Global? Contemporary? Latin American? Time Matters in/and Art Today

Abstract:This article discusses the work of three artists from Latin America that emerged onto the global art world between the 1990s and the present day and became key representatives of a global and contemporary Latin American art. It begins by pointing out the paradox of specifying a specific a geographic production in the context of a global regime. It argues that there are specific types of temporalities in those oeuvres that secure their entry into the ranks of "contemporary art" as the global market around art was configured in the late neoliberal moment. The article suggests that reification in Gabriel Orozco's work, mourning in Doris Salcedo's, and theology in Adrián Villar Rojas's figure temporalities that pass as forms of critique while in fact reinforcing the economic and political mechanisms of the global order. The article ends by proposing a way out of the temporality allowed by the global and contemporary art world.