Making a place: sculpture and territory in Latin America

The gift of statues or the foundation of commemorative space

Public sculpture has played a decisive role in the construction of the Latin American territorial imaginary. After independence, and once the continental integration project failed, “the territorial fracture in the former colonial domains” followed[1]. The map of the “New World” was transformed into a bunch of nations in the making that had to invent the symbols of their sovereignty in order to culturally demarcate their respective jurisdictions. Antonio Guzmán Blanco’s Venezuela, Porfirio Díaz’s Mexico, José María Reina Barrios’s Guatemala and Manuel Bulnes’s Chile fit this model, signed by urban planning and the carrying out of commemorative works.

Everywhere, from the Río Bravo to Tierra del Fuego, monuments to independence national heroes and leaders of the day were erected. Almost invariably, they would primarily be sited at the main square of the once-colonial city. From this moment on, statues disseminated throughout the principal transit lanes and official buildings. The procedure to install the pieces was usually the same, starting in almost all cases with an official commission to a local (when there was one) or foreign artist. The outcome was more or less similar, since the monuments made at this time do not differ much from European ones, despite being dedicated to native or mixed-blood heroes. An example is the Monument to Cuauhtémoc (1878-1887), a work of academic style made by Miguel Norteña (1843-1890) and erected on Paseo de la Reforma avenue in the Mexican capital. In this piece, the Aztec warrior is represented as a Roman emperor, leaving as only attributes of his indigenous condition the spear, the crown of feathers, and some ornamental elements that decorate the monument’s base.

In any case, their importance resides in their capacity of volumetric assertion of the local symbols on a real territory. All those statues, still and vigilant, were (are) the three-dimensional expression of an imaginary layout; that is, a sovereignty symbol of the territory on which they are located. They were (are) a foundational mark, whose meaning expanded even to funeral sculptures, a modality that was also widely spread in the continent’s necropolises. If heroic sculpture asserted nation’s sovereignty over the territory, funeral sculpture guaranteed a space for posthumous remembrance. Statues in cemeteries, besides honoring the dead, won for them a “dimensional place” where they could be found.

That search for contextual points of reference, that sort of “territorial emotion” that defines the nation, as Ricardo Rojas puts it, can be seen in El paso de los Andes por el General San Martín (The Crossing of the Andes by General San Martín), an artwork by Uruguayan Juan Manuel Ferrari (1874-1916) located in the city of Mendoza, Argentina. One of the most interesting profiles in this monument recreates the steep topography of the Andes Mountains, on which the equestrian statue of the hero advances along with his army. The work does not only show the hero but also the very “place” of the deed; the piece of geography where the facts occurred, even though this is not the same site where the monument is.

Whereas painting, drawing and engraving contributed to the visual delimitation of a characteristic geography, the public and funeral statue brought about the corporeal identification of that space as a foundation place and remembrance site. It is true this was done with foreign aesthetics and formal budgets following the pattern of an academicism already dying in the European countries but of formidable utility for the symbolic configuration of the continental territory. 

Later on, during the first decades of the 20^th century, the principles of public sculpture will find a more flexible expression in the nativist and creolist currents, which tend to the slenderness of volumes and the introduction of autochthonous ethnic features. The very definite forms of the mixed-blood humanity, “cosmic race” according to José Vasconcelos, describe the image, generally idealized, of a culture that begins to acknowledge the human profile that inhabits its geography. Under these precepts, the sculptural work by Lucio Correa Morales (1852-1923) is developed in Argentina, just like José Belloni’s (1882-1965) in Uruguay, Francisco Narváez’s and Alejandro Colina’s in Venezuela, later joined by the propositions of Costa Rican Francisco Zúñiga, based-in-Mexico, and Cuban Rita Longa.

The ubiquitous space: monumental iconography in postcards, stamps and banknotes

As we have suggested, statues are able to “make a place” for both, those who move around them and those who reside in distant places. Proof of that is the large quantity of engravings and postcards with monument images that entered circulation during the decades at the end of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century.  Added to that is the later issuing of postcards and banknotes in which monuments can be seen as emblematic places from emergent nations

By means of art reproduction techniques, be them graphic or photographic, civic sculpture went from being something more that a volume in space to becoming a recognizable point that was part of a wider itinerary. This way, statues in Buenos Aires, Montevideo, Mexico City, Quito, Havana and Caracas, just to name a few examples, radiate their configuration presence, their stage potential, over other spaces and circumstances.

