloh, “Conceptual Art 1962-1969: From the Aesthetics of Administration to the
Critique of Institutions,” October 55 (Winter 1990), 142,143.
15
Buchloh, “Conceptual Art 1962-1969,” 143.
87
American artists, for the most part, made the public sphere their
target. Thus, not only was the work intended to operate at the
ideological level, but ideology itself became the fundamental
“material identity” for the conceptual proposition.16
According to Ramirez, it was precisely this combination that lead Latin American
conceptualists to produce “some of the most creative responses of our century to
the question of art’s function first raised by Marcel Duchamp.” By working at the
ideological level and making ideology the “material identity” of the conceptual
proposition, Latin American conceptualism not only participated in the
development of global conceptualism but also transcended the North Atlantic’s
narrow interest in the institutionalized world of art. She seems to repudiate what
she calls the self-referential principle of North American conceptualism—as
Buchloh also seems to do—in order to suggest, on the one hand, that the so-called
self-referential principle of North Atlantic critique did not work “at the ideological
level.” On the other hand, Ramirez implies that what also made Latin American
conceptualism political was the nature of its subject, that is to say, the ideology
behind the modernization project implemented in Latin America during the Cold
War. This, of course, is based on her postulation that the institutionalized world of
art was outside ideology.
16
88
Ramirez’s initial critique of the “reductive and self-serving art historical
framework” attempts to recuperate the role that Latin American conceptualism
played in the construction of global conceptualism, which has been denied.
Ironically, however, her attempt “to engage the work of these [Latin American]
artists not as reflections, derivations, or even replicas of center-based conceptual
art” ends up assimilating the former within the same master narrative she seems to
question. In other words, her claim that Latin American conceptualist practices are
“the most creative responses of our century to the question of art’s function first
raised by Marcel Duchamp” seems to look for the inclusion of Latin American
conceptualist practices within the “institutionalized world of art,” situating Latin
American conceptualism within the general history of the movement, as well as to
reinstate the very same dichotomy that gave shape to Latin American modernist art
history, based on the polarities of center/periphery, dependence/autonomy, and
original/copy. Ramirez’s inverted model can be seen then as a rotation, by means of
a multiculturalist claim, of the polarities that framed specific ways of understanding
the politics of culture during the post-World War II period, including what she calls
“the Cold War legacy.” Despite the differences between Buchloh and Ramirez’s
arguments, both insist that what made conceptualism “the most significant
paradigmatic change of postwar artistic production” was the oppositional, leftist
character of its critique.

89
I am not interested in arguing that both conceptualisms—global and Latin
American—were critical or radical in essence. The issue at stake here is how a
model of contradictions and oppositions prevents us from seeing other modes of
cultural critique and struggle. Instead of seeing the Third World as constructed
within a set of dichotomies, where Ramirez’s approach inevitably falls, I suggest
that we consider it to be built within a system of differences, that is to say, to see
the Third World as the First World, or North Atlantic’s other, as well as to register
“other” strategies of struggle and resistance. As Trinh T. Minh-ha put it:
‘Western’ and ‘non-Western’ must be understood not merely in
terms of oppositions and separations but rather in terms of
differences. This implies a constant to-and-fro movement between
the same and the other . . . No system functions in isolation. No First
World exists independently from the Third World; there is a Third
World in every First World and vice-versa.17
During the Cold War there was a radical change in terms of cultural
geographies of power. As I have previously pointed out, in the early post-World
War II period, a series of discourses and practices were initiated in order to create
the Third World as the North Atlantic hegemony’s underdeveloped other.18 Owing
to the fact that the terms of Ramirez’s dichotomies were no longer in the places
17
Trinh T. Minh-Ha, “Of Other Peoples: Beyond the ‘Salvage’ Paradigm,” in Discussions in
Contemporary Culture, ed. Hal Foster (New York: DIA Foundation, 1987), p. 138.
18
See Arturo Escobar, Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World
(Princeton: PUP, 1995).
90
they used to be, she seems to assume that all center-based conceptual art is aligned
with the political right, while all Latin American periphery-based conceptualist
practices were leftist and critical in essence. Left and right, north and south, center
and periphery—terms used to explain power relations during the period—were
transformed within the context of the emergence of both a new imperialism without
colonies and new strategies of cultural resistance.
Instead of cartographies based on the center/periphery model, during the
Cold War the world was constructed in terms of relations of power/resistance that
occupied all territories, including center and periphery, as Trinh reminds us. These
new scenarios of power allowed the emergence of forms of cultural activism, based
not so much on a territory as on a locus of enunciation inscribed within the
contingencies of specific cultural, social and geographic territories. Both Latin
American and North Atlantic conceptualism put forward a critique of modernity
which later found its way into postmodernism and feminism, among other critiques.
However, unlike its North Atlantic counterpart, Latin American conceptualism
delineated a locus of enunciation from a colonial position whereby the art
institution was linked to the discursive regimes that emerged after World War II
and the colonial condition of modernity and modernism was contested and resisted.
Although it is possible to demonstrate how Ramirez’s model applies to
some Latin American conceptualist practices, I would like to explore “other”
cultural and artistic practices that displayed non-humanist, non-dialectic and non-
91
utopian strategies of cultural activism and carried out a profound critique of the
colonial condition of modernity. If it is true, as Ramirez argues, that Latin
American conceptualism anticipated a radical critique, it is possible to examine
such a radicalism not so much by inverting the dichotomist model as bringing to
light the ways in which some conceptualist strategies set in motion a critique of the
system of differences that gave shape to the colonial world after World War II.
Ramirez calls Latin American conceptualism a strategy of anti-discourses,
where the term “discourse” is translated as a textual proposition used as an
“artistic” medium to put forward a critique of the political context of Latin America
during the sixties and seventies. Instead, I suggest we explore some Latin American
conceptualist projects as practices interested in investigating and contesting the
discursive colonial condition of Latin America where the term “discourse” is
understood as the configuration of knowledge and power that gave shape to Latin
America after World War II. I propose, then, to view Latin American
conceptualism not so much as a strategy of anti-discourses, but as an anti-
discursive strategy that put into question the disciplinary modes of modernity and
modernism coming from both the political left and the right.
Following this first section, I will revisit some of the facts surrounding the
reception of conceptualism in Colombia at the end of sixties. Taking into account
articles, newspapers, and books regarding some of the first conceptualist
exhibitions held in Colombia, I will examine Ramirez’s understanding of Latin

92
American conceptualism in relation to Traba’s, within the framework of the
broader cultural struggles taking place in Latin America at the time. It is not my
intent to reproach Ramirez’s and Traba’s insights as mistaken or incorrect versions
of Latin American conceptualism. Rather, I will put them into a dialogue to
delineate some conclusions about the politics of Latin American art history.
Secondly, I will concentrate on some of the artistic projects undertaken by
Colombian artist Antonio Caro. Even though the colonial perspective of Latin
American conceptualism can be identified in a variety of Latin American artistic
practices, I would like in particular to explore those anti-discursive strategies
implemented by some of his artistic projects that took on the construction of the
Colombian nation, which, despite being born at the beginning of the 19th century,
became particularly relevant during the Cold War. Antonio Caro’s work, I believe,
developed conceptualist strategies that supplemented the cultural construction of
the Latin American nation, which, in order to keep its unity and coherence, had to
expel non-national stories and their social subjects.
What Dante Never Knew
The work Lo que Dante nunca supo (Beatriz amaba el control de la natalidad)
[What Dante Never knew: Beatrice Loved Birth Control], (Fig. 2.1) from 1966 by
Bernardo Salcedo is considered by most art historians working on Latin American
art to be the first conceptual artwork in Colombia. Lo que Dante nunca supo
93
consisted of a wooden box full of eggs all painted white. The work was first shown
in the exhibition Tribute to Dante Alighieri by Colombian Artists organized by the
Italian Embassy in Colombia. The exhibition displayed works that were included in
a competition—the Dante Alighieri Award—celebrating the date of the poet’s
seventh hundred birthday. The organizers invited both artists and poets to
participate in their respective categories. Bernardo Salcedo won the first prize. The
contest provoked a public dispute among the organizers and the jury. Giulio
Corsini, a member of the jury for the Italian Embassy, protested, arguing that
Salcedo’s work “does not fit the concept of painting, and also does not fulfill the
invitation’s conditions, which clearly stated that the subject should be inspired by
Dante’s life and work.”19 The rest of jury argued that:
The new tendencies of art around the world have allowed for the
creation of ‘objects’ similar in technique to those used by Mr.
Salcedo. Of course, these objects do not belong to traditional
painting but have been accepted by art critics as part of the realm of
plastic arts . . . In regard to the conditions established in the
invitation, the term “inspiration” refers to the subjective sphere of
the artist and does not imply, in consequence, the need to “illustrate”
passages of [Dante’s] work or his life.20
19
Álvaro Barrios, Orígenes del Arte Conceptual en Colombia (Bogotá: IDCT, 1999), p. 12.
20
Barrios, Orígenes del Arte Conceptual en Colombia, p. 14.
94
Although Salcedo’s work could be viewed as an amusing comment on the modern
obsession with birth control due to the “demographic explosion” in
“underdeveloped countries” during the Cold World, Marta Traba commented on
the incident in El Espectador, a national newspaper, in this way:
Last year, Bernardo Salcedo exhibited his first boxes and objects in
The Museum of Modern Art in Bogotá . . . His work What Dante
Never Knew (Beatrice Loved Birth Control) and the deafening
laughter that emerged from it did not bring Dante or Beatrice down
from their heavenly pedestal. It demonstrated, instead, the
impossibility for a twentieth-century artist to pay homage to the
greatest lyrical genius of the sixteen century without being absurd
and almost irreverent.21
For most art critics and historians in Colombia, however, the first truly
conceptualist show was the exhibition Espacios Ambientales [Ambient Spaces] held
at the Museum of Modern Art of Bogotá in 1968. (Fig. 2.2) Contrary to Ramirez’s
statement regarding the Cold War’s legacy established by Marta Traba, the show
was in fact organized by Traba herself and others and presented the work of some
artists that would later be labeled conceptualists.22 Most of the accounts of the facts
surrounding this exhibition, as well as the early reception and subsequent
21
Quoted by Álvaro Barrios, Orígenes del Arte Conceptual, p. 17.
22
The exhibition included works by Álvaro Barrios, Ana Mercedes Hoyos, Felyza Bursztyn and
Bernardo Salcedo, among others.
95
developments of conceptualism in Colombia, have been compiled by Álvaro
Barrios in his book Orígenes del arte conceptual en Colombia [Origins of
Conceptual Art in Colombia]. Regarding the exhibition, Barrios states that the idea
to put on a show of this kind was inspired by his experience in Italy, where he had
the opportunity to visit the show entitled Lo Spazio dell’Immagine in Foligno. Lo
Spazio consisted of a series of interventions in a medieval building by a group of
Italian artists and bears a resemblance to the curatorial concept of Espacios
Ambientales. Along with interviews with the leading artists of conceptualism in
Colombia, the book also compiles press reviews, clippings, and pictures about the
main events regarding the stories of conceptualism during the sixties and seventies.
An excerpt of a press review from the national newspaper El Espectador caught my
attention. Traba promoted the exhibition in these terms:
I would like to make an announcement about an exhibition which,
according to my judgment, will be the most important event of the
year. The show Espacios Ambientales will be held between
December 10 and 23 at the Museum of Modern Art, which is now
located in the Universidad Nacional de Colombia [National
University of Colombia] . . . I am organizing the exhibition, which
gives me great pleasure. The exhibition intends to attack the
spectator’s passivity as well as to demand his/her attention. It is
impossible to continue to insist that the relation between spectator

96
and art has changed. It needs to be demonstrated. This is the first
attempt to do it. When the indignant or amused spectators’
inevitable “what-is-this?” arises—looking for definitions such as
“this is a painting,” “this is a sculpture,” “this is a cow,” “this is a
butterfly”—different answers will be given. We intend, on the
contrary, to demonstrate that (1) What the spectator searches for in
contemporary art will never be found and (2) The spectator will find
what he/she was not looking for and, even more, what he/she never
thought existed.23
The exhibition opened on December 11, 1968. During the opening, at the entrance
to the Museum, a group of students demonstrated against the exhibition, loudly
chanting, “Art is for the people not for the bourgeoisie.” Late at night, two students,
Iván Ramírez and Pedro Berbesí, from the Schools of Medicine and Law of the
National University respectively, broke in and attacked the exhibition, destroying
two works, including that of Álvaro Barrios.24 They also left cards, spread all over
the floor, which clearly displayed their impression of Espacios Ambientales
through their statement: “After this shit, art is in mourning.”25
As Barrios himself recalls, “The culprits were caught by the security guards
as they were destroying my own piece, Pasatiempo con luz intermitente [Hobby
23
Marta Traba, “Defensa del sí y defensa del no,” El Espectador Lecturas Dominicales (December
8, 1968), p.14.
24
Elkin Mesa, “Declaración de protesta de Álvaro Barrios contra los izquierdistas que destruyeron
su trabajo en el MAM,” El Siglo (December 13, 1968), p. 5.
25
Marta Traba, “Destruída exposición,” El Espectador (December 12, 1968), sec. A, p. 9.
97
With Intermittent Light], and Víctor Muñoz’s Bogotá, una ciudad en marcha para
beneficio de todo el país [Bogota: A Progressing City for the Benefit of the Whole
Country].”26 (Fig. 2.3) Marta Traba, as director of the Museum, brought charges
against the students, and they were put in jail. El Siglo, a national newspaper,
concluded an article concerning the attack by stating:
We hope that it won’t be the same as it was a few years ago when a
member of the group “Amauta,” Naftalí Silva, was arrested for the
damage he caused to a group of valued artworks from the same
Museum of Modern Art [at that time located in the National
Library], and he was released a few days later.27
In regard to the repeated attacks against the Museum of Modern Art, one week after
the story surrounding the opening of Espacios Ambientales, Traba wrote in El
Espectador,
In a country like Colombia, where every hour a child dies because of
hunger or hunger-related diseases and where illiteracy prevails, it is
normal that the majority of people who read and write completely
ignore that they are living in the twentieth century, with its
particular culture and original world view. It is also logical that a
privileged sector of the population that has access to education
despises all forms of knowledge that would allow them to situate
26
Barrios, Orígenes del Arte Conceptual en Colombia, p. 18.
27
Mesa, “Declaración de protesta de Álvaro Barrios,” p. 5.
98
themselves in this century. They consider this to be pointless,
ignoring what matters and what does not.28
Traba repudiated the attack in these terms,
I am concerned with the ways in which these experiences of
knowledge, devoted to enriching the vision and understanding of
cultured people, can be considered for some students to be an art
exhibition uninterested in the problems affecting Colombians. It is
sad to see that they do not understand that the escape from
underdevelopment, regardless of the political situation that our
country may be in, capitalism or socialism, totalitarianism or
popular revolution, cannot be possible without employing various
strategies. That is why, when we educate, we have to stimulate a
creative culture; we can build dams, but we also have to have more
and better museums. Any other conduct furthers the economic,
cultural, and political status quo that has governed Colombia since
the colonial period.29
Among the artists included was Bernardo Salcedo, whose work consisted of a
proclamation by which he declared as his own work the Museum’s toilet, as it
resembled his previous white boxes and objects. The Colombian artist Ana
28
Traba, “Destruída exposición,” sec. A, p. 9.
29
Marta Traba, “Reflexionando después de las batallas,” El Espectador, Lecturas Dominicales
(December 22, 1968), p. 14.
99
Mercedes Hoyos constructed a wooden labyrinth where, suddenly, through a
window, mail envelopes came into the room. Traba described Hoyos’ work, which
won first prize,30 not as a conceptual artwork, or an imported fad but as a formalist
piece: “The space created by Hoyos is rhythmically articulated, passing through
dark and light zones as well as from lucid to oppressive situations in order to
convey the surrealist atmosphere of her paintings. Art becomes a livable place. It
embodies plasticity and practicality.”31
Taking into account Traba’s response to the attack, as well as her
explanations of the works shown, we might wonder about the specific conceptual
character of this exhibition. It is clear that Traba did not consider the works shown
to be conceptual art, nor did she endorse the students’ attack as if it was a reaction
to the ways in which “a sector of our artists had surrendered to North American
cultural imperialism.” Instead, an argument for developmentalism can be read in
every single word of her rejection of the students’ action that night. For the
moment, and based on my examination of the accounts from the original
newspapers surrounding the opening, I am tempted to argue that the show’s
conceptualist character was clearly emphasized not so much by Traba and the
curators or by the works shown as by the students’ action outside the Museum as
30
The idea of giving a prize emerged during the organization of the exhibition and was an attempt to
motivate artists to participate. Marta Traba accepted the offer by Lía Ganitsky, art collector and
patron, of 25,000 Colombian pesos.
31
Juan Calzadilla, “Razones de un jurado: Soy espectador de un funeral,” El Espectador (December
16, 1968), sec. A, pp.1-4.
100
well as the cards left by the culprits after the assault.32 This is not to argue, as
Ramirez would, that the conceptual aspect of the show has to do with the leftist
character of the students’ performance, but that their performance, working at the
margins of the exhibition, raised the question of the cultural condition of art, that is
to say, its inscription within broader cultural and political contexts, institutions,
practices and disciplines.
At the risk of being too general, I propose that whenever the artistic nature
of a work is questioned, the conceptual aspect of art is underscored. That is to say,
every time the question “What is this?” is asked in front of an artwork, one is not
looking for an explanation like “this is a painting” or “this is a cow”—as Traba puts
it in order to accentuate the underdeveloped character of “the Colombian people”—
but, on the contrary, it is a questioning of the status of art and, in turn, an
exploration of the institutional conditions that make the art institution, and society
in general, name, display, and value objects and practices in such a way.
Following this rather general definition of conceptualism, the label
“conceptual art” does not define any particular entity or essence of the work—in
terms of the medium used, style, or artistic movement—but rather calls attention to
the cultural component of every artwork whereby a complex of institutions,
practices, and professions creates social distinctions and gives some objects a
32
Álvaro Barrios and I have started an artistic project to declare Ivan Ramirez and Pedro Berbersí
the first truly conceptualist artists in Colombia. The project initially involves the publishing of a
note in newspapers and television and radio news in an attempt to find them and an exhibition that
will bring together Colombian artists that have worked or are working with conceptualist strategies,
emphasizing the critique of those artworks to the colonial condition of modernity.
101
particular value. I think this was precisely the component emphasized by the
culprits at this exhibition as well as by a quite heterogeneous group of artistic
projects during the sixties and seventies that established a critical relationship with
the cultural conditions inherited from modernity and modernism. Following this
approach, Salcedo’s appropriation of the Museum’s toilet may be as conceptualist
as the culprits’ performance. If we follow the conceptualist fascination with
tautology—for instance, Art as idea as idea—the legend “After this shit, art is in
mourning” could be read differently.
Both the performance and the cards brought together a conceptualist agenda
not necessarily by denouncing the local political context, as Ramirez argues, but,
perhaps, by highlighting the cultural contingency that linked the art institution with
late capitalist society, which Ramirez also argues. However, Traba’s response to
the assault contradicts Ramirez’s viewpoint regarding her rejection of
conceptualism as an “imported fad.” Traba’s critique of the assault seems to relate
not to a subtle imperialism beneath conceptual art but to a need for a strong
harmonization of the art institution with developmentalism, performed through the
ethics and principles of artistic modernism.
The National Mummy
In search of “other” strategies of cultural struggle within this context of either/or
politics practiced by the left and the right at the time, I will examine some works of
102
Colombian artist Antonio Caro, who has pointed out that his first encounter with art
and conceptualism was marked by the two exhibitions I have just described, which
clearly express the ongoing debates about art and politics at the time. “It was
absolute Manichaeism,”33 Caro has said in one of the public interviews he and I
have produced as a collaborative project between art and cultural studies.34
Regarding the political atmosphere he encountered once he enrolled in the National
University to pursue his BFA, he also stated:
At that time being from the left was like a pleonasm because it was
assumed that politics had to come from the left. Those who knew
what was going on had to be political and had to be from the left . . .
One was political, obviously from the left, clearly very intelligent,
evidently living according to one’s principles or one was a lackey to
imperialism, a pariah, revolting, reactionary, a stupid idiot. In fine
arts, there was also Manichaeism of this style . . . I was from the
33
Víctor Manuel Rodríguez, “Entrevista a Antonio Caro,” Valdez 2 (2007), 339.
34
During the last years, Caro and I have been working on a collaborative project which consists of a
series of public interviews and discussions regarding the reception of conceptualism in Latin
America, the political character of his artistic project within the context of the cultural struggles in
the Cold War period and the role of art within the social conditions of Latin America. The project
attempted to address these issues by creating a dialogue that brought together two different
perspectives: artistic practices and cultural studies. It tends to explore diverse ways to relate them
with one another–different from art history’s and criticism’s approaches—while giving special
attention to the politics of the artistic and intellectual work. These interviews took place in Bogotá,
Cali and Tunja (Colombia) and in Quito and Guayaquil (Ecuador). The whole collection of
interviews will be published shortly. Two of these interviews have been published and included in
this dissertation. See Appendix 1 and 2.
103
Manichaeism epoch and was studying in the National University,
where everything was political in the leftist sense.35
Caro’s first known work, Amigos y Amigas: Homenaje tardío de sus amigos y
amigas de Zipaquirá, Manaure y Galerazamba (Cabeza de sal)36 [Friends: Late
Homage to Your Friends from Zipaquirá, Manaure y Galerazamba (Head of Salt)],
was exhibited in the Salon Nacional de Artistas of 1970 in Colombia. (Fig. 2.4) It
consisted of a head made of salt, outfitted with spectacles, and bearing a strong
resemblance to Carlos Lleras Restrepo, a former president of Colombia. It was
placed inside a glass box where drops of water slowly dissolved it. Owing to
technical difficulties, the box was poorly sealed, and the salted water ran all over
the Museum’s floor. Some art critics and the left interpreted the work as an
amusing critique of the political establishment in Colombia and of the ways in
which the ruling class had caused the deterioration of our social condition, as the
spreading of salt all over the Museum was read as a bad omen for our country.
Eduardo Serrano, a well known Colombian art critic, wrote in 1976 about
Cabeza:
In 1970, Caro made his first public appearance with his work
Cabeza de sal, with which he put into question our artistic values.
There is no need to emphasize the lack of understanding with which
35
Rodríguez, “Entrevista a Antonio Caro,” 339-340.
36
He refers to the Colombian zones devoted to salt exploitation originally occupied by native tribes.
The style mimicked a presidential speech.
104
the work was greeted by the art critics of the time. In our context, art
seems to mean mastering a technical difficulty or reaching a
profound expression of our emotions . . . The radical change Caro
proposed as an alternative to our usual approach to art as a technique
was perfectly obvious, despite the confusion.37
In 1980, Miguel Gonzalez, another well-known Colombian critic and curator,
wrote:
[Cabeza de sal] was a work-game, whose ephemeral condition and
the artist’s performance inaugurated a new era in our national art. A
molded figure that dissolves shows a radical jump between a
traditional understanding of art as manual training and the genuine
comprehension of an avant-garde fact. The deployment and
exploration, up to the last consequence, of the physical properties of
the material, were turned into an irony that put into question the very
definition of art as well as its integrity, expressivity, and
permanence.38
Both critics underlined at that time what would be one of the most often employed
approaches by Colombian art historians to understand conceptual art and Caro’s
work. Being framed within a formalist, avant-gardist mode of artistic production,
37
Eduardo Serrano, “Antonio Caro,” in Un lustro visual (Bogotá: Tercer Mundo Editores, 1976), p.
141.
38
Miguel González, “Todo está muy Caro,” Arte en Colombia 13 (October 1980), 39.
105
conceptualism has been mainly read as a style or a medium, that is to say, as a
modernist way of producing artworks. In this sense, it is important to return to the
ways in which Ramirez highlights the political character of conceptualism, even if
her approach needs to be revised.
I want to stress, however, the reading of Cabeza by the Venezuelan critic
Juan Calzadilla in 1970. Calzadilla was a member of the jury of the Salon in which
Caro’s work was first exhibited. He stated: “This work is an original idea, wisely
resolved using an anti-artistic approach, which is part of what has been called the
political art of our times.”39 My interest in Calzadilla’s assessment lies in the ways
in which his definition of conceptualism and Caro’s work suggest a politics of art
that is based not so much on quoting the political context—even if in Caro’s work
there is a clear relationship to it—as on an anti-artistic approach, understood as a
profound critique of the art institution. In regards to this work, Caro has said:
Cabeza was done with a little luck and just a little bit of tenacity, but
in reality, in simple terms . . . Juan Calzadilla, the Venezuelan critic,
published the first critique of Cabeza in a newspaper. Only after
reading what he wrote did I understand what I had done . . .
Calzadilla said: It’s povera art, it’s a conceptual expression and it’s
political . . . Later, in 1976, they asked me about Cabeza and I
responded that it questioned Colombian politicking . . . An
39
Calzadilla, “Razones de un jurado,” sec. A, p. 1. My emphasis.
106
important fact is that, because of the fortuitous accident of the water
that spilled and the journalistic news on the Cabeza piece, I was
catapulted very quickly to a certain level of artist.40
As I have said, Cabeza was first exhibited in the National Salon of 1970. The
exhibition was held at the National Museum of Colombia, which is one of the most
visible icons in the cultural construction of Colombia as a modern nation. The
Museum was established on July 28, 1824, under the denomination “Natural
History Museum and Mining School.” The creation of a museum that, along with
the display of its collection, would house a school to educate the population in the
new disciplines had been planned in 1819, a few months after independence from
Spain was declared. As Benedict Anderson has remarked, museums, along with the
pilgrimage of functionaries of the Spanish Crown, print capitalism, the census, and
the map, played an important role in the narration of the modern nation, in the
creation of imagined communities. He says: “The census, the map, and the museum
. . . profoundly shaped the ways in which the state imagined its dominion—the
nature of human beings it ruled, the geography of its domain, and the legitimacy of
its ancestry.”41 In particular, museums allowed new nations to create foundational
myths of origin and collect the past in order to provide a sense of the wholeness of
the newly constituted nation.
40
Rodríguez, “Entrevista a Antonio Caro,” 340.
41
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism
(London: Verso, 1991), p. 163 - 164.
107
The following note appeared in the government journal on July 18, 1824,
announcing the foundation of the National Museum of Colombia on July 4:
We are pleased to announce that . . . the Museum of Natural History
has opened to the public. In its early days, the museum already
possessed some strange things; the following are the most important:
A collection of minerals, organized according to the celebrated
system of Hüy [sic], within which are unique specimens due to their
crystallization and richness. Most of these minerals come from
Europe and other remote parts of the world. The new Museum also
has pieces of meteoric iron, found in different parts of the Republic
by Mr. Rivero and Boussengoult [sic]. There are many bones of
unknown animals, extracted from Soacha, which are very curious
because of their size. It also contains a mummy found near Tunja,
with its very well-preserved blanket, which might be 400 years old,
and some insects of extraordinary beauty. It also possesses some
mammals, reptiles, fish and some very well-made tools. It also has a
laboratory and a drawing room. Since the government wishes to
support an institution that helps propagate enlightenment and at the
same time to see all republican goods reunited, it invites governors,
priests, judges, and local authorities to send all curious things like
minerals, animals, insects, reptiles, fish, and sea shells. It will be

108
appreciated if they arrive alive. If this is not possible, they must be
sent in the best possible way, always taking care to send the animals
with their heads and feet; the reptiles and fish may be sent in spirits
and the insects fixed by pins. They must be put into a box along with
some tobacco and pepper to avoid the skeleton being injured. We
hope that with the help of the people, Colombia can compete with
the cabinets of European nations.42
Despite the Creoles’ persistent rejection of the Spanish Crown, the nation they
imagined was precisely based on the expeditionary tradition created by the Empire
to which they were subjected. It was a tradition whereby the New World was
narrated as a natural, exotic place, ready to be rediscovered in all its natural
richness. As Benedict Anderson argues, however, what really produced a sense of
bond among the Creoles was not so much their rejection of Spain—as usually
understood—as the need to control the nation’s inner difference, mostly
characterized by indigenous and African peoples. As he has noted, before the Wars
of Independence, functionaries of the Spanish administration in the colonies had to
face the emergence of various subversive movements coming from the indigenous
populations and African slaves. In Venezuela—indeed, all over the Spanish
Caribbean—planters resisted the law and procured its suspension in 1794. The
revolt of the Comuneros in Colombia arose in response to the application of new
42
Quoted by Martha Segura, Itinerario del Museo Nacional de Colombia 1823-1994 (Bogotá:
Museo Nacional de Colombia, 1995), p. 52.
109
taxes and produced an enormous mobilization to Santa Fe de Bogotá in 1781.
Bolivar himself once claimed that a “Negro revolt was a thousand-times worse than
a Spanish invasion.”43
The Creoles used the representation of the New World constructed by the
Spanish Crown in order to translate internal difference into exotic nature. It was an
attempt to exclude from national history its non-national histories coming from the
indigenous peoples and African slaves in an attempt to contain the heterogeneity
proper to its population—its discontinuous time and its local disparity—and to
control the arbitrariness of the national space. Ernest Gellner has pointed out that
“The cultural shreds and patches used by nationalism are often arbitrary historical
inventions. Any old shred would have served as well . . . nationalism . . . is itself in
the least contingent and accidental.”44 The collection, heterogeneous in itself, was
translated into a homogeneous series of “minerals, animals, birds, insects, reptiles,
fish, sea shells, etc.” as an attempt to materialize the Creoles’ illusion of a whole
and united nation. Gellner adds: “Nationalism is not the awakening of nations to
self-consciousness: it invents nations where they do not exist.”45 The Creoles’
nation is then invented by the Museum’s collection as a succession of natural
plurals, securing the homogeneity and linearity of the nation’s space and time as
well as placing the newly-born nation within the world order at the time.
43
Quoted by John Lynch, The Spanish-American Revolutions 1808-1826 (New York: W.W. Norton
& Company Inc., 1984), p. 192.
44
Quoted by Homi Bhabha, “DissemiNation: Time, Narrative and the Margins of the Modern
Nation,” in The Location of Culture, Homi Bhabha (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 142.
45
Quoted by Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, p. 6.
110
The Creoles’ anxiety about the non-Creole population created the nation as
a community composed of a succession of natural plurals that would replace the
indigenous peoples and African slaves with the minerals and animals that populated
the territory. At the same time, the collection, by constructing the nation as a series
of “natural” objects, also expressed the Creoles’ anxiety over the emptiness of the
national. In other words, the Creoles imagined its community by accumulating
objects in the Museum’s collection, and yet this cultural operation reveals that
something is missing in order for the nation to be complete. The supplementary
character of the addition of objects threatens the very coherence of the national
imagination simply because it demonstrates to us that accumulating does not
always add presence. The succession of plurals makes us fully aware of the absence
of a unique and metaphysical principle that gives coherence to the nation’s past.
Thus, anxiety about internal difference was accompanied by anxiety about
the impossibility of representing the nation as a whole and united community. The
article regarding the opening of the National Museum not only represents the
nation but also conjures it by inviting the population to add more and more objects
to the series: “Since the government wishes to support an institution that helps
propagate enlightenment, and at the same time to see all republican goods reunited,
it invites governors, priests, judges, and local authorities to send all curious things
like minerals, animals, insects, reptiles, fish, and sea shells.”46 The Creoles’
46
Segura, Itinerario del Museo Nacional de Colombia, p. 52
111
containment of and anxiety about internal difference are revealed not only because
the very collection deconstructs itself but also because it includes an object which
reenters the national imagination and reestablishes the heterogeneity of the nation.
The collection included a “mummy found near Tunja, with its very well
preserved blanket, which might be 400 years old.”47 Heterogeneity disrupts,
obviously, not just because the mummy adds to the series—understood as a natural
sequence—a “cultural object,” but also because it reintroduces the history and
culture the Creoles tried to make us to forget. The Creoles’ national imagination
attempted to create a nation whose territory was inhabited by minerals, animals,
insects, reptiles, fish and sea shells. In doing so, they wanted to exclude not only
the stories of those whose lives needed to be exterminated for the nation to be born
but also the Creoles themselves as those who were responsible for such genocide.
The idea of a collection organized as a succession of natural plurals attempted to
hide the Creoles’ locus of enunciation in order to present the invasion and
colonization as something also natural. The presence of a mummy in the collection
reveals the absence of a nation and reestablishes the heterogeneity of the nation’s
time and place.
One hundred and fifty years later, by the time of Caro’s Cabeza, the
Museum’s collection counted among its belongings more mummies and objects
coming from the Pre-Columbian past. The rooms were organized temporally. On
47
Segura, Itinerario del Museo Nacional de Colombia, p. 52
112
the first floor, there was the Pre-Columbian past, whose material culture vanishes
as soon as one ascends to the succeeding floors and enters into the space of the
nation. The second floor displayed an endless series of portraits of the former
Presidents of Colombia. The third and last floor was devoted to art that was
regarded as the highest expression of the Colombian nation. The history of the
nation was narrated as if the indigenous people and African slaves had disappeared
after the Conquest and during the Colonial period to give way to the modern state
incarnated by the portraits of Colombia’s governors and modern culture embodied
by art.
Caro made Cabeza of salt and intentionally used ancient indigenous
techniques to produce it, the intention being to remind us that this mineral was and
has been a very important cultural and economic resource for the lives of the
indigenous people from Colombia before, during, and after colonization. In fact,
salt was their currency, used to exchange goods instead of gold, which was
exclusively used to talk to their Gods. What we see is the head of a former
President of the modern Colombian state, wearing spectacles, drawing our attention
to the visual and pedagogical devices used by the Museum to create a continuous
and uniform national time-space. The head of a former President constitutes a
metonymy of all the Colombian Presidents who, according to the Museum’s
narrative, gave birth to the nation. It is a repetition of the Museum’s strategy to
represent the nation through a series of portraits. The salt constitutes a metonymy
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of the indigenous population, which was represented as a succession of natural
objects. It is a repetition of the Museum’s strategy to represent internal difference
as nature. By adding water to it—that is to say, by reversing the process of the
fabrication of salt—Caro makes the head disappear. Caro’s Cabeza inverts the
process of the nation’s formation. The disappearance of the head reveals the
absence of the nation and the appearance of the salt reveals the nation’s forgotten
stories. As Cabeza repeats the discourse’s operation that creates otherness
metonymically, it re-introduces those signs of difference that dislocate the nation’s
time and space and reveal the contingent and exclusionary character of the nation.
Cabeza becomes the national mummy to the extent that—in the same way as the
mummy found near Tunja—it deconstructs the national imagination and brings to
light both the stories of the people excluded and those who exclude them. As
Cabeza re-introduces other stories into the symbolic nation’s time-space, the
National Museum of Colombia, as a metonymy of the nation, is cursed, dislocated,
and knocked off center.
Visual Guerrillas
I have argued that the either/or approach that has been used to understand the
cultural struggles that took place during the Cold War has impeded us from
exploring other non-dialectic, non-humanist modes of cultural critique. In
particular, regarding the emergence of conceptualism in Latin America, I have

114
pointed out that some artistic projects that have been labeled as such elaborated a
profound critique of the art institution from a colonial point of enunciation. This
questions not only modernity and modernism but also the ways in which the art
institution was linked with the construction of colonial power. Approaching
different ways of understanding the role of conceptualism in Latin America, Luis
Camnitzer called Caro’s artistic strategies those of a “visual guerrilla.” He wrote:
Caro certainly fits into the artistic current which since the 1960s has
called itself conceptualism, but he also fits into something much
vaster and culturally more important. Caro is in a very particular
way a visual guerrilla. He carefully points to the targets that are
defined and beloved by the art world power structures . . . Caro is
probably the most subversive artist working in Latin America in
these times, and an unavoidable point of reference for many of us.48
By definition, guerrilla warfare is a form characterized by irregular forces
employing unorthodox tactics to fight small-scale, limited actions against orthodox
forces. Regarding this designation, Caro has said: “In a very reductionist way it
is—and this will concur with what Luis Camnitzer says: ‘a visual guerrilla.’ With
very few theoretical elements, with very few resources and the managing of very
few material elements, I attack and act. Yes, it’s a way to attack.”49 Camnitzer
48
Luis Camnitzer, “Antonio Caro: Guerrillero visual, visual guerrilla,” Polyester 4, 12 (Summer
1995), 44.
49
115
relates Caro’s work to that of guerrilla warfare based on the ways in which his
artwork “points to the targets that are defined and beloved by the art world power
structures.” However, I would like to stress some other features of guerrilla
strategies that give shape to not only the ways in which Caro operates as a visual
guerrilla, but also his work’s ethics. In particular, figures such as repetition,
camouflage, masquerade, and deception, which are forms of “artistic” struggle
typically used by Caro, would help us understand the materialization of proper
tactics from a colonial perspective that emerged during the Cold War period. In
defining the configuration of power/knowledge that creates colonial relations,
Homi Bhabha wrote of mimicry as a relationship between power and resistance,
whereby self and other are constructed in representation within a system of
differences rich in figures such as trompe-l’œil, irony, and repetition.50 In order to
be productive, colonial discourse needs to create its other, which is both its double
and its slippage and excess. Mimicry deploys disciplinary powers to produce a
recognizable other within discourse, and yet, as it repeats more than represents, it
sets in motion the proliferation of differences which threaten the discourse’s
authority. Understanding Caro’s work as a strategy informed by mimicry allows me
to clearly underline an ethics of a myriad of strategies that emerged during the Cold
War. These do not necessarily translate into a utopian and humanist rationale but
into the use of unorthodox forces to fight small-scale and limited actions that
50
Homi Bhabha, “Of Mimicry and Man,” in The Location of Culture, Homi Bhabha (London:
Routledge, 1994), p. 85-92.
116
undermine the effectiveness of the knowledge/power apparatus of colonial power
and weaken its authority.
Caro’s work Maíz, consisting of a series of images and several
performances regarding the maize plant, has been shown repeatedly in different
formats in various public places, including museums. The first works of this series
were shown in 1974, three years after his work Cabeza. In 1973, Caro’s work was
not selected to be included in the National Salon. The work he had offered
consisted of an installation based on Marlboro boxes. Eduardo Serrano, whose
insight regarding Caro’s Cabeza I quoted above, invited Caro to exhibit Marlboro
in San Diego, a very well-known gallery at the time. The opening of Caro’s
exhibition was planned by the critic to occur on the very same day the Salon was
supposed to open in the National Museum, just few blocks away from the gallery.
On that day, San Diego Gallery was almost empty in comparison to the crowd who
went to the opening at the National Salon. Caro, in despair and frustration, decided
to go to the National Museum, get the attention of the media, approach jury
member Germán Rubiano, and slap him. After this scandal he decided to produce a
work entitled Defienda su talento [Defend Your Talent], which later became the
title of the exhibition where the first version of Maiz was shown. (Fig. 2.5)
The exhibition Defend Your Talent in the Belarca Gallery opened to the
public on January 18, 1974. It consisted of images of the plant, cobs, and arepas (a
kind of bread made from maize-flour) drawn directly on the gallery’s walls. (Fig.
117
2.6) The exhibition was widely debated among critics and visitors. In fact, there
were visitors who wrote pejorative comments about the images that occupied the
whole gallery: “This is not worth it,” “Talent?”51 In an interview for El Espectador,
Caro responded, “My works are based on what has been called conceptual art since
I depart from an idea and develop it, using the possibilities I have at hand.”52 For
him and the press, the conceptual character of this exhibition lies in the fact that he
produced a work in situ, a performance, which was ephemeral and impossible to
sell and, therefore, was understood as a critique of the art market and the ways in
which it created a form of cultural production. Regarding the transitory nature of
the work, as well as the inconvenience of having to clean the walls in the gallery,
he said “I do not think my works are to be bought. Usually, they are big placards or
huge cardboards that certainly do not fit in a house. I do not care much about
selling my art; my purpose is to communicate with people using a message, an
idea.”53
The Maíz project has changed over the years. (Fig. 2.7) Caro’s first
approach was to depict images of the plant, trying to represent it in a sort of
naturalistic way. However, as he has said repeatedly, his talent was not so much
based on a gift or virtuosity to depict reality as on the ways in which he used
whatever he had at hand to convey meaning. Maíz as we know it today it is a sort of
51
Nohra Ramirez, “Defienda su talento,” La República (January 27, 1974), sec. A, p. 5.
52
Ramírez, “Defienda su talento,” p. 5.
53
Ramírez, “Defienda su talento,” p. 5.
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indigenous seal that clearly reminds us of Amerindian Colombia was mediated by
Caro’s training in advertising. Although he prefers not to talk about it, he thinks
that it was advertising that gave him the opportunity to get rid of the artistic
formalism that dominated art schools in Colombia and to learn how to “get to the
point.” As he has said:
I didn’t do academy . . . Life brought me to work in a publicity
agency, a fact that is very important in my work. There I acquired
many work elements that can be seen in Colombia Coca-Cola . . .
[Fig. 2.8] For me it was very important that I worked in that agency
because I believe that it kept me informed, it helped me adapt to the
world, and it gave me a formal education that I needed and filled a
school or academy hole.54
Caro changed the depiction of the plant from a European representation of nature
toward a more mythical understanding of the relationship between image and
world, which, according to him, was closer to the indigenous understanding of the
world and its representation. From his first work on maize and his effort to depict it
as “it is,” Caro constructed an icon that represented not so much maize and all its
54
Rodríguez, “Entrevista a Antonio Caro,” 345. His work Colombia-Coca Cola (1976) clearly
represents Caro’s interest in advertising and colonialism. Caro noted that both Colombia and Coca-
Cola have the same number of letters and fused both into one word, drawing attention to the sort of
imperialism without colonies historically practiced by the United States. Colombia-Coca Cola was
attacked by both the right and left. For some, it was a childish misunderstanding of the political,
economic, and technical support coming from the U.S. to help the poor areas of the world to
overcome underdevelopment and become modern. For others, it was a bad visual exercise since it
did not recognize the established way of making art for the people, that is, the traditions of socialist
realism.
119
related products as Amerindian culture as such. After being used as a decorative
motif in other Caro works, for instance in Todo está muy Caro [Everything is so
expensive],55 it became a work in itself. Maíz has been reproduced in murals and in
posters. (Fig. 2.9) In 1992, the Colombian government released a stamp using
Caro’s work within the context of the 500 hundred-year commemoration of
Spanish invasion. He created a sign, an advertisement to repeat the translation of
the other into nature and to reintroduce the stories of extermination that gave shape
to America. It was a response to the government and cultural institutions which
regarded the occasion as a reason to celebrate the linguistic and cultural tradition
inherited from Spain. This association between a maize plant and the representation
of Pre-Columbian America is explained in an anecdote by Caro:
After I exhibited Maiz for the first time, I was invited to Matto
Grosso (Brazil) to participate in a collective exhibition of Latin
American artists. I remember feeling isolated and distanced, despite
the fact that the Brazilian people were very friendly and hospitable.
As part of the activities taking place along with the event, I was
invited to a dinner where envueltos were offered. Envuelto is a sort
of bread made of maize wrapped with the leaves that cover the
55
“Todo está muy Caro” translates as “Everything is so expensive.” Using his advertising approach,
Caro produced a series of posters to promote himself and to criticize the rise of the cost of living in
Colombia, as Caro is both his last name and the word for expensive in Spanish.
120
maize-cob. After I tasted and smelled it, I thought: I am home. I am
in America.56
Caro has continued working with this mimetic strategy by repeating the
representation of indigenous Colombians as nature in several projects. For instance,
his work Achiote [Annatto] uses annatto as a pigment to write the word “Achiote”
on cards and to distribute them among the public attending a conference or an
opening. He also initiated a work called Proyecto 500 [Project 500] in 1987, five
years before the 500 years of Spanish colonization was to be celebrated. (Fig. 2.10)
“Proyecto” consisted of a series of talks he gave in museums, galleries, discos,
universities, and bars, based on quotes from Simón Bolívar and other so-called
heroes of Colombia’s independence and recorded in historical and literary
documents and used in children’s school texts. During the talks, he tried to
convince the audience to consume arepas and hot chocolate, hoping that they might
therefore resist consuming wheat or coffee, as the latter are not native goods.
However, Caro’s strategies of mimicry can be better seen in his work
Homenaje a Manuel Quintín Lame (1972) [Homage to Manuel Quintín-Lame].
(Fig. 2.11) Regarding the origins of his interest in Quintín-Lame, Caro has said:
After reading a review in a magazine that I liked, a book about
Quintín Lame arrived, which interested me, which I adored. I said to
myself, I can use this subject . . . Afterwards, life dictated that I live
56
Caro told me this anecdote in an informal interview that has been edited but not published.
121
on various occasions with an indigenous community on a daily
basis, sharing their usual and ordinary life. In my artistic activities I
repeated the signature of Manuel Quintín Lame, and the practice of
repeating the signature made me reflect and think about it. The
Manuel Quintín Lame piece came to me casually and today, due to
my personal experiences and due to repeating it so many times and
because of speaking about it so many times, I have a lot of
information and opinions about it, but maybe the best answer is the
one that I gave a long time ago about this same issue: The Manuel
Quintín Lame piece is good not so much because of me or my work,
but rather due to the importance of Manuel Quintín Lame. It is really
the most important piece that I have done.57
Manuel Quintín-Lame was born in 1883, three years before the Colombian modern
state emerged and its political charter released. His parents, Mariano Lame and
Dolores Chantre, were descendents of the Paeces, plural for the Paez people, an
indigenous group located in southwest Colombia. Despite their military defeat in
1605, the Paeces continued deploying strategies of cultural and social resistance,
which raised many concerns for the colonizers. In 1640, the Jesuits, who were in
charge of the evangelization of the indigenous peoples, were obliged to retreat from
57
Víctor Manuel Rodríguez, “Entrevista Pública,” in Prácticas Artísticas/Enfoques
Contemporáneos, ed. Víctor Manuel Rodríguez (Bogotá: UNal-IDCT, 2003), p.67.
122
their “soul conquest” because of the Paeces’s persistent resistance to Catholic
values. The priest Manuel Rodriguez wrote in 1684:
The Paeces, I think, are the crudest and most barbaric people ever
known in the Indies. The encomenderos58 never could get them to
surrender. They resist everything . . . only a few adults are Christian,
and, when it comes to learning, they do not attend our teaching
except by laughing at us out loud, mocking everything we say. Their
best known inclination is their leisure and drunkenness, preventing
us from getting them to reach the supreme Lord, who is the first
reason of all.59
Quintín-Lame devoted his life to the defense of the indigenous peoples against the
oppression and negligence of the Colombian state. Jailed on nearly two hundred
separate occasions, Quintín-Lame became his own lawyer, successfully
representing himself and winning several cases for the indigenous peoples. In
particular, he resisted the expropriation of indigenous lands by the rich aristocratic
families of the region protected by the State. In order to achieve this goal, Quintín-
Lame performed a kind of mimicry by which he learned the rhetoric and legal skills
of the modern state to use it against itself. An autodidact, he memorized the Civil
58
Encomendero was the name given by the Spanish Crown to a Spaniard in charge of educating a
group of indigenous people in the Catholic religion and civilized habits. In return, the group had to
pay the encomendero. This exploitation was promoted by the Spanish Crown and known as
Encomienda.
59
Quoted by Hernando Gómez and Carlos Ruiz, Los Paeces: Gente territorio. Metáfora que
perdura (Popayán: FUNCOP-Universidad del Cauca, 1997), p. 3.
123
Code as well as the book entitled A Lawyer at Home, which allowed him to assume
the defense of indigenous peoples’ rights. Quintín-Lame was also a prolific public
speaker, and his voice was heard all over the country at that time. In a famous
speech in 1927, he addressed the heads of indigenous tribes and organizations,
stating that:
Today, after being among this race, privileged by divine nature,
abandoned by all governments and almost totally killed off, in envy
and pain, a race that has been covered with tears and blood from the
12th of October 1492 to the 12th of January 1927, where my whole
person, lit up, not by the light that exists in the schools and colleges
of the civilized country, but by the light that hurt my lips and the
government of my mind . . . Indigenous gentlemen of Colombia: I
address you from the prison cell where I find myself detained by the
gigantic and usurping hand of the white and mixed race who,
through force, without law or charity, have come to seize, through
said force, our territorial properties cultivated in crops (Mieses),
destroying our virgin mountains and taking over every type of mine
that we possess, exiling us from the four walls of our homes.60
As Caro himself has said, Homage to Manuel Quintín-Lame is a performance in
which he retrieves the indigenous leader from oblivion and duplicates his signature.
60
Archivo General de la Nación 952, 315-316.
124
(Fig. 2.12) Quintín-Lame did not know how to write. For him, therefore, to sign
was a very solemn and theatrical act that should be understood as recognition not
so much of an individual self as of a cultural and collective performance whereby a
visual representation creates and vindicates a culture. Quintín-Lame’s signature
was written to be read in Spanish. However, mimicking the governors’ style, he
added baroque arabesques by using symbols of indigenous pictograms.
Before his first public presentation, Caro had to repeat Quintín-Lame’s
signature more than five hundred times to appropriate its calligraphy. In order to
invoke and convey meaning, Caro begins his performance by burning native herbs.
He then repeats Quintín Lame’s signature on a board, on paper, or on a wall. What
Caro appropriates, however, is not the aesthetic qualities of Quintín-Lame’s
calligraphy but rather the very strategy of mimicry and repetition with which both
Caro and Quintín-Lame call into question the authority of the nation as well as that
of culture and the art institution. By imitating the nation’s rhetoric, Quintín-Lame
called into question colonial discourse’s pretension of being imitable. Certainly,
Quintín-Lame imitates the rhetoric of the nation. However, the nation’s rhetoric is
not precisely imitated but disseminated; that is to say, it cannot hold on to the
authority of meaning since its translation by the nation’s internal other brings
difference to bear to the extent that Quintín-Lame uses the nation’s rhetoric against
itself. At the same time, by imitating Quintín-Lame's signature, Caro calls into
question art’s pretension of being inimitable. Both use the strategy of repetition of
125
symbols, codes, and tactics whereby cultural institutions create the nation, obliging
us to forget the stories of exclusion and extermination that gave shape to the
modern nation.
Caro appropriates multinational commercial typographies, national icons,
and the signature of a non-national leader, as well as indigenous mediums and
techniques, bringing to light those fragments, shards, and patches used by
nationalism to exclude/include internal difference and create the nation’s
community. In the seventies, by the time of Caro’s homage to Quintín-Lame, the
situation of the indigenous people of Colombia had dramatically deteriorated, since
the expropriation of their land confined them to small regions of the country. They
had to migrate and become a labor force for the owners of the lands that were once
their own. The agrarian problem, as it was called by governors and politicians,
reached extreme levels of despair and violence, in part owing to the application of
developmentalist models framed by the American mission in Latin America. On
the one hand, there was the World Bank’s Mission, which in the early 1950’s
implemented models to improve the agrarian sector. By expropriating land and by
stimulating an agrarian economy based on small owners, its object was to create an
agrarian economy that would fit into the world order. On the other hand, there was
also a policy whereby peasants were encouraged to abandon their land and populate
the cities to further the industrial development of the country. The peasant and
indigenous insurgency confronting this situation led to the emergence of the

