Beyond the fantastic, contemporary art criticism from Latin America
Edited by Gerardo Mosquera, Cuban historian and art critic, the anthology, Beyond the Fantastic, presents the most important art criticism of the past ten years written "from" Latin America. This criticism has shaped a vision that goes beyond the notion of the fantastic, the 'bad' name that Andre Breton gave to Latin American art.
Today's Latin American art boom started in the 1980s and has to do mainly with the imperatives of postmodern aesthetics. The success of some of Latin American artists like Ana Mendieta, Andres Serrano , Kcho or Meyer Vaisman, is no more than a reflection of a "tutelary" access to the mainstream, the power structures of a self-appointed hegemonic culture, on the part of a group of artists who are not amongst those who produce and support what is considered "mainstream" art.
This publication in English is, in the first place, of enormous interest because it brings plural and independent voices to the centre-periphery debate-a debate which is still discussed exclusively in terms of centredness and ethnocentrism. In the same way, this corpus of essays provide an update of Latin America's own critical discourse of the 1960s and 1970s, which was strongly influenced by Marxism and dependency theories, and it avoids simple and Manichean interpretations. In the third place, these writings clearly go beyond the purely visual by taking into account socio-cultural, indigenists, popular, postmodern and feminist issues. Beyond the Fantastic is important then and not just because it represents a serious revision of our notions of the multicultural issues which are of crucial significance to us all.
We should remind ourselves at this stage that the artistic creations of the "others", that is, Latin America, Asia