Behind Closed Doors

I think I expected a warmer greeting walking into the Philip Johnson galleries at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), given the focus of the show they currently house. Crafting Modernity: Design in Latin America, 1940–1980 posits that in the twentieth century the Latin American home was a “site of experimentation for modern living.” But the spaces in the galleries, instead of reflecting the typical trappings of experimentation—trials, errors, uncertainties, mess—or of home—patina, use, wear, also mess—are rigidly arranged and uncomfortably bare. There is an unwelcoming abundance of space, a definite and disturbing feeling of sparseness, and a sense that the eye has no clear spot to land, that it might not totally matter where it finally does. And yet somehow the rooms are full of stuff. There are chairs everywhere (though because they perch on short platforms, isolated, facing no particular direction, they didn’t give me the impression that they were made for actually sitting in). There are sets of plates and cups and vases and other small housewares, but sterilized in glass vitrines, they fail to compel. And there are photographs of homes all over the walls, in frames and in serial projections that cycle through images of the greatest hits of midcentury Latin American architecture—Amancio Williams and Delfina Gálvez Bunge’s (though MoMA doesn’t credit her) Casa sobre el arroyo in Mar del Plata, Argentina (1943–45); Miguel Arroyo and Alfredo Boulton’s Casa Pampatar in Isla Margarita, Venezuela (1953); Lina Bo Bardi’s Casa de Vidro in São Paulo (1950–1)—but despite its putative concern with the domestic, the show is incapable of reproducing the real texture of home life, or life at all.

But let’s back up a little. Take your shoes off. Can I get you a glass of water?

MoMA’s last big Latin American design show, mounted nearly ten years ago, looked at the role of architecture in the development of the region throughout a period of “complex political shifts” (read: US–backed and sanctioned dictatorships, with their attendant state violence). That exhibition, Latin America in Construction: Architecture 1955–1980, came sixty years after the museum’s Latin American Architecture since 1945, its first attempt at showing East Coast tastemakers that the totalizing push and energy of the modernist project had reached the Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking half of the hemisphere, thus making it worth paying attention to. This seems to be the general attitude with which MoMA still approaches the twenty-six countries to the south of Texas’s border line, the one possible exception being a show mounted in 1984 at MoMA PS1 that chronicled—in a hand-painted time line supplemented with artworks, maps, and political paraphernalia—US intervention in Central and Latin America over two centuries. Not much else explains the continued use of the 1980s as the end point for the period of interest, nor the dogged insistence on looking backward and backward and backward some more. Even the museum’s 2023 Chosen Memories, which highlighted sculpture, photography, and mixed-media works made by contemporary artists from across Latin America, had a marked tendency toward nostalgia and historicization—I mean, just look at the title.

From this set of curatorial decisions, I got the definitive sense that MoMA is constantly trying to define and pin down a place that is impossible to define and pin down. Even the acknowledgement, given by Crafting Modernity organizers Ana Elena Mallet and Amanda Forment, that Latin America is “far from a homogenous territory” doesn’t challenge as much as help to calcify efforts to treat the region as singular, when in fact it’s unfathomably multivalent and diverse. (More than forty languages are spoken in Peru alone, for example.) “Latin America” doesn’t really exist.

Let’s back up a little bit more: What we know as Latin America today exists as an entity largely because of conditions that were foisted upon its constituent communities. The term itself first appeared and came into use in Second Empire France (to drum up support for an invasion of Mexico, which happened and was soundly quashed) and was later adopted in the US for strategizing political relationships (consensual and not) with the territories south of the border. The attributes—language, religion, certain cultural conventions, early urban development—shared by the countries that make up the region today are largely a result of their past as Spanish, French, and Portuguese colonies; beyond that, the bonds that hold Latin America together are much weaker. Some nations, like Argentina, Chile, and Peru, were born of overlapping independence movements; others, like Mexico, came from a more singular struggle. Bolivia and Guatemala have significant Indigenous populations, whereas in Argentina and Uruguay, native peoples live on mostly in memory, having fallen victim long ago to campaigns of eradication. The “Pink Tide” of the early 2000s, which supposedly marked a leftward turn in the region’s politics, has proved to have been temporary at best and an exaggeration at worst; political trajectories throughout Latin America are clearly more heterogenous than the term implied. This isn’t to say that its states don’t share interests (they do, after all, have in common borders and ecosystems and populations and waterways) but rather that they are not a bloc—not economically, not culturally, and certainly not politically. Trying to understand what happens, and what has happened, in these countries by using as a frame the idea of Latin America—and that’s what it is, an idea, not a place—is virtually useless.

How are you doing? Do you need anything else?

