While ambitious art museums, biennials, galleries, curators, and critics promoted early Colombian conceptual art and its antecedents as being part of the latest international art trends, the intrepid iconoclasts who created it were not at all interested in being au courant or international. Far from it, their primary focus was on addressing local issues and audiences. They had an ambivalent relationship to institutions, taking advantage of internationalization, which was part of a strategy for cultural and economic development. But these artists did so in order to insert their own tactics emerging from, and dealing with, the realities of underdevelopment. Artists such as Antonio Caro, Jorge Posada, and Efraín Arrieta--developing approaches first introduced by antecedents like Bernardo Salcedo, Feliza Bursztyn, and Beatriz González--sought to open the viewers' eyes to the concrete experience of the here-and-now through the use of usually banal and often ephemeral materials and techniques. They focused critically on social issues--nationalism, education, imperialism, agrarian inequity, governmental policy, and political organization. In taking on specific, timely, and usually local matters dealing with culture, politics, the economy, and social organization, they sought to upset the prevailing conditions outside as well as inside the realm of art. Even the introduction of new forms and ways of producing art should be seen as an ideological rather than a formal exercise since it constituted a cultural assault against the Colombian ruling class. This art, then, was political: it was motivated by beliefs regarding the public affairs of a country. I argue that early Colombian conceptual art was a visual means of exposing institutional strategies of control. I show how this art partook of the spirit of participation which marked the late 1960s and early 1970s in Colombia and in the world. In the process, I add to the understanding of this tumultuous period in world history, since my study is an example of the complex processes of cultural production in an age of globalization. / text

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This dissertation examines two controversies involving paintings of the female nude by artists Debora Arango and Carlos Correa during a period of political crisis in Bogota (Colombia) in order to open the political to cultural analysis and thus shed light on scenarios of change in the 1930s and 1940s. Unpacking the controversies lends insight into the unique ways in which modernity, the body, its representations, sexuality, gender and politics came together in Colombia during this period. Such an approach also shows that modernity in Colombia involved shifts in religious and secular frames of sense-making and morality. This dissertation argues that the controversies and the female nudes provide a window into the Liberal regime's creation of culture as an autonomous sphere as part of its cultural program, which bridged high and popular culture, as well as on aspects of private life concerned with sexuality and gender. It shows how such changes registered in the lives of the artists and how the artists translated the changes they experienced into modes of pictorial expression. This dissertation argues that the demands of the aesthetic and the demands of politics during this period pressed on each other, resulting in the wide-spread perception of moral breach that came to a head in the "scandals of the female nudes." This dissertation thus sheds light on dimensions of both the political and the private during this period. / Because art and politics were thus entangled, this dissertation shows that, in this particular Colombian modernity, society was not polarized, that the private and the private overlapped, that issues of intimacy surfaced in the public realm, and that Catholicism was the idiom shared by men and women who were grappling with change. It shows that the cultural program of the Liberal regime was the immediate referent for criticism in these events and, through it, of the Liberal regime's reforms of education of 1934 and 1936. Finally, it shows that this modernity and its attendant anxieties were played out through the body in the public and the private realms, within, not against, the Catholic tradition, in unprecedented ways. This thesis demonstrates that politics and issues of sexuality and gender were entangled in the public sphere and converged in the female nudes, turning them into a major threat to morality within both religious and secular frameworks. By unpacking the controversies, this dissertation marks a seminal break with historical accounts that describe Colombia's as a failed modernity, its society as polarized, and debates over sexuality and gender as the product of politics. This dissertation also contradicts art historical writings that account for the production of images and the reception of art in this period solely in political terms.