Non-literary Fiction: Art of the Americas under Neoliberalism

By Esther Gabara

Explores a new form of fiction that emerged in late-twentieth-century visual art across the Americas.
 
With Non-literary Fiction, Esther Gabara examines how contemporary art produced across the Americas has reacted to the rising tide of neoliberal regimes, focusing on the crucial role of fiction in daily politics. Gabara argues that these fictions depart from familiar literary narrative structures and emerge in the new mediums and practices that have revolutionized contemporary art. Each chapter details how fiction is created through visual art forms—in performance and body art, posters, mail art, found objects, and installations. For Gabara, these fictions comprise a type of art that asks viewers to collaborate in the creation of the work and helps them to withstand the brutal restrictions imposed by dominant neoliberal regimes. 
 
During repressive regimes of the 1960s and 1970s and free trade agreements of the 1990s, artists and critics consistently said no to economic privatization, political deregulation, and reactionary social logic as they rejected inherited notions of visual, literary, and political representation. Through close analyses of artworks and writings by leading figures of these two generations, including Indigenous thinkers, Gabara shows how negation allows for the creation of fiction outside textual forms of literature.
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Release date: Dec 6, 2022
• ISBN: 9780226822372

Book preview

Cover Page for Non-Literary FIction

Non-literary Fiction

Non-literary Fiction

Art of the Americas under Neoliberalism

Esther Gabara

The University of Chicago Press

CHICAGO LONDON

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2022 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637.

Published 2022

Printed in the United States of America

31 30 29 28 27 26 25 24 23 22     1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-82236-5 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-82235-8 (paper)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-82237-2 (e-book)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226822372.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Gabara, Esther, 1972–, author.

Title: Non-literary fiction : art of the Americas under neoliberalism / Esther Gabara.

Description: Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2022. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2022008956 | ISBN 9780226822365 (cloth) | ISBN 9780226822358 (paperback) | ISBN 9780226822372 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Art—Political aspects—Latin America.

Classification: LCC N6502.6 .G33 2022 | DDC 709.8/09045—dc23/eng/20220327

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022008956

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

Contents

List of Figures

Negating: An Introduction

CHAPTER ONE

Line: Making Fiction in Word and Image

CHAPTER TWO

Motif: Recurrent Images of Walking

CHAPTER THREE

Gesture: Signals in Motion

CHAPTER FOUR

Corpus: Telling Bodies, Living and Dead

CHAPTER FIVE

Color: Taken In by Realism

Epilogue: A Refuge

Color Plates

Acknowledgments

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Figures

Introduction

0.1.  Henrique Alvim Corrêa, illustration for La guerre des mondes, 1906

0.2.  Alfredo Jaar, Estudios sobre la felicidad, 1979–1981

0.3.  Sample ballot for Chilean plebiscite reproduced in Chile: 1988 Plebiscite Resource Book, 1988

0.4.  Colectivo de Acciones de Arte, No+, 1983

0.5.  Alfredo Jaar, A Logo for America, 1987

0.6.  Alfredo Jaar, A Logo for America, 1987

0.7.  Abraham Cruzvillegas, Autoconstrucción, 2008

0.8.  Chemi Rosado Seijo, El repartidor de noticias, 2000, from the series Tapando para ver

Chapter One: Line

1.1.  Color-banded khipu, Inka, 1450–1534

1.2.  Ulises Carrión, Looking for Poetry/Tras la poesía, 1973

1.3.  Ulises Carrión, Looking for Poetry/Tras la poesía, 1973

1.4.  Décio Pignatari, Agora tal vez nunca, 1964

1.5.  Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, Nueva Corónica i buen gobierno, 1615

