The view of the domestic interior places us at the vantage of an observer who has withdrawn from the scene in order to contemplate the environment in which they will receive visitors. On the cube at the left there is an ashtray with an unlit cigarette, as if just before being lit the harmony achieved by the ordering of the space and the objects merited photographic immortality. Something along those lines might serve to narrate this mid-1980s advertisement for the store Hogar, addressed to a middle class who’s desire for social ascent did not wane with the war. Although the order of the books on the marble table places the domesticity of the scene on offer in doubt (it seems more like a dentist’s waiting room), I would like to linger a moment on the painting above the fireplace. There, two heavy black circular forms float on a red background, and a tubular figure bisects one of the circles, pulling it up toward the upper left-hand corner of the painting. It is an abstract painting, yes, but of the ancestralist kind of which Fernando de Szyszlo has remained the major Peruvian and Latin American figure since the beginning of the 1960s (see, among other pieces, his series The Execution of Túpac Amaru).

Szyszlo’s painting sought to synthesize what was perceived as the vanguard in international abstract art with pre-Columbian symbols and allusions to foundational events in national culture – in some cases titling the works in Quechua. As an article in The Economist notes: “In his paintings, the totemic figures struggle against dark forces, or are trapped in the labyrinth of the unconscious. They are a gloomy reflection on the human condition. In this sense his work is universal. But it is also an attempt at expressing the struggle in Latin America for a modernity that reflects its past and its complex ethnic and social reality.” [1] If Szyszlo employed his semicircles and jagged figures, Milner Cajahuaringa worked with the trapezoidal form, and both artists defined a formal universe – a “telluric abstraction” – that we find today both in academic painting environments and in spaces for the sale of paintings for tourism.

Although Szyszlo considered collecting – and the art market – to be that which can “develop the love of painting”[2] among the affluent strata of society, advertisements where the artist’s work appeared as part of a mass communication with his endorsement are rare (with the exception of some posters for the Feria Internacional del Pacífico from the mid-60s). An openly public use of his work would have implied accepting a direct implication of consumption or commercial propaganda for his work, which is to say, a use remote from the strictly aesthetic. For Szyszlo, abstraction is a road to “the absolute” that can counter the automatisms of modern life – among them, everyday alienation and the predominance of commerce in art-, and its post-war formulation corresponding to what David Harvey calls high or late modernism, where the militant character of previous modernisms – including the historical avant garde – was seen as outmoded by the universalist (and anti-class) spirit of North American liberalism against the socialist bloc. [3]

But what is interesting here is to capture the specific subjectivity of the high modernist artist, for whom transcendence and inalienability that he aspires to embody enable him to deny that the sale of the products of his labor have a material impact in a dynamic determined by capitalism and its “vulgar materialism”, including where their commercial success is undoubtable. We could say, following Daniel Miller, that subjectivation of said inalienability bracketed under the figure of the artist is the precondition for the “valorization” of art in the market, and that price increases are quite rare without an elevated (and socially recognized as such) subject as a guarantee of that inflation. [5] Returning to the initial image, then, what is important here is that unsigned painting hanging in the bourgeois interior scene advertised by Hogar where it serves a fundamental function in its speaking to the acquisitive capacity of the subject who would, we would suppose, inhabit it. In its interaction with the small sculpture and the books arranged just so, the painting elevates the scene to the terrain of “good taste”.

The painting’s role in the advertisement signals the principle aim of art as it is commodified: interior decoration. It is the concrete use of the work of art in bourgeois society, which forces us to rethink the modernist doctrine of art’s autonomy resulting from its social function: as Walter Benjamin wrote, commenting on the bourgeois interior of Paris at the end of the 19th century where art nouveau flourished: “the interior is the refuge of art”. [6] Another way of framing this would be to note that, in relation to art, what is at play in the Hogar ad is, to put it more precisely, its evident utilitarian character (where use value would be located in decoration) and its employment as an element of furniture among others. Miller holds that “art exists only inasmuch as frames such as art galleries or the category of ‘art’ itself ensure that we pay particular respect, or pay particular money, for that which is contained within such frames. It is the frame, rather than any quality independently manifested by the artwork, that elicits the special response we give it as art.”[7] In the present case art is marked by a space where it is understood to be one element of design among others, but it, in turn, frames everything else as things we would find in an art gallery. To the extent that art and design usually mediate the opposition between usefulness/uselessness, it is understandable that an artist reclaims autonomy ahead of whatever private use the owners impose on their works. Regardless, beyond denying the ideology of autonomy and criticizing the incongruencies of subjectivity in high modernism, I am interested in finding another way of framing the relation that this sustained with mass consumption.

