Theories of the Nonobject: Argentina, Brazil, Venezuela, 1944-1969 by Mónica Amor (review)

In the past decade, numerous exhibitions have inscribed a distinct account of the development of geometric abstraction in Latin America, narrating it through discrete episodes: Universalismo Constructivo in Uruguay; the Asociación Arte Concreto Invención and Arte Madí in Argentina; Concretism and Neoconcretism in Brazil; and kinetic art in Venezuela. Amid this deluge of curatorial and collecting enterprises, a number of recent publications go far in enhancing our understanding of the ways that the artists of the region recast, but also displaced, the legacy of European constructive art in the postwar period. These studies also complicate the facile interpretation of such practices as the euphorically utopian symptom of economic expansion and modernization.

In its comparative approach, Mónica Amor's Theories of the Nonobject: Argentina, Brazil, Venezuela, 1944–1969 is a valuable contribution to this new wave in the critical history of Latin American geometric abstraction. Borrowing the term coined in 1959 by Brazilian poet and critic, Ferreira Gullar, in his two seminal texts from Neoconcretism—"Teoria do não-objeto" (Theory of the Nonobject) and "Diálogo sobre o não-objeto" (Dialogue on the Nonobject)—the book wields the notion of the nonobject as a lens by which to analyze, in Amor's words, the "crisis of mediums and representation" (1) experienced in the postwar artistic scenes of Argentina, Brazil and Venezuela. The book lucidly contextualizes Gullar's radical notion and extrapolates it to examine a wide array of practices over a twenty-five-year span, elucidating how they were, in fact, closely interrelated: fundamentally, they were utterances of a shared inquietude toward the perceived inadequacy of painting and sculpture in engaging with our surroundings, our bodies, or simply with reality. The book thus proposes the nonobject as an analytical category through which to consider geometric abstraction in the last throes of modernism, using it to trace the aesthetic and political stakes that impelled artists to repeatedly challenge established parameters for the art object.

Amor rigorously expounds Gullar's ideas surrounding the nonobject, which he first published eight years after the inaugural São Paulo Biennial, a watershed for the establishment of Constructivism as the dominant aesthetic philosophy in Brazil. Steeped in phenomenology, Gullar posited the nonobject as an ontological challenge to the self-referentiality of modernist painting and sculpture, taking specific aim at the hermeticism he perceived in Concretism as it had developed in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro by the mid-1950s. To Gullar, the nonobject transcended the limiting modalities of these mediums, rejecting the frame or the base and extending into its surrounding physical space. Without these denotative signifiers, Gullar argued, the nonobject appeared before the spectator as free of discursive associations: It was a pure phenomenon, contingent on a perceptual encounter with the viewer. Indeed, the nonobject and Gullar's philosophical project have been widely explored in numerous studies on Latin American geometric abstraction, but analyses inevitably tether it to the specific Neoconcrete practices of Rio de Janeiro. In contrast, Theories of the Nonobject convincingly extends it beyond this temporal and geographical context, and beyond formalist discourses; here, the nonobject serves to register frictions between diverse calls for aesthetic renewal and larger sociopolitical agendas at play in the postwar period.

Chapter One, for instance, centers on the relation between the formal experiments of Asociación Arte Concreto Invención (AACI) in Buenos Aires and the espousal of dialectical materialism on the part of its artists. Amor rehearses this early instance of the crisis of representation, honing in on the artists' attempts to articulate revolutionary politics through their rejection of painterly representation and of the orthogonal frame. She cogently relates their efforts to unite their ideological adoption of the Communist program with their artistic practice, particularly in their development of the coplanals, three-dimensional objects that entirely abandoned illusionism and insisted on their tangibility and physicality. Ultimately, as Amor outlines, there...