Altered states

A new exhibition in California is rewriting the continent's art history - and putting Latin American artists back in the frame. Dan Glaister reports
Mapa 4 by Nelson Leirner
Right You Are If You Think You Are by Nelson Leirner, part of the Art of the Americas exhibition Santa Barbara Museum

The second part of the Whitney Museum of American Art's exhaustive 1999 survey The American Century made no mistake about just whose America it was interested in. The cover of the show's hefty catalogue was dominated by Jasper Johns's 1958 painting Three Flags, in which three images of Old Glory are superimposed on each other.

Inside, the chapter headings took us from America Takes Command to America at the Crossroads. Bill Hayley was in there, so was Hollywood, corporate hegemony and the cold war. The "American" of the title equated, in no uncertain terms, to the US. That some other nations might have the temerity to occupy the same continent was, either consciously or unconsciously, ignored.

It is a view of America, and the Americas, not very different from that of William Carlos Williams in his celebratory 1925 work In the American Grain. The text takes a sentimental journey through the history of American discovery, propelled by the "heroic prose" of its author. Red Eric, Christopher Columbus, Sir Walter Raleigh, even Daniel Boone spin their tales of subjugation of savages and the birth of the American way.

Williams's book, in turn, lends its title to an exhibition that will spend most of this year travelling across the US. Organised by the Phillips Collection in Washington DC, the exhibition highlights the work of the Stieglitz Circle, the group, named after the artist and patron Alfred Stieglitz, that is credited with bringing modernism to the US. The exhibition has just finished at the Museum of Art in Santa Barbara, California, where it has left its own legacy.

"Our concept of national identity is very different today to the time when Williams wrote that book in 1925," the museum's curator Diana Du Pont says. "I wanted a show to address that. I wanted to do a show to deal with our shared history."

The result is Art of the Americas: Latin America and the United States, 1800 to Now!, a show curated from the museum's permanent collection, and one that raises some pertinent questions: who and what is America, whose is this history, and with whom is it shared?

Certainly the opening of the exhibition is different to the typical survey of 19th- and 20th-century American art. Pride of place in each of the museum's four main rooms is given to Latin American artists. Right You Are If You Think You Are, a playful-serious collage of Mickey Mouse and Day of the Dead skeletons by the Brazilian artist Nelson Leirner, dominates the first room and provides a pithy introduction to the show's premise: the two continents, north and south America, are linked not only geographically, but politically and culturally.

The exchange of ideas is ceaseless. In Leirner's work, Mickey and the skeletons assume the form of continental America; at one moment Mickey is on top, occupying the northern hemisphere, at the next he is underneath, as the skeletons take the high ground. The inane perkiness of Mickey is matched by the sinister grinning countenance of the skeletons. Hands on hips, legs spread, they are like a huddle of macabre smiley faces.

Opposite Leirner's diptych, a notice tells us: "Art of the Americas explores an expanded notion of America beyond the United States ... [It] acknowledges similarities but also critical differences in art shaped by related yet diverse regional histories." Leirner, whose piece is from 2003, might have been commissioned to illustrate the museum's premise.

In turn, the Uruguayan artist Joaquín Torres-García might embody the notion that the contribution of Latin American artists has been written out of the story of western art. Born in Montevideo in 1874 to a Uruguayan mother and Catalan father, his family moved to Spain when he was 17.

There, Torres-García studied at Barcelona's Escuela Oficial de Bellas Artes, graduating to the Quatre Gats, the Barcelona bar that hosted Picasso and his cohorts. He spent the next 40 years moving between Europe, the US and his native Uruguay, developing the approach he named universal constructivism and working and forming artistic alliances with Piet Mondrian among others.

In Santa Barbara, Torres-García's 1932 Composition, in which an uneven grid houses various signifiers, is hung next to Adolph Gottlieb's similarly named painting from 1947. The point, argues Du Pont, is that Gottlieb's geometric composition could not have happened without the earlier example of the neglected Torres-García.

"We bought this in 1997 because we wanted to make a major purchase of Latin American art to show that we were in this for the long run," says Du Pont. "This painting is like a commitment." That commitment proved to be one of the spurs to the museum's current approach to Latin American art. "We couldn't do this unless we had the stuff," says Du Pont. "A third of this show is Latin American art. You're not going to see this in other museums."

The other spur was the arrival of a new director, Phillip Johnston, keen to experiment with new ways to show the museum's permanent collection. So Du Pont decided to apply the techniques usually reserved for travelling exhibitions to the permanent collection, making it the centrepiece. The result is more than bureaucratic convenience or linguistic nicety. In its recounting of the American dream, the exhibition provides a reminder of other traditions and histories - and makes its point in telling ways.

The main tactic is juxtaposition. Eschewing a chronological telling of the story guided by national boundaries, Art of the Americas is arranged according to four themes: people, places, things, and art, society and politics. Works are grouped, often in pairs, to illustrate the connections and missed connections between north, south and central America. An anonymous 1844 painting, Buffalo Hunter, glorifying the Native American stereotype of the bare-chested hunter is flanked by Fritz Scholder's Indian With Three Faces, which confronts the stereotype.

Most of the big names of Latin American art are here, including Diego Rivera and David Alfaro Siqueiros, two artists best known for their murals, who both exported their work and their practice to the US. And it is perhaps their work, and the medium of the mural, that gives the greatest clue as to whether there is an aesthetic relationship between the two halves of the continent, and to what extent the two (or three, or dozen) cultures have fed off each other.

The mural remains a defiantly Latino medium, steeped in the colours, dynamic and street language of Latin America. Siqueiros came to work in the US, leaving his mark during a six-month stay in Los Angeles. And while mural art inspired by either Siqueiros or Rivera did not have an overt influence on the established US art canon, the legacy found expression through Chicano art, a naturalised US expression of Latino sensibilities and preoccupations.

Nelson Leirner, the Brazilian artist who opens the exhibition, dismisses the curatorial exercise under way at Santa Barbara. "I can only find it totally artificial," he tells me by email. "As an academic exercise it cannot be justified because, unless I am mistaken, it has no anthropological grounding.

"I wonder," he adds, "if anyone has taken into account that while American artists are preoccupied with their own work, we Latin Americans criticise the colonial position of so-called first world societies? The games are different, thus the rules will have to be different."

So much for the grand design. But perhaps the strongest indication in the exhibition that it doesn't really matter if the bulk of Latin American art had little influence on US art, and vice versa, comes in an astonishing, wilfully impractical calculating machine. Based on a quipu - an ancient tabulating device from the Andes, according to the press notes - Miguel Angel Ríos's huge machine covers most of a wall. Across the top, picked out in Spanish in red block letters, are the words "Languages and Religions of the American Continent".

Down one side are the names of nations - including the US - while running horizontally to complete the canvas grid is an arrangement of the languages and religions of the continent, peppered with coloured tags, like yachting flags. And suspended in front are lengths of knotted black cord. What it tells you is anyone's guess, its efficacy as a calculator at best dubious. But it feels profound and important, and fun. And whether or not it has any place in the grander history of art, its story is one that deserves to be told.

· Art of the Americas: Latin America and the United States, 1800 to Now! is at the Santa Barbara Museum, California, until November 21. Details: 001 805 963 4364.