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Oppose AB 2446: Save Access to Arts
Education
ARTS EDUCATION ADVOCATES - STOP AB 2446 NOW
Dear Arts Education Advocate,
At a time when arts and music programs are being eliminated or drastically
cut in school districts across our state, Assembly Bill 2446 (Furutani)
threatens to further limit access to arts education. If passed, the bill
will diminish the number of students benefitting from arts education by
adding career technical education as an alternative to the existing "visual and performing arts
or foreign language" graduation requirement. To add insult to injury,
at a time of diminished resources, adding access to career tech courses has
the potential to increase cost pressures on school districts statewide by over
a million dollars.
Last week, in spite of grassroots opposition, the Appropriation Committee
approved the bill. AB 2446 is now on the Assembly Floor. A vote is
expected this week; it could be as soon as tomorrow.
Take Action Today.
We need to take our message to the members of the Assembly today.
Thus far, the bill has only been heard in committees. Now is our
chance to communicate our opposition loud and clear to the Assembly as
a whole. If the bill passes the Assembly floor vote, it will be sent to
the Senate and, if passed there, on to the Governor. Take a moment to
stop AB 2446 now.
Go to this link to take action immediately:
http://org2.democracyinaction.org/o/5155/p/dia/action/public/?action_KEY=3253
Questions? Email: sibyl@artsed411.org
Copyright. California Alliance for Arts Education.
The
Latin American-ization of the United States
by Dr. Shifra M. Goldman
This paper is dedicated to Henry Kissinger, Secretary of State during the Richard
Nixon administration.
In 1969, during a meeting of American states in Viña del Mar, Chile, Kissinger
is quoted as saying "Nothing of importance can come from the South; history
is not made in the South." I read this quote in the invitation to the Mercosur
Biennial, and therefore dedicated my paper to Kissinger's arrogance.
It provides an ironic frame for everything I intended to say.
"The Latin-Americanization of the United States," may seem somewhat
removed from the theme of the 1997 Mercosur Symposium held in Porto Alegre, Brazil,
focused on American utopias and toward the subtheme of art and politics. However,
I think the issues and topics are more complex than they appear, and I hope to
present a point of view that reverses, or at least diverts, a century-old notion
of Latin American culture as derivative - from Europe, initially, and from the
United States after World War II. This verdict left Latin America without a claim
to vanguard originality, with a charge that theirs was an art that was primitive,
exotic, or exclusively folkloric, and without influence in other parts of the
world. These are false and biased claims fostered by Eurocentrism, about which
Edward Said commented "European culture gained in strength and identity
by setting itself off against [the Third World] as a sort of surrogate and even
underground self."
Such sentiments promoted the idea that the movement of culture occurred as a
one-way street, so to speak, without any reciprocity, and that it ignored the
appropriations inherent in the parallelism between modernism and so-called "primitivism," which
permitted the continuation of an unacknowledged debt that European modernism
owed to many areas of the Third World - from Africa, Asia, the Near East, the
South Pacific, and Latin America. Thus the debts of Cubism and German Expressionism
to Africa, of Matisse to Islamic art, of the Impressionists to Japan, of Henry
Moore to pre-Columbian art, of the Abstract Expressionists to Native American
art, and of others to the South Pacific, were canonized as vanguard on one hand,
and "primitive" (without merit except as sources) on the other. An
artist like Wifredo Lam was considered second class for many decades, although
he influenced artists in New York, as did Siqueiros and Roberto Matta. Such a
premise was revived and widely criticized in the 1984 exhibition "Primitivism
in 20th Century Art" at New York's Museum of Modern Art. In fact, this type
of myopia prompted the famous anthropophagic manifesto of Oswald de Andrade,
written in May 1928 for the São Paulo vanguard, led by the example of
Tarsila do Amaral.
If European and Latin American modernism both drew on "primitivism" -
a misnomer for pre-Columbian and folk arts - why should only the European model
be considered "vanguard" while the Latin American was relegated to
a second-class status, intellectually and aesthetically? Why should Joaquín
Torres García and the members of his Taller, or the kineticists of Venezuela,
or the concrete and neo-concrete artists of Brazil and Argentina at later dates
be considered less important or innovative than the Europeans? How is it that
the Mexican muralists, the works of Cândido Portinari and Antonio Berni,
should be considered on a lower level of formal and aesthetic achievement in
the arena of political and social criticism than those of the German Expressionists?
