An interview with Gerardo Mosquera
Paco Barragan Throughout the twentieth century the history of art has been fundamentally the history of Western art. It did not take into account the arts in Latin America, Africa, Asia or Australia. When it did so, it described them much more in ethnographic terms than as modern art. Has this been due simply to an ethnocentric and neocolonialist appreciation of art?
Gerardo Mosquera Well, there are many' processes involved. On the one hand, there are the so called "ethnographical" objects that were not created as art by the societies that made them, but as part of complex ceremonial, symbolic, cultural rituals. The West took them and put them into a different context. They were placed in Western museums and seen differently- transformed into artistic objects, from the Western point of view. I'm not saying that there were no aesthetic values of symbolic communication in these objects in their originating societies, but that they also were part of a ritual. When these objects were first brought to the West they were placed in ethnographical museums because, at that time, it was considered that they had no artistic value, that they were grotesque forms. Then modernism nourished itself with these forms and used them to renew Western figuration. And from that very moment these objects had to be considered art. But, and this is very important, we are talking about processes irrelevant to these objects, that have mainly to do with the manipulation which the Western world does with all objects. So, there is that on the one hand. One the other hand, there is the colonial process. We are even living in a postcolonial world where we can no longer... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline