Réseaux artistiques latino-américains : synchronicités, contacts et divergences

Understanding originality and innovation to be proposals that contribute to the interpretation of change and to the formation of a transnational field of art and visual culture from Latin America, this dossier for Artelogie investigates tensions between the historical avant-gardes of the early twentieth century, both in Latin America and Europe, and the neo avant-gardes that emerged globally between 1960 and 1990, approximately. The relationship between these vanguards has been fraught by theoretical and methodological difficulties posed by scholarly literatures that have assessed these phenomena, themselves by no means homogenous or coordinated, mostly in terms of derivation and creative exhaustion. This assessment has originated from the so-called centers of the art world and early universalist theories of the avant-garde rather than from their local places of art making and its circulation. These largely Eurocentric claims have foreclosed analysis of the historical significance of key moments in postwar art and their critical and innovative potential in comparative terms. The reappearance of collage and assemblage, and of grid and monochromatic painting, to name only a few avant-garde techniques, was a self-reflexive return, offering a critique of postwar societies. Neo avant-gardes consciously forged formal and informal networks that linked colleagues and strategies beyond their local scenes or nationalist histories. With this dossier we seek to investigate temporal, spatial, formal, and thematic synchronicities that emerge from both contact and divergence among artworks, artists, critics, curators, and other cultural agents. Through their critical comparison we expect to produce conceptualizations of postwar art history that generate and invert rather than merely add to dominant narratives to date.