Luis Camnitzer

Rachel Weiss

A collection of essays that elaborate themes such as art world systems versus an art of commitment; artistic genealogies and how they are consecrated; and, the possibilities for artistic agency.

On Art, Artists, Latin America, and Other Utopias

A singularly authoritative—yet also anti-authoritative—gathering of a life's work in art, education and activism. For more than half a century, the artist Luis Camnitzer has been concerned with the same things. The essays gathered in this book outline a radically democratic and frequently provocative vision of both art and education. In the first essay, written in 1960, Camnitzer proposes curricular change of the Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes in Uruguay, part of a collective effort to bring the school up to the ideal level Camnitzer and fellow artists, students, and educators desired. And in the final essay Camnitzer sums up what he would want an art school to be if he applied to one today—suggesting (with typical dry wit) that the first effort to improve art education may not have succeeded. Working across such mediums as printmaking, sculpture, language, and installations, Camnitzer's work investigates how power is exercised and can be challenged in society. An influential teacher, over the six decades covered by this volume, he has interrogated the power structures inherent to the practice of art at the same time as he explores its liberating potential. Many of these texts are published here for the first time. The book offers a singularly authoritative—yet also anti-authoritative—gathering of a life's work in art, education and activism.

One Number Is Worth One Word

Lucy Steeds

"The third edition of the Bienal de La Habana, which took place in 1989, extended the global territory of contemporary art and redegined the biennial model. This book examines the project in its historical and international contexts ... Making art global (part 2) will focus on the Paris exhibition 'Magiciens de la Terre' of 1989."--P. [4] of cover.

Making Art Global

Artist, educator, curator, and critic Luis Camnitzer has been writing about contemporary art ever since he left his native Uruguay in 1964 for a fellowship in New York City. As a transplant from the "periphery" to the "center," Camnitzer has had to confront fundamental questions about making art in the Americas, asking himself and others: What is "Latin American art"? How does it relate (if it does) to art created in the centers of New York and Europe? What is the role of the artist in exile? Writing about issues of such personal, cultural, and indeed political import has long been an integral part of Camnitzer's artistic project, a way of developing an idiosyncratic art history in which to work out his own place in the picture. This volume gathers Camnitzer's most thought-provoking essays—"texts written to make something happen," in the words of volume editor Rachel Weiss. They elaborate themes that appear persistently throughout Camnitzer's work: art world systems versus an art of commitment; artistic genealogies and how they are consecrated; and, most insistently, the possibilities for artistic agency. The theme of "translation" informs the texts in the first part of the book, with Camnitzer asking such questions as "What is Latin America, and who asks the question? Who is the artist, there and here?" The texts in the second section are more historically than geographically oriented, exploring little-known moments, works, and events that compose the legacy that Camnitzer draws on and offers to his readers.

Starting with the groundbreaking 1981 exhibit called "Volumen I," New Art of Cuba provided the first comprehensive look at the works of the first generation of Cuban artists completely shaped by the 1959 revolution. This revised edition includes a new epilogue that discusses developments in Cuban art since the book's publication in 1994, including the exodus of artists in the early 1990s, the effects of the new dollar economy on the status of artists, and the shift away from socialist themes to more personal concerns in the artists' works. Twenty-four new color plates augment the more than 200 b&w illustrations of the original volume.

Revised Edition

New Art of Cuba

arte conceptualista latinoamericano

Didáctica de la liberación

Conceptualism played a different role in Latin American art during the 1960s and 1970s than in Europe and the United States, where conceptualist artists predominantly sought to challenge the primacy of the art object and art institutions, as well as the commercialization of art. Latin American artists turned to conceptualism as a vehicle for radically questioning the very nature of art itself, as well as art's role in responding to societal needs and crises in conjunction with politics, poetry, and pedagogy. Because of this distinctive agenda, Latin American conceptualism must be viewed and understood in its own right, not as a derivative of Euroamerican models. In this book, one of Latin America's foremost conceptualist artists, Luis Camnitzer, offers a firsthand account of conceptualism in Latin American art. Placing the evolution of conceptualism within the history Latin America, he explores conceptualism as a strategy, rather than a style, in Latin American culture. He shows how the roots of conceptualism reach back to the early nineteenth century in the work of Símon Rodríguez, Símon Bolívar's tutor. Camnitzer then follows conceptualism to the point where art crossed into politics, as with the Argentinian group Tucumán arde in 1968, and where politics crossed into art, as with the Tupamaro movement in Uruguay during the 1960s and early 1970s. Camnitzer concludes by investigating how, after 1970, conceptualist manifestations returned to the fold of more conventional art and describes some of the consequences that followed when art evolved from being a political tool to become what is known as "political art."

Luis Camnitzer

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