Postcards, postage stamps and banknotes have favored, in their own way, a gift of ubiquity for the public sculpture, by being the vehicle that disseminates that will to “make a place” where there was none before; that is, to found the real stage of a fictitious continent. “The postcard connected personal communication and image. It was no longer the sender’s own image (it could be too), but that of other place, site, or real or symbolic motif the sender chose for the addressee. It had then the quality of a specific transference that complemented the literary message”.[2]

Going from the logic of the monument in situ to the representation on a postcard, the public sculpture enters a prerecorded space lacking in thickness and materiality, but with a high evocative allure. Now that site can be any place where someone, avid for news, receives a postcard. If the monument “makes the place”, the postcard reproduces and disseminates it, extending its accessibility beyond the territory.

An artist that has used the postcard as support for a reflection on civic sculpture in the urban space is Venezuelan Eugenio Espinoza. Among his postcards, modified with acrylic, there is one that stands out where it can be seen the monument to María Lionza by Alejandro Colina, a sculptor who framed much of his work within the cultural heritage of indigenous communities. The proposal, dated 1973, entails adding a grid on the preexisting image, thus breaking the sinuous anatomy of the indigenous goddess and presenting the conflict between figurative expression and geometric rationality.

Philatelic stamps, as postcard images, have also served as a means of spreading information about sculptural heritage. In El descubrimiento de América en la filatelia mundial (The Discovery of America in World Philately), Juan Manuel Martínez Moreno puts together a wide series of stamps with reproductions of Columbus monuments.[3]Among them, a Cuban 5 cent postage stamp from 1942 stands out, which depicts a statue dedicated to the Great Admiral in the city of Cárdenas (Matanzas, Cuba). The work was made in 1862 by Spanish sculptor José Piquer y Duart (1806-1871) and among its distinctive symbols there is a globe at Columbus’s feet. This element does not only make an allusion to the discovery deed as such, but also to the emergence of a new territoriality that joins the coordinates of a unique world. Paradoxically, the monument in question is fenced in; that is to say, it demarcates an exclusiveness territory that breaks at the very instant the piece is reproduced on the stamp, thus extending it to a wider circulation space.

Something even more fascinating happens with the reproductions of statues on banknotes. The Mexican, Chilean, Bolivian, Dominican and Colombian pesos, the Ecuadorian sucres, the Costa Rican colones, the Honduran lempiras and the Venezuelan bolivars exhibit on their reverse the monumental iconography of their respective countries. To give an example, it is enough to point out the image of the Hemiciclo a Juárez (Hemicycle to Juárez) reproduced in the Mexican 20 peso banknote. The work, allegorical in nature, was made during Porfirio Díaz’s times by sculptor Guillermo de la Heredia.

In this case, as in many others, civic sculpture gains access, with no modesty whatsoever, to the most diverse transaction spaces: banks, stores, public services…  Once inserted in the monetary system, the statue’s image does not only multiply its public presence but also transcends the commemorative and aesthetic value that gave rise to it. This way, the monument’s condition becomes consubstantial to the money’s nature, inhabiting those impossible spaces where there is no room for the physical literalness of a statue, be it a wallet, a pocket or a cash register. Banknotes, as postcards and postage stamps, have brought about the ingenious transformation of a bronze or stone figure into a printed image, freeing the three-dimensional object from the volume and weight that prevented it from “making a place” beyond its actual location.

A critical variant of this idea is the workInsertions into Ideological Circuits: Banknote Project (1973) by Brazilian Cildo Meireles, who takes advantage of paper money as support for his work, trying to transcend the limited reach of traditional artistic spaces and thematizing the communicational sense of alternative media. In this regard, the artist stamped texts on one-cruzeiro and one-dollar banknotes with questions such as: What is the place of the work of art? or Who killed Herzog? These questions were in circulation from pocket to pocket, bank to bank, “making a place” for art where there was none before.

Construction of modern space and contemporary scene

The entrance of modernity involves the replacement of the academic canon and the creation of a space dominated by order and technique, where sculpture must join in as part of the environment. Universalismo constructivo (Constructive Universalism), a programmatic text by Uruguayan Torres García, prefigures the rational topos that settles on the combination of abstract and symbolic elements, which correspond to the universal and the ancestral respectively. This view exemplarily transcends to civic space in his Monumento cósmico (Cosmic Monument, 1938), a piece located at Parque Rodó in Montevideo. The work, presented as a large stele incised on stone, starts from a geometric matrix on which dissimilar symbols are incorporated. The upper part is rounded off with three volumes –a cube, a sphere and a pyramid- which sum up that search for a paramount order based on formal simplification.