1.6.  Ulises Carrión, Gossip, Scandal and Good Manners, 1983

1.7.  Waltércio Caldas, Leitura silenciosa, 1975

1.8.  Waltércio Caldas, Espelho para Velásquez, 2000

1.9.  Waltércio Caldas, Untitled, 1990

1.10.  Waltércio Caldas, Escultura escultura, 2005

1.11.  Waltércio Caldas, Momento de fronteira, 1999

1.12.  Waltércio Caldas, Momento de fronteira, 2000

1.13.  Abraham Cruzvillegas, Autodestrucción 7: Deshaciendo el nudo, 2015

1.14.  Abraham Cruzvillegas, Autodestrucción 7: Deshaciendo el nudo, detail, 2015

Chapter Two: Motif

2.1.  Antonio Caro, from the series Homenaje a Manuel Quintín Lame, 1972

2.2.  Carlos Garaicoa, Homenaje al 6, 1992

2.3.  Carlos Garaicoa, Homenaje al 6, detail, 1992

2.4.  Antonio Caro, Proyecto 500, 1992

2.5.  Francis Alÿs, Turista, 1994

2.6.  Francis Alÿs, Re-enactments, 2000

2.7.  Francis Alÿs, from the series Ambulantes, 1992–2006

2.8.  Francis Alÿs, 61 out of 60, 1999

2.9.  Lorie Novak, Lento, pero avanzo, 2010

Chapter Three: Gesture

3.1.  Carlos Garaicoa, Perseguido por la palabra, opto por el gesto, from the series La palabra transformada, 2009

3.2.  Show Opinião, Polygram/Philips, 1965

3.3.  Lotty Rosenfeld, Una milla de cruces sobre el pavimento, 1979

3.4.  Stuyvesant Van Veen, Gesture and Environment, 1941

3.5.  Cover, Giovanni Meo Zilio and Silvia Mejía, Diccionario de gestos: España e Hispanoamérica, vol. 1, 1980

3.6.  Cover, Giovanni Meo Zilio and Silvia Mejía, Diccionario de gestos: España e Hispanoamérica, vol. 2, 1983

3.7.  HARTO, in Diccionario de gestos: España e Hispanoamérica, vol. 2, 1983

3.8.  INVERTIDO, in Diccionario de gestos: España e Hispanoamérica, vol. 2, 1983

3.9.  Silvia Mejía, Parola, sostantivo femminile, 1978

3.10.  Lourdes Grobet, La familia Solar, 1983

3.11.  Lourdes Grobet, Brazo de Plata con la máscara de la Migra, toreo de Cuatro Caminos, 1981

3.12.  Lourdes Grobet, Portrait of Siglo XX, 1982

3.13.  Lourdes Grobet, Luchadores Nezahualcóyotl, 1975

3.14.  Michel Groisman, Porta das mãos, 2007

3.15.  Michel Groisman, Sirva-se, 2001–2004

3.16.  Michel Groisman, Sirva-se, 2001–2004

Chapter Four: Corpus

4.1.  Artur Barrio, Livro de carne, 1978–1979

4.2.  Artur Barrio, CadernosLivros, 1978–1979

4.3.  Artur Barrio, Rodapés de carne, 1978–1979

4.4.  Amalia Pica, Catachresis #63 (tongues of the shoes, legs of the chair, legs of the table, teeth of the fork and arm of the chair), 2016

4.5.  Amalia Pica, Catachresis #11 (teeth of the saw, leg of the table, elbow of the pipe), 2011

4.6.  Amalia Pica, Reconstruction of an Antenna (as Seen on TV), 2010

4.7.  Artur Barrio, Situação T/T/, 1 (segunda parte), 1970

4.8.  Artur Barrio, Defl . . . . . . Situação . . . . . . . +S+ . . . . . . Ruas . . . . . . . Abril. . . . . ., 1970

4.9.  Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Nildo vestindo um parangolé de Hélio Oiticica no Viaduto da Mangueira, 1978

Chapter Five: Color

5.1.  Waldemar Cordeiro, Uma cadeira é uma cadeira, 1964

5.2.  Hélio Oiticica with B7 bólide vidro 1, 1963

5.3.  Jean-Baptiste Labat, Nouveau voyage aux isles de l’Amérique, 1742

Color Plates

1.  Lourdes Grobet, Tigres, Zitlala, Guerrero, 1981

2.  Josef Albers, Study for Homage to the Square: Less and More, 1969

3.  Alejandro Puente, Trama, color y luz, 1969

4.  Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle, Byron, Lisa, and Emmitt (from The Garden of Delights), 1998

5.  Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle, Color Field 5 (with Casta Painting), 2003

6.  Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle, Guerrero Negro, 2008

7.  Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle, Phantom Truck, 2007

8.  Cildo Meireles, Desvio para o vermelho: Impregnação; Entorno; Desvio, 1967–1984

9.  Nicolás García Uriburu, Coloration of the Grand Canal, Venice, 1968

10.  Nicolás García Uriburu, Coloration of the Grand Canal, Venice, 1968

11.  Chemi Rosado Seijo, El Cerro, detail, 2003

12.  Chemi Rosado Seijo, Carta de colores, 2012

Negating: An Introduction

An interview with Cildo Meireles (b. 1948) at the turn of the millennium centered on the question of fiction. Reflecting on his own practice over the decades, the Brazilian artist admitted a long-standing fascination with Orson Welles’s 1938 radio broadcast, which famously posed as news coverage of the Martian invasion of Earth: "The War of the Worlds is an example of an art object that worked perfectly, in the sense that it seamlessly dissolved the border between art and life, fiction and reality."¹ Meireles situated the broadcast at the nexus of visual art—an art object—and literary fiction, as the radio show was based on H. G. Wells’s 1897 serialized science-fiction novel. The artist also described the impact of the canonical Latin American writers Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortázar, and João Guimarães Rosa on his own attempts to bridge aesthetics, politics, and ethics in the visual arts. The desire to make work at these same junctures, Meireles explained, increased as the military dictatorship that came to power in Brazil in 1964 grew more repressive.

