Juan Ledezma.

Introduction to “National Vision: Venezuelan Cinetismo and the

Phenomenal Framework of Democracy,” in Perception and Agency in Shared Spaces of
Contemporary Art (New York: Routledge, 2017); part IV: “The Aesthetics of Social
Space”; chapter 10, 121–132.

Official planning rewrites a nation’s history as a project that reasons facts into prospective

situations. So did the national prospects enforced in Venezuela every four years starting in

1960, after the collapse of a decade-long dictatorship and the inauguration of the

country’s first stable social democratic government. Each of these plans concluded with a

“Program for the Development of Community” and its providential account of how lifting

the restrictions levied on public action would prompt the true advent of democracy.

Touting themselves as “instruments of communal integration” poised to precipitate

“social change,” such programs rewrote the positivist history of the nation in the near-

reverse form of its populist expectations.1 If in the first half of the twentieth century

positivism imposed the halted pace of order on the attainment of collective progress, in

the second half, under conditions of “great social mobility,” a “politics of amplitude”

would foster the “incorporation of the people [in the achievement of] the common

good.”2

The social rationality of an unprecedented “mechanism of participation” would

make that political shift possible.3 Banking on their “two-current theory,” the community

developers expected participation to connect the top-to-bottom stamp of planning’s

technical reason to the surging creativity of the population.4 The technocratic approach to

social bonds as quantifiable relations would thereby meet its democratic counterforce in

1
Raúl Leoni, Documentos Presidenciales, 1965–69, vol. 1 (Caracas: Oficina Central de Información,
1965), 422.
2
Leoni, Documentos Presidenciales, 1965–69, vol. 2 (Caracas: Oficina Central de Información, 1966),
293; vol. 1, 18.
3
Leoni, Documentos Presidenciales, 1965–69, vol. 4 (Caracas: Oficina Central de Información, 1968),
531.
4
Leoni, Documentos Presidenciales, 1965–69, vol. 3 (Caracas: Oficina Central de Información, 1967),
354, 471.
an “intangible achievement”—the integration of creative “psycho-social traits” in the

formation of a communal “subject,” engaged both rationally and emotionally in its own

development.5 That subject never materialized. The self-defined “governments of action”

of Rómulo Betancourt (1959–1964) and Raúl Leoni (1964–1969) failed to preside over

the field of popular participation, which remained a rhetorical site, fraught with

incongruent claims such as the technical management of unconstrained constructive

drives. Incongruity, however, did not temper the hype of the nation’s engineers, who in

1979 declared Venezuela a “participatory democracy” in which people would shape their

planned fate.6 It was not the time to make that claim. 1979 was the year when the country

began to rue the insolvency of the “national project” first launched in 1960, the moment

when economic decline started to discredit the social democratic promise of its

modernity.

Having risen to prominence in the early 1960s, cinetismo, a Venezuelan modality

of optico-kinetic art, equally approached its point of visual exhaustion as the 1970s ended.

The temporal coincidence between cinetismo and the discourse on democratic progress

underscores their ideological symmetry: driven by their own promissory platform, kinetic

artists also sought to install a nation-wide mechanism of participation, in this instance

fueled by the engagement of people in the kinetic modification of optical structures. This

essay zeroes in on such an overlap as it detects in the country’s kinetic art an instrument

for the perceptual, and therefore phenomenal, assembly of a social democratic subject.

The theoretical question is how the two chief proponents of cinetismo, Carlos Cruz-Diez

and Jesús Rafael Soto, might have transformed the narrative framework of the state,

rendering it phenomenal. The historical issue, on the other hand, is to explain why the

5
Leoni, Documentos Presidenciales, vol. 4, 525, 533–7.
6
Leoni, Documentos Presidenciales, vol. 1, 18; CORDIPLAN, Venezuela. V Plan de la Nación (Caracas:
Oficina Central de Coordinación y Planificación, 1976–1980).
works of these artists reached a hegemonic rank, configuring an instituted form of public

vision that not merely was collective, but downright national. With those two aims in sight,

I propose a shift of attention from nation and narration, already amply theorized, to

nation and abstraction.7 This shift entails reciprocal assimilation rather than replacement:

it is bound to assess how the state narrative’s phenomenal conversion implied the

development of discursive functions for abstraction, also engaged in the country’s

prefiguration.

Subchapters:

The Public Work: A Narrative of Massive Participation

Socially Symbolic Vision

Agency and the Populist Mandate

The Methodological Destruction of Stable Form

7
Cf. Homi Bhabha, ed. Nation and Narration (Routledge: London and New York, 1990).