A Companion to Modern and Contemporary Latin American and Latina/o Art. Группа авторов
(1992). Cuban modernism: the search for a national ethos. In: Wifredo Lam and His Contemporaries (exh. cat. ed. M. Balderrama), 57. New York: The Studio Museum in Harlem.
9 Boxer, D. and Poupeye, V. (1998). Modern Jamaican Art. Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle Publishers/University of the West Indies Development and Endowment Fund.
10 Breton, A. (1945). Le surréalisme et la peinture: Suivi de genèse et perspectives artistiques du surréalisme et des fragments inédits. New York: Brentano's, Inc. Reprinted as Surrealism and Painting. trans. Simon Watson Taylor. (New York: Harper and Row, 1972).
11 Breton, A. (1946). Lam. Port‐au‐Prince: Centre d'Art.
12 Breton, A. (1972). Martinique, Charmeuse de Serpent, with texts and illustrations by André Masson. Paris: Editions Jean‐Jacques Pauvert.
13 Carpentier, A. (1948). De lo real maravilloso americano. El Nacional, Archives SDO Wifredo Lam, Paris. Also published in Carpentier, Chroniques, 342–349.
14 Césaire, A. (1941). Fragments d'un poème. Tropiques 1 (April): 10–23. Paris: Edition Jean Michel Place, 1978.
15 Césaire, A. (1945–1946). Wifredo Lam de l'Antilles. Cahiers d'Art 20–21: 357–359.
16 Césaire, S. (1942). Malaise d'un civilization. Tropiques 5 (April): 43–49. Paris: Éditions Jean‐Michel Place, 1978.
17 Crevel, R. (1930a). Colonies. Le Surréalisme au Service de la Révolution 1: 9–12.
18 Crevel, R. (1930b). Bobards et fariboles. Le Surréalisme au Service de la Révolution 2: 78.
19 Franqui, C. (1945). El retorno de Wifredo Lam. Carteles (12 December): 93–95, 98.
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21 Kelley, R.D. (2009). Black, Beige, and Brown: Surrealist Writings from Africa and the Diaspora. Austin: University of Texas Press.
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24 López Oliva, M. (1986). Albisola Mare en Wifredo Lam. Granma 7 (14 September) Archives SDO Wifredo Lam, Paris.
25 Mabille, P. (1945). La jungle: De l'importance prise par la critique d'art à l'epoque contemporaine. Tropiques 12 (January): 173–187. Paris: Edition Jean Michel Place, 1978.
26 Merewether, C. (1992). Wifredo Lam: A Retrospective of Works on Paper (exh. cat.). New York: Americas Society.
27 Monnerot, J.M. (1933). A partir de quelques traits particuliers à la mentalité civilisée. Le Surréalisme au Service de la Révolution 5: 35–37.
28 Mosquera, G. (1983). Exploraciones en la plástica cubana. Havana: Editorial Letras Cubana.
29 Murderous Humanitarianism. 1932. http://racetraitor.org/murderoushumanitarianism.html. (accessed 26 July 2013).
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31 Sandler, I. (1970). The Triumph of American Painting: A History of Abstract Expressionism. New York: Praeger.
32 Sims, L.S. (2012). Surrealism in the Caribbean: The art and politics of liberation at the crossroads of the world. In: Caribbean: Art at the Crossroads of the World (exh. cat. ed. E. Fuentes and D. Cullen), 223–239. New York: El Museo del Barrio, in association with Yale University Press.
33 Sims, L.S. (2002). Wifredo Lam and the International Avant‐Garde, 1923–1982. Austin: University of Texas Press.
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7 The Oscillation Between Myth and Criticism: Octavio Paz Between Duchamp and Tamayo
Cuauhtémoc Medina
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In a country such as Mexico where the writer, at least until the end of the twentieth century, functioned as a general cultural administrator, even more than did scholars, theoreticians, and specialists, it seems almost pointless to trace the boundaries between writing and art criticism. Some might even say that by introducing the differentiation I am simply rehashing the disqualification of “poetic criticism” by Latin American theoretical critics back in the 1970s. Or (even worse) that I am attempting to force a colonial assimilation onto the periphery by projecting a series of purely metropolitan conditions, including the integration of criticism into the mechanisms of a developed art market, the full‐time marketing operations of a specialized press, even the assumption that criticism is itself an artistic creation mediated by the refinement of audiences.
My intention is quite different. I propose a certain historical maneuver whereby I redeem a small part of the disparaged local “poetic” criticism – or to be precise, criticism written by poets – that becomes meaningful only once it is restored to all its eccentricity. In other words, I am attempting to restore the relative folly of a critical operation, a moment of misunderstanding (a common occurrence in the geopolitical fabric of the twentieth century) that took place around 1950, when a young poet of the surrealist periphery, Octavio Paz, managed to position Rufino Tamayo as the visible head of postmural Mexican painting for the remainder of the twentieth century. Obviously, I must first distance myself from any form of worship of Tamayo or Paz, who are seen as ideals that identify modernist nationalism. This implies conceiving of history as a means of estrangement in the Brechtian sense; once any form of apologetic pretension is dismissed, history acts much like ethnology in showing the present to be a contingency, and by revealing that our situation and even our discourse are not only temporary, but that they also embrace a diversity of canceled paths. In this context we can view criticism as a paradoxical historical object, and we can place an author such as Paz just outside the apparatus of intellectual mummification induced by its national cosmopolitan use.
In any case, the distinction between criticism and writing on art has the advantage of helping to detect a very special cultural operation: no matter how broad and often astounding Paz's prose on art is (close to one thousand pages in two complete volumes), it is rather pointless to study “Octavio Paz's art criticism” merely as an historical record of his opinions and tastes concerning the art of his time, or as essays written for special events or friends, or even as his theoretical development on the relationships between modernity, revolution, and poetry. An alternative is to assume that even those whom the division of labor calls “professional art critics” adopt the “function of critic” by exception: that is, only when they controversially define, for others and in the name of others, a relationship with works