It’s sort of dark in here, the light too dim and unfocused, but no matter. There’s much to admire about Clara Porset’s sumptuous Totonaca Chair (1952), inspired by a ceramic figure produced by the Totonac people of eastern Mexico, and Miguel Arroyo’s hefty Pampatar Butaque (1953), an interpretation of a vernacular Caribbean seat. Their commitment to local influences is contrasted by the decidedly “International” chic of the nearby W Chair (1947–55), designed by César Jannello and used in Le Corbusier’s Casa Curuchet (1953) in La Plata, Argentina, and the almost Finnish efficiency of Jacques Mosseri’s Cuatroenuno nested tables (1978). That tension, between the local and the global, runs through the show as an undercurrent and is made explicit only in moments: in paintings with clear European antecedents and publications boasting design advances across Ibero-America. But it’s unclear exactly what Crafting Modernity expects us to make of it.

Elsewhere in the city, up Fifth Avenue where 82nd Street meets Central Park, the Met’s single-gallery Weaving Abstraction in Ancient and Modern Art, which closed in mid-June and brought together modern textiles and their ancient Andean antecedents, managed to capture and wrestle with this tension much more successfully. Maybe it’s because there, the works were freed from the pressure to cohere into a single narrative, displayed to amaze and, vitally, allowed to speak for themselves.

Lenore Tawney’s long, delicate Shrouded River (1966), a linen-and-wood textile sculpture in a rich and soporific deep violet color, hung from the ceiling of a gallery in the Modern and Contemporary Art wing. Lit from above, the woven work and its neighbor, Tawney’s The Bride (1962), rendered in ecru linen and feathers, sent the eye floating upward and around the room. Small pieces like twelfth-century miniature dresses made of colored feathers set in a checkerboard pattern by artists from the Ica Valley in Peru and tiny but variegated and textured framed tapestries by Sheila Hicks, all purposefully and effectively illuminated, invited the gaze to focus. In between, there were strictly gridded tapestries by Anni Albers, fifteenth-century Chancay headcloths delicate as a spiderweb, Inca tunics in deep reds and blacks, and complex woven walls by Olga de Amaral (which also turn up at MoMA). The exhibition was a delight. Curators Iria Candela and Joanne Pillsbury seemed to know that modernists took from historical precedent little more than their shapes; they didn’t try to pretend otherwise. Their object selections and their presentations found the magic in this pilfering.

Back at MoMA, the struggle to register modernism’s totalizing relationship with anything that came before it takes on mythic proportions. Follow me into the back corner gallery, where diagrams mapping the connections between big-name designers (Tomás Maldonado, Carlos Cruz-Diez, Oscar Niemeyer, Luis Barragán, et al.) and other cultural actors in Mexico, Colombia, Chile, Brazil, Argentina, and Venezuela reveal what has so far only been alluded to. Here is MoMA’s real concern, the story it has told itself and that it hopes you’ll buy, too: The sweeping political and social proposition called modernism was heroically exported to Latin America by a distinct set of great individuals, themselves the beneficiaries of European and US institutions that should be revered. Institutions like, well, MoMA.

Why set this whole thing inside the home, I wonder, when so many of these countries’ most strident, most dedicated, most fervent overtures toward modernism took place at the scale of the building (Santiago’s caracoles, those Guggenheim-like shopping malls), if not the city block (consider Clorindo Testa’s massive concrete national library in the city of Buenos Aires, extending its reach out onto the street via plazas and walkways and walls), if not the city itself? (I don’t think I even need to mention Brasília.) What do we gain from setting this whole thing puertas para adentro, behind closed doors?

Certainly not a sense of the real material culture of these places, which could have been more successfully demonstrated through displays suggesting how some of these objects—Geraldo de Barros’s bright red polyurethane bar cart (ca. 1970), for example, or Ricardo Blanco’s painted plywood foldable chair (1973)—might have been used alongside more mundane objects, or vernacular ones, or mass-produced ones, or ones brought across the Atlantic. If the focus were really the home, then it might have been good to give viewers a sense of how people actually lived with the items inside it. If it were really craft, then it would have been good to give viewers a sense of how the chairs or rugs or bowls were actually made. And if it were really modernism, or a striving toward modernity, then the exhibition’s materials wouldn’t have so blatantly ignored the political context from which they emerged.

I suppose, though, that if the home is a laboratory, then here it is cold and clinical, a refuge from reality. The reality being, of course, that modernism failed not only as an aesthetic project but as a social and political one, that the continued popularity (and marketability) of the objects and design sensibility it produced is its only real legacy, that its promise of progress aided by technology, of a prosperous future ushered in by order and mass production, was an empty one. The caracoles of Santiago are largely in disrepair; Argentina’s national library, designed in 1961 and completed more than three decades later, has an unusable book transportation system and an extremely hard-to-maintain structure; and Brasília is a city with hundreds if not thousands of the workers who built it buried in its foundations. But at MoMA, even the shots of people on the street in various urban centers feel as tight and controlled as an interior. What we’re left with is a shockingly unfeeling and vague idea of home, the threat of something unseen growing in the darkness, and a desperate desire to throw open a window.