REVIEW ARTICLE

DISPLACED BOUNDARIES:
GEOMETRIC ABSTRACTION
FROM PICTURES TO OBJECTS monica amor

suárez, osbel. cold america: geometric abstraction in latin america

(1934–1973). exhibition presented by the Fundación Juan march, madrid,
Feb 11–may 15, 2011.

crispiani, alejandro. Objetos para transformar el mundo: Trayectorias del arte

concreto-invención, Argentina y Chile, 1940–1970 [Objects to Transform the
World: Trajectories of Concrete-Invention Art, Argentina and Chile, 1940–1970].
buenos aires: universidad nacional de Quilmes, 2011.

The literature on what is generally called Latin American Geometric

Abstraction has grown so rapidly in the past few years, there is no
doubt that the moment calls for some reflection. The field has
been enriched by publications devoted to Geometric Abstraction
in Uruguay (mainly on Joaquín Torres García and his School of
the South), Argentina (Concrete Invention Association of Art and
Madí), Brazil (Concretism and Neoconcretism), and Venezuela
(Geometric Abstraction and Kinetic Art). The bulk of the writing on
these movements, and on a cadre of well-established artists, has been
published in exhibition catalogs and not in academic monographs,
marking the coincidence of this trend with the consolidation of major
private collections and the steady increase in auction house prices.
Indeed, exhibitions of what we can broadly term Latin American

© 2014 ARTMargins and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology doi:10.1162/ARTM_a_00083 101

 Geometric Abstraction, in many instances produced under the
aegis of a par­ticular collection, have lent greater visibility to this
material and have made the market a key factor in the consolidation
of the field.1
After the groundbreaking monographic catalogs of Neoconcrete
artists Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticica, produced in the 1990s in
Europe, 2 the late 1990s and early 2000s witnessed the appearance
of a number of survey exhibitions in which the overarching notion of
Latin American Geometric Abstraction, or the objects associated with
this artistic current, were presented and organized mainly around
national or regional references (Argentinean Concrete Art, Brazilian
Concretism and Neoconcretism, Venezuelan Kinetic Art, etc.). The
catalogs of such exhibitions tend to identify these artistic movements
with local aspirations for progress and modernity and, more often
than not, narrate their history according to teleological trajectories that
move from Europe to Latin America. The general aim of such survey
catalogs has been to insert local artistic production into canonical art
historical frames, at times obscuring the contradictory projects that
informed the different currents of Geometric Abstraction in question,
along with the larger political, economic, and cultural contexts in
which they occurred.
It is revealing that at a recent workshop of curators and historians
at the Getty Research Institute,3 where the topic of Latin American art
exhibits was being discussed, almost every one of the eleven or so par-
ticipants refuted the current relevance of such contemporary surveys of
Geometric Abstraction. This concerted response speaks to the extent to
which such exhibitions have tended to fulfill the function of presenting
this material to new audiences at an introductory level; it also suggests

1 Exhibitions of this work in commercial galleries have also proliferated, and it is worth
noting that some of these galleries are major power brokers, such as Gagosian and
Hauser & Wirth.
2 Lygia Clark (Porto: Fundação Serralves, Museu de Arte Contemporânea, 1998;
Barcelona: Fundació Antoni Tàpies, 1998; Marseille: MAC, Galeries contemporaines
des Musées de Marseille, 1998; Paris: Réunion des Musées Nationaux, 1998; Brussels:
Société des expositions du Palais des Beaux-Arts, 1998), exhibition catalog; Helio
artmargins 3:2

Oiticica (Rotterdam: Witte de With; Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 1992), exhibition
catalog.
3 The summer workshop on Latin American/Latino art took place at the Getty Center on
July 23, 2013, as part of the first phase of Pacific Standard Time: L.A./L.A. (Los Angeles/
Latin America), an initiative that will culminate in a city-wide series of exhibitions and
public programs in 2017.

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that the time has come to re-evaluate their panoramic pretenses and
expository form.4 The fact that so many of these exhibitions and
­catalogs are linked to a limited number of private collections is also
an important consideration in the study of the field, and a phenom-
enon that remains largely unanalyzed in the literature on the topic.
Moreover, it seems crucial in this context to highlight that the unceas-
ing iteration of exhibitions devoted to the trend has displaced the domi-
nant tendency, during the 1980s and early 1990s, to portray Latin
American art as inherently “fantastic,” magical, or exotic.5 Such earlier
curatorial proposals focused almost exclusively on figurative art, to the
detriment of abstraction and the more experimental practices of the
postwar period. By contrast, it seems as if the subsequent emphasis
on Geometric Abstraction could afford to promote a more sanitized,
modern, and optimistic vision of Latin America—as if Geometric
Abstraction could wipe clean the messiness of the unfashionable other.
That is, it would appear as though the play of lines and rectilinear
forms, permutations and orderly configurations that populate many
of these works, as well as the monochromatic surfaces from which all
traces of figuration are absent, could be more suitable representatives
of Latin America in the era of postidentity politics.
Two recent publications—one bilingual and one in Spanish—shed
light on the current status of Latin American Geometric Abstraction.
The first, entitled Cold America: Geometric Abstraction in Latin America
(1934–1973), is the catalog of an exhibition that took place at the Juan

