This Must Be the Place: Latin American Artists in New York, 1965–1975 at Americas Society, New York, captures the city’s frenetic pulse
With vibrant counterculture, cheap rent, myriad art and gallery spaces, plus burgeoning experimental film, dance and theatre scenes, New York during the 1960s and 70s was an exciting, albeit gritty, place to be. Organised by Americas Society director Aimé Iglesias Lukin, with over 40 artists across three rooms, This Must Be the Place captures the city’s frenetic pulse. Its true revelation, however, is the sheer diversity of Latin American artists who visited the Big Apple, often to escape oppressive military regimes back home. Some, such as Luis Camnitzer, stayed on. Others, while not establishing strong local roots, used their sojourns to experiment in new methods and media – as Hélio Oiticica did with film. Though archival materials in the show touch on political collective actions, its chief insight is that, as much as they were shaped by it, Latin American artists made New York a creative mecca.
This is the second instalment of a two-part show (Part I closed this past December), both of which feature minimalist and conceptual artists reckoning with Pop art. In Part II, Eduardo Costa’s Fashion Fictions (1966–), a 24K-gold wearable sculpture photographed for Vogue by Richard Avedon encapsulates this affinity with advertising and commerce. The spectre of Andy Warhol as the quintessential New York artist haunts the galleries. Carlos Irizarry’s serigraph Andy Warhol (1970) reads as homage to Warhol’s iconic self-image and multiples. But the way Irizarry forces Warhol’s garish palette into a rigid grid and the smudgy Xerox-like surface subvert the originals’ mystique.
Self-reflexivity is a common theme in the minimalist works. Ana Maria Maiolino’s spare etching Escape Angle (1971), in which a white blob oozes out the corner of a black-outlined square, suggests a break with constructivist rigour. Rubens Gerchman’s Pocket Stuff (1971), a wooden box whose compactness and portability embody the notion of living out of one’s suitcase, as an immigrant might, ironises painting as the last bastion of high art in its miniature deconstructivist plastic squares (white, engraved with the word ‘White’, cobalt-blue engraved as ‘Sky’, etc). Similarly, in a series of etchings titled Envelope (1967), Luis Camnitzer wittily pairs a rectangle with a series of words (‘window’, ‘box’, ‘painting’, ‘grid’). By resignifying the figure as conceptually charged yet commonplace, Camnitzer reflects on art’s adjacency to life, and exposes the falsity of treating them as binary.
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