Is an exhibition by more than 30 Latin American artists in Dublin a sign that European art conservatism is opening up, asks Aidan Dunne.
By far the biggest and most ambitious group exhibition of art from Latin America ever held in Ireland, The Hours features work by some 30 artists. Several of them have exhibited here before: Vik Muniz had a very popular solo show at Imma; Ernesto Neto has also exhibited at Imma and at Kilkenny's Butler Gallery; the work of Argentine painter Guillermo Kuitca was seen at the RHA. Columbian Doris Salcedo was in the Liverpool Biennale some years ago, and she has shown in Tate Britain.
So could one say we are reasonably familiar with the contemporary art of Latin America? The show's curator, the genial Sebastian Lopez, is having none of it. He was born in Argentina (his antecedents were Spanish and Italian, a common mixture there), and is an art historian and curator, now based in Amsterdam.
"Latin American artists are largely ignored by European curators. Any number of artists will tell you that, how difficult it is to show abroad. I'm afraid the wonderful art world of which we are all so fond is actually quite conservative. There is resistance to what I would describe as a maturity of seeing." This is all the more unfair, he points out, because: "If you look carefully at the history of modernism, it was substantially built up by Latin American artists, but this is rarely acknowledged." He cites several examples: "Diego Rivera introduced colour into cubism, which had been a monochromatic style. The Chilean Hui Dobro was a dadist before any European. It's impossible to think of surrealism without Matta or Wilfredo Lam."
However, artists, he adds, do not carry the same burden of prejudice as historians, critics and curators. They tend to see things in a more open, less partisan way. From continent to continent, "they interact and influence each other". Nor is this a particularly new phenomenon, a product of cheap air travel and a well trodden international art circuit, as we might like to imagine.
"As a historian I've done a lot of work on the 1920s and 1930s in Paris and what today we call multiculturalism was the norm then." But given artists' innate multiculturalism, does it make sense to speak of Latin American art? It's a question to which he has given a lot of thought. "Looking back it seems that the term is sometimes relevant, sometimes not. If you go back to the 1930s and 1940s, at the time in many Latin American countries there was the renewed conviction that what they could produce was valid and worthwhile. You must remember that in colonised countries cultural expression was largely forbidden. In Guatemala there was a terrific tradition of painting, for example, but they were simply not allowed to practice it."
He thinks there is still quite a way to go to restore a balance in terms of giving due credit to Latin American visual art. "That has substantially happened in terms of literature (the show's title comes from Jorge Luis Borges), music, cinema, but not in visual art." Having considered not having the words Latin America in the title at all, he came down in favour of a precise verbal formula: "Visual arts of contemporary Latin America, rather than Latin American art."
FOR THE PURPOSES of this exhibition, he looked for work in which artists engaged with conditions in their own countries. "That is, they have anchored their discourse in the circumstances, the psychological, social, political circumstances of their native countries - often the countries where they live." He adds that because many of the included artists live abroad: in New York, in London or other major European cities. Although the Spanish-born Santiago Sierra travelled in the other direction, settling in Mexico.
Everything in the show is drawn from the Swiss-based Daros-Latinamerica Collection, which was established in 2000 by Ruth and Stephan Schmidheiny. Its director is Hans-Michael Herzog. Lopez says he had a huge resource from which to make his selection. He faced difficult choices in terms of scale: to opt for an especially large piece would have crowded out other artists, so a certain democracy prevailed.
"It is already quite a large collection, and I think an important one," he says of Daros. "It's quite daring in that it incorporates works intended for public spaces, something that other collections would hesitate to do. So in Dublin as well we have this dialogue between works in the gallery space and the public space."
If you've been around Dublin city centre you may already have seen one of the Daros's public works: the 30 black, white and grey flags along the Liffey around Capel Street Bridge. This is the work of Cuban artist Wilfredo Prieto, and is called Apolitico (Apolitical). Drained of colour, the flags seem to symbolise a deadened, homogenised world. More provocatively, Chilean artist Alfredo Jaar's A Logo for America records in video form a site-specific piece made for Times Square in New York. Part of the display, reading "This is not America's flag" is superimposed on the Stars and Stripes. The point, Lopez explains, is the US's appropriation of the term "America", a sore point in Latin America.
You can encounter another public piece in the form of a 1955 Ford Victoria parked in the centre of the courtyard at the Royal Hospital. It is the work of Mexican artist Betsabee Romero, who has made several works utilising abandoned cars. This one, Ayate Car, was sited in a Tijuana community just on the Mexican side of the border with the US. It's not the happiest place. Thousands congregate there hoping to make the journey north. Yet Romero's reworked car is symbolic of hope.
It's covered with ayate, a rough fabric, onto which she has painted numerous roses in reference to the story of Juan Diego. An image of the Virgin miraculously materialised on Diego's ayate garments, and she showered him with fresh roses to confirm her presence. Robero has also filled the interior of the car with dried roses. It is a striking, beautiful object and a source of tremendous interest to Imma visitors.
THE STORY GOES that Colombian artist Nadin Ospina's work arose from his purchase of a piece of pre-Colombian art. Dismayed when a knowledgeable friend told him it was a forgery, he set about finding those responsible. He succeeded, getting in contact with a couple of families of highly skilled ceramists. Getting to know them he learned their techniques, leading to his own hybridised versions of traditional ceramic pieces, authentically archaic looking but for their inexplicable incorporation of the likenesses of various Disney characters, including Donald Duck and Pluto. The pieces work on a number of levels.
Not surprisingly, perhaps, given the country's recent, troubled history, a dark current runs through the work of many Colombian artists, Lopez points out - from Jose Alejandro Restrepo's evocation of Charon, ferrying the spirits of the dead across the river Styx to Juan Manuel Echavarria's video documents of individuals singing songs in which they record their traumatic experiences of violent events. Breathe on Oscar Munoz's polished mirrors and images the dead momentarily appear and fade. Doris Salcedo's Noviembro 6 is one of a trilogy of pieces memorialising an atrocity in 1985, when guerillas stormed the Palace of Justice in Bogota, killed magistrates and officials, and destroyed archives. Salcedo's outrage stems partly from the fact that, for pragmatic, political reasons, the event is, she says, almost completely ignored.
There is a strong tradition of painting in Argentina, and painter Guillermo Kuitca is one of the best-known artists in the show. Lopez has enabled us to trace a network of his recurrent preoccupations via a mass of his drawings, a kind of visual diary-cum-notebook, arranged on one wall. The work of another Argentine painter, Fabian Marcaccio, is also impressive.
An anthropological strand runs through the work of such artists as Mexican Maruch Santiz Gomez, whose Beliefs documents everyday objects and the folklore surrounding them, and Cubans Tania Bruguera and Marta Maria Perez Bravo, both of whom explore Afro-Cuban religious systems. In passing, Lopez notes that the Brazilian artist Vik Muniz, whose speciality is elucidating "how an image becomes an icon", reputedly used thousands of real diamonds for his photographed likeness of Marilyn Monroe, an appropriately glittering work. Lopez is a hugely enthusiastic advocate of the work of all the artists he has selected. His hope is that the show will play its part in transforming our views of visual culture not only in contemporary Latin America, but in a longer, historical perspective as well.
The Hours: Visual Art of Contemporary Latin America is at Imma until Jan 15 next year, 01-6129900