The October issue of Eco [Echo] magazine (1960–82)—which attracted an important coterie of writers, translators, and cultural thinkers throughout its life—published an article by the poet, essayist, and translator Jorge Zalamea (1905–1969) who was considered by many to be a pivotal figure in cultural and political thinking in Colombia. In his article, Zalamea coined a novel concept about art. While avant-garde artists champion the concept of pure art, he wrote, “I only understand art as testimony,” suggesting that art was an essential epistemological tool in the quest for a historical understanding of nations.
Though Zalamea’s essay makes no material or historical references to contemporary events in Colombia, he does discuss Colombian art in the twentieth century and alludes to the “current debates.” For some time there had in fact been some differences of opinion concerning what exactly Colombian art should be. There was some doubt as to whether it should express “local” (indigenous) subjects or the “universal” themes espoused by European tradition or the increasingly powerful United States. The poet Andrés Holguín had once said that, “our poetry has been written on the fringes of history,” a definition that perhaps unintentionally applied to Colombian art as a whole. In other words, Colombian artists did the same thing over and again, looking to Europe and the United States for inspiration, and then thinking of themselves as Colombians and artists. Meanwhile, their immediate circumstances were a taboo subject that had no place in the history of Colombia’s cultural expression. This was only natural in an environment in which the country’s politics were informed by Montesquieu’s books or Roosevelt’s political history rather than by local geographical and sociopolitical conditions, and where there was a cultural history that was devoid of tradition. There was no attempt to perform the sort of constant review of local work that builds a local tradition, despite the fact that there had been great artists at work in Colombia since the end of the colonial era. As in the time of the viceroyalty, the intellectuals and critics of the twentieth century continued to build their poetics on a totally foreign artistic foundation.