126
guerrilla movement Manuel Quintín-Lame, which was led by the Paeces
themselves to fight against the expropriation of native land and the abrogation of
their rights.
As Homi Bhabha states: “Being obliged to forget becomes the basis for
remembering the nation . . . it is through this syntax of forgetting that the
problematic identification of a national people becomes visible.”61 This national
rhetoric forces us to forget those non-continuous, non-national histories. Caro and
Quintín-Lame, however, by re-introducing those signs of difference, reverse what
has to be forgotten in order to remember the nation to become what has to be
remembered in order to forget the nation.
As a form of mimicry, Caro uses art as a way of both being seen and hiding,
of playing by the rules and challenging the conventions of the art institution
themselves. Furthermore, as his work deals with representations of otherness made
to create the nation, Caro’s work repeats those representations to link the art
institution with the broader condition of power that gave shape to Latin America as
the North Atlantic’s other. Thus, I would like to use the designation un-art,62 which
Caro himself has been using to define his artistic project. Asked about the use of
this label, Caro said:
At an anecdotal level, I heard about the “UN” concept when I
worked in a publicity agency . . . Coca-Cola has always had its rival,
61
Bhabha, “Dissemination,” p. 160-161.
62
Original in English.
127
Pepsi-Cola, and both spend a lot of money in attacking one another
because there is a high level of cola consumption, but marketing
strategists discovered that there are people that drink neither of these
drinks and this sector is “UN-cola” people. This was very famous in
the cola wars. The Coca-Cola Company created Sprite, the UN-cola
. . . Taking into account the ways in which the field of art in the
seventies was based on antinomies such as figurative or abstract,
political or apolitical, I decided to call myself un-artist and my work
un-art.63
The notion of un-art relates to the field of art, yet it does so by putting into question
the field of art itself. Different from appellatives such as anti or against, un-art
suggests that questioning the art institution requires cultural practices to be inserted
within the institution as “art” while establishing an eccentric relationship to the art
institution that seems to put into question its knowledge/power apparatus. Caro’s
un-art sets in motion strategies within the field of art in order to operate within its
circuits and yet diminish its authority. Caro uses indigenous materials like
pigments, herbs, minerals and plants to repeat in art the metonymies of presence of
otherness used by colonial discourse to identify/expel difference. Regarding the
critical nature of his un-art, Caro says:
63
Rodríguez, “Entrevista pública,” p. 63.
128
I am going to say it like this openly, I have a secret weapon. I like
that this conversation has a hard-line style. I have a secret weapon,
and it is that the value of my discourse is not so much in what may
be valid in art circles but in that the elements of my discourse are
valid, real, and concrete in society and specifically in Colombian
society . . . Artistic discourse has rarefied so much these days, which
makes it very sophisticated. My work counts because the discourse
that I use to disguise it as art is valid without art . . . I believe that
the artistic value of my art comes from outside of art.64
Towards a Politics of Conceptualism in Colonial Contexts
I have suggested that a different reading of the regional context within which
conceptualism emerged and was appropriated in Latin America would allow us to
understand “other” practices hitherto ignored. Instead of thinking of the Cold War
period from a binary and humanist rationale, which leaves us with either/or politics
of art and culture, I have read it as a system of differences whereby Latin America
was constructed as the development “other,” giving way to strategies of
power/resistance based precisely on a politics of difference. I have also argued that
what made Latin American conceptualism different from its North Atlantic
counterpart was not so much its visual scheme, its subject, or its leftist rationale as
64
129
its locus of enunciation, its critique of modernity and modernism from a colonial
position. Although for some intellectuals, artists, and politicians, Latin America
was thought of in terms of binary opposites of left and right, an emerging
discursive regime was shaping a colonial world order, which, by
assimilating/expelling the other, attempted to transform Latin American difference
into reason, progress, and history.
Following the either/or politics of the left and right, Traba denounced
conceptualism as an aspect of American imperialism, and yet, when it came to
reading the practices surrounding the first conceptualist show in Colombia, she
interpreted those practices in terms of high modernism. She argued for cultural
transformations that helped create Latin America as the underdeveloped other,
easing the implementation of cultural and pedagogical devices to create Latin
American nations as part of the new colonial order. Caro delineated a colonial locus
of enunciation by calling attention to the ways in which the art institution was
immersed in a new colonial order after World War II. They deployed strategies of
appropriation and mimicry of art, conceptualism, and the national rhetoric. Instead
of making the global history of conceptualism richer and wider or demanding the
insertion of their works within the conceptualist genealogy, those practices
radically altered the politics of art as it was understood in the historical rhetoric of
the Cold War period.

130
Going back to the agenda proposed by Ramirez, she impels us to be fully
aware of the representation of the Latin American or Latino “other” at work in
international art circuits. She also suggests that “we step beyond denunciation of
the neocolonial politics at work in the Latin America/Latino exhibition boom and
focus more precisely on the ideological and conceptual premises that guided the
organization of these art shows.”65 Mosquera, for his part, asks for uses of
conceptualism that are more involved with the particularities of our Latin American
societies. He also asks for us to pay attention to practices based on postmodern
appropriations of international art that have transformed our “complex of being
‘derivative’ . . . into pride in the particular skill of appropriating and transforming
things for one’s own benefit.”66
At stake in this agenda is the issue of power related to the ways in which the
Latin American “other” is constructed in representation. Mosquera and Ramirez,
although in different ways, draw attention to the importance of representation when
it comes to examining the ways in which Latin American art is shown or produced
in Latin America. Framed within the politics of multiculturalism, these claims are
based, however, on the assumption that there is a Latin American other beyond
representation, or better, on the illusion of representation as something that can be
negotiated. Such an approach, inscribed within the pretension of a homogeneous
multiculturalist political space, generated particular modes of artistic production
65
Ramírez, “Beyond ‘The Fantastic’,” p. 60-61.
66
Mosquera, “Modernism from Afro-America: Wifredo Lam,” p. 13.
131
which included dialogues with the communities represented in art shows,
participative and collaborative ways of producing art, as well as a subtle laughter
about the prodigal appropriations of international art by Latin American artists.
Different readings of social contexts, as well as of the role of the art
institution in representing/producing that context, lead to different conclusions. The
research that has been done within the field of visual and cultural studies has
provided us with interdisciplinary tools to link one thing to the other. It has allowed
us to approach the art institution as a social practice linked to discursive regimes,
not just because of the ways in which artworks take the context as their subject—
even if it is done for the sake of appropriation—or because of the methods used for
integrating the communities represented, but because of the ways in which the art
institution becomes a crucial strategy of the disciplinary modes deployed by power
relations.
However, what is discussed here is not precisely a methodological or
theoretical issue. At stake are political propositions whereby Latin America, by
means of art and culture, has resisted modernity, its colonial condition, and
explored “other” ways of dealing with it in the contemporary world. This world I
have been referring to is no longer mapped in fixed territories of center/periphery,
global/local, modern/traditional, here/there. It is a world constructed through forces
of power and resistance that share and struggle within colonial territories. If we
agree with Mosquera about the need for a “new criticism [that] puts forward
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particular strategies, working on the margins, deconstructing power mechanisms
and rhetoric, appropriating and resignifying,” this agenda for a new criticism needs
to pay attention not only to what occurs within the art institution but also to what
links the art institution with these new forms of power set in motion by new forms
of colonialism. This sort of inquiry is all the more necessary, not only because
Latin American and Latino artists are consistently working on the relationships
between the art institution and broader social practices but also because other
professionals working in the field are already involved in the creations of those
practices. By the same token, their practices need to be constantly situated in terms
of the politics they mobilize. To admit that power relations are constructed through
a system of differences is to acknowledge that the colonial order creates its own
subjects in representation, which links all artistic practices with those forces of
power and resistance. Paraphrasing Okwui Enwezor, an agenda for a postcolonial
art must depart from an understanding of these new cartographies of power—the
postcolonial constellations, as he calls them—to provoke the emergence of new
practices of sovereignty, agency, and subjectivity that insist on the articulation of
global ethics for engaging the residual effects of imperial hegemony.67
67
See Okwui Enwezor, “Contemporary African Art: Beyond Colonial Paradigms,” Art Papers 26, 4
(July/August 2002), 6 -7, and “The Postcolonial Constellation: Contemporary Art in a State of
Permanent Transition,” in Research in African Literatures 34, 4 (Winter 2003), 57 - 82.
133
CHAPTER 3
Covering the Land of the Present: Hélio Oiticica’s Parangolé
Before the Portuguese discovered Brazil,

Brazil had discovered happiness.
Oswald de Andrade, Anthropophagite Manifesto
The Conga Fair
In 1965, within the context of the exhibition Opinião 65 [Opinion 65] at the
Museum of Modern Art in Rio de Janeiro, Brazilian artist Hélio Oiticica exhibited
the complete version of his artwork Parangolé for the first time. It consisted of
objects such as standards, banners, tents, and capes to be worn, used, and displayed
by dancers from the samba school “Estacão Primeira de Mangueira” [Mangueira
First Station] situated in the Morro da Magueira [Mangueira’s Hill], one of Rio’s
favelas [slums]. (Fig. 3.1)
Since 1964, Oiticica had been researching the subject, visiting the morro
and attending samba lessons at the Estacão. During that year, he produced
preliminary versions of the Parangolé, which already included standards, banners,
and tents. Its final version, presented at Opinião 65, incorporated capes, which
curiously became one of the features which most attracted museums and art
134
galleries when they displayed this artwork—leading to the perception that the capes
themselves were the artwork and their real function, to be worn while dancing
samba, was incidental. The capes were garments made of common fabrics and cast-
offs. The banners and standards called to mind the symbols used in carnival
celebrations, and the tent was as an allusion to favela architecture and was only
intended to be occupied temporarily. Later versions also included plastic containers
and other materials. Each Parangolé’s props were meant to create an environment
or atmosphere which, while appropriating some elements from the Morro da
Mangueira’s culture, invited people to become participants, though not so much
bystanders as the center of the artwork.
In 1964, Oiticica wrote two short articles about his research on Parangolé:
“Fundamental Bases for the Definition of Parangolé”1 and “Notes on Parangolé,”2
dated November 2nd and 24th, 1964, respectively. In both, Oiticica attempted to
explain the use of the word parangolé as a title of his work. The two articles were
written for the exhibition Opinião 65 and were published in 1986 in Aspiro ao
Grande Labirinto, a collection of Oiticica’s articles edited by Luciano Figueredo,
Lygia Pape, and Waly Salomao.3 In “Fundamental Bases” Oiticica defined the
word parangolé as “an idiomatic expression from the slang of Rio de Janeiro that
generally means sudden agitation, animation, happiness, and unexpected situations
1
Hélio Oiticica, “Fundamental Bases for the Definition of Parangolé,” in Hélio Oiticica, ed. Guy
Brett, Catherine David, and Chris Dercon (Rotterdam: Witte de With, 1992), pp. 85-88.
2
Hélio Oiticica, “Notes on the Parangolé,” in Hélio Oiticica, p. 93-96.
3
Luciano Figueredo, et. al. Aspiro ao Grande Laberinto (Río de Janeiro: Editora Rocco, 1986).
135
between people.”4 According to Waly Salomão, the word parangolé was also used
in a slang expression formulated as a question. He said: “Qual é o parangolé?
[What is the parangolé?] is a kind of funny question that is no longer as current as
it was during the 1960s in the slums of Rio. It is nothing more than a friendly way
of asking: ‘What’s going on?’ ‘What’s up?’ or a discreet way of asking ‘Have you
got any marijuana?’”5 Furthermore, the translator of the article “Cornerstones for a
definition of ‘Parangolé’,” a version of Oiticica’s “Fundamental Bases” translated
into English for the exhibition catalogue of Hélio Oiticica: The Body of Color
organized by Mari Carmen Ramírez, wrote a note trying to add new meanings of
the word by recalling its connotations and uses in Rio de Janeiro during the fifties.
According to the translator, at that time the word was used to make a pejorative
comment on a conversation or statement which was perceived as pointless and
uninteresting by the listener. However, he suggests other associations:
Oiticica was probably aware of [parangolé] additional senses of
artfulness or astuteness, as used to designate the cunning and street
smarts generally associated with the Carioca figure of the dandy-like
malandro,6 typified by his individual ethos, existing at the margins
of society and surviving by his wits through improvised activities
4
Oiticica, “Fundamental Bases,” p. 88.
5
Waly Salomão, Hélio Oiticica: Qual é o Parangolé e outros escritos (Rio de Janeiro: Editora
Rocco, 2003), p. 37.
6
Malandro: an individual who does not have a job and lives at the expense of others, but does so
with certain malice.
136
such as grift [sic], petty theft, and pimping . . . Parangolé also
signifies dishonest behavior intended to deceive.7
On February 17, 1965, after writing both “Fundamental Bases” and “Notes,” and
before Opinião 65, Oiticica wrote a piece recalling his experience of finding the
word parangolé in the Mangueira favela. According to the introductory note, the
piece was meant to be a footnote to his article “Fundamental Bases for the
Definition of Parangolé.” Apparently, it should have been inserted in the first
paragraph, right after his discussion of the use of the word parangolé for his
artwork and to replace his statement, “(see elsewhere the theory of the name and
how I found it).”8 The piece remarks:
The use of “parangolé” as a title for this artwork came from my
discovery of the same word in, if it is possible to say it, a
“parangolé-structure” in the urban surroundings of Rio de Janeiro.
The structure was composed of four wooden pillars joined into a
rectangle, one pillar in front of the other, with parallel threads from
top to bottom, creating a virtual wall. From each thread, plastics of
diverse colors were held by knots. The sense of space—of nucleus—
the structure had was indescribable. In addition, there was a piece of
burlap descending from one of the pillars, forming a small tent (the
7
Mari Carmen Ramírez, Hélio Oiticica: The Body of Color (Tate: London, 2007), p. 297.
8
137
structure’s builder slept inside it, as I noted later). The word
“parangolé” was written on it.9
The various meanings of the word parangolé highlight several ideas which, I
believe, are crucial to expanding the usual interpretation of Oiticica’s work by art
curators, critics or historians. Oiticica’s use of the word parangolé to mean a
“sudden agitation, animation, happiness, and unexpected situations among people,”
defines the Parangolé as an intervention which attempts to provoke unexpected
reactions towards art objects, practices and institutions, among the spectators. In
this light, the Parangolé is a collective and participatory play—not just a matter of
capes—that attempts to lend “other” signifying practices to experience art,
disrupting usual conventions about its meaning and the roles of artist and
spectators. However, this collective participatory play revolves around traditions of
Brazilian popular music and dance. It seems to me then that the Parangolé deals
with the two opposing worlds created by modernity: the great division between
canonical art and popular culture, which historically excluded the popular cultures
of Latin America, including those of Brazil. Putting these popular traditions into
artistic contexts vindicates those cultures, and in the case of the Parangolé, the
poor and excluded sectors of the city of Rio who create it. Even more, the
association of the word with strategies of deceit and disguise used by such sectors
throws light on Oiticica’s ethics and modus operandi. As I will show, Oiticica’s
9
Hélio Oiticica, “17-Fevereiro-1965,” in PHO (Projeto Hélio Oiticica) 0187-65 (February 1965).
138
challenged modernity’s imposition of certain notions on art upon those marginal
sectors, employing the same tactics the latter use to ensure the survival of their
cultural practices in adverse conditions. Parangolé should be seen as a performance
that brings to light and opposes the colonial side of the art institution, offering the
excluded cultures possibilities for disrupting the developmentalist discourse
imposed on Latin America during the Cold War.
Against the understanding of the Parangolé as objects, the association of
the Parangolé with the meaning of a “sudden agitation among people” is perhaps
due to the footnote Oiticica wrote in his “Fundamental Bases” as well as the
circumstances that surrounded its first exhibition at Opinião 65. The show at Rio’s
Museum of Modern Art was organized by Jean Boghici, an art dealer and owner of
the Galería Revelo in Rio, and by Ceres Franco, a Brazilian art critic who lived in
Paris at the time. The exhibition was one of the events celebrating Rio de Janeiro’s
fourth centenary. Between August 12 and September 12, 1965, the works of
thirteen European and sixteen Brazilians artists were shown to promote what was
called New Realism (Nouveau Realisme) as a reaction to the growing influence of
abstraction. The latter was seen by some Brazilian artists and critics as an
expression of American imperialism, as well as a cultural project that lacked social
and political commitment. Franco wrote on this occasion, “The new painting seeks
139
to be independent, polemical, inventive, denunciatory, oppositional, social, and
moral. It is inspired by the immediacy of urban life, together with its myths.”10
Opinião 65 was, in turn, inspired by the musical show Opinião, performed
at Rio de Janeiro’s Teatro Arena in 1964. (Fig. 3.2) Planned by Augusto Boal, it
brought together singers and cultural activists such as Nara Leão, João do Vale, and
Zé Ketti. Its aim was to protest against the military coup that seized power and
installed a military dictatorship in Brazil in 1964, and which ruled the country until
1985. The military coup was the right’s reaction to a growing leftist influence in the
Brazilian government and resulted in part from American pressure to check the
threat of communism in Latin America.
Opinião was the first massive response to the new regime by intellectuals,
artists, and activists. It inaugurated a type of collaborative work that characterized
Brazil’s cultural life during the sixties and seventies whereby collective projects
that challenged mainstream art were linked with forms of political activism and
criticism. Leão, do Vale and Ketti were already known for their provocative lyrics
and performances that openly denounced the extreme poverty of Northeast Brazil,
the general abandonment of the favelas in Rio’s morros by the state, and the
repression of any dissenting thought by the military. During the show, Leão and do
Vale interpreted the song Opinião with lyrics by Zé Ketti, which gave the name to
the show. The song became famous and was recorded in an album with the same
10
Quoted in http://www.itaucultural.org.br
140
title. The song translates, They can stop me/They can hit me/They can leave me
here without eating/I won’t change my opinion [opinião].
Maria Bethânia, who was seventeen years old and the sister of the already
renowned Caetano Veloso, replaced Leão, who was having trouble with her voice.
María Bethânia’s interpretation made João do Vale and José Candido’s song
Carcará famous, due to her aggressive style and the association between a native
bird of prey, the Crested Carcará, and Brazil’s situation: Cárcara claws, kills and
eats/Carcará is not going to die of hunger/Carcará braver than men/Carcará
seizes, kills and eats. At the end of the song, as the musicians repeated in chorus
Carcará, María Bethânia belligerently recited the number of Brazilian peasants
who were dying of hunger, or were jobless or displaced from their native regions,
blaming the Brazilian government for the situation. Waly Salomão remembers
Opinião and María Bethânia’s interpretation of Carcará:
The epic verses of a song by João do Vale describe “a wicked
bird/with a twisted beak/ like a hawk.” At first, it was interpreted in
the sweet new style of Nara Leão. Later it was given a metallic,
rough-throated and shocking interpretation by the seventeen-year-
old María Bethânia. In a surprisingly short time, it became an
inspiring hymn of protest against the “glorious” military
dictatorship.11
11
Salomão, Hélio Oiticica, p. 57.
141
The exhibition Opinião 65 at the Museum of Modern Art of Rio de Janeiro is
generally regarded as the visual version of the type of denunciatory responses
initiated the year before by the musical show. Art critic Ferreira Gullar observed,
“Something new is happening in the field of plastic arts, and this new character is
expressed by the very title of this exhibition: the painters are hitting back, stating
their opinion! That is crucial!”12 The show exhibited works by British artist Wright
Royston Adzak; Argentineans Antonio Berni and Jack Vanarsky; Spaniards
Manuel Calvo and José Paredes Jardiel; and Gérard Tisserand and Alain Jacquet
from France, among many others. From Brazil, there were artworks by Carlos
Vergara, Pedro Escosteguy, Waldemar Cordeiro, Ivan Serpa, José Roberto Aguilar,
Adriano de Aquino, Carlos Vergara, Antonio Días, and Hélio Oiticica.
Organizers and artists actively participated in the creation and realization of
the exhibition. Carlos Vergara, whose work was included in the show, stated,
“Opinião 65 was a political attitude embraced through an artistic attitude. The basic
idea was to express our opinion . . . an opinion about art as well as politics.”13 The
exhibition’s political intention pervaded the artistic proposals of the Brazilian
artists so much that the very titles of some of the works were provocative. Among
them were The General by Carlos Vergara, Victor? by Antonio Días, Palmeira vs.
Flamingo and Miss Brazil by Rubens Gerchman. Speaking of the role of art in
12
Ferreira Gullar, “Opinião 65,” Revista de Civilizaçao Brasileira 4, (1965). Reprinted in Arte em
Revista 2 (1979), 22.
13
Quoted by W. Salomão, Hélio Oiticica, p. 58.
142
Brazilian politics, Antonio Días declared, “I refuse to succumb—the struggle
interests me as a way of life . . . The artist is a sort of consciousness between the
individual and the collective.”14
During the opening, while most of the visitors were contemplating the
artworks, Oiticica arrived, followed by a group of dancers from the samba school
of Mangueira, dressed in capes and carrying tents, banners and standards, while
dancing samba and playing tambourines, drums, and frying pans. (Fig. 3.3)
Salomão recalls that for the opening “it was planned that he would come but not in
the barbaric way he did: He was not only bringing his Parangolés but also directing
an entourage that seemed more like a conga fair.”15 (Fig. 3.4, 3.5) The Museum’s
director ordered Oiticica and the dancers to be expelled from the premises, arguing
that the performance was dangerous for the artworks being exhibited. Clearly
shocked, Oiticica invited the dancers to continue the performance in the Museum’s
gardens. Suddenly, the spectators left the Museum and crowded into the garden,
joining the dance.
The circumstances surrounding the opening of Opinião 65 were widely
reported by journalists. A few days later, Rio’s newspaper Diário Carioca
announced, “Parangolé’ impedido no MAM” [Parangolé banned from MAM].16 In
a note “Ainda o Parangolé” [Again the Parangolé], published in the newspaper O
14
15
16
Claudir Chaves, “‘Parangolé’ impedido no MAM,” Diário Carioca (August 14, 1965).
143
Globe, Jean Boghici wrote, “Parangolé is what it is. It is pure myth. Hélio Oiticica:
The national Flash Gordon. He does not fly through outer space. He flies through
social layers.”17 Thus, despite the Museum director’s reaction, or perhaps because
of it, Parangolé was highly appreciated by artists, critics and journalists. Artist
Rubens Gerchman said to Salomão, “It was the first time the poor entered the
Museum. Nobody knew if Oiticica was a genius or a madman and, suddenly, I saw
[his work] and it amazed me.”18
Some aspects of the Parangolé in the opening at Opinião 65 are similar to
the Parangolé performance I experienced during the opening of the exhibition
Cosmococas at the Hélio Oiticica Art Center in Rio de Janeiro on September 12,
2005. As happened at the opening of Opinião 65, people of the favela popped in,
something which took us all by surprise as it was not announced in the program.
The unexpected presence of the Parangolé at the opening was meant to celebrate
the fortieth anniversary of the first exhibition of the work in Opinião 65. As we
were visiting the rooms where the Coscomocas was being shown, we heard the
strident chords and rhythms of samba and batucada in the streets near the Center,
which is in downtown Rio, surrounded by slums and red light districts. The visitors
attending the exhibition tried to go outside to see what was happening. Suddenly,
people from the Morro appeared, dancing with Parangolé capes and banners, as
they organized the tents. As I have noted, the banners were flags made of fabrics of
17
Jean Boghici, “Ainda o Parangolé” O Globe (August 16, 1965).
18
144
diverse colors, while the tents looked like small wooden cabins covered by cloth,
similar to the tent Oiticica described when he discovered the word parangolé. The
dancers displayed their capes, which have slogans such as Da Adversidade Vivemos
[On Adversity We Live] and Estou possuido[I am possessed]. While they danced,
people from the exhibition joined in, passing around the capes, forming a circle,
singing or just screaming. Passersby also joined in—including homeless people—
becoming fully integrated into this participatory play. The police arrived an hour
later and asked the people on the street to go into the Center. It was an ironic
reversal of the situation at Opinião 65 when people of the Morro, who were
dancing in Parangolé, were asked to leave the exhibition. Forty years later, we
were asked to go into the Center, since the use of public place is highly regulated
and this kind of street demonstration is not allowed after 6 p.m.
Oiticica’s Cosmococa 4 NOCAGIONS was held on the ground floor of the
Center. It is a room-size installation that includes a slide projection of images from
John Cage’s book Notations, which has diagonal lines of cocaine on its cover. (Fig.
3.6) The slides were projected onto the four walls surrounding a swimming pool.
The people in the Parangolé jumped into the pool without hesitation as soon as
they entered the room. Musicians with their tambourines and saucepans also
jumped in, continuing to play their music. My amazement and incredulity—I never
thought I would be able to participate in a Parangolé performance—gradually
increased as I got more and more involved with this double experience: I was
145
watching one of Oiticica’s plays and at the same time directly participating in
Parangolé, surprised by the disorder, wearing and exchanging the Parangolé capes,
and deeply enjoying the Brazilian music and dance. The meaning of the Parangolé
as a “sudden agitation among people” was combined with that of vindicating other
cultural practices coming from those still excluded in the city of Rio. However, this
intervention took place in the Center founded by Oiticica’s brother after Oiticica’s
death and during the exhibition showing the work he produced during his stay in
New York. The Cosmococas had already been exhibited in New York, Columbus
(Ohio), and Barcelona (Spain). It is as if the Parangolé performance in Rio was
planned to remind us of the dangers of forgetting Oiticica’s engagement with
marginal and popular practices and his critique of the art system, issues that I will
develop further. Having been exhibited as works of art in museums all over the
world, the capes, banners, and tents had returned to the favela and the people were
reclaiming the Parangolé as their own.
Returning to Opinião 65, it is mostly remembered because of Oiticica’s
work, despite the fact that his Parangolé was at odds with the organizers’ idea of
promoting New Realism as a counterpoint to abstraction. Clearly, Oiticica’s work
did not fit the dictates of New Realism, simply because his work explored neither
painting per se nor art’s function in the ways New Realism did. Oiticica’s previous
Neo-concrete work was regarded as part of the constructivist agenda and was
clearly interested in the possibilities of modernism in Brazil that turned to a

146
reevaluation of the role of the spectator in Western art as expressed by the word
vivência.19 Oiticica’s collaborative work with Lygia Clark proved to be fruitful in
this respect, to the extent that their artistic projects challenged the very foundation
of constructivism. Both Clark and Oiticica considered art to be a total experience
and a source of human expressiveness. The role of the spectator, the relationship
between body and mind, the need to expand our sensual experience of a work of art
and bring art closer to bodily experiences were issues that gave shape to Oiticica’s
previous work. But this previous collaborative research clearly did not fit into the
artistic agenda of New Realism and Opinião 65.
In terms of the way that other artists and activists “expressed their opinions”
about the dictatorship and the poverty of the country, Oiticica’s work was eccentric,
not so much because he did not express his opinion as for the content of that
opinion and the ways he did express it. His work seemed to contradict the political
intentions of Opinião 65, that is, the notions of politics, its relation to art, and the
problems of Brazil, held by the organizers, critics, and artists participating in the
show. In contrast with most of the works, which regarded art as a “reflection” of
reality and the poor and popular culture as a subject—the previous musical version
of Opinião was an example—Oiticica brought the poor into the Museum to
19
Guy Brett has pointed out the difficulties in translating the Portuguese word vivência. He has said:
“It translates literally, and poorly, as ‘life-experiences.’” in Guy Brett, “The Experimental Exercise
of Liberty,” in Helio Oiticica, p. 224.
147
question the manner in which the art institution linked to both the left’s and right’s
appropriation of the poor and popular culture for their own political purposes.
As I have explained in Chapter 2, following the Independence Wars in the
nineteenth century, many Latin American oligarchies tried to consolidate the
emerging nation-states through narratives which pretended that a heterogeneous
collection of non-modern peoples had a single national identity. As Gareth
Williams has written, “The formation of the modern nation state in Latin America
was for the most part predicated on the active integration and institutionalization of
the notion of the people—of the common populace, or the popular/subaltern sectors
of society—as the originary ground from which to consider the contours of national
history, national identity formations, and national modernization.”20 Thus, the
recognition that Brazil lacked a true national culture was combined with an attempt
to integrate the popular into a nation-state.
During the thirties and fifties, this concern led to attempts to reconcile
modern art with the idiosyncrasies of a country where there was a continuous
mixing of black, indigenous and European cultures. However, while the right
wanted to include this heterogeneity within a national identity without relaxing its
own political control and ideology, the left promoted the idea of inclusion from
below; that is, it regarded the popular as a force with a hegemonic will. “The idea
of the people and, along with it, the concept of the popular, came to be constructed
20
Gareth Williams, The Other Side of the Popular: Neoliberalism and Subalternity in Latin America
(Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2002), p. 4.
148
as a potentially hegemonic formation designed to suture the totality of the nation’s
demographic and cultural differences to the formation and expansion of the nation
state,”21 Williams remarks. Carlos Zilio has further pointed out that the left thought
of a national culture as an enterprise that was or should be modern, Brazilian, and,
above all, socialist. In other words, Brazilian culture had to be based on and
oriented towards the people.22
As a result, the dream of a nation, whether populist or socialist, was
combined with the dream of converting the poor and the popular into a political and
artistic subject. For the populist, making Latin American countries modern meant
converting native Latin Americans and black slaves from Africa into peasants and
industrial laborers, yet that attempt also meant destroying or repressing their
cultures, since they were regarded as non-modern and underdeveloped: a threat to
the nation’s consolidation and progress. For the left, the dream of a nation should
be accomplished by promoting a truly popular national tradition. In the field of art
the socialist popular project followed the various attempts at a socialist art that was
emerging in all Latin America in such artistic movements as Mexican Muralism.
In this light, Opinião 65 might be understood as a response to the
dictatorship of leftist artists and critics. It attempted to recover the political
influence on the people which the left perceived might be lost due to the military
21
Williams, The Other Side of the Popular, p. 5.
22
Carlos Zilio, “Da Antropofagia á Tropicalia,” in O Nacional e o popular na cultura brasileira,
(Sao Paulo: Editores Brasiliense, 1982), p. 15.
149
coup. This political context explains why most of the works at Opinião 65 were
committed to denouncing Brazil’s brutal reality and addressing the people. It also
explains Antonio Días’s remarks about the role of art and Gerchman’s celebration
of Oiticica’s Parangolé as a way of allowing the poor to enter the Museum, which I
referred to above.
It seems clear to me that Oiticica was not particularly interested in
following the approach of the leftist intellectuals who organized Opinião 65 or the
populist pretensions of the right. His work neither assumed a position of authority
towards popular culture nor pretended to speak for the people. On the one hand, he
rejected the right’s attempt to integrate the popular into the national project as he
did not invite the poor to the Museum for them to become “cultured” spectators and
normalized citizens who would help nationalism become consolidated. On the other
hand, Oiticica also rejected the leftist pretension of speaking for the people and
converting popular culture into a subject and the telos of artistic practices. Oiticica
invited the poor into the Museum to question the ways in which the insertion of
their culture into leftist cultural practices really meant the opposite of what it
pretended to be, namely, the exclusion of their system of signification from the
cultural field, since for the left the popular also needed to be transformed into the
modern in the name of socialism.
As I stated in the Introduction, the implementation of developmentalism
was accompanied by the consolidation of the art institution in Latin America.

150
While modernizing policies in the field of economy were being implemented,
museums of modern art and art schools were founded in Latin America, along with
art criticism and the study of Latin American art history. Developmentalism and the
art institution followed prior attempts by local governments and political parties to
solve the “problem” of the popular, since both reaffirmed the idea of
inclusion/exclusion found in representations of popular culture, based on the right’s
illusion of a modern nation and the left’s of modern socialism.
My goal in this chapter is to explore the relationship between Oiticica’s
Parangolé and popular culture as a part of a broader body of Latin American
artistic projects that explored the colonial nature of developmentalism and its links
with the newly-born art institution during the Cold War. I argue that by
appropriating the very representation of popular culture and re-inserting it within
the art system, Parangolé explored strategies of cultural critique to oppose the
intention of integrating the poor within either a national project or a socialist
project. Standing in and outside of modernity at the same time, Parangolé re-
inserted those means of expression rejected by modern culture into the art
institution, postponing modernity’s wish to fabricate, integrate, and convert the
popular into art. The Parangolé also encouraged the creation of environments for
new social and communitarian experiences coming from popular culture, which
represent marginal means of coping with the adversity of developmentalism in
Latin America.
151
I will explore Oiticica’s critique of the forms the avant-garde took in Brazil
by contrasting his prolific writing about Brazilian art with the art-historical
approach which classifies his work as part of the avant-garde of the sixties and
seventies. I will argue that his positions opposing the avant-garde were based on a
profound inquiry into the role of art in the colonial context of Latin America, the
need to put it at the service of creating marginal collective experiences of solidarity,
and a sense of belonging and community among those subjected to colonial and
class power relations. I will further argue that the ethics of his artistic search cannot
be approached without taking into account its roots in Brazilian and Latin
American cultural traditions. I will examine the claims for a more culturally-based
approach made by some Latin American scholars, which place Oiticica’s work
within the context of the anthropophagite tradition in Brazil. Using strategies of
disguise, mimicry and concealment this tradition “devoured” modernity to open up
new intercultural dialogues and practices of subjectivity which, I believe, are
consistent with Oiticica’s anarchist spirit, interest in the marginal, and search for
“other” practices of art and culture.
In this light, the Parangolé, I argue, should be seen—and experienced—as a
demonstration rather than as an object, that is, a performance that is performative. It
is a performance in the theatrical sense as it displays, through dance and acting, the
stereotypes and constructions imposed on popular cultures. In doing so, it is also
performative insofar as it disseminates the meaning that developmentalism has

152
imposed on popular culture. As in an anthropophagite ritual, Brazilian popular
sectors in Parangolé swallow the representations that have made their cultures non-
modern and open up new meanings that may enable them to survive in a continent
condemned to modernity.
An Ethical Necessity
Art historians generally divide Oiticica’s work into four major stages to explain
how his unique research on artistic issues progressively led to his surprising
innovations in color and artistic support. The following is my summary of those
stages, based on the analyses of Guy Brett, Simone Osthoff, and others:
1. The Glass Bolide (fireball or flaming meteor): Glass containers to be
opened by the viewer. Color seems to function as a glowing mass to
which the person is attracted, rather like a moth to flame. He produced
more than 50 versions. (Fig. 3.7)
2. The Box Bolide: Boxes with spatial divisions which play on the
mysteries of interior spaces, of opening and closing, of what can’t be
physically entered or completely seen. At first, they may seem like
examples of “object as painting” or “painting as object,” ones which
also have a nucleic mass. The Box Bolides reflect what Oiticica deemed
“the constructivism of the favelas”—the structures and colors of Rio de
Janeiro’s slums. In his Box Bolides, Oiticica employed various

153
materials, including plastic and glass, traditionally used to build shelters.
He then lined his boxes with photographs and mirrors. Both the Glass
Bolides and Box Bolides often included words or images; olfactory
effects as well or were meant to pay homage to different people. (Fig.
3.8)
3. The Penetrable: cabins or labyrinths whose recesses are to be explored
bodily and with all senses, especially the touch of one’s feet. Tropicalia
and Eden are considered to be the most complete project of this series.
(Fig. 3.9) The former was exhibited for the first time at the Museum of
Modern Art in Rio de Janeiro in 1967. Tropicália was also the name of a
wider project by Brazilian artists, musicians, and writers who worked on
folkloric or exotic representations of Latin America. (Fig. 3.10)
4. The Parangolé: clothing, capes and banners as elements of dance and
carnival display taking place in tents and structured around free corporal
expression.23
This linear analysis of the development of Oiticica’s approach to color and artistic
support has been interpreted as caught between a number of contradictions or
dichotomies. One has to do with the relative importance he gave to structural and
formalist issues, on the one hand, and political ones, on the other, that is, issues of
23
Guy Brett, “The Experimental Exercise of Liberty,” p. 226-227 and Simone Osthoff “Lygia Clark
and Hélio Oiticica: A Legacy of Interactivity and Participation for a Telematic Future,” Leonardo
30 (1997), 279.
154
emancipation and revolt. On another level, we are faced with a contradiction,
difficult to resolve, between his public image as a “madman” or anarchist, and his
rational and methodical approach both to his art objects and the theories he
propounded to justify his innovations.
In particular, I would like to refer to the interpretations of Guy Brett and
Mari Carmen Ramírez, which are especially important since they were the curators,
along with others, of the two most comprehensive exhibitions of his work which
have taken place since his premature death in 1980. My concentration on them does
not rule out the importance of the insights of other commentators, who include not
only a good number of scholars, historians, and critics in the field of art, but also
philosophers and social scientists who believe that Oiticica’s work is related to
wider issues ignored by conventional art history and criticism. The fact that their
interpretations came out of their organization of major public exhibitions interests
me since it enabled them to reach larger audiences than critics ordinarily have. The
first exhibition is Helio Oiticica, which was held in 1992 and organized by Guy
Brett, Luciano Figueredo, and Catherine David. It was seen in Europe, Brazil and
the United States and was the first to do justice to the enormous volume of his
work. The second exhibition, Hélio Oiticica: The Body of Color, was organized by
Mari Carmen Ramírez and Luciano Figueredo and was shown in Houston and
London between December 2006 and April 2007.

