Choose Your Memory

John Haber
in New York City

The Phelps de Cisneros Collection

Daniel Lind-Ramos and Latin American Art

"Chosen Memories" opens not with an image, but by breaking the silence. It is all about giving voice to the silenced, the people of Latin America. It sees them as muzzled by colonialism past and corporate interests in the present. It sees them as muzzled, too, by dictatorships and nature itself in the course of life and death. And still the voices carry on.

The Museum of Modern Art shows off a gift over the years of works by forty artists, from Patricia Phelps de Cisneros. It favors artists that you may never have known, to underscore its theme of voices, but it opens with the sound of birds. If that sounds soothing, they are extinct birds, but do not lose heart. These are human voices, as recorded by Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa and Rosângela Rennó in a Wedding Landscape. They belong to a living tradition of remembering, through rituals like this one, but just who is calling, the living or the dead? Memory here is trickier than MoMA lets on.

The story of Latin American art continues slightly closer to home, in Puerto Rico, but equally far from urban poverty and politics. It continues, too, in Long Island City—in the museum's space to experiment, to play around, and to assert old stories and cultural identity. Daniel Lind-Ramos obsesses over them all, but then he obsesses over everything he does. Still, when Lind-Ramos titles a work Alegoría de una Obsesión, or allegory of an obsession, the obsession is not just his. It is a people's, and they have been obsessing a long time. He knows that well, too, and translates it into obsessive art, at MoMA PS1.

The missing globe

Both shows must sound awfully dogmatic, at a time of renewed focus on Latin American art and Latin American architecture, including art from Haiti, art from Cuba, and art from Puerto Rico. In planning for MoMA, you may have seen what looks like a classic of modern sculpture, a metal arc with points at each end directing one's eye to the space between. Museums have brought out the region's contributions to Modernism at that, only starting with Gego. This show has gold thread weaving through forty-eight bales of hay and fishnet transformed into glass and steel, both by Cildo Meireles. It weaves through its humble origins to Minimalism, but the show's interests lie elsewhere.

That arc is not sculpture at all. It is a photo by Claudio Perna, of a desktop globe without the globe. The solid sphere has vanished twice over, on the way from object to art and then to reproduction. Europeans, MoMA argues, conveniently left out much of the globe, too, while imposing their image of a pristine continent waiting for them to discover it. The show's first section, "Returns," focuses on just that. Just for starters, the Peabody Museum at Harvard never noticed that scraps in its collection came from a sinkhole that Mayans imagined as a tunnel to the spirit world—not until Gala Porras-Kim pointed it out.

Others recreate the work of explorers and find it lacking. José Alejandro Restrepo displays native plants on seventeen monitors, to correct Alexander von Humboldt in 1801. Leandro Katz restages photographs from 1839, while Gilda Mantilla and Raimond Chaves turn the pages of a book titled, embarrassingly, Secrets of the Amazon. Firelei Báez paints a fabled creature over an antique map, as Terra Nova. Suwon Lee photographs old sites in the polluted present, as Purple Haze and Dust City. All those years of modernization have taken their toll.

A second section, "Reverberations," turns attention to cultures that those eyes could never see. Western eyes dismissed cracked pottery, in video by Armando Andrade Tudelad, as deformed. Laura Anderson Barbata travels up the Amazon with the offer to teach useful skills to native peoples and to learn in return. Her photos look more clumsy than skillful, but they record a personal journey. Sheroanawë Hakihiiw bases paintings on ancient symbols and what they represent. He, too, is on a journey between a valued past and a modern or postmodern present.

So are Meireles in Minimalism and Perna, who takes up sculpture after all, without need for a globe. Garden shears on a tripod look deadly, even as they promise fresh growth. Mario García Torres investigates the site of an actual work of Minimalism, a mural by Daniel Buren. The hotel cannot help looking a part of nature just for tourists. Aline Motta, too, weaves between generations, in a video where Brazilian men play with dice and women paddle the rivers. So does Anna Maria Maiolino with a photo of three women connected by family and, physically, a thread.

A third section, "Kinships," might indeed sum up the show, with just three works. It speaks of "networks of belonging," as if kinships and networks were not present all along. Paulo Nazareth calls his video Antropologia do Negro, with reference to the slave trade. Yet the man lying amid skulls reworks rituals, too, this time from Brazil, as another spiritual passage. Iran do Espírito Santo brings a final evocation of Minimalism and performance, with vertical stripes that turn the walls into a passage between light and shadows. As a fitting ending, video of his dying father reduces Alejandro Cesarco to silence.

Explorers and preservers

His father's death is Cesarco's Present Memory, but just how clearly does MoMA see the present, and how well does it remember? Besides skating over the region's contribution to modern and contemporary art, it goes light on politics. It refers to slavery and colonialism, but its loyalty lies with creative voices. The curators, Inés Katzenstein with Julia Detchon, speak of "cultural heritages," in the plural, but the differences are hard to see. No collection can do it all, nor should it try. Has it, too, though, effaced half the globe?

The focus on European explorers is particularly revealing, and they do not look half bad. They came as scientists and mappers, observers and preservers, like models for art. Katz's photos and Restrepo's monitors face stiff competition. For another, the focus leaves a very peculiar impression. One might think that Europe did its best to efface a Latin America much like today's. Had Spain and Portugal never arrived, its people would be speaking proudly in Spanish and Portuguese to this day.

