Description
Book SynopsisVenezuela's turbulent twentieth century saw boom and bust as the former Spanish colony transformed into a major postwar cultural player. In this sweeping study of visual and material production, Sean Nesselrode Moncada explores the integral relationship between the global oil industry and the celebrated rise of geometric abstraction, kinetic art, and modern architecture in midcentury Venezuela. Oil provided the crucible for national reinvention, ushering in a period of dizzying optimism and bitter disillusion as artists, architects, graphic designers, activists, and critics sought to define the terms of modernity. An innovative, transdisciplinary reevaluation of Venezuelan modernism,Refined Materialreveals how the logic of refinement conditioned the terms of development and redefined our relationship to nature, matter, and one another.
Table of ContentsContents
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Introduction: The Alchemy of Refinement
1 Designing Oil
2 Refi ning Amuay
3 Building the Vista
4 Vibrating Nature
5 Killing the Well
Epilogue: The Ooze of History
NOTES
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
INDEX
