The Tragic Death of Latin American Art: Gerardo Mosquera’s Art Criticism as a Revenant

The recent history of Latin American Art has the narrative structure of a tragedy. On the one hand, it has been built on metonymies and synecdoches devoted to exceed the geographical condition of the region. The result is what I call ‘anxious Latinamericanism’, a form of studies with no real connections with any specific place. On the other, is tragic because it has been sentenced to death in order to exist as a discrete form of modernism. It was the Cuban critic Gerardo Mosquera who, tropicalized as a peripheral Faust, declared in 1996 the following, “el arte de América Latina ha dejado de serlo”, confirming the tragic destiny of Latin American art: to find presence, identity and authority in its own death. My proposal for the panel elaborates on the afterlives of Latin American Art, by evoking the contribution delivered in absentia by Octavio Paz to the Simposio de Austin (1975). In his statement, Paz impelled Latin American art critics to embraced a search for the very aesthetic essence of the region, anticipating with this command the ontological death announced by Mosquera two decades later. Contrasting Paz’s words with the voice of Juan Acha –another participant at Austin and the promoter of Latin American art theory as an independent visual thinking, I will connect these 70s debates with Beyond the Fantastic. Contemporary Art Criticism from Latin American, a compilation of essays edited by Mosquera in 1995, which galvanized the death of Latin American art as a discourse.