Sign, Color, Spirit: American Ancestralist Suggestions

Abstract

Within the framework of the reinterpretations of pre-Columbian art in the contemporary world, a preponderant role was played by those movements and artists who, overcoming the pure formality of the repertoires of the past, opted to seek alternatives to recover the “spiritual” essences imbricated in them. They dived into the space of the magical, the mythical, the symbolic. This article approach different continental proposals given in the conceptual framework of “the archaic” and “the ancestral”, regarding both the pre-Columbian and the contemporary indigenous cultures. In this context, we will analyze strategies for the contemporaryization of the ancestral (or the ancestralization of the contemporary) in which formulas such as abstract expressionism, informalism or assemblage will play a fundamental role, as means for the creation of ancestrally suggestive pictorial climates. We will also analyse the critical and institutional fortunes achieved by these proposals mainly between the 1940s and 1960s.