The body of work of Carlos Granés represents one of the most systematic of all attempts to figure out the relationship between art, ideology, and politics in Latin America. Books like El puño invisible, Salvajes de una nueva época, and El rugido de nuestro tiempo—read alongside Delirio americano, which serves as their interpretive axis—make up an intellectual map of the continent on which the movements of the artistic avant-garde appear not as marginal phenomena, but rather as decisive forces in the shaping of Latin American political life. The hypothesis that traverses these texts is as provocative as it is suggestive: Latin America has been molded not only by its economic structures and social conflicts, but also by the “delirium” of its artists. The result is a paradox: what was born as a critical impulse toward rupture, transgression, and the refusal of order ended up feeding into both the excesses of politics and the dynamics of the market.
The epigraph from Vicente Huidobro that opens Delirio americano—“While dreams belong to everyone, delirium belongs only to the poets”—works as a key to reading the book. Delirium, understood not as pathological derailment but as creative power, is that which allows us to imagine alternative worlds. Nonetheless, when this power escapes the realm of the aesthetic imagination and is cast over political reality, it takes on an ambivalent character: it can open up new horizons of freedom or bring about new forms of domination.
In this sense, Granés takes his place in a Latin American liberal tradition that, today, is weakened. His defense of individual freedom—of expression, of lived experimentation, of invention—finds a space of privilege in art. The avant-garde movements, in their most radical dimension, not only produced new aesthetic forms, but also enacted new ways of life: they made of existence itself an open work, a laboratory of possibilities. This conception implies an antidogmatic ethics, one resistant to closed systems and absolute truths. Life, like art, cannot be subjected to a program.
Nevertheless, the historical development of the avant-garde movements brings with it a crucial tension. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, art ceased to be conceived of only as individual exploration and took on a transformative mission. The year 1898—with the war in Cuba and the emergence of the United States as a hemispheric power—marks an inflection point in Latin American consciousness. Faced with this new imperial threat, artists progressively abandoned their aesthetic self-absorption and adopted a political role. Rubén Darío, the poster child of modernismo, left behind mythological imagery and addressed Roosevelt directly. Art began to speak on behalf of a community.
This shift gave rise to a new cultural nationalism embodied by figures like José Enrique Rodó and Leopoldo Lugones. The exaltation of the Latin American, in opposition to the Anglo, was enunciated through an elitist conception of the spirit: the artist as guide, as a higher consciousness able to guide collective fate. This idea, which seemingly sought to affirm identity in the face of foreign domination, contained a profound ambiguity: in his aspiration to elevate the community, the artist placed himself above it.
Here, Granés’s interpretation enters into dialogue with Walter Benjamin’s well known distinction between the politicization of the aesthetic and the aestheticization of politics. In Latin America, the two trends came together: art became an instrument of ideological struggle while politics took on aesthetic forms that rendered it seductive and all-encompassing. As a result, art lost its autonomy, becoming subsumed by political programs that used it as a vehicle for their own legitimization.
The Mexican Revolution serves as a paradigmatic example of this process. The muralists produced iconography that exalted the people and mythicized the revolution. While denying neither these works’ aesthetic power nor the significance of bringing art to public spaces, Granés underlines their propagandistic dimension: this art no longer interrogated reality, but rather froze it into a singular, idealized image. The artist, far from a dissident, became a civil servant. Thus a bureaucratic art emerges, aimed at consolidating official narratives.
This phenomenon is not exclusive to projects from the left. Throughout the twentieth century, fascism as well as communism found an essential ally in art. Poets and intellectuals celebrated machinery, war, the people, or the revolution, depending on the ideological camp to which they belonged. In this sense, Latin America went through an “age of utopias” marked by the conviction that it was possible to rebuild society from the ground up. Nonetheless, as Granés points out, these utopias tended to turn into shortcuts: they simplified the complexity of political life and scorned the deliberative mechanics of democracy. In this regard, the Latin American politics of the twentieth century were indeed savage.
One of the most cutting claims to be found in this text is that authoritarianism cannot be explained only through the actions of militaries or popular movements. Artists, too, with their redemptive imaginations, have contributed to creating the conditions needed for its emergence. In his Tres cartas al Tío Sam, Vicente Huidobro issues a mea culpa when faced by the rise of Nazism and other forms of tyranny. In hindsight, he recognizes a lack of faith in democracy: “Because we were all tired of democracy, disappointed by its lack of vitality, by its injustices, by its slowness, by its inner weakness; discontented, at the least, by its modes of action. There was a cold reluctance to defend it; it inspired no enthusiasm in anyone.” The ethics of radicality—where, in art, it was legitimate to destroy the past in order to create something new—found their complement in the revolutionary projects that sought to establish a better world, and still echo in certain present-day leaders, whom Granés dubs “creator-presidents.”
Behind this problem lies demiurgic tension: the idea that the artist can not only imagine a world, but also shape it. Influenced by currents like Rodó’s arielismo, this impulse was translated into a hierarchical conception of culture in which certain spirits consider themselves called upon to lead the rest. Thinking in these terms, the step from aesthetic elitism to political authoritarianism is less abrupt than one might think.
Granés’s vision of history also reveals the persistence of nationalism in different forms. The right-wing authoritarian projects of the 1940s, aspiring to order and hierarchy, failed in their attempts at modernization. Later, in the 1960s, there emerged a left-wing nationalism that, under the banner of emancipation, promoted armed struggle and the radical transformation of society. Despite their differences, both share a common logic: the subordination of the individual to a collective project. The revolutions that triumph tend to be conservative, accepting neither criticism nor deviation.
