- Artist
- Sandra Gamarra born 1972
- Original title
- Tres reflexiones sobre Modernidad en los Andes
- Medium
- Video, high definition, 3 monitors, black and white
- Dimensions
- Duration: 4min, 12sec
- Collection
- Tate
- Acquisition
- Purchased 2017
- Reference
- T14924
Summary
Three Reflections on Modernity in the Andes 2014 is a three-channel video installation that can be either projected or shown on monitors. It can be shown on adjacent screens or on neighbouring walls but not on a single screen or monitor sequentially. It was first exhibited in Gamarra’s solo exhibition at Galeria Leme in São Paulo in 2014, What Made Us Modern / Crisp Images in a Humid Environment, the title of which incorporates a quote from the Peruvian sociologist Anibal Quijano. The work comprises three short videos of four minutes and twelve seconds each, that are titled respectively Abstracciones (Abstractions), Pasaje Natural (Natural Landscape) and Polvo Eres (Ashes to Ashes). Each video takes an extract from a different text and juxtaposes the words in the form of subtitles, without sound, with images filmed in black and white. In Abstractions the images are of a textile, which is slowly revealed to be a poncho spread out flat, through which the head of an indigenous man slowly appears; in Natural Landscape the images are of colonial-era paintings; and in Ashes to Ashes a piece of imitation Pre-Columbian ceramic is filmed being covered in fresh clay, smashed with a chisel and then carefully ‘excavated’ and reassembled to produce a fake pre-Columbian object.
In Abstractions the text is by the Mexican writer, artist and gallery owner Marius de Zayas (1880–1961), an essay written for the periodical Camera Work, no.41 in 1913; in Natural Landscape it is an extract from Lest Not Destroy the Beloved Peru written in 1962 by the Peruvian novelist, poet and anthropologist José María Arguedas (1911–1969); and in Ashes to Ashes it is from Seven Interpretive Essays on Peruvian Reality published in 1928 by the Peruvian journalist, political philosopher and activist José Carlos Mariátegui (1894–1930). Each of these Latin American writers helped to define modernity and modernism in the Americas in the first half of the twentieth century. De Zayas was an associate of the American photographer Alfred Stieglitz (1864–1946) and was influential within an early twentieth-century avant-garde network linking Mexico, New York and Paris. Arguedas, who wrote in both Spanish and Quechua but also blended the two languages, was known for his portrayals of indigenous Andean life. José Carlos Mariátegui was a leading Marxist and founder of the Peruvian Socialist Party, which was based not on European models but the Peruvian Indian commune. He was also a founding figure of indigenism (a movement at times allied to muralism and social realism) that – through his socialist vanguard journal of art and culture Amauta – sought to unite modernism with indigenous culture.
Marius de Zayas’s text addresses the evolution of art, and the development and comprehension of abstraction, in relation to the evolution of the races and makes certain racist assumptions about ‘primitive’ (indigenous) peoples in relation to ‘white’ culture which he sees as advanced. He also interprets the ‘primitive’ as only capable of an art of the ‘fantastic’ – a stereotype of Latin American art that has persisted in various forms through the twentieth century. Arguedas’s text is a meditation on the Andean landscape, and its relation to Peruvian history, from the vantage point of an aeroplane. He contrasts the modernity of the plane with the achievements of the Andean peoples who centuries earlier had developed sophisticated ways to manage the landscape. He calls for modernity in the form of machine and the ancient respect for the earth not to be seen as incompatible but complementary. Mariátegui’s text addresses the plight of the living survivals of Incan civilization – the people. He says, ‘All that survives of Tawantinsuyo is the Indian. The civilization has perished, but not the race’.
By selecting texts by these three writers, Gamarra advances an examination of the politics of modernism from the perspective of Latin America, but particularly from a distinctly Andean perspective. In both Mexico and Peru modernism had to negotiate a complex, deeply rooted and persisting indigenous culture that had not been erased by colonialism. Mariátegui’s ideas later influenced revolutionary guerrilla movements such as the Tupamaros and the Shining Path, and his work is still widely read today. Gamarra’s video triptych, through references to such modernist figures, thus links the legacies of modernism in the Andes and the aesthetics of abstraction – both indigenous and modernist – with the politics of self-determination as it has played out in the Andes since. This period of early twentieth century history saw a project, lead in part by Mariategui, to recuperate the arts of the indigenous culture – the foundation of disciplines of archaeology and anthropology within Peru by Peruvians, thus diminishing the distance between the object of study and the investigator. This progressive reclamation of identity and rootedness culminated in the Agrarian Reform act of 1968.
Further reading
Press Release for the exhibition What Made Us Modern / Crisp Images in a Humid Environment, Galeria Leme, São Paulo 2014, http://galerialeme.com/en/expo/what-made-us-modern-crisp-images-in-a-humid-environment/?section=release, accessed July 2014.
Tanya Barson
July 2014
Does this text contain inaccurate information or language that you feel we should improve or change? We would like to hear from you.