UC Berkeley

The birth of modernist art in South America is largely attributed to the Uruguayan artist, Joaquín Torres-García. Born in Montevideo, Torres-García spent forty years living abroad in Europe and the United States, before returning home. Because his life was divided between Europe and the Americas, his artwork and legacy are discussed as exemplars of art as mestizaje, but to label him thusly performs an erasure of both the Indigenous influence on his aesthetic and his commitment to establish a truly Latin American art. His homecoming was not heralded by a desire to impose an imperialist aesthetic on Uruguay but inspired him to establish an autochthonous art, first through the Asociación de Arte Constructivo (1935-39) and then through the Taller Torres-García (1942-62), which outlived him by over a decade.

In this dissertation, I interpret both his artwork and his literature as philosophical texts, as such, I examine the Indoamerican roots in his thinking and art practice and seek to reorient the assumed direction of influence on South American modernism away from Europe and back to American soil. I then place Torres-García and his body of work within the Chickasaw academic, Jodi Byrd’s, theory of cacophony. If one of the failures of postcolonial theory is that it flattens relations into a binary, cacophony, a concept Byrd builds from the Chickasaw-Choctaw notion of haksuba, seeks to nuance this. Reading Torres-García within this framework, I argue, allows me to simultaneously critique him and his indigenismo ideology, while also analyzing his Indigenous modernism and its attempt to create community within and across the Americas.