The borderless Baroque: a traveling exhibition examines the scope and sensibility of what its curators call "post-Latin American" art - Import/Export

The austerity esthetic of post-Sept. 11 art (which wanes with each passing day) was preceded by one of the most elaborate, over-the-top trends in recent art history. In an essay published in the New York Times on Jan. 2, 2000, Museum of Modern Art curator Robert Storr was quoted as saying that "for the past 20 years contemporary art has been tending toward the baroque." (1) Whether used in reference to bejeweled Madonnas by Chris Ofili or space-straining, reality-bending installations by Damien Hirst, the term "baroque" has been in the air for quite a while. In May 2001, the ambitious new Kunsthalle in Vienna opened with an exhibition titled "Baroque Party." The term referred, in part, to the position of the museum within the precinct of the Museums Quarter, many of whose buildings were designed by the Baroque architect Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach. The exhibition included the work of Wim Delvoye, represented by Cloaca, a machine simulating the human digestive process; choreographer and filmmaker Yvonne Rainer; artist Paul Thek and others. "Baroque Party" did not attempt to define a contemporary baroque style but merely suggested that many of the strategies of recent art employed elements of elaboration and decoration.

Such terminology is equally, if not more poignantly, appropriate when discussing contemporary art in Latin America, a region to which, perhaps more than any other, the label "baroque" has been consistently attached to describe visual cultures in all their aspects. A current touring exhibition, "Ultra-Baroque: Aspects of Post-Latin American Art," has taken on the daunting task of defining the term "baroque" in relation to recent art from Latin America. The show is both enlightening and problematic, and also curiously timely, in that it follows on the heels of so many recent exhibitions of contemporary Latin American art in the U.S. and abroad. Many of the 15 artists and a number of pieces in the exhibition, which at its end will have been seen in six venues in the U.S. and Canada, are familiar to those who frequent international biennials and individual shows of artists from Brazil, Mexico, Colombia and other countries south of the U.S. border.

"Ultrabaroque" was organized for the San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art by Elizabeth Armstrong, currently chief curator at the Orange County Museum of Art, and Victor Zamudio-Taylor, an independent curator. The curators, both of whom know the field well, also called on a team of advisors from various parts of Latin America. I saw the exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, where the narrow galleries in which it was installed made for cramped quarters, not exactly adequate for some of the larger-scale installation pieces. Nonetheless, the show had an undeniable visual impact, a sensation at times produced by the richness and sensuality of the pieces displayed and, at other times, by the cacophonous heterogeneity of the whole.

This is an exhibition with two points of view, both of which are suggested by its title. The first premise has to do with the relationship of certain strands of contemporary artistic practice in Latin America to a continuing "baroque sensibility" which, the organizers suggest, has a vibrant resonance in the work of many of today's artists born in Latin America or living there. The second questions the validity of using culturally or geographically specific terms to define bodies of work. The organizers prefer to call this art "post-Latin American." I applaud Armstrong and Zamudio-Taylor for tackling such a complex concept as "baroque" and attempting to apply it to aspects of contemporary work. Their success has been relative to the ambiguities and challenges presented by the word itself. Before addressing the show directly, it might be useful to make a few observations about the historical development of the term "baroque" and the centuries-old debate about its meanings.

Art history's founding father, Johann Joachim Winckelmann, first used the term in the mid-18th century to refer to a specific phase in the history of esthetics and taste. He and many others have cited its possible origins in the archaic Portuguese term for an irregularly shaped pearl (whether or not this is the ur-expression has never been proven). One hundred years later Jacob Burckhardt used the word in his highly influential text Der Cicerone (1855) to describe the decorative, expressionistic nature of 17th-century architecture in Italy. More modern German art historians writing in the 1880s and 1890s, such as Heinrich Wofflin and Alois Riegel, gave greater credence to the notion of the Baroque, which they defined as constituting art made between ca. 1600 and ca. 1750. (Following accepted usage, I will here capitalize "baroque" when referring to a specific style of a specific time and otherwise leave it lowercase.) They classified the Baroque as a period with its own positive stylistic definitions and visual vocabulary, and not simply as a prolonged moment of artistic decadence at the tail end of the Renaissance, as Winckelmann and others had done. (2)