Constitutive Visions by Christa J. Olson

Author:Christa J. Olson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General Fiction
Publisher: Pennsylvania State University Press
Published: 2014-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

In that sense indigenista artists placed their efforts alongside those of indigenous communities and used both to encourage a changed national vision. Those arguments did not suggest that the indignity of having one’s art defaced was equivalent to the exploitation faced by indigenous communities. They did, however, evince a strong sense of connection, of parallel forms of injustice operating at different orders of magnitude. For some indigenistas, that common link as workers allowed the artists to become advocates for the cause of indigenous labor. The critic Ignacio Lasso called Kingman the “Painter of the Worker’s Drama” in 1940, arguing that he and Diógenes Paredes (another indigenista) had “taken on the tremendous responsibility of expressing the collective inquietude of the proletariat masses of Ecuador, which is to say the yearning of the people, of claiming rights for the humble, of empathizing with the terrible results of hunger, lack of clothing, misery, and opprobrium.” Similarly, in 1945 Humberto Vacas Gómez described Kingman as, “in reality, the painter of the drama of the suffering and exploited man of the high plateau.” Introducing an exhibit by Carlos Rodríguez and Humberto Estrella in 1940, the critic Enrique Terán suggested that the artists had struck a blow for workers. Their pictures, starkly portraying the exploitation of indigenous campesinos and urban workers, were “accusations against the medieval Ecuadorian reality, sustaining the organized action of young workers that aims to create a new vital rhythm in the old and decadent Ecuadorian patria.”52

Kingman himself made similar arguments about artistic responsibility for the circumstances of the masses and the force such artwork would carry. He declared in a 1949 lecture that “the artist of today also knows when his moment has arrived to suffer because it is the moment in which [suffering] has touched the collective. When hunger and injustice have struck their mortal claws into their familiars, … the nerves of the artist irritate themselves to the point of total exhaustion.” The artist’s response to such injustice was, of course, to paint, and that painting was an active force, bringing about new awareness and a new reality for the nation. It created justice and was what Terán called “the art of the truth and the truth in art.”53 Artists were to make images of the nation that would call toward solidarity, action, and a new vision of the collective. The indigenistas demonstrated their ideological commitments and advanced their arguments for a more just society, then, by laying new claim to the topoi of indigenous labor. Speaking for and about the image of the true Ecuadorian—the laboring Indian—the indigenistas advanced a new nationalism.

Though the indigenistas used their art to communicate solidarity with indigenous people and alter how their contemporaries imagined the nation, their work originated and circulated primarily in Ecuador’s urban centers, and their arguments were aimed toward an urban, middle- and upper-class, white-mestizo audience.54 Drawing on the modernist, social-realist aesthetics that influenced artists across the Americas and building on the existing common sense that connected indigenous labor to national

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