Abstract
A meticulously organized, tree-lined stretch of Park Avenue on the Upper East Side provides a felicitous backdrop for The Metropolis in Latin America, 1830–1930, organized by Idurre Alonso (associate curator of Latin American Collections) and Maristella Casciato (senior curator of Architectural Collections) of the Getty Research Institute. The exhibition—originally on view at the Getty Center from September 2017 to January 2018 and later installed at the Americas Society in New York from March to June 2018—was one of over seventy exhibitions in museums and private galleries throughout the Los Angeles basin making up the Getty-sponsored Pacific Standard Time: Latin American and Latino Art in LA initiative (PST: LA/LA). This wide-ranging collection of shows celebrated cultural connections between Los Angeles and Latin America, highlighting modern and contemporary art that displayed inter-American connectivity. It was arguably the most significant artistic event of 2017, and coming as it did in the midst of heightened political tensions generated by the Trump administration’s controversial policies regarding immigration, the critical mass of Latin American art was a beacon of hope and a reminder of American interconnectedness. 1
The Metropolis in Latin America is one of only a few PST: LA/LA shows centered on the Modern era and also one of the few to travel to the East Coast. Furthermore, the works on display break with traditional art mediums to explore the aesthetics and function of Latin American urban landscapes. As one of the flagship exhibitions anchoring the Getty Center galleries, The Metropolis in Latin America enjoyed a position of prestige in the PST: LA/LA constellation. Thus, it is an important, overdue, and curatorially unique perspective on the history of urban planning and infrastructure across Latin American capitals. Within the exhibition, typographically dense zoning maps balance dynamic news reel footage, and documentary photographs by Marc Ferrez—the patriarch of Brazilian photography—serve as counterpoints to Le Corbusier’s fantastical sketches for Rio de Janeiro. All are compellingly framed within the rarely exhibited theme of early Modern urban planning.
The exhibition’s collection of quasi-scientific documents is an undeniably rich contribution to the history of Latin American visual culture. However, with few explanatory texts to elucidate their curatorial decisions, the organizers miss an opportunity to more deeply engage their unique materials. The exhibition’s macroscopic approach, which focuses on ideologies of city planning and infrastructural development rather than discrete buildings or landmarks, is refreshingly wide-ranging. However, the tone of the sparse accompanying wall panels is unfortunately aestheticist and bourgeois, declining to critically examine the conservative agendas of nineteenth-century city planners and politicians. Furthermore, the exhibition censors the radicality of twentieth-century Latin American artists and architects, many of whom were committed Marxists.
The iteration of The Metropolis in Latin America at the Americas Society, where this reviewer saw it, is modest in scope, fitting into three small rooms. In an attempt to create narrative structure, the curators selected six Latin American capitals—Buenos Aires, Havana, Lima, Mexico City, Rio de Janiero, and Santiago de Chile—as their primary case studies. However, maps and photographs of Cuzco, Santo Domingo, and the aborted French outpost of Port Napoleon on the island of Hispaniola demonstrate this to be a loose delimitation. In spite of the show’s long nineteenth-century focus, the opening vestibule presents visitors with an overview of “The Colonial City.” Thus, the exhibition also surpasses its proposed temporal limitation, suggesting that perhaps the curators should have either been more flexible in defining its parameters or more stringent in editing the checklist.
As a result of these tenuous, self-prescribed boundaries, the exhibit’s opening overview of colonial city planning feels both revelatory and oddly perfunctory. Directly opposite the gallery entrance, visitors are confronted with a full-wall enlargement of a photograph of a massive cathedral on a sparsely populated city square. The photograph’s explanatory panel is buried in the room’s center display, and there are no obvious markers of location within the scene, so the image becomes a visual summation of the Latin American urban landscape. The terse introductory wall text delineates succinctly how the Latin American grid, with its central plaza, was a powerful expression of colonial power. The ubiquity of this urban arrangement did not originate in the colonies’ common cultural background, it was resultant of royal decree. Hence, the gloss with which the introductory images and text fold all of Latin America into a common urbanist trajectory smacks of oversimplification. The usefulness of a unified “Latin American” identity is a subject of constant debate among Latin Americanists, but here the category is wholly unchallenged. 2
This lack of engagement with the current historical and cultural discourses of the field is one of the exhibition’s primary flaws. National, racial, cultural, and geographical differences between disparate populations and locations across the Northern and Southern Hemispheres are generalized into a central narrative of Europeanized modernization. Text panels briefly suggest friction between the colonizers and “newly subjugated populations” but do not unpack how the colonial mind-set was manifest in the imagery displayed on the gallery walls. The loincloth draped, dark-skinned figures in an engraved vista of Cusco from the early eighteenth century and the variegated skin tones represented by Johann Moritz Rugendas in his nineteenth-century engravings of Rio de Janeiro go without commentary, as though racial and class discrimination played no role in shaping Latin American spaces. At a time when historians of the region’s art are increasingly invested in issues of social justice and critical race theory, this exhibition evades pressing dialogues.
