The exhibition catalogue Inverted Utopias: Avant-Garde Art in Latin America by Mari Carmen Ramírez and Héctor Olea seeks simultaneously to remedy faulty perceptions of the modern art of Latin America and to revolutionize the writing of its history. Focusing on two periods of heightened aesthetic inquiry—the 1920s and 1930s, and the decades immediately following the Second World War—it is required reading for anyone concerned with the art produced in this vast region or with twentieth-century art in general.

The title of the award-winning exhibition invokes the famous drawing published in 1936 by Joaquín Torres-García in which he inverted the map of South America so that the southern tip of the continent faces upwards, yet the cardinal directions remain intact. In other words, north is north, south remains south; but in Torres-García’s view of the world, the south has more prominence and now looks “down” on the north. This bold, yet simple, reversal of topography upsets the normative polarities of the global order and was created in order to redirect Latin American artists away from centers of artistic production such as Europe and North America and toward the Americas. Torres-García urged artists not only to find inspiration in their homelands, but also to forge distinctive and energetic centers of avant-garde production, as well as to refuse a subaltern status in relation to dominant trends. For decades, so-called “Latin American art” has been considered by some scholars of European and North American modernism to be “derivative” of European avant-garde movements. Inverted Utopias—both the exhibition and its catalogue—intended not only to put such claims to rest, but also to show the ways in which Latin American art has at several historical junctures rivaled the artistic production of twentieth-century Europe. Therefore, in the effort to upend historical hierarchies of value, the curators propose the concept of the “inverted utopia” to suggest that the avant-garde movements in Latin America turned the utopian impulses of the historical European avant-gardes on their head. Even though modernism in Latin America developed out of the historical avant-garde, it transformed those impulses, thoughts, and meanings into something unique. While this recasting of “influence” into something more positively oriented (even revolutionary in spirit) is not necessarily a new concept in the field, it is a crucial one that bears more widespread attention. What differentiates the critical apparatus of this exhibition is its proposal that the European avant-garde moved in one direction (forward toward the utopian future), while its counterpart in Latin America acted in “reverse drive” (xvi), i.e., it looked to the past.

Although the exhibition regrettably did not travel beyond its originating venue of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, it first appeared in a slightly modified version at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, in December 2000-February 2001 with the title, Heterotopías, medio siglo sin-lugar: 1918–1968. The original title conveys Michel Foucault’s concept of heterotopias. Unlike a utopia, which by definition is unattainable, a heterotopia is a counter-site within culture that pertains to a real site but that consistently contests and inverts it. Within this framework, if the historical avant-gardes make reference to the project of utopia, then the various avant-gardes of Latin America are heterotopias, contesting and inverting the artistic movements of European modernism.

Lavishly illustrated, the voluminous exhibition catalogue includes twenty-one interpretive essays by thirteen leading critics from Latin America, Europe, and the United States (including the exhibition curators Ramírez and Olea). It is one of those rare catalogues that provides substantial scholarly revisions as well as generous visual material not readily accessible in other publications. While the exhibition featured approximately two hundred works of art made between 1920 and 1970 by approximately sixty-eight artists and artist groups from nine Latin American countries, the catalogue augments that presentation with three hundred and fifty color illustrations, plus hundreds of black-and-white images that contextualize the material at hand. The project focuses on movements and works of art that defy certain stereotypes of modern Latin American art (figuration, didacticism, surrealism) and concentrates more readily on currents of abstraction and conceptualism; as a result, figuration and politics are not eschewed but recontextualized as products of a dialogue among a variety of modes of production and aesthetic strategies. More than mere derivations of European avant-garde movements, the works illustrated here are chosen both for their contributions and challenges to international modernism.

Elegantly crafted, the catalogue brings the works’ often aesthetic radicality, sublimity, and complexity to the fore. Closely following the exhibition’s curatorial logic, the catalogue is divided thematically into six broad oppositional categories: Universal and Vernacular, Play and Grief, Progression and Rupture, Vibrational and Stationary, Touch and Gaze, and Cryptic and Committed. Classifying these oppositional pairings (the standard modus operandi of art history) as “constellations,” Ramírez and Olea employ Theodor Adorno’s model to eschew traditional geographic or chronological presentations of modernism in Latin America. One wonders, however, if the inclusion of European and North American works of art would have provided a more expansive network and, in turn, reinforced some of the basic arguments and ambitions of the project, i.e., to promote dialogue across continents. As it now stands, Inverted Utopias focuses mostly on the southern continent. Nonetheless, capturing the breadth, complexity, and spirit of the diverse Latin American avant-gardes is an extraordinarily difficult task, and the curators have risen to the challenge that Ramírez herself put forth over a decade ago when she implored curators to look “beyond the fantastic” (beyond the irrational and surreal elements that previously defined modern Latin American art) when mounting large survey exhibitions. The intellectually stimulating format allows the curators to cover a broad scope and territory without homogenizing artists spanning a diverse continent: cultural specificity is not forsaken even when making claims for the universality of this art. Furthermore, rather than providing authoritative answers, it affords the curators the opportunity to invite previously unacknowledged comparisons and to provoke open-ended questions.