 ***

Elsewhere I have presented the tapestries designed by José Bracamonte Vera in 1973 as among the cultural objects that signal the secular reinvention of pre-Columbian iconography within the nationalist context promulgated by Velasquismo. [8] The magazine 7 Días was commissioned to present them locally at the beginning of 1973, setting a scene where a model -who seems to be Gladys Arista, although there are no credits given- poses in a white sweater with white leggings before the eye of photographer José Casals. The explanatory note presents the tapestries as offering an alternative to the boring photographs or the “reproductions of tumis on black velvet” that adorned the walls of the local bourgeoise, a “modern design” in which Bracamonte brought together “the new and the old” -art and the country’s traditional artisanship. Against what a current examination might suggest, the tapestries did not contradict Bracamonte’s socialist convictions nor his compromise with the Revolución Peruana. They were produced parallel to his work as a designer for Sinamos [9], and made no attempt to separate his commercial work from his work motivated by ideological principles. This allows us to understand how Bracamonte, like many artists under Velasquismo, reformulated the high modernist artistic subjectivity and understood the role of the market as a mechanism of circulation – potentially a massive one– for their work.

For Peter Stallybrass, bourgeois subjectivity is constituted in opposition to the fetishism that he identified as the form of relating subjects and objects in commercial exchange, which was sustained by African peoples during the mercantile boom and under colonial commerce. [9] Against the Catholic icon, the fetish appeared as an object incarnated in the body which possessed an ambivalent status: while the “objectivity” of the icon permitted one to prostrate oneself before it – as with sacred painting-, the fetish was an object whose singularity negated the principle of interchangeability that was sought out in order to construct an autonomous market sphere. Some of that “negation of the object”, in Stallybrass’s terms, survived in aesthetics as a discipline that secured the autonomy of art, in underestimating its earthly or material character through its functional capacity to habituate us to experiment with that secular religiosity identified with the tropes of the beautiful and the sublime, which takes the museum as its ritual space par excellence. [11] It is a matter of protecting art from the pressure of the general equivalence towards which the mercantile society pushes society as a whole.

The first image in this essay questions the devaluing of the social uses of art, revealing it as a rather precarious ideological fantasy, but Bracamonte’s tapestries, as well as the experience of propaganda art in the 20th century, permit the conceptualization of an alternative position with respect to the high modern repression of fetishism inherent in commodities. For Peter Osborne, the autonomy of art implies the production of meaning through form, independent of the function of the artwork. [12] According to that doctrine, Szyszlo’s work – or its imitation or falsification, which he himself rejected publicly on a number of occasions – has to signify the same thing whether it is in a living room, a gallery, or a museum, and for that reason the artist can reject its concrete uses by virtue of the form as sole vector of signification. Contrary to this position, Bracamonte seemed to have understood that, within a capitalist society – including one in transition toward another social organization, as the socialist wing of the military regime believed- autonomy is not an inherent property of art but a condition that artistic praxis reaches through its commodification. That is to say, by intensifying its social circulation, the sphere where its capacity to generate income and provide the producer with economic independence is put to the test.

From the beginning of the 20th century an array of Peruvian artists such as Antonino Espinosa Saldaña, Francisco Olazo and Elena Izcue turned their attention to a study of pre-Columbian design. Izcue developed a vast body of work where she brought together the reasoning, patterns, and forms of a range of cultures which were then being discovered by archaeologists, but what is interesting is that she produced not only the studies on paper or pedagogical compendia of her investigations, but that she printed her designs on silk, at times destined to be used as scarves. This small local arts & crafts tradition would seem to still be found, then, in Bracamonte’s work in the 1970s, with other logics of socialist design than those we find in William Morris or in the productivism of Soviet artists like Liubov Popova and Várvara Stepanova, for whom the production of useful objects signified a bet on beautifying the new life after the October Revolution. Something of that does echo in Bracamonte’s tapestries. The times of Velasquismo required not only a new art, but a new national bourgeoise taking up its own tradition in everyday life.