155
Guy Brett’s essay for the 1992 exhibition, “The Experimental Exercise of
Liberty,” borrows a famous remark about the Brazilian avant-garde of the 1960’s
by the Brazilian art critic Mário Pedrosa. Although Brett states that “to some extent
all ‘later’ work of Oiticica’s involved a reconsideration of ‘earlier’ work,” 24 he
insists on the linear development of Oiticica’s work and concentrates on the
dichotomies between art and life, and between madness and lucidity, both of which
relate, in turn, to the ethics of emancipation found in the rhetoric of the avant-
garde. Of the dichotomy between art and life, Brett writes: “Hélio was pulling away
from the ambience of ‘art’ towards ‘life,’ almost as if he was stealing concepts for
the sake of life, concepts that would focus life without fixing or monumentalizing
it, remaining fragile and precarious in their forms as physical objects.”25 Of the
dichotomy between madness and lucidity, he says: “His transgressions were
effective since he knew very well the nuances of Brazilian conformism, including,
incidentally, that of assuming that the artistic projects of this wild person were
‘crazy’ and unrealizable. The two sides co-existed in Hélio—delirious abandon and
meticulous order, intellect and trance.”26 Brett links Oiticica’s approach to that of
artists in other countries whose work raised social questions in a visionary way in
the sixties and seventies, “rather as artists did in Russia during and after the
Revolution, though in a different way.”27 He argues that Oiticica belonged to a
24
Brett, “The Experimental Exercise of Liberty,” p. 222.
25
26
27
156
third-world avant-garde which exposed the contradictions in the economic and
social values of a Brazilian ruling class that clearly followed the bourgeois model.
He says: “Hélio took a leading position in the avant-garde through his involvement
with the favela people, which aimed at not only confronting the social
consequences of that model, but also at creatively collaborating in the creation of a
“post-colonial” national culture in Brazil.”28
Brett’s parallel between Oiticica’s work and the early twentieth-century
European avant-garde’s critique of bourgeois society attempts to place Oiticica’s
work within the framework of the modern idea of an artistic avant-garde at the
forefront of social change. Following the critique of the autonomy of the European
avant-garde in the eighties, his main argument attempts to prove that differently
from that European avant-garde, Oiticica’s third-world experiment made use of the
avant-garde ethics to link art to politics, without forgetting the avant-garde’s wish
to link art and life.29 Having stated all this, however, Brett then succumbs to a
formalist rhetoric that focuses on issues of color and artistic support. He says of the
four stages:
The nature of the innovations Hélio made, and the genres or
“orders” he derived from them, which served him as a structure of
experimentation for the rest of his life, become very clear if one
28
29
I am referring to the work of Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant Garde (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota, 1984) which, I believe, influenced Brett’s reading of Oiticica’s work.
157
continues at this point to take color/painting as the subject of the
process.30
Other critics, exemplified by Mari Carmen Ramírez, take this formalist approach a
step further. While her interpretation maintains the idea of a linear progression, she
abandons any attempt, like Brett’s, to identify Oiticica’s work with the sixties
avant-garde—or its contemporary revival—or pay attention to his “madness” or
search for freedom, choosing, instead, to concentrate on the purity of his formalism
and the rigor of his theories. Thus, in her introduction to the catalogue of the
exhibition Hélio Oiticica: The Body of Color, an essay entitled “Hélio’s Double-
Edged Challenge,” Ramírez begins with a reference to the Brazilian critic Frederico
Morais’s “theory of marginality” in order to explain Oiticica’s questioning of the
art institution and its effect on the third world.31 However, for her the two
dimensions of art and life in Oiticica’s work led him along a “forked path” between
his anarchic and “systematic” thought, his concerns about art and a Brazilian
society plagued by contradictions, “his vision of a new ‘state of invention’ that
blurred the perceived division between art and life,” and “the oscillation between
avant-garde and underdevelopment.”32 She concludes:
The emphasis on the artist as rebel, however, has conveniently
obscured other aspects of Oiticica’s personality and production that
30
31
Ramírez, Hélio Oiticica, p. 17.
32
158
have recently come to surface, demanding equal attention. In reality,
the poète maudit coexisted with the methodical intellectual, intuitive
researcher, and consummate artistic practitioner . . . [This
exhibition] brings to light a critical yet, until now, little-explored
dimension of the artist’s lifelong preoccupation: color.33
Ramírez attempts to depict Oiticica’s persona and work as fully committed to the
development of highly sophisticated formal solutions to his anarchist subjectivity:
“Even the anti-art posture he deployed after 1965 could not undo the seduction of
the rich colors, textured materials, and striking fabrics of the constructions, capes,
environments, and trans-objects he produced by crafting or appropriating everyday
materials.”34 She concludes, “Without doubt, the enticement of a proposal that is
close enough to us in its organization yet is ungraspable in its delirium leaves us
with no choice but to rise to its double-edged challenge. Such is the main purpose
of the present undertaking.”35 In the same way as Brett, she winds up with a
formalist interpretation of Oiticica’s work. Ramírez affirms:
From the very beginning, Hélio considered color to be a fully
autonomous system that had remained far too long subordinated to
the pictorial support. As such, color had its own spatial and temporal
dimension that could only be appreciated when released from the
33
Ramírez, Hélio Oiticica, p. 17-18.
34
35
159
plane. . . . Taken as a whole, these [1950] series represent the basis
for a supreme order that liberates the senses through chromatic
experiences in both time and space. . . . Considered from this novel
perspective, color can be seen not as a means or a set of formal
elements, but as a structural system unto itself—one, in my view,
that is the key to understanding Oiticica’s entire oeuvre.36
Consequently, Oiticica’s work has been seen either as an innovative response to the
crisis of the avant-garde or as a true Latin American contribution to formal issues
that determine twentieth-century art’s inner development. For Ramírez, Oiticica’s
work of the fifties created color as a supreme order, making it paradigmatic for the
debates of the second half of the twentieth century. Brett, for his part, emphasizes
the ways in which Oiticica’s work connects issues that have been of central
importance to art in the past few decades:
It is remarkable to what extent the work of Oiticica touches almost
all the areas of recent art, whether they are conceived as a set of
passive categories–kinetic art, process art, the monochrome,
minimal art, conceptual art, pop art, political art, land art,
environmental art, body art, participation, performance–or as
burning and contested issues: the status of the object as
communication or consumer commodity; notions of authorship and
36
160
the relations of artist to audience; the gap between fine art and
popular culture; questions of identity, sexuality, decolonization and
cultural difference; the relation between art and life.37
Despite their differences, both critics begin by placing Oiticica’s work in the
framework of avant-garde experiments and questions about the relationship
between art and life. However, this intention progressively fades as both finally
concentrate on Oiticica’s innovations in color and artistic support. According to
both, these experiments run from his first constructivist works, which freed the
canvas from the wall to create atmospheres where color would be perceived as an
element crucial to the creation of space, to his Parangolé, where the capes
represent the final liberation of color from the canvas or any other artistic support,
and convert it into a living component of bodily expressions. For one critic, this
formal achievement connects Oiticica’s work and life. For the other, it finally
converts color into a system sufficient unto itself. In the light of this formalist
reading, Oiticica’s search for the experimental—which established his differential
relation to modernism—is converted into experimental art which successfully
resolved avant-gardist formalist concerns about the nature of art and its link to life.
Since, in my view, the interpretation of art is above all political, I wonder what
happened to Brett’s initial emphasis on the utopian politics of the avant-garde, not
to mention Ramirez’s leading role, in the eighties, in questioning the way Latin
37
Brett, “The Experimental Exercise of Liberty,” pp. 223-224.
161
American art was represented by mainstream museums and art historians, a topic I
discussed in Chapter 2.
I would like to return to Morais’s reference to Oiticica’s work as a “theory
of marginality” in order to change the terms of Brett and Ramírez’s arguments and
free the interpretation of that work from their binary rationale whose ethics
inevitably points at a dialectic and utopian politics, one which, in my opinion,
Oiticica overtly rejected. If Oiticica’s work aimed at a “theory of marginality,” I
consider it interestingly productive to think of it as a proposal that was not trapped
within those dichotomies but actively exploited the construction of difference
inherent in contradictions such as: art/culture, developed/underdeveloped,
art/politics. If, as Morais argues, Oiticica develops a “theory of marginality,” we
should not squeeze his work into the narrow dichotomies between art and life or
formalist experimentation and social awareness characteristic of art criticism.
Instead of situating his work within or outside that system of representation—a
binarism that falls into the trap of that representation—I see Oiticica’s marginality
as a set of strategies that worked on those very distinctions created by the art
system, and, by the same token, on the distinction between developed and
underdeveloped created by the U.S. in the Cold War period. His work did not seek
to enrich the modernist system of art implemented by developmentalism nor
consider popular culture to be a utopian place for individual freedom. By activating
the workings of difference within those dichotomies, his work challenged both the
162
dichotomy of art/popular culture and the utopian politics of the outside, contesting
both developmentalism and the art institution.
In what follows, I would like to expand upon Oiticica’s insights into
popular culture, the notion of the experimental, “marginal” anti-art and Latin
American views of the role of art within colonial contexts. Without
underestimating the experimental character of his visual, performance or spatial
innovations, I prefer a more culturally-based approach, related to the struggles
against the colonial condition of Latin America, which allows us to come up with a
different analysis of Oiticica’s dream, one that, I believe, vindicates “an other”
ethics different from the utopian politics of the avant-garde, whose idea of
emancipation art historically amounts to what Ramírez calls “the artist’s
emancipation of color into space.”38
In order to contrast this interpretation with the conventional critical ones, I
would first like to present the detailed account of his work and its relation to
Brazilian art in an essay he wrote in 1967, “Esquema Geral de La Nova
Objetividade” [General Scheme of The New Objectivity], published on the
occasion of the exhibition Nova Objetividade at the Museum of Modern Art of Rio
de Janeiro. Above all, Oiticica characterized Nova Objetividade not so much as a
new artistic tendency as a “state . . . not a dogmatic, aesthetic movement. . . . [It] is
more an ‘arrival,’ made up of multiple tendencies, characterized, significantly, by
38
163
the ‘absence of unity of thought.’”39 In this article, Oiticica summarized the main
characteristics of Nova Objetividade:
1- General constructive will; 2- A move towards the object, as easel
painting is rejected and superseded; 3- The participation of the
spectator (physical, tactile, visual, semantic, etc.); 4- A commitment
to political, social, and ethical problems; 5- A tendency towards
collective propositions and consequently the abolition, in the art of
today, of the ‘isms’ so characteristic of the first half of the twentieth
century (a tendency which will be encompassed by Mário Pedrosa’s
concept of ‘Post-Modern Art’); 6- A revival and new formulations
of the concept of anti-art.40
In contrast with the individualism Oiticica saw in the arts of Europe and the United
States, the will towards collective construction calls for the merging of individual
creative propositions into grounded and grouped cultural practices. This
constructive will would encourage art to involve itself with social issues and create
a collective stealing and resignification of those colonial cultural traditions through
the eyes of local practices. Instead of searching for an “authentic” local culture, the
will towards collective construction wanted to undermine the North-Atlantic
hegemony by appropriating and then desecrating it. As I will explain later on,
Oiticica highly praised the theory of cultural anthropophagy, choosing it as a
39
Hélio Oiticica “Esquema Geral da Nova Objetividade,” in Helio Oiticica, p. 110.
40
Oiticica, “Esquema Geral da Nova Objetividade,” p. 110.
164
strategy to promote tactics of difference against Brazilian nationalist or leftist
ideologies, on the one hand, and Europe and the United States on the other and thus
absorb their cultures in what Oiticica, called an act of “Super-Anthropophagy.”
The materialization of this constructive will was implicit, he believed, in the
evolution of Brazilian art after World War II. Oiticica noticed it in the change from
traditional painting and sculpture to “the successive creation of reliefs, anti-
paintings, even spatial or environmental structures, and the formulation of the
object, or rather the arrival of the object.” 41 From this displacement of traditional
art forms there emerged a trend towards a social and participatory art which
involves the “discovery of the body,” of which the Parangolé or Parangolé-
variations, as Oiticica called them, are examples.
The promotion of collective creations—not dependent on the creativity of
the individual artist—raised the question of the spectator’s experience of art. For
Oiticica, Nova Objetividade questioned the notion of transcendental contemplation
of art, and employed two main strategies: a “manipulation” of the spectator through
“sensorial-corporeal” and/or “semantic” participation. Although not completely
independent of one another, these strategies attempted to demolish the Western
notion of a supreme art with universal meanings which are supposedly embedded
in its concrete forms. Instead, they played with the translations that resulted from
the dissemination of Western traditions in colonial contexts. They led to the
41
165
creation of a variety of new forms ranging from participatory plays to events which
gave the “individual” an opportunity to create “his/her” work.
Following the ideas of Brazilian critic Ferreira Gullar, Oiticica called for the
abandonment of aesthetic formalism and the creation, through participatory art, of
cultural conditions that would foment “revolt, protest, and constructive work.”42
The political situation of Brazil at that time encouraged artists to adopt this
approach, since they believed that collective creations would be a way to challenge
not only cultural colonialism, but also the social exclusion and repression found in
Brazilian society. Seen in this light, New Objectivity was an attempt to appropriate
the avant-garde, yet mock its pretensions towards autonomy. He says: “The
phenomenon of the avant-garde in Brazil is no longer the concern of a group
coming from an isolated elite, but a far-reaching cultural issue, of great amplitude,
tending towards collective solutions.”43 These forms of collective art manifested
themselves in individual and collective creations carried out in public contexts (as
the Parangolé itself operates) or in proposals that called for the active participation
of the spectator in the creation of the work. Of particular interest, Oiticica linked
these departures to collective expressions of popular culture which already
contained the principle of collective play and made use of participation,
improvisation and free creativity.
42
43
166
At the end of his Nova Objetividade, Oiticica asked himself: “In an
underdeveloped country, how can we explain and justify the appearance of the
avant-garde, not as a symptom of alienation, but as a decisive factor in its collective
progress? Who does the artist make his work for?”44 Following in the footsteps of
Mário Pedrosa, one of the first to proclaim the end of modern art and welcome the
emergence of post-modern art—an idea which I will discuss below—he called for
the abolition of all “isms,” in order to clear the way for an ethical and creative
circumstance he called anti-art, which would “not only hammer away at the art of
the past, but create new experimental conditions where the artist takes on the role
of ‘proposer,’ or ‘entrepreneur.’”45
Oiticica’s manifesto was not limited to a categorical rejection of modernist
aesthetics or a questioning of the utopian politics of the avant-garde. It had two
other important aspects, which are frequently ignored by the critical analyses: his
opposition to the art institution and its links to developmentalism. Although this
manifesto addresses the same important issues that the art of the time dealt with,
especially the validity of the avant-garde, his conclusions were different. He did not
situate his proposals outside of the art system but attacked that system from within
by calling attention to its hidden historical and cultural assumptions. On the one
hand, he refused to accept that the avant-garde’s attention to local struggles
between the poor and the bourgeoisie—whose existence he did not deny—were
44
45
167
ethically valid, since the same avant-garde was part of an art system based on the
developmentalism responsible for those struggles. In other words, he revealed the
darker side of the avant-garde by showing its connection to the colonial order that
emerged after World War II.
On the other hand, his rejection of modernism and formalism tended to
follow the avant-garde’s belief that art should be at the forefront of social change.
However, his ethics diverged from that of the avant-garde, insofar as he was less
interested in the avant-gardist link between art and life than in the link between art
and culture. Thus, his interest was not so much concentrated on a formalist
experimentalism whereby art would abandon its claims for autonomy by reaching
wider audiences, as in historically and politically situating the struggles between
artistic and cultural practices. For Oiticica, the ideal relationship between art and
culture does not involve converting cultural practices into art, or bringing art to the
poor. By transforming art into collective creations, with the artist as a proposer,
culture does not become a set of consumer goods, as it is in “enlightened”
modernity. Instead, culture is understood as a set of signifying practices and
meaningful expressions of social sectors which have been economically, socially
and culturally excluded, either by the rhetoric of Brazilian nationalism or by
socialist notions of art for the people, both of which reflect the developmentalist
discourse. Based on the assumption that art and culture are always charged with
political meanings, his work distances itself from the liberal notion of individual
168
freedom promulgated by humanism and moves towards the recognition of “other”
cultural practices which, in historical terms, are so odd that they overturn
modernity’s illusion that art is an autonomous sphere and its distance to culture is
an issue of mere aesthetic quality and artistic creativity.
If we accept that Oiticica worked on the dichotomies between
developed/underdeveloped or art/culture postulated by developmentalism and the
modernist art institution in Latin America then his public image as an anarchist or
“madman” takes on a new significance. I would like to highlight the value of this
position since, I believe, it changed the terms of the cultural struggles of the period
which were mostly based on a utopian and dialectic politics of art and culture.
Instead, he concentrated on the workings of difference inherent to those
developmentalist and modernist barriers and dichotomies, setting in motion
practices that deconstructed its meanings and revealed its hidden powers.
Returning to the Parangolé, I would like to illustrate the ways in which
Oiticica’s general approach to Brazilian art, the one I just commented on, gave
shape to his experiments in changing the relationship between popular culture and
art. Whereas art historians see the Parangolé as the highest point in the linear
development of his work, Oiticica called the Parangolé a “crucial point” in his
“experience of color-structure in space, in reference to a new definition of what
would be, in this same experience, the ‘plastic object,’ or rather, the work.”46 As
46
169
Oiticica saw it, the Parangolé brought together practices and objects which were an
intimate part of the sphere of Brazilian art and the lives of Rio’s poor and
materialized in a variety of expressions ranging from favela architecture to dance.
Although they already had symbolic and practical uses, their real significance,
Oiticica remarked, emerges from their interrelationship within the Parangolé and
their challenge to the art institution. He says,
Even though I use prefabricated objects in the works . . . I do not
seek the poetics of these objects as the goals of this transposition but
use them as elements which only matter as an entirety, the entirety
of the work . . . This relationship may become a “trans-objectivity,”
and the work, an ideal “trans-object.”47
The key concepts of “trans-objectivity” and “trans-object” illustrate the use and
integration of objects and practices from art and the favela into the Parangolé. The
joining of elements from popular culture and art became a kind of “trans-object,”
which is nothing more than a participatory game in which the previous
significances of art and the favela elements are released, paving the way for
unexpected experiences of art. More than a synthesis of the two, the Parangolé
played the role of putting into question institutionalized meanings of art and
culture, already naturalized by the modern art system, allowing its dissemination
towards unknown and unexpected practices. In this regard, Oiticica clearly
47
170
distanced himself from both a kind of folklorist nationalism—impelled by the
right’s wish for a truly Brazilian culture—and avant-gardist primitivism—propelled
by the socialist wish for a truly modern culture derived from “the people.” Oiticica
notes: “It is not the case—as the word parangolé, derived from slang could lead
one to suppose—of implying a fusion of my work and folklore or an identification
of this nature, transposed or otherwise, that would be completely superficial and
useless.”48 Following these ethical referents, Oiticica established a further
difference between his project and Cubism’s use of found objects from non-
Western cultures to create an artistic statement. While Cubism saw the entire
African culture as a way of revitalizing Western art, his Parangolé, he wrote:
“places itself, as it were, at the opposite pole from Cubism: it does not take the
entire object, finished, complete, but seeks the object’s structure, the constructive
principles of this structure . . . not the dynamization or dismantling of the object.”49
In this there is an implied association between the appropriation of non-Western
cultures by avant-gardist primitivism and colonialism. Except for Dada, which
Oiticica regarded as the main source of his concept of anti-art, he rejected the
formalist appropriation of the non-artistic for artistic purposes, in the sense that the
“dismantling” of exotic objects or practices is a metaphor for the colonialist
discourse about Latin America and its indigenous cultures. Oiticica both
participated in the favela culture and used some of its “structural elements,” like
48
49
171
architecture, inserting them into the art world to promote experimental vivências,
but the Parangolé is not an artistic reflection on them. In other words, it does not
convert popular culture into an object of artistic consideration, nor does it claim
that popular culture represents Brazilian culture as a whole.
In 1972, Oiticica sketched a general outline of the Parangolé entitled
“Parangolé Synthesis.”50 The schema places the spectator’s vivência at the center
of the work in order to provoke “a continuous and far-reaching interference” with
his/her behavior, provoked by the wearing of capes, dancing, and unexpected
situations:
concrete situations defined as
PARANGOLÉ- program programs of circumstance
(circumstantial projects involving environmental-street-

group)
DEMITHYCISM OF PARANGOLÉ
program of open
circumstance non-mythicized
‘object-event’
non-theatre
of the first PARANGOLÉ
non-ritual circumstantial situations
remained
non- placed events

open to experimentation
myth
not striving for myth or ‘rituality of the
moment’ (as cognition of the
moment)
Momentless
to feed the moment: instead of raising it

into mythical categories or implementing
aesthetic preciousness
50
Hélio Oiticica, “Synthesis-Parangolé,” in Hélio Oiticica, p. 165.
172
Oiticica clearly distanced himself from a canonical notion of art, theater and ritual,
which is intended to divide a collective experience into artist, artwork and spectator
or bring about an enlightened or educated response. The use of such terms as
“momentless” or “to feed the moment” underlines his insistence that the Parangolé
represents a collective, open experimentalism beyond “mythical categories or the
implementing of aesthetic preciousness.” Thus, Oiticica defines the Parangolé as a
program which is open to the circumstantial, a notion consistent with the idea of the
Parangolé being an improvised collective performance that can occur in
environments like streets, plazas, or even indoors (like the ones I have described at
Rio’s Museum of Modern Art and the Hélio Oiticica Art Center). The
circumstantial is relevant, since Oiticica thought of the Parangolé as something
that might be planned but never foreseen. Parangolé is an event in which the
sudden presence of people wearing capes, displaying banners, and erecting tents is
meant to provoke uproar and encourage people to undergo unexpected individual
and collective transformations. The individual body transformed by the capes—
which recall the gaudy clothing worn at Rio’s Carnival—now incites the
transformation of the collective body by creating a whole environment for delirium.
All of his ideas about popular culture and the avant-garde, which I have just
discussed, framed Oiticica’s own understanding of the Parangolé. In his 1966
article, “Position and Program,” Oiticica explored the Parangolé from the
standpoint of his notion of “the experimental,” which, in turn, is part of a broader

173
strategy he called the “Environmental Program.” Oiticica considered the Parangolé
to be a truly environmental art, made up of “environmental wholes,” which aimed
to create situations where all kinds of objects converge—from the infinitely small
to the architectural. The Parangolé is defined as an anti-art form which invalidates
all conventional metaphysical, intellectual, and aesthetic positions. He defined the
artist as an instigator of creation: “There is no proposal to ‘elevate the spectator to
the level of creation,’ to a ‘meta-reality,’ ” he wrote, “or impose on him an “idea”
or “aesthetic model” about those concepts, but to give him a simple opportunity to
participate, so that he finds something he wants to realize.”51 A truly environmental
activity is the result of the very process of appropriating and displaying objects, and
encouraging the participation of both the artist and the spectator. Oiticica argued
that: “This comprehension of the malleable meaning of each work is what shatters
the pretension to base it on a set of orders: moral, aesthetic, or otherwise.”52 The
Environmental Program would then set in motion a resistance to any given social or
cultural order. As Oiticica stated:
An ethical necessity of another kind comes into being here, which I
would also include in the environmental, since its means are realized
through the word, whether written or spoken, and in a more complex
way through discourse: This is the social one, incorporating an
ethical (as well as political) position which comes together as a
51
Hélio Oiticica, “Position and Program,” in Helio Oiticica, p. 100.
52
Oiticica, “Position and Program,” p. 100.
174
manifestation of an individual behavior. I should make it a bit
clearer; first of all, that such a position can only be totally anarchic .
. . It is against everything that is oppressive, socially and
individually—all the fixed and decadent forms of government, or
reigning structures . . . For me, the most complete expression of this
entire concept of “environmentation” was the formulation of what I
called Parangolé.53
The inclusion of Oiticica in the avant-garde rationale by mainstream art critics
reveals the need for more culturally-based approaches to his work. These would
understand Oiticica’s eccentric and anarchic work as a proposal that did not derive
from the avant-garde but set forth an alternative rationale which deconstructed
modernism and identified it as the cultural counterpart of developmentalism. Citing
Frederico Morais’s interest in this cultural approach, Catherine David also insists
that Oiticica’s work should be regarded “more from a Brazilian cultural perspective
than an artistic one.”54
As far back as 1965, the Brazilian critic Mário Pedrosa had taken a similar
culturally-based approach to the Parangolé and the context in which it took place
in his article “Arte Ambiental, Arte Pósmoderna, Hélio Oiticica” [Environmental
Art, Postmodern Art, Hélio Oiticica].55 This approach, he suggested, should follow
53
Oiticica, “Position and Program,” p. 103.
54
Catherine David “The Great Labyrinth,” in Hélio Oiticica, p. 249.
55
Mario Pedrosa, “Arte Ambiental, Arte Pós-moderna, Hélio Oiticica,” in Crítica de Arte no Brasil:
Temáticas Contemporáneas, ed. Glória Ferreira (Rio de Janeiro: FUNARTE, 2006), pp. 143-145.
175
the same route as Oiticica’s work itself, which moves from the artistic and
formalist to the cultural and the postmodern. The relationship of Parangolé to
samba led Pedrosa to state that it was precisely Oiticica’s connection with dance
and Rio de Janeiro’s morros that forced him to combine his rejection of modernist
aesthetics, on the one hand, and the Third World experience of modernity, on the
other:
It was during the artist’s initiation in samba that he shifted from
visual experience, in all its purity, to a tactile, kinetic, joyful, sensual
experience of materials, in which the whole body, hitherto restricted
by the distant aristocracy of the visual, transforms itself into a total
source of sensuality . . . Aesthetic non-conformism— Luciferian
sin—and social-psychic non-conformism—individual sin—are
melded. In the art of this young artist, beauty, sin, revolt and love
give a new accent to Brazilian art . . . If you want to know his
record, perhaps there is one: Hélio is an anarchist’s grandson.56
Pedrosa concludes by arguing that Oiticica’s work, and that of other Brazilian
artists, gave birth to an environmental, postmodern art. Pedrosa noted:
Today, we have reached the end of what has been called “modern
art” . . . We are now in another phase, which is no longer purely
artistic but cultural and radically different from what came before
56
Pedrosa, “Arte Ambiental, Arte Pós-moderna, Hélio Oiticica,” p. 145.
176
and was initiated, say, by Pop Art . . . I would call this new phase
“postmodern art.” Its strictly artistic values tend to be absorbed by
the plasticity of perceptional and situational structures . . . It is not
expressivity in itself that interests the present avant-garde. On the
contrary, it is completely suspicious of hermetic individual
subjectivism.57
Pedrosa’s use of the term “postmodern” to describe Oiticica’s work in 1965 has
caught the attention of the critics, not only because of his surprisingly early
awareness of the crisis of modernity but also because of the way in which it may be
used to place Oiticica’s work within contemporary debates. Michael Asbury, for
instance, cites the date of Pedrosa’s claim to question the idea that Oiticica is a
“paradigmatic figure in Brazilian contemporary art, exemplifying a Brazilian
tradition which runs from the early modernists to the contemporary.”58 I share
Asbury’s rejection of the notion that Oiticica is a trans-historical artist who
“touches almost all the areas of recent art.” However, I also think that this
historicist approach is too problematic to be of much use. As mentioned in previous
chapters, some artistic projects which appeared during the Cold War in Latin
America shared with their European and American counterparts a profound distrust
of modernity. However, the former called attention to the colonial side of
57
Pedrosa, “Arte Ambiental, Arte Pós-moderna, Hélio Oiticica,” p. 142.
58
Michael Asbury, “Hélio Oiticica and the notion of the popular in the 1960’s,” ARARA 3 (July
2003), 1.
177
developmentalism and opened up a different spectrum of artistic and political
possibilities.
The similarities between Oiticica’s concerns and those expressed by
postmodernism in the early eighties are worth noting. In particular, they include
Oiticica’s plea for the abolition of the figure of the author, for art to be lived as a
collective experience and proposition, for the revision of previous forms of anti-art
prompted by the avant-garde yet rejected by modernism, and above all, his
understanding of artistic practices as deeply involved in politics, impelling artists to
convert that link into a matter of reflection and an ethical position. Despite these
similarities, however, I believe that it does not make sense to establish a point by
point comparison between Pedrosa’s use of the term postmodern and the practices
given that name during the eighties and nineties. Pedrosa’s use of the term
“postmodern” to describe Oiticica’s work may be seen as an example of a justified
enthusiasm on his part, since he saw in Oiticica a symptom of a local cultural
critique of post-World War II developmentalism. The Brazilian ruling classes,
guided by American foreign policy, believed that Brazil held out the promise of
development. After the foundation of Brasilia as the capital of the country, which
was the epitome of a modernist architectural project, Pedrosa, criticizing this kind
of imposition, said that Brazil was a country condemned to modernity.59
59
Mario Pedrosa, “Reflexões em torno da nova capital” Brasil, Arquitetura Contemporânea, 10
(1957). Reprinted in Mário Pedrosa: Dos Murais de Portinari aos Espaços de Brasília, ed. Aracy
Amaral (São Paulo: Editora Perspectiva, 1987), pp. 303-16.
178
The Law of the Anthropophagite
I would like to relate Pedrosa’s and Morais’s ideas about the need for culturally-
based approaches to Oiticica’s artistic project to the Brazilian anthropophagite
tradition. This tradition officially was born in 1928 with the publishing of Oswald
de Andrade’s Manifesto Antropófago [Anthropophagite Manifesto] in the first issue
of the Revista de Antropofagia, the magazine of the movement. (Fig. 3.11)The idea
of Brazilian culture as an anthropophagite one was in the mind of intellectuals and
artists years before the Manifesto was published. Back in 1924, Andrade had
published “Manifesto da Poesia Pau-Brasil” [Pau-Brazil Poetry] in which the pau-
brasil tree—which gave the country its name and was its most important export
during the colonial period—is the basis of a series of metaphors about Brazil’s role
as an exporter of “exotic” culture and importer of mainstream culture.60 A year
before the publication of Andrade’s Manifesto, José Bento Monteiro Lobato
published A Aventura de Hans Staden [The Adventures of Hans Staden]61 which is
a version, in the form of a children book, of the famous polemical report by Hans
Staden of cannibalistic practices on the Brazilian coast, which appeared in
Germany in 1557.62 Furthermore, in the same year the Manifesto came out, Mario
de Andrade published his novel Macunaíma: a herói sem nenhum caráter
60
Oswald De Andrade, “Manifesto da Poesia Pau-Brasil,” in A Utopia Antropofágica: A
Antropofagia ao alcance de todos, ed. Benedito Nunes (São Paulo: Globo, 1990), pp. 41-45.
61
José Bento Monteiro Lobato, “Aventuras de Hans Staden,” in Obras completas (São Paulo,
Brasiliense), III, 1968.
62
Staden, Hans. Hans Staden's True History: An Account of Cannibal Captivity in Brazil, trans. and
ed. Neil L. Whitehead and Michael Harbsmeier (Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2008).
179
[Macunaima: The Hero Without Character] which tells the story of a Brazilian
descended from the cannibalistic tribe of the Tapanhumas. (Fig. 3.12) Macunaíma,
“the hero of our people,” continuously metamorphoses into a Black man, an Indian,
a Western white man, and also an insect, a fish and even a duck, depending on the
circumstances.
Nevertheless, the birth of the anthropophagite cultural movement may be
even earlier, if we take into account some anecdotal information about
A Semana de Arte Moderna [The Week of Modern Art] which took place in Sao
Paulo on February 13 -17, 1922. The Semana, consisting of academic seminars and
exhibitions, was a gathering of artists and intellectuals who discussed the impact on
Brazilian art, poetry and literature of the European avant-garde of that period, in the
context of the growing modernization of the country. It is said that during one of
the many banquets offered during the Semana, Oswald De Andrade, after ordering
frog’s legs, explained how, according to the theory of evolution, the human race
originated from the batrachians. The Brazilian painter Tarsila de Amaral, De
Andrade’s partner at the time, interrupted him: if the banqueters were eating frog’s
legs, then, logically, they were “quasi-anthropophagites.” De Andrade riposted, in
English: “Tupi or not Tupi: that’s the question,” a play on words referring to the
generic name given to the tribes that inhabited the region of what we know today as
Brazil, Venezuela, Peru, Colombia, Ecuador and Panama and that were represented
as cannibalistic by the Spaniards.

180
At the Semana, Tarsila De Amaral also first showed her work entitled
Abaporu—the Tupi term for an anthropophagite: aba-man; poru- who eats—which
soon became an icon of the movement. (Fig. 3.13) Abaporu, De Amaral’s birthday
present to De Andrade, is described by De Amaral herself in these terms:
A monstrous lonely figure, with huge feet, is sitting in a green plane
with his arm bent and his hand supporting his tiny head. In front of
him, there is a cactus with its absurd flower blooming . . .
Overwhelmed by the image, Oswald de Andrade and Raul Boop
contemplated Abaporu for a long time . . . They felt that a great
intellectual movement could materialize from that image.63
Perhaps the importance of the painting does not come from the depiction of an
anthropophagite but has to do with the fact that it is in itself a devouring of the very
representations Western culture uses to proclaim its superiority. The painting
depicts a sensual cannibal in a pose reminiscent of Rodin’s The Thinker; however,
instead of concentrating on his head—which De Amaral describes as “tiny”—it
gives importance to his feet and body. More importantly, the painting seems to
elaborate on the many illustrations found in Staden’s True Story. In all of them,
Staden, while assuming the authority of truly having experienced an encounter with
alterity, distanced himself from it to objectively describe a cannibal scene in order
to keep his cultural authority. That is, he is part of the picture but not of alterity.
63
Quoted by Carlos A. Jauregui, Canibalia: Canibalismo, calibanismo, antropofagia cultural y
consumo en América Latina (Madrid: Iberoamericana, 2008), p. 410.
181
Recognized as a pioneer of the construction of Latin America as the European
other, Hans Staden converted anecdotal and isolated accounts found in letters and
traveler’s tales into a complex narrative which defined the Latin American as a
cannibal and Latin America as Cannibalia.
One of his pictures in particular describes the Tupis preparing a cannibal
ritual.64 (Fig. 3.14) While the Tupi men and women are bringing wood, lighting the
fire and putting human heads and arms into a huge pot, Staden depicted himself as
a tiny man, with bent arms and legs, who sits on the floor and leans his head on his
right hand in a pose similar to the one found in De Amaral’s Abaporu. Hence, De
Amaral did not reproduce the Western representation of the anthropophagite, but
devoured Staden’s representation of himself as a colonial authority on the Tupis,
thus repeating the very anthropophagite act that Staden aimed to depict.
Cultural anthropophagy was in turn part of a broader cultural movement
known as Modernismo, whose leading figures were Mario de Andrade and Oswald
de Andrade. As in the rest of Latin America, Brazil’s role in the global economy
was the exportation of luxury goods. The late-nineteenth-century coffee boom in
Brazil brought the first wave of modernization, giving political, artistic and
intellectual circles a belief in progress but also causing concerns about a loss of
autonomy and identity. In the early twentieth century, many Brazilian intellectuals
were dissatisfied that, as De Andrade put it, Brazil was becoming the “dessert” of
64
Jáuregui, Canibalia, fig. 14.
182
the global powers, instead of the “main course.” By eating the invader and
absorbing his strength, they thought, Latin America would produce a culture
capable of standing on equal terms with the colonial powers.
The formal inauguration of the movement was marked by the publication of
Oswald De Andrade’s Manifesto Antropófago, which is considered today to be the
road map of cultural anthropophagy. Since it is written in the form of a poem made
up of 54 aphorisms grouped into different sections, it is almost impossible to
summarize the multiple philosophical, literary, psychoanalytic and historical
meanings of the Manifesto. In the words of Carlos A. Jáuregui: “The text has a
diffuse poetic structure that allows for multiple readings and possibilities. More
than illogical, the text is non-logical.”65 The narrative mode of the Manifesto,
which makes use of repetitions and non-grammatical expressions, seems to be an
exercise in deconstruction which allows its aphorisms to be interpreted in many
different ways and makes it relevant to current cultural predicaments. The
Manifesto calls for a “Carahiba Revolution”66 that will enable Brazil to reformulate
its relation to Western culture:
65
Jáuregui, Canibalia, p. 411.
66
The word Carahiba is the English version of Caraiba, which refers to the linguistic group to
which the Tupis belonged. The word was used by the Spaniards to designate all tribes which they
thought engaged in cannibalistic practices, even if their origin was not Tupi, including the aboriginal
inhabitants of present-day Brazil, Peru, Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador and Panama. Later, the name
was transformed into Caribe and limited to the aboriginal inhabitants of the islands of the
Caribbean.
183
Only Anthropophagy unites us. Socially. Economically.
Philosophically . . . Tupi or not Tupi, that is the question.67 . . . I am
only interested in what is not mine. The law of men. The law of the
anthropophagite . . . We want the Carahiba Revolution. Bigger than
the French Revolution. The unification of all effective rebellions
under the direction of man. Without us Europe would not even have
its poor Declaration of the Rights of Man. The golden age
proclaimed by America. The golden age. And all the girls.68 We
were never catechized. We really made the Carnival. The Indian
dressed as an Imperial Senator . . . We caused Christ to be born in
Bahia. Or in Belém do Pará. But we never allowed the birth of logic
among us.69
De Andrade’s anthropophagite ideas reflected the intellectual concerns of his time.
The Manifesto criticized the official ideology of Brazilian Indianismo, which was
mocked as a nationalist rhetoric which failed to change the terms of the relationship
between Brazil and Western cultures at it represented Brazilians as “bon savages.”
Similar calls for a modernity based on a radical critique of colonialism were made
in Mexico, Uruguay, Argentina and Peru. The Uruguayan artist Joaquín Torres-
67
Originally in English.
68
Originally in English.
69
Oswald De Andrade, “Manifesto Antropófago,” Revista de Antropofagia 1 (1928). Translated into
English in Third Text 46 (Spring 1999), 92-96.
184
García declared: “Our north is in the south,”70 and the Peruvian political
philosopher José Carlos Mariátegui challenged the idea of nationalism as he saw it
based on race: for him, race was a cultural construct Europe invented in order to
colonize the world.71
The Manifesto also makes use of Freud’s, Nietzsche’s and Hegel’s ideas,
which are constantly appropriated and reformulated to address the problem of what
Brazilian scholar Renato Ortiz calls the clash between the country’s will to
modernity and its construction of a national identity.72 Freud’s use of the myth of
devouring the father to explain the origin of civilization resonates throughout the
Manifesto. According to Freud, the totem is a symbolic representation of the death
of the patriarchal rule which consequently has been internalized as taboo. The
transition from totem to taboo represents the transformation of the primitive and
savage into Kultur and civilization. The Manifesto reverses these terms by defining
cultural anthropophagy as the permanent transformation of taboo into totem,
advocating the destruction of Western civilization and a journey towards the natural
man. This journey, however, does not involve a return to patriarchal dominance.
Colonialist depictions of cannibalistic rituals, both visual and written, persistently
refer to the leading role of women in such feasts. Hence, the Manifesto’s plea for
the inversion of taboo into totem implied not only a return to the natural man and
70
Joaquín Torres-García, “Escuela del Sur,” in Arte en Iberoamérica, ed. Dawn Ades (Madrid:
Comisión Quinto Centenario, 1989), p. 319.
71
José Carlos Mariátegui, “Arte, Revolución y Decadencia” in Arte en Iberoamérica, p. 316.
72
Renato Ortiz, A Moderna Cultura Brasileira (Sao Paulo: Editora Brasiliense, 1988), p. 35.
185
contempt for Kultur as a Western fabrication, but also the inversion of patriarchal
into matriarchal rule.
The Manifesto’s call for a journey towards the anthropophagite also echoes
Nietzsche’s claim for “opening one’s eyes and taking a new look at cruelty,”73 his
response to the question posed in The Will to Power “Where are the barbarians of
the twentieth century?”74 In an article entitled “De la razón antropofágica: Diálogo
y diferencia en la cultura brasilera,” [Of Anthropophagic Reason: Dialogue and
Difference in Brazilian Culture] Harold de Campos highlights Nietzsche’s
influence on anthropophagy, concluding that the movement has been the only true
Brazilian philosophy and one of the major Brazilian contributions to Latin
American debates on the relationship between the local, the national and the
universal. For Campos:
Oswaldian “anthropophagy” is the reasoning based on a critical
devouring of the world’s cultural legacy, undertaken not from the
submissive and reconciled perspective of the “bon savage” . . . but
from the insolent viewpoint of the bad savage, the devourer of white
men, an anthropophagite. It does not involve submission (a
catechesis), but “transculturation,” or even better, transvaluation: a
critical vision of history as a negative function (in Nietzsche’s
73
Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, trans. R. J.
Rollingdale (New York: Penguin Books, 1990), p. 159.
74
Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, p. 183.
186
sense) capable of appropriation as well as expropriation, de-
hierarchization, deconstruction.75
As some authors have argued, however, De Andrade’s use of Nietzsche’s notion of
history as a negative function that questions the idea of progress and civilization is,
in turn, inscribed within a Hegelian vision of history as synthesis and, ironically, as
a journey towards utopian progress.76 For instance, in the introduction to De
Andrade’s collection Pau Brasil, Benedito Nunes defined De Andrade’s
philosophy as a “circular dialectic movement,” which tries to reconcile Nietzsche
and Hegel, even though the idea of history as eternal recurrence is superseded by
Hegel’s dialectical becoming (Aufhebung).77 Imagining Brazilian culture to be the
antithesis of Western traditions, De Andrade attempted to turn anthropophagy into
a synthesis of the two opposites which would build a future on the basis of a
profound critique of Western civilization performed by both Western and non-
Western cultures.
This is not to say, however, that anthropophagy does not represent an
innovative contribution to the redefinition of culture in colonial contexts. Even
though De Andrade’s anthropophagy seems to waver between a utopian and an
anti-utopian vision, his re-use of the very cultural trope the West used to colonize
75
Harold De Campos, “De la Razón Antropofágica,” in De la razón antropofágica y otros ensayos
(Mexico: Siglo XXI Editores, 2000), p. 4.
76
See Luís Madureira, “A Cannibal Recipe to Turn a Dessert Country into the Main Course:
Brazilian Antropofagia and the Dilemma of Development,” Luso-Brazilian Review 41, 2, (March
2005), 96. See also Benedito Nunes, “Introduccion,” in Pau Brasil: Antropofagia (Rio de Janeiro:
Companhia Litográfica Ypiranga, 1972), IX, p. xiv.
77
Nunes, A Utopia Antropofágica, p. xiv.
187
Latin America has had an enormous influence on twentieth-century cultural
debates. The Manifesto promoted an important cultural experimentation, based on
the repetition and appropriation of such colonial representations that opened up
multiple possibilities for cultural critique in Brazil and has been widely deployed
by Brazilian artists, activists and intellectuals during the twentieth century. By
appropriating the colonial trope of Latin America as cannibalia, cultural
anthropophagy becomes a weapon against dialectical synthesis. Hence, instead of
promoting an ontological outside, anthropophagy’s preferred means are disguise,
discontinuity, fragmentation, and counter-evolution. De Andrade himself ironically
dates his Manifesto: “Year 374 after the swallowing of Bishop Sardinha,” which is
a reference to Bishop Sardinha’s voyage to Brazil in 1556. It is told that after his
boat sank at the mouth of the Coruripe River, he and the ninety members of the
crew were captured, tortured and eaten in an anthropophagite ritual by the
Tupinambá.
The continued use of anthropophagy by Brazilian artists during the
twentieth century owes much to De Andrade’s innovative repetition of
anthropophagy as the negative term of the colonial equation. It can be found in the
malandra novel, concrete poetry, the neo-concrete movement in the visual arts and
tropicalism in music, whose propositions do not naturally derive from Western
tradition but create “other” marginal routes to it. As De Campos states: “For a long
time now, the devouring jaw of these new barbarians has been ‘chewing up’ and
188
ruining more and more cultural heritages in the world . . . its eccentric and
deconstructive charge functions with the marginal impetus of the carnivalesque,
demystifying and desecrating the tradition.”78
These features of anthropophagy were the theme of the XXIV São Paulo
Biennial in 1998, which reinterpreted this strategy in the light of contemporary
thought. In an essay in its catalogue, “Anthropophagy Subjectivity,” Suely Rolnik
argues that it entails at least four operations: “1. To bastardize the culture of the
upper class and, indirectly, European culture as the standard. . . . 2. To refute the
paradigm of creating culture in order to reveal truths, which, according to
Andrade’s Anthropophagite Manifesto, is ‘a lie repeated many times.’ . . . 3. To
blur the distinction between colonizer and colonized. . . . 4. To set in motion an
anthropophagite mode of subjectivation that dismantles the principle of identity
which defines contemporary hedonism and civic narcissism.”79
In “Zombie Anthropophagy,” Rolnik also explores the nature of this
resistance, defining anthropophagy as a response to the colonization Latin America
has been subjected to for the past five centuries.80 Speaking of how anthropophagy
upsets the normalization of difference, she does not regard otherness as something
that has to be perceived but as a field of forces in which our relation to the other is
expressed and experienced instead of represented or described. As an alternative

