Under the Same Sun: Art from Latin America Today

In her 2011 work Venn Diagrams (under the Spotlight), a forerunner to A ∩ B ∩ C, Amalia Pica uses overlapping circles of colored light to refer to her childhood in 1970s Argentina. During this period, the country’s military junta forbade the concept of intersection from being taught in elementary classes, concerned that even its mathematical representation might ultimately prompt citizens to conspire against it. In A ∩ B ∩ C, Pica invites performers to manipulate translucent colored shapes, producing new configurations that, emancipated from the historical anecdote, use abstraction and intersection as an invitation to reimagine forms of collaboration and community.

In this work, part of a larger series of “transitional structures,” Gabriel Sierra has built an armature in the passageway that connects two rooms. With its unfinished wood composition and simple geometric design, Sierra’s installation seems to expose the structural skeleton that exists beneath the museum’s walls, heightening the visitors’ awareness of their movement between the various spaces of building and exhibition.

One of a series of classified ads published in Brazilian and other newspapers that advocate absurd or impossible situations, Air Art Proposal of Composition of Colored Clouds in the Sky of New York articulates Paulo Bruscky’s plan to tint the metropolitan sky. A pioneer of mail art working with ephemeral materials, performance, and text, Bruscky produced the work during his first trip to New York, which was supported by a Guggenheim Memorial Foundation fellowship. Air Art Proposal follows a related ad, published in the newspaper Diario de Pernambuco, which appeals for “a chemist, meteorologist, or anyone capable of coloring a cloud.”

This work is made up of several slide projectors—objects redolent of the lecture hall—ranged around the gallery space, each one casting a rectangle of light onto the wall in front of it. Here, Uruguayan artist Luis Camnitzer points to the fact that art history is written by those in power, and tends to exclude certain accounts (including Latin America’s) from the canon around which the discipline organizes itself. The work’s empty projectors present viewers with a space within which to imagine and, potentially, write these “other” narratives.

The first of a series of indices for imaginary books, this alphabetical list invites the reader to mentally write a text in reverse, forging links between already-cited references to European, Latin American, and North American architecture, art, film, literature, music, and philosophy. Index also functions as a portrait of its maker as a young artist by detailing his aspirations, influences, and interests.

Artforhum appeared first in the form of a multicolored neon sign that was shown in the artist’s 1971 solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Since then, he has returned to it as a way to proclaim his discontent with the status of art as a product made by and for an elite. The work reads as a pun on Artforum, the name of the iconic art-industry journal. The resultant word, a contraction and corruption of the provocative question “Art for whom?,” suggests not only that the magazine has routinely ignored art produced outside the European-North American axis, but also invites the viewer to question his or her own cultural position.

This video documents Alfredo Jaar’s 1987 animation for an electronic billboard in New York City’s Times Square, which was originally commissioned by the Public Art Fund as a part of the Messages to the Public program. The 42-second sequence appeared alongside scheduled advertisements over the course of two weeks. Images of the flag and map of the United States are followed by declarations that contest the meaning of each. In this work, Jaar challenges the ethnocentrism of the United States, which habitually claims the identity of the entire American continent as its own.

In February 1979, Marta Minujín wrote to the McDonald’s Corporation to request sponsorship for a project: “I write to you because I have an idea to be made with hamburgers.” Minujín planned to build an iron replica of the Statue of Liberty and install it lying down in New York’s Battery Park, a dormant icon awaiting revival. Visitors would be able to enter the sculpture and traverse walkways inside it.

For Homeless Lamp, the Juice Sucker, Iván Navarro built a grocery cart out of fluorescent tubes and with it wandered the gallery-lined streets of Manhattan’s Chelsea district. The luminous sculpture evokes the work of Dan Flavin while also referencing an object commonly repurposed by homeless people for storage and transportation. Scored to the Mexican revolutionary song “Juan Sin Tierra” (John the Landless), the documentary video follows Navarro and a friend as they search for public electricity with which to illuminate the sculpture. Presenting the artist as a transient figure, Navarro offers a critique of the inequity of the art world and the difficulties faced by migrants in establishing connections with the place to which they have relocated.