Meireles is not alone in his fascination with this particular fiction. War with Mars has reappeared at key moments as a cipher for hemispheric tensions between north and south. The alien invasion appeared in US serials as the drumbeat was amped up in the months before the Spanish-American War (1898), and it was reinvented for radio by Welles on the cusp of World War II and the country’s massive expansion of military and economic power.² Meireles himself began to work with fictions in the 1960s, as the United States threw its support behind the repressive regimes across the hemisphere that welcomed experiments with economic privatization, political deregulation, and reactionary social logics, known broadly as neoliberalism. Brazilian art had an intimate connection to the story from the beginning. H. G. Wells disliked the illustrations that accompanied the serialized printing of War of the Worlds, but he enthusiastically embraced the drawings a young Brazilian artist, Henrique Alvim Corrêa, made for the 1906 French translation (fig. 0.1). Alvim Corrêa died of tuberculosis in Europe soon thereafter and effectively disappeared from Brazilian art history. However, studies and exhibitions of his drawings reappeared between 1965 and 1973, just as Meireles’s generation confronted the struggle to make art under dictatorship.³ Since then, many contemporary artists from Latin America have named the importance of both Welles and Wells to them: from Meireles and Waltércio Caldas in Brazil to the Colombian Iván Argote’s fictional dismantling of a colonial monument in Paris in 2021. Meireles’s brief reference therefore signals a significant and ongoing history of fiction as political art, including and beyond Welles’s famous science-fiction provocation.

Figure 0.1 Henrique Alvim Corrêa, illustration for La guerre des mondes (War of the Worlds), translated from the English by Henry D. Davray. Published by L. Vandamme & Co. Jette-Bruxelles, 1906.

The reflections prompted by the interview with Meireles identify core questions about fiction, art, and politics that govern this study and demarcate the period it spans. Fiction was taken up by artists who came of age with him in the 1960s and 1970s, as neoliberal reforms were imposed by explicitly repressive regimes, and again by the next generation of artists who came of age in the 1990s, as they confronted the full realization of neoliberalism under democratically elected governments. South America—especially Chile but also Brazil—played a key role in Milton Friedman’s foundational neoliberal economic theory and was subjected to its proposals in the last decades of the twentieth century.⁴ The genealogy of fiction constituted by leading artists of these two generations provokes basic questions about its form and politics. How can a fiction be considered an art object? How do these art objects do the work of novels, given their tenuous narrative status? If they are not narrative, then how do we describe the temporality of their fictions? In decades when the idea of the avant-garde was under intense scrutiny, what is at stake in Meireles’s articulation of their classic theme of art and life as fiction and reality? Once we are not talking about literary texts, the fundamental question becomes, How do we know that an art object we encounter in real life is a fictional one?

Substantial scholarship on contemporary artists who broke the frame of the painting, abandoned the walls of the museum, and embraced the body and performance has addressed these issues to some degree. Art historians, critics, and curators have even spoken of fiction in the same breath that they declare the radical potential of these new art practices. However, they have not answered the core question that drives this study: what is the precise nature of fiction in these visual and objectual forms? To answer, I first peel fiction apart from long-held narrative conventions. I then compose a theory of visual fiction, building upon the discipline of art history’s precise narrative of aesthetic interventions, and literary studies’ articulation of the power of imaginary texts. The concept of non-literary fiction comprehends the mechanics, composition, and inventiveness of these strange objects and recognizes their political promise for life under late twentieth-century neoliberalism.