4 Exhibitions produced by the Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros are too many to list
here. Its most comprehensive catalogs include Geometric Abstraction: Latin American Art
from the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Collection, ed. Yve-Alain Bois, Paulo Herkenhoff,
Ariel Jiménez, Luis Pérez-Oramas, and Mary Schneider Enríquez (New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 2001), exhibition catalog; and The Geometry of Hope: Latin American Art
from the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Collection, ed. Gabriel Pérez-Barreiro (Austin: Blanton
displaced boundaries

Museum of Art, University of Texas at Austin, 2007), exhibition catalog. Other important
exhibition catalogs of Geometric Abstraction associated with private collections are
Juan Ledezma, The Sites of Latin American Abstraction (Miami: Cisneros Fontanals Art
Foundation, 2007); Aracy A. Amaral, Arte construtiva no Brasil: Coleção Adolpho Leirner
(São Paulo: DBA Artes Gráficas, 1998); Mari Carmen Ramírez, The Adolpho Leirner
Collection of Brazilian Constructive Art at the Museum of Fine Arts: Building on a Construct
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009); and Geometry Beyond Limits: Latin
American Contemporary Art from the Jean and Colette Cherqui Collection (Paris: Maison
de L’Amerique Latine, 2010).
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5 The seminal text on this topic is curator Mari Carmen Ramírez’s “Beyond the Fantastic:
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Framing Identity in U.S. Exhibitions of Latin American Art,” Art Journal 51, no. 4
(Winter 1992): 60–68.

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 March Foundation in Madrid from February 11 to May 15, 2011. 6 At 504
pages, Cold America is the longest catalog on the topic, and one of the
few not directly connected to a private collection. It follows the same
regional-survey format as the catalogs mentioned above, although it
includes material from Cuba, Colombia, and Mexico, in addition to
Uruguay, Argentina, Brazil, and Venezuela. In this publication, the
reader finds essays by experts from different geographical areas, illus-
trations, a chronology, a bibliography, and a selection of translated doc-
uments from the period (1934–73). The title of the exhibition and
catalog, which one cannot avoid associating with the cold temperatures
and the (arguably) cold-minded cerebral behavior and efficiency of
northern Protestant societies (as well as the Parisian debates about
abstraction chaud and froid), reverts Uruguayan artist Joaquín Torres
García’s inverted map, as well as his famous proclamation that “our
North is the South,” to its original position.7 One wonders if this
is symptomatic of the institutional success that Latin American
Geometric Abstraction has accrued over the last decade, for now our
North is the North; that is, we celebrate Latin America’s closeness
to the sensible social and cultural modes of those European coun-
tries in which Neo-plasticism, Concrete art, and various forms of
Constructivism thrived. Indeed, the term cold abstraction was coined
in Paris during the 1950s to refer to the Hard-Edge and Constructivist-
derived work advocated by Denise René Gallery after the war; it was
an art meant to restore order and measurement in a world of chaos.
Rationalism, objectivity, and precision were all qualities that the
various branches of Constructivism, Concretism, and Geometric
Abstraction in some ways cultivated, and to which they aspired. The
title Cold America implies that such qualities constitute the criteria
against which the art included in the exhibition measured itself.
The introductory text by the curator of the exhibition, the Cuban
critic Osbel Suárez, is organized chronologically and geographically, yet
it moves away from familiar narratives. Indeed, it initially proposes a
familiar trajectory, one that starts with Joaquín Torres García and ends
with Venezuelan kinetic artist Jesús Soto, if only to thwart expectations
by concluding with an episode dedicated to Cuba that occupies almost
artmargins 3:2

6 Osbel Suárez, Cold America: Geometric Abstraction in Latin America (1934–1973) (Madrid:
Fundación Juan March, 2011), exhibition catalog.
7 Joaquín Torres García, Círculo y Cuadrado (Montevideo), no. 1 (May 1936).

