THE HISTORY OF ARGENTINE ART IN LIGHT OF DECOLONIAL STUDIES

Abstract

At the end of the last century, colonial, postcolonial and decolonial studies set in motion a “detachment” from the dominant modes of knowledge acquisition in the social sciences and humanities. In the 1990s, Latin American intellectuals debated the colonial side of modernity and the cultural, theoretical and practical hegemony that the central countries maintained. In the field of art, this resulted in the problematization of the Eurocentric canons present in the artistic system and the lack of independent theoretical and visual thinking. In light of these problems, this article investigates one of the features of coloniality in force in the Histories of the Visual Arts “with capital letters” in Latin America and particularly in Argentina; that is, the neutralization of diversity in the construction of a national art. To this end, we have used the transdisciplinary qualitative methodology, which articulates different areas of knowledge (history, anthropology, philosophy, sociology, art history) from a decolonial interpretive perspective. In the theoretical analysis and historiographical reflection, a decentration is observed in the history of national art promoted by the Institute of Aesthetic Research (Faculty of Arts, National University of Tucumán), which interrupts the disciplinary canon favoring the emergence of the American, in both the folkloric and the ancestral.