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- Volume 3, Issue 2, 2014
Journal of Curatorial Studies - Volume 3, Issue 2-3, 2014
Volume 3, Issue 2-3, 2014
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Curating the Nation and the Hemisphere: Mexico and Brazil at the US Centennial Exposition, 1876
More LessInternational expositions offer a lens for understanding the evolution of a national image. This article further posits that they provide common ground where new global partnerships can be forged. Specifically, it examines the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia to demonstrate how the joint presence of the President of the United States and the Emperor of Brazil at the opening ceremonies symbolized the western hemispheric perspective formulating in American identity politics during the late nineteenth century. Pan-American relationships between not only the United States and Brazil, but also between the United States and Mexico, reverberated in multiple aspects of the exposition’s public dimension, and contributed to its success.
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A ‘Primitive’ Latin America on View at the 1889 Exposition Universelle
By Maya JiménezAt the Exposition Universelle in Paris (1889), Mexico’s national pavilion was designed in the Aztec revival style and stood alongside a reconstruction of an Aztec village. These structures, as well as the artworks exhibited within their walls, perpetuated a view of a primitive and unchanged Mexico. Conversely, Venezuelan Arturo Michelena garnered an award for his painting of a French Royalist heroine, and Argentine Eduardo Schiaffino for his depiction of a nude, demonstrating the appeal of European and Classical subjects among exhibition critics. How did these divergent views of Latin America function on the international stage, and particularly at universal expositions? This article seeks to explore the ways through which Latin American countries either addressed or shunned their pre-Hispanic past at the Exposition Universelle, revealing the ways in which their pavilions, artifacts and fine art catered to notions of the ‘primitive’ as much as it did subvert them.
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Occupying Paris: The First Survey Exhibition of Latin American Art
More LessThe first survey of Latin American art ever to be held anywhere in the world took place in Paris at the Musée Galliera in 1924. Rather than showcasing a particular stylistic tendency, organizers conceived of Latin American heritage as the unifying factor behind the show, giving rise to an exhibition format that would persist for the rest of the twentieth century. The stylistic eclecticism of the exhibition compelled critics and audiences to ponder the existence of a Latin American aesthetic and to attempt to pin down characteristic traits common to the region. This article examines the content, reviews and ramifications of this foundational exhibition of Latin American art.
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Cuban Art and Culture In and Around the 1939 New York World’s Fair
More LessDisplays of Cuban art and culture were present at a number of sites associated with the 1939 New York World’s Fair. At the fairgrounds, allegorical murals and sculptures decorated the Cuban national pavilion, while dancers performed at the independently owned Cuban Village in the Amusement Zone. In Manhattan, the Riverside Museum displayed Cuban artworks as part of the US government-sponsored Latin American Exhibition of Fine and Applied Art. This article explores how the concerns and tensions between the organizers of these diverse contexts, each with unique political, economic and cultural motivations, informed presentations of Cuban art and culture in and around the 1939 New York World’s Fair.
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Mexican Art Today: Inés Amor, Henry Clifford and the Shifting Practices of Exhibiting Modern Mexican Art
More LessIn 1935, the Galería de Arte Mexicano opened in Mexico City to advance modern Mexican art. Director Inés Amor developed relationships in the United States to build a transnational network for her artists. Mexican Art Today, a 1943 exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, highlights characteristics of Amor’s curatorial project. Collaborating with curator Henry Clifford, Amor assembled an exhibition that reframed modern Mexican art for US audiences, shifting attention from muralism to easel painting and presenting contemporary achievements without historical and popular contextual examples. Studying Mexican Art Today elucidates the important role played by Amor in shaping the understanding of Mexican art in the United States.
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Staging the Global: Latin American Art in the Guggenheim and Carnegie Internationals of the 1960s
More LessThe Guggenheim and Carnegie Internationals served as influential platforms for curators and critics to propagate their visions of the global art world in the 1960s. As Cold War tensions escalated, much was at stake in the branding of international art and Latin America’s position within it. In these US exhibitions, geopolitical discord and cultural specificity became sublimated in order to stage internationalism in terms of unity and harmony. The exhibition format forced critics and curators to directly confront globalization, inciting attitudes ranging from progressive inclusivity to chauvinistic assertions of western art’s supremacy, and sparking thorny debates regarding international style, formalism, objective quality in art, and cultural categorization.
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Feeling the Past: Display and the Art of Memory in Latin America
More LessMemory is a compelling and recurring topic in contemporary art. This article examines the mechanisms through which Latin American exhibitions and artists’ urban interventions have addressed the violent and traumatic pasts suffered under decades of dictatorships. The representations of these brutal pasts are activated through images and museographic devices that involve not only the architecture of museums and other sites of memory, but also the choreography and experience of the visitor. I argue that even such formal and abstract structures bear an underlying purpose and politics, which is to produce an emotional contact with the past. By analyzing display sites and artworks dealing with trauma, this article problematizes the relationship between space, memory and history.