 ***

In Antes y Después del Futuro, a publication that brings together three series of works that gather documents from a range of local archives, Gilda Mantilla and Raimond Chaves sought to “use these texts and images as an object of inquiry; as projectiles to pierce the ideological construction that they sustain.” And, they continue:

In this way we begin to look at the printed traces of the art scene in a series of genera; interest publications in Lima dated between 1970 and 1999, a time lapse that concentrates a significant quantity of processes, dynamics and conflicts of which today’s Perú is, in large part, the product. We undertook a termite-like reading that, although arbitrary and random, never resigned itself to compromise or renounced its rigor. Everything interested us: criticism, reviews, interviews, feature articles, advertisements, and images; and we took the opportunity to amplify the margins of our investigation, beyond a solely cultural scope, toward the more general context. The documentation gathered, as raw sources, is invaluable material with which to infer much about the circumstances that have given form to the local art system. [13]

 Along with these methodological considerations, the duo presents their montage of a variety of documents as part of an inquiry into the history of local art that allows us to understand that proximity between art and the sphere of general commodity circulation– not only the art market. In some sense, this gathering makes visible a certain political economy of art (a preamble to its criticism), its link to the general processes of its production, circulation, distribution and consumption in society, and art’s role within them. Social classes and their tastes appear, as well as the links between art and the power of money. In the small sample that I have taken, the documents come from advertisements where what is at play ranges from the place of modern art in design and interior decoration to fragments from texts and images that indicate a certain penetration of the social by art as a synonym for “good taste”, etc. Antes y Después del Futuro deserves to be thought from the systemic level in which art operates socially. Here it is worth looking at the diagram of the art-culture system proposed in the 80s by James Clifford, an “authenticity-making machine”, which is to say, a social mechanism oriented toward the production of a certain aura that recovers objects and people, including those non-auratic spaces that sustain that differential recovery. [14]

Against the identification of this system with its institutions – like the museum -  the images gathered by Mantilla and Chaves inscribe themselves along the conflicting axes aproposed by Clifford. So as to analyze this, however, let us tie in what was examined earlier: Szyszlo produces art inspired by culture, rejecting commodification; Bracamonte, inspired likewise by pre-Columbian culture, runs along the line that extends from art to non-art through the commodification of his modern design. Against a high modern style that defines the work of an author and the middle-class aspirations defined as two separate spheres, we encounter in the latter a style that responds, instead, to a sort of popular modernism (Mark Fisher), which, mediating a compromise between the avant garde and mass culture, attempts to extend art beyond restrictive and elitist spaces in the early years of the 1970s. Nonetheless, recently a notion as contemporary art – within what the work of Mantilla and Chaves are formulating – has proposed modifications to Clifford’s schema, by showing that the local forms in the art-culture system incorporated fashion and interior design – absent in the original schema – as social spaces where art is inscribed and with those that entail a relation that is made each time more evident: from the appearance of artworks together with appliances  or furniture in marketing images, we have moved on today to the installation of a showroom pop-up on the edges of local art fairs – a set to experiment the comfort of a mattress, for example. As if publicity had gone on to assume an objective form that one can now experience directly; as if those historical relationships randomly registered by Mantilla and Chaves were today found on a terrain conducive to flourishing beneath the open sky now that the art market has broken down the barriers that were confined to the relations between private parties, although without convening the larger public to consume their exchanges visually, as they actually do at the fairs .

Toward a reformulation of the schema, we can say the following: on one hand, today artistic practice seems to be demarcated by the barriers that differentiated it from culture, and it also seems to traverse the entire semiotic square without the old high modernist restraints and the rigid demarcations of the antiquated bourgeois culture. Even the Museo de Arte de Lima (MALI) [EXP NOTE] speaks of an “expanded contemporaneity” that would surpass the old elitist demarcations that this very institution embodied. On the other hand, and as a complement to that supposed liberation of artists, dealers, collectors, and institutions, the broader commercial dismissal of art is affirmed, in spite of (or due to) the growing share that the contemporary art market has captured within the local institutional framework. This is due to the fact that denegrating the market has today become one of the preferred discursive positions that curators of fairs and local collections, like many artists, resort to, disavowing economic interest in order to generate the aura of the unmotivated, of the aesthetic, now extended as a superstructure liberated from the base that attempts to also bring the relations of labour and exchange back within the purview of the artistic field. Although the art-culture system of high modernism today appears to be surpassed by a new configuration of art in the context of advanced capitalism, some of the images rescued by Mantilla and Chaves prefigured the place that art would assume in our present.

