‘This is Not America’: Negation in Contemporary Art and Theory

• In Event: The Expansion of the Arts II: Politics

Abstract

Chilean Alfredo Jaar’s 1987/2014 art work lends the title for this study of negation in contemporary American thought, on how art has sought to make life livable under the conditions of modernity in the neoliberal era. This generation said no to Margaret Thatcher’s global prohibition of any alternative. Experimental acts and theories of negation, crossing out, blacking out, and refusal crisscrossed the continent. In Mexico, artists of the “No-Grupo” (1977-1983) and Peruvian theorist Juan Acha named arte no-objetual as a mode of liberation from global capitalism. In Brazil, poet and critic Haroldo de Campos replaced images of underdevelopment with a baroque cannibal whose “non-origin” in “non-infancy” offered “a critical view of History as a negative function.” Ferreira Gullar began his manifesto on the não–objeto by negating its negation, and Hélio Oiticica theorized his work as a não-narração that was spontaneous, childlike, and pleasurable. Argentine Rodolfo Kusch conceived of La negación en el pensamiento americano as indigenous peoples’ rejection of coloniality and the denunciation of the value of affirmative thought, which is lodged in Western notions of scientific objectivity. A new generation of artists continue to negate: Carlos Garaicoa’s “La habitación de mi negatividad” (2003), Chemi Rosado’s “Tapando para ver” (2002), and Santiago Sierra’s global tour of “No” (2000-02). I suggest that these formulations of negation offer a crucial alternative not only to neoliberal hegemony, but also to founding concepts of “critique” and “art and politics” that have dominated art history and literary theory.

Author

• Esther L Gabara, Duke University