Pop goes Boom. A recent slate of excellent exhibitions of modern and contemporary Latin American art in the United States has expanded awareness for US viewing publics of the breadth and depth of artistic production, including architecture, graphic design, and fine art across the Americas in the second half of the twentieth century. These publics include not only conventional art consumers, but also the increasingly visible and vocal Latino/a/x population in the United States, in its present fraught situation. The importance of understanding the contributions to and the interrelatedness of Latin America and Latin Americans and the United States is thus more urgent than ever. Focusing on one particularly eventful decade, the exhibition Pop América 1965–75 and the exhibition catalog essays explore multivalent implementation of the sprawling phenomenon of Pop during this period. A consummately contemporary art movement, Pop used visual vocabularies, techniques, and technologies drawn from advertising and publicity, and served as a repudiation of the abstraction(s) that had dominated the international art world in previous decades.
As exhibition curator Esther Gabara notes in her introduction to the catalog, Pop in the United States was intrinsically polyvalent—simultaneously a celebration and critique of commodity culture and its technologies of representation—but it was seldom explicitly political, or self-reflexive. In important centers of artistic production, including Argentina, Brazil, Peru, Colombia, Mexico and Cuba, “pop,” both noun and verb, serves to reference an explosive quality, an action of liberation, resistance, and revolutionary solidarity, not an apolitical art movement. The exhibition foregrounds the oppositions that Pop seemed to flaunt—political/apolitical, leftist/neoliberal, pleasure/struggle—showing how images such as the Coca-Cola logo and the flag, both beloved icons of US Pop, generated a wide range of meanings and interpellate varied constituencies. Drawing on the lexicon of mass communication, including figures and objects, Pop was instantly accessible to non-specialist audiences.
Pop was deployed not only for artistic and consumerist ends, but also in service of nation- building. Iconic projects in this period, notably the Hemisfair in San Antonio, Texas, and the 1968 Mexico City Olympics used Pop graphics to build national identification. As the exhibition documents, Pop incited audiences to move beyond passive spectatorship into active participation, and indeed partisanship, both with and against regimes of power. But Latin American pop served not only to support entrenched political agendas, but also to reinforce revolutionary solidarity across national lines.
Writing about the use of Pop aesthetics in graphic art and design in Cuba, Mexico, and the United States (specifically the Chicano and Black Power movements in California), Jennifer Josten notes that at the same time that Andy Warhol was developing the artistic vocabulary that became synonymous with Pop, Raúl Martínez, known for posters and paintings featuring iconic heroes Che Guevara and Jose Martí, began producing works exemplifying his belief that “the mass-produced, public-facing poster was revolutionary Cuba's truest art form,” adapting this strategy to his fine art paintings. Latin American Pop artists and designers, like their US counterparts, worked on both sides of the boundary between commercial design and fine art.
Similarly, the avant-garde Mexican journal El Corno Enplumado featured front covers designed by proto-conceptualist artist Felipe Ehrenburg and back covers advertising consumer goods from baby food to kitchen appliances. As Roberto Tejada comments in his essay on the journal, Ehrenburg infused his cover illustrations with art history and irony. Arguably, this historical and critical intervention is another contribution from Latin America that was under-represented in US Pop.
One of the most prominent characteristics of global Pop is the return of the figure. Largely absent from the avant-garde anti-figuration of mid-century abstraction, the figure once again became a privileged site for presentation and representation in Pop. Yet, in his catalog essay Sergio Delgado Moya claims that the figure in Pop, rather than a return of the repressed, is marked by defilement, defacement, and disfiguration and works that deconstruct and decenter conventional representational codes, thereby mounting a critical response to celebrity and pop-culture-obsessed US Pop.
In a hemispheric overview, looking to the United States as the counterpoint to Latin America Pop in the development and epistemology of Pop makes geographic and hegemonic sense. Yet, possible associations with British and other regional iterations of Pop art go unacknowledged; the critical bite and manic saturation of surfaces of Richard Hamilton, for example, would make a fascinating conversation. It is one that I am sure will be opened as this rich area is mapped in future scholarship and exhibitions.
