ARTH 550B: Contemporary Art & Technology in Latin America

Discusses Latin American art of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, detailing the indigenous, colonial, post-colonial, and political influences.

Find here a thorough exploration of Latin American art since 1990, a period during which the Latin American art scene has grown in importance and influence.

Taking as its premise that the proposed epoch of the Anthropocene is necessarily an aesthetic event, this collection explores the relationship between contemporary art and knowledge production in an era of ecological crisis.

Brazilian Art under Dictatorship is a sophisticated analysis of the intersection of politics and the visual arts during the most repressive years of Brazil's military regime, from 1968 until 1975. The author describes how Brazilian visual artists addressed the political situation and opened up the local art scene to new international trends. Focusing on innovative art forms infused with a political undertone, Calirman emphasizes the desire among Brazilian artists to reconcile new modes of art making with a concern for local politics.

This volume traces the full trajectory of the artist's career, from early, rarely published figurative works, to interactive series that continue to this day, to architectural projects in public spaces around the world.

In this volume, Ariel Jimenez interviews Cruz-Diez about his art and career, which spans some of the most exciting transformations in the history of Latin American art.

This focuses on Brazilian postwar avant-garde artists updated modernism in a way that was radically at odds with European and North American art historical narratives. Brazilian avant-garde artists of the postwar era worked from a fundamental but productive out-of-jointness. They were modernist but distant from modernism. In Constructing an Avant-Garde, Sérgio Martins seizes on this uncanny obliqueness and uses it as the basis for a reconfigured account of the history of Brazil's avant-garde. His discussion covers not only widely renowned artists and groups--including Hélio Oiticica, Lygia Clark, Cildo Meireles, and neoconcretism--but also important artists and critics who are less well known outside Brazil, including Mário Pedrosa, Ferreira Gullar, Amílcar de Castro, Luís Sacilotto, Antonio Dias, and Rubens Gerchman.

These fascinating interviews (presented in English and Spanish) were undertaken over the course of several years. They offer an unprecedented opportunity to understand his remarkable contributions to Latin American art. Also revealed is an essential account of the key moments of a long and fruitful life, from his simple childhood to his key role in the development of kineticism in Paris in the 1950s and '60s.

Since the colonial era, Mexican art has emerged from an ongoing process of negotiation between the local and the global, which frequently involves invention, synthesis, and transformation of diverse discursive and artistic traditions. In this book, María Fernández uses the concept of cosmopolitanism to explore this important aspect of Mexican art, in which visual culture and power relations unite the local and the global, the national and the international, the universal and the particular.

A historical study of Chile's twin experiments with cybernetics and socialism, and what they tell us about the relationship of technology and politics. In Cybernetic Revolutionaries, Eden Medina tells the history of two intersecting utopian visions, one political and one technological. The first was Chile's experiment with peaceful socialist change under Salvador Allende; the second was the simultaneous attempt to build a computer system that would manage Chile's economy. Neither vision was fully realized--Allende's government ended with a violent military coup; the system, known as Project Cybersyn, was never completely implemented--but they hold lessons for today about the relationship between technology and politics.

A study of the intersecting fields of art history, ecology, visual culture, geography, and environmental politics. While ecology has received little systematic attention within art history, its visibility and significance has grown in relation to the threats of climate change and environmental destruction. By engaging artists' widespread aesthetic and political engagement with environmental conditions and processes around the globe--and looking at cutting-edge theoretical, political, and cultural developments in the Global South and North--Decolonizing Nature offers a significant, original contribution to the intersecting fields of art history, ecology, visual culture, geography, and environmental politics.

Contains the chapter: "Diego Rivera: paradise lost in Rockefeller Center. Revisited" by Irene Herner.

Colorful and playful kinetic sculptures, experimental objects designed to be catalysts for community building, manifestos calling for joy and the negation of melancholy: these are the elements that have shaped The Geometry of Hope. The title brings together two threads that epitomize postwar abstract art from Latin America: on the one hand, geometry, precision, clarity and reason; on the other, a utopian sense of hope.

In dialogue with Gabriel Perez-Barreiro, Kosice recalls his contributions to an era of hotly debated movements and manifestos; the magazine Arturo; the formation of Arte Mad ; his interactive mobiles; and his groundbreaking use of materials like neon and water to articulate a futuristic vision that includes Hydrospatial City, a community suspended in space.

In the twentieth century, avant-garde artists from Mexico, Central and South America, and the Caribbean created extraordinary and highly innovative paintings, sculptures, assemblages, mixed-media works, and installations. This book presents some of these works by looking at more than 250 works by some seventy of these artists (including Gego, Joaquin Torres-Garcia, Xul Solar, and Jose Clemente Orozco) and artists' groups, along with interpretive essays by leading authorities and newly translated manifestoes and other theoretical documents written by the artists.

This collection of essays documents the creative involvement of Latin American artists and intellectuals with modern technologies from the nineteenth-century to the present. Acknowledging the extensiveness of the histories of both modern technologies and modernism, the essays cover a diversity of media, technologies, and conceptual aspects of techno-culture that Latin American thinkers have engaged with to depict individual and collective visions of sociocultural progress.

This book focuses on a single, key aspect of Julio Le Parc's work--his preoccupation with changing light. Le Parc, born in 1928 in Mendoza, Argentina, is one of the world's best-known kinetic artists. By 1958 he had moved to Paris and begun creating his first light works and mobiles, most of which were made in the 1960s, while he and other young artists, including Fran ois Morellet, were founding and developing GRAV (Groupe de Recherche d'Art Visuel).

