ABSTRACT
Positivism guided the disposition of nineteenth-century Latin American governments toward constructing ordered nation-states that would only gradually become democratic. In the past century, notions of the people as the principal agent of political change disrupted that disciplinary model. In a few countries, abstraction provided the frame within which the friction between both templates took on a phenomenal dimension: strongly collectivist, Latin American abstract art was positivist as it tested its formal protocols against the physiology of perception, yet also populist as it searched for participatory modes of vision. This double character marked the transformation of Venezuelan geometric abstraction into cinetismo, which was inextricable from the concurrent reconstruction of urban space. Cinetismo offered an outlet for democratic demands, yet always under the constraining rule of a positivist formalism. Its study allows for historically specific insights into the unfulfilled promises and actual restrictions of participatory art.
