Summary of Hispanic Art Presentation

9-13-07

Joel Gargano

 

What I attempted to do in the presentation on our particular class topics of Hispanic and Islamic art was to speak directly from my own personal experience with ‘Hispanic’ art.  This personal experience consists of a friendship both professional and personal with an artist (Santos Arzu Quioto) who creates art that is recognized and known in his own country of Honduras and abroad as having an important place in the cannon of contemporary Latin American Art.  The importance of his work has been recognized in various Biennales including one of the most important ones in Venice, Italy. 

 

My interest in proclaiming his work as an example for our class in the presentation was to bring a sense of new thinking in what Latin American art can represent, be it one example.  I think as students and soon, teachers, we will have plenty of history to utilize in introducing our young students – most of whom have not even visited a major museum or gallery to art that’s classified for our convenience in easily labeled genres and eras.  This experience of showing slides and books of image plates to them can have some value in that it allows them to skim over the remarkable variety of human visual inventiveness.  However, having an artist or work in the presence of students for them to linger in front of or in for as long as they like can give them an almost shape-shifting or perspective altering experience.  What I mean by this is that the physical proximity of the art can reveal things to the student they wouldn’t get from a book.  It very powerfully brings them to question what the piece is in its materiality and why it was made.  These questions can give further paths to the student for investigation and then hopefully get  them going down those paths which as teachers we desire for them to travel – the paths of critical thinking, self-awareness and discovery of the world of ideas and explanations.  I believe these attempts to get students to think about things critically and generate new thought is the objective of ‘The Conversation Game’ and Visual Learning Strategies, which are the learning process tools that our group was also to explain to the class.  It is introspection and criticism of ideas that we want from students.  These are the basis for creativity and production of images.  Games and strategies are methods for drawing these creative ideas out of students but they aren’t as powerful or long-lasting as the experience of being in front of work that for some, can be an epiphany.

 

I had an epiphanic experience that I remember to this day when first sitting in Santos Arzu’s installation of paintings at the Kresge Museum in 1998.  The non-specificity of his work allowed me to dwell on an emotional and conceptual level with the work that would not have happened if I’d seen it in a book or pamphlet.  Viewing his work took me to another place – a place of a kind of spiritual serenity and contemplation.  It reminded me of places I’d not been – somehow.  The texture of his work carried the labor of his hand and the hands of his ancestors.  The forced decay of his paint revealed time lines much longer than the timelines of my life in the United States.  His shared, cultural heritage as an African-Honduran with other Central Americans, European and Mayans somehow carried over and through to me through his work.  As a student I was moved, just as I wish for my future students to be moved, to reach towards other cultures, other interpretations of the world and into the present history.

Santos Arzu and Hispanic Art