The disconnect may be due to the show’s lack of a catalog, which is in itself a huge loss, as photographs of the pieces on display are difficult to find in other locations. A catalog would not only have served as a repository for these important visual references, it would have created a space for more in-depth and nuanced analyses of the selected landscapes. The perplexing omission (The Metropolis in Latin America is one of the few PST: LA/LA museum shows not to publish a catalog) is both a lamentable oversight and a primary reason for the show’s lack of critical depth. As a result, the exhibition cultivates a pervading sense of deflection that leaves the visitor with the uneasy sensation of having sailed past an iceberg and only seen its tip.
Upon leaving the first gallery, one enters the largest room of the exhibition, which houses objects grouped into the categories “The Republican City” and “Spaces for Leisure and Culture.” The exhibition design of this central space is a highlight of the show, which both effectively grounds the miscellany on display and transports the visitor into a nineteenth-century planning office. Here a large, unfinished pine table punctuated with minimalist glass cases, easels, and display boxes serves as the primary mounting apparatus. In mimicking the iconic silhouette of a drafting desk, the horizontal surface positions the visitor in the role of architect or urban planner. Visitors thus become spectators in the process of the cities’ development rather than observers after the fact. On the walls, photographs and engravings are framed in shadowboxes crafted out of the same unfinished pine, bestowing them with a sense of monumentality and gravitas often not associated with works on paper and other ephemeralia.
The metamorphosis of the gallery space into a planner’s studio infuses the objects on display with an increased immediacy and relevancy. Thus, temporally transported, a red-highlighted map of Buenos Aires’ boulevards demarcating those to be widened and areas to be raised for the creation of “paseos públicos” can be appreciated both as an historical document and as part of an active process of urban renewal. Engravings of the landscaped gardens popular throughout South America in the nineteenth century serve as portals to the Latin American garden cites of the past. A second map in the gallery shows a plan for the enlargement of one such city park, inviting visitors to ocularly perambulate its sandy paths, graphically outlined in manicured hedges. A third map meticulously plots every address in downtown Mexico City, so that those familiar with its streets can visualize its transformation at the level of the individual address. Together with the displayed photographs of mounted national heroes, tree-lined avenues, and airy “paseos,” these historical surveys convey the heady optimism of Latin America’s turn of the century bourgeoisie.
But like the photographic and engraved albums placed throughout the show, strategically opened to their most alluring view, the room only shows one page of the urban story. Near the head of the gallery, Brazilian mayor Francisco Pereira Passos looks out of a 1911 photograph by then well-known photographer Augusto Cesar de Malta Campos. Continuing in a current transhistorical vein, his contented expression can be read as approbation of the exhibition’s bourgeois orientation. The photograph exemplifies the historical narrative’s domination by heroic, gentrifying figures like Pereira Passos, whose modernizing visions were limited to projects benefiting the predominantly white, upper-class social elites. Both an engineer and politician—as were several of his urbanizing peers across the continent—Pereira Passos inaugurated a period of extensive urban reform in Rio de Janiero. Using Paris’ Haussmannization as a model, Pereira Passos enlarged Rio’s avenues, creating the city’s most important thoroughfare, the Avenida Central (now called Avenida Rio Branco). 3 He also promoted infrastructural projects—including electrical, water, and sewage systems—that propelled Rio into modernity. However, his vision was primarily motivated by a desire to improve the commercial and leisure spaces of the rich rather than distributing urban amenities among the municipal population. The wide-scale destruction of lower-income housing perpetuated by Pereira Passos and his successors propelled Rio’s housing crisis. Displaced citizens formed the city’s first favelas, now one of the city’s defining attributes. Historical hindsight leads the modern viewer to wonder whether Pereira Passos really improved the city’s infrastructure or just redistributed and exacerbated its problems. Unfortunately, this question is left both unasked and unanswered. 4
The third and final room in the exhibition continues the colonialist and classist tracks of the previous spaces and demonstrates the curators’ resistance to engaging the varied political contexts vital to understanding modern Latin American urbanism. Encompassing three sections, “Modern Infrastructure,” “National Architecture in Context,” and “Towards Modernism,” the curation of this room suggests that Latin Americans planners’ and architects’ approach to the modernist project was dominated by internationalism well into the twentieth century. While international influence on Latin American architecture and planning continues into the present, by the turn of the twentieth century, there were significant movements resisting European movements and staking claims for national cultural trajectories. These came in a variety of forms from Anthropofagia in Brazil, to Constructivism in Uruguay, to Estridentismo in Mexico, and Indigenismo in Peru (as well as Mexico). Not all of these movements directly spoke to philosophies of urban planning, but they all addressed issues of modern urbanism within distinct national contexts while consciously rejecting promiscuous internationalism.
