COART-INT · Decentralizing Conceptual Art's Internationalism: Latin American artists in Western Europe, 1968-1979
Horizon 2020 — Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions
- Duration
- 2019-09-01 → 2023-05-31
- EU contribution
- €281,359
- Participants
- 1
- Scheme
- MSCA-IF
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Results in brief
Decentralizing Conceptual Art's Internationalism: Latin American artists in Western Europe, 1968-1979
The project aimed to investigate the transnational networks of Latin American artists in Western Europe and construct a revisionist history of post-1945 conceptual and fluxus art based on these findings. The project had four key objectives. The first was to: expand our understanding of Latin American and European conceptualist art practices through a transnational context. Second: comprehensively reassess regional art histories – Belgian, Dutch, English and Latin American – of this period, giving a more layered history of the semi-peripheries’ importance in the formation of Conceptual art, with a focus on the way artists acted on local scenes. Third: identify and analyse specific artworks within a framework of Conceptual art’s internationalism and to discuss how these works are intricately defined by and vehicles for artist’s nomadic condition and spatial exploration within it. Finally: map out different models, meanings and discursive constructions of internationalism in the 60s and 70s. The project resulted in establishing a decentered, transnational network of artists in Belgium, the Netherlands and England, but also Italy and German Democratic Republic, who were connected through their art practices and work. My findings established that their histories of migration were propelled by a multitude of professional and personal factors and that once in Europe they formed a diasporic community of art marginal to but linked to the dominant centers of conceptual and fluxus art. This knowledge is significant in the writing of narratives that foreground transnational mobility and migration, diasporic identity, relational histories across borders through artistic and cultural production.
Data: CORDIS, © European Union
Project objective
My proposed project problematizes Conceptual art’s internationalism and its historicization with an innovative study on transnational artists who expatriated from Latin American repressive political regimes to Europe, establishing themselves in Belgium, England and the Netherlands between 1968-1979. The objective is to assert these artists as agents of transcultural processes and their conceptual practices as operating within a dynamic matrix that is at once local and international, deterritorialized and rooted. Through an analysis of unique data collection, oral history and artworks this research aims to fundamentally revise the art historical canon by de-centering the major narrative of Conceptual art of the 1960s and 70s to comprehensively address the prominent roles these artists had on their adopted localities, a Latin American diasporic art world and the formulation of internationalism. By focusing on the interstitial spatial regimes these artists occupied and created, this research effectively redraws the discipline’s original topography and conventional analyses fixed within national paradigms towards a logic of transnationalism fueled by the mobility of agents, objects and practices. In the example of this project, a transnational methodology reassesses regional art histories — Belgian, Dutch, English and Latin American — to capture interregional flows and networks of production. Furthermore, it underscores a present condition in which geographical and cultural borders are increasingly more connected. The topic is timely in regards to the evolving understanding of Conceptual art. More specifically, the issues of exile, mobility, internationalism and localism that figure into this work offer a unique case study into Conceptual art’s role in driving and defining a “global” condition that is relevant today and more specifically art’s “global contemporary”, also referred to as “new internationalism of contemporary art.”
Original text from CORDIS.
Participants
- UNIVERSITEIT VAN AMSTERDAM · AmsterdamCoordinatorNetherlands
Links
Data: CORDIS, © European Union