The exhibition Southern Geometries, from Mexico to Patagonia, presented at the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain until 24 February 2019, plunges visitors into the multiple forms of geometric abstraction in Latin American art. A sensory experience that leaves behind Western visions of art history in favour of formal, graphic and colourful cohesion.
Southern Geometries, from Mexico to Pata
gonia follows in the line of institutional exhibitions open to extra-occidental and often extra-artistic works. In Paris we have had
Magiciens de la Terre in 1989 at the Centre Pompidou, Histoires de voir in 2012 at the Fondation Cartier, and Carambolages in 2016 at the Grand Palais. These exhibitions have two particularities, more or less accentuated. First, they shift the hierarchical dualities between a ‘Western’ centre and a ‘non-Western’ periphery, between a North and a South, or Souths, and show the contribution of postcolonial research. Second, they strongly criticize the hierarchies maintained by art history, by associating works assimilated into international art circuits (galleries and museums) with other works that do not depend on this rationale of the ‘art world’ but seem to belong instead to ethnological collections. All of this culminates in a profusion of media, as is the case with Southern Geometries. There are two possibilities open to such exhibitions: they can either conserve the baseline (Western) discourse on (Western) art, or they can get rid of it. Southern Geometries takes the latter approach: the presentation of ‘multiple forms of geometric abstraction in Latin America, whether these find their inspiration in pre-Columbian art, European avant-garde movements or indigenous cultures’ invites visitors on a journey where they are overcome by the resonance of the forms and reminiscences of colours, from all eras and from all of South America. Here for example, the abstract ‘modernity’ of the Valdivia statuary, dating from three thousand years ago, is showcased. We see geometry solely from the point of view of South American artists and artisans. Geometric abstraction, as it was constructed in Western historical discourse, is absent from this exhibition. Juan Araujo’s painting, Homage to the Square #1 (2016), is erected as an emblem of this stance. According to the catalogue, this representation of Josef Albers’s famous work, inspired by his discovery of Mexico in the 1930s, ‘denounces an ultimately Western vision of art history’. Indeed, Albers’s work is depicted in its frame, hanging on the wall of the exhibi
tion space onto which it throws its shadow: it is crudely returned to its status as a masterpiece in the history of Western art.
DECORATIVE ABUNDANCE
But the exhibition, beyond the new proposals on the geopolitics of the writing of history, holds on to its stated purpose: a ‘beautiful’ sensory experience. A purpose that it fulfils easily, although this experience is facilitated and somewhat toned down by the prevalent trend of South American abstract motifs in clothing and textiles. We indulge in the decorative abundance of the tailor-made ballroom by architect Freddy Mamani, who has transformed the city of El Alto in Bolivia, with the brightly coloured facades and formal vocabulary based on indigenous geometric traditions, particularly of the Aymara people, from who he is descended. In the basement, the gaze is drawn to Alfredo Volpi’s Composiçáo geometrica (1955), placed next to ink drawings on cotton paper by Wauja artists (Brazil), created in the 1980s.These ink works, collected by Brazilian anthropologist Vera Penteado Coelho, are based on a formal vocabulary of some fortyfixed motifs created from the triangle, dot, circle, quadrilateral and the line. However, the anthropologically inclined will learn no more about these geometries, their origins and uses, the cultures that produce them, their renewals and contemporary reappropriations by artists or artisans who belong (or don’t belong) to these communities. The exhibition’s focus is not ethnography, as evidenced by the large number of cultures represented in a space limited to four rooms: 250 pieces by 70 artists from 10 cultures across 14 countries. The catalogue provides some elements of contextualization, but it seems that the emphasis has been placed on the visitor’s visual pleasure—while strolling through the exhibits, they experience a feast for the eyes, although the arrangement and hanging of the works may suggest other links. We are no longer sure who is creating, who is looking, or from where it comes. As in the section devoted to the Kadiwéu artists, for example, a community living in the southern Brazilian state of Mato Grosso. Here, drawings (now part of the Fondation Cartier collection) and ceramics are presented alongside photographs of painted bodies taken by Italian artist and ethnologist Guido Boggiani at the end of the 19th century and by Claude LéviStrauss in the mid 1930s. This assemblage may be said to confuse the Kadiwéu’s productions with European representations of them in an anthropological context, and the way in which they are depicted in their closeup photographs. Does this decontextualizing device—done to privilege the visual and viewing pleasure—truly lead to an overhaul of our categories? Isn’t there a risk that, by holding on to formal comparisons, we might miss the nature and wealth of the trajectory of geometric abstraction, not only in South America, but also at an international level? The exhibition A Tale of Two Worlds: Experimental Latin American Art in Dialogue with
both institutions. It provided a very different solution to the same problem of the showcasing of South American art. Obviously the means were not the same since 500 works by 117 artists and collectives, taken from the collections of the Frankfurt museum and chosen from key pieces of Latin American art from the 1940s to 1989, were presented here in relation to each other around themes (Concrete Experiments, The Contemporary City, From Monochrome to Reality, etc.).
REDRESS THE BALANCE
The curators clearly sought to redress the balance, hitherto unfavourable to South American artists in terms of historians’ discourse on Western art.The intelligence of the exhibition’s method was that it no longer raised the question of the actual encounter between artists. While it was sometimes underlined that certain artists had worked together (Alberto Greco, Yves Klein, Ben Vautier, Piero Manzoni) or were aware of each other’s works (hence the conflictual relationship between Beatriz González and Claes Oldenburg), the most important thing to grasp was that together, all of these artists constructed the major formal and theoretical issues that have permeated art up to the present-day, whether they worked in a parallel fashion along similar lines or whether they actually collaborated together. A subtle but very effective way of criticizing the meagre recognition given by Western art historians to these exchanges and of repositioning Latin American art into that same historical text.Thus there is much to gain in respecting the singularity of each work and each context, broadening our notion of formal reappropriations and cultural transfers,(1) from the pseudomorphism of coincidence (the ‘look like’ [2]) up to the resemanticization born of the encounter.
Translation: Emma Lingwood Born from the collaboration between the director of the Museo de Arte Moderno in Buenos Aires, Victoria Noorthoorn, and the director of the Museum für Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt, Klaus Görner, it was shown in
the MMK Collection 1940s–1980s, which finished the day Southern Geometries opened, justly considered the intercultural dimension of geometric abstraction in the 20th century, constantly fed by exchanges and transfers.