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Aesthetic Moments of Latin Americanism

I can imagine an exploration of the past in which we are able to compare three ways in which arts are related to social time. In the 1960s, art worked as a herald of utopia, trying to include in the present a future that seemed feasible. In the 1980s and 1990s, it was a memory of the defeat—seeing to it that the future that could never be would continue to have a place in the present, albeit by evoking the dead and the losses, the exiles and the hopelessness. Since the 1990s, a large number of artists speak of the instant: instead of works that portray long-term possible or historic scenes from history or long-term possibilities, they put forward installations and performances to be seen right now. By taking up the issue of aesthetic moments, I am not adopting the latter perspective. Inasmuch as I am suggesting a rethinking of “the Latin American” or “Latin Americanism” as it relates to three different situations of the last forty years, I am interested in trying to understand a medium-length duration of time. However, I am not able to find any conception of Latin American history, or of the ways in which the arts are situated in each moment, that allows one to conceive them as stages or periods, part of a larger evolutionary or involutionary logic. Certainly, there are other keys to understand what happened in the arts and what is now happening in the arts. Here I offer a reading of three moments that become less and less enigmatic to me when I explore their relationship with the present.