Exhibiting Fiction

Three significant museum exhibitions have invited visitors to walk into and among fictions—F(r)icciones (F[r]ictions, Museo Reina Sofía, 2000), More Real? Art in the Age of Truthiness (Walker Art Center, 2012), and Fictions (The Studio Museum in Harlem, 2018)—which they named as powerful instances of political art. Despite their focus on contemporary art as fiction, all three highlighted artists for whom that politics meant a confrontation with the history of colonialism in the Americas and its legacies of race and racism. The Peruvian sociologist Aníbal Quijano coined the phrase coloniality of modernity to account for the structural violence that persisted throughout the colonial, national, and now fully globalized periods in the Americas. He names racial discourse as the prime carrier of continued epistemological and social violence: a mental construction that expresses the basic experience of colonial domination and pervades the more important dimensions of global power, including its specific rationality: Eurocentrism. The racial axis has a colonial origin and character, but it has proven to be more durable and stable than the colonialism in whose matrix it was established.⁵ The visual fictions presented in these exhibitions contend with a reality well known by the Zapatista indigenous movement in Mexico, the cultural and armed uprising led by the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (EZLN), which exploded on January 1, 1994, with the implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement. Neoliberalism and coloniality are coetaneous phenomena.⁶

The Brazilian curators of F(r)icciones took their title from the famous collection of short stories by the Argentine Jorge Luis Borges. Ivo Mesquita and Adriano Pedrosa write that Borges offers the disordering of fiction and history necessary to provide an account of Latin America: its colonial baroque art and architecture, its modernist avant-garde experimentation, and finally its contemporary, neo-baroque reflections on cultural and racial hybridity. The curators productively mixed works from across these art-historical periods in order to disturb the modern narrative of progress—the rationality of Eurocentrism—that positions the Americas as always lagging behind. Several of the artists included in F(r)icciones also appear in this study, as they are exemplary of the politics of fiction making that this foundational exhibition signaled. However, Mesquita and Pedrosa ultimately rendered the very idea of Latin American art visible in and as difference, and so remained grounded in a logic of representation that, as I argue here, these same artists abandoned.

Some two decades after F(r)icciones, Connie H. Choi and Hallie Ringle curated Fictions, which presented artists of African and Latin American descent in the United States whose works are about breaking down popular understandings, creating new truths and constructing counter-myths. They are about both fiction and fact.⁷ Their exhibition emphasized the urgency of examining the politics of fiction across a hemispheric network that includes Latin American and Latinx art.⁸ The curators did not, however, substantively adapt fiction’s literary form: metaphors, narratives, representations, signifiers, and myths pervade their writing about visual artworks. Choi even concludes her essay with a reflection not on fiction but about the increasingly narrative nature of contemporary art. Even the Dia Center for the Arts’ earlier symposium and volume Critical Fictions (1991), presented as a bridge between contemporary art and the decade’s postcolonial interventions, highlighted the politics of fiction but did not bring that discussion onto its home turf of visual art.⁹

More Real? Art in the Age of Truthiness took on that challenge, expanding the comedian Stephen Colbert’s neologism to encompass a wide range of political art projects in the first years of the twenty-first century. The curator Elizabeth Armstrong and contributors to the exhibition catalog predominantly focus on the truth or lies of fiction, and the ethics and politics of deceiving the viewer. Carrie Lambert-Beatty revisits her precise and influential concept of parafiction, which names artworks that entrap viewers in plausible but invented scenarios. While she does not mention War of the Worlds, the mythic debates it sparked over Welles’s culpability for causing chaos among unexpecting listeners who fled their homes in fear of Martian armies, make it an important precursor of parafiction as she defines it. Lambert-Beatty offers a concrete definition of fiction, proper to the interdisciplinary practices of contemporary art, which not surprisingly comes with one of the few direct mentions of colonialism in the catalog. She writes that in these deceptions and fakes, artists negotiate twin pressures to be locally specific and internationally legible. [The artist Michael] Blum’s Safiye Behar project concerns postcolonial subject matter, while the question of EU accession toward which the artist mobilized the story is part of the contemporary process of globalization.¹⁰ That parallel sentence structure, however, presents the postcolonial as historical content relevant to local audiences, whereas the contemporary theoretical and political critique of globalization at the heart of parafiction speaks to the international art world. I return to Lambert-Beatty’s important concept in chapter 5, but I must note here that in an addendum she regrets not beginning her study of parafiction in the 1990s.¹¹ She specifically names the landmark performance Couple in a Cage (also known as Two Undiscovered Amerindians Visit the West, 1993), which Cuba-born Coco Fusco and Mexico-born Guillermo Gómez-Peña produced in response to the quincentennial commemorations of the conquest of the Americas. The two dressed up as members of an invented, uncontacted tribe from the Gulf of Mexico and spent days locked in a gilded cage. Performers playing museum docents presented them in the style of human zoos, which existed from the colonial period until the turn of the twentieth century. Echoing Lambert-Beatty’s geopolitical and historical correction, Armstrong’s curatorial introduction begins by highlighting three Latin American and Latinx artists, despite naming the globalized (art) world as the context for More Real. The particular intersection of colonial history and late twentieth-century globalization in the Americas evidently plays a crucial role in the concept of fiction in contemporary art.

