What Do We Mean When We Talk About 'Latino Art'?

When the Whitney Museum of American Art announced the , people took to the Internet to chime in about who's been included and who's been left out; the last biennial had been blasted for ignoring Latino artists. But when a new show opened at the Smithsonian American Art Museum featuring only Latino artists — — it was blasted for other reasons.
"Meaningless," in The Washington Post. In a review of the Smithsonian show, Kennicott was referring to the label "Latino art." (Yes, his word choice ticked off a lot of people, but more on that shortly.) Kennicott's point was that by grouping art by ethnicity, throwing together works by artists of different styles, periods and backgrounds, "you get a big mess."
Speaking to NPR, Kennicott defended his critique of the Smithsonian show:

"If we look at the art included in this exhibition, it includes everything from a Cuban exile who spent a lot of time in Paris and worked in a very cool, lovely, abstract style to Mexican-American artists who were doing a very political kind of art in Los Angeles. And one begins to wonder if there is, in fact, a lot in common between what they're doing."

So is there such a thing as "Latino art" or "Asian art" or "African-American art"? Are they "racial hang-ups," as African-American artist Raymond Saunders put it in his 1967 essay ""? Or are they necessary categories that force white-run museums, publishers and concert halls to recognize artists of color?
These questions are at the heart of the debate ignited by Kennicott's word "meaningless."

Sculptor and writer Barbara Chase-Riboud is troubled by race-based groupings. She currently has an exhibition of work inspired by Malcolm X at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Courtesy of the Philadelphia Museum of Art

"I was pretty stunned," says New York-based artist and filmmaker Alex Rivera. So he about Kennicott's review on his Facebook page. Rivera told NPR that he and other artists have seen these reviews before. "Every so often there's a show, kind of like the one at the Smithsonian, that gathers our work together and gives it a venue," Rivera says. "And every time that happens, there's a review that says putting our work together is a bad way to organize art." Yet, Rivera says, critics rarely review the work itself. Rivera also notes that critics do not question such equally broad categories as "American" or "European" art.
It was a lively Facebook thread with several people in the Latino arts community chiming in. Artist Judithe Hernández wrote, for example: "When was the last time the Guggenheim, Whitney or MOMA, exhibited contemporary Latino American artists?"
Even Kennicott chimed in. "I was kind of the skunk at the party in those discussions," he says. "But I was interested because it was a good conversation." Kennicott was so interested, in The Washington Post.
Someone who didn't weigh in on the volatile discussion was Smithsonian curator Carmen Ramos. It took her three years to put together "Our America." With 92 artworks by 72 artists who have roots throughout Latin America, it's an extensive survey that covers the period from the mid-20th century to the present.
Ramos fully agrees the term "Latino art" is extremely broad. It's also extremely rich, she says, yet many of the artists in the Smithsonian show — regardless of style — have been ignored by mainstream museums. "We use the term 'Latino art' as a construct, as a handle, really, to talk about an absence in the way that we think about American art and culture. That's why the word 'presence' is in the subtitle. Presence is the opposite of absence," Ramos says.
But that brings up a larger issue: Are museums doing an artist a favor or a disservice when they group shows together around ethnicity or gender rather than aesthetics? believes it's a disservice. She's a conceptual artist whose work is in the collections of major museums, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York. She recently that a film of hers be removed from a show of black performance art. Piper preferred not to be interviewed, but she sent NPR the email she sent to the show's curator. In it she wrote that "as a matter of principle," she does not allow her work to be exhibited in "all-black shows," because she believes these shows "perpetuate the segregation of African-American artists from the mainstream contemporary art world."

Sculptor and writer Barbara Chase-Riboud is equally troubled by race-based groupings. She currently has an exhibition of work inspired by Malcolm X at the . She's also the author of Sally Hemings: A Novel. From her home in Paris, Chase-Riboud says these categorizations happen not just in the visual arts, but in music and literature, too.
"I don't think people really understand the almost humiliation of being a creative person who thinks and believes he is doing something original and doing something universal, to suddenly be lumped in with anybody or everybody who has the same skin color. There's no logic to it," Chase-Riboud says.
She believes it also lets institutions off the hook. "So if they had one black show per year, they could go on doing business as usual for the rest of the year, which is why certain black writers have stopped publishing in February," she says. Black History Month might have been created "for good reasons," but Chase-Riboud says it now feels like "tokenism."
Nonetheless, some in the Latino arts community say that the show at the Smithsonian is a major milestone. New York University professor Arlene Davila says "the whiteness" in the art world exists "at all levels." So identity-based shows like "Our America" are the only ways Latino artists can stand on such a big stage.
In fact, Davila supports the ongoing campaign for a Smithsonian museum dedicated to Latino culture. "I would love to be in a universe where we don't need to have culturally specific museums because we do have a diverse museum world that represents all of us," Davila says. "But I don't live in that society right now. I don't know if we're going to be living in that society a hundred years from now, the way we are."
The Smithsonian exhibition "Our America: The Latino Presence in American Art" is on view in Washington until early March. Then it begins a national tour.

