Fall 2003

LAS 381 • ISS IN CONTEMP LATIN AMER ART

Course Description

We investigate the major post-World War II tendencies and movements from abstraction to conceptual art particularly in Argentina. Brazil, Chile, Venezuala, and Colombia by looking at artists such as Jorge de la Vega, Lygia Clark, Helio Oiticica, Cildo Meireles, and groups like Tucuman Arde and Colectivo Acciones de Arte. Some of these artists used and articulated spaces (gallery or street, or between object and audience) in ways that were markedly different from their contemporaries in the United States. We consider these disparities in their specific cultural and political contexts, and in terms of how they also differed from country to country by reading Latin American critics Marta Traba, Ronaldo Brito, Ferreira Gullar, Nelly Richard and English critics Guy Brett and Lawrence Alloway. There will be assigned weekly readings from Xeroxed materials and books on reserve, one short and one long seminar report, the latter to culminate in a paper.

back