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half of the opening essay. The text is a fair summary of the proposi-
tions, events, exhibitions, and publications that fostered Geometric
Abstract and Concrete/Constructivist tendencies in Argentina, Brazil,
Venezuela, and Cuba. But in order to avoid repetition, in what has
become a predictable introductory narrative in exhibition catalogs,
Suárez bypasses well-known tales of origin regarding Concretist and
Neoconcretist visual arts in Brazil and Geometric Abstract art in
Venezuela, by focusing instead on Concrete poetry in the cities of Rio
de Janeiro and São Paulo and on architect Carlos Raúl Villanueva’s City
University in Caracas. One appreciates the effort to shed light on less
familiar territory, but the result is diffusive and arbitrary, especially
given that the last four (out of nine) sections of the introduction are
devoted to what the author calls the “concrete brevity” of Havana. The
history of the emergence of Geometric Abstraction in Cuba, which,
according to the author, was forged by only a few individuals, is no
doubt worth telling. However, the essay does not completely address
the cultural significance of this artistic episode on the Caribbean
island, since the material is treated at the introductory level alone.
Other countries—Argentina, Brazil, and Venezuela—receive more
careful attention in the catalog’s individual essays.
César Paternosto, another contributor to Cold America, provides a
close reading of Uruguayan-Argentine artist Rhod Rothfuss’s proposi-
tion of the marco recortado (cutout frames). Paternosto is mostly con-
cerned here with the pioneering gesture that the cutout frame signified
in the 1940s, as well as its genesis and impact on subsequent artists.
Rothfuss conceived of the cutout frame in opposition to pictorial illu-
sionism and the window effect of naturalistic painting that orthogonal
frames historically presupposed. The result was a series of pictorial
propositions that bypassed rectangular formats in favor of irregularly
shaped canvases and, later on, relief-like paintings that made real space
a constitutive element of the work. Paternosto, an artist included in the
displaced boundaries

show, carefully maps the genealogy and conceptual trajectory of this

radical proposition through meticulous research. His essay suggests
possible links between Rothfuss’s cutout frames and Torres García’s
wood reliefs. This association is indeed the most interesting one
between the older artist and the work of the Concrete Argentines com-
ing of age in the mid-1940s. The author also alerts the reader to a rela-
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tionship between these cutout frames and the shaped canvases of

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Ellsworth Kelly. He very precisely indicates the specific connections

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 and encounters that occurred in postwar Paris between the American
artist and the Argentines who practiced the cutout frame.
María Amalia García’s essay on the cultural exchanges between
Argentina and Brazil during the 1940s and 1950s is an exemplary piece
of research. In contrast to other contributors who focus on formal and
conceptual analysis within Latin American Geometric Abstraction,
García attends to the institutional scaffolding that supported this move-
ment at the second São Paulo Biennial of 1953. As García writes,
“abstraction and internationalism” were new concepts that came to
guide cultural regional hegemony during the period. García’s research
is impeccable, and her focus on the institutional determinations of
Geometric Abstraction redirects our attention from questions of form
and originality to questions of cultural politics and representation. 8
A short and previously published essay on Brazilian Concretism
and Neoconcretism by the legendary critic and poet Ferreira Gullar
(the spokesperson for Neoconcretism between 1959 and 1961, and the
most famous commentator on these Brazilian movements) rehearses
the author’s views on the accomplishments of the art of the period.
Gullar emphasizes the role of his poetic experiments (book poems and
spatial poems, also called object-poems) and the importance of the dia-
logue between poets and artists.
A much longer and in-depth analysis of the Venezuelan case is
introduced by Luis Pérez-Oramas, who also ponders the phenomenon
of Latin American Geometric Abstraction more broadly. The author
warns his reader that these tendencies flourished and acquired sym-
bolic force in only a few countries, and that in the present, as in the
past, Geometric Abstraction sustains a universalist myth that occludes
the political and anthropological implications of its form. He maps the
regional desire for modernity embedded in these artistic developments
and returns over and over again to the idea that these new artistic prac-
tices constitute “place,” the “place of the modern,” or “modernity as
place”—a concept that allows him to focus on the local dynamics and
motivations that inform the work of the artists under discussion. He
elucidates the different phases of Venezuelan Geometric Abstraction,
recapping a chronology introduced in his 2007 essay “Caracas: A
artmargins 3:2

8 For a thorough treatment of this subject, see María Amalia García, El arte abstracto:
Intercambios culturales entre Argentina y Brasil (Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI Editores, 2011).

106
Constructive Stage.”9 In the end, the main objective of Pérez-Oramas’s
contribution to Cold America is to relativize the radicality of Kinetic Art
through a nuanced critical account of Venezuelan Cinetismo (Kinetic
Art), as embodied in the work of Jesús Soto and Carlos Cruz-Diez.10
In these artists’ drive to dematerialization and visual effects, Pérez-
Oramas sees inscribed “the humanistic logic of classical illusionism.”
Understanding the work of these artists as “machines that produce
optical mirages,” Pérez-Oramas posits them as “ideal visions”11 equiva-
lent to the illusionism cherished by academic painting. In other words,
in spite of their unconventional formal modalities, the vibrating picture
plane of Soto’s and Cruz-Diez’s works remains the support of an ideal
scene. This scene is not figuratively represented, but rather invoked
through the techno-scientific symbolic universe that the works ad-
dress through the picture plane’s optical vibrations and abstract
rhythms. This in turn refers to the phantasmatic congruence between
Venezuelan modernity and reality: the idealized realization in the work
of art of that utmost efficiency with which modernity is associated.
Ultimately, Pérez-Oramas’s aim is to link the chimera of this unblem-
ished modernity in a Venezuela fraught with political, economic, and
social contradictions to the transparency and dematerialization to
which Cinetismo aspired—posing, in passing, fundamental questions
about the politics of abstract forms.
The final essay in the catalog is by Gabriel Pérez-Barreiro, whose
field of expertise is Argentine Concretism. Pérez-Barreiro ponders the
relationship between context and form in two works by the Argen-
tine artist Alfredo Hlito, Ritmos cromáticos (1947) and Ritmos
cromáticos III (1949); one by Belgian artist Georges Vantongerloo,
Fonction-composition (1937); and one by Swiss artist Richard Paul

