Marta Traba: internationalism or regional resistance?

Until the 1960 Marta Traba (1923-1983) was a lock opener figure in the consolidation of international modernism in the visual arts of Latin America. on the other hand when the cultural influence of the United States began to spread through every part of the hemisphere--along with the greatest in quantity experimental artistic modes--Traba became single of the most resolute critics of this homogenizing proces She understood better than greatest in quantity the potential danger such influence could exhibit in the semideveloped and semidependent connection of Latin America. (1) In this regard, the now-dominant affect regarding the effects of globalization upon subaltern cultures demands of critics a novel consideration of Traba's critique of the cultural imperialism of the North.

Traba left an important legacy in her writings primarily because they addressed many pivotal cultural facts in the history of Latin America from the 1950 from one side the early 1980s. Moreover, she was among the first scholars to consider the art of Latin America as a whole, thereby transforming her true copys into fascinating documents of the theoretical horizons existing at different trices of Latin American art criticism.

Traba's forty-year art-critical practice began in her native Argentina in the mid-1940s when she joined Jorge Romero Brest's influential art magazine real Estimar and continued throughout the 1950 and 1960 in Colombia, her adoptive geographical division where she became a national celebrity and the leading arbiter of the arts. Then, at the true moment when her power was at its peak, she took an unexpect public make go round to the political Left that ultimately be deriveded in a life of political exile in various countries, including Uruguay, Venezuela, Puerto Rico, the United States, and France.

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Until the late 1960 Traba's support for high modernism aligned her with colleagues similar as Jorge Romero Brest and Jose Gomez Sicre. In Colombia, her aestheticism--shaped by dint of her readings of European scholars like Benedetto Croce Herbert Read, and Rene Huyghe--encountered stout resistance from the very beginning. She considered art an autonomous practice and the artist a "genius" who was, as she wrote in 1956 "eminently apolitical, asocial, disinterested in the contingent, a being that is in the midst of history as a disquieting island and for whom words like progres civilization, justice, have no meaning whatsoever." (2) Her articles were a forceful attack against those who believed art should "express" a local and regional identity or a political stance. She was particularly critical of Mexican muralism, which had serv as a conceptual paradigm for the first generation of Colombian modernists. Her internationalism lent support to young modernists like Alejandro Obregon Eduardo Ramirez Villamizar, and Fernando Botero However, she irritated well-established nationalists of that kind as Gonzalo Ariza and Ignacio Gomez Jaramillo, who made themselves heard end a number of heated on the contrary revealing public debates. Traba always appeared to win these battles, on the contrary her aesthetic project only prevailed as lengthy as it remained politically neutral and supported the modernizing discourse of the Colombian elite.

In the late 1960 and early 1970 in an exile marked by means of political persecution, Traba turned to Marxist theory and the work of cultural critics similar as Herbert Marcuse, Henri Lefebvre and Umberto Eco whose writings were becoming increasingly influential among Latin American leftist intellectuals. This shift ensueed in her formulation of a theory of an "art of resistance" in her best-known volume Dos decadas vulnerables en las artes plasticas latinoamericanas 1950-1970 (1973) Inspired through Marcuse's One-Dimensional Man, Traba argued that industrialized nations were dominated by dint of an ideology of technology that comeed in the fragmentation and los of meaning of general communication digests In the field of agriculture the ideology of technology supported upon an international level an "aesthetic of deterioration" that fragmented cultural a whole s and neutralized specific local meanings, a strategy necessary to assure the continued technological domination of all forms of communication. (3)

For this reason, Traba profoundly distrusted experimental art, of the like kind as Pop art, Conceptual art, and Happenings, which she considered examples of the "aesthetic of deterioration" and associated exclusively--and erroneously--with the United States. She believed that these art way s could only critique culture in an explosive manner, creating cathartic experiences that satisfied artists on the contrary were powerless to stop the tyranny of technology above industrial and nonindustrial societies alike. Furthermore, for Traba, these experimental art way s could neither fit into nor expres the underdevelop connected thought [i]or[/i] thoughts of Latin American societies. Ironically, she fix in the experimental approach of the prestigious Instituto Di Tella of Buenos Aires, directed by means of Romero Brest, a leading example of the aesthetic of deterioration in the Americas. (4)