Buenos Aires Herald
Published Sunday, July 15, 2001
REVIEW
Art history that reads like a saga
By Alina Tortosa
For the Herald
Vanguardia, internacionalismo y política / Arte argentino de los años sesenta. By Andrea Giunta.
Paidos , Espacios del saber- abril 2001.
The new book by Dr. Andrea Giunta (1960,
Buenos Aires) is a major academic achievement, a turn of the screw as regards
previous publications by Argentine art historians on any given period. Other
histories are basically linear accounts within a cultural and political
context, the story of the development of certain artists or movements, or
theoretical approaches to an aesthetical development. In a comprehensive Introduction, eight
chapters: Modern art in the margins of peronism, Proclamations and programs
during the Libertadora (Revolution), The scene of the “new” art, The
avant-garde as a problem, The decentralisation of the modern paradigm,
Strategies of internationalisation, Apories of internalisation, The avant-garde
between art and politics, Art as collective, violent action and a Conclusion,
Giunta analyses in depth the building up of the different cultural, social and
political influences, public and private systems of behaviour, aims and
achievements, and the international and national political strategies to use
art as a means to other goals. The
author has not only read widely, as is clear by the bibliography that supports
the text, but held innumerable discussions with Argentine and foreign
intellectuals from different persuasions and disciplines. It is this
argumentative and interdisciplinary structure that gives the text elasticity,
strength and perspective.
Many of the subjects Giunta writes on long
delayed updates on the development of modern and contemporary Argentine art and
on Argentine history tout court.
A much-needed research on the career and on the contribution of Jorge
Romero Brest –about whom very little had been written so far- to the
development of art in Argentina during the fifties and sixties focused from
different perspectives, are some of the
many bonuses of this book.
Vanguardia,
internacionalismo y política / Arte argentino de los años sesenta, reads like an appealing story. It starts in the late
forties and fifties with the liberation of Paris and the introduction into
Peronist politics, which allows Giunta to trace the authoritarian spirit of
Peronism -a “popular” government that,
while voting long delayed social laws, regimented all activities and
disciplines to serve its own economic and political aims, taking an isolated
backward cultural position-, and the reaction of the art world to the issues
created by the limitations imposed on them by the government. This long period of cultural ostracism
divided Argentina into those who were for the Government and those who were
against it, at times blurring intermediate preoccupations and commitments. The second chapter, which deals with the de
facto government that took over after Peron was ousted, outlines the efforts
that were made to rejoin, or should I write, to join the Western world, by
upgrading industrial developments and artistic endeavours, hoping to acquire an
international stance. This chapter brings into light the work of those
intellectuals who understood what was going on in the art world, and the
blindness of a government and a society that believed that by outlawing
peronism they could do away with it in the mind and heart of Peron’s followers,
as if prescription did away with beliefs and feelings. Some of the artists, who had been postponed
under Peron’s Government for not adapting to his dictates, were shocked to find
that they were postponed again on aesthetic issues. The realization that being for or against did
not necessarily sum up as merit was to
some a new frustration.
The end of the Second World War, followed
by the Cold War designed the role played by the US in the interchange of
American and Latin American art
exhibitions, and grants awarded to Latin American artists and
writers. The US, like the Pied Piper of
Hamlin, played the flute to seduce artists and intellectuals to distract them
from the strong appeal that the Cuban Revolution held for most of them. A few Argentine artists, cultural operators
and politicians felt that exposure and recognition in the US would place
Argentine art at the centre of ongoing international events. For a time and at some point everybody’s
interests seem to meet. Giunta examines
minutely and objectively the thoughts and aims of institutions and individuals
in this context.
The good will relationship cultivated by
Argentine artists and local government and cultural institutions throughout the
first post Peron period finally gave way to strong dissension. Artists felt once more that they had to
fight for values that had been lost.
The
writer discusses the concepts of
avant-guard, internationalism and politics as understood at the time here and abroad from several angles. Throughout the book she keeps to the agenda
outlined in the title with Cartesian discipline.