Latin American critical theory offers a rich genealogy around the concept of coloniality that helps to comprehend that intersection with globalization. Political fictions have faced a double bind, however, in that interdisciplinary field.¹² When they invent, accusations point to their irrelevance to real world concerns. When explicitly framed as deception, in the culture-jamming style of Couple in a Cage, moralizing judgments are passed about lack of veracity as a dearth of political significance. Even setting aside the predominance of a certain instrumentality in the social sciences in Latin American studies, humanists also have focused on documentary (and testimonio) forms more than fictive invention when addressing the politics of art and literature.¹³ Within art history, the Latin Americanness of contemporary art is often cast as political, but the field generally understands that politics to be external to the work of art.¹⁴ That is to say, the boundary between art and life, fiction and reality remains firm. Yet the literary scholar Peter Brooks argues that the invention of fiction is fundamental to human life and dismisses attacks on fiction as lies that don’t know it, lies that naively or mendaciously claim to believe they are truths.¹⁵ Brooks offers a straightforward and not solely literary definition: "Fictions are what we make up in order to make believe. . . . Making in order to make up, to make believe, seems a reasonable description of literary fictions, and why we write and read them."¹⁶ If Brooks limits his study of that making (up) to the realist novel, his vision of fiction as vital creation—neither an instrument external to creative invention nor lies or useless fantasy—enables us to encounter it beyond the written page and in the practices of making that redefined contemporary art in the last decades of the twentieth century. Without a precise concept of how artists made such fictions beyond the limits of narrative, our understanding of contemporary art and politics in the hemisphere is impoverished. Absent the history of inventive responses to coloniality and neoliberal expansion in the South, no theory of fiction is complete.

American Neoliberalism

Repressive regimes supported by the United States, like the one that pushed Meireles toward fiction, laid the groundwork for the core neoliberal principles imposed across the American hemisphere. They championed the dismantling of public institutions and safety nets, and as Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval note, fashioned certain kinds of social relations, certain ways of living, certain subjectivities.¹⁷ If by 2013 an academic journal based in the United States felt it necessary to defend neoliberalism from accusations of being an evacuated term, across Latin America it remains meaningful in scholarly research, newspapers, and everyday political debates.¹⁸ These discussions typically locate its origins in experiments in Chile in the 1970s led by Milton Friedman and the economics professors known as the Chicago Boys. Sources cited throughout this book, however, trace initial experiments with these social and economic reforms in the Americas to the 1960s, coinciding with the radical experiments that ground histories of contemporary art.¹⁹

The economist and national security expert Norman A. Bailey published an exemplary article promoting these policies in 1965. The Colombian ‘Black Hand’: A Case Study of Neoliberalism in Latin America was a harbinger of now-familiar characterizations of Latin America as a laboratory for those social, political, and economic experiments. A decade before Friedman flew to the aid of the military dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet in Santiago, and two decades prior to the North Atlantic alliance between Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, Bailey had a plan. The early publication celebrated the Brazilian military coup d’état of 1964 as the model for an aggressive campaign in Colombia.²⁰ His pro-business, free-market hemispheric strategy was uniformly opposed to all forms of collectivism.²¹ Bailey outlined simultaneous defense and attack strategies involving direct pressure on politicians and subsidies of right-wing candidates, infiltration of leftist organizations, the formation of independent mini-universities, right-wing think tanks, anti-guerrilla militias, and aggressive media campaigns. Like Friedman later, he was content to ally with repressive regimes, but state repression was just one tool in the broader violence employed to introduce, maintain, and expand these social transformations.

Returns to representative democracy in the mid- to late 1980s undoubtedly provided relief from those widespread tactics of disappearance and martial law. Nonetheless, through the 1990s Bailey continued to work as an adviser to presidents Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush on their Latin American strategies. As much as scholars, filmmakers, and artists since have noted continuities with the still-neoliberal representative democracies that followed dictatorships, the artists working during that political transition were already aware of the trap.²² In another interview, Meireles reverses expectations about the relative freedom of artists in 1977, a moment when the Brazilian military regime eased its tactics, and the harsher years a decade earlier when the dictatorship had cracked down and suspended habeas corpus. Meireles explains that governmental repression at the level of the production of the artwork little affected the vitality (pouco afetou a vitalidade) of the artwork, while market control at the level of its distribution in the era of multinational economies, of trans-ideological undertakings, [meant] it is necessary to look again at the very notion of ideology.²³ That concept, artistic vitalidade, is crucial to non-literary fictions in the conclusion of this study. For now, note that Meireles argues that the effective censorship by market forces was worse for art than dictatorship was and that the shared experience of the foreclosure of liberties cemented affinities among artists across the hemisphere.²⁴ Meireles’s call to reconsider ideology under emergent neoliberalism frames a challenge to uncover the dominant and often-invisible fictions that operate as social control; his admiration of War of the Worlds proposes that to do so, artists must invent other fictions.