As so often, though, the artists have a more complex view. Right at the start, the bird calls multiply in unexpected ways. As the work's title announces, they were Previously Unknown to Science. Even before that, one hurries past a video that the curators fails to mention. Thiago Rocha Pitta pictures a small boat on stormy seas, as Heritage. If you were wondering what survived from Hurricane Sandy, the boat bears many flags, and who knows how long they will fly?

The artists have nuanced views as well. Porras-Kim first encountered those scraps not in the Yucatán, but at the Peabody, and they appear as abstract marks, as transient as dust. Lee adopts a high point of view for his beleaguered city, immersing it in a valley much like the one in a landscape photo beside them. The markings on Tudela's "deformed" pottery strangely resemble the coppery patterns of semiconductors in Analia Saban's tapestry to its right. Michael Stevenson recreates a "proto-computer," a Rube Goldberg apparatus of flowing water, as Fountain of Prosperity. If it also raises "some questions about bananas," colonialism enforced a crazy economy.

Another tapestry, by Gabriel Kuri, enlarges a supermarket receipt for anything but natural food. As if in answer, Las Nietas de Nonó lived for a while as hunter gatherers for FOODTOPIA. If that sounds too nostalgic, they also marched about in silly masks, along corridors with a changing neon light show. If politics still seems in short supply, Mauro Restiffe photographs crowds celebrating a democratic election in Brazil—and then the crowds disperse, leaving only uncertainty. How about museum politics, and is MoMA itself immune? Las Yeguas del Apocalipsis, Pedro Mardones Lemebel, and Francisco Casas Silva improve upon a crowd pleaser, Frida Kahlo, with a double portrait of Las Dos Fridas.

This is still only a gift, not a survey of Latin American art. Givers get their reward, in an exhibition like this one, connected only by loaded scholarship and a collector's sensibility. When Regina José Galindo undergoes gold fillings and then their removal, I felt for her (at least a little), but not for traffic in gold in Guatemala. When Daniel Steegmann projects a slide of gold leaf, I felt nothing at all. If you exit with an impression of diversity rather than coherence, that may have to do. Memories are always contested.

Obsessions and old stories

Puerto Rico's pride and fears began well before Hurricane Maria brought destruction to the old ways of life that Daniel Lind-Ramos loves. They continue to obsess, too, in what has become a permanent state of emergency. The artist himself piles on so much emergency gear that an assemblage becomes an installation. It can seem way too light in weight or, conversely, as ponderous as myth making. It stops short of engagement with actual events and their cost. Still, it could serve as shelter from the storm.

That allegory alone is an obsession. Its stacks and carts add up to an overloaded wheelbarrow, well on its way to nowhere. The driver is determined all the same, even as his or her legs have worn down to mere poles ending in shoes. Waterproofed fabric hangs down like inadequate protection or yellowed jowls. It might be an allegory of survival and persistence or of hard labor and fatal loss, but it retains an air of comedy. Born in 1953, Lind-Ramos has been around quite a while himself, and he has not lost his sense of humor.

An allegory requires a narrator, and the artist supplies one—in a show called "El Viejo Griot," or the old storyteller. He prefers to translate it as "the elder storyteller," and, sure, a griot is a village elder as well as fabulist and magician. Regardless, the old guy has life in him, and he dances about on video in a preposterous costume that is surely more than half the point. (He or the artist scales a tree, half naked, in a second video.) Come to think of it, the three witches in Macbeth are tricksters and storytellers, too. And their stories trick Macbeth into treason and self-destruction, but only by telling the truth.

The griot lends his name to a sculpture as well, the largest in the show. The prow of a small boat heads right toward the viewer, while sacks of grain spread to either side, each bearing a date. (Lind-Ramos is nothing if not careful, even if you cannot pin down what he is taking care to do.) Two gloved hands beat the drums with their palms, while the prow bears a horn, silently accompanying the story. Again the work points to traditional ways of life, in fishing and food production. More waterproofing, in bright blue, ripples like stormy seas.

You may have seen Puerto Rican art just last year at El Museo del Barrio, where Raphael Montañez Ortiz made Saint Sebastian into a martyr to colonialism. You may have seen it again at the Whitney, where art after Hurricane Maria had its own obsession, with the heavy hand of the United States. (Other artists at MoMA PS1 keep pointing fingers, too, like Iiu Susiraja and Onyeka Igwe.) Lind-Ramos is not into divisions, in a show subtitled "Una Historia de Todos Nosotros," or a story of all of us. Titles that include Maria come with robed figures that could be the Virgin Mary herself. Besides, he takes a longer view.

For him, these are the Taîno people, tracing their roots to the Afro-Caribbean diaspora. They are still, as another work has it, sentinels of the new moon. The curators, Loíza Kate Fowle with Ruba Katrib and Elena Ketelsen González, give almost every assemblage it own room, in a small show that piles up fast. A work may have the center of a room, for laborers in motion, or the center of a wall, for a cabinet or a totem with many eyes. It can quickly lose its novelty. Still, there is room in the present for an old storyteller.

jhaber@haberarts.com

The Patricia Phelps de Cisneros collection ran at The Museum of Modern Art through September 9, 2023, Daniel Lind-Ramos at MoMA PS1 through September 4.