Awards
2011 Frank Jewett Mather Award
Luis Camnitzer
Luis Camnitzer (photograph by Jean Noel Schramm)
Luis Camnitzer has translated his tricultural perspective—born in Germany, raised and educated in Uruguay, and a participant in the New York art world—into a tripled practice. As an artist, teacher, and critic, he has lucidly addressed the aesthetic, social, and political conundrums of our times with firm but low-key authority. His intricate perception, laced with humor and irony but not dependent on them, allows Camnitzer reasoned closeness to, and passionate distance from, the issues he addresses. His grasp of such issues, allowing him to clarify their complexities and contradictions for our benefit, powers the persuasiveness of his prose; but, then, so does his writer’s voice, vital in its ruminative wit and eloquent in at least two languages. Camnitzer’s latest collection of writings going back forty years, On Art, Artists, Latin America, and Other Utopias (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2009), reasserts the reasoned authority of his voice.
Firmly connected to the long tradition of the Latin American intellectual, and straddling the positions of philosopher, reporter, and cultural critic, Camnitzer speaks incisively to issues of cultural displacement, transnational aesthetics, and the peripheral condition of most of the world’s contemporary art. At the same time he keenly acknowledges the artist’s personal struggle to resist and to absorb inherited culture, academic discourse, normative practice, and art-world globalization. In doing so, Camnitzer makes the reader feel invested in subjects that may be far removed from his or her experience. Written originally for international art journals, exhibition catalogues, and academic conferences, the essays in On Art, Artists, Latin America, and Other Utopias, which date from 1969 to 2007, assume a universal address, speaking elaborately and elegantly to sensitive readers in South America, North America, and the world over.
Jury: Paul Krainak, Bradley University, chair; Peter Frank, THE Magazine; and Florencia Bazzano-Nelson, Tulane University.