78
De Campos, “De la Razón Antropofágica,” p. 20.
79
Suely Rolnik. “Anthropophagic Subjectivity,” in XXIV Bienal de São Paulo: Roteiros. Roteiros.
Roteiros. Roteiros. Roteiros. Roteiros (São Paulo: A Fundação, 1998), pp. 137-145.
80
Suely Rolnik, “Zombie Anthropophagy,” in What, How & for Whom (WHW) (Kassel: Kollective
Kreativitat, 2005), pp. 1-15.
189
cartography of representation, anthropophagite subjectivity makes use of
sensations, desire and the need to become different from what one is.
Recalling the re-emergence of anthropophagite subjectivities during the
sixties and seventies, Rolnik cites Oiticica’s work as example of the way in which
anthropophagy was used as a form of promoting new forms of subjectivity opposed
to those offered by developmentalism and colonialism during the Cold War.
Catherine David too has noted: “Hélio Oiticica’s work [was] grounded in the
Brazilian ‘anthropophagite’ tradition, whose principles [he] updated.”81 Oiticica
was clearly aware of the enormous possibilities of the tradition initiated by De
Andrade. Along with various references to it in his own writings, Oiticica
translated the Anthropophagite Manifesto into English in 1972.82 As I have
previously stated, in his article “Nova Objetividade,” Oiticica considered the idea
of constructive will, which emerged in Brazilian art of the sixties, to be rooted in
the Movement of 1928, and saw anthropophagy as “the defense [that] we possess
against such external dominance . . . our main creative weapon.”83
It is important to note, however, that Oiticica’s political interpretation of the
movement differs from that of De Andrade and his followers. While De Andrade
diminished Nietzsche’s defense of barbarism and questioning of history to
reinforce the Hegelian logic of progress, Oiticica quotes Nietzsche in order to
81
David, “The Great Labyrinth,” p. 251.
82
Hélio Oiticica, “Anthropophagous Manifesto,” PHO 0198/72 (December 1972), 1-6.
83
Oiticica, “Nova Objetividade,” p. 111.
190
criticize both Hegelian transcendentalism and the nationalist will to power
underlying De Andrade’s anthropophagy. In particular, this is seen in his references
to Nietzsche’s Übermensch (superman or overman) and his Dionysian ethics, both
of which gave shape to Oiticica’s Parangolé, anarchist politics and rejection of the
notion that art is “transcendental.” In a conversation with Waly Salomão, Oiticica
said: “I am Nietzsche’s son and Artaud’s stepson. I have read Nietzsche since I was
13.”84 Oiticica applies Nietzsche’s concept of the übermensch—someone who
abandons morality and any other form of conditioned, dogmatic behavior—to
marginal people or criminals, and then the inhabitants of the favela, whose lives are
conditioned by class and colonial relations and whose cultural possibilities are
constantly limited by modernity. The use of the word Parangolé to designate “the
cunning and street smart” who live at the margins of society and are also known as
malandros thus acquires another significance. Nietzsche’s übermensch becomes
Oiticica’s malandro, a member of the social sectors who attempt to create “other”
lives in conditions of adversity. The Parangolé, as an anthropophagite ritual,
devours Western culture by appropriating its modern system of art. The poor use
costume, music and dance to devour the art institution and turn those social sectors
conditioned by colonialism into a collectivity of marginal supermen or super-
84
191
anthropophagites. In his “Parangolé Synthesis,”85 Oiticica defined the components
of the Parangolé and their inter-relationship:
1964, the first PARANGOLÉ
The work now requires immediate corporal

participation; as it envelops the body, it demands that
it move and ultimately dance.
DANCE was, then, for me aspiration

towards myth, but also, more
important, it was in-corporation
Today, it is no more than NON VERBAL
Corporeal climax Non-display
corporal proposition taken to the level of open experimentalism
absorption of time: end of the fragmented display: to speak of

cosmos should not imply something extra-concrete but the
adoption of the power to invent.
For both Nietzsche and Oiticica, the role of art is not so much that of enabling
people to transcend life or to escape from it through a higher ideal, as to create
conditions which allow them to achieve an anarchic existence. Nietzsche regarded
dance as a means of achieving this and becoming a superman: “Lift up your hearts,
my brothers, high, higher! And don’t forget your legs either. Lift up your legs too,
85
Oiticica, “Synthesis-Parangolé,” p. 165.
192
you good dancers; and better yet, stand on your heads!”86 Through dance, he wrote,
“man expresses himself as a member of a higher community; he has forgotten how
to walk and speak and is on the way toward flying into the air. . . He is no longer an
artist; he has become a work of art.”87 Following this idea of Nietzsche, the
Parangolé allows the merging of the Apollonian force—the creative power that
reveals itself through images—with the Dionysian in order to produce a collective
delight in intoxication. It does not intend to provoke transcendental states of mind
but a corporeal delirium. As Oiticica remarked in his article “A dança na minha
experiência” [Dance in my experience], written in 1965: “[Dance] is for me an
indispensable, more vital experience, mainly as a demolisher of pre-concepts,
stereotypes, etc.”88 Embracing dance was a way for him to make his own work less
intellectual through the release of inhibitions. He regarded ballet as too
intellectualized, due to the rigid structure of “choreography” and the search for
transcendence. Instead, he chose improvised dance, which for him meant
something “like an immersion in the rhythm; a vital and complete identification
between gesture act and rhythm; fluency where the intellect is obscured by a
mythical internal, individual and collective force.”89 Dance, which might be
understood as both the means and the end of open experimentalism, is related to in-
86
Friedrich Nietzsche, “Thus Spoke Zarathustra,” in The Portable Nietzsche, ed. and trans. Walter
Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1976), p. 406.
87
Nietzsche, “Thus Spoke Zarathustra,” pp. 36-37.
88
Hélio Oiticica, “A dança na minha experiência,” PHO 01201/65 (November 1965), 1.
89
Oiticica, “A dança na minha experiência,” 1.
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corporation, not as integration but as an impulse to the corporeal, that is to say, a
command to bring ourselves to a corporeal climax and to a one’s transformation.
Given this approach, Oiticica did not want us to see the body as a support
for an artwork. However, Brett, in his article “The Experimental Exercise of
Liberty,” states:
Hélio has said that as color frees itself from the rectangle and from
representation, it tends to “in-corporate” itself . . . The notion of the
“body” [in the Parangolé] is the two-way link between the world of
painting and the world of the spectator. As color “incorporates”
itself, the viewer experiences color no longer just with the visual
sense but kinesthetically, with the whole body and senses. The word
“support” would therefore lose its meaning.90
Even though Brett tries to follow Oiticica’s rejection of the body as support for the
Parangolé, he tends to create a subject which “perceives” the artwork
“kinesthetically with the whole body and senses.” In his “Notes” Oiticica not only
discarded the idea of the body as a support, but also set forth other connections
between his Parangolé and different forms of experimentation in dance and
performance:
My entire evolution, leading up to the formulation of the Parangolé,
aims at this magical incorporation of the elements of the work as
90
194
such, into the whole vivência (life-experience) of the spectator,
whom now I call “participator.” “Wearing” [costumes] by itself
already constitutes a total experience since, by unfolding [himself]
and making his own body the nucleus, the spectator experiences, as
it were, the spatial transmutation which takes place there: He
perceives, . . . as the structural nucleus of the work, the existential
unfolding of this inter-corporeal space.91(Fig. 3.15, 3.15a)
“Spatial transmutation,” “inter-corporeal space,” and “incorporation” are all terms
close in meaning to the experience of the body in an anthropophagite ritual, which
is in this case become transformed by devouring the colonial conditions and by
being the central nucleus of art, music, performance and dance. If the body were
considered a support, it would only be for the multiple representations of the poor
and the popular created by developmentalism and the art institution. Along with the
appropriation of the architecture of the favela, the use of samba or other musical
genres coming from popular culture are elements that function as conditions to
create popular culture in representation. What the body supports is precisely the
representation of the popular whose very components also cause circumstances that
foster the emergence of experiments of what Oiticica called the “vivência-total
Parangolé” [Parangolé total-experience]: a permanent unfolding of different ways
of existing in a marginal world. In his 1970 article, “Brazil Diarrhea,” Oiticica
91
Oiticica, “Notes,” p. 93.
195
made use of metaphors of bodily functions, the body and anthropophagy to refer to
the colonial situation in Brazil. I find them useful to understand the politics of the
Parangolé. He states:
To annul the colonialist condition is to shoulder and swallow the
positive values given by this condition . . . to build this constructive
position that emerges from a critical ambivalence one must oppose a
conformist position and always base yourself on absolute general
values. In Brazil, therefore, a permanent, universal critical position and
the experimental are constructive elements. Everything else is dilution
in diarrhea.92
The metaphors of shouldering and swallowing the colonial condition by wearing a
cape, dancing and singing are strengthened by the words written on the capes,
which play with stereotypes about the Brazilian poor and popular culture and call
attention to their construction of subjectivities. When people from the favela wear
the cape, the performer, who is already the subject of this discourse, displays a
condition that has to be shouldered: (Fig. 3.16)
Why impossibility/crime/existence in searching/search for happiness
Sex, Violence, that’s what pleases me
Cape of Liberty
Out of your skin/grows the humidity/the taste of earth/the heat
92
Hélio Oiticica, “Brazil Diarrhea,” in Hélio Oiticica, p. 142-143.
196
I embody revolt
I am possessed
We are hungry
Of Adversity We Live93
Yet by being in a state of Parangolé the participant also swallows such a condition.
As Oiticica reminds us, the Parangolé is a non-verbal proposition, aimed at open
experimentalism, in which dance leads to a corporeal climax which unleashes the
power to invent. He asserts: “The very act of “dressing oneself” in the work already
implies a corporeal–expressive transmutation of oneself, which is a primordial
characteristic of dance, its primary condition.”94 (Fig. 3.17) The body wearing the
cape dances and moves and is thus transformed, provoking a dynamic of
differentiation in which to eat the other is not to become the self but to become
other. The fact of wearing the representation of oneself is also a way to transform
that self and force it to move toward a life that is not yet manifest and whose
meaning has been deferred.
The Anthropophagite tradition gave shape to Oiticica’s art not only because
it allowed him, as De Campos points out, to define his differential relation to the
modernist avant-garde but also because it established an ethical position which
enabled him to integrate his ideas about modernism, developmentalism and the role
93
Quoted by G. Brett, “The Experimental Exercise of Liberty,” p. 230.
94
Oiticica, “Notes,” p. 93.
197
of art in the underdeveloped world. Furthermore, the Anthropophagite tradition
gave Oiticica an opportunity to link his own artistic search to politically charged
cultural contexts, bringing to light the tensions underlying the thrust to modernity
and challenging the way that the new idea of a developed nation excludes marginal
sectors while pretending to integrate them. His appropriation of Western culture
and counterpoised use of popular culture was meant to unleash experimental
possibilities for the creation of new senses of individuality for those who live in
conditions of adversity.
I would like to finish by comparing the founding image of America as Cannibalia
to the cannibal feast of Parangolé. The image is a woodcut in a broadsheet
published in Augsburg in 1505, which was probably by Johann Froschauer. (Fig.
3.18) It has allowed colonialism to depict the natives as immoral cannibals
engaging in an orgy of sex and death, which is an idea that still persists and has
been extended to every representation of otherness. Divided into different scenes,
the print illustrates a ritual on a seashore, where eleven savages in exotic dress
dismember, cook and eat the body of a man who, from the style of his hair and
clothing, seems to be European. Since it shows men and (predominantly) women
sharing their food with children, it probably depicts a family of cannibals, all
standing except for a young mother. All of them skillfully divide up and eat huge
portions of legs, arms and hands. Two vessels showing the Cross are in the sea.
198
Since the gazes of the cannibals are turned to a point beyond the frame,
attention is focused on the body parts of their European victim. The remains of the
white man’s body—a head, a leg and an arm—dangle from the top of the tent,
where three women are preparing and serving the feast. For Europeans,
cannibalism was so strange it became the preferred trope to represent their
encounter with the other and produce the irreducible identity of America as
Cannibalia. However, perhaps even more monstrous for the European imagination
was to see the European’s own body reflected back at them, its familiar structure
distorted by “other” taxonomies as it is dismembered and put to “other” uses. The
Western representation of the body that epitomizes enlightenment and morality is
shattered. The body is turned into a heap of wastes and heterogeneous parts which
no longer offers the confidence of a recognizable shape but bring, instead, a fear of
the unknown. The image of the primitive as the excrement of civilization is
reversed into the image of a European who is devoured and reduced to excrement.
Similar feelings of estrangement must have gripped the people who
attended Opinião 65 and participated in the exhibition of the first Parangolé. The
Parangolé seems to keep some of the elements that depict the cannibal feast of
Froschauer. The tent where the European body is being dismembered is replaced by
the “parangolé-structures” found in Rio’s favelas. The mainsails of the boats with
the cross painted on them have turned into standards of diverse colors and capes
with statements that summarize the representations of Latin American popular

199
culture and the poor as disposable bits of developmentalism. What is eaten is the
dismembered body of newly-born art institution in America Latina whose members
and joints forged its link with developmentalism. The cannibal feast of the
Parangolé allowed the twentieth-century cannibals of the underdeveloped world to
devour Western representations of themselves and, as in De Amaral’s interpretation
of the Staden prints, turn Western culture’s image back on itself, subjecting it to
unexpected taxonomies and usages. In so doing, these cannibal malandros—the
barbarians of the twentieth century—are marginal figures who are now part of
higher community, a collective body, that “live at the expense of others,” by
appropriating, falsifying and deceiving. In the words of Salomão:
The first Parangolé was inspired by the vision of a human pariah
who transformed the trash he scavenged in the streets into a
collection of belongings . . . “I AM POSSESSED” . . . A cape is like
a magical mask that doesn’t refer to an archetypal ancestry nor a
present that nullifies itself as the present when it congeals, and much
less to a utopian future . . . HO [Hélio Oiticica] stripped himself of
the inferiority complex of the peripheral world and freed himself
from the domain of the pastiche artistic fashions of the affluent
world . . . HO is a cannibal giant of/from South America.95
95
Waly Salomão, “HOmage” Third Text, 46 (Spring 1999), 131-132.
200
CHAPTER 4
Eroiticica
I have always liked what is forbidden.1

Hélio Oiticica
Slippery Ground
During his short life, Oiticica participated in important group exhibitions such as
the International Exhibition of Concrete Art in Zurich (1960), the V Biennale de
Paris in Paris (1967), The Ninth International Art Exhibition of Japan in Tokyo
(1967), and Information at MoMA in New York (1970). His first solo international
exhibition took place at the Whitechapel Gallery in London (1969). However, it
was not until the posthumous itinerant exhibition Hélio Oiticica in 1992 that
Oiticica’s work really began to win international recognition from art historians,
critics and audiences.
This growing interest in Oiticica’s work since the 1992 retrospective has
resulted in an important body of scholarly work and the mounting of important solo
and collective exhibitions that have shed light on various aspects of Oiticica’s role
1
Quoted by Guy Brett in “The Experimental Exercise of Liberty,” in Hélio Oiticica, ed. Guy Brett,
Catherine David, and Chris Dercon (Rotterdam: Witte de With, 1992), p. 222.
201
in the development of the visual arts after 1945. This attention has mostly focused
on the way in which his interest in the emancipatory role of art, in the body as the
center of the aesthetic experience, and his strong identification with the excluded
social sectors of Brazil, provided unexpected solutions to the concerns of modern
art. In this light, Oiticica’s work has been shown in Documenta X (1997), Beyond
Space in the 7th Havana Biennial (2000), Hélio Oiticica: Obra em estratégia in the
Museu de Arte Moderna, Rio de Janeiro (2002), Hélio Oiticica: Quasi-cinemas in
Columbus (Ohio) and New York (2002), Cosmococa-Program in Progress in the
Centro de Arte Hélio Oiticica in Rio de Janeiro and MALBA in Buenos Aires
(2005), and The Body of Color in Houston and London (2007).
The 1992 exhibition was conceived of in 1988—eight years after Oiticica’s
death—by Chris Dercon (Director of PS1) and Luciano Figueredo (Coordinator of
the Projéto Hélio Oiticica in Rio de Janeiro), at the time when some works and
installations by Oiticica were included in the group exhibition Brazil Projects at
PS1 in New York. This PS1 exhibition assembled works by seventy Brazilian
artists, including Fernando Pinto, Antonio Dias, Adir Sodre and Ivens Machado.
The works embraced a wide range of media, such as video, sculpture, photography,
painting, costume design, and television. Oiticica’s work drew the attention of
leading critics, scholars and journalists and was a surprise to the visitors. (Fig. 4.1)
In a review in the New York Times on March 6, 1988, Michael Brenson, after
explaining the context of the exhibition, wrote:

202
One of the strengths [of the exhibition] is the installation devoted to
Hélio Oiticica . . . His work is a bundle of contradictions. It is
defined by a need for purity and a need for disguise. His bolides, or
boxes, some of wood, suggest models for radically simple
architecture, as well as labyrinths without exit. His Grand Nucleus is
a large installation with rectangular planks suspended like screens
above an open plot of floor that is surrounded by a bed of pebbles.
The tension between openness and claustrophobia, asceticism and
dandyism gives Mr. Oiticica’s work a personal urgency that the
show as a whole lacks.2
Guy Brett and Catherine David, who were already familiar with Oiticica’s
art, became interested in organizing a retrospective of the works he produced
between 1955 and 1980. Along with Chris Dercon, Luciano Figueredo and Lygia
Pape, Brett and David provided the general concept and co-curated the exhibition.
Rotterdam’s Witte de With Center of Contemporary Art and the Galerie Nationale
du Jeu de Paume in Paris, in association with the Projéto Hélio Oiticica in Rio de
Janeiro, organized the retrospective, which was shown in Rotterdam, Paris,
Barcelona, Lisbon and Minneapolis between 1992 and 1994.
The 1992 retrospective was initially thought of as an opportunity to
emphasize Oiticica’s fascination with Mondrian’s “prophecies,” which spoke of the
2
Michael Brenson, “A Brazilian Exhibition in a Didactic Context,” The New York Times (May 6,
1988).
203
end of art as it progressively moved towards its total incorporation into everyday
life and of the need for art to recover its historical perspective. For the organizers,
Oiticica’s relation to Mondrian was manifold. First, it was reflected in Oiticica’s
active participation in the creation of the Brazilian new-concrete movement of the
fifties and sixties that translated and appropriated European constructivism.
Second, it was also expressed in his whole body of research, which attempted to
integrate color and support into space to create a universe of visual structures.3
Finally, his neo-concrete period used constructivism as an opportunity to question
the postulates of modern art and modernity in its entirety. The organizers stated:
“We originally thought of giving this exhibition the name of one of Oiticica’s
works: Homenagem a Mondrian [Homage to Mondrian]. (Fig. 4.2) There is also a
strong link between the fate of the French and Brazilian modernist movements.”4
This initial idea of having Oiticica’s link to Mondrian as the axis of the show gave
way, however, to what the organizers called a documentary approach which would
provide the public with a more general sense of Oiticica’s work. As Guy Brett
stated:
Since Hélio himself is not around to re-present his work in the
conditions of 1992, the best course open seemed to be to adopt a
documentary and informational method, . . . trying to act as fully as
3
Chris Dercon, et. al. “Posfacio dos organizadores,” in Hélio Oiticica, ed. Guy Brett, Catherine
David, and Chris Dercon (Rotterdam: Witte de With, 1992), p. 274.
4
Dercon, “Posfacio dos organizadores,” p. 274.
204
possible within that mode, and to leave the way open for any
number of ‘re-creational’ works or references to Oiticica (including
critiques of this exhibition).5
The organizers, in the epilogue written for the catalogue, attempted to place this
documentary method within a more general political framework which discusses
the way in which Oiticica’s work and life participated in the European avant-garde
and modernism. They stated:
The works of Oiticica are strongly linked to Brazilian socio-cultural
realities. However, even if rooted in local sources, his art is
universal. Simultaneously, despite the fact that his work had its
origin in an international tendency such as the concrete movement, it
cannot be associated with the Western idea of an international art.
From our perspective, Oiticica’s art is extremely relevant to the
extent that it transgresses stereotyped and Eurocentric conceptions
about Latin American culture, while enforcing our own vision of the
“other.”6
Despite the documentary intention of the exhibition, the visual material in the
catalogue and the essays by Brett and David analyze his work in terms of the four
major phases I have explored in Chapter 3: Glass Bólide, Box Bólide, Penetrable,
and the Parangolé and thus emphasize its formalist aspects: liberating color from
5
6
205
support and the avant-garde aim of articulating art and life. In line with the
comparison with Mondrian, the four phases were interpreted as Oiticica’s attempt
to dissolve the art object and re-create it for everyday purposes. Insofar as they
regarded Oiticica’s work as a transgression of “stereotyped and Eurocentric
conceptions about Latin American culture,” one might infer, at first sight, that they
echoed the by-then generalized critical idea, discussed in previous chapters, that
called for a recognition of the role of Latin American art in the development of
post-War art. At the end of the epilogue, however, they asked:
How is it possible that Oiticica’s work was practically unknown up
until now? Have we finally begun to realize our prejudices, mistakes
and omissions? Is it owing to the difficulties and complexities of
Oiticica’s own work? Hélio Oiticica was a restless wanderer. He
was the kind of person Pascal describes as someone who is never in
a specific position, nor has a definite place or dimension.7
The organizers’ demand for the recognition of Oiticica’s work is ambiguous. Their
argument places his life and ethics on different, and somehow contradictory,
planes: First, his work is strongly linked to the social and cultural context of Brazil.
Second, and despite this fact, his work is universal. Yet the international character
of his work is different from the Western idea of international art. Finally, speaking
7
206
of the role his life plays in his work, Oiticica is given an unspecified position, a no-
place or no-dimension: He was a restless wanderer.
Though I am tempted to discuss the political assumptions behind their use
of Oiticica’s work to question the Eurocentric system of art, I prefer to concentrate
on their final remarks, which remove his life from the very context they insist is
needed for an analysis of his work. The formalist explanation of Oiticica’s work
consistently omits the role in it of subjectivity and fails to define the position, place
or dimension from which his artwork is produced, displayed and appropriated. This
is not to argue for an overly biographical approach to Oiticica to help illustrate the
sources of his inspiration, but to link his artistic search to broader struggles and the
conflictive nature of the construction of subjectivity. The challenge, then, is to link
his work not so much with artistic issues but social and political ones. Curiously,
the avant-garde rhetoric which joins art to life and has been used to explore the
ethics of Oiticica’s work simultaneously creates a representation of life that makes
it impossible to situate the social and cultural struggles that give shape to the
subjectivities of those interpellated by that rhetoric.
The above is even more inexplicable when we consider that the 1992
exhibition assembled and displayed a number of Oiticica’s works, as well as
relevant written material such as sketches, letters, catalogues and texts, which were
practically unknown before then and are important to any interpretation of his art. It
included projections and installations of his Quasi-cinemas mostly produced during

207
his stay in New York that had never been exhibited in his lifetime. (Fig. 4.3) More
importantly for my purpose, several of those New York projects clearly display his
interest in the relationship between art and sexuality, especially his own, and thus
reveal aspects of his art that critics only have spoken of sotto voce up to now.
The inclusion of these works in the exhibition would seem, then, to cast
doubt on the organizers’ avant-gardist rhetoric, the division of his work into four
major phases and their depiction of Oiticica as a restless wanderer who has no
place, however conflictive, from which he produced his work and articulated it with
his life. For not only do these works explore new media that have little to do with
what critics have called his progressive development in issues of color and support,
they also shed light on his attempts, in New York, to link his life and his work
through an ethic which those critics underplay.
In his essay “The Experimental Exercise of Liberty,” written for the
catalogue of the exhibition, Guy Brett, noting the relevance of aspects of Oiticica’s
life that abruptly came out in the exhibition, makes a direct reference to Oiticica’s
gay sexuality and his interest in exploring sexuality through his art. This reference
is important; as it is one of the few made on his sexuality by art critics and is
included in one of the most comprehensive articles about him. Brett stated:
Already Hélio’s earliest Parangolé capes, as clothing, are by nature
transsexual. They have no attachment to conventional signs of either
masculinity or femininity. Both seem to dissolve in the intention to

208
incite expressivity. Hélio was gay, and a gay sexuality could be
traced in his work, but all his proposals related to sexuality seem to
be non-divisive, transsexual.8
Brett seeks to give a general account of the theoretical and social aspects of
Oiticica’s art, as well as to place it in the context of the critical debates of the
second half of the twentieth century. However, even though Brett refers to
Oiticica’s sexuality, his understanding of the Parangolé and other works which
deal with his sexuality tends to dismiss its importance to his art and place his
interest in it beyond sexuality. His subjectivity becomes dissolved in the intention
to incite expressivity.
In the case of the Parangolé, it might be argued that the capes as such did
not explicitly act as signs or codes of gender division. As I have argued in Chapter
3, the capes are artistic experiments or demonstrations which question the
representation of Brazilian popular culture found in the binary division of
developed/underdeveloped during the Cold War. However, this is not to say that
the excluded Brazilian social groups are beyond gender, sexual, ethnic or class
divisions. Oiticica addressed both the external nature of colonialism during the
Cold War and the effect it had on the creation of various forms of difference within
Brazilian society. Even though the Parangolé mainly draws attention to those
excluded by global race and class divisions, it also focuses on those marginalized
8
209
by internal relations of power. The colonial subjects of global developmentalism
are also the women, gays, black or poor who have been colonized by Brazilian
society.
This is even truer when we consider, as Oiticica insisted, that the Parangolé
is not meant to be just about capes, but is a “vivência total” [total experience]. If
the Parangolé is a performance which displays and combines “other” ways of
living which emerge from adversity, it is almost impossible to exclude, from such a
vivência, the wide variety of meanings given to it by the participants and spectators.
The meaning is activated by the capes, but the capes do not entirely capture it. The
meaning is disseminated and transformed by the spectator’s vivência. The
performance becomes the excess that challenges the nominal meaning of the capes,
tents and banners. Thus, it is problematic to define the capes as such as non-
divisive and transsexual since it limits the performative possibilities of the
Parangolé, that is, the way they enable the participants or spectators to
acknowledge their double colonial condition and become something different from
what they are. In this line of thought, it would be interesting, for example, to find
out what the Parangolé means for a gay man who adores cross-dressing, even if the
capes are not explicitly designed to display gender divisions. Indeed, I found some
pictures of the Parangolé capes to have a profound homoerotic appeal—in
particular, Cape 23 M’Way Ke, Cape 25 and Cape 26, worn by Romero and Luis
Fernando Guimarães and exhibited in New York in 1972. While Guimarães,

210
adopting a hieratic pose, scorns the camera, Romero, photographed at the World
Trade Center, looks straight at us, challenging our idea of him as desirable. (Fig.
4.4, 4.5) Both display the stereotype of the sexualized Brazilian male body.
Brett’s problematic use of the term “transsexual” to define Oiticica’s
interest in sexuality has been also commented on by Rudi C. Bleys in his book
Images of Ambiente: Homotextuality and Latin American Art 1810-Today. He
writes:
Transsexuality may not be the right term, as Oiticica’s intention is to
question fixed gender roles, rather than to claim a feminine realm
for men (or vice versa). Metasexuality may be a better term to
capture Oiticica’s sexual utopia . . . Oiticica’s position is
postmodern avant la lettre as it entails a deconstruction of current
sexual ideology. But his work remains simultaneously embedded in
modernism. It is a hybrid, in fact, combining the language of
Constructivism (Neo-Concretismo) with a plea for ‘participation’,
amalgamating Brazil’s body culture, his own sexuality and carioca
society all at once.9
In spite of Bleys’ attempt to be more precise about Oiticica’s approach, his term
“metasexuality” leaves us in the same indeterminate zone as Brett’s
“transsexuality.” Bleys understands transsexual to be the practice of exchanging
9
Rudy Bleys, Images of Ambiente: Homotextuality and Latin American Art 1810-Today (London &
New York: Continuum, 2000), p. 139.
211
gender roles, that is to say, as transgender. He thinks Oiticica’s proposal is rooted
in a sexual utopia, yet he also calls it postmodern, that is, intended to deconstruct
sexuality. Bleys seems to be speaking of a sort of pan-sexuality where all sexual
differences dissolve. He regards the postmodern as an overlapping of sexual
practices, which misses postmodernism’s critique of the major narratives which
have created sexuality. However, if we think of sexuality as a set of discourses and
practices that create sexual subjects, it is difficult to understand those subjects and
their alternative sexualities without taking into account the system of power which
produces them. In other words, their sexualities do not flow freely: they are related
to the system they try to resist. If Oiticica’s work on sexuality is postmodern avant
la lettre, I believe his responses are deconstructive, that is, they challenge the
heteronormative regime of sexuality and its contempt for alternative pleasures. If
we are to classify Oiticica’s approach to sexuality as postmodern and
deconstructive, we need to consider these practices not so much as the “free
radicals” of that discourse as ones that are “aberrant” to it, as Eve K. Sedgwick,
citing Paul de Man, does when she speaks of the deconstructive character of queer
sexualities.
Brett’s and Bley’s terms seem to contradict the very interpretation they
formulate: Oiticica worked on sexuality but his interest in it went beyond sexuality.
One of their assumptions is that sexuality is a derivative of gender—the sex/gender
system, as Sedgwick calls it, following Gayle Rubin. Sedgwick points out that
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modernity used the binary division of same/other sex object in order to discipline
desire. This system excludes our line of reasoning, since it prevents one from
thinking about pleasures unrelated to gender divisions, and “other” ways of being
sexual—matters such as affection, belonging, and professional choices, including
artistic ones. The indiscriminate use of the terms sex, gender and sexuality places
one on “slippery ground,” as Eve Sedgwick says. Hence, her call for defining
sexuality as “the array of acts, expectations, narratives, pleasures, identity-
formations, and knowledges, in both women and men, that tends to cluster most
densely around certain genital sensations, but is not adequately defined by them.”10
Nevertheless, the main question is these critics’ unwillingness to link
Oiticica’s gayness to his work on sexuality. Although Brett asserts that “Oiticica
was gay and a gay sexuality could be traced in his work,” and Bleys sees Oiticica’s
art as a postmodern amalgamation of “Brazil’s body culture, his own sexuality and
carioca society all at once,” both show a typical uneasiness about the link between
subjectivity and artistic practices. When Brett pointed out Oiticica’s gay
sexuality—which Oiticica rarely made public—he seemed to pull Oiticica out of
the closet, as it were, only to push him back by desexualizing his work. The
following arguments by Brett figuratively function as a closet door which
continuously opens and closes:
10
Eve K. Sedgwick, The Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of
California Press, 1990), p. 29.
213
What is particularly revealing in the New York context is Hélio’s
interweaving of sexual mixing with linguistic mixing, “Multisexo,”
“twowaynis,” and “bilinguex:” word play is combined with
drawings in the playful and beautiful Barnbilônia. If these works
both recall James Joyce and prophesy later linguistic performances
by artists working on the borders between cultures, like Guillermo
Gómez-Peña today, they also place questions of identity and the self
. . . in a very broad perspective.11
Perhaps the metaphor I used is not totally accurate. When it comes to sexuality, art
criticism and history seem to pull queer artists out of the closet and then push them
into the art institution. Once that is done, it is permissible to hint at an artist’s
sexuality only if that information helps critics and historians to explain the work in
formalistic ways. This makes it more difficult to understand the relation between
queer artists and the broader cultural context. Placing their works in that context
would give us a better understanding of the sort of political struggles they and their
art face, and help us with our own contemporary struggle and highlight meanings
of their works that go beyond the strictly artistic.
In order to challenge the art institution’s interpretation of queer
subjectivities, I would like to make use of the scholarly work that has been done to
redefine the distinction between sex, gender and sexuality and thus come up with a
11
214
more productive approach to the relationship between art and sexuality. Such a
redefinition, Sedgwick remarks, will allow us to think about sexuality as “the full
spectrum of positions between the most intimate and the most social, the most
predetermined and the most aleatory, the most physically rooted and the most
symbolically infused, the most innate and the most learned, the most autonomous
and the most relational traits of being.”12 This approach, pioneered by Visual and
Cultural Studies and Queer Theory, has proven fruitful.13 More and more scholars
are coming to see that works by queer artists are not simply “art;” that is to say,
only embedded in formalist concerns but rather are related to the social struggles of
the communities to which they belong.
Going back to the questions asked by the organizers at the end of the
epilogue of the catalogue of the 1992 exhibition, I would say that our perception of
Oiticica’s work and life still seems to be based on prejudices, mistakes and
omissions. Curated by Argentinean Carlos Basualdo, the first exhibition of the
complete series of Quasi-cinemas was held in 2002 at the New Museum of
Contemporary Art in New York and the Wexner Center for the Arts, with support
from the Kölner Kunstverein. In the Critical Voices Series roundtable which
accompanied this exhibition, Arto Lindsay and others commented on Oiticica’s
work and told anecdotes about his stay in New York during the seventies. Arto
12
Sedgwick, The Epistemology of the Closet, p. 29.
13
Douglas Crimp’s pioneering work on Andy Warhol is an example of this line of inquiry and has
been profoundly inspiring for this project.
215
Lindsay, who was a very close friend of Oiticica’s in New York, called attention to
Oiticica’s sexuality and the need to take it into account when exploring his work:
Hélio was very much a kind of ultimate queen. Like incredibly
brilliant, incredibly demanding and witty, and pushing himself as far
as he could. It was very difficult to be openly gay in Rio, especially
as he was from a really traditional family. And when he joined the
Samba school, it was much easier for him to be himself sexually. He
was supposedly a great dancer . . . This puts a different spin on some
of the more formal things. The whole Baudelairian cinema aspect
doesn't get talked about a lot. . . . There was a real thing, and that
gives a real edge to this other kind of stuff, which sometimes seems
very schematic . . .14
In what follows, I will bring to light some of works Oiticica produced in New York
which explicitly deal with sexuality and the ways they relate to Oiticica’s interest in
making his work a personal vivência and his life a public affair. Oiticica gave the
name Quasi-cinemas to his New York body of work which consists of his series
Cosmococas, Helena inventa Ángela María, Neyrótika and Agrippina é Roma
Manhattan. In general, Quasi-cinemas was the name Oiticica gave to his
experiments with filmic image and narration. They were room-sized installations
14
The Critical Voices Series http://www.newmuseum.org/docs/oiticica.pdf, p. 4.
216
that included music and slide-projections where people were encouraged to sit or
lie down in order to experience a personal and collective bodily transformation. I
will specifically explore Neyrótika and Agrippina and Roma Manhattan. In my
analysis, I would like to include as Quasi-cinemas some unfinished film projects,
such as Brazil Jorge, Boys and Men and Babylonests, which were meant to take
place mostly in his New York apartment on Second Avenue. In contrast with his
series Neyrótika and his super 8 film Agrippina—which have been shown at
exhibitions in Brazil, the United States and Europe—these unfinished projects have
to be interpreted from Oiticica’s notes and precarious scripts, which are being
digitalized by the Projéto Hélio Oiticica in Rio de Janeiro.
I will situate Oiticica’s body of work produced in New York in the early
seventies within his broader search for suitable environments “to demolish social
prejudices and group barriers” which hinder vital experiences.15 As I have argued
in Chapter 3, Oiticica’s rejection of the modernist aesthetic led him to undertake
projects, known as anti-art, which attempted to modify the relation between the
artist, audience, and artwork, through the creation of what he called “environmental
wholes.” In New York, Oiticica continued to explore this interest in creating
atmospheres with the production of his Quasi-cinemas. However, Oiticica’s
experience in New York gave this search for the creation of environments a
particular character. The works he produced became, in turn, elements of a much
15
Quoted by Catherine David “The Great Labyrinth,” in Hélio Oiticica, p. 255.
217
larger environment where Oiticica attempted to integrate his life into his work and
create conditions for him to share his marginal experience with immigrants, street
people, friends or lovers. Oiticica found in New York an underground world where
streets, parks and architecture become crucial elements of an enormous and
exciting environment, a kind of universe of pleasure, solidarity and affection—a
sort of Third World factory in the First World, to borrow Warhol’s term—which I
would like to call Eroiticica.
In my account of Eroiticica, I will first examine his Babylonests, the name
for his apartment on Second Avenue, which he converted into cabins to shelter—
metaphorically—other ways of living. I will relate this to Tropicália, his first
installation of this kind, and his Ninhos [Nests], which were first exhibited at the
Whitechapel Gallery in London in 1969. Second, I will explore his scripts and his
Neyrótika. The latter consisted of a projection of eighty slides of young men taken
at his Babylonests, with a soundtrack by Marvin Gaye and Tito Puente, interrupted
by poems by Arthur Rimbaud read by Oiticica and government announcements. I
will also examine his unfinished 1972 super-8 film Agrippina é Roma-Manhattan,
featuring Christiny Nazareth, Mario Montez and the Brazilian artist Antônio Dias.
Along with Agrippina, Oiticica intended to produce Tropicamp. It is part of a larger
project called Subterranean that Oiticica planned to hold in Central Park, in which
Mario Montez would perform “anthological impersonations” of Tropicamp figures,