Benjamin says: “Under the dominion of the commodity fetish, the sex appeal of the woman is more or less tinged with the appeal of the commodity. it is no accident that the relations of the pimp to his girlfriend, whom he sells as an "article" on the market, have so inflamed the sexual fantasies of the bourgeoisie.” [15].

A half-naked woman (Katty) looks with a certain desire at a coffee table book by Szyszlo, thus continuing to give meaning to that formula at the foot of the photo: “the art of seduction”. Doubtless there is here, as in Bracamonte’s tapestries, a certain objectifying of the woman as a body given over to consumption, but what is also indicated is a visual transaction in which art will catch some of the aura of the model, and vice-versa. Is the same operation being performed in both images? I do not believe so, and in comparing them we attend to two central moments in the historical process of Peruvian art. In the first, art sells us an utopian image in the pleasant and habitable domestic form, engrained in the totality of the Peruvian nation, and the woman seems to take active part in the construction of the image’s atmosphere, to the point of diverting attention from the tapestries. In the second, art appears as a closed (and costly) book that, together with the female body, the image incites the viewer to possess and consume in private.

***

In her polemic performance Untitled (2003) Andrea Fraser made a sexual encounter with a collector happen with the mediation of the Friedrich Pretzel Gallery. After the encounter in a hotel, the video of the exchange was published on 5 DVDs – one for the collector. Beyond the complicated restrictions that govern the circulation of those copies, the artist maintains: “Untitled is about the art world, it’s about the relations between artists and collectors, it’s about what it means to be an artist and sell your work—sell what may be, what should be, a very intimate part of yourself, your desire, your fantasies, and to allow others to use you as a screen for their fantasies. It’s not really about sex work, it’s not really about prostitution, and it’s not about getting my fifteen minutes. You know, and it’s not about reality TV.” [16] But the artist asserts that the act works on the metaphor of art as prostitution: “Is it any more prostitution because I happen to be having sex with a man than it would be if I were just selling him a piece?”.

Fredric Jameson would say that here the commodity form finally conquered subjectivity itself, that limit that, together with nature, Marx had established as the terrains that capital would have to deeply reconfigure in order to declare victory over bodies and resources that in the final instance are not commodities, that only seem to take on their form in image and likeness – as it likewise is with art, whose production is marginal to the law of value. Far from postmodernity having thrown art into the incessant flow of signs, destroying the ideological categories of “author” and “work”, Fraser seems to suggest that, in fact, the art market intensifies the intimate relationship between artist and work, to the point that both can be sold or leased out in the same operation and as the same thing. While Untitled gave a sense of empowerment in bringing the collector to a ground that she both designed and controlled, the artist recognizes that in its circulation the work “becomes a screen for people to project things onto, or an opportunity to produce or reproduce certain stereotypes.” Still, Fraser has undercut the role that the female body fulfills as part of the visual medium of art marketing, and reclaims as her own the production of the medium itself, affirming something like “I am the screen” – which is the logic of a large part of her artistic production, an institutional critique that seeks to embody the political economy of art in her own body and subjectivity. [17]

The preceding images raise a critique of the objectifying of women as the engine of artistic consumption. That critique must reckon with the fact that today the local art market is moving toward some acceptable degree of parity in the composition of collections, art dealing is a profession principally occupied by women, and public and private institutions seem to be taking up (some) feminist flags. With this in mind, it will do to insist on what, beyond those laudable changes on the level of representation, which do not necessarily center female artists in current or historical social recognition, Benjamin offers an old and indispensable key to conceptualizing the artistic field within capitalist society. At the margin of certain artistic initiatives that point toward the break with the current hegemony, what remains is a social space organized for and by the aesthetic (and sexual) fantasies of the bourgeoise: fantasies of spiritual transcendence that compensate the vulgar materialism of capital to which that class is given over; fantasies of exclusive ownership over cultural objects and over people that produce them. In the recent past there are still experiences to explore in seeking to understand how interventions in that field were attempted, but the critical question in the present is if it is possible that art might become part of a libidinal and ideological organization of social desire distinct to that which we currently have, to that of another class.

