ANTONIO CARO | Colombia: the country of others

Antonio Caro. Photograph by Juan Osorio.

Antonio Caro (Bogotá, 1950–2021) burst onto the Colombian art scene in the 1970s. His work—scandalous and controversial—has remained relevant ever since, and today he is a benchmark for conceptual art in Latin America. From Cabeza de Lleras (1970) to the more recent Jabón, bendito jabón (2020), Caro sustained a proposal that transcends the art object and its commercial speculation, centering its purpose on the idea.

The power mechanisms of the institutional art circuit were not indifferent to what Antonio Caro proposed. About his work—predictably, in a body of work fully inscribed within the conceptual—everything has been said:

Luis Camnitzer notes:

On the other hand, Carmen María Jaramillo, in Fisuras del arte moderno en Colombia, says:

It is clear that, beyond the aesthetic validity of Antonio Caro’s work, what matters is its conceptual validity—where all its force resides—particularly what has to do with “the allusion to the economic and cultural colonialism of the United States in Colombia,” which is evident in works such as Colombia Marlboro, Colombia Coca Cola, El imperialismo es un tigre de papel, or Minería, among others. Bernardo Salcedo, referring to foreign conceptual art, claimed that it represented “the current human impossibility of dreaming, something that developing countries cannot embrace, for these fashions represent the artist’s sensory void.” [iv] If to the expressions “impossibility of dreaming” and “the artist’s sensory void” we add “Patria boba,” coined as a mockery in the nineteenth century, we can sketch the map of…

A Colombia that seems always willing to hand itself over, without hesitation, for the meanest and most paltry of prices. Columbia would be the name of this ownerless jungle paradise—today better known as a mining paradise—served up in abundance for everyone else. Perhaps this moment of fatal danger will soon be remembered in a heritage museum, as this installation, held in the deep silence of emptiness, mordantly attempts to emulate. [v]

The quotation is the curatorial text of “El país de los demás,” an artistic project by Fernando Arias that questions Colombia’s colonial condition from various angles, and underscores the urgency of “defining the idea of nation or identity,” or, if one prefers, of abandoning that intention altogether. This is suggested by the metamorphosis of the word Colombia into Columbia: a transition from the jungle country that “is part of the largest forest reserve on Earth” to the mining country, an “ownerless paradise that lives by plunder and is happy with emptiness.” [vi] Arias’s work establishes a dialogue with Caro’s; it re-signifies it not only conceptually but also in form and manufacture: Coca-Cola script and the use of nonconventional materials. Arias’s Columbia is “drawn” with gold dust.

Between one proposal and the other, nearly four decades have passed. Some things have changed in the national art scene; and yet the country’s economic and cultural dependence is greater than ever. This is where Antonio Caro’s critical contribution, through his work, is representative—not only for its consistency, but also for its painful validity: Cabeza de Lleras, Colombia Marlboro, Colombia Coca Cola, Achiote, Maíz, El imperialismo es un tigre de papel, Todo está muy caro, Firma de Manuel Quintín Lame, Aquí no cabe el Arte, 500, Malparidos, Minería, Gabriel, Jabón…

Víctor Albarracín, in his book El tratamiento de las contradicciones, devotes a brief story to Antonio Caro: “Perhaps A, in fact, keeps in a little black velvet box a set of teeth made of pure gold with diamond inlays. Perhaps, in the solitude of his home, he goes—smiling—toward the mirror’s complicit silence and becomes, for a few fleeting instants, the perfect stand-in for Snoop Dogg.” [vii]

I end with that happy image: Caro, with a set of pure gold teeth, smiling at the mirror of eternity.

Notes