218
such as “Carmen Miranda + other things.”16 Subterranean was to be an enormous
labyrinth through which people would walk, with sounds and images evoking pop-
culture representations of Latin America. Oiticica’s experiments with filmic image
and narration and his interest in creating a queer universe I call Eroiticica were part
of a rich queer artistic scene he found in New York which included Jack Smith and
Andy Warhol, among others. Through Mario Montez, Oiticica became fascinated
with Jack Smith’s work on American clichés about Latin America. “Tropi-
Hollywood,” “Pop-Tropicália” and “Tropi-Pop” are some of the names Oiticica
gave to Smith’s treatment of the Latina stars of Hollywood.
As with all his environments, Eroiticica was meant to create conditions for
the spectators to free themselves from prejudices that hinder their vivências and to
create unexpected situations which would allow them to collectively become
different. Within this atmosphere, his Neyrótika, Agrippina and the scripts are to be
seen as challenges to stereotypes about sexuality and marginality that reflect
Oiticica’s own experiences. Of particular interest, Oiticica’s exploration of
stereotypes of sexuality is combined with an important analysis of their link to
colonialism. That is, he seems to approach sexuality from the perspective of the
colonial construction of Latin America and the representation of the Latin
American sexual subject. By introducing an insightful analysis of representations of
the male body and homoeroticism, his work also explores the ways in which that
16
Hélio Oiticica, “Mario Montez: Tropicamp,” Projéto Hélio Oiticica (PHO) 0275/71 (October
1971), 4.
219
body is inscribed within American representations of Latin America. In his
Neyrótika, Agrippina e Roma Manhattan, Tropicamp and his scripts, Oiticica
shows the double colonial condition of those (including himself) who are regarded
as an “other” both for their sexual marginality and Latin American condition.
In Chapter 3, I approvingly quoted Brazilian critic Mario Pedrosa’s plea for
perspectives on Oiticica’s art that are more culturally based. Pedrosa’s idea should
be expanded to give an account of the relation between this work and his sexual
subjectivity. Oiticica’s statement “I have always liked what is forbidden”17 is not
simply a clue to his source of inspiration, but rather a statement about his own
marginal sexuality and the way it led him create experimental worlds to live
differently.
Babylonests: A Third-world Factory
Although Oiticica lived in Washington for two years during the late forties, when
he was ten years old, it was not until 1970, when he participated in the exhibition
Information at the Museum of Modern Art, that he became involved, in New York,
with the U.S. art scene. Information was organized by Kynaston L. McShine,
Associate Curator of Painting and Sculpture at the MoMA, to call attention to the
work of young artists who, in the late sixties, displaced the traditional art object
with other media in an attempt to reach larger audiences. As McShine wrote in the
17
Quoted by Guy Brett in “The Experimental Exercise of Liberty,” p. 222.
220
catalogue, the use of new media reflected two important developments in art at the
time. First, artists used mass media to appeal to audiences flooded with television,
cinema and newspapers. Second, artists wished to respond to political crises like
the Vietnam War and the military dictatorships in Latin America.18
Information included such artists as Joseph Beuys, Victor Burgin, Gilbert
and George, Sol LeWitt, Lucy Lippard, Cildo Meireles, Yoko Ono, Pistoletto, and
Hans Haacke—who presented his famous MoMA Poll. (Fig. 4.6, 4.7)) The artists
were invited to contribute statements about the role of art in the political context of
the time. Oiticica wrote:
It is important that the ideas of environment, participation, sensorial
experiments, etc., be not limited to objectal [sic] solutions: they
should propose a development of life-acts and not a representation
more (the idea of ‘art’): new forms of communication; the
propositions for a new unconditioned behavior—My work led me to
use forms of accidental leisure as direct elements to a new
opening.19
Oiticica presented a version of Ninhos, first shown at his solo exhibition Eden at
the Whitechapel Gallery in London in February, 1969. For Oiticica, Eden was an
important achievement which came out of a number of attempts to create an
environment for experimentation, leisure and self-recognition. Captivated by the
18
Kynaston L. McShine, “Introduction,” in Information (New York: MoMA, 1970), p. 138-140.
19
Hélio Oiticica, “Information,” in Information, p. 103.
221
architectural features of the Whitechapel Gallery, Oiticica built Eden as a “total
ambience.” It allowed spectators to participate in the work in different ways: they
could lie down or walk barefoot on sand, straws and leaves while listening to music
by Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil. In the exhibition catalogue, he wrote: “[Eden]
is an experimental “campus,” a sort of environmental taba,20 within which one may
carry on human experiments—human referring to the possibilities of the human
species. It is kind of mythical place for feeling, for acting, for doing things and
building each one’s inner cosmos.”21 In “Expêriencia Londrina: Subterrânea” [A
London Experience: Subterranean], Oiticica called the Ninhos a result of his wish
to abandon the art object and replace it with environments for acting, for life. He
said: “The Ninhos propose an idea of multiplication, reproduction and growth for
the community.”22 (Fig. 4.8)
Oiticica’s fascination with the architectural goes back to his Parangolé,
which included cabins and tents inspired by the favela. In his “Fundamental Bases
for the Definition of Parangolé,” Oiticica expressed his interest in these terms: “In
the architecture of the favela, for example, there is the implicit character of
Parangolé, which is the structural link among its constitutive elements, the internal
circulation and the external dismemberment of these constructions. There are no
20
Taba: indigenous settlement.
21
Hélio Oiticica, “Eden,” in Hélio Oiticica (London: Whitechapel Gallery, 1969), p. 1.
22
Hélio Oiticica, “Experiência Londrina: Subterrânea,” PHO 0290/70 (January 1970), 1.
222
abrupt changes between the living room, the bedroom or the kitchen. There is only
the essential which defines the parts that communicate in a continuum.”23
His first experiment in this regard was Tropicália. The name was coined by
Oiticica and adopted by a group of musicians, including Veloso and Gil, who, in
the best anthropophagite style, appropriated mainstream U.S. music to question the
promotion of a so-called Brazilian national culture by both the right and the left.
For him:
Tropicália directly emerged from this fundamental need to
characterize a Brazilian situation . . . at the beginning of the text
“New Objectivity,” I invoked Oswald de Andrade and the sense of
“Anthropophagy” as an important element to characterize that
Brazilian situation. Tropicália is the first conscious, objective
attempt to place an evidently Brazilian image in the current context
of the avant-garde and national manifestations in general.”24
The Tropicalist movement used government and media stereotypes about Brazil to
produce a kind of Third World camp. Their music and lyrics reveled in bad taste
and political protest and the whole movement was involved with ethnic, social and
sexual marginality. They used titles such as Questão de Ordem [Question of
Order], Marginália II and Soy loco por tí, América [I am crazy for you, America],
and wrote parodies of Brazilian folk music. (Fig. 4.9) Their lyrics included quotes
23
Hélio Oiticica, “Fundamental Bases for the Definition of Parangolé” in Hélio Oiticica, p. 85.
24
Hélio Oiticica, “Tropicália,” in PHO 0128/68 (March 1968), 1.
223
from Oswald de Andrade’s Anthropophagy Manifesto, such as “Tupi or not Tupi:
that’s the question”. The group participated in a television special for TV Globo:
Vida, paixão e banana do tropicalismo [“Life, Passion, and Banana of
Tropicalism”], presenting a parody of what the dictatorship thought of as truly
Brazilian culture.
As the movement identified with the malandro and similar marginal figures,
Oiticica participated in it, producing a banner for a 1968 concert at Sucata, a night-
club in Rio, featuring Velosa, Gil and the radical group Os Mutantes. The banner
originated in a work Oiticica had created in 1966 to commemorate his outlaw
friend Cara-de-Cavalo [Horse-Face], who had been killed by the police. (Fig. 4.10)
Oiticica wrote: “I knew Cara de Cavalo personally, and I can say he was my friend,
but for society he was public enemy number one, wanted for audacious crimes and
assaults.”25 Featuring the silk-screened figure of his fallen friend and the inscription
“Seja marginal, seja herói” [Be marginal-Be a hero], the banner was widely
displayed before and during the concert. Oiticica explained that the banner was a
“protest against the Brazilian mentality that has its faithful representatives in the
death squads which treat the marginal like an object.”26 (Fig. 4.11) During the
concert, the police ordered the banner to be removed. The musicians agreed to it,
but Veloso kept denouncing the military censorship during the concert. Gil, for his
part, criticized the exclusion and poverty of Black people, using African rhythms
25
Helio Oiticica, “Cara de Cavalo,” in Hélio Oiticica, p. 25.
26
“Show de Caetano pára mesmo,” Ultima Hora (Oct. 17, 1968), p. 3.
224
and lyrics in his songs. On the morning of December 27, 1968, Caetano Veloso and
Gilberto Gil were arrested by the military in their apartments in São Paulo.
In 1970, after Information and when he had just returned from New York,
Oiticica was awarded a Guggenheim grant. The idea of living in New York
enchanted him, as he wrote to Lygia Clark on August 2, 1970: “I love that city and
it is the only place in the world that interests me.”27 However, there were also
political reasons for his voluntary exile. Censorship by the military in Brazil was
reaching serious levels. Along with Veloso and Gil, Brazilian critic Mario Pedrosa
had been arrested. Oiticica lived his stay in New York as a form of exile which
influenced his whole vivência. Faced with economic difficulties, he found
temporary jobs as a translator in addition to being a nighttime telephone operator.
Soon after he arrived in New York, Oiticica converted the apartment he
lived in into a nest: a place where exiled Brazilian and Latin American artists,
musicians and intellectuals, together with friends he made in New York, shared his
experimental environment. The name Babylonests corresponded to his first
apartment in New York at 81 Second Avenue, No. 14. (Fig. 4.12) He used that term
because, as he wrote, “New York fascinates me like Babylon.”28 In his article
“Fatos” [Facts] Oiticica defined the purpose of his Babylonests:
It is a proposition of play-luxury-pleasure which is not connected to
romantic dreams of aspiration for a Utopian aristocracy (halls of
27
Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticica, Cartas 1964-1974 (Rio de Janeiro: Editora UFRJ, 1998), p. 161.
28
Hélio Oiticica, “Fatos,” PHO 0316/73 (June 1973), 1.
225
crystal, lights of silk), but rather to a practice of experimentality yet
to be experienced and formulated . . . Babylonests: begun the first
week of February ‘71: times: people: function of easily movable
spaces-nucleus.29
Built by Oiticica himself, Babylonests consisted of small cabins made of wooden
poles, which were covered and divided by usually transparent fabrics of diverse
colors and had mattresses, pillows and cushions on the floor where people could
read, have sex, sleep or do whatever they liked. (Fig. 4.13, 4.14) As Guy Brett
described them:
Babylonests was a structure of two or three floors (I do not
remember well) that filled out the space of his small apartment.
There were small cabins with curtains, mattress, etc. Hélio occupied
one of them. There was also a separated kitchen and a bathroom. He
never knew very well all the people who were living there, since all
the time there was someone entering or leaving . . . When I was in
New York, Hélio was working at night as an international telephone
operator . . . He returned from work at seven in the morning, slept a
little, and then he was at his typewriter. He liked to have everything
working at the same time in his nest: typewriter, radio, tape
29
Oiticica, “Fatos,” 1.
226
recorder, television, telephone, etc., and he kept jerking me around
because I preferred silence.30
His nests and the city became a world of refuge where he could not only live in
exile, but also experiment with new ways of living. They reflected his desire for a
shelter that would free him from his role as a Brazilian, an artist, a person who had
to be cultured, middle class or even heterosexual. On October 27, 1973, Oiticica
wrote in his notebook 2/73:
SHELTER-WORLD
SHELTER-REFUGE
The individual choice is the only way for the experimental

As a free exercise to explore
FREE OF TIES
Of homeland
Of the object and necessity
Of the production of artworks to solve the conflict between
subject-object
Of images
Of the literacy of the cultivated man
Of the compulsory social role.31
His Babylonests was a continuation of Tropicália, Ninhos and previous
experiments in creating “environmental wholes.” (Fig. 4.15) Tropicália would be a
“reverselens” for seeing the military’s idea of Brazil for what it really was—a place
of conservative “tropicalism,” a “Brazilian reactionary-brainwashed” situation—
and by implication a critique of developmentalism and the modernist idea of art.
30
Guy Brett, Brasil Experimental; arte/vida: proposições e paradoxos, ed. K. Maciel (Rio de
Janeiro: Contra-Capa, 2005), p. 20, 22.
31
Hélio Oiticica, “Mundo-Abrigo,” PHO 0194/73 (July 1973), 1.
227
Instead of a utopia or a new “art-ism” which would be as distorted into tropicalism,
Oiticica wanted his Babylonests to be a shelter-world—mundo-abrigo— to offer
the possibility of new life-acts: forms of communication and unrestrained behavior
within a kind of community-cell. He wrote,
My work led me to use forms of accidental leisure as direct elements
in this approach to a new opening . . . From the accidental use of the
act of lying down, for instance, internal questions-situations may
arise; possibilities of relating to unconditioned situations-behavior . .
. What happens is that these leisure-form proposals can directly
concentrate on individual situations: they are universal (wholly
experimental) and this matters a lot for Brazilian life (the country
where all free wills seem to be repressed and castrated by one of the
most brainwashed societies of all times).32
The mundo-abrigo, however, is a collective experimentation which separates
Oiticica’s work from the concepts of liberation found in humanism and the avant-
garde. The centered self is exposed to chance and difference, that is to say,
experiences its deconstruction as subject and lives art as an unexpected, accidental
experience. Oiticica thought New York was suitable for “creating collective
ambience-leisure-spaces which bring together a kind of activity that does not
32
Oiticica, “Mundo-Abrigo,” 3-5.
228
become fragmented into pre-conditioned structures, but searches for a closer body-
ambience relationship.”33
The mundo-abrigo he created in his Babylonests became an important
element of his representation of Manhattan as a broader shelter for unexpected
situations and the experimental. As I have noted, his previous environments had
been a place which, while both public and private, was personal, but his shelter-
refuge expanded the concept to parks, streets and places in New York, as if the city
were a single labyrinth permitting a closer body-ambience relationship and a better
opportunity to incorporate his sexuality into his work. When Oiticica spoke of the
architectural character of the favela, he referred to the external dismemberment of
its structure and absence of abrupt changes between spaces which formed a
continuum. As I will show in his notes for films, the favela’s architectural
atmosphere, as a vindication of popular culture’s need for alternative conditions of
living, is replaced by New York, where the Babylonests and the city’s buildings,
parks, bars and streets become dismembered parts of a continuum linked by
Oiticica’s desire in the context of the city’s marginal sexual cultures.
Golden Boys on my Knees
Soon after arriving in New York, Oiticica became involved with the underground-
film scene. In a letter to Lygia Clark, dated May 14, 1971, he wrote of having met
33
Oiticica, “Mundo-Abrigo,” 10.
229
all of Warhol’s Superstars. Also, in a letter to Torquato Neto, October 12, 1971, he
recalled his excitement about the works of Jack Smith, Andy Warhol and Ron Rice,
giving details of Flaming Creatures, Normal Love, In the Grip of the Lobster, The
Whores of Babylon, Chumlum, Screen Test No. 2, Chelsea Girls and Harlot.34 The
term Quasi-cinema was coined by Oiticica after seeing Jack Smith’s performance
Travelodge of Atlantis. In a 1971 letter to Waly Salomão, Oiticica described his
experience of seeing Smith’s work in these terms:
It began at ten-thirty, three hours late, and he spent half an hour on
the first three [slides] alone; he moved around the screen in such a
way that the projection of the slides was cut off, and he shifted the
position of the projector to cut off each one in just the right place:
the rest of the slide spilled over into the environment: incredible; I
was overcome with expectation and anxiety, which was worth it; it
was a kind of quasi-cinema, for me as much cinema as you can
imagine: the same complex simplicity that you could feel in
[G]odard: more than that, in my view: the images, the duration of
each slide on the screen, etc., was brilliant and extremely important:
sound tract [sic] of AM radio music . . . Latin malagueña music,
34
Oiticica, “Mario Montez: Tropicamp,” 1.
230
incredible things, noises: telephone, automobile traffic, etc.; it ended
at one in the morning: I went away transformed!35
Oiticica recalled this experience again months later, in a letter to his friend and
colleague Lygia Clark, using the same term to describe Smith’s performance: “I
went to a slide projection with soundtrack, a kind of quasi-cinema, which was
incredible . . . Jack Smith is a kind of Artaud of cinema.”36 For Oiticica, Jack Smith
anticipated his idea of quasi-cinemas: “He extracted from cinema not a naturalistic
vision imitating appearance, but a sense of a fragmented, shattered mirror.”37
Earlier in 1968, Oiticica had already expressed his interest in experimenting
with the filmic image. He actively participated in the local underground film milieu
and was an actor in such films as Cáncer by Glauber Rocha, Dr. Dyonélio and O
Segredo da Múmia [The Mummy’s Secret], by Ivan Cardoso and in an unfinished
project on Oiticica (HO), also by Cardoso. Even before conceiving his Quasi-
cinemas, Oiticica had intended to realize several film projects. In 1969, he
undertook a collaborative one, with his friend Neville D’Almeida, called Mangue
Bangue.38 All of the footage was shot in Brazil, but since Oiticica was living in
London by then, it was edited by Almeida alone.
35
Hélio Oiticica, “Letter to Waly Salomão,” in Hélio Oiticica e a cena Americana (Río de Janeiro:
Centro de Arte Hélio Oiticica, 1998), p. 2.
36
Lygia Clark/Hélio Oiticica: Cartas, Luciano Figueredo, ed. (Rio de Janeiro: Universidad Federal
de Rio de Janeiro, 1996), p. 204.
37
Hélio Oiticica, “BLOCO-EXPERIENCIAS in COSMOCOCA: Program in Progress,” in Hélio
Oiticica, p. 180.
38
Mangue refers to the red light district in Rio, where Oiticica frequently visited his friends from the
Mangueira favela. Bangue is the onomatopoeic form for a gun detonation.
231
Oiticica wrote various notes on Mangue Bangue, expressing his enthusiasm
about the possibility it gave him to consolidate what would become his main
approach to the Quasi-cinemas. For him, Mangue Bangue was a pioneering attempt
to integrate the filmic into his understanding of art as a truly experimental
experience—experimental in the sense I have discussed in Chapter 3. The filmic
image would provide him with the tools he needed to emphasize his idea that art is
a process—not an object—and to bring together different “creative structures” that
would challenge the centrality of the artwork to the aesthetic experience. Oiticica
sought to achieve a simultaneity, using heterogeneous fragments of images, texts
and sounds, which would deny any possibility of sequence or perception of the
work as a whole. This open structure was, as he described it, a “fragmented
proposal of necessary language that resulted in the thin leavings and the flip
gratuitousness of the pleasure of filming . . . yes the work is meta-critical of cinema
as language: the non-verbal quality oscillates and shows futility as the solution to
forms defined as image-photo or audio-visual: It is NON-NARRATIVE-NON-
PHOTO-SOUND-IMAGE-QUASI-CINEMA CINEMA.”39
However, insofar as Oiticica’s interest in the filmic image was part of a
broader attempt to create atmospheres where the spectators would participate in a
group play of luxury/pleasure, the true precursor of the Quasi-cinemas series he
later produced in New York was Nitro Benzol & Black Linoleum. (Fig. 4.16)
39
Hélio Oiticica, “Mangue-Bangue,” PHO Notebook 2/73.
232
Outlined in 1969 during his stay in London, the project was never mounted. It was
supposed to include the participation of Oiticica’s friends in Rio, such as Lygia
Pape, and have music by Veloso and Gil. It consisted of three stages where films
previously shot would be shown to an audience which would gradually participate
in playful activities like kissing, dancing, eating ice cream, drinking Coke, or
feeling the texture of fabrics like silk, velvet and cotton. Nitro Benzol & Black
Linoleum also foreshadowed Oiticica’s exploration of sexuality. At times, the lights
would be turned off to allow people to do whatever they liked. The films included
shots of Edward Pope cross-dressing, a naked woman in a bath tub, a woman
performing a blow job, and views of the Morro da Mangueira in Rio.40
Once in New York, Oiticica attended a film course at New York University,
and acquired a super-8 camera and editing table.41 He started to shoot and produce
scripts for several projects which, for the most part, were never finished and only
survive as written outlines, though some filmed fragments have been recently
discovered and are being restored. It is likely that these films were meant to be part
of installations within the framework of the Quasi-cinemas, as Oiticica was not, at
this point, very devoted to producing films as such, but using filmic images in his
environments. While it is difficult to give a detailed account of them, I will
extrapolate from the notes to describe what the films would have been like if shot.
40
Hélio Oiticica, “Nitro Benzol & Black Linoleum,” PHO 0322/69 (September 1969), 1-11.
41
Clark/Oiticica, Cartas, p. 161.
233
Oiticica’s first attempt to produce a film in New York is dated April 24,
1970. Boys & Men is explicitly devoted to Andy Warhol and James Joyce. (Fig.
4.17) According to the written outline, it was to consist of eight scenes that together
last about an hour. Requiring a “gay atmosphere,” the film is about “young
teenagers (about ten of them who should look very beautiful, freaks and shy).” The
camera shows them dressed in tight trousers and gives details of “their legs, pricks,
etc. . . . Eventually one of them may be without a shirt . . . another in shorts: only
two of them.” After a scene when a fixed camera would show a man’s naked legs,
which “should be well-built and hairy” and an off-camera male voice would read
an excerpt from Joyce’s Ulysses, Wally and Geraldo would be together in a big bed
covered by a blanket, and change positions, moving up and down the bed, with
their hands emerging from or disappearing beneath the blanket. Then, they would
begin an improvisation. Later, Nando appears in a bathing suit and Sidiny in
trousers and bare chest. “They dig each other,” Oiticica explains. Sidiny walks
through a misty forest, and sees a sign which reads “Mme. Duarte.” He follows the
sign and finds her. Mme. Duarte is Rogério Duarte in drag as a gipsy fortune-teller.
She reads Sidiny’s palm and seeing that the life-line is very long, follows it down
his arms to his chest, “stripping him while she ‘searches for the end’ until she
gradually gets to his prick,” which she firmly grasps. At the end, the camera shows
Sidiny naked, swimming in a pool, shot from five different angles.42
42
Hélio Oiticica, “Boys & Men,” PHO 0336/70 (April 1970), 1-8.
234
Dated February 1, 1971, the notes for the super-8 film Babylonests are more
detailed, since they include technical information about the locations, costumes and
material needed for the filming and the length of each sequence. (Fig. 4.18) It was
to consist of 6 thirty-second scenes to be filmed in five locations in Manhattan,
with shots of the YMCA sign, playgrounds, trains, a place Oiticica called
pandemonium in Christopher Street—which seems to be a name he invented for a
gay bar—and the Fillmore East Auditorium. These scenes are combined with
others meant to be filmed at Oiticica’s Babylonests. There, while two men in bed
are kissing each other and “balling,” a third man in the bathroom, wearing a turban,
puts lipstick on. Later, he would appear in a bath-tub, sleeping on “chosen
materials.” Eventually, at the end, this third man “tries on a strange dressing
complex, ‘hermaphroditen’ (unisex underwear).” The other story takes place at the
pandemonium where people get together without their faces being shown. There is
also a scene in the empty Fillmore East Auditorium. There are also many short
scenes that are worth noting: the couple in bed suddenly watch TV and write; a
penis is bandaged, people load a truck. At the end, the “nest’s activity is shown in
the dark: not defined, just felt, strange, indirect light.”43
Jorge Brasil [Brazil Jorge], dated March 1, 1971, was considered lost until
some of the footage was found in 2002 in the archive of the Projéto Hélio Oiticica
in Rio de Janeiro. (Fig. 4.19) It is currently being restored. Though it has never
43
Hélio Oiticica, “Babylonests,” PHO 0243/71 (February 1971), 1-4.
235
been shown, from the incomplete written outline we know that there are scenes
meant to take place in the subway mixed with shots of the Babylonests and Battery
Park. In the credits and ads, a sentence in white would appear on the screen: “Forty
two picares [blinking] vices.” The film was meant to combine images of a man
reading a newspaper in the subway, a nearly naked guy in the Babylonests combing
his hair and dressing in a yellow, “pseudo-drag” plastic dress, and a long landscape
shot of Battery Park where an adolescent walks up and down the sidewalk. The
piece was to end with a shot of the entrance to Fillmore East on Second Avenue at
night, near Oiticica’s apartment, where people are waiting to enter a show and a
“person in the crowd is dressed in yellow plastic.”44
These written projects might be seen as a register of the New York he
constructed as a mundo-abrigo for pleasure. As a truly Quasi-cinema experience,
the films, were to be composed of fragmented sequences of his Babylonests and
views of parks and places in Manhattan. In them, his idea of scattered and
fragmented filmic images goes even further than his filmed projects in imagining
situations that combine the familiar and the unexpected. On the one hand, there are
conventional representations of what Oiticica would call predetermined situations.
These are the expected scenes of gay couples in his Babylonests, nearly naked
guys, and drag queens and transvestites in “familiar” contexts. On the other hand,
these predetermined situations are contrasted with ones in which the abrupt
44
Hélio Oiticica, “Jorge Brasil,” PHO 0244/71 (March 1971), 1.
236
emergence of the accidental sets the scene for forbidden acts at odds with
conventional scenes of the parks, streets and bars of Manhattan.
For his Eoriticica was meant to shelter and permit unconditioned behaviors
in order to put a different spin on notions of social roles. This mundo-abrigo he
created in New York sought the possibility of a non-defined experimentation which
would free art and life from conditions prefigured by society and allow chance to
create “uncanny” situations which de-center both the artwork and the spectator’s
experience. He said: “Accidental conditions are necessary to reach that
experimental shift . . . since what is experimented in terms of de-conditioning (non-
sublime, non-cathartic) of patterns of behavior is radical.”45 These accidental
conditions were also meant to create a “free collective experience,” a kind of
doomsday which was not intended “to clean the earth of human species so much as
to exterminate that ‘experimental exercise of freedom,’” 46 invoked by Mario
Pedrosa when referring to the role of the artist. Third, the idea of the collective
distances itself from those structures imposed by society, like family. For him, the
collective is more like a mutable group which avoids becoming a family, much less
a representation of a liberated one.47 Finally, his Eroiticica, set in urban
surroundings, was the only suitable place for these unforeseen, accidental
45
46
47
237
experiences which produce life-acts that allow us to perceive ourselves as though
we were going through a permanent and violent transformation.
His Quasi-cinema Neyrótika, produced in 1973, may have been a further
development of his approach to sexuality. Oiticica defined it as “non-narration
assembled in New York april/may 1973: 80 slides with sound track and specific
timing.” 48 (Fig. 4.20) Although he considered Neyrótika to be unfinished, it was
shown at the 1973 Expo-Projecão 73 [Expo-Projection 73] in Belo Horizonte
(Brazil). It is the only Quasi-cinema that was exhibited while he was alive. The
exhibition, organized by Aracy Amaral, displayed the work of Brazilian artists who
used unconventional media to question the modernist idea of art as an object. As
she observed: “Here and everywhere in Western culture, we can notice experiences
with films, audio-visuals and sound researches being made by artists. What they are
doing is trying to manipulate non-conventional “media” in order to express
themselves in a selective arrangement of reality or to record it.”49 She quoted
Oiticica’s definition of Neyrótika, as “non-narration, as non-discourse, non-artistic-
photo, non-audiovisual: sound trail is a continuity punctuated by casual interference
improvised on the radio’s recorded structure.”50
Neyrótika is composed of seven groups of slides and a soundtrack.
Although all the photographs were taken at the Babylonests, each group employs
48
Hélio Oiticica, “Filmography (?),” PHO 0163/80 (January 1980), 1.
49
Aracy Amaral “Some ideas about Expo-Projecão 73,” in Expo-Projecão, ed. Aracy Amaral (São
Paulo: Centro de Artes de Novo Mundo, 1973), p. 5.
50
Amaral, “Some ideas about Expo-Projecão 73,” p. 5.
238
different lighting, framing and poses. (Fig. 4.21) Joãozinho, Dudu, Cornell,
Romero, Didi, Carl and Arthur are Oiticica’s Garotos de ouro de Babylonests
[Golden Boys of Babylonests]. (Fig. 4.22) Oiticica gives his boys different
expressions: Joãozinho appears casual and indifferent; Dudu exhibits his blond hair
and lipstick-covered mouth; Cornell, naked, tries out different poses; Romero, in a
hammock, shows his bare chest, beautiful face, arms and legs. As a classical Quasi-
cinema, the rhythm of the slide sequence gives us both close-up and medium shots
of the different parts of the boys’ bodies. They are sometimes in a horizontal
position and then suddenly seem to be suspended. Occasionally the sequence is
interrupted by a slide of a tape recorder. (Fig. 4.23) Eventually, Oiticica’s voice is
heard, reading an excerpt from Rimbaud’s Delires:
I am a widow—I was a widow—but yes, I was very serious in the
past, and I was not born to become a skeleton!—Almost a child was
he—His mysterious delicacy had enticed me. I forgot all my human
duties to follow him. What a life! True life is far away. We are not
in the world. I go where he goes, I need him. And often he loses his
temper with me, me, poor soul. The Demon!—He is a Demon, you
know, he is not a human being.

239
As Ivana Bentes has said, Oiticica did not “make ‘pretty’ pictures of pretty boys.”51
Of particular interest, the titles of Neyrótika appear in the slide devoted to Dudu. A
banner is placed diagonally across his torso. The banner reads: “BRAISES OF
SATIN,” which translates as “satin embers,” a phrase from Rimbaud’s Une Saison
en Enfer, where the poet asks his lover to reawaken the heat from satin embers and
for yesterday’s passion to continue to burn. The banner diagonally crosses not only
Dudu’s torso but the entire slide. “Braises of satin” is written on both Dudu’s body
and the whole image, that is, it speaks of both Dudu’s body as desire and the act of
photographing it. (Fig. 4.24) At first glance, Oiticica’s exploration of sexuality calls
attention to the homosexual body. But, as the quote from Bentes’s points out,
Oiticica did not make pretty pictures of pretty boys, but pictures of homosexual
bodies being pictured. That is, he explored the way in which the portrayal of the
homosexual body creates a difference from the naturalized heterosexual body.
Lee Edelman has already noted how the metonymy of discreet sexual acts
has historically become a metaphor for the homosexual. Homographesis is his term
for the process in which “the homosexual” is inscribed in a tropology that turns him
into a legible other. It marks his body as a negative term of writing, that is, the
body becomes a construction to set the differences which enable homophobic
51
Ivana Bentes, “H.O. and Cinema-World,” in Hélio Oiticica Quasi-cinemas, ed. Carlos Basualdo
(Columbus: Wexner Center for the Arts, 2002), p. 149.
240
culture to define its sexual other. In these terms, the homosexual body stands for a
“secondary, sterile, and parasitic form of social representation.”52
Oiticica’s Neyrótika explores the inscription of the body within the social
imagery of normality/abnormality through the potent lens of photography. His
golden boys are displayed as slightly feminine or truly masculine, as rock stars and
porno stars, wanting to be desired and yet despising the voyeuristic gaze of the
spectator. However, I must add that Oiticica’s golden boys seem to bear two marks:
one that identifies them as the sexual other, and the other as the non-white or non-
Western other. His golden boys are doubly marked: one is the mark of sexuality
and the other of colonialism. If the construction of identities functions as a
metonymic chain, tracing its links would demonstrate the connections between
various forms of difference. As in his Parangolé, Oiticica insists that colonial
difference is inextricably linked to other forms of difference.
Edelman has also said that as soon the homosexual body is created as
legibly marked, those marks “have been, can be, or can pass as, unmarked and
unremarkable.”53 Therefore, he adds, if homographesis describes the writing of the
body as difference, it also set differánce in motion, that is, “it reveals the
impossibility of “any” identity that could be present in it.”54 Oiticica’s golden boys
52
Lee Edelman, Homographesis: Essays in Gay Literary and Cultural Theory (Routledge: New
York & London, 1994), p. 9.
53
Edelman, Homographesis, p. 7.
54
Edelman, Homographesis, p. 13.
241
of Babylonests display a marked representation and the process of its unmarking. In
the exhibition catalogue of Expo-Projecão 73, Oiticica writes:
NEYRÓTIKA IS NONSEXIST.
One night I sat Beauty on my knees
—I found it bitter—I cursed her
NEYRÓTIKA is as it is pleasurable.55
As Oiticica said, “the image is not the supreme conductor or unifying goal of the
work . . . It is not that the image and the visual do not matter anymore . . . but
rather, they are part of a fragmented play which originates experimental positions
that are taken to the limit.”56 For him, certain experiences are ungraspable by any
image, or better, vivência is both something that all imagery aims to capture, and
that which makes the image impossible. Using photographic images, Oiticica
showed those marked bodies as totally visible with all their metonymies of sex and
race. Yet, in so doing, difference remains invisible. Oiticica’s rejects Neyrótika as a
pure representation of beautiful bodies. Instead, he seems to proclaim his
representation as working on representation, that is, Neyrótika reflects on the sex
system that both marks those bodies as homosexual and racial bodies. It also
questions that system. Neyrótika is about pleasures, Oiticica reminds us. It
vindicates pleasures over sexuality. In so doing, it puts at risk the essentialism that
the heterosexual body aims to denote.
55
Hélio Oiticica. “Neyrótika,” PHO 0480/73 (April 1973), 1.
56
Oiticica, “BLOCO-EXPERIENCIAS in COSMOCOCA Program in Progress,” 6.
242
Mario Montez, Tropicamp
In a letter of October 15, 1971, Oiticica told his friend Torquato Neto how he met
Mario Montez at Ira Cohen’s house. For Oiticica, Mario was “a sort of caliph of the
underground”. (Fig. 4.25) He recounted Mario’s stories of New York’s
underground cinema and the filming of Warhol’s Harlot, and explained his role in
that scene and the reason for his stage name:
Why did he choose Mario Montez? According to what he said, I
deduced that Jack Smith, with his obsession with MARIA
MONTEZ, was a decisive influence in all that: he adored her as a
Tropi-hollywood star. Mario said: “You know, Jack told me a lot
about her, and when I was in the process of choosing a name I
became absorbed by her, reading and seeing everything about MISS
MONTEZ—when it came time to make CHUMLUM, I said: I
would like to be called MARIO MONTEZ.”57
For Oiticica, Mario’s choice was “as simple and lucid as any true discovery.” It
allowed him to further explore the link between sexuality and colonialism through
an examination of the construction of stereotypes and representations of Latin
America. For him, Mario was a pure identification between two “stars” in similar
situations: Maria Montez and Mario Montez are two Latinas who evoke the “Tropi-
Pop” cliché for Americans, thanks to Hollywood in the case of Maria, and the
57
243
underground cinema in the case of Mario. Oiticica saw Smith’s viewpoint “as a
kind of Pop-Tropicália; more than a nostalgia for Latin American music, his work
is, unlike Warhol’s purely American pop, a search for the cliché ‘Latin America’
and its influence in the context of super-America.”58 Comparing these two
influential underground figures in terms of their stance on stereotypes, Oiticica
thought Smith represented a Tropicália pre-pop tempo which mixed the clichés-
tropi-hollywood-camp. Warhol, on the other hand, was “a kind of pop and post-pop
that combines all Hollywood-America clichés.”
Oiticica’s interest in Mario Montez led to two unfinished projects: the
Agrippina e Roma-Manhattan and Mario Montez-Tropicamp. (Fig. 4.26) In both,
Oiticica attempted to examine the fabrication of Mario Montez as a representation
of Latin America. In Agrippina and Tropicamp, he uses Smith’s representation of
Mario Montez as the tropi-camp star, exaggerating Mario’s impersonation of Latina
stars like Carmen Miranda. Oiticica said that “Mario Montez personifies the
LATIN AMERICA cliché as a whole; more important is the fact that this image-
incarnation-character was raised in the States.”59 In addition, both convey Oiticica’s
view of Manhattan as a fragmented labyrinth where “Greco-roman” architecture
blends with the streets, malandros, street whores, unexpected situations and
surprising characters, like Mario Montez dressed as a “Spanish” woman or Carmen
Miranda.
58
59
244
Agrippina é Roma-Manhattan is a super 8 film, about fifteen minutes long,
filmed in 1972. As a part of his Quasi-cinemas, Agrippina examines the
relationship between image and narration, trying to create a cinema of “non-
narration.” Instead of presenting a continuous sequence, the film consists of
scattered images that highlight—and question—the sexual roles of the characters,
in line with Oiticica’s notion of Eroiticica. Nevertheless, the film is roughly
divided into four sections, each filmed in a different location and with different
characters. The first section features Christiny Nazareth, who stands by the open
back door of a car while the camera pans over buildings like Forty Wall Street and
the Metropolitan Life Insurance Tower and shows details of her very short dress,
Roman sandals and Cleopatra-type makeup. After an abrupt cut, her Latin lover
appears, inviting her to get off the car. They stand in front of a building, and then
the Latin lover leads Nazareth to the New York Stock Exchange building. Before
entering the building, both turn and face the camera.
The next section begins with their solemn entrance into a classical Greek-
style building, the camera emphasizing its anachronistic architecture and
contrasting it with adjacent buildings in a contemporary style. (Fig. 4.27) Christiny
adopts a serious pose near an enormous column. The camera wavers between
Christiny, the column and the surrounding buildings. The next scene shows a
woman in a very short dress, on a corner of Madison Square, who seems to be
waiting for someone as the camera pans over the Flatiron Building, the Empire
245
State building and Madison Square. The film ends with a scene of Mario Montez in
a car, getting ready to perform. After making sure that her wig fits, Mario gets out
of the car and starts walking along Fifth Avenue with the Brazilian artist Antonio
Dias. Mario is wearing a Spanish dress with flamenco shoes. (Fig. 4.28) They begin
to play dice on a metal grating on the pavement near a store as the camera focuses
on Mario’s costume and body. This last scene focuses intensely on Mario Montez’s
body. The camera shows every detail of his back, bottom, legs, and shoes, marking
the body of Mario as masculine/feminine and Latino. (Fig. 4.29)
Eroiticica was meant to be a place of unexpected situations which create
conditions for life-acts lies on the border of pre-determined situations that are
permanently threatened by the same unforeseen circumstances. In Agrippina,
Oiticica’s Manhattan is a world full of pleasures and pressures on the border of
chance. Christiny, her malandro boyfriend Antonio Dias and Mario Montez walk
through Manhattan and the latter two wind up playing dice. In a letter to Carlos
Vergara of July 22, 1972, Oiticica called this last scene of Agrippina an oracle in
which the towers resemble “Magrittean buildings.” Games of chance are composed
of unforeseen combinations where everything which is solemn, such as “the austere
and vulgar solemnity of Wall Street,” becomes endangered by vulgar circumstance.
Playing dice thus functions as a metaphor and Manhattan turns into an acropolis
full of sexual and racial otherness.

246
For Oiticica, Mario as Carmen Miranda was part of a wider anthological
project, TROPICÁLIA-SUBTERRANIA. “See the picture that accompanies this
article,” he wrote, referring to a photograph, taken by Carlos Vergara, where
Oiticica’s boyfriend Romero poses with Mario Montez-Carmen Miranda: it was
inspired by Jackie Curtis’ Vain Victory, where Mario played MALAFEMINA.”
(Fig. 4.30, 4.31) He added:
She is Carmen, without imitating, which makes some people
say that [the film] is bad: But, the CARMEN-image is a lot
more than that: it is not a naturalistic-imitative representation
of CARMEN MIRANDA, but a key-reference to the
TROPICAMP-cliché: it is from this cliché that the entire film
is constructed: cliché-CAMP: ‘she met her guy, uy, uy—in
Uruguay, ay, ay . . . ’: [I see her with] a red-green dress of a
samba school, combined with some other elements to make a
counterpoint.”60
What interests Oiticica, in contrast to Warhol and Smith’s approaches, is the
identification of Maria Montez and Mario Montez: they are both queer Latinas
living in the United States, to which he adds the identification of Mario Montez and
Carmen Miranda to speak of the complexities of his own situation as a Brazilian,
queer and artist and his identification with those who painfully and lovingly share
60
247
his shame and alienation. Oiticica’s insistence on the marking of the gender code of
masculine/feminine on Mario’s body is expanded to his dress, thus reminding us of
his—and Maria’s—representation of the Latino and Latin America.
Camp, as Andrew Ross defined it, places outmoded cultural codes at the
service of the struggles of social minorities. Using these outmoded codes,
minorities not only transform them for their own good, but also question the values
of a society which once excluded them from participation in its culture. Mario
Montez is Smith’s camp version of María Montez, the American gay icon of the
forties, which vindicates the appropriation of the hegemonic modes of cultural
production by American gays to create a sense of community and exercise their
right to be different. Oiticica, in turn, appropriates Smith to produce a camp version
of camp, that is, it creates a double representation of camp by Mario Montez, to
which he adds a depiction of Mario as Latino. In so doing, Oiticica’s camp version
of Smith’s camp—his Tropicamp—calls attention to the colonialism implicit in
such representations. It reminds us of the colonial condition that underlies both
María’s representation by Hollywood and Mario’s representation by underground
cinema. It also explores the manner in which both Latino gays and Latin Americans
appropriate the American hegemonic modes of cultural production to transform
them for their own cultural and political agendas.

248
In New York, Oiticica became more and more of a malandro, who, as I wrote in
Chapter 3, is characterized by “the cunning and street smarts generally associated
with the Carioca61 [underworld] . . . [this] dandylike [figure is] typified by his
individual ethos . . . [he lives on his wits] at the margins of society through . . .
graft, theft and pimping.”62 Through his Eroiticica, he not only expressed his
identification with marginal people, but also fully lived his own life on those
margins.
In the article “Waiting for the Internal Sun: Notes on Hélio Oiticica’s
Quasi-cinemas,” in the catalogue of the exhibition entitled Hélio Oiticica: Quasi-
cinemas, held in New York and Columbus (Ohio) in 2002, Carlos Basualdo also
approaches Oiticica’s New York period in the light of his vivência. For Basualdo,
however, Oiticica’s experience in New York was mostly conditioned by his
economic difficulties and feelings of exploitation: “[Oiticica’s] optimistic vision of
New York had darkened. The ‘only city that interests me’ had turned into an
‘infernal island’ that ‘lives off slave labor.’”63 Basualdo writes:
The only way to resist repressive police violence was to configure
his position as an artist around the figure of the outlaw; the only way
to resist the instrumental violence of late capitalism (and, one could
61
Name for the inhabitants of Rio de Janeiro.
62
Translator’s Note, “Cornerstones for a definition of ‘Parangolé,’” in Hélio Oiticica: The Body of
Color, ed. Mari Carmen Ramírez (London: Tate Gallery, 2007), p. 297.
63 Carlos Basualdo, “Waiting for the Internal Sun: Notes on Hélio Oiticica’s Quasi-cinemas,” in
Hélio Oiticica Quasi-cinemas, ed. Carlos Basualdo (Columbus: Wexner Center for the Arts, 2002),
p. 47.
249
almost say, of neoliberalism) was to appropriate, through a
transgressive gesture, one of the most potent signs of its
instrumentalizing power and to use precisely that as an artistic
material. The “trash-image,” a pure residue that does violence to the
very process of value production as value for accumulation, is the
tool which Oiticica and D’Almeida would use to organize the
program of Cosmococas.64
Basualdo’s article mostly concentrates on the Cosmococas series and scarcely
mentions Oiticica’s work on sexuality. For instance, of Nitro Benzol & Black
Linoleum he merely says that, unlike the other Quasi-cinemas, it includes “the
performance of actions with a strong sexual content.”65 In the case of Agrippina,
along with anecdotal information about the shooting, he quotes Waly Salomão’s
description of Mario as “an actress invented by Jack Smith and Andy Warhol in
homage to the Mexican [sic] icon María Montez.”66
Basualdo resorts to the figure of the artist as an outlaw, which, in turn, is
transformed into the assertion that this “trash-image” is the cornerstone of
Oiticica’s art. In Basualdo’s view, Oiticica’s identification with trash-people
allowed him to assume an artistic persona as an outlaw and, by the same token, to
find an artistic solution to the problem of “the matrix of alienated production.”67 He
64
Basualdo, “Waiting for the Internal Sun,” p. 50.
65
66
67
250
argues that: “The romantic representation of the figure of the outlaw—and
Oiticica’s recurrent identification with such figures as Antonin Artaud, Arthur
Rimbaud, Jimi Hendrix and Jack Smith himself—is for the artist nothing other than
an attempt to resist the instrumentalizing tendencies of late capitalism in the sphere
of artistic production.”68 Basualdo’s argument revolves around Oiticica’s
experience to conclude the ways in which he produced an art based on the “trash-
image.” However, he fails to give an account of other places which situate
Oiticica’s work culturally and personally. Furthermore, Oiticica’s experience is
subjected to a traditional left political rhetoric which doesn’t do justice to his work
and his life.
This even applies to his Cosmococas series, which was developed in
collaboration with the Brazilian filmmaker Neville D’Almeida and, to summarize,
consisted of eight works Oiticica called “block-experiences.” As in all of his Quasi-
cinemas, Cosmococas included projections of slides in “prepared” environments
where people would be encouraged to walk, sit, lie down or share feelings and
thoughts. The slide projections of Cosmococas had specific directions and a fixed
duration: it was cinematographic in the sense that it included notes on its creation,
staging and soundtracks.69 With soundtracks of Brazilian folk, Latin American and
rock music, and sounds recorded on Second Avenue, the slide projections show the
covers of albums; of books by Yoko Ono, Heidegger and Charles Manson; pictures
68
69
Bentes, “H.O. and Cinema-World,” p. 142.
251
of Luis Buñuel, Jimi Hendrix, Marilyn Monroe and Mick Jagger; and lines of
cocaine on a book or as make-up. (Fig. 4.32)
“The participants,” wrote Oiticica, “will be induced into a light and joyful
play of BODY through DANCE rising above the ground.”70 For his Cosmococa on
Marilyn Monroe, the participants were to be barefoot, given balloons and whistles,
and encouraged to lie down and roll/crawl, as they liked, on sand covered by a
thick sheet of vinyl. CC4 NOCAGIONS included a rectangular swimming pool
where the participants would swim or just stand and watch. CC5 HENDRIX-WAR
included hammocks for its public performance, and people would be invited to
enter it through openings in each corner of the room.
Oiticica believed that rock music and drugs might serve as an effective
challenge to stereotypes. Instead of regarding them as mere subjects of his art, his
own addiction to drugs led him to strongly identify with his protagonists, whom he
saw as heroes fighting against stereotypes of race, gender and colonialism. For
example, of his portrayal of Marilyn in Cosmococa CC3, (Fig. 4.33) Oiticica said:
A supposedly manifest unity becomes fragmented as she resists the
stereotype that should define and limit her. All attempts to link her
to a constant unity seem to dissolve. There was something that
dissolved that unity: fragmentation that leads to another kind of
identification. It is a behavior that fragments the univocal habit of
70
Hélio Oiticica, “TRASHICAPES,” PHO 0300/73 (March 1973), 2.
252
what is verb-voice-appearance . . . How did we come to imagine that
cinema does not have anything to do with sequence and normal
fluency: constant verb-voice-appearance?71
Oiticica’s work questions the representation of those subjects as marginal or
sexual others and links them to their colonial or social condition. Hence the
concern for representation of the excluded, previously seen in the Parangolé, now
surfaces in Neyrótika and Agrippina, and his identification with Brazilian popular
culture is replaced by his identification with marginal and sexual cultures as he
appropriates stereotypes about Latin America and its sexual other. His New York
works explored representations of sexuality and colonialism, or to be more precise,
the crucial role of sexuality in shaping the colonial condition of Latin America.
I have remarked that his stay in New York allowed Oiticica to make his
work a personal vivência and his life a public affair. In exploring Oiticica’s work
on sexuality and its links with his own experience, I have sought to explain not so
much certain sources of his inspiration that have been virtually ignored by art
critics as the relations between his artwork and issues of subjectivity and ethics. For
his accounts of himself as an anti-artist, drug user, and sexual other, among others,
speaks above all of the ways in which his artwork was intended to promote
experimental ways of being marginal. By constructing his Eroiticica as a shelter-
world for alternative lives, he integrated his work with his life and made his life an
71
Oiticica, “BLOCO-EXPERIENCIAS in COSMOCOCA Program in Progress,” 8.
253
artwork. That is, he attempted to create an aesthetic of existence that put his work
at the service of new ways to live differently, both personal and collective. This
stylistics, as David Halperin put it, “ultimately means to cultivate that part of
oneself that leads beyond oneself, that transcends oneself: it is to elaborate the
strategic possibilities of what is the most impersonal dimension of personal life—
namely the capacity to ‘realize oneself’ by becoming other than what one is.”72
Throughout this chapter, I have situated Oiticica’s work and his life in a
broader cultural, artistic and ethical context, believing that this stylistics shares the
ethics and aesthetics of what we now know as queer. As I have said, it is not my
intention to pull Oiticica out of the closet to push him into the art institution.
Neither do I see his work on queer sexuality as a timid coming out, whereby
Oiticica finally made his sexuality public. I acknowledge that his work—like that
of all queer artists—is not more or less queer because of his sexuality. Even more,
the fact that an artist defines him or herself as queer does not make his/her work
queer in itself, even if the work addresses queer issues. Instead of a trans-sexuality
or a meta-sexuality, I believe his Eroiticica promotes a sort of anti-sexuality, which
deconstructs sexuality as a discourse, sharing some aspects of a queer identity
politics which refuses to give an identity content or a utopian referent. This is how I
understand the ethics of the very term queer: It questions essentialism and offers
new forms of meaning and living that defy normalization, vindicating a wider
72
David Halperin, “The Queer Politics of Michel Foucault,” in Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay
Hagiography, David Halperin (New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 76.
254
spectrum of pleasures. I would thus rephrase the words of Salomão quoted in
Chapter 3: Oiticica did not get rid of the inferiority complex of the subjects of
colonialist relations of power. He turned that complex into a productive method for
thinking about other worlds governed by alternative pleasures and modes of
solidarity and affection.