9 Luis Pérez-Oramas, “Caracas: A Constructive Stage,” in Pérez-Barreiro, Geometry of

displaced boundaries

Hope.
10 See, for example, Luis Pérez-Oramas, “La hipoteca del ornato en las artes visuals venezo-
lanas,” in La Cocina de Jurassic Park y otros ensayos visuales (Caracas: Fundación Polar,
1998), 253–77; “La poética del Penetrable y la escena Minimalista: Las paradojas de la
absorción absoluta,” unpublished paper presented at the Fogg Museum, Harvard
University, March 3, 2001; “La Colección Cisneros: Del paisaje al lugar,” in Bois et al.,
Geometric Abstraction; and “Gego and the Analytic Context of Cinetismo,” in Inverted
Utopias: Avant-Garde in Latin America, ed. Mari Carmen Ramirez and Hector Olea (New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004).
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11 Luis Pérez-Oramas, “Notes on the Venezuelan Constructive Scene 1950–1973,” in

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Suárez, Cold America, 59.

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 Lohse, Konkretion I (1945–46). The author addresses the stylistic simi-
larities of these works while also presenting and analyzing the different
artistic milieus and political contexts in which the works were pro-
duced. But the two paintings by Hlito, which are strikingly similar to
those of Lohse and Vantongerloo, are actually never formally analyzed.
The works function as a springboard for a discussion of the contextual
and ideological differences between Concretism in Argentina and
Europe. According to Pérez-Barreiro, these contextual differences
translate into formal differences; he thus contrasts the interest in chro-
matic variation found in Lohse’s Konkretion I with the more structured
compositionality of Hlito’s works. This observation, which leads the
author to associate Hlito’s pictorial organization with the more politi-
cized discourse of the Argentine Concrete artists,12 is suggestive, but it
requires more argumentative force. A broader sampling of works might
have made Pérez-Barreiro’s argument more convincing. Indeed, while
the author’s account of the Swiss and Argentine contexts in which
these works emerged is precise, a corresponding analysis of form does
not follow. Pérez-Barreiro raises important questions about meaning
and context, but the rapport between form and content remains vague
in his account. How, in other words, are the formal differences between
Lohse’s and Hlito’s works related to their different social contexts? Why
did the Europeans privilege color (if indeed they did), while Hlito
favored structured composition?
Pérez-Barreiro ends his essay with a summary of Rhod Rothfuss’s
important essay “The Frame, a Problem in Contemporary Art,” pub-
lished in the seminal Arturo magazine in 1944, to highlight issues of
(mis)interpretation instead of context. Pérez-Barreiro points to Alfredo
Hlito’s misplaced perception that an unidentified Mondrian painting,
which illustrates Rothfuss’s essay, lacked painterly texture and was
instead made of smooth planes of color. This misperception, which
may have been the result of poor photographic reproduction, led Hlito
to construct his paintings through even and flat color. But why, asks
Pérez-Barreiro, would Lohse and Vantongerloo, who had actually seen
Mondrian’s work in the flesh, pursue seamless surfaces just as Hlito
artmargins 3:2

12 Alfredo Hlito was a member of the Asociación de Arte Concreto Invención (AACI), which
in 1946 embraced what Hlito called a “materialist aesthetic.” Influenced by the early writ-
ings of Karl Marx, several member of the AACI also became members of the Argentine
Communist Party. See Alfredo Hlito,“Notas para una estética materialista,” Arte Concreto
Invención, no. 1 (August 1946): 12.

108
did? Relinquishing the contextual question that guided the beginning
of his essay, the author concludes by stressing the subjectivity of inter-
pretation, “the prism of what one wants to see.”13
Cold America certainly benefits from the more thematic and
focused essays by García, Pérez-Oramas, and Pérez-Barreiro, who avoid
introductory accounts of Concretism and Kinetic Art in Argentina,
Brazil, and Venezuela, and instead provide more detailed explorations
of specific works, events, and theories, as well as formal and political
analyses. However, as the exhibition catalog for a regional survey of
Geometric Abstraction, the book would have benefited from a more
consistent introduction that tackled the significant exhibition history
on this topic, as well as its own position within that growing field.
Moreover, Suárez’s discussion of Cuba in his introductory text—a first
in a series of catalogs that have mostly dealt with Uruguay, Argentina,
Brazil, and Venezuela—feels arbitrary, especially in view of the fact
that although the catalog devotes a section to Mexico (which only
includes the work of Germán Cueto) and a section to Colombia (which
only includes photographs by Leo Matiz), there are no substantive dis-
cussions of either Mexican or Colombian Geometric Abstraction, or of
Cueto’s or Matiz’s works, in any of its texts.
The Cold America catalog, then, begs certain questions: What is
the relationship between this unaccounted for material and the various
Geometric Abstract trends that emerged in postwar Latin America?
Why does its introduction not allude to the catalog of the 2007 exhibi-
tion The Sites of Latin American Abstraction,14 which was curated by
Juan Ledezma and also included photography? The introduction simi-
larly lacks any discussion of the section entitled “Europe,” which
addresses the participation of several artists included in the exhibition
in the cultural life of postwar Europe. This incorporation of a section
on the European journals and other activities that concerned or fea-
tured Latin American geometric abstract artists in the old continent
displaced boundaries

