Joaquín Barriendos "Rethinking Latin America from the Margins"
Channel: Rethinking Conceptualism
Date: 2021-03-01

Joaquín Barriendos "Rethinking Latin America from the Margins"

Juan Acha was a remarkable art critic and proliferous theoretician, equally interested in German expressionism, the Renaissance, Marxist social art history, comics, Body Art, or the reception of Fax Art. Born in Sullana, Peru in 1916, Acha played a central role in most of the international discussions related to the emergence of Latin America as an aesthetic subject. He participated in landmark congresses such as the Austin Symposium (1975) or the First Ibero-American Congress of Art Critics and Artists in Caracas (1978). He organized as well emblematic events such as the First Latin American Biennale in Sao Paulo (1978) or the First Latin American Conference of Non-Objectual Art and Urban Art in Medellín (1981). 

It is difficult to neglect today that Juan Acha was a key figure in the second half of the 20th century. However, he was always a marginal thinker –an outsider with unorthodox views. He experienced rejection, institutional animosity, and even racism. Art historians despised his work, sometimes vocally, until very recently. Common arguments are he is too conceptual, too theoretical, too convoluted. But Juan Acha had strong principles and a clear goal in mind. He always defended a vision of Latin America as a region devoted to produce concepts, to inform theories. Latin America was for him a living organism; a subject, not an object of study. He always expressed his conviction that the role of the critic in Latin America is to give shape and embrace an autonomous revolutionary visual thinking, emerged from the aesthetico-political conditions of the region. 

In order to rethink conceptualisms in Latin America we need to rethink first how art concepts and art ideas have been produced in the region. Rethinking conceptualisms means rethinking agency, politics, aesthetics, and epistemology in the Global South. Rethinking conceptualisms means to rethink theory as action, as a time-now in Marxist terms. In this conference, I will revisit one of the most critical periods in Juan Acha’s life, a major biographical fracture he experienced between 1968 and 1975, when he produced what I call his aesthetic-political writings.

This lecture is part of the programme of the online symposium “Rethinking Conceptualism: Avant-Garde, Activism and Politics in Latin American Art (1960s-1980s)” 

Panel discussion: Theories on Latin American Art: Juan Acha, Marta Traba, Luis Camnitzer
Q & A session with Joaquín Barriendos, María Mercedes Herrera Buitrago and Luis Camnitzer via Zoom: 10 March 2021, 18.00 h (GMT +1)

Website: https://rethinkingconceptualism.com/ 

Twitter: @RConceptualism 
Instagram: @rconceptualism 
Facebook: /rethinkingconceptualism

Credits: 
Video: Joaquín Barriendos
Video editing: Katerina Valdivia Bruch 
Portrait photo of Joaquín Barriendos: courtesy Joaquín Barriendos
Graphic: Katerina Valdivia Bruch 

CC Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International 

Rethinking Conceptualism: Avant-Garde, Activism and Politics in Latin American Art (1960s-1980s) 
A project by Katerina Valdivia Bruch 

In collaboration with Ibero-Amerikanisches Institut, Instituto Cervantes Berlin 
Funded by Hauptstadtkulturfonds, Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen 
Supported by Embassy of Uruguay in Germany, Embassy of Chile in Germany

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