In the first of the two parts of this essay, Elsa Flores provides a critical analysis of the work by Miguel von Dangel featured in the São Paulo Biennial. Flores’s premise is that von Dangel’s work is a model “Latin American response” to the international art scene insofar as it selects and formally combines an array of elements on the basis of a coherent cultural perspective. Von Dangel’s work brings together the universal and the regional, as well as tradition and modernity. He selects a range of elements of different orders in his art, which he then combines in collages and assemblages. Those elements assume formal meaning owing to the artist’s unique poetics and the mystical connotations it entails.

El regreso de la cuarta nave [The Return of the Fourth Ship, 1982] was one of the emblematic works by German-born Venezuelan artist Miguel von Dangel (b. 1946) featured in the XVII São Paulo Biennial. In her discussion of those works, Argentinean critic Elsa Flores, who lived in Venezuela for a period, formulates the thesis that von Dangel’s work is a consciously “Latin American” response to the international art scene—an argument she backs up with the artist’s own writings and commentaries.  

In this first part of the article, Flores employs the terms historian Pierre Francastel applies to the work of art in his work on the sociology of art. Specifically, Flores makes use of Francastel’s notions of the “selection of elements” and the “combination of forms” to show that, in both operations, von Dangel looks to specifically Latin American cultural contexts. In her analysis, Flores states that the coherence with which the artist performs both of those operations makes his work truly authentic as it finds an original way out of terms like universality and nationalism, tradition and modernity that are formulated as polar in Latin American literature. Flores examines in detail the origin of the wide range of elements and materials that von Dangel uses in his art. Indeed, those elements are a key component of his aesthetic. She also addresses the basis for the artist’s careful selection. The second part of this article was published in the Caracas-based newspaper El Nacional on December 18, 1983, under the title “Miguel Von Dangel: La respuesta latinoamericana (II)” (see ICAA digital archive doc. no. 1154906).

For other critical texts on von Dangel’s work, see Yasmin Monsalve, “Mi obra ha tenido que luchar contra muchos prejuicios: Un premio nacional visto con la luz de Petare” (ICAA digital archive doc. no. 1102125); Elsa Flores, “Miguel Von Dangel” (doc. no. 1056044); Roberto Montero Castro’s essay, “Transfiguraciones de Miguel Von Dangel” (doc. no.1153996), published in 1986; María Luz Cárdenas’s essays, “La Batalla de San Romano de Von Dangel (I) (doc. no. 1154028) and “La Batalla de San Romano de Von Dangel (II)”(doc. no. 1154092); Ruth Auerbach, “Hoy, el paisaje es aquí y ahora”, (doc. no. 855314), published in 1996; Julio Ortega’s essay, “La iridiscencia del ojo de la materia o como leer un objeto artístico procesal” (doc. no. 1155251), published in 1997; and Axel Stein, “Interview with Miguel Von Dangel” (doc. no. 1102348), originally published in English in 1998.