echoes the structure of another catalog, The Geometry of Hope, which

includes a chapter about Geometric Abstraction in Paris after World
War II. Clearly, Cold America aspires to supersede these two previous

13 Gabriel Pérez-Barreiro, “Invention and Reinvention: The Transatlantic Dialogue in

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Geometric Abstraction,” in Suárez, Cold America, 75.

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14 Juan Ledezma, The Sites of Latin American Abstraction (Miami: Cisneros Fontanals Art
Foundation, 2007), exhibition catalog.

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 catalogs. However, it fails to substantiate the curators’ inclusions of
Colombia, Mexico, and Europe, as well as the medium of photography,
either in the critical essays or in the Documents section.

Argentine architect and historian Alejandro Crispiani’s Objetos para

transformar el mundo: Trayectorias del arte concreto-invención, Argentina
y Chile, 1940–1970 (Objects to Transform the World: Trajectories of
Concrete-Invention Art, Argentina and Chile, 1940–1970; 2011) does not
concentrate on Argentine Concretism and its offshoots, as most publi-
cations dealing with postwar Concrete and Geometric Abstract art in
Argentina have tended to do. Instead, Crispiani focuses on the ramifi-
cations of Concreto-Invención (Concrete-Invention) in architecture and
industrial design.
The first part of the book charts material well-rehearsed in recent
publications on Concrete Art in Argentina: the one-time publication
of the magazine Arturo in the summer of 1944 and the coining of
Invencionismo, a term proposed by Edgar Bayley in 1945 that defined
the Argentine avant-garde’s unique response to European Concretism.
In this section Crispiani also provides a detailed discussion of Chilean
poet Vicente Huidobro’s influence on Tomás Maldonado, Edgar Bayley,
Lidy Prati, Carmelo Ardén-Quin, Rhod Rothfuss, and Gyula Kosice,
among others; the relationship of these artists to Torres García; and,
most importantly, the alliance between Invencionismo and Marxism,
which was corroborated by several artists’ membership in the
Argentine Communist Party. In 1946 this politicized group became
the Asociación de Arte Concreto Invención (Concrete Invention Art
Association; AACI), forming a short alliance that dissolved the follow-
ing year. Crispiani focuses on how the artists associated with Arturo
and the AACI used the term invention to give voice to their desire to
transform aesthetics through a correspondence between art and tech-
nology. In the militant prose of Alfredo Hlito, who was one of AACI’s
members, invention was defined in opposition to fortuitous discovery
and to alienation; it was a function of practical consciousness. “To
invent,” Hlito asserted, “means to INTRODUCE INTO THE WORLD
what did not exist until now BY MEANS OF EXPERIMENT AND
artmargins 3:2

INDUSTRY.”15

15 Alfredo Hlito, “Representación e invención,” Boletín de la Asociación de Arte Concreto

Invención, no. 2 (December 1946): 7 (original capitalization).

110
 The second and third parts of Crisipani’s book are dedicated to
the relationship between art, architecture, and industrial design. His
case studies focus on the Escuela de Arquitectura de Valparaíso (School
of Architecture of Valparaiso; EAV) in Chile; Tomás Maldonado’s
involvement with the Hochschule für Gestaltung in Ulm, Germany;
and the Grupo de Diseño (Design Group) in Chile, led by the German
industrial designer Gui Bonsiepe during Salvador Allende’s short-lived
Socialist government (1970–73). The liaison between the proposals
and actors associated with Concreto-Invención and the fields of archi-
tecture and industrial design that Crispiani traces is predicated on
some important events. For instance, two members of the AACI16 left
Buenos Aires: Claudio Girola to lay the groundwork for important
reforms at the EAV, and Maldonado to lead the Hochschule für
Gestaltung. The book’s greatest contribution is in following the trajec-
tories of Girola’s and Maldonado’s geographical and professional dis-
placements into the realms of architecture and design pedagogy, and in
pursuing the radical consequences of Concreto-Invención’s careful
analysis of the pictorial signifier and the corresponding ontological cri-
sis of the art object.
As the title indicates, the “object” is central to Crispiani’s book,
which helps him establish a rapport between art and design by rethink-
ing two categories of objects: those intended for contemplation, and
those intended for use. Both, art objects and functional objects, were
to be put in the service of a revolutionary practice informed by the
Marxism to which both the artists of the AACI and Bonsiepe adhered.
Crispiani is aware of the elusive relation between form and politics, a
relation that was central to these artists, architects, and designers.
Thus, in the introduction, Crispiani argues that only the analysis of
textual sources (manifestos, artists’ articles, art publications, and theo-
retical references), of which he makes masterful use in the book, allows
us to understand the ideological constitution of the artifacts and objects
displaced boundaries

