Transmissions: Art in Eastern Europe and Latin America, 1960-1980 THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART NEW YORK CITY SEPTEMBER 5, 2015-JANUARY 3, 2016 The Museum of Modern Art's (MoMA) exhibition Transmissions: Art in Eastern Europe and Latin America, 1960-1980 is not, as its title seems to imply, about cross-cultural artistic activities and networking between its two titular regions. Sustained artistic contact between the two regions was rare during the 1960s and '70s, one notable exception being an international mail art network that the exhibition briefly explores. (1) Instead, Transmissions investigates parallel but largely separate practices of artistic production and networking in the two regions during this period, beginning from shared conditions of repression between various Eastern European and Latin American countries during the height of the Cold War. Transmissions' bi-regional frame implicitly invokes the horizontal model of art history most closely associated with late Polish art historian Piotr Piotrowski. In contrast to art history's usual vertical model, which orients the art of regions in secondary and tertiary relation to that of the Western European and American center, Piotrowski advocates for a reciprocal model that not only analyzes the periphery through the terms and assumptions of the center, but also challenges the universality of the center through the perspectives of its peripheries. While Transmissions brings together two regions mostly to the exclusion of the center, it also proposes a productive discussion between Eastern European and Latin American artists based their common position as close Others to Western Europe and the United States, respectively. In Piotrowski's words, these regions are on the periphery ... [and] outside the center but still within the same cultural frame of reference [as it]. (2) The exhibition begins with the work of artists who had participated in Art Abstrait Constructif International, the 1962 exhibition of postwar abstraction at the Galerie Denise Rene in Paris. Alongside works culled from MoMA's permanent collection by Lucio Fontana and Piero Marzoni (both Italy), Ellsworth Kelly (USA), and Francois Morellet (France)--all likely already familiar to MoMA's core audience--are newer acquisitions by peripheral artists such as Willys de Castro and Sergio Camargo (both Brazil). (3) Also included are artists who migrated across the Atlantic or through the Iron Curtain to Western Europe, such as Lygia Clark (Brazil to France), Julio Le Parc (Argentina to France), and Victor Vasarely (Hungary to France); and others who immigrated from Western Europe to Latin America to escape Nazi persecution, such as Gego (Germany to Venezuela) and Mira Schendel (Switzerland to Brazil, by way of the former Yugoslavia). In reassembling these artists, Transmissions poses the postwar international proliferation of modernist abstraction and its critical, revisionist, and belated variants, as well as the internationalist exhibition model popularized during that period, as figures for the actual migration of, or communication between, artists across borders. The exhibition's introductory framing of the artistic transmissions of Cold War peripheries through a common visual language establishes the bi-regional organizational scheme of its remaining ten sections (around themes such as anti-art, the body, the street) through the familiar principle of international abstraction. Furthermore, while many of the exhibited artists were often critical of modernist abstraction in its mainstream, universalist guise, the exhibition perhaps also invokes that earlier multi-regional model's utopianism as a spiritual antecedent of what it calls transmissions. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Bridging the exhibition's first and second sections, the latter focusing practices that challenge the borders of artistic media and the autonomous individual artist, are two permutations of Julije Knifer's meander, an abstract geometric form that the Croatian artist repeated from 1960 until his death in 2004. …