A project of this scale inevitably generates the familiar complaints regarding inclusivity, which is particularly acute in the field of Latin American art wherein new reputations and new “discoveries” are still being made, i.e., why are some artists included and others omitted? In the effort to expand our knowledge of Latin American art, the curators do not include well-known names such as Frida Kahlo or Diego Rivera; instead, they favor lesser-known artists or groups, such as Oscar Bony or El Techo de la Ballena. While the desire to highlight lesser-known works and artists is admirable and well intentioned, this omission weakens the basic premise of an “inverted utopia” since major figures of Latin American art are excluded. Other omissions are surprising given the effort to document the avant-gardes of Latin America: specifically, the paucity of essays on artists from the Caribbean. Additionally, the small representation of Mexican artists (José Clemente Orozco and David Alfaro Siqueiros are the only ones featured) may be an attempt to redress the recent preponderance of studies on Mexican art, but this exclusion threatens to hinder an objective understanding of that nation’s contribution to the whole of Latin American visual culture. No single presentation, especially in a survey format, can presume to be comprehensive; and in this case, the curators acknowledge the unfolding nature of the study and exhibition of Latin American art.

The stated ambition of Inverted Utopias is to to promote a much-needed intellectual dialogue across continents and disciplines that will significantly expand the framework for understanding the complex contribution of Latin American artists to 20th-century art” (press release). In this effort, the curators and the catalogue essays establish networks of avant-garde art in Latin America that aim to represent “genuine manifestation[s] of autonomy” (xvi) from European modernism—or, perhaps more accurately, genuine re-interpretations of European modernism—to suggest that these artists “departed from the legacy of their colonial predecessors” (ibid.). As Ramírez explains in the prologue and introduction, the artists included in the exhibition and catalogue realized a “new art” in their places of origin, in societies facing tumultuous changes in light of modernization.

The curators chose artists actively engaged in the production of manifestoes and theoretical texts. By focusing on artists from so-called open (to outside cultural influences) urban societies, Inverted Utopias, in effect, extends a paradigm first proposed by the critic Marta Traba. Rereading and revising as revolutionary what others have periodically called unoriginal or peripheral, the curators seek to negate the subordinate status of Latin American art by demonstrating how the artists included in the exhibition played an integral role in the development of global modernism. While their efforts are laudatory, their claims are perhaps at times overstated. By making implicit aesthetic value judgments and claiming that these avant-garde movements rival European modernism, they are in danger of falling prey to the same qualitative logic they are supposedly critiquing. Is it not possible to make an argument for difference without the supposition of hierarchical values?

In the introduction, Ramírez outlines the tensions inherent in each of the six constellations, some of which are self-evident from their titles, while others benefit from further elaboration. The antipathy between universal modernist principles and autochthonous sources characterizes the constellation entitled the Universal and Vernacular, which is devoted mostly to art produced in the 1920s and 1930s. Play and Grief traces various responses to societal crises through the modes of parody, caricature, the grotesque, and black humor. Geometric Abstraction, Concrete art, and Constructivism form the focus of the constellation Progression and Rupture, while dynamic art, such as the works of Siqueiros, Gego, and Venezuelan Cinetismo, which interrogate the conflict between stasis and movement, comprises Vibrational and Stationary. Sensorial art, both tactile and optic, takes center stage in Touch and Gaze, while the Cryptic and Committed constellation scrutinizes currents of Conceptualism in Latin America.

Aimed at a knowledgeable readership, every essay within a given constellation presents a sophisticated reading of the critical discourse surrounding the distinct avant-garde manifestations. In general, the articles are either brief overviews of an understudied artist/movement or offer new interpretations of better-known subjects. Of the nineteen essays that comprise the constellations, four and a half tackle the pre-World War II period. Cut from the English language version are four essays that originally appeared in Heterotopías; an entire constellation on display in Spain did not make an appearance in Houston and therefore was also eliminated from the catalogue. Originally entitled “Constelación Promotora,” the curators revamped this section as Dogma and Resistance in the Documents section of the catalogue (discussed below). This constellation originally included essays by Thomas Llorens Serra and Robert Lubar on Torres-García and an essay by Cuauhtémoc Medina on Dr. Atl; in addition, an essay by Saúl Yurkiévich on Julio Le Parc replaces one by Luis Pérez Oramas on Armando Reverón. While questions of space (both curatorial and editorial) perhaps prompted these changes, in light of the fact that there is little published in English on, for example, Dr. Atl, or even Reverón, these would have been useful texts to include. Moreover, Lubar’s text provides valuable insights into Torres-García’s aesthetic impulses prior to his move to Uruguay.