he studies. His exploration of the Marxist literature that informed the

formal experiments of the members of the AACI is key in this regard,
since one of the most distinctive traits of Concreto-Invención was its

16 Formation of the AACI was spearheaded in 1946 by artist Tomás Maldonado and his
brother Edgar Bayley. Heavily influenced by European Concretism, mainly its Parisian
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iteration, the Argentines’ interpretation of Concrete Art involved a commitment to

Communism.

111
 profound desire to transform art objects into revolutionary objects. To
understand how this goal was meant to be accomplished, Crispiani
analyzes the AACI’s attack on the orthogonal frame/format of the
­picture plane, which suggested that the frame/format functioned like
the container of an illusion.17 Pushing beyond the limits of Concrete
Art’s self-referentiality and rejection of naturalism, the Argentine
Invencionistas found it imperative to dismantle not only pictorial repre-
sentation, but representation as such, literalizing the call for concrete
elements that characterized Theo van Doesburg’s Concrete Art.18 Self-
referentiality and the rejection of representation, which manifested
themselves in works that rejected the orthogonal plane in favor of irreg-
ularly shaped supports, favored process, change, and a necessary ques-
tioning of the status of traditional, illusionistic painting.
Crispiani’s analysis of the Marxist scaffolding of Invencionismo is
the most exhaustive to date. However, like other accounts of the politics
of the movement and its members (Edgar Bayley, Tomás Maldonado,
Manuel Espinoza, Alfredo Hlito, Claudio Girola, Aldo Prior, Raúl
Lozza, R. V. D. Lozza, Simón Contreras, and Enio Iommi, to mention
only those affiliated with the Argentine Communist Party in the mid
1940s), Crispiani does not address the actual political events unfolding
at the time.19 Instead, he closely follows the alliances pledged by the

17 The objects that resulted were the so-called marcos recortados (cutout frames) that occupy
Paternosto and Pérez-Barreiro in the essays discussed above. These “shaped canvases”
later developed into so-called coplanares (coplanals), works that also had irregular perime-
ters and whose support, usually wood panels, was constituted by several fragments situ-
ated on the wall, allowing the wall to be part of the overall structure.
18 The principles of the movement were published in the only issue of Art Concret, which
appeared in April 1930. There, van Doesburg emphasized the need for a universal
art entirely conceived by the mind before its execution. A quest for the work’s self-­
referentiality was one of the cornerstones of European Concrete Art. The meaning
of a work was to reside in the combination of its plastic elements, and its construction
was to be “visually controllable.”
19 Andrea Giunta, “El arte moderno en los márgenes del Peronismo,” in Vanguardia,
internacionalismo y política: Arte Argentino en los años sesenta (Buenos Aires: Paidós,
2001), 45–83; Ana Longoni and Daniela Lucena, “De cómo el júbilo creador se trocó
en ­desfachatez: El pasaje de Maldonado y los concretos por el Partido Comunista, 1945–
1948,” Políticas de la memoria (Buenos Aires), no. 4 (Summer 2003–4): 118–28; María
Amalia García, “La construcción del arte abstracto: Interconecciones entre el internacio-
artmargins 3:2

nalismo cultural paulista y la escena artística Argentina, 1949–1953,” in Arte argentino y

latinoamericano del siglo XX: Sus interrelaciones (Buenos Aires: Fundación Espigas, 2004),
17–54; María Cristina Rossi, “En el fuego cruzado entre el realismo y la abstracción,”
in Arte argentino y latinoamericano del siglo XX, 85–125; María Amalia García, El arte
abstracto: Intercambios culturales entre Argentina y Brasil (Buenos Aires: Siglo Veintiuno
Editores, 2011).

