Beyond the Fantastic: Contemporary Art Criticism from Latin America

Rating:
Summary: Online-Review in Universes in Universe
Review: Please see "Beyond the Fantastic"an review by Gerhard Haupt.http://www.kulturbox.de/univers/america/beyond/e_haupt.htm //// It is without doubt interesting and significant to note that although Latin American art has, in recent decades, gained growing recognition and distribution throughout the world, the texts by critics and theorists from Latin America have been given little international attention. These texts have appeared in isolated form in journals and exhibition catalogs, most often organized by European or North American curators. This means that outside the sub-continent Latin American art has in many cases not been transmitted by Latin Americans themselves. An external vision can without doubt offer some revealing insights, but in the case of this region, the vision is often too generalized, full of commonplaces or simply the product of a Eurocentric understanding of modernity. It is to this point that the title of this anthology edited by Gerardo Mosquera refers. For the first time, the English-speaking public is offered a collection of major critical and theoretical essays which provide a multiple vision of this art »beyond the fantastic«. In most of these texts, the art of Latin America is the starting point for theoretical analysis and reflection, which make an essential contribution to our understanding of the complexity of contemporary art in general. Thus it cannot be over-emphasized that although this is criticism from Latin America, it is not only for Latin America. The book is important not only to the relatively small number of specialists in Latin American art. Although in the »West« there is recognition of the increasingly polycentric development of the globalizing processes, not enough attention is being paid to the potential for innovation coming from the supposedly »cultural peripheries«. Wolf Lepenies, Rector of the College of Science of Berlin, was quite right to say last year, in the presence of leading personalities from German economic scene, that European societies should leave aside the role of being »teaching« cultures and become »learning« cultures. It is time to finally revise the obsolete structures of thought which pervade the international art debate - still dominated by a »central« point of view and its media machinery - in order to do justice to the complexity and growing interconnection of the art processes across the world. It can't be a matter of enlarging the Western building of thought with just some more rooms around its nucleous. The whole decaying edifice should be demolished and rebuilt in a new collective effort by all its participants. Some progress in this direction would have been made if a book such as Beyond the Fantastic had been recognized not only as a regional study but as an important contribution to the general debate.