How is it, finally, that the work of David Alfaro Siqueiros should be linked
on equal terms, in a recent exhibition in Düsseldorf, Germany, with that
of Jackson Pollock who was his student in 1936 in New York, and learned his famous "drip" technique
from the Mexican master? Without Siqueiros' discovery of synthetic paints for
the fine arts and the accidental effects that could be achieved, Pollock's most
famous style could not have occurred. This brings us full-circle to the Latin-Americanization
of the United States. My argument is divided into two classifications, both of
which are historically and politically situated: the first classification deals
with Latin American influences within the popular (vernacular) and mass media
aspects of the United States; the second with that of the fine arts.
Popular/Vernacular, Protest Arts, and the Mass Media
Among the countries of Latin America, the one, possibly, that the United States
most resembles is Brazil - in size, wealth of natural resources, in civilizations
built on the land of indigenous peoples and with the labor of African slaves.
Both encouraged immense European immigrant populations, and, by the 19th century,
that of Asian peoples from Japan and China for agricultural labor. A further
characteristic of these two former colonies, is that settlement by their European
colonizers began on the Eastern seaboards and slowly spread west and north, thus
concentrating high culture, industry and finance along the Atlantic Ocean. Even
the penetration of the interiors had similar characteristics: the bandeirantes
of Brazil, and the pioneers and frontiersmen of the United States, were the forces
that carried out penetrations and land appropriations which led to an entire
mythology about the process, reflected in civic monuments and cinematic legends.
Finally, due to the enormous territories involved, a persistent regionalism marked
even the 20th century, at least until the 1960s when recognizable symptoms of
postmodernism and its accompanying globalization began to make themselves evident
in North America.
However the Latin-Americanization process had taken place long before. By 1848,
U.S. imperial projects of expansion had managed to absorb, by war and a pittance
in dollars, almost one-half of Mexico's total territories acquired by the new
nation some twenty-five years earlier from Spain. Mexico's northern territories
became the U.S. Southwest, containing Texas, California, New Mexico, Arizona,
Colorado, and parts of Utah and Nevada. The land was appropriated through legal
and illegal means. Spanish was spoken (bilingualism was guaranteed by treaty,
but made difficult by ethnocentrism), and states, cities, villages and streets
were named in Spanish throughout the area; foods, music, festivals, and customs
were adopted - though denigrated; and racism toward brown-skinned peoples (Mexicans
and Indians) was pronounced for over 100 years, and still exists today, but more
subtlely. Cowboys learned the skills and anglicized the words of their trade
from the Mexican vaqueros (the gauchos/gaúchos of the North). With the
1970s, a generation of rebellious young Mexican Americans from throughout the
Southwest and Mid-west changed into Chicanos and Chicanas, demanded and received
higher education, and created an original culture as a fusion of Mexican fine
arts (murals and posters) and U.S. popular and high art sources. The early Pachucos
and the present Chicanos recreated a language called caló (Mexican slang)
and today speak "Spanglish" along with university-derived English.
By 1898, the United States took over from Spain the Caribbean nations of Cuba
and Puerto Rico - and added the Philippines for good measure. Cuba achieved its
fragile sovereigntysome twelve years later; the Philippines in 1945; and Puerto
Rico is still a colony. The eastern seaboard of the U.S. was populated by Cubans
(Florida), and Puerto Ricans (New York) from the 19th century to the present.
Cuban and Puerto Rican food, salsa music, hand-rolled cigars (in Tampa, Fla),
and botánicas for religious and ritual products became part of the U.S.
scene, while younger Puerto Rican artists in the 1960s called themselves Nuyoricans,
after New York. Correspondingly, a constantly increasing number of politicians,
professional persons, and business people throughout the country are of Latin
American descent, most Spanish-speaking.
