Description
Book SynopsisSophie Halart is a Visiting Teaching Fellow at the Universidad Catolica de Chile, Santiago de Chile and a Teaching Fellow at University College London, UK, where she received her PhD on contemporary women artists in the Southern Cone.
Mara Polgovsky Ezcurra is Lecturer in History of Art at Birkbeck, University of London, UK and received her PhD in Latin American Cultural Studies from the University of Cambridge, UK.
Trade ReviewNelly Richard once commented on the difficulty of reading the politics of Latin American contemporary art abroad without reducing the works to a testimonial function or, alternatively, stripping them of their incisive concreteness. This wonderful collection speaks to the emergence of a critical discourse on Latin American art that manages to hold form and politics not just in the balance but to read one through the other: a truly groundbreaking achievement. * Jens Andermann, Professor of Latin American Studies, University of Zurich, Switzerland *
Sabotage Art provides a welcome shift of emphasis amidst perennial redefinitions of “political art” in Latin America. Framing sabotage as a “positional choice with regard to the institution” allows Halart, Polgovsky Ezcurra and their collaborators to critically interrogate the longstanding association of Latin American art with struggle or “adversity” for both historical case studies and the market delirium over “contemporary art”. This book makes for an excellent teaching resource on overlooked artists such as Paulo Bruscky, Enrique Guzman, Marcos Kurtycz, and Edgardo Antonio Vigo, offers fresh examinations of canonized avant-gardes in Argentina and Chile, and considers recent participatory projects in Bogotá and Mexico City. Yet it is most valuable in the sum total of its discrete chapters, which together demonstrate a range of new methods for a field now hitting its stride. * Daniel Quiles, Assistant Professor, Department of Art History, Theory & Criticism, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, USA *
Table of ContentsList of Illustrations Notes on Contributors Acknowledgements Introduction
Mara Polgovsky Ezcurra and Sophie Halart Part I: Ensnaring, Burning, Trespassing: Material Sabotage 1. Marta Minujin’s Self-Sabotage: From Existentialism to Counterculture
Catherine Spencer 2. Shaman, Thespian, Saboteur: Marcos Kurtycz and the Ritual Poetics of Iconoclasm
Mara Polgovsky Ezcurra 3. Pictorial Eviscerations, Emblems, and Self-Immolation in Mexico: Dissensus in the work of Enrique Guzmán and Nahum B. Zenil
Erica Segre 4. Bureaucratic Sabotage: Knocking at the door of the ‘Big Monster’
Zanna Gilbert Part II: Cannons and Canons: Explosive vs. Implosive Postures 5. Cogs and Clogs: Sabotage as Noise in Post-1960s Chilean and Argentine Art and Art History
Sophie Halart 6. Impossible Objects: Gabriel Orozco’s Empty Shoe Box and Yielding Stone
Natasha Adamou 7. El Museo de la Calle. Art, Economy and the Paradoxes of Bartering
Olga Fernández López 8. Stay at Your Own Risk: Disturbing Ideas of Community in Two Projects by Elkin Calderón
Carla Macchiavello 9. ‘The Space of Appearance’: Performativity and Aesthetics in the Politicization of Mexico’s Public Sphere
Robin Greeley Notes Index