255
CHAPTER 5
“Thinking otherwise” otherwise: Towards a Critical (Re) thinking and (De)

colonization of Latin American Cultural Practices.
Border thinking
Between June 13 and 15, 2001, scholars and activists met in Quito (Ecuador) in
order to explore the current state of cultural studies in Latin America. Some of its
leading figures had met before on several occasions, at the Pontificia Universidad
Javeriana (Bogotá, 1999) and Duke University (Durham NC, USA, 2000), to work
out an agenda that would set forth critical responses to globalization. This 2001
reunion, however, was given the formal name of the 1st Conference of Latin
American Cultural Studies, since it not only invited important scholars, such as
Catherine Walsh, Walter Mignolo, Santiago Castro-Gómez, Daniel Mato, Fernando
Coronel, John Beverly, and Mabel Moraña, among others, but also leaders of social
movements and students of cultural studies from Caracas, Bogotá and Quito.1
According to the organizers, the purpose of the Conference was to
consolidate a project that would examine the relationship between colonialism,
culture and politics in the region and the role of cultural studies in alternative
modes of studying and developing strategic interventions in the field of culture in
1
The main papers and conclusions of this Conference have been collected in Estudios Culturales
Latinoamericanos: Retos desde y sobre la region andina, ed. Catherine Walsh (Quito: Universidad
Andina Simón Bolívar, 2003).
256
Latin America. This project would be interdisciplinary, crossing the traditional
boundaries of the social sciences, and bring together “other” practices and bodies of
knowledge, from socially and culturally excluded groups, that challenge the
modern “geopolitics of knowledge” which systematically labels knowledges and
cultural practices of those groups as “primitive,” pre-scientific, or popular. Cultural
studies was seen, then, as a means of decolonizing Latin American culture through
an epistemology which “critically articulates the colonial design and its legacies in
the present, taking as a contextual axis current and local histories in the Andean
countries and the relationship between these local histories and global designs.”2
The resulting project, known today as the Modernity/Coloniality Project, has
attracted the participation of more and more scholars and activists. Although the
Project includes members from different parts of Latin America and the U.S., it has
created an especially strong link between those from Lima, Quito, Bogotá and
Caracas.
The Project’s starting point is a profound critique of the long Latin
American tradition of the study of culture originated from the social sciences,
which includes such great thinkers as José Carlos Mariátegui (Peru), Marta Traba
(Argentina), Angel Rama (Uruguay), Nestor García Canclini (Argentina), Jesús
Martín Barbero (Colombia), and Antonio Cornejo Polar (Peru). For the Project, that
2
Catherine Walsh, Freya Schiwy and Santiago Castro-Gómez, Indisciplinar las Ciencias Sociales:
Geopolíticas del conocimiento y colonialidad del poder. Perspectivas desde lo Andino. (Quito:
Universidad Andina Simón Bolívar/Editora Abya Yala, 2002), p. 11.
257
tradition follows the colonial condition that informed the emergence of the social
sciences whose methods and epistemologies followed a Eurocentric model
irreducibly anchored in the colonialist project of modernity. The social sciences not
only ignore the politics of its own making, but also forget the ways in which the
self-contained model of society they created was made possible by the European
colonial expansion. That is, its development was not a consequence of qualities
inherent to the European social structure and social relations, but of the colonial
interaction of Europe with Africa, America and Asia.
Echoing the conclusions of The Gulbenkian Commission, the Project
considers the social sciences to be a result of the international division of
intellectual labor.3 While the First World produces universally valid theories and
methods and converts other cultures into subjects of knowledge, third-world
cultures are condemned to be case studies and to consume those theories. Along
with the Commission’s suggestion to open social studies towards interdisciplinary
dialogues and cultural studies, the Project insists on the need to decolonize the
hierarchic relationship between scholars and social groups regarding the contexts,
methods and perspectives to produce knowledge.4
3
The Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, based in Lisbon, established in 1993 the Gulbenkian
Commission on the Restructuring of the Social Sciences. It comprised a distinguished international
group of scholars coming from a variety of disciplines. The Commission explored the development
of Social Sciences and called attention to the need to restructure it, taking into account the
interdisciplinary approach of cultural studies. See Immanuel Wallerstein, Open the Social Sciences:
Report of the Gulbenkian Commission on the Restructuring of the Social Sciences (California:
Stanford University Press, 1996).
4
Walsh, Estudios Culturales Latinoamericanos, p. 15.
258
The Project nevertheless recognizes the merit of some previous attempts to
unveil the links between colonialism and the social production of knowledge about
culture. In particular, the Project highly values some de-colonizing insights
developed by liberation theology of the sixties and seventies, dependency theories,
the postmodernism pioneered by Nelly Richard, discussions of hybridity and
colonialism and the work of the Latin American Subaltern Studies Group in the
United States. However, as Escobar has remarked, instead of a linear history, the
Project “should be seen as ‘an other’ way of thinking that runs counter to the great
narratives of modernity; it places its own inquiry on the very borders of systems of
thought and reaches towards the possibility of non-Eurocentric modes of
thinking.”5
The emergence of the Project as a cultural studies enterprise has caused
heated debates. Some argue that there is no need for a new discipline since the
study of culture in Latin America already has a strong and buoyant tradition,
composed of the great thinkers I listed above, who have made profound
contributions to the subject. Others, mainly from the social sciences, argue that the
field of cultural studies is an example of the intellectual imperialism of European
and U.S. universities and is already out of date. Thus, one of the main tasks of the
Project is to promote different epistemologies that challenge those knowledges and
practices that silence modernity’s claims to centrality by exposing its self-
5
Arturo Escobar, “Worlds and Knowledges Otherwise,” Cultural Studies 21, 2 (2001), 180.
259
referential reasoning and denial of its own colonialist pretensions. Naming this
enterprise “Modernity/Coloniality” indicates that modernity can only exist by
colonizing its other and fitting that other’s heterogeneity into a narrow linear
scheme of progress.
The project has attacked these assumptions through the use of three axes of
investigation and political action. The first axis is known as the coloniality of
power, a concept initially formulated by the Peruvian intellectual Anibal Quijano to
explore the role of race in the colonialist dimension of globalization. He states,
Current globalization is, above all, the culmination of a process that
began with the creation of America and of colonial/modern
capitalism and became the new pattern of global power. One of the
fundamental axes of this pattern is the social classification of the
world’s populations in terms of race, a mental configuration that
expressed the basic experience of colonial domination and has
permeated the most important dimensions of global power since
then, including its specific rationality: Eurocentrism. Such an axis
has then a colonial origin and character, but it has proven to be more
enduring than the matrix which established it. It implies,

260
consequently, an element of coloniality in the pattern of power
which is today globally hegemonic.6
Quijano further argues that race and the capitalist division of labor are historically
associated and have reinforced one another, producing a racial global division of
labor that has characterized the organization of capitalism during the past five
hundred years. Colonialism created racial identities based on skin color,
articulating them with the capitalist division of labor, with white populations at the
top and the colored people at the bottom. In this respect, Santiago Castro-Gómez
has further argued that Quijano’s coloniality of power follows the subaltern studies’
attempts to develop Michel Foucault’s notion of disciplinary power by including in
its analysis the inscription of discourses/practices that informed modern societies
within a global structure that configures the European colonial world. He says:
“Modernity’s disciplinary devices are inscribed within a double governability. On
the one hand, [power] is exercised within the nation state as an attempt to produce
homogeneous identities through normalization. On the other hand, it is exercised by
the hegemonic powers to secure its economic growth and its cultural supremacy.”7
Quijano’s coloniality of power has paved the way for the second axis: The
coloniality of knowledge. Global power based on racial divisions excluded the
6
Anibal Quijano “Colonialidad del poder, eurocentrismo y América Latina,” in La colonialidad del
saber: eurocentrismo y ciencias sociales: Perspectivas latinoamericanas, ed. Edgardo Lander,
(Buenos Aires: CLACSO, julio de 2000), p. 201.
7
Santiago Castro-Gomez, “Ciencias Sociales, violencia epistémica y la cuestión del otro, in La
colonialidad del saber: Eurocentrismo y ciencias sociales. Perspectivas latinoamericanas ed.
Edgardo Lander (Buenos Aires: UNESCO/CLACSO, 2000), p. 153.
261
bodies of knowledge and practices of groups given an inferior social position
(mainly Native- and African- Americans). This geopolitics of knowledge is a key
strategy of modernity, since global power subjected all cultures to a Eurocentric
model based on distinctions between the civilized/primitive,
developed/underdeveloped or scientific/popular. Consequently, it silenced other
kinds of knowledge, forced the colonized to partially learn from the dominant
culture and claimed that European culture was the culmination of all others.
Quijano concludes: “As a part of the global pattern of power, Europe concentrated
under its hegemony the control of all forms of subjectivity, culture, knowledge and
its production.”8
Recently, Catherine Walsh and Nelson Maldonado-Torres have introduced
the concept of the coloniality of being as a third axis of the Project, which refers to
the way that Eurocentric modernity has denied certain groups the right to be
considered “people.”9 Following Franz Fanon’s notion that human existence is
constituted by agency, and has a subjective and situated dimension, the coloniality
of being refers to colonial processes that create difference, denying the colonized
groups the possibility of being-thinking-acting.10
Basing itself on the three axes, the Project envisions a “de-colonial”
horizon. For Catherine Walsh, “de-colonial” should not be confused with

8
Quijano, “Colonialidad del poder, eurocentrismo y América Latina,” p. 209.
9
Catherine Walsh, Pensamiento crítico y matriz (de)colonial: Reflexiones latinoamericanas (Quito:
Universidad Andina Simón Bolívar/Editora Abya Yala, 2002), p. 22. See also Nelson Maldonado-
Torres, “The Topology of Being and the Geopolitics of Knowledge,” CITY 8, 1 (April 2004), 29-56.
10
Walsh, (Re)pensamiento, p. 23.
262
decolonization. The latter, while acknowledging the exclusion of certain groups,
seeks, as modernity does, to integrate them into globalization. Instead, she argues, a
radical de-colonial project should stand completely outside of modernity and
concentrate on the recognition of the culture and knowledge that exclusively
pertain to excluded groups. Walter Mignolo, for his part, would base this de-
colonial effort on the notions of border thinking, border epistemology and
plurotopic hermeneutics, that is, a post-western perspective that changes the terms
of the dialogue between the interior and the exterior of modernity.11 Enrique Dussel
has introduced the notion of transmodernity as a negation of negation which allows
for non-hegemonic discourses that directly oppose modernity itself.12 Finally,
Escobar argues that there is no inside or outside in the contemporary world, since
globalization has taken the universality of modernity to its limits. He thus suggests
that the Modernity/Coloniality project should not look for an ontological outside.
Rather, it should refer to “an outside that is precisely constituted as difference by
the hegemonic discourse.”13
Needless to say, Walsh’s notion of de-coloniality clearly runs against
Mignolo’s, Dussel’s and Escobar’s perspectives. Walsh argues that, given the
11
See Walter Mignolo, “The Many Faces of Cosmo-polis: Border Thinking and Critical
Cosmopolitanism,” Public Culture 12, 3 ( Fall 2000), pp. 721-748. See also Walter Mignolo, Local
Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges and Border Thinking (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 2000).
12
See Enrique Dussel, 1492: El encubrimiento del Otro: Hacia el origen del "mito de la
modernidad" (La Paz, Bolivia: Plural Editores, 2004). See also Enrique Dussel, Hacia una Filosofía
Política Crítica (Bilbao, España: Desclée de Brouwer, 2001).
13
Escobar, “Words and Knowledges Otherwise,” 186.
263
hierarchical assessment of knowledge by modernity, those perspectives continue to
have Eurocentric thought as its main referent and the possibility of exchanges with
“other knowledges” becomes a one-way street: While subordinate groups must
appropriate the Eurocentric legacy, it does not happen the other way around. In
particular, she considers Mignolo’s ‘border thinking’ to be a strategy that would
continue to dismiss local knowledge, as it does not radically change the relations of
power, but merely proposes new forms of dialogue still based on the hegemony of
Western bodies of knowledge. Walsh suggests, instead, subsuming Mignolo’s
border thinking into a broader strategy, which she calls “border critical
positioning”, that would not take the dominant knowledge as a referent. More than
a transformation, she argues, a de-colonial project calls for “a radical re-
construction of beings, powers and knowledges, that is, the creation of radically
different conditions . . . that would contribute to the fabrication of different
societies.”14 For her, then, interculturality is the best strategy for de-coloniality,
since, she argues, it creates “an other” image of society, allowing for a different
geopolitics of power as well as of knowledge and existence.
I cannot do justice to the complexity of the formulations made by those who
have participated in this important debate. However, I think that some critical
aspects of it are worth mentioning, not only because they accentuate the ethical
perspective that motivates my approach to Latin American cultural struggles in this
14
Walsh, Pensamiento crítico, p. 24.
264
dissertation, but also because they bring to light some of the risks that scholars,
artists and activists involved in this project may face in their everyday struggles.
Some of their assumptions, mainly by Walsh, seem to make the Project sound as
logocentric, essentialist, and utopian as the modernity it is supposed to challenge.
Even though the majority of participants seek to de-colonize the dominant
geopolitics of power, knowledge and being, their analyses of the politics of
exclusion and the excluded sectors show important differences.
The first has to do with the centrality of race in their analysis of colonialism.
It is not my intention to question the historical facts that support the idea of a
colonial order based on race. As I have said in previous chapters,
developmentalism assimilated classic colonialism in order to exclude the cultures
of social sectors defined largely by race. However, I have pointed to other forms of
difference—gender and sexuality among them—which, while they might predate
globalization, have been vital in the emergence of forms of colonialism. The
Eurocentric imagination also made use of gender, sexuality and class to define the
American other. The very ideas of America as a woman, of Americans as cannibals
and sodomites and of traditional cultures as primitive indicate other ways of
constructing difference which were used to insert Latin America within the global
power structure.
The problem of choosing race as “the last instance” is manifold. On the one
hand, the Project tends to fall into the trap of the Eurocentric mode of thought it is
265
supposed to challenge since it reproduces modernity’s anxiety over heterogeneity
and discontinuity. On the other hand, it tends to close the Project’s inquiries as it
seems to privilege the issue of race as the cornerstone of Latin American cultural
studies. In one his many genealogies, Stuart Hall insisted on the need to consider
cultural studies as an open field of investigation regarding the link between culture
and power. It is not productive to define the sort of inquires that define a cultural
studies project. However, he argues that what preserves cultural studies from
pluralism is its political interest in producing strategic interventions in both the
practices of knowledge of culture and cultural construction of power. “There is
something at stake in cultural studies,” he says as a way to accentuate both the
political character of the intellectual practice and the political interest in making a
difference.15 Asking ourselves “What is at stake?” implies then a self-reflection that
allows us to examine the political assumptions and positions that mobilize our
intellectual choice, but above all to explore different perspectives of the struggles
that are giving shape to subject positions within the cultural field. There are more
and different intellectual challenges and cultural struggles at stake in Latin America
than those identified by the Project, simply because there are other excluded social
sectors that are fighting to make a difference. If cultural studies is seen as a
possibility to transform power relations in the region, the Project’s claims to de-
15
Stuart Hall, “Cultural Studies and its Theoretical Legacies,” in Cultural Studies, ed. Lawrence
Grossberg, Cary Nelson and Paula A. Treichler (New York & London: Routledge, 1992), p. 278.
266
colonize has to become its very starting point to examine the ethics of its own
intellectual work.
For its emphasis on race also implies that the only valid de-colonial agenda
must follow that of the Native- and African-American populations, impeding other
forms of difference from “decolonizing” practices of knowledge and power.
Despite Walsh’s effort, interculturality becomes not so much an opportunity for
unexpected and heterogeneous solutions emerging from battles and negotiations
between the dominant and subordinated cultures, but a Utopia where the political
subject of hegemonic knowledge is only defined by race, and hides its genders,
sexualities and other forms of difference. The predominance of Native- and
African-American populations in some countries of the region may explain this
approach but it does not justify it. Walsh’s and Quijano’s claims come from Peru
and Ecuador where Native-Americans account for nearly 70% of the whole
population. If so, we need not only to decolonize the de-colonial project but also
adjust it to other countries of the region, where the proportion between Native-
Americans and other population groups is nearly the reverse and decolonizing
agendas are in the hands of other political subjects.
In Colombia alone, organizations defending of the rights of the gay, lesbian,
bisexual and transsexual population have proven to be successful and, among other
achievements, helped to revoke the law that penalized homosexuality until 1980.
These groups have made successful human rights appeals to the Constitutional
267
Court, expanding the usual interpretation of the Constitution which excludes sexual
minorities. It is worth noting the fact that, without asking for the legalization of
GLBT marriage, today Colombian GLBT people can declare a same-sex partner as
a permanent one and include him/her as a beneficiary of health benefits. People
who are openly GLBT may now work in educational institutions, which was
forbidden ten years ago. Hate crimes, which before were assumed to be crimes of
passion, have been given a legal status as a violation of human rights and offenders
are now prosecuted accordingly. Instead of despising these forms of struggle
because they do not promote a radical new society, as Walsh claims, these
collectives have worked within the restrictions of our democracy by making use of
instruments of change that are already at hand in order to secure the human rights
of their respective communities.
These organizations have gathered together not only GLBT activists, but
also scholars, artists and members of state institutions in the struggle to win
recognition for alternative sexualities. This fact clearly proves that social power
may emerge from collaborative projects where many actors may converge. Groups
in the academy such as GAEDS [SSGSD: Supporting and Study Group of Sexual
Diversity] in the Universidad Nacional have been fighting homophobic attitudes in
their university, the largest in Colombia, and inserted such issues in the curricula of
the faculties of Social Sciences and Cultural Studies. Furthermore, the NGO
Colombia Diversa [Diverse Colombia], created in 2003, has defended GLBT rights
268
and denounced expressions of homophobia in the mass media. It also offers legal
advice to such minorities.
All of this has been accompanied by campaigns to get state institutions to
guarantee the rights of those whose sexuality is non-normative. The Bogotá
Municipal Administration’s Development Plan for 2004-2008 included the defense
of GLBT rights, not only through legal and social programs, but also the
recognition of their cultural rights. One of the main results has been the
progressive—though still insufficient—transformation of ideas about sexual
diversity held by the general public. The results of the biannual Urban Culture
Survey of twelve thousand Bogotá residents aged 13 years or older —which I will
explore in more detail below—show that while in 2001 97% did not want to have
“homosexual” people as neighbors, only 37% felt that way by 2008.16 This
illustrates the emergence of a greater solidarity about minority rights which is also
evidenced, for example, by the numbers who attend the annual GLBT rights march
[Marcha por la Ciudadanía LGBT] which, different from the traditional gay parade,
rose from 8,000 in 2003 to nearly 300,000 in 2008, including family members,
friends, neighbors and coworkers of the LGBT community who share their defense
of the right to be sexually different.
I do not want to exaggerate the triumphs of these struggles. Homophobic
discourses and practices still influence relationships in schools, families and public
16
Políticas Culturales Distritales 2004-2016 (Bogotá: IDCT, 2006), pp. 85-110.
269
institutions and there is still much work to be done. However, this change in
attitudes towards sexuality in Colombia does support my concerns about the
Modernity/Coloniality Project, insofar as it shows the heterogeneity of the current
struggles and should remind the Project of the need to expand its concept of the
“other” and accept the diversity of the sectors that are fighting to decolonize social
and political relations. The interdisciplinary nature of the Project implies an
acknowledgement that the resistance to the colonial discourse not only comes from
certain excluded sectors, but also from mainstream academic, cultural and public
institutions. If power functions as a circuit and is not possessed by anyone but
creates subjects and practices, resistance to it may also come from unexpected
places and political agents.
De-colonizing, I believe, thus implies a radical de-colonizing of some of the
assumptions of the Project. I would like to return to Walsh’s notion of a “border
strategic positioning” as a response to Mignolo’s border thinking. Although it
seems to contradict her plea for “authenticity,” I found it productive insofar as it
opens up possibilities for a genuine decolonizing project, one that would take into
account other subject positions and forms of struggle. Strategic positioning seems
to define the subjects by their struggles, which, by permitting identities to be seen
not as a fixed and ancestral may pave the way for a more realistic notion of the
differences that emerge from struggle and negotiation. Placing those struggles on
the border of any given system of power undermines the political dichotomies
270
found in humanism, including the predetermined identities of multiculturalism.
Strategic positioning also allows including important forms of struggle based on a
more generalized rejection of the will towards hegemony. The excluded or
subaltern nature of those subjects does not necessarily mean that their political goal
is to become hegemonic. Instead, some of those groups are willing to remain the
negative term of the colonial formula, resisting any liberal attempt to integrate
dissidence into the social order.
For possible, though not necessarily complete, answers to these issues, I
would like to explore two cases that show the sort of struggles that give shape the
field of art in contemporary Colombia. It is my main goal in this chapter to open
the Project towards other intellectual and cultural struggles that are at stake in the
region, contributing to expand its character as a cultural-studies enterprise. First, I
will explore the fate of art and culture policies of the Bogota municipal
government, as revealed by the government’s biannual survey of Bogotá residents’
responses. While the policies attempt to make culture available to the poor and
create a globalized city, the survey demonstrates a wide gap between institutional
and popular conceptions of art, insofar as the poor appropriate art in unexpected
ways and disrupt the enlightened modernism of the art institution.
Along the same lines, I will also discuss two exhibitions, held at the Galleria
Santa Fe in Bogotá in 2003 and 2005, which were organized by a group of Bogotá
artists, members of queer movements, critics and curators from the fields of visual
271
arts and cultural studies. The exhibitions established a dialogue between artistic and
queer sectors which challenged the representation of queer sexualities by the art
institution. They combined academic, theoretical and political activism to present
different alternatives for de-colonizing in the globalized era to redefine the
Project’s political and intellectual horizon to include others who are looking for
ways to live differently.
All Living on the Same Side
In November 2003, the Instituto Distrital de Cultura y Turismo of Bogotá D.C.,
Colombia [Institute of Culture and Tourism], conducted a survey of Bogotá
residents’ perception of the cultural programs of the City government. It polled
1,443 people, thought to be representative of the 4,300,000 inhabitants of the city
who are above the age of 18. It examined their knowledge, preferences and
opinions about the cultural programs of public institutions during that year. It also
explored the ways in which different social sectors relate to cultural institutions and
artifacts and their codes and modes of perceiving art and the city’s artistic heritage.
The survey was part of a wide number of studies, undertaken by the
Observatory of Urban Culture of the IDCT, which aim to gather precise statistical
information that will enable public and private institutions to evaluate, improve and
disseminate their cultural programs. The issue was relevant at that time, because it
was a critical component of the administration’s Development Plan “Bogotá: All

272
Living on the Same Side”, which argued that the persistent chaos of the city could
only be solved through a profound cultural change. The city’s inhabitants were
overwhelmed by problems of insecurity, violence, inefficient transportation and
pollution, among other things. Mayor Antanas Mockus, the guiding light of the
Plan, thought that cultural habits played a major role in this disorder, that is, the
ways in which those who lived in Bogotá thought about the city, related to each
other and respected or did not respect social codes and the law.
Mockus, who initiated the Civic Culture Program during his first
administration (1994 – 1997), believed that there was a rupture between the law,
individual morality and collective culture. For him, these were the three axes that
regulate individual and social behavior, and the harmony among them would be the
basis for an ideal democracy. Mockus argued that this occurs when an individual’s
behavior is validated in cultural terms. In an ideal society, in turn, what is culturally
approved is also legally approved. Therefore, in a democratic society cultural
values are more demanding than the law, and the individual’s morality is even
more demanding than culture. In Colombia, he said, the “divorce” among the three
had opened social spaces for violence, delinquency and corruption, discrediting
social institutions and cultural traditions, and putting individual morality in
jeopardy. In his article “Cultura Ciudadana: Programa contra la violencia en Santa
Fe de Bogotá 1994-1997” [Civic Culture: Program against Violence in Santa Fe de
Bogotá 1994-1997], he concluded:

273
The exercise of violence and corruption increases and consolidates
precisely because they are culturally accepted within certain
contexts. Clearly illegal behaviors, and ones frequently subject to
moral censorship, are tolerated. The divorce among these three
systems that regulate human behavior is expressed in actions that are
in their majority illegal but morally and culturally approved, or
culturally disapproved but morally permitted, or morally
inadmissible but culturally tolerated and accepted. Likewise, some
legal obligations are not recognized as moral obligations or lack
cultural approval in certain social contexts.17
This concept of Civic Culture was consequently defined as “the ensemble of habits,
activities and shared minimum rules intended to create a feeling of belonging,
facilitate coexistence in the urban space, lead the city to be considered a collective
patrimony to be protected, and ensure the recognition of citizen’s rights and
duties.”18 In turn, the Civic Culture Program that attempted to promote changes in
the Bogotanians’ habits was based on the conviction that conflicts arise and
become aggravated when communication among people is limited, and that an
“intensive communication” may help dissolve violence. An enthusiastic follower of
Jürgen Habermas’s ideas about interactive communication, Mockus considered that
17
Antanas Mockus “Cultura Ciudadana: Programa contra la violencia en Santa Fe de Bogotá 1994-
1997,” in SOC-127 (Washington: DIB, 2002) p. 3.
18
Rocío Londoño, “De la Cortesía a la Cultura Ciudadana,” in Bogotá: El renacer de una ciudad,
ed. Gerard Martin et. al. (Bogotá: Editorial Planeta, 2007) p. 134.
274
an argumentative interaction among people would promote new social relations and
would replace violent confrontation with a face-to-face interaction of ideas and
arguments. Therefore, the divorce between the law, individual morality and the
collective culture would be overcome, since interaction would provide a cultural
consensus in which everyone obeys the law. He states:
Intensive communication permits a careful analysis of one’s moral
convictions and a profound modification of the criteria with which
one judges the actions of oneself and others and what is considered
to be culturally acceptable. It also allows more opportunities to
emerge for heeding differences and opportunely detecting conflicts,
which makes it possible to invoke civil rights earlier and to thread a
continuum between moral argumentation (that is, circumscribed by
the individual and his/her immediate group), cultural argumentation
(that is, the need to be right in front of one’s neighbor) and juridical
argumentation (the struggle to be right in the face of the law).19
The “All Living on the Same Side” Program insisted, then, that this transformation
would be achieved, not by changing the law, but rather by promoting new habits
through projects which encouraged a cultural self-regulation among strangers. It
defined four objectives: 1. To achieve the fulfillment of norms for coexistence. 2.
To provide Bogotá residents with the ability to fulfill their duties. 3. To improve
19
Mockus, “Cultura Ciudadana,” p. 6.
275
the capacity to build agreements among people and peacefully resolve conflicts. 4.
To improve the ability to communicate through art, cultural activities, recreation
and sports.
The Civic Culture Program employed cultural programs and media
campaigns to attain these objectives. Among them, it is worth noting the “Civic
Cards” Action, which employed a card that had a thumbs-up sign on one side and a
thumbs-down sign on the other. Drivers were encouraged to use it to express their
approval or rejection of the conduct of other drivers or pedestrians. The “Mime and
Zebra Crossing” program attempted to regulate the public’s use of streets and side-
walks. Usually car drivers had no respect for pedestrian crossings. When a car
stopped on the “Zebra Crossing”—the white stripes painted on the street to
designate pedestrians’ crossing area—a mime would approach the driver, calling
the attention of others to the violation of the code, and thus embarrassing the driver
for disrespecting the law and impeding the right of pedestrians to safely use the
street. The “Voluntary Disarmament” program encouraged people to voluntarily
surrender guns and knives to the authorities. Finally, the “Cultural Activities in the
Public Space” program was aimed at recovering public spaces for leisure and
peaceful coexistence and thus change the widespread perception that Bogotá was
unsafe, which meant that residents were reluctant to use parks and other public
spaces.
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The success of the Civic Culture Program has been nationally and
internationally recognized and has been implemented in other Colombian cities, as
well as in Ecuador, Peru and Venezuela. Among its results, it is worth mentioning
the reduction in violent deaths. In 1993 the homicide rate was 4,452 deaths per year
and in 1997 the rate was 2,814 deaths. Since then, it has continued to decline. In
2001 the rate was 1,993. Motor vehicle deaths in Bogotá also decreased, from a rate
of 1,341 in 1994 to one of 834 in 2000.
In the field of culture “All Living on the Same Side” mostly promoted
activities in public spaces, so that people could communicate through “face-to-
face” interactions and appreciate the shared values of peaceful coexistence and
mutual respect. Along with it, the Plan attempted to give the poorer classes a wider
access to culture, under the “Cultura en Común” [Culture in Common] program. It
consisted of a series of presentations of visual arts, theater, cinema and classical
music in the poorer areas of the city, accompanied by educational programs to
develop their residents’ ability to enjoy art and participate in artistic activities.
Although it was not explicitly stated, the cultural component of the Plan
seemed to follow Pierre Bourdieu’s approach to culture. For Bourdieu, class
position is not only determined by people’s role in the production of goods, but also
by the ways in which symbolic goods are produced and distributed among them.
The possession or not of cultural capital, he argued, turns everyday distinctions into
an expression of class distinctions. Assuming that the poor lacked cultural capital,
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“Cultura en Común” intended to alleviate this exclusion by making art and the
appreciation of it available to everyone and thus to restore social power to the lower
classes. The idea was that their acquisition of cultural capital would simultaneously
transform their attitudes, preferences, bodily habits and cognitive perceptions, that
is to say, their habituses, in line with canonical definitions of art. In other words, it
attempted to change the position of classes within the social structure.
The key concepts of the Plan, and the survey, seemed to rest on Bourdieu’s
interconnected notions of habitus and cultural capital. Generally, Bourdieu uses the
term habitus to refer to a system of enduring dispositions that are incarnated in
bodies.20 In his book Distinction, Bourdieu offers a more comprehensive
description of habitus, which I summarize here. Habitus, as ‘history incarnated in
the bodies,’ orients people’s practices and perceptions. It also describes the process
whereby the social is interiorized by individuals, achieving a correspondence
between objective structures and subjective ones. It also creates notions of social
distinction which people tend to think of as natural.21 Nick Prior has enlarged
Bourdieu’s ideas by suggesting that the sociology of art should distinguish three
fields of action or dimensions: First, there are the artists and their works. Second,
there are the institutions—museums, galleries, the city—where those works are
20
Pierre Bourdieu, In Other Words: Essays towards a Relative Sociology (Cambridge: Polity Press
1990), p. 190.
21
Pierre Bourdieu, La distinción: Criterio y bases sociales del gusto (Madrid: Taurus, 1988), p.
170-171.
278
exhibited. Finally, there is the audience which has access to both and possesses
stocks of cultural and economic capital that activate their habituses.22
In this regard, the Plan seemed to be based on the belief that a change in the
relative positions of social classes in the city would be accomplished not only by
re-distributing the cultural capital, but also by modifying the previous cultural
habituses of Bogotanians. This is all the more evident from the survey made at the
end of the Mayor’s term, precisely because it attempted to show changes in the
habituses and the improved access to art of the lower classes. Thus, the
Development Plan used culture to promote the Mayor’s vision of a democratic
society in two important ways: First, it assumed that cultural change would spread
democratic values and practices. Second, it attempted to democratize cultural
products, in order to adjust the cultural tastes of the poor to the Western tradition of
art.
The survey consisted of forty-five questions, divided into five sections:
notions about art, traditions, artistic education, consumption and information. The
first section, Notions about Art and Heritage, had two questions and was meant to
measure the perception of the terms by those who were surveyed. It hoped to
contrast the meanings of the terms with the ones held by the cultural institutions.
As the survey listed the respondents’ class origin, sex, age and educational level,
the results would give valuable information about the relation between class and
22
Nick Prior, “A Question of Perception: Bourdieu, art and the postmodern,” The British Journal of
Sociology 56, 1, (2005), 125.
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cultural capital. The second section, Traditions, had fourteen questions and asked
the respondents about their first contact with art and the role of family, school and
friends in their perceptions of it. It also included a representative list of artists
whom the respondents were asked to match with their different fields to determine
their knowledge of art.
The third section, Artistic Education, which had three questions, asked
those surveyed if they had gone through a specific training in the field of art,
beyond what they learned at school. The fourth section, Cultural Consumption in
the Last Year, had nineteen questions and was meant to determine the respondents’
attendance, in the past year, of concerts, exhibitions, plays, etc, especially the
frequency with which they took advantage of the administration’s cultural
programs. Finally, the fifth section, Information, had ten questions about their
knowledge of art and intensity of their interest in it.
Although it would be useful to analyze all the answers, I will concentrate on
those which throw light on my argument about the character of cultural struggles
within the context of the globalization of modernity. Globalization represents a new
geopolitics of cultural struggles and the creation, by certain social sectors, of
“other” alternatives that vindicate their particular cultural practices.
When asked, “What is the first thing that comes into your mind when you
hear the word ‘art’?” 62.9% said they thought of art as a sort of corporal or
intellectual activity: painting, dancing, sculpture, etc. 11.9% related it to something

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well-made or pretty, that is to say, an adjective to qualify an object or practice: an
artistic bakery, for instance. Lastly, 11.1% also used the word art as an adjective
but this time related to the ability or skill to do something, for example “you are an
artist at computing”. A breakdown by class reveals some interesting differences,
however. The upper classes mostly related art to a profession, while the middle
classes think of art as an adjective to qualify an object. The lower classes primarily
associate it with an adjective to qualify a skill. In terms of gender, school
attendance and age there are no major differences. However, women show a slight
tendency to associate it with something pretty or well-made, whereas men associate
it with knowing or learning something.
In terms of the formation of habits, 56% had their first contact with art
between the ages of 5 and 12, while 18.3% had it between ages of 13 and 20. 9.3%
said they had no relation to art whatsoever. A deeper analysis of the responses, by
age range, allows us to clarify the factors which led children to their first contact
with art. 61.7% of the people between 18 and 24 said that it occurred when they
were between 5 and 12, while only 44.4% of the people above 60 claimed the
same. Likewise, 13.7% of young people said that their first contact took place
before the age of 5.
For a good part of those surveyed (60.5%), the first contact with art was
through a school teacher. Adding the percentages of those whose contact initially
took place through their mothers, fathers and other relatives, 48% stated that they
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were initiated by the family. However, it is worth noting that in the upper classes
the influence of the father and mother is higher than in the middle and lower
classes. It is also important to note that in the middle and lower classes initiation in
art on the person’s own initiative or through contact with a friend was a relevant
factor. The influence of priests is low in general, except for the upper classes,
perhaps owing to the fact that most of the upper class schools are run by Catholic
religious communities.
However, what seems to be the important role of secularized schools in
familiarizing youngsters with art is contradicted by what schools actually do in this
respect, if one analyzes the results by age. People of sixty years and older and
young people between the ages of 18 and 24 state that they did the same artistic and
cultural activities at school: go to history and nature museums and parks. Perhaps
the only difference is the higher frequency of those activities nowadays, compared
to what took place in schools forty or fifty years ago. Furthermore, artistic activities
at school are less frequent than leisure ones. Although youngsters may put on a
play or paint at school, schools do not frequently organize visits to art exhibitions,
concerts, dance recitals or plays. Finally, I would like to highlight some of the
results from the Habits and Preferences in the Last Year section, which examines
cultural consumption and preferences. 12.4% stated that they do not possess any
object of art. The survey did not list any object. It was an open question, where the
adjective “artistic” did not define a particular characteristic of the objects