In the 1930s and 1940s, the search for exoticism in Hollywood produced the extravagant
figure of Carmen Miranda - whose criticized life (now documented in a wonderful
1994 film by Helen Solberg) was revived and reconsidered by Brazilian "tropicalism" in
the 1960s (Caetano Veloso, Hélio Oiticica, and others; today by Regina
Vater of Texas). The samba and bossa nova penetrated the United States along
with Mexican boleros and rancheras, Cuban sones, and Latin jazz played by both
African Americans like Dizzy Gillespie, and by Caribbean musicians. Latin American
stars also penetrated Hollywood, some no longer in degrading or stereotypical
roles, but in serious drama, while Brazil's Hour of the Star and Bye Bye Brazil,
Argentina's The Official Story, the multinational cast of Babenco's The Kiss
of the Spider Woman, and other Latin American cinema (even Cuba's, despite many
difficulties) reached the United States on a more or less popular level, shown
in art houses and on cable television. By the 1980s, Chilean musical groups like
the Quilipayun and the Inti Illimani toured the United States; as did Brazilian
Laurindo Almeida and Argentine's Mercedes Sosa; while records by Chileans Violeta
Parra and Victor Jara, and Daniel Viglietti of Uruguay, circulated in the United
States. Music from Central America, particularly El Salvador, came north, patronized
by the huge numbers of refugees from that besieged nation who crossed the border
in the 1980s, aided and abetted by U.S. religious, political and artistic groups
across the country, to enter North America, and to become permanent residents
or citizens.
Also under the rubric of popular (as well as elite) culture has been the canonization
as well as commercialization of three Latin American figures: Frida Kahlo, Che
Guevara, and Eva Perón. While Kahlo was adopted in the 1970s by the U.S.
feminist movement and as a role model for Chicanos and Chicanas, and images of
Guevara as a utopian hero circulated in the 1960s, Evita is a recent arrival.
The packaging of Frida, and the 1990's attention to Che, particularly on the
30th anniversary of his death in Bolivia, have become so intense that the terms
fridamanía and chemanía have been coined to express some of the
advertising fervor and exploitation accompanying their images. Evita, of course,
has been subsumed to the presence of rock-star Madonna who played the film role
in 1997, and all three have successfully competed in the U.S. and Europe with
standard cult personalities like the Beatles and Elvis Presley. There is no question
that Frida and Che represent utopic figures internationally, while Evita was
certainly considered as such by the Argentine descamisadas. However the Che and
the Frida of the 1960s and 1970s have been totally distorted in the anti-utopianism
of postmodernism where they have been rendered as "spectacles" through
mass-media-ization, and the source of profitable sales, from earrings to watches,
to beer.
New York, the art market, and the transnationalization of Latin American art.
The early influence in the 1930s and 1940s of the Mexican School in the United
States needs no further documentation here. Suffice to say that Mexican art was
well-known and admired from New York to California where major murals were painted
with teams of North Americans. When muralism was revived across the United States
in the 1970s, the Mexican model was once more explored. Modern Latin American
art, however remained unknown.
Paris was the city of predilection for an international potpourri of literary,
musical and visual arts representatives, including many Latin Americans. However
new factors entered the formulation after World War II when New York became a
center for the fine arts. Described sardonically by French art historian Serge
Guilbaut as How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art, Guilbaut connects the
importance of New York as a cultural capital replacing Paris, to Abstract Expression,
freedom (presumably from communism), and the Cold War. He tracks this process
back to 1935 and the de-marxification of the intelligentsia; however the capture
of modernist supremacy by New York is dated to 1948 - the period during which
the United States undertook to educate the world about the originality and importance
of a home-grown Abstract Expressionism, using it as a banner of cultural freedom
in comparison to that offered by the Soviet Bloc. I have written extensively
about this phenomenon, including the crucial role of the Rockefeller-managed
Museum of Modern Art of New York, in propagating this ideology, as well as its
attempted micro-management, over several decades, of art programs and museum
practices in Latin America in collaboration with the related organization known
as the Center for Inter-American Relations (now called the Americas Society)
of New York, and, at times. the Visual Arts Department of the Organization of
American States.
More crucial to an understanding of the Latin-Americanization process, is an
analysis of the 1970s and 1980s, following on the heels of a 1965 revision of
U.S. immigration regulations which had the unexpected effect of opening the doors
to formerly restricted immigration from the Third World - including many Latin
American artists, but also Asians from the territories of U.S.wars in Korea and
Indochina. The 1970s were signaled by a new market consciousness of the excellence
of modern Latin American art and its exceedingly cheap prices compared to the
overheated world market. I can quote one case from 1977 when a major Frida Kahlo
painting was sold below auction estimates at Sotheby's auction house in New York
for $19,000. (The peak price in recent years for a Kahlo painting has surpassed
the three million mark in dollars.)