The essays featured in Universal and Vernacular confront topics such as Oswald de Andrade’s concept of Anthropophagy and Xul Solar’s abstruse writings. In his essay, “Anthropophagic Utopia: Barbarian Metaphysics,” Benedito Nunes examines Andrade’s 1924 Manifesto Pau-Brasil and elucidates how the philosophy of Anthropophagy not only called for cultural cannibalism (the digestion of European cultures/avant-gardes and their ultimate transformation into autonomous phenomena), but also how the theory itself represents an inversion of the one-sided direction of imports. Olea’s essay, “Xul’s Innermost Experience: the Verbivocovisual Presentiment,” moves beyond an analysis of the artist’s paintings; it is a call to look at the scope of Xul’s oeuvre, specifically his use of language both in the visual arts and poetry, in order to understand more fully the uniqueness of his total world vision. The last text included in this section condenses Ramírez’s critical essay on Torres-García’s Constructive Universalism and the artists associated with the School of the South, an essay that originally appeared in the 1992 exhibition catalogue El Taller Torres-García: The School of the South and Its Legacy.

Play and Grief features a brief and insightful overview by Angel Rama of the activities and significance of El Techo de la Ballena, a politically radical artistic movement active in Venezuela in the 1960s, which defined itself against the geometric abstraction that became the national visual language in the 1950s. Marcelo Pacheco’s “Posh Art and Post-Historic Art: Argentina (1957–1965)” offers a synopsis of the heterogeneous artistic tendencies in Argentina that appeared against the backdrop of a fundamentally academic art promoting the notion of good taste, but which were unencumbered by the complexities of historical conceptions of truth. “The Anti-Aesthetics of an Art of Chaos” by Olea sheds light on Luis Felipe Noé’s little-studied theoretical writings that introduced the concept of chaos as a strategic Latin American inversion of the playfulness of U.S. Pop art. Lastly, this constellation provides a useful translation of Marta Traba’s against-the-grain interpretation of Beatriz González’s work. Rather than viewing her furniture pieces—painted transformations of iconic works of art and mass media personalities—as humorous and ironic, Traba instead locates her artistic production within Adorno’s aesthetic theories, reading them as a critique of fetishism, kitsch, and camp.

Comprised of two essays, Rupture and Progression begins with Ramírez’s “Vital Structures: The Constructive Nexus in South America,” a consideration of temporally and geographically disparate traditions of constructivism in Latin America. Ramírez provocatively argues that three avant-garde proposals—the Uruguayan Torres-García, the Argentinean Grupo Madí, and the Brazilian Neo-Concretists—made “the individual or humankind either as the kernel or the central receptor of the constructive work” (195), and by humanizing the European Constructivist model contaminated with humanism “the notion of the self-referential structure of the work of art” (200; emphasis in original). Ramírez argues her assertion that the proponents of European Constructivism were not humanists on the basis that various individuals and movements—such as Van Doesburg, El Lissitzky, and Mondrian—embraced mechanical precision, material production, and a culture of pure formal relationships (193). While her interpretation of European Constructivism ignores the sense of the human embodied by the concerns for the collective that buttress, for example, Russian Constructivism, her larger purpose is an appeal to resist the compartmentalization of art history into isolated and discrete “isms.” The second essay, Ana Maria Belluzzo’s “The ruptura Group and Concrete Art,” traces the historical trajectory of the Sao Paulo group that receives little attention by critics and scholars in the United States in comparison to the Rio de Janeiro group that included such figures as Hélio Oiticica and Lygia Clark. Belluzzo reinforces Waldemar Cordeiro’s central role in the development of Brazilian Concrete art.

One of the few constellations in the catalogue to juxtapose art from the two periods under discussion, the intellectually compelling Vibrational and Stationary unites the figurative works of Siqueiros with the geometric abstraction of Venezuelan Cinetismo and the work of Gego, artists who have probably never before been considered together, but who have been grouped in this instance because of their innovative approaches to movement, perception, and spectatorship. It is here that the concept of the constellation as conceived by the curators works at its best. In his essay, “The Vertical Screen,” Olivier Debroise explores Siqueiros’s manifesto “Los vehículos de la pintura dialéctico-subversiva” (ca. 1930) and Eisenstein’s theories of “The Dynamic Square” (1931). Debroise argues that Eisenstein adopted the format of the vertical narrative/composition in his films as a result of seeing Siqueiros’s vertical mural in the staircase of the Escuela Nacional Preparatoria, and that both artists explored the avant-garde possibilities of cinematographic dynamism. In the end, however, Debroise suggests that neither Siqueiros nor Eisenstein fully realized the utopian dimensions (active observation and cinematographic dynamism) that their manifestoes and theoretical statements proffered. Meanwhile, Ariel Jiménez’s text, “Neither Here Nor There,” delves into the paradoxes of Venezuela’s collective project of modernization and of the concept of universality as it specifically applies to the work of Jesús Rafael Soto and Carlos Cruz-Diez. Lastly, in “Gego and the Analytic Context of Cinetismo,” Luis Pérez Oramas reasons that the work of Gego should be considered a deconstruction and anti-heroic projection of the universal myth expounded by Cinetismo.

