Browsing by Author "Gabara, Esther L"

This dissertation explores the influence of anarchism on the development of modern art in Mexico and the Americas from 1910 to 1950. It argues that art was an integral component of anarchist movements and that the philosophy and politics of anarchism guided major aesthetic debates about modern art in Mexico. Two key figures anchor this study: Ricardo Flores Magón (1874-1922) was an anarchist writer, activist, and head of the Junta Organizadora del Partido Liberal Mexicano, an anarcho-communist group of exiled Mexican anarchists living in the U.S. Dr. Atl (1875-1964) was a landscape painter, early proponent of muralism, and promoter of Mexican folk art. These figures are a starting point for unveiling a wide network of well-known and marginalized artists, writers, and intellectuals who engaged with anarchist philosophies. Using previously unexplored archival sources, correspondence, and unpublished manuscripts, this study examines a range of different artistic works—paintings and murals, cartoons and drawings, correspondence and book illustrations—that ranged in form and style from realism to impressionism and expressionism. By examining the reproduction and translation of these works throughout Mexico, the U.S., and South America, this dissertation also shows how anarchist art production transcended linguistic and cultural divides and furthered efforts to construct a hemispheric network of transborder solidarity.

I study three contemporary Chilean works of visual culture that appropriate and re-assemble visual material, discourse, and atmosphere from the bureaucracy of the military state. I examine Diamela Eltit’s textual performance of legal discourse in Puño y letra (2005); Guillermo Núñez’s testimonial art Libertad Condicional (1979-1982) based on the documents pertaining to his imprisonment, parole and forced exile; and Pablo Larraín’s fictional film Post Mortem (2010) inspired by Salvador Allende’s autopsy report. I argue that they employ a framework that exposes both the functional and aesthetic modes of bureaucracy complicit in state terror that operate within the spectacular and the mundane. Furthermore, I trace bureaucracy’s origins from the founding of the nation to its current practices that enabled the societal conditions for dictatorship and continue to uphold dictatorial legacies into the present.

In my analysis, I engage theories from performance, legal and media studies to interpret how Eltit critiques the press coverage of human rights trials, Núñez informs institutionalized preservation of memory, and Larraín demonstrates the power of fiction in our documentary reconstruction of the past. I conclude by arguing that this examination of bureaucracy is imperative because state bureaucracy anchors vestiges of the dictatorship that persist into the present such as the dictatorship-era constitution and the newly revived preventative control of identity documentation law.

This dissertation investigates how non-academic agents (i.e. artists, curators, and institutions) helped construct the current canon of Latin American art. It takes as case studies key exhibitions held in Brazil in order to examine how the central concepts of anthropophagy, geometric abstraction, and the political came to characterize the art of the region. Drawing on extensive archival research and interviews, this work traces a local genealogy, thus offering a different starting point for understanding the Latin American art canon that has been recently institutionalized in such places as the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York as part of the global turn in art history.

Citing their different language and colonial history, Brazilian artists and critics have tended to view their art production as distinct from that of the rest of the continent. This dissertation, by contrast, recognizes Brazil as a fundamental player in the shaping of both a Latin American cultural identity and an expanded notion of the Americas. This expansion of Latin American art influences how artists represent themselves and how such production is actively being inserted into collections around the world.

The Latin American wars of independence (1810-1825) dealt a severe material blow to the Hispanic world, separating the majority of Spain's former colonies from the Spanish crown. This dissertation aims to investigate the visual and discursive narratives developed in support of the Spanish Crown in the nineteenth century, which were fundamental to sustaining the colonial system in Spain's remaining colonies, including Cuba and the Philippines. Spain’s final attempts to recover its continental empire were invested predominantly in military strategies of reconquest between 1827 and 1830. However, this dissertation shows that, alongside military incursions, another campaign—a vindication of the Spanish Crown’s image and government—was employed in Cuba and the Philippines to illustrate the benign side of Spanish colonialism through urban improvements and infrastructure achieved by colonial administrations. These infrastructure programs, known as -policía de ornato-which loosely translates as "ornamental policing"--persisted under Isabel II's reign and were cemented with many projects on the islands.In the 17th century, the word - "police"- in Spanish, -"policía"- could be understood as referring to the executive branch, since it controlled several things such as education, health but the term lingered into the 19th century. The term "policía de ornato" refers to the aesthetic qualities of infrastructure such as city squares, promenades, and fountains. By portraying itself as secondary to security, the -policía de ornato- was able to become a prescriptive tool in the formation of urban areas, as well as in the negotiation of a new manner of exercising power. This ability to arrange space outlasted Ferdinand VII's reign and ensured the Spanish Crown's hegemony in the nineteenth century. My aim in researching these infrastructure projects is twofold: I show how their aesthetic aspects aided their function as disciplinary mechanisms, while also demonstrating how their representations in literary and visual artifacts compromised their intended regulatory function. Although infrastructure is undeniably a tool for enacting various types of social control and oppression, I argue that it also allows for a resistant counterpoint to intentional violence. My research seeks to uncover how early nineteenth-century aesthetic artifacts questioned and unearthed such brutality. Rather than slowing down the critical process, reimagining these infrastructures through visual culture or literature enables us to rethink space, politics, and even material structures. A tri-continental archival research was indispensable to recover the infrastructure programs developed in these final Spanish colonies since most of the records and projects are still housed in various institutions. Through the lens of Global Hispanophone studies, this dissertation adds to the history of other visualities in the nineteenth century, the image of power in the Hispanic world, and studies of colonialism, urbanization, and infrastructural studies.

