B.5.1 Nomadism and New Spatial Framings of Latin American Art: Ulises Carrión, Felipe Ehrenberg and Marta Hellion in Exile in the 1970s

Elize Mazadiego, University of Amsterdam

The artists Ulises Carrión (Mexico, 1941-89) Felipe Ehrenberg (Mexico, 1943-2017) and Martha Hellion (Mexico, 1946) share a common experience of exile from repressive political regimes in Mexico, which transplanted them to Europe in the late 1960s. In Amsterdam Carrión co-founded the independent art space In- Out Center in 1972 and Other Books and So in 1975. Ehrenberg and Hellion co-founded Beau Geste Press in Devon, England in 1970. Both spaces offered an alternative and international mode of production and circulation for conceptual art practices. Their monthly publications of mail and ephemeral works, Ephemera and Schmuck, were particularly formative in collating geographically dispersed artists and their work together, which in turn facilitated transnational networks in material and conceptual ways.

For the panel I propose to examine the ways in which these diasporic artists and their artistic production disrupted the spatial organization of a given geographic order and how this has implications for understanding them and their work as Mexican or Latin American. I consider: to what extent do their mobile, networked conditions enable concepts of space that are international or postnational? How is their work materially and conceptually de-localized and how does this complicate the tendency to identify it within a national, regional and territorial framework? Taking Deleuzean thinking as a point of departure, I frame Carrión, Ehrenberg and Hellion, and their art as distinctly “nomadic” – distinguished by geographic crossings, but also by conceptually unsettling the bounded, stable and sedentary concept of the nation-state. My paper considers how these artists are “forces of deterritorialization” and part of a complex spatial array that is potentially neither Latin American or European. I argue they are constituted by a diverse web of spatial relations and thereby engender new understandings of Latin American art and more broadly space, geography and the identifications that accompany this.

B.5.2 How to Make Site-Specific Art when Sites Themselves Have Histories: Whittier Boulevard as Asco’s El Camino Surreal

Brandon Sward, University of Chicago

The term “site-specific” is generally used to describe art self-consciously made to exist in a certain place, which effectively makes the site a static background for the dynamism of art. If we accept this definition, then how are we to account for the fact that sites themselves have histories? I answer this question through an analysis of four performances along Whittier Boulevard, Stations of the Cross, First Supper (After a Major Riot), Walking Mural and Instant Mural by the Chicano/a art collective Asco. A major artery running from the LA River to Brea, Whittier Boulevard carries a portion of El Camino Real (“Royal Road,” “King’s Highway”), which connected the 21 missions of Alta California. We know Asco was aware of this fact because a member...

Situating these performances within the colonial geography of California challenges analyses of Asco by historians like C. Ondine Chavoya, who have too narrowly interpreted Asco as opposing current events like the Vietnam War and gentrification, when Asco actually had a more nuanced and expansive understanding of oppression. These performances show a group struggling to speak against stereotypes around artistic production that would seek to domesticate and folklorize them. Although scholarship on Asco explains these gestures as “protest art” against the Vietnam War, situating these performances against the backdrop of Whittier Boulevard highlights the radicality of Asco. By engaging with Catholic and muralist imagery, Asco draws parallels between their experience as racial minorities and colonialism, which helps us to appreciate the composite nature of Chicano/a identity and how artists might make site-specific work when sites themselves have histories.

B.5.3 The Painter and the New World: Celebrating the Centennial of the Canadian Confederation through a Hemispheric Approach

Alena Robin, Western University

1967 was a special year of celebration for Canada. Throughout the country, different events were underlying the first centennial of the confederation. For this occasion, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts organized a temporary exhibit with a survey of paintings ranging from 1564 to 1867. David G. Carter, director of the museum and curator of the exhibit, offered a selection of artworks that addressed the topics of seas, lands, people and ideas, opening a hemispheric dialogue, including artists from Canada, the United States, and Latin America, and artworks that illustrated those lands and people. This presentation will consider the specific circumstances in which the exhibit was conceived, and how the director made initial contacts with museums and collectors to include artworks from Latin America. The focus will be on the works chosen and the narratives created, but also on the communication established that opens the door to early cultural exchange and diplomacy contacts between Canada and Latin America, and the reception from the audience who visited the exhibition. This presentation is based on first-hand documents from the museum archive.