Art and Politics “Art has been a cry for freedom.”

Colombian scholar Carlos Granés talks about the profound connection between art and politics in Latin America and the contradictions of the region’s creative spirit. He also explains why, in his opinion, the industry’s political correctness is problematic.

Carlos Granés, Colombian author and lecturer, studied Psychology and Anthropology of Art in Colombia and the United States. He holds a Doctorate in Social Anthropology from the Complutense University of Madrid. He has published several books, including El puño invisible (The Invisible Fist), a history of the European and American artistic avant-gardes, and Salvajes de una nueva época (Savages of a New Era), an analysis of the relationship between the cultural industry, capitalism and some political ideologies.

His new book, Delirio americano (American Delirium), published in early 2022, is a detailed and illuminating cultural and political history of Latin America. It examines the complex relationships between art and power from the early 20th century to today.

In Latin America, culture has traditionally been considered secondary when examining the history of the region. But you see art as central to the political development of the 20th century. How did you arrive at this idea?

I realized several years ago that the proximity between cultural and political projects is a distinctive phenomenon of the 20th century. Since the beginning of the century, with the idea of the avant-garde, the artist is no longer a mere creator of aesthetic objects, which represent or reproduce reality. Inspired by thinkers such as Max Stirner or Friedrich Nietzsche, artists begin to have more ambitious goals: to create new men, to turn art into action. That inevitably leads to politics. In Italy, this was very clear at the beginning of the century, with regard to futurism and its connections to fascism.

In Latin America, at the beginning of the 20th century, writers, painters, and politicians shared the same tables in cafes and studied at the same universities. Their influence on one another was obvious. Another factor, which today seems somewhat strange since politics has changed so much, is the fact that political activity derived from intellectual activity. There was a close relationship between political action and the previous work of thinking.

“American Delirium” offers countless examples of Latin America’s incredible creative energy. However, along with artistic wealth, there is also a tendency towards intolerance and violence. How is this expressed through art?

Latin America is immensely diverse. Different rhythms, images and sensibilities have flourished in each region. One of the great virtues of avant-garde art of the 1920s was to show that magnificent wealth.

But we can also see the presence of totalizing tendencies in art in the 1920s. A painter like Uruguyan  Pedro Figari (1861-1938), who painted the Rio de la Plata gauchos and vindicated peasant virtues, revived the gaucho as an Argentine symbol but also wanted to believe that this very local character could be the symbol of all of the Americas. That is a symptomatic of a certain Latin American mentality: believing that plurality can be reduced to a single element, which leads to exclusion.  Something similar happened with Andinismo (the avant-garde indigenous literary trend of the 1920s), which arose in Puno, Peru, and narrated the Andean landscape, activities, and sensibility in a new way. But later Figari said something like: the Americanism of the continent has to be Andean. In this reasoning, the virtues that those poets found in the indigenous mountain peoples—honesty and vigor—should be imposed on the entire continent.

In these and other examples we see that we end up looking for one overarching response to a very complex region. That is one of the errors of our way of thinking: not accepting the plurality of values and lifestyles and wanting to reduce them to a single standard.

In the book, we also find the idea that Latin American history moves on a kind of pendulum between oppression and revolution, which leads to new forms of oppression…

I think that there are certain cycles that repeat themselves in Latin America. As Chilean historian Eduardo Devés writes, on the continent, we tend to go from identity to modernizing cycles. There are periods when the region is obsessed with questions like: Who are we? What are our strengths and weaknesses? In other periods, we are more concerned with modernizing ourselves and with our integration in the world economy.

Both cycles are intended to be emancipatory. Questioning one’s identity always seeks liberation: it seems that if we understand who we are, we can become independent from external influences. But this line of thinking has often led to nationalism, confining ourselves to our own identity and opening the door to authoritarian leaders. The other trajectory, toward modernization, has allowed us to create wealth, modernize cities and communicate with the world. But it has also served as a pretext for nationalism and has ended up justifying the presence of autocratic leaders. One way or the other, we always end up legitimizing the “strong man”.

One feature of avant-garde art is that it seeks to lay claim to freedom, whether for groups and minorities or for the individual. However, as you show very clearly, that impulse has often been instrumentalized by politics. To what extent can art—and specifically Latin American art—be defined as an exercise in an essential, albeit risky, search for freedom?

It would be very categorical to say that art is always the same thing. It is true that there have been various stages in Latin American history of the 20th century in which art has confronted power and created a space for freedom. This was evident in the 1960s and 70s, when much of the continent was under military dictatorships. The dictatorships completely eliminated the art system; all art that was not at the service of the dictatorship had to be made in underground locations. Before that, surrealism in the mid-century sought to emancipate the creative individual, his desires, his instincts, and even his perversions. And prior to that, the first avant-garde era of the beginning of the 20th century was also revolutionary with various movements such as Indigenism, Negrismo, Muralism and Criollismo, which sought to free themselves from traditional models, from academia and from the influence of foreign art.

The problem is that many of those movements were exploited by nationalist and very undemocratic politicians, such as the Mexican PRI (Institutional Revolutionary Party) or Maximiliano Hernández Martínez (dictator between 1931-1944) in El Salvador who was a caricature despot. But yes, there is no doubt that throughout much of the 20th century art in Latin America has been a cry for freedom.

How do you see the art situation today?

One could say that since the end of the 20th century, the cultural industries have won the game. Everything that was subversive until the 1960s has found its way into the museum, into the collections of billionaires, and become a prized commodity. The rebellious spirit of counterculture that art used to have has worn off. In fact, this is the result of a victory: the avant-garde changed tastes and attitudes toward art, and today the market and institutions are calling for rebellion and experimentation. Art has become the new establishment.

In Latin America there is a particular phenomenon, that of “the art of victimization,” of the vindication of those who have been forgotten or victimized by politics, dictatorships, etc. What began here as a marginalized impulse for vindication is today part of the institutional political discourse throughout the world: identity politics, the struggle for inclusion. This is also evident in advertising: there is not a single company that does not wave the flag of multiculturalism, feminism, antiracism, etc., to promote itself. This is why one cannot say that, today, art is countercultural. Instead, art is seeking out what is fashionable. And this is a criticism I make about the discourse of political correctness, which art has committed itself to.

What is problematic about art fighting against various forms of oppression?

Art in general is politically incorrect, not moralizing. Its aim is not to tell people what to do or what not to do. Art should be able to be anything. It shouldn’t be anything. Art is what the artist wants it to be…

But saying that art should not be politically correct, isn’t that imposing an obligation, a definition on art?

Of course, art can be vindication, a force that supports inclusion. For me, it’s more a matter of mistrust rather than a criticism. I distrust institutionalized moralism, which does not come from art itself; it comes from the institution. And I find it problematic that today the moral discourse in art has become the key to winning awards. This is where I see the artist’s loss of freedom. To enter the institution, the artist must submit to that discourse. And I do not believe that to be art.