The GCC of this sculpture's subtitle is a reference to "Gold Coast Customs," a 1929 verse by British poet Edith Sitwell that traces the "savage" underpinnings of so-called civilized society, a complex cultural relationship echoed in the work itself. In a reference to modern and contemporary architecture, Armando Andrade Tudela has sandblasted a geometric grid into the surface of a copper-colored mirror, which is then veiled by a wrinkled sheet of plastic similar to those used in architectural construction. The blurred reflections that result allude to the distorted and illusory aspects of modernity and "progress."

Adriano Costa reinterprets the approach and aesthetic of Neo-Concretism—specifically as manifest in the work of Brazilian artists such as Hélio Oiticica—in this array of gold-painted household towels. Blending random selection with geometrical composition, the artist disregards the objects’ original function to create a flexible “pre-sculpture.” The work’s color and title (Ouro Velho translates into English as “old gold”) evoke the monetary incentive for colonization, as well as the new materialism that has accompanied recent rapid economic growth in Brazil.

ContraTiempos documents the findings of Runo Lagomarsino’s wanderings under the Marquise, a concrete canopy that connects the different buildings in Oscar Niemeyer and Roberto Burle Marx’s 1954 Ibirapuera Park in São Paulo. Finding shapes that resembled the silhouette of South America in the cracks of the Marquise’s concrete pathways, Lagomarsino photographed the chance continental formations, displaying the images in a slideshow. For Lagomarsino, the fissures in the park’s modernist design serve as a metaphor for flaws in the modernist project as a whole, and for a colonialist “subconscious” that threatens to reemerge from beneath its damaged surface.

The photographs reproduced on the postcards in this work depict locations throughout Brazil—including motels, bars, churches, and stores—that are named after foreign continents, countries, regions, and cities; these include the seemingly incongruous Alaska, Baghdad, China, Jerusalem, Las Vegas, and Tokyo. While postcards typically represent the touristic desire to capture an “authentic” local experience, Rivane Neuenschwander’s images document the artist’s travels throughout Brazil while reflecting the desire of local communities to identify with an increasingly globalized culture.

In Donna Conlon and Jonathan Harker’s video, the style of which is reminiscent of a television advertisement, the U.S. national anthem is played on Panamanian beer bottles and cans. The brand names of the four beers featured—Atlas, Panama, Soberana (“Sovereign”), and Balboa (from Vasco Núñez de Balboa, a Spanish conquistador)—conjure images of Panama’s geography, history, and nationhood. While the video has a humorous aspect—the anthem ends with a toppling beer pyramid and a sonorous belch—the symbolic clash it stages between the United States and Panama offers a sharp critique of the former’s imperialist interventions into the latter through the construction and administration of the Panama Canal, which it controlled from 1914 until 1999.

Centered on the image of a banana plant over which a modified version of the Fresh Del Monte Produce logo is superimposed, Del Montte—Bananeras narrates a history of tension between major transnational banana companies and various Latin American countries, Guatemala in particular. Representing the process by which natural resources are exploited by corporate interests, it also references cynical complicity on the part local elites. The doubled letter in the modified brand name of the title refers to José Efraín Ríos Montt, the military president of Guatemala in 1982 and 1983, who was responsible for the genocidal slaughter of members of the indigenous Ixil ethnic group. Minerva Cuevas has also hijacked the authority of the logo by replacing the self-congratulatory language of advertising with a potent message of political opposition on behalf of a long-subjugated population and landscape.

Claudia Joskowicz uses video to imaginatively recreate events from Bolivia’s “mytho-historic” past, here focusing on the death of Ernesto “Che” Guevara. Joskowicz uses a slow zoom to dramatically set the scene, drawing the viewer’s eye into the dilapidated laundry where Che’s corpse was displayed for the press after his 1967 assassination by the Bolivian army. Actors stand in frozen poses around the body, their reverential stillness evoking Renaissance master Andrea Mantegna’s painting The Lamentation over the Dead Christ (c. 1480). The crucial moment occurs when a photographer mounts the funeral bier to get a better shot, the resultant iconic image sealing Che’s status as a martyr.

