Some stars take longer than others to come into telescopic range. Such is the case with Luis Camnitzer, who, in his early 70s and with a half-century career behind him, is just now having his first New York museum survey.
The show, at El Museo del Barrio, is terse, almost to the vanishing point in places, as might be expected from one of the pioneers of 1960s Conceptualism. Much of what’s here is based on printed language: cryptic propositions, random lists of words and descriptive phrases unmoored from, or very loosely tethered to, other spare-to-barely-there visual matter.
As elusive as the work looks, there’s a truth-in-advertising directness to it. From an early point, Mr. Camnitzer made clear that for him art was not about claiming mastery of a medium or refining an identifiable style. He wanted to use very basic, unglamorous visual and linguistic tools to clear a zone for thinking, without interference from the market or pressure to be predictable.
He has remained steadfast in that quixotic resolve, supporting himself primarily as a teacher and critic. Only fairly recently has the mainstream art world begun to show some serious interest in meeting him on his own terms.
Mr. Camnitzer was born in Germany in 1937. Two years later his family emigrated to Uruguay, and he grew up in Montevideo. He went to art school there, then briefly studied sculpture in Munich, before coming to New York City in the early 1960s, at which point he was making prints and topical cartoons, Expressionist in style.
With its potential for cheap production and wide distribution, printmaking has had a long history in Latin America, particularly as a political vehicle. And its utopian dimension made it a popular medium in the United States in the context of the civil rights and antiwar movements of the 1960s. But Mr. Camnitzer began to find his skill with Expressionism to be a problem. It gained him attention, but it was too easy, demanded minimal thought. He felt he had to throw a wrench into the works.
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