E D I T O R I A L S T A T E M E N T - IA de Investigación especializada en el MIT

ESTADO EDITORIAL

FROM THE EDITORS

The devastating effects of the worldwide Covid-19 pandemic have
poignantly laid bare, once again, the limits of our capacity to act
together and cooperate, even in the face of imminent threats to human
survival on this planet. Como era de esperar, deeply ingrained market mecha-
nisms have ensured, both institutionally and ideologically, that interna-
tional competition rather than solidarity determined the rhythm and
mode of the fi ght against the global pandemic. Beyond and besides the
very necessary measures to prevent contagion, the current crisis further
accelerated the proliferation of borders, walls, and checkpoints (físico
and otherwise) that have been more effective at segregating humans
than at containing viruses. While vaccines roll out from the production
lines of industrialized countries, speculation runs wild on which states
and regions will recover faster and thus be in a position to lead the
“post-corona” world. Y todavía, as Uruguayan artist Luis Camnitzer
observed in a recent interview, we don’t even know whether or not
this quarantine will ever end.

Camnitzer’s interview with Rachel Weiss, conducted by invitation

of the editors of ARTMargins during the early days of the US pandemic,
in March and April 2020, is the opening feature of this issue. In a can-
did, politically insightful, and often moving exchange, the two friends
and longtime collaborators discuss the relationship between art and
education, Conceptualism, Camnitzer’s past and current art projects,

https://doi:.org/10.1162/artm_e_00289

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and his vexed relationship with the art market. Camnitzer talks at
length about his involvement with Cuba in the 1980s, recalling his
vision of the potential of cooperation and solidarity between Latin
American artists around the Casa de las Américas in Havana; debates
the role of art in denouncing internationally the atrocities committed by
Uruguay’s dictatorship; and avows his enduring feeling of isolation and
displacement within the North American artistic and intellectual scene.
Displacement as a crucial phenomenon in the transnational art
world is also the topic of this issue’s Artist Project by Bruno Moreschi,
Christopher Bratton, Dalida Maria Benfield, Gabriel Pereira, y
Guilherme Falcão. Following up on their previous pamphlet history of
_rt (2016), the collective presents here for the first time a second pam-
phlet as part of the same series, entitled _rt movements. Starting from
physical definitions of movement and displacement, they tackle the
multiple implications of these terms in contemporary art practice and
theory. “To move is to become displaced and to displace. . . . Movement
produces ever-emerging meanings, circulating between peoples, lugares,
and histories,” the artists observe, as they inquire into the relationship
between displacement and political power and approach the traveling
fates of artworks such as Picasso’s Guernica and Lygia Pape’s Divisor
in an increasingly interconnected (pre-pandemic) art world.

This question of displacement within and into the framework of
contemporary art resonates strongly in Raino Isto’s “‘I Lived without
Seeing These Artworks’: (Albanian) Socialist Realism and/against
Contemporary Art.” The article examines the arrival of Albania’s
Socialist Realist art in Western Europe and its problematic path toward
readability within 21st-century artistic contexts. En particular, Isto
approaches Harald Szeemann’s 2003 exhibition Blood & Honey at
Vienna’s Essl Museum to discuss the position of Albanian Socialist
Realism in contemporary artistic discourse. He argues that exhibitions
such as Blood & Honey, in mapping the art of the Balkans, at the same
time fulfilled the task of defining the cultural borders of an emerging
new “Europe” against its southern neighbors. The incorporation of
Albania’s Socialist Realism in the global history of contemporary art
thus implied its further isolation and confinement to a specific, periph-
eral place and time, flattening its complexity and downplaying its inher-
ent transnationalism.

Catherine Spencer’s “Navigating Internationalism from Buenos

Aires: The Centro de Arte y Comunicación” charts the strategies of art-

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istas, curators, and critics to engage the international art world under
the eyes of Argentina’s 1970s military dictatorship. Following Andrea
Giunta and George F. Flaherty’s call to challenge the categories and
established roles of center and periphery in the contemporary art world
through scholarship on Latin American art, Spencer takes up the case
of the Centro de Arte y Comunicación (CAYC) to shed light on the
internationalist dynamics of 1970s Argentine artistic production and
discourse.

Karolina Majewska-Güde’s “If You Want to Say Something—Speak

in the Language of the Language: Ewa Partum’s Model of Conceptual
Art” focuses on the Conceptualist practice of Ewa Partum to inquire
into the geopolitical specificities of the cultural production of Central
and Eastern European postwar avant-gardes. Majewska-Güde examines
Partum’s work and her exhibition and communication strategies
through the founding of Galeria Adres in 1972. Contemporaneous
with Buenos Aires’s CAYC, Partum’s gallery took up a similar role of
enabling communication between Polish artists and their peers in
Western Europe and beyond. Working under an epistemic condition
Majewska-Güde defines as “East looking at West not looking at East,"
Conceptual artists in Poland and other Eastern European countries
occupied, she argues, a place “in the orbit” (rather than the periphery)
of Western culture.

A more drastic experience of the tension between the West and its

supposed periphery comes to light in Jalal Al-e Ahmad’s “To Mohassess,
For the Wall,” this issue’s Document, published with an introduction by
Mohammadreza Mirzaei. Written in 1964, during a time of profound
transformations in the Iranian cultural and artistic landscape, the piece
is addressed to the painter Bahman Mohassess upon his return to
Tehran from Italy, where he had studied together with a cohort of other
young Iranian artists. Describing the contemporary moment of Iranian
painting as one of repeated uprootings and transplantations, Ahmad
warns of the dangers of imitating the West—a concept that he under-
stood not just geographically or culturally, but in political-economic
terms as well. As Mirzaei suggests, more than a commentary on paint-
En g, Al-e Ahmad’s text provides a glimpse into the debates and conflicts
surrounding the adoption of Western-style modernism in 1960s Iran
and its perceived clash with local artistic traditions.

Finalmente, this issue’s Review Article, by Irmgard Emmelhainz, dis-
cusses Amy Sara Carroll’s ReMex: Toward an Art History of the NAFTA

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Era (2017). Focusing on art based in Mexico City as well as Chicano,
feminist, and border art in the 1990s, Carroll’s monograph proposes
to rewrite the history of Mexican art in a way that suggests, como
Emmelhainz puts it, an “alternative lineage for Latin American
Conceptualism,” based chiefly on the thread of allegorical representa-
tions of nationality. More than a territory, “greater Mexico” emerges in
Carroll’s study as an imaginary site that transcends geographic borders.
Sin embargo, despite the book’s ostensive problematization of geopolitical
fronteras, Emmelhainz contends that Carroll’s proposal of “reMexing”
risks returning contemporary artistic practices from Mexico, and Latin
American Conceptualism more generally, to the old function ascribed
by colonialism to Latin American art—that of repeatedly producing
national allegories for international consumption.