112
AACI in the first issue of their magazine, whose editorial reads: “The
artists of our movement do not remain indifferent before the everyday
world nor before the problems of the common man. Concrete artists
are in solidarity with all the people of the world and with their great
ally—the Soviet Union—in its efforts to preserve peace and stop impe-
rialist plans to resuscitate fascism.”20 This statement echoes contem­
porary Argentine Communist Party rhetoric, which had become
dissociated from the working class that had elected Colonel Juan
Domingo Perón as president in the elections of February 1946. 21 The
AACI thus adopted what they thought was an internationalist, progres-
sive, antifascist agenda that signaled its incapacity to address, or even
to acknowledge, the troubling association between Perón and the coun-
try’s working masses. In other words, the AACI’s political agenda was
founded on a double blind spot that compromised their vision: they
could not see that the Soviet Union, under Joseph Stalin’s regime, had
become a repressive state, nor could they see that the Argentine
Communist Party had alienated the “common man,” now the grass-
roots base of Peronismo. A looming question for the literature on
Argentine Concrete Art, and one that remains unanswered by
Crispiani, is thus the relationship between the politics of the AACI
and the politics of the group’s local context.
The second and third parts of Crispiani’s book investigate the
alternatives to painting and sculpture that some members of the AACI
pursued after the demise of their radical artistic experiments in the
mid-40s. This investigation takes the author to Chile, focusing on a
series of practices that have never been associated with the material
discussed above. Crispiani starts by mapping the impact of the poet
Godofredo Iommi and the artist Girola on the formation of EAV, where
the creation of the Institute of Architecture in 1952 was informed by
the most progressive developments in modern architecture and
abstract art and poetry. Indeed, art and poetry were important compo-
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nents of the EAV’s activities. An engagement with experimental poetry

20 “Nuestra militancia,” Arte Concreto Invención, no. 1 (August 1946): 2.

21 Perón, a populist, was deemed fascist by many, including left intellectuals and artists,
from early on. On June 4, 1943, a coup d’état organized by the nationalist and authoritar-
ian Grupo Obra de Unificación (Unification Work Group) installed a military-led govern-
ment that had Perón as its sharpest mind. The colonel was removed from power by a
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coalition of parties on October 10, 1945; but a few days later, on October 17, he was rein-
amor

stated as interim president by a massive mobilization of workers; and on February 24,

1946, he was elected, remaining in power until 1955.

113
 seems to have been prompted by Iommi’s “poetic acts,” which con-
sisted of the recitation of a poem in a public situation that dislocated
it from conventional narrative and common sense. At times, these
poetic acts were oral and collectively created. Defined by Crispiani as
“a collage of sounds and meanings,” Iommi’s practice echoes the Dada
events of the Cabaret Voltaire, the Surrealists’ “exquisite corpse” works,
and the Situationist dérives. Crispiani indicates that between 1958 and
1963, when Iommi was based in Paris, he realized several such poetic
acts, which involved physical displacement and travels outside the
city center.
Crispiani further investigates a number of practices (related to
poetry and architecture) that took place within the context of the EAV.
One key example is Amereida—part poem and part art performance,
and the product of a 1965 trip from Punta Arenas, Chile, to Tarija,
Bolivia, under Iommi’s leadership. The resulting work was to serve as a
foundational text for the American continent. Not unlike Iommi’s
poetic acts themselves, Amereida has the quality of a collage. As such, it
combines different styles and genres, alternating between verse, poetic
prose, narrative, personal accounts, historical documents, as well as
cartographic interventions. The reader is as struck by the experimental
nature of these poetic and performative practices—which clearly had
parallels in major cultural capitals such as New York (Kaprow’s hap-
penings), Paris (Situationism), and Caracas (El Techo de la Ballena)—
as by the fact that they did not presuppose an art audience. The latent
aesthetics of dematerialization embodied by these practices are equally
fascinating, especially considering the continuity that Crispiani wants
to establish between the Invencionistas’ experiments “beyond the
frame” and the “poetic acts” that punctuate Amereida and that became
characteristic of the EAV. One should, however, remember that Iommi
was the uncle of two members of the AACI (and not a member him-
self ) and that his ties to the AACI were tenuous.
In the last section of Objetos para transformar el mundo, Crispiani
follows the trajectory of the AACI from Germany back to Chile through
the figure of Tomás Maldonado. Maldonado’s involvement with the
Ulm School of Design and with industrial design more broadly was, to
artmargins 3:2

the Argentine artist, the only possible, and conceptually consistent, out-
come for the experiments of the 1940s. These experiments led to the
demise of traditional pictorial modes through a rejection of the orthog-
onal frame and the increasing incorporation of real space into the

114
relief-like works produced by the artists associated with the AACI. Max
Bill, as is well known, played an important role in this second chapter
of Maldonado’s life and work, since it was the Swiss artist who invited
Maldonado to teach at Ulm in 1954. Crispiani provides a careful analy-
sis of Bill’s aesthetic credo, differentiating it from that of Maldonado.
Beginning with Maldonado’s early interest (1953) in human communi-
cation, mass media, and semiotics, Crispiani traces his intellectual tra-
jectory from the art, architecture, and design journal Nueva Vision,
which Maldonado directed from 1951 to 1957, to his tenure at Ulm.
There, by 1956, Bill’s notion of “good form”22 —a concept that was to
shape the production of objects of mass consumption as simultane-
ously beautiful and practical—was displaced by a new focus on technol-
ogy, science, and social practices. Maldonado replaced Bill’s “good
form” with a model of industrial design geared toward the acquisition
of specialized knowledge and the capacity for interdisciplinary work. As
had happened with Hannes Meyer’s Bauhaus, art was now suppressed
and deemed irrelevant for the formation of the designer. Crispiani per-
ceptively observes that this turn away from art toward the social and
technical sphere operated, at the Ulm School, within the logic of mass
production. He concludes that this did not deter the school from the
goal of a “world populated by rational objects, this time founded on
more real and scientific bases.”23 The latter would facilitate a “mature
social order” that corresponded to the “mature technique” Ulm profes-
sionals pursued.
Crispiani argues that whereas Maldonado ultimately developed a
mainstream practice aligned with industrial capitalism, his student

