Cosmopolitanism in Mexican visual culture
By: by María Fernández
Edition: First edition.
Series: Joe R. and Teresa Lozano Long series in Latin American and Latino art and culture
Publisher: University of Texas Press
Published: 2014
Place of publication: Austin
Language: eng
Number of pages: 438
ISBN-13: 9780292745353
Subjects: Mexican Art; Themes, motives; Architecture; Eclecticism in art; Eclecticism in architecture; Mexican National characteristics
Description: 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 pathfinding book, Maria Fernandez 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. She argues that in Mexico, as in other colonized regions, colonization constructed power dynamics and forms of violence that persisted in the independent nation-state. Accordingly, Fernandez presents not only the visual qualities of objects, but also the discourses, ideas, desires, and practices that are fundamental to the very existence of visual objects. Fernandez organizes episodes in the history of Mexican art and architecture, ranging from the seventeenth century to the end of the twentieth century, around the consistent but unacknowledged historical theme of cosmopolitanism, allowing readers to discern relationships among various historical periods and works that are new and yet simultaneously dependent on their predecessors. She uses case studies of art and architecture produced in response to government commissions to demonstrate that established visual forms and meanings in Mexican art reflect and inform desires, expectations, memories, and ways of being in the world - in short, that visual culture and cosmopolitanism are fundamental to processes of subjectification and identity.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (pages 373-417) and index.
Table of contents: title: Vernacular cosmopolitanism: Sigüenza y Góngora's Teatro de virtudes políticas; title: Castas, monstrous bodies, and soft buildings; title: Experiments in the representation of national identity: the Pavilion of Mexico in the 1889 Universal Exposition in Paris and the Palacio de Bellas Artes; title: Of ruins and ghosts: the social functions of pre-Hispanic antiquity in nineteenth-century Mexico; title: Traces of the past: reevaluating eclecticism in nineteenth-century Mexican architecture; title: Visualizing the future: estridentismo, technology, and art; title: Re-creating the past: Ignacio Marquina's reconstruction of the Templo Mayor de Tenochtitlan; title: Transnational culture at the end of the millennium: Rafael Lozano-Hemmer's "relational architectures".