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themselves but the valuation people give to the objects they possess. According to
the other 86.6%, the objects which the respondents have in their homes and
consider to be artistic are: pictures (64%), craftworks (45.8%), ceramics (34.9%)
and musical instruments or recordings (25%). When asked if they bought an artistic
or cultural product in the last year, those surveyed answered in the following order:
objects related to music (40%), literature (25.8%), crafts (25.2%) and Colombian
traditional music (13.2%), while 35.8% stated that they had not bought anything
that could be named artistic. This question was complemented by information
about the sort of artistic activities people engage in. 39% said they practiced an
artistic activity, 24.8% labeling it as a hobby. This means that one million people
beyond the confines of institutional art do something they call artistic, activities
which challenge canonical notions of art insofar as they imply a practical relation to
what they consider to be culture.
With regard to attendance at cultural activities offered by the municipal
government, 38% stated that they had not attended any during that year. The
remaining 62% said they had attended movies (39%), museums (31.2%), theaters
(26.7%) and art exhibitions (14.7%). The last question asked about the importance
people give to art. 58.4% said that art heightens the cultural level of people, 47.9%
that it is a good source of entertainment and 12% that art does not provide
anything. The upper classes think of art as an activity that heightens the cultural
level, while the lower classes think of it as a source of entertainment and leisure.
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Insofar as the survey drew a rudimentary map of the political economy of
culture in Bogotá, it showed that cultural capital was accumulated in the upper
classes, and family and school were the social institutions that guaranteed its
reproduction. However, this conclusion was somehow to be expected since the
survey assumed a common system of values, that is, it evaluates the spread of
canonical notions of art and the transformation of Bogotanian’s habituses regarding
that system of values. In fact, considering that the majority of respondents did not
share canonical ideas of art, the survey questions the very idea on which the
Development Plan was based, that is, the notion of habituses and cultural capital.
What the survey seems to reveal is that social conflicts have less to do with
the accumulation or distribution of cultural capital than the relativity of that which
is understood to be culture, which reflects in turn the asymmetry of power relations
and the colonialist view of the art and culture of regions like Latin America. That
is, the survey highlights the inclusion/exclusion of non-modern cultural practices,
the relegation of social sectors opposed to the hegemonic value system and the
modernist rejection of certain tastes and habituses in the name of “true” art or the
“cultural heritage.”
Although the survey attempted to prove that people’s habituses had been
improved by the Plan during that period, it provided crucial information that
contradicts it. Instead, it demonstrated the symbolic resignification that artistic
practices undergo when they leave the realm of the art institution and are inserted
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into a broader social context which undermines or transforms them. In other words,
the survey seems to contradict the very principles on which the Mayoralty’s
cultural policy was based, to the extent that it shows that cultural capital is neither a
universal value nor is it exclusively associated with class struggles. Instead, it
seems to show that the distribution of cultural capital takes place in a scenario of
exchange where certain social sectors attempt to negotiate and/or resist the
insertion of hegemonic values into their own habituses, in order to create their own
sense of belonging and mobilize their political agendas
This is a way of arguing for and against Bourdieu. For some, his work is
limited by modernity’s distinction between the objective and subjective structures
of society and the notion of social distinctions exclusively based on class,
disregarding other factors, like gender, sexuality and race, which also create
difference. For others, however, his work on cultural consumption and definition of
the artistic field as a group of professions, institutions and agents have been crucial
to an understanding of the social components of art. Moreover, to think of cultural
capital as a unified set of modern artifacts, practices and knowledges that has to be
disseminated to all is a simplistic view of his argument. It does not take into
account the way in which both the artifact and the viewer are mutually transformed
by a play of resignification which does not come from the object or the viewer, but
rather from the cultural struggle between different symbolic systems. Bourdieu
himself warns that any approach to art that does not acknowledge culture as a space
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of struggle tends to “conceal the relations among social sectors, which,
accordingly, maintain differential and even antagonist associations with culture.”23
Although Mockus’s Development Plan tried to promote democracy by
giving everyone access to culture, it did so by hiding the diversity of meanings and
practices associated with it and the social conflicts which govern its appropriation.
This concealment was brought to light by the survey itself, insofar as the answers
highlighted the process in which cultural artifacts are re-signified to contest
hegemonic systems of cultural power, so that they may be used for the benefit of
excluded social sectors, practices.
A Knight Does Not Sit that Way!
In what follows, I will examine two collaborative projects that developed these
social uses of art and resulted in two exhibitions about queer appropriations of art
and its institutional practices. The first exhibition took place in December 2003 and
was devoted to the Colombian artist Luis Caballero [whose name could be
translated as Louis Knight]. (Fig. 5.1) Caballero was born in Bogotá in 1943 and
died of an AIDS-related disease in 1995. Although he mostly lived in Paris from
1968 on, his drawings and paintings were well-known in Colombia, from both
group and solo exhibitions. Although his earliest work was influenced by Pop Art,
he began to explore the male nude after he won a prize at the 1968 Coltejer
23
Bourdieu, La distinción, p. 10.
286
Biennale. Strongly influenced by classical artists, like Leonardo, Michelangelo and
Delacroix, his drawings and paintings rejoice in the male body, which is depicted in
a mannerist style, with complicated views from below and behind. (Fig. 5.2, 5.3,
5.4) In addition to single male bodies, he also presented a kind of scenario where
groups of male bodies blend in a condition of ambiguity: They seem to be dead or
exhausted, as if they had just finished an orgy.
In Hombre Americano a todo color [American Man in Full Color]—a
posthumous collection of essays published by the Universidad Nacional de
Colombia in 1995—the critic Marta Traba devoted the section “Love” to Caballero
under the title “Luis Caballero: Another stay in hell”, one of the many essays she
wrote on his work. As Brett and Bleys do with Oiticica’s, she seems to desexualize
his work. The following is an example of the way Caballero has been regarded by
Traba and the art institution:
Since Caballero started to paint, his main interest has been the
human body. Far from displaying it as a manageable and explicit
object, as happens with most contemporary artists working on
nudes, Caballero’s work has been impregnated with ambiguities that
both reveal equivocal situations and keep their secret. In the end, he
paints a closed body, hostile to trivial uses, charged with a pure
eroticism that lacks perversity and does not come from a mental
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effort but from the very sensuality by which the nude is
discovered.24
In 1990, when he produced Gran Telón [Great Curtain], (Fig. 5.5) an enormous
canvas of six square meters, for the Garcés &Velázquez Gallery in Bogotá, Traba’s
desexualized modernist rhetoric no longer seemed tenable, since the artist clearly
revealed the link between his work and his homoerotic desire. (Fig. 5.6) In the
exhibition catalogue, Caballero was asked to name the main sources of his work.
He cited the religious imagery of the dying Christ, which was the source usually
mentioned by art historians. But he also spoke of the videotapes he made of his gay
orgies in Paris (Fig. 5.7) and photos of young men violently murdered found in the
Bogotá newspaper El Espacio—famous for its crude graphic violence. (Fig. 5.8)
Speaking of the links between his work and eroticism, Caballero said:
For me, eroticism is one of the most important elements of my work
in terms of both the conscious and the unconscious. Since I began
painting, I have only painted the human body, as it is the only
subject that really excites me and through which I can express
almost anything . . . What interests me is not the making of a “work
of art”, what I want is to work on people, to work on that person that
24
Marta Traba, Hombre Americano a todo color (Bogotá: Editorial Universidad Nacional, 1995), p.
149.
288
I long for but I do not have. In this sense, it is a painting of
frustration.25
As his death was approaching, the Biblioteca Luis Angel Arango of Bogotá [Luis
Angel Arango Library] organized the exhibition Retrospectiva de una confesión
[Retrospective of a Confession] in 1991. The Library is located in downtown
Bogotá and houses the city’s biggest public art gallery and cultural complex. The
Library devoted all of its gallery space to his art and the exhibition was massively
visited, since it offered the possibility of exploring all his work in a detailed, well-
catalogued and chronological way. However, the organizers noticed that the
spectators were mostly queer people. The exhibition became an excuse to meet
people, exchange phone numbers and arrange a date, and it became difficult to gain
access to the public toilets on the ground floor.
Caballero’s work—beyond the art institution or despite it—has been crucial
in promoting a kind of sense of identity among queer communities in urban
Colombia. It is well known how gay people use his art—be it a poster, a canvas or
a drawing—to decorate their habitats, like bars, cafes and hair-dressing salons, and,
in the case of middle– or upper–class gays, their dining and living rooms. In
different ways, they thus make a public but disguised statement of their
homoeroticism. As Caballero’s work is highly regarded in Colombia and displaying
it a sign of good taste, queer communities use it as a sort of secret code to identify
25
Quoted by Rosa Ramírez, “Caballero y el erotismo,” in Caballero (Bogotá: Galería Garcés
Velásquez, 1978).
289
themselves and therefore seem to relate to art in the same way that Caballero did.
As Caballero himself said, he was not interested in art for its own sake but for the
way it allowed him to mobilize his own homoerotic desire. (Fig. 5.9, 5.10, 5.11)
Although the possibility of an exhibition about queer appropriations of
Caballero’s work emerged from the retrospective that took place in 1991, it was
only in 2003 that artists and curators began to put it together. This interest was
stimulated, in turn, by the launching of the “Luis Caballero Award”, which invited
middle-aged artists to exhibit at the Santa Fe Gallery of Bogotá. The idea of an
award that paid homage to his art without taking his queerness into account
emphasized the need for an exhibition that would highlight his importance for the
queer community. Therefore, an exhibition with that approach was put on the
program of the “Luis Caballero Award”.
The title, A Knight Does Not Sit That Way, was suggested by Bogotanian
curator Jaime Cerón, who helped organize the exhibition, and was inspired by the
following anecdote:
A gay man bought a drawing by Luis Caballero and hung it in his
dining room. To celebrate it, the owner organized a fancy dinner
with his closest male friends and his mother. She arrived before the
other guests, sat in the dining room and ‘discovered’ the drawing.
Shocked, she addressed her son and pointing to the drawing, asked:
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“Son, what is this?” Proudly, he answered: ‘Mom, it is a Caballero
[Knight]! She answered back: A knight does not sit that way!
The exhibition questioned the art institution’s refusal to examine the relation
between art and sexuality, a theme discussed in Chapter 4, and the consequent need
for an exhibition that dealt with the cultural constructions of sexuality. It reflected
the interest of artists, cultural studies scholars and curators in the social uses of art
objects that lie beyond the realm of the art institution, in a place where they are
charged with unsuspected meanings and linked with marginal cultures.
The exhibition thus emphasized the way in which a private collection
implies not only a matter of good taste on the part of the owner, but also functions
as a statement about his/her identity, that is, the exhibition was structured around
“collections” which simultaneously expose the artist and the collector. To
emphasize the main theme, the social uses of art, it featured photographs of the
apartments in Bogotá of the owners of the works. It also included works by
contemporary Colombian artists who deal with cultural constructions of sexuality.
The idea was to show both queer works and the collections of queer artists or
collectors, in order to open up new approaches to the social contingency of
sexuality and illustrate the diverse artistic media which express it.
In the case of the collections, it is important to mention the work by Elias
Heim Dotación para museos en vías de extinción [Equipment for Museums in
Extinction], (Fig. 5.12) property of the collector Rubén Lechter, and the works by
291
Gustavo Turizo and Gustavo Castillejo from Gustavo García’s collection. There
were also Juan Mejía’s collection of Wilson Diaz’s work and Miguel Angel Rojas’
Toho produced in the seventies, never before exhibited. (Fig. 5.13) More than a
exhibition about “gay” art, the show intended to disrupt the binary construction of
sexuality on the basis of gender, through works that explore the definition of
masculinity (Juan Pablo Echeverri, Juan Mejía and Wilson Díaz), and cultural
differences and transgressions of gender (José Alejandro Restrepo, Santiago
Monge, Juan David Giraldo, Catalina Rodríguez, Nadia Granados). It was also
important to invite artists working on queer readings of social and cultural icons
(Pablo Adarme and Santiago Monge). (Fig. 5.14)
I want to draw attention, however, to some of the social uses of the
exhibition. At the entrance of the building where the exhibition was taking place
and at the entrance of the exhibition room there were two notices:
First Notice:
No admittance for people under the age of 18.
Second Notice:
The Santa Fe Gallery informs the public:
The exhibition Un caballero no se sienta así explores the
relationship between art and sexuality. You are advised to take this
fact into account when entering the room. It is recommended that

292
people under the age of 18 enter in the company of a responsible
adult.
The two texts have different political and cultural implications. While the
prohibition of minors implied a link between the works of art and pornography, the
second notice asked visitors to examine art within broader social contexts. The
exhibition attracted a large number of visitors, among whom there were probably
minors. Both notices may have been a response to the fact that the press and
television called the exhibition a “scandal.” Some of these news items questioned
the artistic validity of the exhibition and asked for more respect for the sensibilities
of the public. Others defended the exhibition’s treatment of the relation between art
and sexuality. Most of the attacks shared the tendency of art criticism to conceal the
grounds of their own argument: the homophobic association between art dealing
with sexuality and pornography. These reactions underlined the conflicts which
arise when sexual and gender differences are discussed in a social space, and the
role of the art institution in encouraging such conflicts.
The second exhibition, I am not she, might be seen as a continuation of A Knight
Does Not Sit that Way! and took place in December 2005. (Fig. 5.15) At first, the
exhibition wanted to bring to light recent artistic approaches to sexuality and
representation. Some of the artists (who are queer, for the most part) argued,
however, that their works should not be defined or interpreted in terms of their
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sexuality or gender. The first title which the curatorial group came up with was I
am not that way, which would have resembled the title of the previous exhibition
and called attention to the artists’ reluctance to be identified as queer. However,
some artists publicly refused to have their works shown in a queer framework. One
was Wilson Díaz, who had created a video installation entitled El Charquito [Little
Pond]. It showed some boys bathing in a little river and pictures of them wearing
military outfits.26 The camera makes it seem as though the two boys in the river are
being observed by a voyeur. This statement of a circuit of desire which runs from
the voyeur to the boys becomes confused, however, when, after touching and
drying each other, they dress in military uniforms and one unintentionally reveals
that it is the uniform of the FARC (The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia),
the oldest leftist guerrilla group in Colombia. Diaz’s work caused very interesting
debates in and out of the artistic field. While many spectators regarded it as a
statement about the FARC’s corruption, and others took it as an example of Diaz’s
characteristic irreverence, most were shocked. Because of the interest the video
provoked, Wilson Díaz was invited to participate in the exhibition, but he let the
curators know that he was not interested in having his work exhibited in a queer
framework.
26
This work was part of a program organized by the national government in which a group of artists
and intellectuals visited the guerrilla zones of the countryside in order to promote the peace talks
that were taking place between the government and the guerrilla at the time, on the assumption that
art and culture would ease this process.
294
Second, there was the case of Elias Heim’s work La proeza del avaro [The
Miser’s Feat], which was presented at the 3rd version of the Luis Caballero Award.
The work was conceived of as an experiment where the spectator walks in and out
of the gallery space. At the room’s entrance, there was a description of the work
and several warnings that it might shock the spectators. Then, the spectator was
asked to walk through a curved hall—long, dark and narrow—at the end of which
there was a video with a close-up shot of an anus shitting, looped so that the piece
of shit continually went in and out of the anus, suggesting a phallus and
emphasizing the erotic pleasure of both shitting and anal penetration.
Spectators reacted by turning back, closing their eyes or covering their
faces. They mimicked the act shown by the video, as it were, since they had to go
in and out of the long narrow hall representing the intestines, rectum, and anus. In
fact, one woman kept her eyes shut, and had to leave the room by touching the
walls, ignoring that what she was touching was, say, the intestinal tract. When she
realized it, someone had to help her leave the room. She could not stand seeing
herself as a piece of shit (or a phallus) entering and leaving the body, or as a
participant in so shameful an act. Curiously, the media never mentioned the video.
In various discussions of the Caballero Award, however, some critics and artists
discussed the queer aspect of Heim’s work. Nevertheless, Heim publicly stated that
his work was, among other things, a kind of experimental psychology, meant to
examine the relation between psychological and aesthetic experience.

295
The rejection of a queer perspective by some artists provoked further
reflections by the curatorial group. First, there was the question of the ways in
which authors try to control the meaning of their works or address issues of
authorship, and the role the art institution gives to the artist. It was clear that such
artists thought their projects worked on a sort of “artistic” level (read as a universal
or international one) which would be undermined if issues of sexuality came to the
fore in the interpretation of their works. Second, there was the relation between the
art institution and sexuality, for despite the growing tendency to bring sexuality
into the sphere of art, as well as the increasing number of individuals and
collectives working on it, a strong tension emerges when the art institution feels
threatened by what it considers to be non-artistic “subjects” or “objects.” It tends to
normalize them by converting them into the discursive terms of art. Finally, there
was the political role of the art institution’s normalization of alternative sexualities,
though such works of art do not necessarily challenge its supremacy.
The curatorial group wondered about the possibility of an exhibition that
would show the relationship between this normalization and the modernist
discourse. This led to the idea of one revolving around the queer scene in Bogotá in
the seventies and eighties that would feature works that functioned at that time as a
form of visualization of that scene as well as a resistance to that discourse. The task
implied an investigation of artworks and visual and printed material from the
period and in view of the almost total absence of such documentation (including
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leaflets, texts and posters), the group invited spectators to bring whatever
memorabilia they had. For instance, an old drag queen brought costumes, wigs and
crowns she had inherited from her aunt and used whenever she wanted to be in
drag. At that time, gay bars, saunas and other public gay venues were illegal and
information about them circulated by word-of-mouth. This led to the creation of
secret visual and cultural codes which allowed members of the queer communities
to identify themselves. Consequently, the title changed from I am not that way to I
am not she, the title of a very famous song of the seventies by the Spanish singer
Mari Trini: I am not she/I am not the one you imagine/A tranquil and simple
señorita/I am not she/The one you think /That girl you abandon and who always
forgives you/A dove that laughs at nothing and says yes to everything/I am not
she/Frightened in a storm/Wrestling to get to the beach/That little girl/I am not she.
As a point of reference, the exhibition concentrated on the work of the
Colombian artist Miguel Angel Rojas (Bogotá, 1946- ), which has explored the
relationship between art, queer sexualities and public spaces in the city. His most
famous photographs are grouped in series entitled La Vía Láctea [The Milky Way],
Mogador, and Imperio, the latter two being the names of theaters that once showed
porn movies in Bogotá but later disappeared as the city center was renovated. (Fig.
5.16) The photographs record the sexual habits and codes of the gay subculture in
Bogotá during the seventies. They depict sexual encounters in toilets, as well as the
rituals used by the “participants” to call attention to themselves, demonstrate

297
interest, approach someone and display their desires. Because of their clandestine
nature and the poor lighting conditions, the photographs stretched the sensitivity of
the film to its limits. The images are out of focus and grainy from over-exposure,
features that make them very beautiful and moving.
When The Milky Way series was produced in the seventies, it could only be
seen in private. Whoever showed interest in the pictures had to be invited to
Rojas’s atelier to share a kind of secret and avoid the art institution’s censorship. In
1981, the series was shown for the first time in the Garcés & Velázquez Gallery of
Bogotá. Rojas decided to exhibit it in a very small format. The pictures were
circular—as if they were taken through a hole—and had a diameter of 0.5
centimeters. (Fig. 5.17) The small pictures were displayed high on the wall and far
from the viewer. They could not be seen in detail. What the viewers saw was a long
line of black and white points. Rojas said of this series: “In The Milky Way, I
placed those tiny circles on the wall in a straight line, out of the line of vision of the
spectator, which made them more invisible, relying on the faith of the spectator,
who had to believe that those tiny dots were images charged with eroticism. The
whole situation created a fetishist aura that is still alive.”27
There is no doubt that The Milky Way series plays with the codes and modes
of the art institution. However, it does not belong to it. The series seems to resist
the art institution and to vindicate the marginal subculture from which the work
27
José Ignacio Roca, “Objetivo Subjetivo,” in Objetivo Subjetivo Exh. Cat. (Bogotá: Banco de la
República, 2007), p. 11.
298
emerges. While introducing the practices of a marginal subculture into the “safe”
environment of the art institution, Rojas also lets us know that these pictures will
not reveal anything. The Milky Way series escapes desire. That is, the marginal
subculture that appears in its out-of-focus images refuses to be included in the
voyeurism of the world of art. And it will continue to be marginal, but in this case
for the sake of those who participate in that subculture. This is all the more true
since it would not have made any sense for the spectators to go to those theaters
and see “what was going on,” when not even the pictures allowed them to see it.
What the series reminds us of is the impossibility of having access to that universe,
of defining and recording it or translating one culture into another. It lets us know
that despite desire—or perhaps because of it—difference will always appear before
us as a tiny, out-of-focus and incomprehensible object that we will never be able to
grasp.
Rojas’s interest in the gay subculture was expanded in the exhibition by
evoking memories of three emblematic queer places of the seventies and eighties in
Bogotá: Gay bars, XXX cinemas and parks. In addition to assembling the relevant
artworks, the curators wanted to display them, along with other visual and written
material, in a way that would convey the atmosphere and aesthetics of the queer
experience of that time. The exhibition was not meant to be an exercise in art
appreciation or history but a device for promoting new forms of meaning, feeling
and living.
299
With this ethic in mind, the gallery was organized as a scenario where
“things” could happen. Rojas’s The Milky Way was recently exhibited in big
formats and in the exhibition the enlarged pictures were accompanied by actual
cinema seats specially borrowed for the occasion. According to one security guard,
things did happen: He witnessed gay couples exchanging phone numbers, touching
each other and arranging dates. In the absence of visual or printed documentation,
the group recorded stories about the bars, parks, saunas and cinemas of that period.
Headphones hanging from the ceiling allowed people to listen to these stories.
There was also a place in the Gallery which gave the spectators a view of
Independence Park, an important site for queer sexual encounters in the seventies.
A karaoke was installed for people to stand up and sing I am not she, whose pitch
was altered so that it sounded as if a man were singing it. There were also pictures
of the most famous drag queens of Bogotá at the time, most of whom are still
active. Proudly, they allowed us to display their costumes and photos. (Fig. 5.18)
They worked at La Pantera Roja [The Red Panther], the oldest and liveliest drag
bar in Bogotá.
Whereas A Knight Does Not Sit that Way! got a generally hostile treatment
from the media, including two stories warning the public not to see it, the second
exhibition was favorably received. In “Yo no soy esa,” an article published in the
magazine Semana on December 16, 2005, Maria Fernanda Moreno invited people
on a journey through the queer subculture of the seventies, especially “those who
300
are soaked in ignorance, intolerance and prejudice. The New Year will give them a
vision which leaves room for differences, and above all, art ”28 The same tone was
used by the editor of El Tiempo in his note “Memories of a Gay Bogotá” of January
18, 2006.29 However, these exhibitions are just two examples of the increasing
number of artistic projects created by the queer community in Bogota.
I would like to end this section by recalling an incident that occurred on the
closing day of the exhibition I am not she. A party was organized in the Gallery to
which the most famous drag queens of Bogotá were invited, among others. The old
drag queen who had brought her fabulous crown made of pasta shells and plastic
leaves and her seventies-style costumes thanked some of the organizers for
attending “her” art exhibition. (Fig. 5.19) Instead of being seen as the object of
artistic representation, such spectators became the protagonists who exercised the
right to represent themselves. This is all the more important, if we think of the story
of Rojas’s series The Milky Way. After being exhibited at the Garcés & Velázquez
Gallery as an artwork, and later enlarged by art dealers for commercial reasons, the
series was finally exhibited at a queer collaborative project. The Milky Way series
has finally returned to the subculture from which it emerged. (Fig. 5.20)
In previous chapters, I explored the ways in which artistic practices during the
developmentalist period resisted modernism and its construction of sexual, gender,
28
María Fernanda Moreno, “Yo no soy esa,” Semana December 16, 2005.
29
“Recuerdos de una Bogotá gay,” El Tiempo January 18, 2006.
301
race, and class differences through the use of appropriation, mimicry, mockery and
disguise. Beatriz González incorporated images of universal art into beds, hall
stands and mirrors to call attention to the destiny of those traditions in third-world
contexts. Antonio Caro usurped national icons, multinational logos and the
signature of a non-national leader to call attention to the exclusion of the
indigenous cultures and the more general attempt to forget the nation’s past. Hélio
Oiticica inserted popular expressions into the art institution to challenge its notion
that popular cultures are non-modern ones which deserve to be undermined in the
name of progress. His Quasi-cinemas and Babylonests likewise resisted
conventional representations of sexuality and opened up possibilities to live
sexuality alternatively.
Globalization has replaced developmentalism as the dominant expression of
colonialism. Its strategies no longer follow the model of territorialized nations.
Instead, both the exercise of power and cultural resistance to it have been
territorialized in specific local settings. This landscape is now known as glocal: A
new cartography where the global is localized through the action of local
governments and NGOs and the local is no longer perceived as a periphery but a
specific globalized space. Cultural negotiations between the hegemonic and the
subaltern, the foreign and the national, the canonical and the popular now take
place in glocal topographies.

302
The cultural policies of local governments, the strategies of the art
institution and the collaborative projects I have referred to are expressions of this
new topography in Latin America. While local governments attempt to redistribute
cultural capital, the art institution tries to absorb local expressions of non-modern
cultures into its own system, becoming a strategy of globalization which colonizes
the local. To challenge it, some artists and activists have tried to radicalize their
struggles by articulating new forms of social representation which alter the
conventional idea of the artist and develop new links between art and politics. The
artists, activists and cultural studies scholars who participate in these projects share
a commitment to creating “other” ways of thinking about art which continues
undermining the authority of canonical cultures. They seek to decolonize and
(re)think coloniality by operating at the “interior exteriority of the border,” as
Mignolo puts it.30
The Modernity/Coloniality Project should be part of this effort and aims “to
make the struggles against coloniality visible, thinking not only from its paradigm,
but also with the people and their social, epistemic and political practices.”31
Catherine Walsh has remarked that the Project is an attempt to create a critical
space from Latin America where disciplines that have emerged in different
historical moments and epistemological places (re)think and (re)situate culture. If
30
Walter Mignolo, “Local Histories and Global Designs: An Interview with Walter Mignolo,”
Discourse 22, 3 (Fall 2000), p. 11.
31
Walsh, Pensamiento crítico y matriz (de)colonial, p. 24.
303
so, this critical space should acknowledge the heterogeneity of the positions that
gave shape to this space and give an account of the different struggles and subject
positions that configure the field of culture. Cultural studies should serve as
meeting point for diverse trends of thought, forms of collaboration and agents.
Inspired by Anthony Giddens, Arturo Escobar has argued that the impact of
modernity is even more profound and universal than it was before, not only
because the dream of progress—or nightmare as he calls it—is still based on the
massive exclusion and exploitation of the poor of the Third World, but also because
that dream continues to be a white, heterosexual, masculine and Western one.32 Just
as the art institution is even more involved in transforming people’s habituses
today, alternative sectors continue to use art for their own purposes and invent
alternative possibilities of life that lie inside and outside of modernity.
32
Arturo Escobar, Más allá del Tercer Mundo: Globalización y Diferencia (Bogotá: ICANH-
Universidad del Cauca, 2005), p. 11.
304
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APPENDIX 1
Imaginaries of Revolution: Interview with Antonio Caro1

Bogotá, March 21, 2002
Victor Manuel Rodríguez: The main issues that we wish to discuss in this
conversation are your artwork and art’s social function, art’s political role, and all
the disputes associated with the relationship between art and society, art and
culture, and terms like revolution, revolutionary, critical art, and political art,
among others. The first question that I have is this: How should we understand the
first stage of your work, which has an intention, let’s not say to be political because
in some way all contemporary works are also political, but a specific political
intention like the pieces Cabeza [Head] and Imperialismo es un tigre de papel
[Imperialism is a Paper Tiger]? How did you perceive art’s social function and
your own work in that context?
Antonio Caro: In previous conversations we have spoken about the wild nature or
the spontaneous construction of my work. I can say that I have never had
theoretical elements a priori, only a posteriori in my work. Cabeza was done with
a little luck and just a little bit of tenacity, but in reality, in simple terms, I got it
right and it all worked out. Juan Calzadilla, the Venezuelan critic, published the
first critique of Cabeza in a newspaper. Only after reading what he wrote did I
1
Published in Valdez 2 (2007), 242-261.
324
understand what I had done. As I said, and I repeat, I have never had theoretical
elements a priori, only a posteriori, and they were never difficult to have because I
just took them as they gave them to me. Calzadilla said: It’s povera art, it’s a
conceptual expression and it’s political. The next day I knew: I am conceptual, my
art has a povera tendency, and politics interest me; all this I did not know until
Calzadilla stated it. And classified as such, I had to take it on. Partly, being political
was fashionable; remember the people who were around then—on the one hand
Carlos Granada, Humberto Giangrandi, the people from the Cuatro Rojo workshop,
especially Clemencia Lucena, who had a specific political position.2
Making fun of myself as I was then and as I am now, it was easier for me to
make political art than to make erotic art. It sounds like a joke but it is true; at the
time they were like trends or tendencies. You could be a political artist or an erotic
one. I assumed the political trend because—it is a little superficial what I am going
to say—they said that I was political and it was a trend which was easy to assume,
“easy,” I say, within quotes.
VMR: But the political was associated with the left. When Calzadilla said that you
were a political artist he meant that you were a political artist from the left, and
when you say that being political was fashionable you refer to a concept of the
political that came more from the left.
2
All of them were representative of socialist realism. Clemencia Lucena was regarded as the highest
point of this movement.
325
AC: Yes, when I finished high school, I was a stupid and naïve boy, I don’t know
how that works—I was the most naïve and lived on another planet, but I received
the best grades. I was stupid and naïve and fell into or arrived at the National
University context, which was evidently political. Your qualifying of a leftist
politics is very valid, but at that time being from the left was like a pleonasm
because it was assumed that politics had to come from the left. Those who knew
what was going on had to be political and had to be from the left. The right was
considered to be made up of aristocrats or oligarchs from birth or…
VMR: Apolitical.
AC: It was an absolute Manichaeism. Just mentioning the word shows that I lived
in a time of Manichaeism; one was political, obviously from the left, clearly very
intelligent, evidently living according to one’s principles or one was a lackey to
imperialism, a pariah, revolting, reactionary, a stupid idiot. In fine arts, there was
also Manichaeism of this style: You were abstract or realistic; it can now be said
that a cube is a reality, but at that time a cube was not a reality.
VMR: It was an abstract idea, a figment.

326
AC: I was from the Manichaeism epoch and was studying in the National
University, where everything was political in the leftist sense. Recounting the
famous phrase from Ché Guevara—you can’t be a doctor without being political; a
doctor is a political reactionary or is a leftist. As if the appendix was reactionary or
combative, as if guerrillas never felt the pain of appendicitis; it was only a
bourgeois disease. Of course, at the time, these jokes could not be made.
Manichaeism arrived at those extremes. I lived that.
VMR: That intellectual and artistic climate.
AC: Yes. Some time later, in 1976, they asked me about Cabeza and I responded
that it questioned Colombian politicking. This is very difficult to understand
outside of Colombia but here we understand it very well. It was a piece about the
vices of Colombian politicking. I reflected on the question and said that frankly I
was not able to extend myself to a political level. I have never had a clear, rigorous
or methodical political formation. The Cabeza piece came rather—this I can now
say after many years of focusing on being a sponge—from soaking up an
environment. This was more due to the absorption of the environment than a
mental discipline or political activity.
I was never involved in political activities, I never had a political outlook,
but I did things that I considered and that can be considered as political though only
327
because of inertia. Returning to the joke, because my art doesn’t really have erotic
components and, perhaps because of my myopia, I was not geometric. Being ironic,
I was political through the process of elimination.
VMR: Right, that intellectual climate in some way gave shape to your work. I ask
myself, how did this have an impact on Imperialismo es un tigre de papel?
AC: I am exaggerating, but I honestly tried to listen to the people who were
involved in the issue of political art, their questioning, and then in my way, not
very studious nor very methodical, nor very structured, I followed the debates and
the controversies that were so frequent in the University. In intellectual circles,
politics obviously had to be talked about and clearly these politics were from the
left. Any person who knew what was going on had to speak starting from Marxism,
Maoism, and of course, with their hearts filled by the Cuban revolution.
Speaking of which, as a side note, I listened to the Cuban revolution when I
was eight years old and the news was that Fidel had prevailed in Havana and that
they were the revolutionaries. As a child I had that image of the revolution, and
although it sounds funny, Sputnik as well. When I was a child there was the
revolution—bearded gentlemen living in Cuba, and Fidel, who was pretty to some
and ugly to others. Ten years later, Fidel held on, and in the university, and I repeat,
328
intellectuals had to be from the left, I, naïve and all, would go to the debates in the
University on art and politics.
Between the Cabeza and Imperialismo es un tigre de papel there are some
years. When one is young, it is a long time; one lives many things in a year. An
important fact is that, because of the fortuitous accident of the water that spilled
and the journalistic news on the Cabeza piece, I was catapulted very quickly to a
certain level of artist, but I did not have much education. Then, after Cabeza, there
was trial and error. I am vain and I do not take blind punches. I tried and made
errors with my form, or rather with my structure, because conceptualism and
structuralism were trendy. I was trying structural searches, with povera, with the
ephemeral, with photocopies, etc. Through continually searching, a wonderful
premonition of Manuel Quintín Lame came to me in 1972. I did a version of
Manuel Quintín Lame, very much in accordance with or in the fashion of
information art, trying to be objective, with concise information, that of course was
luckily well presented—the word sounds reactionary but it is appropriate—
decorated with the signature of Quintín Lame. Between Cabeza and Imperialismo
es un tigre de papel, along with some other small pieces, came the Homenaje a
Manuel Quintín Lame Homage to Manuel Quintín Lame). So that people do not
think that I am so vain, I always have said that the Quintín Lame is an excellent
piece not because of me but because of Quintín Lame himself.

329
Cabeza was an intuitive approach towards something political. Quintín
Lame was a very fortunate approach without theories and, in the strict
methodological sense, without conceived previous ideas. They were meeting
points. I must say that all my things have been meeting points.
Imperialismo es un tigre de papel was pressured by preconceived ideas; I
say preconceived ideas in a healthy sense, simply in the methodology. It was not
the meeting point that I think a work of art should be—“a meeting point,” in
inverted commas—fortuitous. It was—scientists will forgive me—the result of a
methodological process of research and work in order to arrive at a point. It was a
piece with a convergent process, arriving at a point.
Here, I did have a preconceived idea to make a political piece. I presumed
that it was very well structured but the result did not convince those in political
circles and this was a crucial moment for me, crucial in the methodological sense,
not so much in the personal sense; it was a moment very crucial for me because of
the rejection from political orthodoxy…
VMR: From the left?
AC: Yes, with rejection from leftist political orthodoxy and with assimilation from
the right because the left did reject it and the right accepted it. I automatically
stopped being from the left because it was easy or possibly because I did not really
330
work at a political level or simply because, as I said later, if political art does not
contribute anything politically, why make political art? What one should do is art,
just make art that could have political implications.
Imperialismo es un tigre de papel was a piece which had the intention to
have a political result, and it was rejected by leftist orthodoxy. In some sense this
liberated me from politics, from orthodoxy. I believe that beyond my personal case,
if you analyze the time and different social groups, it was a process that many
people were experiencing. Many young people or even older people were
discussing it.
For example, we could make a gibe at Mr. Alvaro Medina, who, with his
curatorial project Arte y Violencia [Art and Violence] Museum of Modern Art,
Bogotá, 1999), could have presented a political questioning and analysis, but he
made a critique focused on formalist issues. And so you see how ironic it is, when
Alvaro Medina presented his project. Two former contradictors were practically in
the same vain because we were seated one next to the other alongside Mr.
Humberto Giangrandi, who questioned the exhibition’s excessively formal sense
without considering the political. Mr. Giangrandi, whom I never got along with,
ended up speaking in about the same vein.
It’s nice that with what time and life throws you, positions come to a very
strange point; it is something that I cannot explain. I just mention it. After twenty-
five years of political differences, I find myself beside Mr. Giangrandi, arguing
331
against a curator who had a formalist outlook for a problem that should have been
put forward with a political perspective.
VMR: I am interested in how you became involved with the figure of Manuel
Quintín Lame. First, it shows that your search is not a sequential process. It seems
that you work simultaneously in different searches to reach diverse meeting points.
Although Imperialismo es un tigre de papel came after Manuel Quintín Lame, the
latter reflects an important turn in your approach which will be further developed in
Coca-Cola Colombia. I see that Homage to Manuel Quintín Lame is an important
turning point, not so much in a formal sense but in the relationship between art and
politics. When you say that you abandoned politics, it seems like what you
abandoned is a particular way of understanding the relationship between art and
politics. It is clear that Manuel Quintín Lame and Colombia, written in the font of
Coca-Cola, are pieces with an explicit political point of view. Through them you
seemed to reject the idea that a political work of art should be political in the leftist
sense.
AC: Yes.
VMR: There is a turning point; let’s talk about that turning point.
332
AC: Let’s return to when I was eight and the triumph of Fidel occurred. My
birthday is in December, and on January 1st Fidel triumphantly entered Havana, and
apparently that was the Cuban revolution. Soon after turning eighteen, I began to
study in the National University and the revolution was an important factor within
the National University’s Bogotá campus, which was among other things sacred
territory, no, not sacred but independent territory. The revolution was an important
factor and for three years I assumed the political stance that existed then; today we
would say it was discourse. During that time I produced my first piece, Cabeza,
which was applauded by the left as much as by the right despite my not having
clear politics. Perhaps the success is in having chosen the perfect symbol, the
perfect victim. Later Manuel Quintín Lame went curiously unnoticed, although it
was much more transcendental, I guess it did not have the fortune of being a
fashionable symbol. Indigenousness was not trendy, or it was trendy but only in a
very small sector, and it did not have the same popularity as Cabeza.
Later, in a very naïve way, but with conviction and with a supposed political
methodology—evidently from the left—I began to work on Imperialismo es un
tigre de papel. That was an ideological failure and considered by the left as a joke
or a work of art from the right. Personally, I questioned myself a lot, but it was a
very fast process, very immediate—when one is young things are very fast and
very immediate. I abandoned the pretension of making political pieces with a
methodology, with an ideology. I say ideology but perhaps I should say a political
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methodology with political consequences or political work, for example—I am
only mentioning the process—like Clemencia Lucena’s work.
Upon seeing my political failure as a political artist, I abandoned that route
and I began to work free from the pressure of a political principle and a political
methodology from the left that was used at that time. I tried, from that moment, to
contribute more to art than to politics, because I realized that, as an artist, politics
was not my field and politics alone has never seduced me.
VMR: However, you produced Colombia Coca-Cola after that decision. I see that
you did not abandon politics. Perhaps you shift the terms to relate art to politics or
art to society. Was it a modification of strategy?
AC: It’s very interesting; it’s almost as if after each question we return to the same,
we return to the processes of one’s life. It sounds a little romantic but it is still
beautiful. And it also returns to a basic principle that would be good to mention.
It’s that there exists a formal process that in a particular epoch could have been the
academy. I didn’t do academy. I do believe that artists—even in the broad sense of
the word—artists, authors and musicians—are going to have to use formal or
structural processes as their work elements. I say all this because life brought me to
work in a publicity agency, a fact that is very important in my work. There I
acquired many work elements that can be seen in Colombia Coca-Cola. I am not
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responding to the essence of your question, but I want to mention that working in a
publicity agency meant that I worked with elements of material communication and
other things, and if I hadn’t worked in the agency I wouldn’t have known
otherwise. For me it was very important that I worked in that agency because I
believe that it kept me informed, it helped me adapt to the world, and it gave me a
formal education that I needed and filled a school or academy hole. Inertia or
chance introduced me to such important topics. I can’t say that I studied a lot or
that I knew a lot about economics or that I am quick-witted when it comes to
politics. We return to the same. It is intuition—sorry that I use that word but at the
moment I can’t think of another. We can speculate that an artist is an unconscious
receptor and blah, blah, blah, but let’s leave it there.
VMR: Once you commented to me that strategies such as Colombia Coca-Cola,
using iconography from a mass visual culture, allowed you to communicate more
directly with people. You said that people could relate to these images in a different
way from what they did with other iconographies. Since we are talking about the
revolutionary imaginary and we have mentioned the Cuban revolutionary
imaginary, I would like to ask you about May ’68. You once said to me, May ’68
destroyed everything, and Woodstock reconstructed it all again. What did you
mean and how have these imaginaries structured your work?

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AC.: OK, don’t let me forget your question because it’s a good one, but I want to
return a little to the previous one. My interview is like this, and maybe my life is
like this as well. I should mention that between Imperialismo es un tigre de papel
and Coca-Cola there was Marlboro, and someone put to me an interesting question
in pseudo-publicity terms, in relation to capturing a market. With Marlboro I was
referring to smokers, not a very large percentage of adults and adolescents, maybe
not everyone smokes Marlboro. I smoked Pielroja [a Colombian brand of
cigarettes]. This dichotomy is always there, someone would say my schizophrenia.
Sorry, but I who smoked Pielroja produced a piece on Marlboro. This was directly
touching smokers although, logically, the piece had other repercussions.
Someone said to me, that with Coca-Cola I increased its consumption
because everyone drinks Coca-Cola. Coca-Cola, we can say without hesitation, is
practically universal. It’s simply being in the medium.
Your question is very interesting. I was in high school, a Christian school
that was of French origin. They tried to hide May ’68 because it was the heresy of
their very own Vatican in Paris. The heresy happened in Paris and everything
changed. We can compare this with the Twin Towers tragedy: Things happen, like
the towers physically fell down, but the ideologies that sustained them continue.
May ’68 destroyed everything, but today much of what it destroyed still exists.
When I made political art I did so with a style from before May ’68 because the
preconceived ideas subsist further than the physical fact. It’s like amputation: They
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amputate your leg and after six months you talk about how much your leg hurts
although it doesn’t exist anymore, but it continues to hurt. It must have been that.
At least I spoke about Woodstock to give more heat to this interview. Woodstock
was a way in which the reaction pronounced: We want to be different. Maybe they
just said, WE ARE, and we as underdeveloped and Spanish speakers understood
“us.” That was our mistake with Woodstock. They were, they were different.
I believe that being outside academia and in the regular and ordinary world,
the left rejecting my work, and the later effect of Woodstock made me understand
things. It could be that Colombia Coca-cola is my first work in which “I am there
in the moment.” I hadn’t seen it like that in 1976, “I am there.” I don’t know, I
think I just said something important.
VMR: Let’s continue with the representations of the revolution and the processes
of political art and of art and politics. Once I asked you about your relationship
with art institutions and with the major voices of Colombian art criticism and
history. You spoke of your artwork not as anti-art nor as a contra-art but as un-art.
Let’s expand this.
AC: I was a naïve child; Marlboro ‘s being rejected in the Salon Nacional 1974)
hit me hard. I could not continue being a naïve child. I was forced to change, to see
and to understand other positions. Maybe this un-art that we have spoken a lot
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about is not just in the art world, it is also in my personal life, in my intimate life, in
my social relationships, in everything. It’s like those from marketing would say,
how I accommodate a sector, how I take up social positioning. Un has covered my
whole life and encompasses my art as well. In a very reductionist way it is—and
this will concur with what Luis Camnitzer says: “a visual guerrilla.” With very few
theoretical elements, with very few resources and the managing of very few
material elements, I attack and act. Yes, it’s a way to attack. Yes, maybe I am that
visual guerrilla that Camnitzer talks about. It is how you can achieve a lot with very
little. I came to that un lacking things, with myopia, without well trained hands,
with very few economic resources, family power, etc. Now it’s a habit, a mental
dynamic and it still continues to be. Now it’s a constant.
A little more towards what I want in life, because I never was a big star, un
is like having my own land where I can be a king, my little territory, although it’s
not at the top or at the peak of the grand circles. It is a small spot where I am not
vulnerable. Making this analogy, it’s like artistic judo or aikido. That is the little
segment where I am not vulnerable. It’s easier with un. Finally, that which could
appear beautiful is simply a tactic.
VMR: I am very interested in this tactic of un-art. Once you defined yourself as a
tangential artist and, in order to be able to better explain the notion of un-art, you
said, I am a tangential artist in the sense that I form part of artistic practices, part of
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the art institutions, but always in the same way as the tangential I point towards
other directions. Your tactic of un-art creates a critical dialogue with the political
art strategies from the 60’s and 70’s and provokes, together with May ’68 and
Woodstock, a distinct way to relate yourself to the practice of art. And it’s not as if
this is before or after. I think of the term un-art as a precise term as it is very close
to the definition that Camnitzer made of you as the most important political
conceptual living artist from Latin America. Your work acts within the hegemonic
art circles and institutions in so much as you make your art in order to demonstrate
the limits of these institutions.
AC: Although many years have passed, we return to the fact that I undertake
elements a posteriori. Everything that you have mentioned to me makes me see,
and it should be said without a second thought, helps me. I am going to say it like
this openly, I have a secret weapon. I like that this conversation has a hard-line
style. I have a secret weapon, and it is that the value of my discourse is not so much
in what may be valid in art circles but in that the elements of my discourse are
valid, real, and concrete in society and specifically in Colombian society.
My Cabeza has weight not so much because it’s ephemeral art or anti-art or
because of those things that at any rate turned out badly; it counts because of Carlos
Lleras, because he was a well-known person. And Coca-Cola, because of a good
design and the coincidence of the eight letters, counts because almost everyone
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drinks Coca-Cola. Artistic discourse has rarefied so much these days, which makes
it very sophisticated. My work counts because the discourse that I use to disguise it
as art is valid without art. Jumping forward a little to the current time of my
workshops, I am reaching an extreme: Creativity exists without needing anything
from the art world, but art does need creativity although sometimes it doesn’t have
it. I believe that the artistic value of my art comes from outside of art.
VMR: But then this territory which you talk about would be the territory of art,
that which allows you to communicate, because…
AC: Sorry to interrupt you, it’s just that I have the phrase. When we spoke about
Proyecto 500, which consisted of simple talks in small places not directed towards
the general public, although sometimes it was, I have thought about this. My
discourse is only of value in the art world. If I mention my discourse in the street or
in a bus and I am a crazy person.
VMR: You utilize art as a place…
AC: Where I am believed and respected.