Political left and right equally perceived the centrality of the arts in the neoliberal social and economic experiment. Meireles warned that radical politics could be hindered as much as furthered by media and the arts, and Bailey urged his conservative allies to better deploy those enterprises.²⁵ Both understood the important shift represented by neoliberalism’s extraction of profit from knowledge and ideas more than from industry and matériel. Jamie Peck attributes neoliberalism’s reactionary force precisely to that capacity to meld the inherently conservative with the insistently creative.²⁶ Suely Rolnik similarly finds that neoliberal creativity enjoys a seductive power [that] makes it more difficult to perceive that those forms are conservative, bearers of the colonial-capitalistic unconscious that leads to its reproduction.²⁷ Here again, this new phase of modernity retains core elements of coloniality, and the Brazilian critic offers guidance on how to approach the equal dangers of the censorship and blossoming of art under these regimes. Artists invented non-literary fictions, I suggest, as a way to keep making (up) without fueling neoliberalism’s creativity. The mechanics of those fictions structure the chapters to come, but fundamentally, they all involve a kind of making in negation. They negate creativity, narrative, the art object, and representation at large; most importantly, these fictions negate the negation of political and social alternatives to American neoliberalism.

No and Non: Making Negation

Non-literary fiction builds upon a genealogy of negative prefixes that has shaped the Latin American art critical tradition. Two figures had an outsized influence on the concept of negation in contemporary art: the Brazilian Ferreira Gullar, who published his landmark essay Theory of the Non-object in December 1959 and a follow-up Dialogue on the Non-object soon thereafter; and the Peruvian Mexican critic Juan Acha, who began to name new practices that rejected the purity and elitism of the art object as no-objetualismo around 1973.²⁸ If a detailed account of the relationship between these theorists remains beyond the scope of this study, Rita Eder favors considering the two within a shared genealogy, even as she identifies differences in their definitions of the non-object.²⁹ Acha worked closely with the Brazilian critic and curator Aracy Amaral, for whom Gullar’s experimental concrete poetry and theory of the non-object were crucial points of departure. He even invited Amaral to participate in a symposium he organized for the 1978 Latin American Biennial that he co-organized in São Paulo.³⁰ While the two articulations of non-objectualism cannot be collapsed, they signal a broad critical project that Mónica Amor eloquently names a ‘crisis of representation,’ which was closely linked to a rejection of pictorial illusionism, but went beyond it to problematize representation as such.³¹ The politics of this broad non-objectualism has been obscured, however, by studies that emphasize representation: whether artistic representations of the problems plaguing citizens, or representational democracy as the default system to identify and defend their rights. Non-literary fiction sets aside familiar avant-garde disputes over figuration and abstraction, which maintain a concern with representation. Instead, it unveils how artists joined related investigations in literature, anthropology, and philosophy in order to constitute processes, concepts, and forms of invention in negation.

Gullar employed the negative prefix to articulate a materiality or plasticity of the artwork that survived the abandonment of representation, and which emerged in a variety of operations that linked literature and visual art, word and object. An oft-repeated story tells that Gullar initially used the word não-objeto when he encountered a work by the artist Lygia Clark (1920–1988). Upon seeing a prototype of her series of Bichos (Critters)—sculptures made of flat planes connected by hinges and intended to be manipulated by the viewer—Gullar mythically proclaimed it to be not an object but a non-object.³² In Dialogue on the Non-object, he explains, [An object is] a material thing we find at hand, naturally, linked to everyday designations and uses: a rubber, a pencil, a pear, a shoe, etc. In this condition, the object is exhausted in the references of use and meaning. On the flip-side, we can establish here a primary definition of non-object: the non-object is not exhausted in the references of use and meaning because it does not belong to the realm of use or verbal designation.³³ Negation maintains the objectness of the artwork, yet protects it from use-value and market forces as much as from symbolic systems of linguistic substitution such as metaphor. To comprehend the non-object, the viewer does not erase the physical entity in her search for the meaning hidden behind its material presence. Gullar states that the non-object is not a representation but a presentation.³⁴ This basic definition is crucial for non-literary fiction because it introduces a focus on the varied materials of non-narrative art that is not essentially formalist.

