Historian, educator, and essayist Sergio Benvenuto analyzes Uruguayan art on the basis of cultural affinities with and differences from the rest of Latin America, a region riddled with underdevelopment. From a contrarian historical and ideological perspective, he lays out the sociocultural consequences of centuries of colonialism in Latin America at the hands of Europe and the United States. Benvenuto celebrates the new sociopolitical stance he sees taking shape at the time (1960) in the younger generation, a position that he believes is expressed in social movements in Venezuela and mostly in the Cuban Revolution. At the same time, he warns of imported artistic languages, such as culturally disembodied languages as in “abstract art” once again meddling in local art. Benvenuto, a researcher, sees the then-recent Cuban Revolution and emerging social movements in Venezuela as heralding the end of paralysis. Those imported languages are signs of a static culture and a fatalistic attitude as opposed to the expansiveness embodied by Anglo-Saxon America. Benvenuto sees the disappearance of artisan traditions, or their transformation into empty stereotypes, as symptoms of economic, technical, and cultural dependence. In what he sees as the diverse Latin American panorama, Benvenuto asserts that Uruguay is the country in the worst position. Colonized relatively late, Uruguay developed a culture based on the translated book, generating what the author describes as a “dictatorship of the literary” that grew entrenched in the early twentieth century. The culture of the book and of the reader meant that the educated class lost touch with the local milieu since the literature it privileged was not bound to local reality. Emphasis was placed on cultural products from other societies that had, and still have, a worldwide publishing industry. That combination of factors is responsible for what Benvenuto describes as “creative paralysis,” suggestive of the distance between a mental image and the stuff of the lived environment. In the section entitled “La plástica o la raíz que nos falta,” Benvenuto develops the idea that the “arts of matter” favor rootedness since they yield the direct and resistant products that permeate collective consciousness through perception as “instant revelation.” Benvenuto formed part of a generation in Uruguay that saw Latin America as destined for revolution. In 1962, he immigrated to Cuba. Close to the revolutionary government of the island, Benvenuto taught art history during what was a new phase in his life.