Although these artists were as radical as any in the world, especially in their thinking on conceptual art and the dematerialization of the art object, very few of them have enjoyed much international exposure. This book explores the intense, internationally significant developments in Argentine art of the 1960s through English translations of the original documents of the time.

Harnessing the energy of provocative theories generated by recent understandings of the human body, the natural world, and the material world, Material Feminisms presents an entirely new way for feminists to conceive of the question of materiality.

In Mexican Modernity, Ruben Gallo tells the story of a second Mexican Revolution, a battle fought on the front of cultural representation. The new revolutionaries were not rebels or outlaws but artists and writers; their weapons were cameras, typewriters, radios, and other technological artefacts, and their goal was not to topple a dictator but to dethrone nineteenth-century aesthetics. Gallo tells the story of this other revolution by focusing on five artefacts that left a deep mark on the literature and the arts of the 1920s and 1930s: the camera and its novel techniques for seeing the modern world; the typewriter and its mechanisation of literary aesthetics; radio and poetic experiments with wireless communication.

In December 1921, the poet Manuel Maples Arce (1898-1981) papered the walls of Mexico City with his manifesto Actual No. 1, sparking the movement Estridentismo (Stridentism). Inspired by Mexico's rapid modernization following the Mexican Revolution, the Estridentistas attempted to overturn the status quo in Mexican culture, taking inspiration from contemporary European movements and methods of expression. This work provides a nuanced account of the early-20th-century moment that came to be known as the Mexican Renaissance, featuring an impressive range of artists and writers.

In Necropolitics Achille Mbembe, a leader in the new wave of francophone critical theory, theorizes the genealogy of the contemporary world, a world plagued by ever-increasing inequality, militarization, enmity, and terror as well as by a resurgence of racist, fascist, and nationalist forces determined to exclude and kill.

Color coded terror alerts, invasion, drone war, rampant surveillance: all manifestations of the type of new power Brian Massumi theorizes in Ontopower. Through an in-depth examination of the War on Terror and the culture of crisis, Massumi identifies the emergence of preemption, which he characterizes as the operative logic of our time. Security threats, regardless of the existence of credible intelligence, are now felt into reality. Whereas nations once waited for a clear and present danger to emerge before using force, a threat's felt reality now demands launching a preemptive strike. Power refocuses on what may emerge, as that potential presents itself to feeling.

In Parables for the Virtual Brian Massumi views the body and media such as television, film, and the Internet, as cultural formations that operate on multiple registers of sensation beyond the reach of the reading techniques founded on the standard rhetorical and semiotic models. Renewing and assessing William James's radical empiricism and Henri Bergson's philosophy of perception through the filter of the post-war French philosophy of Deleuze, Guattari, and Foucault, Massumi links a cultural logic of variation to questions of movement, affect, and sensation. If such concepts are as fundamental as signs and significations, he argues, then a new set of theoretical issues appear, and with them potential new paths for the wedding of scientific and cultural theory. Replacing the traditional opposition of literal and figural with new distinctions between stasis and motion and between actual and virtual, Parables for the Virtual tackles related theoretical issues by applying them to cultural mediums as diverse as architecture, body art, the digital art of Stelarc, and Ronald Reagan's acting career. The result is an intriguing combination of cultural theory, science, and philosophy that asserts itself in a crystalline and multi-faceted argument.

Instead of smoothing over contemporary arts violent and iconoclastic dimensions, instead of sanitizing and making complex artworks docile in terms of archival possibilities, this book suggests we abandon our fantasy of mastery over representation and respond in kind to the archive-as-artwork, to "living" archives, and to reenactments of history with their seamless connections between fiction and non-fiction.

Nicolas Bourriaud attempts to renew our approach toward contemporary art by getting as close as possible to the artists' works, and by revealing the principles that structure their thoughts: an aesthetic of the inter-human, of the encounter; of proximity, of resisting social formatting. The aim of his essay is to produce the tools to enable us to understand the evolution of today's art. We meet Felix Gonzalez-Torres and Louis Althusser, Rirkrit Tiravanija or Félix Guattari, along with most of today's practising creative artists.

After the dominant models of art-as-text in the 1970s and are now witness to a return to the real - to art and theory that seek to be grounded in bodies and sites, identities and communities.

Soto: Paris and Beyond, 1950-1970 accompanies the first large-scale exhibition dedicated to Jesus Soto to be held at a New York museum in more than 35 years. It highlights this major Venezuelan artist's early career, following his relocation from Caracas to Paris in 1950, and offers a rare opportunity to trace Soto's visionary trajectory and his influence upon, and exchanges with, other members of the avant-garde.

Suggests a theory of art, tests against the French and German avant-garde movements of the twenties, and discusses hermeneutics, ideology, aesthetic categories, and the autonomy of art."

Convinced that all aspects of modern culture have been affected by avant-garde art, Renato Poggioli explores the relationship between the avant-garde and civilization. Historical parallels and modern examples from all the arts are used to show how the avant-garde is both symptom and cause of many major extra-aesthetic trends of our time, and that the contemporary avant-garde is the sole and authentic one.

In post-1968 Mexico a group of artists and feminist activists began to question how feminine bodies were visually constructed and politicized across media. Participation of women was increasing in the public sphere, and the exclusive emphasis on written culture was giving way to audio-visual communications. Motivated by a desire for self-representation both visually and in politics, female artists and activists transformed existing regimes of media and visuality. Women Made Visible by Gabriela Aceves Sepúlveda uses a transnational and interdisciplinary lens to analyze the fundamental and overlooked role played by artists and feminist activists in changing the ways female bodies were viewed and appropriated.