Original post
http://www.npr.org/blogs/codeswitch/2013/11/25/246139726/what-do-we-mean-when-we-talk-about-latino-art

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Neo-Mannerism?

Un articulo que me paso un amigo…. interesante para reflexionar.

ON ART’S INSIDIOUS NEW CLICHÉ: NEO-MANNERISM by Jerry Saltz
At Art Basel 2012. Don't do this. <http://tinyurl.com/ll5xr4a.

Call it Neo-Mannerism. We all know it. That ever-expanding assembly of anemically boring, totally safe artistic clichés squeezing the life out of the art world right now. Earlier this week, I called out one of them, in a review of the (very good) work of Bjarne Melgaard: bad-boy installations, reeking of transgression but not actually transgressing much. That got me thinking about a trend that's even more widespread and just as annoying.
Scads of artists are trying to be junior postmodernists. A phalanx of work has appeared that might be called "Modest Abstraction" or "MFA See, MFA Do." It's everywhere, and it all looks the same. In sculpture there's Anarchy Lite. Those post-minimalist formal arrangements of clunky stuff, sticks, planks, bent metal, wood boxes, fabric, old furniture, concrete things, and whatnot leaned, stacked, stuck, piled, or dispersed around a clean white gallery. There's usually a subtext about wastefulness, sustainability, politics, urbanism, or art history. That history is almost always straight out of sixties and seventies Artforum magazines or the syllabi of academic teachers who've scared their students into being pleasingly meek, imitative, and ordinary.
Looking at 2-D work, I'm this close to that old Carter-administration-era croak of "Painting is dead." Again. Nowadays we see endless arrays of decorous, medium-size, handsome, harmless paintings. It's rendered mainly in black, white, gray, or, more recently, violet or blue. Much of it entails transfer techniques, silkscreening, stenciling, assemblage, collage, a little spray painting or scraping and the like. There might be some smooshy blocks of color or stripes or other obvious open-form abstraction or geometric motif. A few painters are doing the same thing but with brighter colors, larger areas of paint, hints of gesture, or even drips. All this work has readymade references to preapproved, mostly male painters like Albert Oehlen, Christopher Wool, Michael Krebber, Wade Guyton, Laura Owens, and Sergi Jenson, or to the Minimalism or Pop movements, and of course it all calls up Warhol, Richter, Kippenberger, or Prince.
Then there are all the fussy collages of cut-up porn, furniture catalogues, ads, Internet screen-grabs, modernist architecture, urban wastelands, endangered species, sixties protests, or (of course) art-historical jpegs. We also see small-scale, colored, neatly framed, or cut-up photographs about photography. All of this Neo-Mannerism is an art of infinite regress. Defensive. Predictable. Safe. Well-defended. Loved by brainy magazines, websites, and curators but so far up its own ass that it can't breathe.
If art comes from everywhere and everyone thinks differently, why does so much of what we see these days look the same? Reams of artists influenced by and using the same art-history, artists, styles, and stuff. You know what that leads to. As Keith Richards wrote of a former dope dealer of his who got addicted to his own stuff, "Brad's dead now. It was the usual old story. If you're dealing in this shit, don't dabble in it." Artists making this generic work are Brad.
It's spreading, too. Even our wonderful smaller galleries on the Lower East Side, in Bushwick, and the like are awash in it. All this art is dying to be understood. And it is, instantly, by everyone, in the exact same way. Never mind that Oscar Wilde said, "The moment you think you know a work of art, it is dead to you." It fills galleries and biennials and is already so dead-on-arrival it may as well put a gun to its own head. It's all intellectual wallpaper, pricey placeholders, ham-acting, and showbiz. I know artists are facing knotty times, and I say this with love, but: Enough._NYMagazine