The statements by Joaquín Torres García represent a definitive advance towards the abandonment of representation and anecdote, giving way to the foundation of an intrinsically modern space. Such is the search undertaken by the constructive experiments that take place between the forties and seventies in Argentina with the MADI movement and the Concreto-invención (Concrete-Invention) group, in Brazil with Neo-concretism, and in Venezuela with Kinetic art. The prominence in this stage no longer belongs to heroes and independence heroic deeds, but to form, color, and movement. Sculpture becomes an element of visual enhancement for architecture and urbanity, transcending the anecdotal and commemorative nature of yesteryear. The totalitarian uniqueness of the traditional monument is broken and work is done now with modular structures, taking advantage of the possibilities of new materials such as iron, aluminum and plastic.

In this new assertion of the commonplace, sculpture is no longer obliged to re-present anything; it is enough to indicate its presence on the architectural and urban scene. Participation and play replace the solemnity of the nineteenth-century monument. This effort, as the idea inspiring it, is aimed at the city as the foundational territory of modernity, disregarding any allusion to nature or the rural universe.

From the seventies on, new coordinates will be defined for three-dimensional art in Latin America, although this time starting from a less literal layout of the territory that combines what is natural, artificial and mythical. Under the imprint of land art, minimalism and arte povera, public sculpture turns a little more evocative and metaphorical, assuming the notion of place from experience. Nature and the city are two great points of reference for an art that returns, after the failure of the modernizing project, to archaic motifs. Thus, interventions in plains, deserts, woods and urban zones in the continent arise, among which stand out the silhouettes in the landscape of Cuban-American Ana Mendieta and the works in natural environments by Venezuelan Milton Becerra.

Although public art principles derive from the relation with the environment complying with material and scale determinants, some sculptural proposals conceived for interior spaces, be them galleries or museums, have incorporated these criteria to reflect upon their meaning. The equestrian statue of general Juan Vicente Gómez or the work dedicated to an entrepreneur from the Venezuelan aviation, both by Marisol Escobar, put the notion of monument in crisis. They are large format pieces that will never be placed outdoors because they were made of plywood, instead of using a resistant weatherproof material.

This contradiction between scale, material and location becomes more dramatic with the alternation produced between volumetric simplification and naturalistic details. Add to that the use of drawing, a form of artistic expression that incorporates an element of fragility on the sound surface of wood. All this game of different procedures and failed allusions is developed in the context of the museum and not in the city’s open spaces, all of which involves criticism directed at the civic function of the monument. The museum, a place of exclusivity and delight where objects remain enclosed in a showcase-space, transparently thematizes that spot where the public sense of the monument is lost. Consequently, the pieces we comment on no longer centralize any square or urban transit hub; they do not prefigure a foundational place either, they send us to an intertextual space, signed by the mixture of diverse aesthetic-functional patterns.

The deconstructive drive present in the sculptural work by Marisol turns even more acute in these propositions where the principles of monumental art are taken advantage of and neutralized at the same time. What should have been a statue placed in an open space, ends up becoming a museum object and therefore, “out of place”. In other words, the museum is a “non-place” for the monument; that is to say, a space to hold the funeral rites of a dying tradition.

Latin American public sculpture as strategy of territorial assertion would have different ways of manifesting itself, which expression would lead, at the same time, to different types of space. One of commemorative-anecdotal nature, conceived as a place of remembrance and learning; another rational-abstract one that disdains vernacular points of reference and gives shape to a universal topos; a third disseminated-experiential one, for which the site is no more than an ephemeral location, determined by the subject’s presence; and finally, another intertextual and parodical one that takes refuge in the museum, on the margins of the city and nature, deconstructing different elements of the traditional  monument. It is about different strategies of territorial configuration from which successive narratives are woven, narratives over which Latin American society gravitates.

Although simple, this space typology of public sculpture in the continent does not only reveal different aesthetic conceptions, but also the social assumptions that drive them. They are spaces enclosed by certain power relations, which are legitimated or damaged according to the circumstances. The remembrance place promotes feelings of nationalist devotion; the universal topos, on the contrary, fosters perceptive and ludic aspects, regardless of the economic and socio-professional determinants; the ephemeral location tries to restore the prominence of life experience, both in natural and urban spaces; the territory of intertextuality promotes simulacrum and remembrance without obligation.

Currently, all these spaces coexist in a scene saturated with visual stimuli, where the memorial monument, abstract propositions and ephemeral interventions mingle. The superimposition of these symbolisms shapes a hybrid panorama, reinforced by the overwhelming presence of publicity. This way, public sculpture in Latin America allows following the oscillating tracks of successive projects of symbolic foundation of the continental territoriality, allowing people to see the mark of its expectations and failures.

(This text is part of a more extensive inquiry, still under development, about the relation between subject and territory in Latin American art.)