The 1980s provided an even greater surprise as major mainstream institutions
in the U.S. (followed by European and Japanese museums) began to mount blockbuster
exhibitions of modern Latin American art. In 1988, I gave this phenomenon the
title - for better or for worse - of the "art boom", comparing it,
in a prestigious art magazine, with the Latin American literary boom of the 1960s.
The term "art boom" caught on, and is still widely used; however the
curatorial quality and interpretive function within these exhibitions revealed
the ignorance and Eurocentrism of U.S. curators and museum directors alike.
The "boom" also spawned a great number of catalogues, which now constitute
a large part of the historical and critical literature in English, purportedly
filling a lacuna of scholarship. A review of serious books on modern Latin American
art available in the United States today, not only makes their scarcity obvious,
but underlines the low level of scholarship in some of the catalogues, for example,
those like Hispanic Artists in the United States and , Art of the Fantastic:Latin
America, 1920-1987. The one exception was The Latin American Spirit: Art and
Artists in the United States: 1920-1970, an exhibit organized by a Puerto Rican,
with a catalogue written by North American, Latin American and Latino critics
and historians. Catalogues outlive their exhibitions, and readers have their
opinions formed accordingly.
Those of us functioning as knowledgeable critics and art historians in the U.S.
felt ourselves called upon to criticize many of the offerings and point out their
failings, and we are still playing that role. Nevertheless, the U.S. public came
to these exhibitions, and others like them, in the thousands, and were often
astonished at the quality of the work. Private galleries, alive to the art market
and to the great interest in Latin American art, began to proliferate; their
presence spurring a new class of collectors. Thus we can say that the United
States was beginning to be re-Latin-Americanized in this arena, thirty years
after the Mexicans had been written out of North American art history books.
Slowly, new articles and books in English written by Latin Americans and by Latin
Americanists like myself, are beginning to appear, and they emphasize the critical
voice necessary in a period of postmodernism. As Cuban critic Gerardo Mosquera
has pointed out in his introduction to a recent British publication, Beyond the
Fantastic: Contemporary Art Criticism From Latin America :
The 1960s and 1970s [were] decades strongly marked by the "Sixties Spirit" in
its most political sense, influenced to a great degree by the Cuban Revolution
and the activity that generated across the continent. In fact, much of this spirit
was actively created within Latin America, to the extent that one could speak
of a Latinamericanization of US culture. This had been a time of great hopes....The
1980s saw the end of one cycle and the start of another based on failure...[the
new] anti-utopia is not only the result of a critique of modernity and its totalisms...it
is part of new post-utopian thought and...contrary to appearances...is very positive.
The "grand policy" of vertical transformation has been replaced by
specific horizontal micropolicies.
My presentation embraces a much longer chronology than the 1960s through the
1980s, but contains some of the spirit of both - the celebratory and the critical.
Coming from North America, I hold, moreover, to a notion of subterranean subversion.
Facing postmodernism, neoliberalism, and brutal globalizations that are proceeding
relentlessly, I would argue that the Latin-Americanization and the "other-ization" of
the United States - now forced to see itself as one constituency among others;
forced to consider the plurality not only of its changing populations, but also
their multiple cultures which are homogenizing to some degree, just as global
culture is bringing about not only a sense of difference, but a sense of fusion
(most noticeable in music). There can be no real return to the older, ethnocentric,
xenophobic, racist and patriarchal United States - though our most reactionary
and violent politicians and right-wing organizations are trying their best to
reimpose that status. U.S. cultural currents today, just as those of the dominant
European powers who colonized the world on the strength of their supremacy, are
now latinized, africanized, asianized, and feminized, from within. In closing,
it is worth repeating a maxim by Vietnamese-American filmmaker, Trinh T. Min-ha,
that is now well-known in the English-speaking world: "There is a Third
World in every First World, and vice-versa".
Published by Art Nexus (bilingual), No. 29 (July-Sept; Aug-Oct, 1998):80-84
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