Both theorists of the non-object celebrated new practices of art making, which created non-objects with little regard for medium specificity. Gullar attended to artists’ shift toward the sensible and phenomenological as they abandoned historical distinctions between sculpture, painting, and theater. Acha convened like-minded critics, curators, and artists in a landmark gathering in Medellín, Colombia, in 1981, the Primer Coloquio Latinoamericano del Arte No-objectual y Arte Urbano (First Latin American Colloquium of Non-objectual Art and Urban Art). In his overview of the meeting, Alberto Sierra Maya writes:

The non-objectualists were so radical in their option that they said things like: In Latin America we think in another way. In Latin America we are doing this or that and we are not going to hang a painting in this museum, we are not going to fetishize the object, those things you are doing, and we are going to see that people will think in a different way. It was a critical moment, an aggressive and convulsive situation, which was situated in the context of strong Latin American dictatorships, as documented in the installation by the Brazilian Cildo Meireles.³⁵

They celebrated earth art, performance and body art, posters, media interventions and new media, work with found objects and trash, mail art, conceptualism, ephemeral installations, and popular cultural forms including religious rituals and samba.

The list of negations grows even longer among the artists involved in these practices. The Mexican collective the No-Grupo (Non-Group) (active 1977–1982) combined installation and performance in its contribution to Acha’s colloquium dedicated to non-objectual and urban art in Medellín. The member Maris Bustamante since has been a strong proponent of the foundational role of Acha’s non-objectualism.³⁶ In Chile, Cecilia Vicuña wrote Manifesto No for a group of artists and poets that called themselves the Tribu No (No Tribe) (active 1967–1972), and that connected African American jazz, surrealism, and symbolism in their activities in the temperate and unsettled night of the South.³⁷ The Brazilian Hélio Oiticica called the montage of film, slide shows, and installations he made in 1973, não narração (non-narrative), which involved non-discourse, non-audio visual, non-artistic photography, and was even nonsexist.³⁸ The Chicano art collective Asco (Nausea) (active 1971–1987) began a series of No Movies around 1976, organized as public presentations in the streets of Los Angeles in settings resembling movie sets.³⁹ These imaginary films existed only as still photographs and protested the exclusion of Chicanos from Hollywood even as they rejected the influence of its commercial culture on the Los Angeles art scene. Chicanos and Latinos, like many other marginalized artists, have consistently been ascribed only an affirmative mode of address; however, Asco makes evident that negation was an equally promising political and artistic option for them at the time.⁴⁰

Fiction played a crucial role in these theories and practices of non-objectual art. Note the terms of Gullar’s meditation on the relationship between obra e objeto (work and object), artwork and world: The frame was the middle ground between fiction and reality; at once a bridge and a wall that protected the painting, the fictitious space, and made it communicate in fits with the real, exterior space.⁴¹ This narrative of non-objectual art breaking the frame is foundational in Brazilian art history, and Amor summarizes its widely accepted interpretation as a rejection of the fictional space of representation.⁴² Yet Gullar writes that the non-object resides directly in real space and transcends the space, not by eluding it (like the object), but by enfolding itself radically in that space.⁴³ That extension into space involves a broken frame and an active spectator: the primary operation of the non-object is to inspire the viewer’s move from contemplation to action, and so by extension to bridge fiction and reality. In an interview published not long after he had invited Gullar to his symposium, Acha also presented non-objectualism as an activity and a kind of fiction. In no-objetualismo, he states, "I’m not interested anymore in the work of an artist, I am concerned with the process, with the invention.⁴⁴ As I detail in the next chapter, that concept of invention was central to the poets of the concrete movement in São Paulo and to Gullar’s fellow Rio-based neo-concretists. If here Acha overstates the opposition between work" and process, he does so to signal the centrality of invention. These foundational thinkers disclose that when the non-object breaks the pictorial frame and descends from the sculptural pedestal—when it activates presentation rather than representation—it does not abandon fiction. Instead, the broken frame initiates the possibility of an encounter with the invention of fiction in the everyday.