Realism, Race and Citizenship: Four Moments in the Making of the Black Body, Colombia and Brazil, 1853 - 1907 investigates the visual and literary mechanisms used to refurbish racial and social hierarchies in Brazil and Colombia in the aftermath of the abolition of slavery. Chorographic paintings, scientific photographs, identification documents, and naturalist literature are taken to together to argue that: on the one hand, the slave is the fleshy object that defines freedom and, in the postcolonial moment, citizenship. In "Realism, Race and Citizenship: Four Moments in the Making of the Black Body, Colombia and Brazil, 1853 - 1907," I propose that in geo-political spaces where the abolition of slavery and the re-branding of work were intensely debated and violently fought over, realist programs of representation facilitated the propagation of modern racializing schemas. Chapters 1 and 2 study the watercolors created for the Comisión Corográfica (the pre-eminent mapping project of nineteenth century Colombia) and scientific photographs produced in Brazil. These chapters uncover the stylistic conventions that make possible the staging of blackness as visible and immutable biological inferiority and as cumulative category that encompasses a variety of physical and social characteristics including but not limited to skin color, occupation, costume, and physical environment. Chapters 3 and 4 argue that the disavowal of slavery structures Brazilian naturalist novels such as O Cortiço (Aluísio Azevedo, 1890) as well as legislative debates about the nation and the citizen. By focusing on the visual and narrative orchestration blackness, my dissertation provides a critical framework for understanding how realist aesthetic conventions configured (and continue to animate) discourses of race and citizenship in Brazil and Colombia.

In 1967 a massive graphic print based on Cuban photographer Alberto Korda’s world famous image of Che Guevara was draped over the five-story Ministry of Interior Building in Havana’s Plaza de la Revolución. The print became the iconic image of the Cuban Revolution, reaching beyond its architectural surface into an international market of consumer-based goods. My dissertation is concerned with the ways in which Cuba’s architectural past was put to very different use by the Cuban Revolution, and how Cuban modernity was re-imagined in new architectural projects, in the governmentally supported visual arts, and in curatorial work which brought the fine and popular arts into Cuba’s new and re-inhabited spaces. Drawing from critical theory, formal analysis, and methodologies of art and architectural history along with visual studies, I explicate the ways in which art, design and architecture play a significant role in mediating a revolutionary mythology. I argue that national identity, or cubanidad, becomes reliant on such a mythology of revolution, defined by a Third World solidarity and Cuba’s position within a broader socialist world as much as it is by local elements.

My dissertation explores the history of the Cuban Revolution’s visual culture in six thematic chapters, looking at themes such as modernities, revolution, appropriation, utopia, propaganda, and postmodernity. Each chapter explores developments in the relationship between art and architecture, and situates 1960s Havana within Cuba’s broader history as a republic and a colony. Concerned with the role the visual and spatial played within a socialist setting, Cuba became a productive platform to engage in international debates regarding modernity at the height of the Cold War era. My dissertation examines how Cuba deliberately projected its modernity to the world via architecture and the arts, and how these visual and spatial manifestations speak to the utopic character of modernity within Latin America and the Caribbean.

This dissertation, “Sound Matters in Poetry, Music and Arts Under Dictatorship in Brazil,” shows how experiments with sound across three different fields—poetry, popular music, and fine art—established new models for poetic, musical, and artistic interventions in which sounding and listening practices were set to destabilize traumatic experiences under the Brazilian dictatorship of 1964–1985. The cases analyzed in this dissertation are a particular iteration of the long Brazilian modernist tradition, which both responds to global aesthetic modernism and local desires for the construction of a national culture. The first chapter looks at Augusto de Campos’s late concrete poetry, arguing that it is as auditory as it is visual, and that sound is central to his engagement with politics and media in mid-1960s Brazil. The second chapter turns to João Gilberto and Caetano Veloso’s early 1970s work: I show how, prompted by concrete poetry and new media technologies, these artists tackled the trauma of exile through an unconventional and creative use of sound, expanding musical conventions. The final chapter engages with sound art and media, examining works by Antonio Dias, Cildo Meireles, Waltercio Caldas, and Paulo Bruscky: I analyze how they used vinyl records as a sculptural medium in order to combine conceptual inquiry with political critique. Ultimately, this dissertation presents a poetics of sound fostered by artists who created forms of micropolitical dissent during times of macropolitical authoritarianism and brutality.

