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Maoist imaginaries in Latin American art Ana Longoni In the 1960s, in a moment of extreme political tension, arguments between realism and the avant-garde were re-ignited in the Latin American art world. On the one hand, influential experimental movements were gaining momentum in several Latin American countries. On the other hand, a violent campaign in favour of socialist realism was unfolding as communists criticised maverick artists for being ‘ludic’ and ‘decadent’.1 But their criticism was not monolithic. Events such as the Cuban Revolution, the Chinese
presence that resists sentiments of tragedy and the legacy of victimry (Vizenor, 2008 ), has been essential to analyses of contemporary Native American art. Yet, The Heirs of Columbus and Monkman’s performance are important illustrations of another of his related concepts, one often underdiscussed in relation to visual art: that of transmotion . 2 First described in Vizenor’s Fugitive Poses , transmotion is ‘that sense of native motion and an active presence, is sui generis sovereignty. Native transmotion is survivance, a reciprocal use of nature, not a
I focus on two contemporary art installations in which Teresa Margolles employs water used to wash corpses during autopsies. By running this water through a fog machine or through air conditioners, these works incorporate bodily matter but refuse to depict, identify or locate anybody (or any body) within it. Rather, Margolles creates abstract works in which physical limits – whether of bodies or of art works – dissolve into a state of indeterminacy. With that pervasive distribution of corporeal matter, Margolles charts the dissolution of the social, political and spatial borders that contain death from the public sphere. In discussing these works, I consider Margolles’ practice in relation to the social and aesthetic function of the morgue. Specifically, I consider how Margolles turns the morgue inside out, opening it upon the city in order to explore the inoperative distinctions between spaces of sociality and those of death. In turn, I consider how Margolles places viewers in uneasy proximity to mortality, bodily abjection and violence in order to illustrate the social, political and aesthetic conditions by which bodies become unidentifiable. I ultimately argue that her aesthetic strategies match her ethical aspirations to reconsider relations to death, violence and loss within the social realm.
. ( 1838–1995 ), papers, bulk 1920–1960 . Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution . The New York Times ( 1920 ) ‘ Canada Bars Refugees: Minister Says Labor Conditions Forbid Relaxing Restrictions ’, 13 December . Ngai , M. M. ( 2004 ), Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America ( Princeton, NJ and Oxford : Princeton University Press ). Rorty , R. ( 1998 ), ‘ Human Rights, Rationality and Sentimentality ’, in Rorty , R. , Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers, Volume 3
Mixed Messages presents and interrogates ten distinct moments from the arts of nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first century America where visual and verbal forms blend and clash. Charting correspondences concerned with the expression and meaning of human experience, this volume moves beyond standard interdisciplinary theoretical approaches to consider the written and visual artwork in embodied, cognitive, and contextual terms. Offering a genuinely interdisciplinary contribution to the intersecting fields of art history, avant-garde studies, word-image relations, and literary studies, Mixed Messages takes in architecture, notebooks, poetry, painting, conceptual art, contemporary art, comic books, photographs and installations, ending with a speculative conclusion on the role of the body in the experience of digital mixed media. Each of the ten case studies explores the juxtaposition of visual and verbal forms in a manner that moves away from treating verbal and visual symbols as operating in binary or oppositional systems, and towards a consideration of mixed media, multi-media and intermedia work as brought together in acts of creation, exhibition, reading, viewing, and immersion. The collection advances research into embodiment theory, affect, pragmatist aesthetics, as well as into the continuing legacy of romanticism and of dada, conceptual art and surrealism in an American context.
web of cultural connections that has existed between the two countries, Republics and Empires: Italian and American Art in Transnational Perspective, 1840–1970 incorporates papers originally delivered at two international conferences held in Rome in October 2016 and Washington, D.C. in October 2017. Funded in part by the Terra Foundation for American Art, ‘Hybrid Republicanism: Italy and
Introduction In the winter and spring of 1971, dozens of expatriate Latin American artists gathered in apartments and studios of New York, to discuss politics and art, and – although they did not know it – to reclaim the identity of Latin American art. Through their activism and common art practice, they were able to contest stereotyping labelling of the region’s culture and to gain visibility in the competitive milieu of the Big Apple, collectively creating a space of their own. Their case brings light to the diversity of the neo avant-garde movements of
2 Sexual portraits: Edward Melcarth and homoeroticism in modern American art with Erin Griffey The metaphor of the closet pervades historical interpretations of American art just as it pervades other cultural readings. In this peculiar way of seeing the past, the art historian’s role is to reveal concealed meanings, to make the ‘silenced gay self ’ speak, as Gavin Butt has expressed it.1 ‘Modes of disclosure: the construction of gay identity and the rise of Pop Art’, the title of Kenneth Silver’s early 1990s essay on American art in the late 1950s and early
political referent in debate backdrop to understanding the curatorial agenda and reception of the 1993 Whitney Biennial for American Art, as well as a comprehensive examination of the exhibition contributions of Daniel Joseph Martinez, Andrea Fraser, and Lorna Simpson. The 1993 Biennial provides an ideal case study to examine the representation of socio-political issues in art, as it consolidated perspectives on two key terms for the later part of the twentieth century: identity politics and multiculturalism. As detailed in the Introduction and Chapter 1, I define
Museum of American Art in New York City because he wondered if it was too ‘anthropological’ or ‘journalistic’ to be art.18 Artforum’s George Baker in his exhibition review describes Dean’s artwork as turning ‘the Third World other into fodder 79 80 Productive failure for the revitalization of mythic aesthetic modes (e.g., painting, by which it was surrounded in Rinder’s installation)’.19 Baker’s language implies that Dean has appropriated another culture to revitalize ‘mythic aesthetic modes’ – one assumes he means the painterly abstraction of American Mark Rothko