The exhibition neglects the richness of these disparate histories in order to construct a monolithic narrative of Latin American architecture and planning. While the show is meant to be a broad overview, this streamlining seems reductionist. The Modern period was a time of artistic maturation, self-assertion, and the rejection of European dominance in many Latin American countries, and the capitals highlighted in this exhibition were the nodes of this new network of cultural resistance and renewal. It is jarring to see this final gallery presided over by Le Corbusier’s sketches for his lecture “Can Buenos Aires Become One of the Great Cities of the World?” Of course, Le Corbusier’s style left an indelible mark on Latin American architecture and design planning, but his interventions into Latin American cities came with a distinct neocolonial imprint. 5 While Le Corbusier’s visits to Latin America arguably inspired his more site-specific turn, he came to the continent with preconceived ideas about how to transform its urban landscapes in spite of the fact that he knew little about regional geographies and cultures. 6 To include his sketches in a place of privilege within the exhibition seems like a betrayal of Latin American architecture rather than its celebration. (This is especially true as the Le Corbusier drawings are loan objects, and the majority of objects on display are from the Getty’s permanent collection, thus their inclusion seems all the more like pandering to the audience’s desire to see recognizable names.)
Worthy of much more consideration, on the other hand, is the copy of Manuel Maples Arce’s 1924 “super-poem” Urbe. The curators include two copies of the unimposing pamphlet, one closed to show the striking red-and-black cover graphics and another open to a page stamped with a crude, yet undeniably modern, woodblock print featuring a pair of skyscraper silhouettes rising over a darkened city street. Both illustrations were executed by Franco-Mexican artist Jean Charlot, whose distinctive style married the craftsmanship of traditional Mexican prints with international avant-garde imagery. 7 However, Charlot and Maples Arce’s primary aesthetic and ideological references were not French Neoclassicism or International High Modernism. Rather, they invoked a perceived global brotherhood accessed through Marxist Mexican artistic circles. 8 Urbe’s subtitle, “Bolshevik Super-poem in Five Cantos,” directly addresses its authors socialist allegiances, as do references to Russia and “the social revolution” throughout the text. But these important political associations fall by the wayside without panels contextualizing Mexico’s (and, more generally, Latin America’s) strong socialist proclivities, taking root at the turn of the twentieth century. Marxist politics substantially influenced the production of urban space and artistic form in 1930s Mexico, but this is obscured by the exhibition’s emphasis on a false dichotomy of international versus national style. 9
These particular problems—broad generalizations and resistance to national specificity—stem from a long trajectory of US cultural and political imperialism that has shaped the way Latin American art and architecture has been framed in US museums. Modern architecture has received uneven and at times fetishistic attention in the United States. In the 1940s, propelled by the Franklin Roosevelt administration’s Good Neighbor policy and Rockefeller money, Latin American Modern architecture took center stage at The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in shows including curator Phillip L. Goodwin’s Brazil Builds: Architecture New and Old, 1652-1942 (January 13 to February 28, 1943) and Henry Hitchcock Russell’s Latin American Architecture since 1945 (November 23, 1955 to February 19, 1956). 10 Both exhibitions published elaborate photo-rich catalogs that served both as visual compendiums and research incubators for the generations of scholars and architects that followed. By portraying Latin American cities as forward moving—both introductions allude to airplanes and flight within their first paragraphs—these catalogs cemented the characterization of Latin America as an assemblage of backwater badlands, saved from their fates by their adoption of international style architecture. 11 After recounting its colonial and nineteenth-century history, the “Introduction I” to Brazil Builds concludes, “But the story has a happy ending. A few more years pass and almost overnight the lovely capital city [Rio de Janeiro] was cured of its disease and began to reconsider its architectural possibilities in terms of modern life and modern building technique.” 12
Publications and exhibitions of Latin American architecture within the United States still struggle to break away from the legacy of these foundational MoMA texts. 13 A wave of new publications in the field over the last decade has helped remedy the situation, but there is still much “uncharted territory,” especially outside of the research epicenters of Mexico and Brazil. 14 The paucity of sources is even greater in the area of urbanism and city planning. Venezuelan scholar Arturo Almandoz of Simon Bolívar University in Caracas is the primary voice articulating this history, and his text Planning Latin America’s Capital Cities, 1850-1950 likely served as a primary reference for The Metropolis in Latin America’s curators. 15 While Almandoz’s “Introduction” to his edited volume occasionally lapses into facile generalizations, it also includes an incredibly thorough literature review—including an array of both English and Spanish language texts—demonstrating the subject’s potential for continued dialogue. Still the volume’s strength comes primarily from Almandoz’s diligence in gathering scholars throughout North and South America offers episodic and deeply rooted studies of individual capital cities. An exhibition without a catalog simply cannot offer a comparable degree of depth, and unfortunately, mixing together objects from different countries within chronological and thematic categories served to stifle rather than cultivate ideological nuance in this case.
As a result, The Metropolis in Latin America is visually stunning and topically exciting, but it falls flat in terms of stimulating new methodologies or facilitating the understanding of hemispheric relations. However, the show’s macroscopic approach—privileging planning trends over discreet pieces of architecture—is a welcome shift, and perhaps a portend of more sophisticated ways of exhibiting Latin America’s built landscape.