Alberto Delmonte

To Be of This Time

To be of this time means accepting the plastic language of our century. But this does not mean adopting, in a punctual and orderly manner, the different -isms that international fine arts circles present on a daily basis. In recent years in Argentina, in parallel with the debates that the proliferation of schools and tendencies in the plastic arts have brought along with them, another, more concrete discussion is growing, centered around our process of cultural identification.

We are slowly moving away from mythological universalist beliefs, to comprehend that culture is a product of history and society, and therefore every human group develops a culture, which for that matter is unique and differentiated.

Western culture, with its traditional Eurocentric vision, and the developed world, with its exportation of capital and cultural goods, have intentionally contributed to planetizing concepts and needs. This makes it so that their problematics and their culture go on to configure that which we generally define as “universal culture”.

In this equation, less developed countries on the periphery receive modalities and fads that slowly enter their boundaries, until they are used and accepted as things that pertain to them.

This operation is carried out by means of the monopoly exercised over the production and dissemination of cultural products, generating a system of manipulating necessities.

This is perhaps one of the causes behind culture ceasing to be a product of direct interaction between human groups, and being transformed into a product elaborated by professionals.

Argentina cannot escape the phenomenon being provoked by large centers, which need to develop universal habits of consumption, along with the necessities and values that accompany that.

One last manifestation of this fact in our midst is postmodernism, as a movement that questions modernity, its crises, its authoritarianism and its miseries.

But in the end, there is modern European man’s critical position of successes and errors, which, without managing to constitute a new proposal, does act as a sort of complex parenthesis.

Aside from delving further into a value judgment of postmodernism, however, what we should ask ourselves is whether this problematic can be or is one shared by the entire planet.

Because taking events and our realities into account, the North and the South are not equal. The circumstances and possibilities surrounding an adolescent student, a worker or an artist in Boston or Paris are not equal to those in Tucumán or La Paz. That we might analyze and produce thought or cultural objects on the basis of experiences born of different realities is an irony. It is like denying that culture is the result of a cumulative and selective process by a society, and as such, should be its response within an economic and social situation in reference to a determined time and space.

Men group together and then distinguish themselves from one another according to their customs and language. For this reason, each people possesses a culture that is its particular own. To the extent that it grows and crucially develops, its particularity becomes part of man’s universal patrimony. An inverse route, to arrive at the particular from the universal, is not logical. And yet this operation has been taking place among us repeatedly.

In some way, reflecting on these things from this point of departure, and on the basis of this century’s plastic experiences (since we are of our time), a group of artists is incorporating our space, the place where we live and the human group that surrounds us. From this, from “our reality”, perhaps we will arrive at universality.

Translation: Tamara Stuby