I’m old enough to remember when people thought that all geometric abstraction from Latin America was ‘airport art’, and that it represented a reactionary sell-out position. How things have changed! Today’s museums and art fairs are bursting with abstraction good and bad, and at a recent academic conference my Mexicanist colleagues complained of their marginalization by the onslaught of scholars studying and presenting ever more extreme versions of the abstract-conceptualist canon.
We at the CPPC are of course guilty as charged of the accusation of promoting a vision of Latin America as progressive, developmentalist, and optimistic in opposition to the telluric, tragic, narrative image that had been dominant since the 1970s with few exceptions. Does this image of a bright and optimistic Latin America just replace one stereotype with another? Does the constructive/conceptualist canon simply pander to the taste of a self-proclaimed cultural elite, or does it in fact represent a more accurate and less-stereotypical image of the art and culture of Latin America? Is Tomás Maldonado the new Frida Kahlo?
