Popular Contemporary: Revisiting Ticio Escobar’s The Myth of Art and the Myth of the People

Discussions about the representation of Latin American works in the now purportedly global canon of contemporary art often elide critical questions about art's relationship at once to state-centered modernization and to the larger political and epistemological project of modernity. This oversight bears on the problem of historicizing Latin American art since the 1960s as it relates to the failure or purported closure of these projects. Rather than focusing on the regional or national identity of Latin American art, my paper examines the national question or the issue of national self-determination in the now somewhat démodé reflections on modernity and postmodernity in Latin America, and more specifically, Ticio Escobar's El mito del arte y el mito del pueblo (1987). In it, he approaches contemporaneity in two different senses: as the juxtaposition of high art and popular art, which he defines as indigenous and mestizo symbolic forms that may or may not incorporate elements of mass culture; and as the political activation of a disjointed togetherness in time. Escobar’s attempt to question and reconfigure the terms of political modernity, social class, and art also represents a theoretical passage often neglected in the elliptical movement between the neo-avant-gardes of the 1960s and their representation in global contemporary art history in recent years. El mito thus serves as a way of approaching the question posed by the participants of Speak Out! Charla! Bate-Papo! regarding the status of Latin American art with respect to the universalist claims of European modernism.