The political and aesthetic character of those fictions is better described by the word operation rather than work, object, or even process. The Argentine critic Jorge Glusberg, a powerful voice in Latin American criticism beginning in the 1960s, introduced the word at Acha’s Medellín colloquium, in order to contrast no-objetualismo with postmodernism. He reflects favorably on the former as more philosophical than the latter, specifically in its capacity to offer the concept of operadores estéticos (aesthetic operators).⁴⁵ Glusberg’s use of the term shares but long predates Jacques Rancière’s proposal to understand the "politics of fiction not in terms of what it represents but in terms of what it operates: the situations that it constructs, the populations that it convokes, the relations of inclusion or exclusion that it institutes, the borders that it traces or effaces between perceptions and action, between the states of things and the movement of thought; the relations that it establishes or suspends between situations and their meanings, between temporal coexistences or successions and chains of causality.⁴⁶ Different operations of fiction constitute relation and structure social imaginaries throughout the chapters that follow, but the Latin American aesthetic operators explicitly substituted operation for object" in order to invent alternatives to one dominant structure that governed those imaginaries: the market. Acha’s colloquium on non-objectualism explicitly took on the biennial circuit and its promotion of the market value of object-based art. Del Valle furthermore frames the colloquium in the context of the emergent debt crisis in the region, which was precipitated by the global oil crisis of the 1970s.⁴⁷ Rancière’s primary focus on fiction as narrative distracts him from literature’s material form as a book, one that circulates as a commercial object through publishing houses, bookstores, and copyright laws. In contrast, the first chapter sets up just how important the reinvented book-object was for the fictional operations of non-objectualism. As non-objects, these aesthetic operations of fiction could reject the market in art objects without abandoning the materiality of object-based art.

The political stakes of negation grow increasingly clear for the reconsideration—through fiction—of ideologies, market, and repression that Meireles urged. Even as neoliberal dictatorships gave way to neoliberal democracies in the 1980s, the Anglo-American powers invested in that new world order pursued hegemony over negation itself. The British prime minister Margaret Thatcher (1979–1990), who shared a dedication to privatization and reducing the social safety net with her US partner, President Ronald Reagan, was famous for two phrases: there is no society, only individuals who either succeed or fail in the competitive market of capitalism; and there is no alternative to that political vision, which she repeated so forcefully that the acronym TINA became her nickname.⁴⁸ The question that still must be posed, then, is how artists and theorists were able to negate within this hegemonic negation. How did they say no to the preclusion of options and to the denial of society itself?

The artist Alfredo Jaar (b. 1956) asked that question precisely in the decade of transition from dictatorship to democracy in Chile, even if (as we will see) he did not positively answer it. As much as the country long has served as the prime example of Latin America as a laboratory for neoliberalism, in narrating his own biography, Jaar emphasizes the same broader American affinities that Meireles described. Born in the Andes, Jaar moved to Martinique as a child around 1961; the family abandoned the Caribbean for Santiago on a wave of enthusiasm after the democratic election of the socialist president Salvador Allende in 1970. Soon after, General Augusto Pinochet destroyed those dreams in a coup d’état supported by US president Richard Nixon and his secretary of state, Henry Kissinger. The violent military regime was friendlier to its northern friends’ economic theory, and so paradoxically, when Jaar landed in New York in 1982, he arrived in a representative democracy that was the sponsor of the undemocratic regime he fled. At the same time, his arrival in Manhattan represented a return to an island demographically, culturally, and linguistically part of the Caribbean. Jaar describes the impact of his fully American trajectory: It was in Martinique where my strong links with Africa began. . . . I really identified myself with that place, which gradually linked into the greater culture of Africa. . . . I went to school at the Lycée Schoelcher where the intellectual elite of Martinique came from: Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, and Édouard Glissant. At the time, Césaire was also the Mayor of Fort de France, the capital!⁴⁹ The two major works that established Jaar as an international political artist—indebted to a Black Caribbean tradition, and articulated in its diasporas as much as his exile from the Andes—deployed visual negation in hemispheric struggles. They are exemplary of how to create the no, the not, the X, and how to signal the limits of representative democracy as much as documentary representation under American neoliberalism.

In Estudios sobre la felicidad (Studies on Happiness, 1979–1981), Jaar invented a fictional plebiscite for Chileans on a seemingly innocuous question (fig. 0.2). He employed interviews, videos, photographs, and billboards that asked the viewer: ¿Es Ud. feliz? (Are you happy?). There are three core elements to this investigation into artistic and political representation made under the full force of Pinochet’s regime. First, to ask a yes-or-no question, as in a plebiscite, which engages the spectator as a voter. Second, to frame the question such that the answer that militates for freedom is no. Finally, to conceive of affect, happiness or otherwise, as an entry into political subjectivity and the legitimate grounds for a political act. These same components later would shape the famous Campaña del no (No campaign), the advertising campaign that convinced Chileans to vote no to Pinochet’s continued military rule in 1988. That plebiscite, however, was not