My dissertation, <“>Transcending Borders: The Transnational Construction of Mexicanness, 1920-1935,<”> examines the conflicting attitudes towards "Mexicanness" or mexicanidad both in Mexico and the United States, an area that, Jos<é> Lim<ó>n, conceptualizes as "Greater Mexico." Beginning with an analysis of the Mexican postrevolutionary state's construction of nationalist culture, I argue that the transnational invention of Mexicanness through the circulation of the Aztec artifact reveals the possibilities for people of Mexican descent to reclaim public space and cultural citizenship on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border. I examine the construction of Mexicanness through an analysis of the limitations of Mexican post-revolutionary literary production in generating a clear vision of Mexican nationhood as well as the possibilities for nation building offered by public spaces such as the museum and the monument (an outdoor museum). Tracing the cultural manifestations of Mexican nationhood as expressed by the state and by people of Mexican descent is essential to understanding how the nation is practiced and thus intimately intertwined with the practice of citizenship. Through an interdisciplinary analysis of the Aztec artifact's various incarnations as an archaeological artifact, created artifact, and spurious artifact, I contend that the artifact represents an alternative text for the study of nationalism in its ability to narrate a national identity ultimately shaped beyond Mexico's geographical borders.

This dissertation centers on the relationship between art and politics in postwar Central America as materialized in the specific issues of racial and gendered violence that derive from the region's geopolitical location and history. It argues that the decade of the 1990s marks a moment of change in the region's cultural infrastructure, both institutionally and conceptually, in which artists seek a new visual language of experimental art practices to articulate and conceptualize a critical understanding of place, experience and knowledge. It posits that visual and conceptual manifestations of violence in Central American performance, conceptual art and installation extend beyond a critique of the state, and beyond the scope of political parties in perpetuating violent circumstances in these countries. It argues that instead artists use experimental practices in art to locate manifestations of racial violence in an historical system of domination and as a legacy of colonialism still witnessed, lived, and learned by multiple subjectivities in the region. In this postwar period artists move beyond the cold-war rhetoric of the previous decades and instead root the current social and political injustices in what Aníbal Quijano calls the `coloniality of power.' Through an engagement of decolonial methodologies, this dissertation challenges the label "political art" in Central America and offers what I call "visual disobedience" as a response to the coloniality of seeing. I posit that visual colonization is yet another aspect of the coloniality of power and indispensable to projects of decolonization. It offers an analysis of various works to show how visual disobedience responds specifically to racial and gender violence and the equally violent colonization of visuality in Mesoamerica. Such geopolitical critiques through art unmask themes specific to life and identity in contemporary Central America, from indigenous genocide, femicide, transnational gangs, to mass imprisonments and a new wave of social cleansing. I propose that Central American artists--beyond an anti-colonial stance--are engaging in visual disobedience so as to construct decolonial epistemologies in art, through art, and as art as decolonial gestures for healing.

This dissertation explores the development of war photography in crucial decades of the construction of Chile and Argentina as nation-states (1860s-1880s). This was a moment of intense change and expansion of visual media, epitomized in the growth of photographic business and the emergence of new illustrated journals. The appearance of new and improved modes of production and circulation of images coincided with Chile and Argentina's aggressive expansionist agendas. In this project, I focus on the Triple Alliance War, the War of the Pacific, and two moments of the larger processes of Indigenous dispossession and massacre known as the "conquest of the desert" and the "pacification of the Araucanía." The portrayal of state action was no minor matter for these newly independent countries, as they actively sought to install an image of their imagined nations, both locally and internationally. However, their mastery of visual discourses was temporarily shuddered as they failed to recognize the importance of photography, while focusing more on promoting the arts--particularly painting. In other words, in the representation of military action, photography was overlooked. Commercial photographers created unexpected challenges in the process of the consolidation of official narratives since they saw in war a commercial opportunity and produced new representations of what war-and those wars in particular-were like. By studying the different visions of the wars of territorial expansion coming from photography--in comparison to those in painting and the illustrated press--I uncover the visual decisions and strategies that develop as the command of these visual devices grew stronger. In this moment of massive education of the gaze, many of the questions raised by the expansion of these visual technologies overlap with crucial issues of the nation-building process. This project thus also explores the institutional, commercial, and educational practices that molded visual literacies by formulating long-lasting conventions that governed the creation and interpretation of images about historical events.