That triad involves a set of assessments that go beyond the world of art and encompass very complex social and cultural considerations. This is why, in the language of critics and curators, the categories of the global, the local, the multicultural, transculturation, and the intercultural, along with identity seem to dominate the languages of art, without which it is impossible to understand its present or predict its future.

Mosquera has put forward theoretical viewpoints that he currently views as essential elements for curatorial practices, criticism and art theory. His recommendations for establishing a definition of what is Latin American, is one example. The idea is not just to reach a definition per se, but to grasp all its implications within the politics of representation, the way the cultural dialectic of art is interpreted, its condition with regard to those same politics of representation, and the means through which globalization is diversified and art is internationalized.

All of that has helped us to reflect on those circumstances, to express ourselves without the constraints of an art with labels, through a Latin American art that ceases to be Latin American, or through an art stemming from Latin America where each circumstance is understood, its nuances are appreciated and attempts at reaching a definition are treated as more than a merely semantic issue. Mosquera has devoted much of his efforts to those aims. Exhibitions such as “Ante América” (Before America), “Los hijos de Guillermo Tell” (The Children of William Tell), articles such as Hacia una postmodernidad “otra”: í?frica en el arte cubano (Toward an “Other” Post-modernity: Africa in Cuban Art), or his extraordinary book, “Beyond the Fantastic”, trace the route of a cultural criticism with ethical implications, a theory that seeks answers to the crucial issues of art practice and the aesthetic theory that supports it, while always trying to answer difficult questions: “… the paradox becomes all the more evident if we ask ourselves why the Other is always us, never them…”.

By the same token, his aesthetic analyses of the international language of art is valuable, as are his explanations of its meaning for peripheral practices based on questions generated by the interaction between center and periphery, as seen through the processes of appropriation, re-signification and re-semantization, among others. In turn, we could also view his interpretation of art as a document of political art, of conceptualism with as social edge, and particularly his ideas on how “cultural components act more upon the overall structure of works than strictly within their visuality”. This forms part of a specific approach that is important when seeking to understand the social edge of art within peripheral contexts, particularly with regards to the subject of identity from a more contemporary perspective.

In another sense, Mosquera places emphasis on the ideas of how Latin American art has enriched the possibilities of “international” trends from within themselves. He states that “…numerous artists work as much “toward the within” as “toward the outside” of art, resorting to post-conceptual resources to tie in the aesthetic, the social, the cultural, the historical and the religious without sacrificing artistic research…”. Ideas of this caliber establish the foundations for a theory that seeks to center its aims on artistic processes that include other variables in their approach.

Written in a straightforward style and laced with a special sense of humor, Mosquera’s book leaves us waiting for other compilations of texts he has written for exhibition catalogues, or one that will include his significant reflections on Cuban art. This would provide us with more comprehensive information on a writer who has traveled unceasingly for over twenty years, a native of the Caribbean who has stirred up contemporary conceptions of art, pointing out their inadequacies when seeking to understand it when it stems from a different cultural logic.

NOTES:

* Final words of Gerardo Mosquera’s book, “Caminar con el diablo. Textos sobre arte, internacionalismo y culturas” EXIT Publicaciones. 2010. 174 pages. The correct title should read: “Caminar con el diablo. Textos sobre arte, internacionalización y culturas” (Walking with the Devil: Texts on Art, Internationalization and Cultures”.