Avant-Garde, Internationalism, and Politics: Argentine Art in the Sixties(Latin America Otherwise)

The 1960s were heady years in Argentina. Visual artists, curators, and critics sought to fuse art and politics; to broaden the definition of art to encompass happenings and assemblages; and, above all, to achieve international recognition for new, cutting-edge Argentine art. A bestseller in Argentina, Avant-Garde, Internationalism, and Politics is an examination of the 1960s as a brief historical moment when artists, institutions, and critics joined to promote an international identity for Argentina's visual arts. The renowned Argentine art historian and critic Andrea Giunta analyzes projects specifically designed to internationalize Argentina's art and avant-garde during the 1960s: the importation of exhibitions of contemporary international art, the sending of Argentine artists abroad to study, the organization of prize competitions involving prestigious international art critics, and the export of exhibitions of Argentine art to Europe and the United States. She looks at the conditions that made these projects possible-not least the Alliance for Progress, a U.S. program of "exchange" and "cooperation" meant to prevent the spread of communism through Latin America in the wake of the Cuban Revolution-as well as the strategies formulated to promote them. She describes the influence of Romero Brest, prominent art critic, supporter of abstract art, and director of the Centro de Artes Visuales del Instituto Tocuato Di Tella (an experimental art center in Buenos Aires); various group programs such as Nueva Figuracion and Arte Destructivo; and individual artists including Antonio Berni, Alberto Greco, Leon Ferrari, Marta Minujin, and Luis Felipe Noe. Giunta's rich narrative illuminates the contentious postwar relationships between art and politics, Latin America and the United States, and local identity and global recognition.

Table of Contents:
List of Illustrations ix About the Series xi Preface and Acknowledgments xiii Translator’s Note xvii Abbreviations xix Introduction 1 1. Modern Art on the Margins of Peronism 25 2. Proclamations and Programs During the Revolucion Libertadora 55 3. The “New” Art Scene 91 4. The Avant-Garde as Problem 119 5. The Decentering of the Modernist Paradigm 163 6. Strategies of Internationalization 189 7. The Avant-Garde Between Art and Politics 243 Conclusions 281 Notes 291 Bibliography 373 Index 397

About the Author :
Andrea Giunta is a professor of art history at the Universidad de San MartÍn and an associate professor art history at the Universidad de Buenos Aires. She is the author of Goeritz/Romero Brest: Correspondencias and the recipient of fellowships from the Rockefeller, Getty, and Guggenheim foundations. Peter Kahn is a Ph.D. candidate in Hispanic American Literature at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

Review :
"How can artists and institutions from peripheral countries participate in global conversations? Mexican muralists, Brazilian avant-gardists, and the Sao Paulo Biennale have done it. Yet none have done so with as sophisticated a strategy as those who remade the visual and multimedia arts scene in 1960s Buenos Aires. Offering the most thoroughly documented and innovative analysis of that period, Andrea Giunta eloquently renews Latin American art criticism."--Nestor Garcia Canclini "Avant-Garde, Internationalism, and Politics is a precise and intelligent book. It is also profoundly original in its reconstruction of the public debate of the 1960s. Andrea Giunta has investigated the links between the artists and the revolutionary horizon, as well as those between the artists and establishment institutions. With this dual perspective, she follows in a fascinating way the processes of the internationalization of Latin American art. Her book is indispensable to understanding the political and aesthetic ideologies of the period."--Beatriz Sarlo, author of Jorge Luis Borges: A Writer on the Edge "Andrea Giunta is one of the sharpest minds working in the post-World War II cultural field anywhere, and Avant-Garde, Internationalism, and Politics is a work of amazing breadth, originality, and complexity. It touches on many facets of U.S. cultural life as well as on the many ways a Latin American country tried to find a suitable postwar identity in a ruthless historical moment. With this book, Giunta is redefining the parameters not only of art history in Argentina but of contemporary cultural discourses in general."--Serge Guilbaut, author of How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art: Abstract Expressionism, Freedom, and the Cold War