22 The term derives from the title of a traveling exhibition organized by Bill and sponsored
by the Swiss Werkbund in 1949. “Good form” is concerned with the development and
production of functional and beautiful objects for mass consumption. Bill emphasized
the moral dimension of Bauhaus concerns about the integration of industry and art,
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arguing that through “good form” audiences would be exposed to goodness—“good”

because it was at once beautiful and practical. He argued for what he called a new
humanism, one that would transform consumer goods into cultural goods. See Max Bill,
“The Bauhaus Ideas from Weimar to Ulm,” in Architects Yearbook, vol. 5, ed. Morton
Shand (London: Elek Books, 1953), 29–32, as cited in Paul Betts, “Science, Semiotics and
Society: The Ulm Hochschule für Gestaltung in Retrospect,” Design Issues, no. 2
(Summer 1998): 72. See also Bill’s essay “Form, Function, Beauty,” in which he wrote:
“Since form means ‘the sum of all functions in harmonious unison,’ and since ‘Form =
Art = Beauty,’ the obvious conclusion is that Art as well as Beauty may also be defined as
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the ‘sum of all functions in harmonious unison’”; in Tomás Maldonado, Max Bill
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(Buenos Aires: Editorial Nueva Vision, 1955), 119.

23 Crispiani, Objetos para transformar el mundo, 373.

115
 Gui Bonsiepe set out to test the role of design in the construction of a
socialist society geographically located at the peripheries of advanced
capitalism, Salvador Allende’s Chile. While Crispiani omits the imme-
diate political context of Peronismo that surrounded the AACI in the
mid-40s, in this last section of the book he does underline the affinity
between Bonsiepe’s focus on the social and economic roles of indus-
trial design, on the one hand, and the Socialist agenda of Allende’s gov-
ernment, on the other. Bonsiepe’s holistic understanding of the life of
the object proposed that the object was to be rational: opposed to the
whims of the market, and thus based on necessity and planning. The
visual form of the object was secondary. As Crispiani summarizes
Bonsiepe’s thinking and the ideology of the Chilean state, which he
never questions, “the revolution is an act, not a representation.” The
author then effectively closes his narrative with an emphasis on this
rejection of representation that purportedly ties the Concrete Art
objects of the Argentines to the design agenda of Bonsiepe: “we could
say of these objects that they are concrete: they don’t carry illusions and
do not appeal to mirages.”24
The salient aspect of Crispiani’s book is his discussion of the uto-
pian desire to affect reality through art, architecture, and design, and
the unfulfilled aspirations for art’s “political and historical relevance”
in Argentina and Chile. Objetos para transformar el mundo shows that
key figures such as Iommi, Girola, Maldonado, and Bonsiepe attempted
to develop practices that would generate a “new relation between things
and men,” as well as a pedagogy and material culture that would resist
the logic of circulation and production imposed by the market. And yet,
neither aesthetic devices nor functional objects committed to Marxism
or Socialism, which were either blind to the local government or fully
engaged with it, would significantly effect social change. Disregarding
disciplinary boundaries, Objetos para transformar el mundo maps a cri-
sis in art and politics whose ramifications are cleverly analyzed through
micronarratives that weave together local and international perspec-
tives, as well as objects with texts.
Crispiani’s book could have better balanced the historical writing
and interpretation of the movements and authors studied to communi-
artmargins 3:2

cate the information and his arguments more directly. He could also

24 Ibid, 409.

116
have been more reflexive regarding the various political contexts that
served as background for the practices that the book studies. Despite
such shortcomings, he has undoubtedly managed to advance the criti-
cal and historical literature on Concrete Art in Argentina by exploring
alternative trajectories. By moving outside the boundaries of painting
and sculpture and into the realms of architecture and design, and by
crossing geographical boundaries from Argentina to Chile and
Germany, Crispiani has produced a new template for postwar histories
of Latin American Geometric Abstract art.
Something similar might be achieved by exhibition catalogs, as
well, if their curators and editors were willing to engage the material
thematically rather than through the regional-survey model. The cur-
rent state of the field begs for a more nuanced, analytical, and self-
reflexive critique of Latin American Geometric Abstraction. More
focused studies of the interrelations between artists and regions, and
between more and less canonical practices and media, might shed new
light on these complex episodes of our globalized modernity.

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