[1] “Fernando de Szyszlo y la globalización del arte latinoamericano”, reproducido en: https://gestion.pe/tendencias/fernando-szyszlo-globalizacion-arte-latinoamericano-the-economist-219774

[2] Fernando de Szyszlo, La vida sin dueño. Lima: Alfaguara, 2016, p. 142

[3] David Harvey, La condición de la posmodernidad. Investigación sobre los orígenes del cambio cultural, Buenos Aires: Amorrortu, 2012 [The Condition of Postmodernity, 1988]. I have offered a broader reading of these ideas in Mijail Mitrovic, Extravíos de la forma: vanguardia, modernismo popular y arte contemporáneo en Lima desde los 60. Lima: Arquitectura PUCP Publicaciones, Fondo editorial, 2019. Some of the passages in this essay come from that book.

[4] Daniel Miller, “The Poverty of Morality”, Journal of Consumer Culture, Vol. 1(2), 2001 pp. 225-243

[5] Daniel Miller, “Alienable Gifts and Inalienable Commodities” en Myers, Fred (ed.), The Empire of Things: regimes of value and material culture, Santa Fe: School of American Research Press, 2001, pp. 91-115

[6] Walter Benjamin, El truco preferido de Satán. Madrid: Siglo XXI, 2012, p. 93. [Trans. note: In English, see Benjamin’s Paris: Capital of the 19th Century.]

[7] Daniel Miller, “Materiality: An Introduction” in Daniel Miller (ed.), Materiality. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009 [2005], p. 5

[8] Mitrovic, op. cit. I extended these ideas in commenting on a series of serigraphs by Francisco Mariotti based on tocapus at: https://vadb.org/articles/historia-contemporaneidad-y-mercado-en-lima

[9] Sinamos (Sistema Nacional de Apoyo a la Movilización Social) was a state organization promoted by the Velasco government as an alternative to the traditional political parties, which were left on the margins of national political life after the coup d'état of 1968. Within Sinamos, various cultural experiences were promoted, which I have explored in several recent investigations.

[10] Peter Stallybrass, “Marx´s coat”, en Patricia Spyer (ed.), Border Fetishisms: Material Objects in Unstable Spaces. New York y Londres: Routledge, 1988, pp. 183-207

[11] Carol Duncan, “Art Museum and the Ritual of Citizenship”, en: Ivan Karp y Steven D. Lavine (eds.), Exhibiting Culture. The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display. Washington: Smithsonian Institute, 1991, pp. 88-103

[12] Peter Osborne, El arte más allá de la estética. Ensayos Filosóficos sobre arte contemporáneo. Murcia: Ed. Cendeac, 2010. [Art Beyond Aesthetics: Philosophical Criticism, Art History and Contemporary Art. Art History, Vol. 27, Issue 4. 2004]

[13] Gilda Mantilla y Raimond Chaves, Antes y después del futuro. Lima: Meier Ramírez, 2015

[14] James Clifford. “Sobre el coleccionismo de arte y cultura” en Criterios. Revista de teoría de la literatura y las artes,
estética y culturología, nro. 31, La Habana, 1994, pp. 131-150. [James Clifford. The Predicament of Culture. Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art. Harvard University Press, 1988.]

[15] Walter Benjamin. The Arcades Project. Belknap Press, 2002. 345.

[16] Praxis (Delia Bajo and Brainard Carey), “Andrea Fraser”, The Brooklyn Rail, October 2004. https://brooklynrail.org/2004/10/art/andrea-fraser

[17] See, among other essays, her “L’1%, C’EST MOI” in: Andrea Fraser, De la crítica institucional a la institución de la crítica. Ciudad de México: Siglo XXI, 2016. [Trans. note: Available in English at https://monoskop.org/images/4/42/Fraser_Andrea_2011_L_1%25_c_est_moi.pdf

Mijail Mitrovic Pease is an anthropologist and art critic. He teaches at PUCP in Lima, Peru and is the author of Extravíos de la forma: vanguardia, modernismo popular y arte contemporáneo en Lima desde los 60 (Arquitectura PUCP Publicaciones).