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‘Where’ Else Could We Talk About?: The Border as Nomadic Site
More LessSince 2005, Mexican artist Teresa Margolles has created a number of installations that address the drug- and gang-related violence that has plagued Mexico’s northern border for the last two decades. Many of these artworks also share a decidedly spatial quality, as Margolles has physically transported material traces of criminal acts to secondary sites. Such site-oriented and performative techniques allow Margolles to present the border as ‘nomadic’, an unhinged site-specificity that widens the scope of the artist’s inquiry from the direct experience of the actual space itself to investigate a larger discourse on the border. This article analyzes Margolles’s What Else Could We Talk About? (2009), curated by Cuauhtémoc Medina, at the 53rd Venice Biennale. Through a theoretical framework of aesthetic and philosophical nomadism, I argue that the exhibition functioned as a critical intervention in producing the border as a space of social, political and institutional critique.
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Jill Magid’s Woman with Sombrero: A Poetic Interrogation of Artistic Legacy
By Anne BarlowThis article on the exhibition Woman with Sombrero (2013) by Jill Magid at Art in General focuses on the artistic methodologies and exhibitionary strategies used by the artist in exploring the legacy of Mexican architect Luis Barragán, whose personal archive remains in Mexico, but whose professional archive now resides in Switzerland. While able to reproduce imagery from the personal archive in Mexico for the purposes of the exhibition, Magid was unable to consult the professional archive or use images of Barragán’s work due to strict copyright restrictions. Designed to remain just within the confines of the law, the resulting exhibition and related performance contained visual references that were both real and imagined, alongside artistic gestures, invitations and correspondences that ultimately reflected Magid’s interrogation of art, ownership and national identity.
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Exhibition Reviews
Authors: Sarah J. Wall, Maria Alejandrina Coates, Biljana Puric, Rana Öztürk and Henry SkerrittThéâtre du Monde Curated by Jean-Hubert Martin, La Maison Rouge, Paris, 19 October 2013–12 January 2014, first shown at Museum of Old and New Art, Berriedale, 25 June 2012–8 April 2013
Luis Paredes, Escapes Y Refugios Curated by Bayardo Blandino in collaboration with Centro de Artes Visuales Contemporáneo de Mujeres an las Artes CAVC/MUA, Museo Para la Identidad Nacional, Tegucigalpa, 5 November 2013–12 January 2014
In Praise of Deserters Curated by Corrado Salzano, Inex Film, Belgrade, 16–28 November 2013
13th Istanbul Biennial: Mom, Am I Barbarian? Curated by Fulya Erdemci, various sites around Istanbul, 14 September–20 October 2013
Sakahàn: International Indigenous Art Curated by Greg A. Hill, Candice Hopkins and Christine Lalonde, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, 17 May – 2 September 2013
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Book Reviews
The Curatorial: A Philosophy of Curating, Jean-Paul Martinon (Ed.) London: Bloomsbury Academic (2013), 280 pp., Paperback, ISBN: 978-1-47252-560-4, £65.00
Scandalous: A Reader on Art and Ethics, Nina Möntmann (ED.) Berlin: Sternberg Press (2013), 178 pp., Paperback, ISBN: 978-1-93410-587-0, €19.00
Institutional Attitudes: Instituting Art in a Flat World, Pascal Gielen (Ed.) Amsterdam: Valiz (2013), Antennae Series No. 8, 288 pp., Paperback, ISBN: 978-9-07808-868-4, €19.50
Art & Textiles: Fabric as Material and Concept in Modern Art from Klimt to the Present, Marcus Brüderlin (Ed.) Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz Verlag (2013), 392 pp., Hardcover, ISBN: 978-3-77573-627-5 (English), ISBN: 978-3-77573-626-8 (German), €49.80
The Global Contemporary and the Rise of New Art Worlds, Hans Belting, Andrea Buddensieg and Peter Weibel (eds) Cambridge, MA: MIT Press with ZKM/Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe (2013), 464 pp., Paperback, ISBN: 978-0-26251-834-5, US$50.00
Art Production Beyond the Art Market?, Karen van den Berg and Ursula Pasero (eds) Berlin: Sternberg Press (2013), 286 pp., Paperback, ISBN: 978-3-94336-594-8, €19.00
Audience as Subject, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts San Francisco: Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (2013), 142 pp., Paperback, ISBN: 978-0-98267-895-4, US$27.00
Visual Cultures as Seriousness, Gavin Butt and Irit Rogoff London and Berlin: Goldsmiths, University of London and Sternberg Press (2013), 88 pp., Paperback, ISBN: 978-3-94336-539-9, £10.00
Artist-Run Spaces: Nonprofit Collective Organizations in the 1960s and 1970s, Gabriele Detterer and Maurizio Nannucci (eds) Zurich, Dijon and Florence: JRP|Ringier in co-edition with Les Presses du reel and Zona (2012), 294 pp., Paperback, ISBN: 978-3-03764-191-0 (English)/978-2-84006-512-0 (French), €20.00
Outrage: Art, Controversy and Society, Richard Howells, Andreea Deciu Ritivoi and Judith Schachter (eds) New York: Palgrave Macmillan (2012), 352 pp., Hardcover, ISBN: 978-0-23035-397-8, US$95.00
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