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Oil, Abstracted: Cruz-Diez Returns to El Farol

Fri, May 27, 4:15 to 5:45pm, TBA

Abstract

Although it served as the official organ of the U.S.–owned company Creole Petroleum Corporation in Venezuela, the journal El Farol (1939–75) is best remembered for its pivotal role in the legitimization of abstraction and the professionalization of design in the country, largely thanks to the graphic contributions of its three most celebrated art directors, Gerd Leufert, Nedo Mion Ferrario, and Carlos Cruz-Diez. Yet this apparent elision of the journal’s ideological coordinates was in fact built into the very premise of El Farol, which aimed from its foundation to naturalize corporate intervention in the “host nation.” While actively situating the oil company as a purveyor of a developmentalist modernity, the publication also promoted the arts as a means of fostering an emergent sense of nationalism.
This paper focuses upon the return of Cruz-Diez to El Farol in 1974, some twenty years after serving as art director. Invited to design a special issue, the artist wholly restructured the journal in the format of his iconic Fisicromías. In doing so, he reframed his earlier, figurative work as anticipatory of a later kinetic metamorphosis, but this process of self-redefinition also functioned as a crystallization of the journal’s stated aim to amount to “algo más que petróleo.” Occurring one year before the dissolution of the publication and of Creole, Cruz-Diez’s intervention serves as the logical endpoint of an imagined process of metamorphosis, from a product of foreign intervention to an assertion of national(ist) self-actualization—a trajectory of self-presentation that mirrors that of Venezuela’s modernist experiment.

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