The fifth constellation, Touch and Gaze, translates a little-known article from 1967 on Le Parc by Yurkiévich and offers an overview by Paulo Herkenhoff of Neo-Concretism’s use of the haptic (“tactile”) gaze crucial to a thorough understanding of the work of artists such as Oiticica and Clark. The third essay, by Guy Brett, which originally appeared in Cahier (Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam), similarly seeks to retrieve the tactile associations of Oiticica’s work. Brett questions the limitations of exhibiting Oiticica’s work in an institutional setting such as a museum, which mummifies it rather than fulfills its original intention to be physically completed by public participation.

The last constellation, Cryptic and Committed, includes a valuable transcription into English of León Ferrari’s drawing The Written Painting (17 December 1964). It also features a reprint of a 1964 letter by Max Bense, “On the Subject of Waldemar Cordeiro’s popcretos,” and an assessment by Justo Pastor Mellado of José Balmes’s proto-Conceptual “critique of historicism” within the context of a synopsis of Chilean painting in the twentieth century. Essays by Olea and Ramírez conclude the final constellation. Olea analyzes Ferrari’s drawn poems as both blatantly unorthodox and pious in their attempts to unravel a universe based on faith. Ramírez’s treatise rightly argues that due to a strong ideological impulse and search for sociopolitical emancipation the various currents of Conceptualism in Latin America should be seen autonomously from the Conceptual art movement in the United States, which remained more hermetic in its critical evaluation of the institutionalized art world.

As argued by Ramírez and Olea, the construct of the “inverted utopia” is multivalent. It is used both to suggest the distinct direction of the Latin American avant-gardes in relation to their European sources (past vs. future) and to claim the “autonomous” status of the Latin American avant-gardes based on their critical regurgitation of European models that have been inverted through their incorporation of autochthonous traditions. The first criteria risks obscuring the complexity of artistic production on both sides of the Atlantic by relegating it to a one-dimensional forward or reverse drive. In addition, it remains unclear how any of the essays, except for those in the Universal and Vernacular constellation, support this time-based concept of the avant-gardes. On the other hand, almost all of the essays argue more or less for varying degrees of digested influence and are more successful in conveying the “originality” of these various movements. Torres-García, Cinetismo, Neo-Concretism, and Grupo Madí all emerge as able proponents of the “inverted utopia” paradigm. The question that lingers, however, is what are the ramifications of this model for the study of Latin American art? Are autonomy and originality the only criteria by which all art should be judged? As part of a struggle for validity and inclusion in the story of modernism, perhaps. In the end, however, might it be more fruitful to change the very terms of the debate and question the inherent hierarchical value judgments that are in place and that continue to reinforce the very canons and teleological histories against which the curators rally?

The last section of the catalogue, Documents, arguably one of the most valuable, is an anthology of lesser-known primary sources, which further contribute to the compilation in one volume of a wealth of contextual material. The selection of approximately ninety documents (organized by constellation) includes manifestoes and theoretical writings by the artists and groups represented in the exhibition, texts rarely circulated beyond the periodicals or books in which they were originally published. While it frustrates the user not to have an index to the documents, the value of this section to scholars and students cannot be overestimated.

By questioning research methodologies and presumptions inherent in the documentation, exhibition, and promotion of Latin American art, Inverted Utopias lays the groundwork and opens up the opportunity for new paths of inquiry. Most importantly, through its scholarly persistence and groundbreaking research, this catalogue presents one of the next steps in the long overdue process of reevaluating the story of modernism to include the Latin American contribution. Perhaps one can already see the impact of critics such as Ramírez and Olea and others in the reinstallation of the Painting and Sculpture galleries of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, to include Torres-García next to Piet Mondrian, Reverón in dialogue with Pierre Bonnard, and Oiticica and Clark taking their rightful place near North American Minimalism. While it leaves us with many questions, Inverted Utopias is a remarkable, pioneering work and a sorely needed contribution to studies of twentieth-century art. Rather than introducing artists, providing definitive answers, or summarizing the entire field, both the exhibition and catalogue recontextulize individual artists and movements, as well as the broader study of modern art in Latin America. There is no doubt Inverted Utopias will remain a useful, essential, and important source with which to grapple for many years to come.