CALL FOR PAPERS

Latin America: The Last Avant-Garde

Co-sponsored by the Department of Art History, The Graduate Center, CUNY and
the Department of the History of Art, Yale University

April 4-5 2008, New York City

This symposium is organized around the conceit that Latin America is the
site of the last avant-garde. We are not interested in the truth or falsity
of this conceit, but how it operates as an interpretive paradigm. In several
key episodes of Latin American art, artists and critics have positioned the
region as a privileged, even mythological, site for the final realization of
an avant-garde project initiated in Europe. In other instances,
avant-gardism provided a discourse of rupture by which Latin American
artists aligned themselves with revolutionary, utopian, and universalist
aims while disavowing European cultural dependency and advancing a claim for
the unique character of the national or regional avant-garde. In both cases,
the original military metaphor of the avant-garde, with its associations of
innovation, radicality, and novelty, has been brought to bear on artistic
movements and individual experiments that have self-consciously figured
"lastness" as a strategic paradigm.

The conjoining of these two impulses within the Latin American avant-garde
forces into view key structural contradictions between modernity, Modernism,
and the avant-garde. How is characterization of the Latin American
avant-garde as either unitary or merely reactive complicated by the
avant-garde's fundamentally international character? How has avant-gardism
intersected with political, economic and military pressures particular to
the region? How have Latin American artists engaged in interdisciplinary
collaborations and expanded networks of informational flow in order to
catalyze new, or "final" articulations of the avant-garde? How have artists
exploited temporal delay and geographic marginality as aesthetic and
conceptual gambits, and how might such articulations debunk the very notion
of the avant-garde's originality?

In recent years, Latin American modern art has reemerged as a priority
within academic departments and museum collections, an interest that
coincides with a shift away from regionalism and identity politics as the
central tropes of its study. In this sense too, Latin American art can be
considered the "last," or most recent, avant-garde to be canonized (or
colonized) within art historical Modernism. How can new studies and
interpretations of Latin American avant-garde art allow us to refigure
histories of "prewar" and "postwar" art, modernity and cultural exchange,
theories of the avant-garde and neo-avant-garde, and other modernist
methodologies? How might recent theoretical models posited in exhibitions
such as Inverted Utopias and The Geometry of Hope such as the
"constellation," "regressive utopia," or "deformed modernity" impact the
study of avant-gardism in Latin America? At a current moment in which the
dialectic between "local" and "global" has taken center stage, how might art
historians help shape a history of the region that accounts for and
challenges larger threads of avant-gardism?

We welcome submissions for 20-minute papers that employ, problematize, and
expand concepts of the avant-garde in order to address 20th century Latin
American art and its critical reception. Papers will be published in PART,
Journal of the CUNY PhD Program in Art History
(http://dsc.gc.cuny.edu/part).

Please e-mail a 300 word abstract and CV to koyaanisquilesgmail.com and
Irene.smallyale.edu by November 15, 2007.