Marta Traba: internationalism or regional resistance?

Until the 1960s, Marta Traba (1923-1983) was a key figure in the consolidation of international modernism in the visual arts of Latin America. But when the cultural influence of the United States began to spread throughout the hemisphere--along with the most experimental artistic modes--Traba became one of the most resolute critics of this homogenizing process. She understood better than most the potential danger such influence could represent in the semideveloped and semidependent context of Latin America. (1) In this regard, the now-dominant concern regarding the effects of globalization on subaltern cultures demands of critics a new consideration of Traba's critique of the cultural imperialism of the North.

Traba left an important legacy in her writings primarily because they addressed many pivotal cultural events in the history of Latin America from the 1950s through the early 1980s. Moreover, she was among the first scholars to consider the art of Latin America as a whole, thereby transforming her texts into fascinating documents of the theoretical horizons existing at different moments of Latin American art criticism.

Traba's forty-year art-critical practice began in her native Argentina in the mid-1940s when she joined Jorge Romero Brest's influential art magazine Very Estimar and continued throughout the 1950s and 1960s in Colombia, her adoptive country, where she became a national celebrity and the leading arbiter of the arts. Then, at the very moment when her power was at its peak, she took an unexpected public turn to the political Left that ultimately resulted in a life of political exile in various countries, including Uruguay, Venezuela, Puerto Rico, the United States, and France.

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Until the late 1960s, Traba's support for high modernism aligned her with colleagues such as Jorge Romero Brest and Jose Gomez Sicre. In Colombia, her aestheticism--shaped by her readings of European scholars like Benedetto Croce, Herbert Read, and Rene Huyghe--encountered strong resistance from the very beginning. She considered art an autonomous practice and the artist a "genius" who was, as she wrote in 1956, "eminently apolitical, asocial, disinterested in the contingent, a being that is in the midst of history as a disquieting island and for whom words like progress, civilization, justice, have no meaning whatsoever." (2) Her articles were a forceful attack against those who believed art should "express" a local and regional identity or a political stance. She was particularly critical of Mexican muralism, which had served as a conceptual paradigm for the first generation of Colombian modernists. Her internationalism lent support to young modernists like Alejandro Obregon, Eduardo Ramirez Villamizar, and Fernando Botero. However, she irritated well-established nationalists such as Gonzalo Ariza and Ignacio Gomez Jaramillo, who made themselves heard through a number of heated but revealing public debates. Traba always seemed to win these battles, but her aesthetic project only prevailed as long as it remained politically neutral and supported the modernizing discourse of the Colombian elite.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, in an exile marked by political persecution, Traba turned to Marxist theory and the work of cultural critics such as Herbert Marcuse, Henri Lefebvre, and Umberto Eco whose writings were becoming increasingly influential among Latin American leftist intellectuals. This shift resulted in her formulation of a theory of an "art of resistance" in her best-known book, Dos decadas vulnerables en las artes plasticas latinoamericanas 1950-1970 (1973). Inspired by Marcuse's One-Dimensional Man, Traba argued that industrialized nations were dominated by an ideology of technology that resulted in the fragmentation and loss of meaning of general communication codes. In the field of culture, the ideology of technology supported on an international level an "aesthetic of deterioration" that fragmented cultural systems and neutralized specific local meanings, a strategy necessary to assure the continued technological domination of all forms of communication. (3)

For this reason, Traba profoundly distrusted experimental art, such as Pop art, Conceptual art, and Happenings, which she considered examples of the "aesthetic of deterioration" and associated exclusively--and erroneously--with the United States. She believed that these art modes could only critique culture in an explosive manner, creating cathartic experiences that satisfied artists but were powerless to stop the tyranny of technology over industrial and nonindustrial societies alike. Furthermore, for Traba, these experimental art modes could neither fit into nor express the underdeveloped context of Latin American societies. Ironically, she found in the experimental approach of the prestigious Instituto Di Tella of Buenos Aires, directed by Romero Brest, a leading example of the aesthetic of deterioration in the Americas. (4)