Faced with this panorama, the avant-garde movements teach us an ambiguous lesson. Their transformative drive sought to redefine the image of the human being. “Poetry can serve to understand the relationship between a concrete subjectivity and the world—sorrows and dissatisfactions, the injustices suffered by a perceptive spirit with a marginal disposition—but, as an instrument to politically diagnose the ills of society, poetry is risky and perilous.” The same ambition for change can give rise to totalitarian endeavors.
The case of the Latin American Boom illustrates a further precedent. Many of the Boom’s authors held anti-imperialist political positions, but their aesthetic background was heavily influenced by the literary traditions of the Anglo world, such as the writing of William Faulkner. Far from a contradiction, this tension reveals culture’s capacity to transcend borders. The global dissemination of these works represents, in and of itself, a form of universality that Latin American politics have seldom attained.
Roberto Bolaño, at the tail end of the twentieth century, perceived the exhaustion of this drive. In his work, the opposition between civilization and barbarism dissolves: the two come together within the same subject. The revolutionary poet becomes a ghost, and literature is riddled with precarity and disenchantment. His is a post-utopian consciousness, in which delirium has lost its innocence.
Over the course of Granés’s books, he presents a re-reading of this continent’s cultural history. In his essays, he undertakes an “excercise of judgment” in dialogue with the form and fluency of the fictional story: an invitation to keep delving deeper and confronting his pages with freedom of movement. The author leaves the text’s order open, such that readers can be guided by their own interests. At the same time, he does not lose sight of the present: “A fanciful effort, like holding water in your hands, that still, every now and then, brings with it some discovery.” Along this path, Granés outlines multiple connections: from the battlefield where José Martí fell to Managua, Chiapas, and, of course, Havana; from the universality of César Vallejo to the death of Fidel Castro, pausing over the solitude of Lezama Lima in the midst of the revolution, or making note of a (terribly corny) poem recited by Gustavo Petro at the UN.
Granés does not limit his investigation to this continent; he analyzes on a cosmopolitan scale, as is necessary in order to understand what’s going on within. Several cases feed into this exercise of judgment: the sale of a Banksy piece at Sotheby’s, the reading of Marx’s Das Kapital at the Venice Biennale, and the Bolivarian tourism of Podemos, plus the condescension of Europe and U.S. universities (noted by Octavio Paz and Vargas Llosa), a bus displaying transphobic messages on tour through the United States, Colombia, and Chile, and Paul McCarthy’s giant butt plug installed in the Place Vendôme.
Thus, Granés reveals a phenomenon that came following May of 1968: cultural leftism was quickly absorbed by capitalism, and products born of revolt were transformed into merchandise. Defiance became consumable. The machine does not break: it adapts. Capitalism incorporates the values of counter-culture and ends up institutionalizing rebellion.
Nonetheless, in recent decades, a significant shift has taken place. Individual exploration—the aspiration to turn one’s own life into a work of art—has given way to a politics of collective identities. Singularity has been redefined in terms of belonging: gender, ethnic, and cultural identities frame new forms of political action. While this process has allowed for greater awareness of historical inequalities, it has also generated, according to Granés, a fragmentation of common space. Citizenship ceases to be a universal principle and becomes a mosaic of specific vindications.
This transformation implies a change in the function of art. Aesthetic expression no longer seeks to explore the human condition, but rather to affirm an identity. In this context, the border between artist and activist is blurred. The former must submit to “good causes,” sacrifice their freedom, and, if possible, exploit their coveted victim’s capital. “The artist has turned from a little god into a servant of the puritanical moralism that sprouted from U.S. soil to spread through other Western societies.”
Politics, for its part, adopts theatrical, performative traits, privileging visibility and expression over deliberation. This brings the risk that performance might take the place of accord, weakening the foundations of democratic coexistence. “We are left, then, with a politics that is highly entertaining and televisual but of appalling quality, immoral, strident, and savage: a menace to the civilizing ideals of the modern, liberal West. And with art that is innocuous and inauthentic, unbearably predictable, boring, and conservative, more defensive than open to experimentation and surprise. Incorrect politicians and correct artists: the worst combination.”
At present, Granés’s diagnosis is critical. Latin American culture appears trapped in an obsession with the past: memory, myths, and identities lie at the center of the debate, while the future loses imaginative heft. In this context, the figure of the “creator-president” emerges: the leader who sees himself as an artist or visionary, thus completing the cycle in which art and power are once again intertwined.
Granés’s body of work is a portrait of our torrential history. Reading it leads us to miss a certain civilizing skepticism, a line of defense against ever more warped visions of reality. Despite his work’s thoroughness, it offers no grand solutions or answers, though it does provide some indications of where to hold on. These come in his defense of surrealism: “that attempt to return to the beginnings of life, to childhood or a more primitive time, to recover that which the adult and the civilized had lost,” the antithesis of the nationalist warrior. And in the final paragraph of Delirio americano, where he concludes that none of the political movements or “mythologies” created from our redemptive dreams has coalesced society or led to prosperity. Perhaps our best guide is the following: “an unredemptive liberalism, cosmopolitan and impure, that fosters plural leaderships. Like anywhere else, Latin America sits atop a complex, barbarous history of tragedies and triumphs. The future awaits us, as it awaits any other human community. The time has come to take a step into the twenty-first century.”
Translated by Arthur Malcolm Dixon
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