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VMR: Because of this it could be called un-art. With the letters of Colombia and
Coca-Cola where one alters the other, there can’t be “un” without “art” and vice
versa. This relevance or this specificity, in one field or the other, is only possible
due to the relationship of mutual necessity and of negation between un and art. This
is equivalent to what Camnitzer spoke about: You work with the institution but
always redirecting the work in a tangential way.
AC: Yes that’s true, but neither can I be too heroic.
VMR: I say this because this strategy streamlines a way to intervene in our society
but in doing so and serving the art institution, it also speaks of this institution:
questioning it, criticizing it, re-proposing it.
AC: You mention very real things. In regard to Proyecto 500, I thought: If I placed
myself in the academic world, everyone would laugh; they would throw tomatoes
at me because my discourse isn’t structured for the academic world. If I say it in a
public plaza I am just another crazy person. However, disguised or with an artistic
posture, people listen and say, “This person says very interesting things.” That is,
the un doesn’t exist on its own, on the one hand. A more concrete example: When I
would collect change, I was a crazy person who would go from shop to shop asking
for change. I was crazy and if I would have left them in my house, like what
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happened to me a long time ago with the Marlboro cigarette packets, I was just a
maniac, a crazy with cigarette packets or with change or who knows what other
absurd thing to accumulate. But I take this absurdness with me to the art world and,
as you know, the un saves me. It’s a little like that type of enjoyable schizophrenia
that exists in my life; if I couldn’t put my things in the art world I would be a crazy
man, but I manage to put them in the art world and they are applauded. However,
maybe they applaud me in the art world because of the exotic that I bring to it. I
think the word “exotic” isn’t the most appropriate but has some truth to it. Maybe if
what I do wasn’t so exotic in the art world, I would be lost among all the average
people who are out there. If I was an erotic or abstract or an orthodox conceptual
artist or one of those who work in the media, I would be equally mediocre like all
the other mediocrities. It’s this dichotomy: I am worthwhile in the art world
because of what I bring to it; furthermore, people expect that I will make or do
something strange or different or something exotic; I have this as a characteristic. If
I showed common or regular things in the art world, I would not be accepted.
VMR: Your work today is directed towards non-artistic spaces and is
fundamentally oriented to working with people from the city, with whom you
develop creative workshops. What reflection a posteriori, have you made about
this?
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AC: Leaving the interview and our conversation as continuous, I began the
workshops in 1990. In 1998 I publicly presented the results of the workshops, and
not that long ago, when I was writing up my résumé, I took out my last
presentations of these workshops that were among my individual presentations, and
I wrote a separate chapter of work presentations of the workshops. Up until 1998
these workshops were secondary. From 1998 they began to be my work, and now,
more modestly, I say that they are my activity. This happened to me like it happens
to everyone, that is, all of us who are more than fifty years old; now the world is
changing a lot. I will explain myself. Think of how all those people worked to
construct East Germany and, well, now East Germany doesn’t exist. I was a
Manichaeist and all the dogmas ceased to exist. For the people who believed in
ideologies all their utopias ceased to exist. The world is changing a lot and I believe
that the art world is also changing a lot. For example, the creator of works still acts
but doesn’t exist. In the contemporary world, there are still the phenomena of
things but their base, their essence, doesn’t exist. Just like now there are a lot of
people who are professionals who have to start another profession or focus on other
fields of knowledge or activity. I believe that the artist model or the scheme that
was around when I started, the super star, this cannot be offered up anymore. So
it’s not just my process, my fifty-one years and my decadence. An artist, the very
same art in inverted commas, has changed. I think the big museums have begun to
be obstacles in the cities, although they look very pretty

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APPENDIX 2
Public Interview1
Antonio Caro & Victor Manuel Rodriguez
Moderator: Andrés Corredor
Bogotá, May 7, 2002
Andrés Corredor: I have been invited to facilitate this conversation. One more in
the Public Interview project that has been carried out by Antonio Caro and Victor
Manuel Rodriguez and which has been centered on art and politics, conceptualism,
and the character of contemporary art. As a methodology to carry out this exercise,
we will work in two parts: The first is a brief introduction by Antonio Caro. Further
along, Antonio Caro and Victor Manuel Rodriguez will present a joint process that
consists of an assessment of art practices in Antonio’s artistic projects and the
visual and cultural studies perspectives that shape Victor Manuel’s interest. The
second part will introduce some questions from the audience. Slides of Antonio
Caro’s work will also be projected. These don’t necessarily refer to the themes that
we will discuss in this exercise, but in some way they help give direction to the
activity. I introduce Antonio Caro.
1
Published in Prácticas Artísticas/Enfoques Contemporáneos, ed. Victor Manuel Rodriguez
(Bogotá: UNal-IDCT, 2003), pp. 49-70.
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Antonio Caro: Before I start this conversation, I want to say hello to Mr. Douglas
Crimp. I am so glad he is here with us in this difficult time for Colombia.2 Please
give a round of applause to Mr. Crimp. On the other hand, I wish to greet a good
friend of Colombia’s, who has suffered the unspeakable in airplanes and airports to
arrive in this horrible city, at the frightening altitude of 2,640 meters. I speak of
Gerardo Mosquera, who also deserves fervent applause. This is nice, so let’s
continue with applause. Without knowing much about culture, politics, and those
types of things, I would say that she comes from Bogotá’s cultural antipodes: Ms
Adrianne Samos, who is from Panama and who is also suffering from Bogotá’s
frightening altitude. Give her a warm welcome.
I go through this protocol so that I can loosen up a little first—I am very
nervous—and second, because I consider it to be the right thing to do. I also wish
to give many thanks to David Lozano, so that he doesn’t get embarrassed. I give
many thanks to the National University’s Division of Cultural Events, which
provided this space, and to everyone who worked in that office for up to more than
ten hours a day to make this forum possible. I give much gratitude to this Division
and make a gibe because this event was not coordinated by the Art School. It has
been planned by the Division, and this says a lot. Fortunately, the phenomenon of
art is bulging out of its own limits and this meeting shows this. All of which is very
important.
2
Antonio Caro’s English left as is.
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I have to thank you for your presence. I hope that each one of you has come
here to construct your own interests about the problematic of art today. I hope that
they are dissimilar interests because you are all different people and come from
different disciplines and positions and, as such, your interests cannot be the same. I
wish to highlight that here, unlike the usual four cats that we always see in the
exhibitions, there are people that come from other disciplines, other professional
fields, like Elvia Mejia, who produced a TV show about my work in the time of
Tiempo Libre. Finally, I should highlight the work of Victor Manuel Rodriguez in
the conception, coordination, and the development of this event. 3
After the good things that Jaime Cerón said about me, I should remain quiet.
But, well, I will spoil it. The fact that I am here is not casual. Mr. Rodriguez said to
me, “We want to invite you to a theoretical meeting. You are going to be in a
conference.” In the beginning I was happy to have been invited, later I felt inhibited
because of what a conference requires: a theoretical framework, research,
argument, constructive thought, etc. I felt inhibited because of the methodological
difficulties and because of qualms: this Yo-Yo,4 I speak of myself, I of me, and me
of I. I think this is now old-fashioned. This is the same, however within an
interview; my egocentrism is being held back; it’s more discreet. Furthermore, the
3
The interview took place within the context of the Conference Prácticas Artísticas/Enfoques
Contemporáneos [Artistic Practices/Contemporary Approaches] which took place in the
Universidad Nacional de Colombia in May, 2002. It had Douglas Crimp as a keynote speaker and
invited artists, critics and curators from Latin America such as Gerardo Mosquera, Adrienne Samos,
José Alejandro Restrepo, and Jaime Cerón.
4
Here Antonio plays with the word “yo”. Yo in Spanish means “I” and hence he plays with the
movement of a yo-yo and the various ways in which he is about to talk about himself.
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interview prevents me, as Jaime Cerón did, as others have done, from writing up
my talk. So, the mode of this interview comes from my mental laziness and it’s for
my own comfort.
I got to know Victor Manuel Rodriguez some years ago when he was a
professor of art and art history at the University of Los Andes Bogotá), and he
invited me many times to talk with his students. A year ago, returning to his studies
in the States, he looked for me: I want to talk to you, he said. Later, during a two-
three month period, he interviewed me and this formed – or filled a gap – part of
the dissertation that Victor Manuel is writing.
Later, with a base in pedagogic processes that Victor Manuel had developed
in Ecuador—where he has been many times, he wanted me to be involved in a
workshop program. Finally, thanks to him, I went to Ecuador. But before going, we
had another conversation and spoke about this possibility. In this process, the
premise of a change of context ensured that the reflection was different. We worked
on the theoretical framework for a public interview that he was going to do with me
in Quito Ecuador) as part of his presentation of particular types and expressions in
current Latin American art.
It was an interesting process for me as it made me reflect on many things. I
want to state to you that, to assure that the interview was not unintelligible, the
Ecuadorian audience needed to have some background information about my work
to understand Victor Manuel’s questions and my answers. Here we presume that

347
you know things about me; many of you were born when I was beginning as an
artist, and some of the girls here hadn’t even been born. Therefore, we presume that
you know things about me, but in Ecuador you don’t. We had to fill this gap with
some background information so that the interview would be understandable.
I am losing track of things, but what I want to mention is that it was very
important for me to decide, for example, what work or piece of mine could be
understood by the Ecuadorian public. We went through my “extremely varied”
work. We spent much time searching, as there was so much that we didn’t know
where to start. Finally, we found a piece that is presented here, in let’s say a small
context, which turned out to be comprehendible and had references to Ecuador. It
was a piece on the Gran Colombia.5
I am talking a lot about this because I want to mention the first important
point: For me, dialogue with Victor Manuel has been positive. Many years ago, I
gave a small slap, which was rather a symbolic act, to a critic. Today I publicly
declare that an approximation with a theorist has been positive for my work. I,
under oath, declare publicly that talking with a person who comes from art theory
has been positive for me. In this dialogue, I have found points of analysis for my
own work. It’s the first thing that, I publicly declare, theoretical dialogue has been
5
Gran Colombia was name given for the government to the newly born nation after the
Independence Wars which included in its territory what is known today as Colombia, Venezuela and
Ecuador.
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important for my own reflections; including giving me the ability to theorize, well,
in so far as an artist can theorize.
It is important to keep in mind this coupling of words, “reflect” and
“theorize.” Thanks to Victor Manuel, I could analyze the reading of my work in
accordance with a specific context and have evaluating elements to decide, this one
yes, that one no, this one yes, that one no. This happened in Bogotá, previous to
arriving in Quito. Fortunately, in Quito everything worked out for us and we had
another favorable experience in Guayaquil, that is, we have an established dialogue.
Today, so that we don’t begin to talk about a private conversation, Andrés Corredor
is with us. He is going to take on a special role because he is going to ensure that
this private dialogue is opened to you all. What we want to do is construct a fluid
dialogue, initially from here, and we hope this is a positive experience for you all,
not just as listeners but so that we can achieve, with your participation, a real
interaction.
ACO: According to the proposal put forward by Antonio in the preparation of this
conversation, he is going to ask Victor Manual a question.
AC: OK, brilliance doesn’t last for me more than 7 minutes; for this reason, I adore
television commercials; they are marvelous. It is just 30 seconds and with that you
are satisfied. One question that was not brought up and was thought up 20 minutes
349
ago, a question that I have also been asking myself for a long time and perhaps one
of you is thinking it, Victor Manuel: Why am I here?
Victor Manuel Rodriguez: I can respond to that question only partially. I could
say why we invited you and you should state why you are here, that is, why you
accepted the invitation. I would only say that we think it’s important to present this
collaborative project between cultural studies and art practice. We are particularly
interested in your early works, specifically Coca-Cola Colombia, the pieces on
Manuel Quintín Lame, and some others. When I first began to talk with Antonio,
my interest, as he says, “Was to fill a gap that existed in my doctoral dissertation,”
and this consisted of exploring the reception of conceptualism in Latin America.
My interest in Caro’s work is part of a broader project on how some
theories, which come from history and criticism of art, gave shape to Latin
American artistic practices in the 60s and 70s, and many Latin American artists
produced very important responses to this artistic and cultural rhetoric. I have been
working on the reception of American formalism in relation to the work of Beatriz
Gonzalez and on the rhetoric of the artistic avant-garde dream of joining life and art
in relation to other Latin American artists. In the case of Antonio, I maintain that he
is one of a group of Latin American artists who anticipated forms of cultural
critique, fracturing the binary and oppositional character that art history has used to
frame Latin American art in the sixties. These artists anticipated means of cultural
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action that, we can say, were close to contemporary strategies and seek to
counteract the strength of the hegemonic discourses on culture and art. I see
Antonio’s work as a critical dialogue with this art rhetoric, with the art institution,
and with the very practice of art. This is basically my general interest, and therefore
we considered it important that he be here. You said when we invited you that we
could have invited anyone, but your work allows us to mobilize these questions in a
very important way.
In regard to the reception of Latin American conceptualism and Antonio
Caro’s project, I am interested in advancing a dialogue with Latin American art
history and criticism, particularly with two essential theses that have oriented the
debate about this topic. I refer, first, to the thesis of resistance that is now famous
among us, written by Marta Traba. I also refer to the later thesis of Mari Carmen
Ramírez that maintains that Traba’s interpretation has prevented us from including
the works of Latin American artists within the major trends of North-Atlantic
conceptualism. I argue instead that Latin American conceptualism appropriated the
North-Atlantic critique of modernity in order to explore its very colonial condition
and the ways in which art and the art institution were very important parts in the
creation of this condition. The dialogue with Antonio demonstrates that these
artistic works put forward the problem of the rhetoric of art in a way that is slightly
different from how Marta Traba and Maria Carmen Ramírez see it.
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These are certain topics that have oriented our discussion. The first involves
the way in which Antonio Caro perceives the reception of conceptualism. There are
already various genealogies on this subject. Recently, Alvaro Barrios’ book
Orígenes del arte conceptual en Colombia [Origins of Conceptual Art in
Colombia] was published. Other discussion topics include the relationship between
Antonio’s art practices and the art institution, specifically the circulation and
validation of artistic production processes, given that there is a strong interest in the
way in which art criticism and art history determine these processes. An anecdote
always appears among us about the work Defienda su Talento [Defend your
Talent]. As he already remarked, Antonio Caro gave a tactful slap in the face to a
critic. We have always thought of it as a metaphor to elaborate on the way in which
the work of Antonio positions itself in respect to the major art circles.
In a recent interview we spoke about the revolutionary imaginary in the
work of Antonio. We started with an analysis of the Cuban revolution, the reaction
to Antonio’s work from the political left, and the conservatism that existed in the
art world at the end of the 70s—Woodstock, rock, the hippie movement, etc., that
are, according to Antonio, the imaginaries that, in some way, have given shape to
his work.
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These are some of the reasons for our invitation. Antonio’s t-shirt says it all:
Todo está muy Caro.6 You are here not as an paradigmatic artist; you are here as an
artist that can help us answer a series of questions that, from my point of view and
perhaps from the broadest point of view of cultural studies, are important when
talking about current artistic practices. This focus has been important as it has
prevented us from falling into an analytical methodology that attempts to, for
example, situate Antonio Caro within the genealogy of conceptualism in Latin
America. That is, we have distanced ourselves from what art criticism and art
history have said about his work, and we have taken a broader focus. This focus has
shown us that instead of associating Latin American Conceptualism with the big
genealogies of the artistic avant-garde, maybe it would be important to explore the
way that Caro’s works puts forward an analysis of how his work appropriates
international conceptualism to explore the narrations of the Colombian nation,
especially in two projects: the project of Coca-Cola Colombia and of Manuel
Quintín Lame.
AC: We should give Andrés a turn, but he is in deep concentration. I forget many
things; we have to make this enjoyable, like those old gatherings in Bogotá,
6
Antonio’s surname, Caro, means expensive in Spanish “Todo está muy Caro” can be read as
“Everything is very expensive” which can be used as “Everything is very Caro (Antonio)”.
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because it appears as if Mr. Rogelio Salmona7 forgot to put lighting in this
building.
Before this conversation, there was a third conversation or various
discussions for an interview that was to be published, God help us, in the magazine
Valdez, with the theme of revolution. When we arrived at Coca-Cola Colombia, it
was very interesting for me to talk with Victor Manuel about this piece. I am not
going to reconstruct the process, but for the first time I said something—seen from
an artistic point of view it is very stupid but very important. I said: we artists are
such formalists, we always think within limits that are named style or structure and
we don’t realize that we are working in a social medium.
For the first time, twenty five years later, thanks to conversations with
Victor Manuel, I discovered that I had made Coca-Cola Colombia not because the
words were similar or because Colombia and Coca-Cola both have eight letters or
because it was easy to mix them up. No, none of that! I realized that I made that
work because—personally—I was in a particular moment. I was looking at things
in a different way, and with this look I saw what was in front of me. I am myopic, I
can’t see much but it was something like this. I realized through talking with Victor
Manuel that this specificity of fine arts, the object, the form, and all of that
7
Colombian architect who was born in Paris in 1929 and died in Bogotá in 2007. He is considered
to be the most notable Colombian working on architecture and urbanism. He moved to Paris in 1948
and studied architecture with Charles Édouard Jeanneret-Gris, called Le Corbusier. His use of
elements such as water, brick, circular areas, terraces and the play of indoors and outdoors areas are
inspired by pre-Columbian constructions. In particular, he continuously referred to his interest in the
squares of Teotihuacan (Azteca), Uxmal y Chichen Itza (Maya) as an example of his use of water as
connector of different areas and the ceremonial character of the terraces.
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represent a fallacy. I am very antiquated, even here in this university. I took a
course in clay modeling. I, who am from this old tradition, had a bias for form and
specifically for the medium. But one is a social subject who reacts to social
phenomena and gives answers, and my answers are formal and material, but this
does not mean that the formal and the material are the most important aspects.
What is important are the context, the phenomenon, and the response. I realized
this in that interview, and from that moment I came to believe that as an artist you
are just a person who responds to social phenomena in specific social contexts. One
makes a type of formal response that people observe, value, and then later it has an
importance in the artistic field. One always responds to social phenomena—sorry
for my stupid comment but it’s the truth. One gives formal responses to social
phenomena because one is a social being; the limitation of formalism is that one
believes that formalism is an entire world, but the world begins after formalism.
I have already mentioned two positive axioms that I discovered in these
conversations. Having discussions with people from other disciplines, with other
visions, is enriching, and it helps me to reflect. The words return: “reflect,”
“theorize,” because everybody reflects, even artists reflect. What happens is that
some artists don’t have the capacity to construct. I put this doubt on the table:
Theory helps an artist reflect but, due to many factors, some artists don’t manage to
construct theory.
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ACO: We do consider that within conceptualism the same discursive fact can
constitute itself as an artistic response but, on the other hand, we believe this
exercise of the Public Interview that reflects on the artistic problematic affects in
some way the relationship between the artist and the institutions that validate the
production of art.
AC: You represent a third person in discord, hopefully the third in harmony. For
me the most beautiful part of this meeting is that hopefully, not for me but for other
people here, in this forum, it helps you, the assistants, and the “audience” to
construct your own focus on contemporary art. Although the dialogue that I have
with Victor Manuel is positive on a personal and disciplinary level, what interests
me are you: the “audience.” For example, distributing pieces of paper, that is a
practice of mine that could be stupid; I try to get close to the “audience.”
Now that on the Internet there are very complex discussions on art that are
only for beginners, I worry about the “audience.” It could be that this dialogue is
very positive and good for me and for Victor Manuel’s specific field, but the most
important is that it is helpful for the “audience,” sorry for being rude with you
people. For me the problem is crucial. What I discuss with Victor is useful for me
on a personal level. I hope that it helps me communicate better with all these
people who are so rudely called the “audience.”

356
VMR: I would like to put forward a question that allows us to concentrate on
Antonio’s work. I remember that in one of our conversations you mentioned that
your work wasn’t anti-art, it wasn’t contra-art, but rather it was “UN-Art.”
AC: We must make a thematic or linguistic definition of “UN,” to state what it
isn’t as apart from what it is.
VMR: You mentioned that the term “UN” comes from English. I believe it puts
forward interesting themes to approach the form in as much as the work relates the
practice of art to politics. It puts forward a position that isn’t exactly against, that is,
that doesn’t situate itself in a dialectic or oppositional way to the art system. “UN-
Art” reveals this position.
AC: Obviously I don’t speak perfect English, but the concept is taken from
English; it isn’t “U.N.,” the Universidad Nacional, but “UN.” One must respect
this. At an anecdotal level, I heard about the “UN” concept when I worked in a
publicity agency and I read an article about it. It is a serious phenomenon in
publicity, it appears to have gone out of style, but it was a very interesting
phenomenon in publicity, “UN.” Coca-Cola has always had its rival, Pepsi-Cola,
and both spend a lot of money in attacking one another because there is a high level
of cola consumption, but marketing strategists discovered that there are people that
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drink neither of these drinks and this sector is “UN-cola” people. This was very
famous in the cola wars. The Coca-Cola Company created Sprite, the UN-cola.
This is something very serious. I read it, I repeat, when I was working in publicity.
I liked the concept “UN” and it appears to reverberate well with who I am. I
even think that in my personal life. I am “UN.” I was here many years ago, in the
very traditional academy that the National University Art School offered, and later
I had to leave to make money. I ended up working in a publicity agency. There I
learned very important things about communication and how to manage the media,
which have been essential to my work, both in composition and in ideas. This
notion of “UN” is very interesting for me. Because I obviously couldn’t be
Obregón, Botero, Negret, or Ramírez, I looked for another market sector, which is
the “UN” sector, and I moved in that sector. This is my strategy. I feel like it’s a
publicity strategy, and in this little sector, up until now, I am King, and nothing
uglier than I has appeared. I am saying this in a very informal, personal way. I took
on this publicity concept of “UN,” and it’s there where I move.
VMR: Once you said to me that your work wasn’t one thing or the other, that it
was the complete opposite. I would like it if we could think about this a bit as it
appears to situate your work in areas that interest us: the slap to a critic, your
resistance to sell your pieces, the way in which you work have been inserted into
the art circles. “Un-Art,” we said, is art; that is, it is art as it circulates and is valued
358
as such. But we also mentioned that “UN” established a critical relationship with
the art institution. You said, “Yes, of course, my work isn’t one thing or the other;
it’s the complete opposite.” I think that this statement illustrates the ways in which
your insert your work within the art field. About this, you mentioned that your
work was tangential because although it passed by it, it only brushed the field of
art; that your work has always had another direction. I think that all of these
statements demonstrate particular politics towards art practice in which you
recognize that your work is dealing with those institutional practices that promote
and value artworks and put them out to circulate, and they give them the name of
art. I continue answering your first question, that of why am I here?
AC: I am in a forum talking about my artistic practice. It can’t be denied that I am
in the art world and that I move within that world. I remember in the Proyecto 500
talks, people listened to me because they had been previously invited to an artistic
event. However, if I walk into the classroom next door where some scientists are
talking, I would be an uneducated person, rude and, as well as stupid, crazy. You
are all listening to me because I am included in this forum’s program. I hope that
you feel that my words are honest: that I am speaking the truth and nothing more
than the truth, but I cannot attempt to construct theory and this is part of the game, I
am here making jokes, a clown with this t-shirt, giving out pieces of paper, etc.
359
I am here because, among other things, I enjoy it, as it’s my area and it’s
where I am listened to; in other places I am not listened to and they don’t even
make an effort to understand me. I am here responding: first, because I want to be
here and, second, because you pay attention to what I say. I don’t understand how,
but you do. This is the game. I make jokes so that people don’t tire, but try to say
something intelligent so that you say, “Oh! How brilliant!” Being a little bit
annoying but making sure that I am not thrown out of the place is my position. I am
taking my time, not being concise with my words, but it’s a tactic that has a
strategy. I am here because I like it, I am here because you listen to me and, finally,
we are going to say something romantic, because I like this and because I believe
that the last utopia that hasn’t totally fallen is art. However, I can’t take the right
path because I am myopic, I am not coordinated and, finally, taking off my mask in
front of all of you, because I am like this. If one day I win the lottery, I am going to
be a fat man dressed with a tie, but for now I am like this and this is my place in the
market. What the big multinationals fear is a change in logo, of image; one must do
this with tranquility, very well thought out, and so, although I would like to sell
watercolors, I cannot be a watercolorist. I gave myself this image and I must
continue to play with it. My God! Is this a forum or I am in a session of
psychoanalysis?
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VMR: You mentioned the possibility of talking about yourself as if the character
Antonio Caro was talking. What would you say in regard to this?
AC: All of this has been spontaneously planned. We wanted to give a talk like what
they do on the radio when one must not answer to everything or you lose. Up until
now we have managed to make sure that I don’t speak a lot about my works, and
this is good. However, you place me in the dialectic or in the dichotomy of the
possibility of the person or the personality. My personality in the street tries to be
nice and pleasant, but part of the artist game is being a personality. I don’t know
right now what would be tactically better, to be the person or the personality. We
return to schizophrenia. The schizophrenia is the division, so… am I crazy?
VMR: I think that this duality is what allows you to be involved in these processes
and also criticize them; that is, it is the same situation as “UN-Art,” where one
makes art and at the same time also uses it as a category. I would like for us to open
this up to the audience. As we ask you, your questions must be written down.
Audience: You, who are so ugly, how come you are always with such beautiful
girls?
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AC: Because I am not attractive or beautiful or young, nor do I have qualities or
resources, etc., I have in my daily life, a defect that is very badly looked upon by
the youth of today. I am intense. So my apparent “success” with women is due to
my being an “UN-lover.”
Audience: What role should art schools play?
AC: When I began this talk, I highlighted the fact that this talk was supported by
the Division of Cultural Events and that it wasn’t organized by the Art School. I am
not a professor in an art school because of a simple fact, I don’t have a degree. I
studied some things—it sounds funny but its true—in the three and a half years that
I studied in this university. For one year and a half I didn’t really study and in the
two years that I was studying, I only studied one and a half semesters, so I am not a
professor because I don’t have a degree.
I think the same thing happens in social organizations as happens to human
beings. Just as species have mechanisms to survive, the educational institutions
have their own. What should we do so that we are perpetual professors? Demand
the title which allows us to be professors. It is an institutional problem. Although in
many things I am very conventional, I also consider that I am a person. I must
borrow an English word, “anti-establishment,” and the education seen from this
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anti-establishment point of view is just a way that the system uses to perpetuate
itself.
VMR: I would like it if you read this question.
AC: A suicide.
VMR: No. I would like you to read it because it is written in the style of Coca-
Cola Colombia.
AC: Why do you think you are Colombian; is it useful to be Colombian? I have an
immediate response. I am Colombian because yesterday I lost my Colombian
identity card number 19.120.898 Bogotá). Whoever finds it and returns it, thank
you very much. That is, it’s a judicial administrative reason. A gentleman, who is
not here, spoke about some things this morning; he said that we still need to
construct a concept of nation, so, in order not to enter into politics, I prefer to give a
stupid and foolish answer. I am Colombian because up until yesterday I had the
Colombian identity card number 19.120.898 Bogotá).
Is it useful to be Colombian? It would appear not to be. I have a lot of
friends who are happy—not many but at least five, I swear, who are happy with the
constitutional possibility of being able to have double nationality, and right now
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they are in Europe with Spanish passports as they are children of Spaniards. Borges
has already said that being Colombian is a question of faith. There is some
romanticism that compels me to say, yes, it is beautiful being Colombian, although
it may not be very practical.
Let’s analyze what it is to be Colombian: People from Providence Island are
Colombian. They are black, 1.90 meters tall, speak English, and profess the Baptist
religion. Owing to a lack of fortune, due to a political issue, the island belongs to
Colombia. Colombians are also indigenous gentlemen Murui Muinane—Huitotos
in the colonial definition—who live in the Amazon and are unfortunate enough to
live in Colombian territory, a territory hit by the war on cocaine. So, Colombia is a
legal term; I don’t know how to respond in political terms.
Don’t think that I am very sensitive or very wise, nothing like that, but once
a poet said something very beautiful about Colombia, not about Colombians—pay
attention to this little difference. One thing is the physical territory, the geographic
space, and the other thing is the inhabitants. Aurelio Arturo said a long time ago—
giving this a literary reference—that Colombia was country of countries where
green is all the colors.
Audience: Can you broaden the concept or the antecedents of the Manuel Quintín
Lame project?
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AC: I am going to respond anecdotally. I worked in a bookstore where I was paid
minimum wage and always, every month, I had to find money that I didn’t have
because I consumed more books than what I could buy with my salary. After
reading a review in a magazine that I liked, a book about Quintín Lame arrived,
which interested me, which I adored. I said to myself, I can use this subject. We
conceptualists were—this has now gone out of fashion—utilitarian.
Psychoanalysis, confessions. I said, “This is a good subject. I am going to make a
piece about it.” In the signature of Manuel Quintín Lame, I found the element that I
needed to construct the piece. This was my first contact with Manuel Quintín
Lame.
Afterwards, life dictated that I live on various occasions with an indigenous
community on a daily basis, sharing their usual and ordinary life. In my artistic
activities I repeated the signature of Manuel Quintín Lame, and the practice of
repeating the signature made me reflect and think about it. I want to make a little
parenthesis and mention, one of the things that I discovered in my talks with Victor
Manuel Rodriguez. I never, at least in my personal case, had a theoretical basis to
constructing my work. A piece usually comes thanks to God or by luck. Not very
many ideas come to me, but the pieces arrive first, and later the theoretical
reflection—this is very important. The Manuel Quintín Lame piece came to me
casually and today, due to my personal experiences and due to repeating it so many
times and because of speaking about it so many times, I have a lot of information
365
and opinions about it, but maybe the best answer is the one that I gave a long time
ago about this same issue: The Manuel Quintín Lame piece is good not so much
because of me or my work, but rather due to the importance of Manuel Quintín
Lame. It is really the most important piece that I have done.
Audience: What does Antonio Caro think about the validity of continuing to think
of Latin American identity in the middle of extreme globalization, on one hand,
and, on the other hand, considering the fact that its more and more common that an
artist is a nomad and lives in various cultures at the same time?
AC: OK, I am Colombian because I was born of Colombian parents and in
Colombian territory, in what is considered Latin America; therefore, as a person, I
am Latin American. Sometimes I like to think about or resolve things as an
ordinary person because the same problem can be put to an artist or somebody who
engages in another activity. In the essence of the question, the word “artist” is
redundant, so musician Fabiola Zuluaga would have to renounce her dear land of
Cúcuta in order to play in Europe. Renounce your nationality, Mr. Automobiles,
Mr. Montoya. And the soccer players? Sometime we think that the specificity of
being an artist is like being very special or like having seven eyes or whatever. The
same problems could affect a scientist, an athlete, a narco-trafficker, who is a type

366
of businessman. Many Latin American human beings, who are not specifically
artists, could ask this question, what is it to be a Latin American?
I speak as a simple person; we are in a period where globalization is
indicating that some mental confinements and guidelines are being re-drawn.
Borges, who had great impact in the twentieth century, was maybe the most
thoroughly Latin American. It’s not as if I read a lot of poetry, but there is a line
from Borges that says: My grandfather fought in Junín. How much more Latin
American can you get than this? But Borges’ bones are in Switzerland.
Audience: You, who have managed to, with your thought and your work, be
categorized as an art “star,” don’t you feel a distance from what you call your
audience?
AC: No.
Audience: If you had the opportunity to be, appear as, or become a woman, what
would be your attitude? Have you already done this?
AC: Silence). This question is too serious; it implies things that I do not know: sex
conditions, gender problems. Those who know say that young children, male or
female, up until 12 years old, are basically the same. The fact that there are female
367
guerillas is due to the fact that with firearms the slight physical inferiority that
women have is made relative. It is more efficient to have a female guerilla with
good vision than an old myopic man like me. The differences between women and
men highly trained in the Olympics oscillates between fifteen and thirty percent.
Women’s capacity to resist pain is very high; the exertion of giving birth is intense.
These are biological questions. Gender, among many things, is a cultural question.
Although I have many friends who are going through menopause and voluntarily
decided to not have children—I think I have seen from a biological point of view,
not from a political analysis of what young Colombians are going to have to go
through in ten years—in this hypothetical space of being a woman, this is all men’s
frustration. I would like to have a child. In daily life I would wear a skirt.
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APPENDIX 3
Manifesto Antropófago
Oswald de Andrade Revista de Antropofagia, Ano 1, No. 1, maio de 1928.)
Só a Antropofagia nos une. Socialmente. Economicamente. Filosoficamente.
Única lei do mundo. Expressão mascarada de todos os individualismos, de todos os
coletivismos. De todas as religiões. De todos os tratados de paz.
Tupi, or not tupi that is the question.
Contra todas as catequeses. E contra a mãe dos Gracos.
Só me interessa o que não é meu. Lei do homem. Lei do antropófago.
Estamos fatigados de todos os maridos católicos suspeitosos postos em drama.
Freud acabou com o enigma mulher e com outros sustos da psicologia impressa.
O que atropelava a verdade era a roupa, o impermeável entre o mundo interior e o
mundo exterior. A reação contra o homem vestido. O cinema americano informará.
Filhos do sol, mãe dos viventes. Encontrados e amados ferozmente, com toda a
hipocrisia da saudade, pelos imigrados, pelos traficados e pelos touristes. No país
da cobra grande.
Foi porque nunca tivemos gramáticas, nem coleções de velhos vegetais. E nunca
soubemos o que era urbano, suburbano, fronteiriço e continental. Preguiçosos no
mapa-múndi do Brasil.
Uma consciência participante, uma rítmica religiosa.

369
Contra todos os importadores de consciência enlatada. A existência palpável da
vida. E a mentalidade pré-lógica para o Sr. Lévy-Bruhl estudar.
Queremos a Revolução Caraiba. Maior que a Revolução Francesa. A unificação de
todas as revoltas eficazes na direção do homem. Sem n6s a Europa não teria sequer
a sua pobre declaração dos direitos do homem.
A idade de ouro anunciada pela América. A idade de ouro. E todas as girls.
Filiação. O contato com o Brasil Caraíba. Ori Villegaignon print terre. Montaig-ne.
O homem natural. Rousseau. Da Revolução Francesa ao Romantismo, à Revolução
Bolchevista, à Revolução Surrealista e ao bárbaro tecnizado de Keyserling.
Caminhamos..
Nunca fomos catequizados. Vivemos através de um direito sonâmbulo. Fizemos
Cristo nascer na Bahia. Ou em Belém do Pará.
Mas nunca admitimos o nascimento da lógica entre nós.
Contra o Padre Vieira. Autor do nosso primeiro empréstimo, para ganhar comissão.
O rei-analfabeto dissera-lhe : ponha isso no papel mas sem muita lábia. Fez-se o
empréstimo. Gravou-se o açúcar brasileiro. Vieira deixou o dinheiro em Portugal e
nos trouxe a lábia.
O espírito recusa-se a conceber o espírito sem o corpo. O antropomorfismo.
Necessidade da vacina antropofágica. Para o equilíbrio contra as religiões de
meridiano. E as inquisições exteriores.
Só podemos atender ao mundo orecular.

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Tínhamos a justiça codificação da vingança. A ciência codificação da Magia.
Antropofagia. A transformação permanente do Tabu em totem.
Contra o mundo reversível e as idéias objetivadas. Cadaverizadas. O stop do
pensamento que é dinâmico. O indivíduo vitima do sistema. Fonte das injustiças
clássicas. Das injustiças românticas. E o esquecimento das conquistas interiores.
Roteiros. Roteiros. Roteiros. Roteiros. Roteiros. Roteiros. Roteiros.
O instinto Caraíba.
Morte e vida das hipóteses. Da equação eu parte do Cosmos ao axioma Cosmos
parte do eu. Subsistência. Conhecimento. Antropofagia.
Contra as elites vegetais. Em comunicação com o solo.
Nunca fomos catequizados. Fizemos foi Carnaval. O índio vestido de senador do
Império. Fingindo de Pitt. Ou figurando nas óperas de Alencar cheio de bons
sentimentos portugueses.
Já tínhamos o comunismo. Já tínhamos a língua surrealista. A idade de ouro.
Catiti Catiti
Imara Notiá
Notiá Imara
Ipeju*
A magia e a vida. Tínhamos a relação e a distribuição dos bens físicos, dos bens
morais, dos bens dignários. E sabíamos transpor o mistério e a morte com o auxílio
de algumas formas gramaticais.

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Perguntei a um homem o que era o Direito. Ele me respondeu que era a garantia do
exercício da possibilidade. Esse homem chamava-se Galli Mathias. Comia.
Só não há determinismo onde há mistério. Mas que temos nós com isso?
Contra as histórias do homem que começam no Cabo Finisterra. O mundo não
datado. Não rubricado. Sem Napoleão. Sem César.
A fixação do progresso por meio de catálogos e aparelhos de televisão. Só a
maquinaria. E os transfusores de sangue.
Contra as sublimações antagônicas. Trazidas nas caravelas.
Contra a verdade dos povos missionários, definida pela sagacidade de um
antropófago, o Visconde de Cairu: – É mentira muitas vezes repetida.
Mas não foram cruzados que vieram. Foram fugitivos de uma civilização que
estamos comendo, porque somos fortes e vingativos como o Jabuti.
Se Deus é a consciênda do Universo Incriado, Guaraci é a mãe dos viventes. Jaci é
a mãe dos vegetais.
Não tivemos especulação. Mas tínhamos adivinhação. Tínhamos Política que é a
ciência da distribuição. E um sistema social-planetário.
As migrações. A fuga dos estados tediosos. Contra as escleroses urbanas. Contra os
Conservatórios e o tédio especulativo.
De William James e Voronoff. A transfiguração do Tabu em totem. Antropofagia.
O pater famílias e a criação da Moral da Cegonha: Ignorância real das coisas+ fala
de imaginação + sentimento de autoridade ante a prole curiosa.

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É preciso partir de um profundo ateísmo para se chegar à idéia de Deus. Mas a
caraíba não precisava. Porque tinha Guaraci.
O objetivo criado reage com os Anjos da Queda. Depois Moisés divaga. Que temos
nós com isso?
Antes dos portugueses descobrirem o Brasil, o Brasil tinha descoberto a felicidade.
Contra o índio de tocheiro. O índio filho de Maria, afilhado de Catarina de Médicis
e genro de D. Antônio de Mariz.
A alegria é a prova dos nove.
No matriarcado de Pindorama.
Contra a Memória fonte do costume. A experiência pessoal renovada.
Somos concretistas. As idéias tomam conta, reagem, queimam gente nas praças
públicas. Suprimarnos as idéias e as outras paralisias. Pelos roteiros. Acreditar nos
sinais, acreditar nos instrumentos e nas estrelas.
Contra Goethe, a mãe dos Gracos, e a Corte de D. João VI.
A alegria é a prova dos nove.
A luta entre o que se chamaria Incriado e a Criatura – ilustrada pela contradição
permanente do homem e o seu Tabu. O amor cotidiano e o modusvivendi
capitalista. Antropofagia. Absorção do inimigo sacro. Para transformá-lo em totem.
A humana aventura. A terrena finalidade. Porém, só as puras elites conseguiram
realizar a antropofagia carnal, que traz em si o mais alto sentido da vida e evita
todos os males identificados por Freud, males catequistas. O que se dá não é uma
373
sublimação do instinto sexual. É a escala termométrica do instinto antropofágico.
De carnal, ele se torna eletivo e cria a amizade. Afetivo, o amor. Especulativo, a
ciência. Desvia-se e transfere-se. Chegamos ao aviltamento. A baixa antropofagia
aglomerada nos pecados de catecismo – a inveja, a usura, a calúnia, o assassinato.
Peste dos chamados povos cultos e cristianizados, é contra ela que estamos agindo.
Antropófagos.
Contra Anchieta cantando as onze mil virgens do céu, na terra de Iracema, – o
patriarca João Ramalho fundador de São Paulo.
A nossa independência ainda não foi proclamada. Frape típica de D. João VI: –
Meu filho, põe essa coroa na tua cabeça, antes que algum aventureiro o faça!
Expulsamos a dinastia. É preciso expulsar o espírito bragantino, as ordenações e o
rapé de Maria da Fonte.
Contra a realidade social, vestida e opressora, cadastrada por Freud – a realidade
sem complexos, sem loucura, sem prostituições e sem penitenciárias do
matriarcado de Pindorama.
OSWALD DE ANDRADE Em Piratininga Ano 374 da Deglutição do Bispo
Sardinha."
* "Lua Nova, ó Lua Nova, assopra em Fulano lembranças de mim", in O Selvagem,
de Couto Magalhães
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APPENDIX 4
“Anthropophagus Manifesto”
Translated by Hélio Oiticica, 1972.
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VICTORMANUELRODRIGUEZDISS - Cold War Legacies Otherwise

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VICTORMANUELRODRIGUEZDISS - Cold War Legacies Otherwise

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Cold War Legacies Otherwise:

Latin American Art and Art History

Victor Manuel Rodriguez-Sarmiento

Submitted in Partial Fulfillment

Requirements for the Degree

Professor Douglas Crimp

Department of Art and Art History

Víctor Manuel Rodríguez-Sarmiento was born in Bogotá, Colombia, on

studying a joint major in History and Sociology, he graduated with a Bachelor of

Pedagógica Nacional. He received a British Council Fellowship to pursue graduate

studies in the History and Theory of Art (Twentieth Century) at Goldsmiths’

Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá, Colombia. In 1997, he received a Fulbright

Fellowship to undertake graduate studies in the Visual and Cultural Studies

department in 2000. The University of Rochester and University of Cornell

teaches courses in cultural studies at the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana and

participates in interdisciplinary cultural and artistic projects in Bogotá, Colombia.

I would like to express my deepest gratitude to Douglas Crimp for his

friendship, guidance and support in pursuing this project. Throughout my studies at

development of this project, Douglas was always enthusiastic, challenging and

supportive. He encouraged me to take risks and to truly apprehend the academic

and political significance of a cultural studies project which combines intellectual

School of Theory and Criticism Fellowship.

generous, providing me with information and material to expand my study of the

Castro-Gómez gave me the opportunity to present this work at various conferences

Andina Simón Bolívar (Quito, Ecuador) and Universidad Javeriana (Bogotá,

Colombia). They gave me invaluable feedback on my research and the opportunity

to share my concerns with students and colleagues. During my studies in Rochester

my family more than I could ever express. Maria Claudia Angel-Solano

accompanied me in developing my interest in the cultural field and becoming an art

practitioner and cultural activist. This project is dedicated to her memory.

leftist models of cultural production. Drawing on the work of Arturo Escobar, I

consider these struggles as part of developmentalism: a discursive formation that

Considering the consolidation of studies of Latin American art to be a

strategy of this discourse, I examine a group of artistic projects which, by using

strategies of appropriation, mimicry and cultural anthropophagy, among others,

resisted developmentalism and the modernist rhetoric of art history. In so doing,

they anticipated feminist, non-national, non-modern, and queer strategies and

explored other forms of subjectivity which enable the colonized to live in

In particular, I study the use of American formalism in Latin America in the

Hélio Oiticica (Brazil, 1937-1980), his revision of the Brazilian anthropophagite

Oiticica produced in New York through the creation of environments, installations

development of cultural studies in the Andean Region, calling attention to some

struggles about the global condition of modernity.

Chapter 1 The Artifices of Marble: Beatriz González’s

Chapter 2 The National Mummy: Antonio Caro’s Un-Art

Chapter 3 Covering the Land of the Present:

Chapter 4 Eroiticica 200

Chapter 5 “Thinking otherwise” otherwise: Towards a Critical

Appendix 1 Imaginaries of Revolution:

Appendix 2 Public Interview 343

Appendix 3 Manifesto Antropófago 368

Appendix 4 Anthropophagus Manifesto 374

Appendix 5 Illustrations 379

0.1 Pedro Manrique-Figueroa. Exhibition Catalogue. 1996. 379

0.2 Pedro Manrique-Figueroa, La vaca sagrada, collage,

0.3 Joaquín Torres-García, Upside-down Map, ink on paper, 1943. 380

0.4 Pedro Manrique-Figueroa, San Benito o mame nene que yo ta

0.5 Cover Prisma magazine. 1957. 381

1.1 Beatriz González, La última mesa [The Last Table], industrial

1.2 Beatriz González, Naturaleza casi muerta

1.3 Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez, Rendition of Breda,

1.4 Beatriz González, Rendición de Breda 4 (detail), oil on canvas,