In The Dictator, David Lamelas adopts the fictional persona of Colonel Riccardo Garcia Perez, an overthrown tyrant from the fictional country of St. Ana. Lamelas’s colonel is a composite caricature of various Latin American dictators including Juan Perón in Argentina, Anastasio Somoza in Nicaragua, and Rafael Trujillo in the Dominican Republic. The video is staged as a television news interview in which the deposed dictator is questioned about his abuse of subversives, the mysterious deaths of his three wives, and his plans to return from exile. Yet, despite the reporter’s ostensibly hard-hitting questions, the interview ultimately serves to affirm its subject’s cult of personality. Lamelas, who had recently moved to Los Angeles when he made this work, offers an incisive yet humorous critique of the ways in which the mass media help fabricate that which we accept as reality.

Brief History is part of a series produced by Carlos Motta between 2005 and 2009 that presents two chronologies of events in Latin America: one of U.S. interventions in the region since 1946, and one of the area’s leftist guerrilla movements. One side of the print outlines the interventions’ interconnected narratives in text; the other depicts two bloody handprints and the symbol of the Mano Blanco death squads from 1980s El Salvador. The whole work thus contrasts the orderly, objective quality of written “facts” with the visceral immediacy of images associated with violence.

Wilfredo Prieto made Walk the first time he left his native Cuba. During a residency on the Caribbean island of Curaçao, the artist put a plant in a wheelbarrow filled with soil and took it on a five-kilometer walking tour. While there is a comic absurdity to this gesture, Prieto’s work connects to a long tradition of walking in twentieth-century art, its precursors including the Situationists’ dérive (drift), the Surrealists’ unconscious explorations of Paris, Robert Smithson’s forays into the ruins of Passaic, New Jersey, and Francis Alÿs’s treks around Mexico City.

Two electric fans stand before the viewer like mute oracles, their opposite, oscillating movements ceaselessly nodding “yes” and shaking “no.” In Yes/No, Wilfredo Prieto creates the possibility of bridging the gap between self and other, left and right, affirmation and negation, through the simple repurposing of mechanical movement. The fact that the fans move in different directions also serves as a metaphor for the continuously polarized confrontation between capitalist and socialist ideologies within Latin America.

Much of Juan Downey’s pioneering video work critiques the purported objectivity of ethnographic observation and documentation. To produce The Circle of Fires, the artist lived with his wife and stepdaughter among the Yanomami indigenous group in the Venezuelan Amazon for seven months; inviting the Yanomami to both make and watch videos of themselves, Downey inverted the conventional roles of observer and observed. Likely seeing themselves in this medium for the first time, the subjects are presented with a new vision of themselves through the screen’s alternate reality. The installation’s multi-monitor design refers to the circular layout of a Yanomami settlement, encouraging viewers to see themselves not as outsiders, but rather as existing within the community it represents.

Making reference to the sketching expeditions undertaken by anthropologists to record “exotic” cultures, Carbon Copy Jungle I consists of an encyclopedic grid of drawings derived from Raimond Chaves and Gilda Mantilla’s research at the Library of the Center for Theological Studies of the Amazon and the Library of the Research Institute of the Peruvian Amazon in Iquitos, Peru. Through the act of making carbon copies of different materials found there, the artists pose various questions about the uses and meanings of drawing, probing its historical function as a method of indexing resources targeted for later exploitation, and examining the practical and political difficulties of preserving historical documents in the tropics.

The Black Cave (La Cueva Negra) explores the Paso del Indio, an indigenous burial ground in Puerto Rico that was discovered during the construction of a highway, and eventually paved over. Drawing on interviews with local residents and with archaeologists involved in the excavation, Beatriz Santiago Muñoz’s video offers a reflection on the origins and meanings of the site, which becomes in the process an allegory for the island’s convoluted history. The camera tracks two teenage boys wandering through the area, their freedom of movement and sense of curiosity symbolizing the romantic but ultimately misguided desire to find and preserve paradise.