{"title":"Geographies of Cuban Abstraction","authors":"Paloma Duong","doi":"10.1353/rhm.2019.0014","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/rhm.2019.0014","url":null,"abstract":"ion may appear superficially coincidental, in other words a mere product of historical circumstance, . . . they were in fact deeply imbricated within a historicist national discourse— cubanía—that provided both an idealist order and the grassroots impetus for action” (3). McEwen traces cubanía to an inaugural, more militant form of cultural nationalism obversely shaped by active resistance to U.S. economic and military imperialism. In McEwen’s exegesis, this cubanista temperament would be nurtured and transformed in the 1940s and 1950s by subsequent polemical engagements with notions like cosmopolitanism, gangsterism, consumerism, and Americanism. This period witnesses the emergence of a second philosophical variant of cubanía, associated as a matter of course to Cuban writer José Lezama Lima and to the intellectual group around the journal Orígenes. This origenista view of culture—the pursuit of a quasi-mystical, transformative aesthetic grounded in teleological ontologies of the national—also runs through the Cuban abstractos profiled in the book, argues the author, albeit conceptually and ideologically adapted to these visual artists’ more politically active endeavors. By historicizing cubanía, McEwen lays the groundwork for an interpretation of the situated politics of abstraction and outlines a comparative framework for the political engagement of three distinct generations of cultural vanguard. And though the author relies on Antoni Kapcia’s descriptive terms of generational cultural nationalisms, her juxtaposition of these categories with the ideological clout of abstraction is a welcome correction to the otherwise reductive tendencies of Kapcia’s taxonomies. These claims are advanced mainly through the story of Los Once, a group of painters and sculptors who emerged in the visual arts scene of Havana in the early 1950s. In this sense,","PeriodicalId":44636,"journal":{"name":"Revista Hispanica Moderna","volume":"72 1","pages":"219 - 228"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2019-12-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1353/rhm.2019.0014","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47072340","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Cronografías: arte y ficciones de un tiempo sin tiempo by Graciela Speranza (review)","authors":"C. Fonseca","doi":"10.1353/rhm.2019.0025","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/rhm.2019.0025","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44636,"journal":{"name":"Revista Hispanica Moderna","volume":"72 1","pages":"238 - 241"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2019-12-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1353/rhm.2019.0025","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44600323","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Beautiful Money; or, What Can Contemporary Art Teach Us about the Neoliberal Economy?","authors":"Pedro R. Erber","doi":"10.1353/rhm.2019.0015","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/rhm.2019.0015","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:In recent years, numerous scholars have called attention to the growing presence of economic rationality in every sphere of contemporary life—including those aspects of human existence portrayed by classical liberal thought as inherently removed from the realm of economic interests. In the realm of contemporary art, which is often described as an exemplary case, it is said that market expertise has replaced critical, aesthetic judgment. However, what if this mode of market expertise and, more broadly, neoliberal reason as such have more in common with aesthetic judgment than one might usually imagine? In reference to the work of visual artists such as Cildo Meireles and novelists ranging from Machado de Assis to Ricardo Lísias, and drawing upon a wide range of theoretical perspectives on contemporary cultural and economic theory, this paper investigates the aesthetic underpinnings of contemporary capitalism.","PeriodicalId":44636,"journal":{"name":"Revista Hispanica Moderna","volume":"72 1","pages":"149 - 159"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2019-12-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1353/rhm.2019.0015","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48967764","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Picturing the Barrio: Ten Chicano Photographers by David William Foster (review)","authors":"Ileana L. Selejan","doi":"10.1353/rhm.2019.0017","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/rhm.2019.0017","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44636,"journal":{"name":"Revista Hispanica Moderna","volume":"72 1","pages":"232 - 235"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2019-12-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1353/rhm.2019.0017","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46715819","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Energy and Abstraction in the Work of Dolores Soldevilla","authors":"Rachel Price","doi":"10.1353/rhm.2019.0021","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/rhm.2019.0021","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Dolores (Loló) Soldevilla (1901-1971) was among the first Cuban artists to work in geometric abstraction, a member of the short-lived Grupo de Diez Pintores Concretos, and someone who continued working in abstraction until her death. In 1957 she also made an important trip to exhibit her art in Caracas, Venezuela, where local aesthetic and political debates would inform the founding of her own gallery in Havana that same year, Galería Color-Luz. After the 1959 Cuban Revolution, however, Soldevilla also penned articles and an experimental novel, and briefly designed toys for the Instituto Nacional de Industrias Turísticas (INIT), an institution that in the early years of the Revolution fostered and oversaw artistic production in a number of unlikely spaces. This article examines Soldevilla's oeuvre from the late 1950s through the mid-1960s to reveal how her foundation in abstraction came to be inflected by three connected pressures: a revolutionary ideology of realizing immediate change and production, debates about the merits of figuration versus abstraction, and mid-century energy-driven developmentalism in an era of petroleum exploration. National plans for energy extraction and tourism in Cuba, philosophical understandings of energy as both actualized and potential, and period debates among Latin American artists and critics over figuration and abstraction all informed both ruptures and continuities in Soldevilla's work during these critical years, manifest in her painting, her novel El farol, her sculptures and in a design for a toy.","PeriodicalId":44636,"journal":{"name":"Revista Hispanica Moderna","volume":"72 1","pages":"161 - 181"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2019-12-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1353/rhm.2019.0021","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46209207","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Foreword: Nature, Market, Media: Explorations in Latin American Art","authors":"G. Montaldo","doi":"10.1353/rhm.2019.0019","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/rhm.2019.0019","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44636,"journal":{"name":"Revista Hispanica Moderna","volume":"72 1","pages":"131 - 134"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2019-12-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1353/rhm.2019.0019","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46660448","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Global? Contemporary? Latin American? Time Matters in/and Art Today","authors":"N. Brizuela","doi":"10.1353/rhm.2019.0012","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/rhm.2019.0012","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This article discusses the work of three artists from Latin America that emerged onto the global art world between the 1990s and the present day and became key representatives of a global and contemporary Latin American art. It begins by pointing out the paradox of specifying a specific a geographic production in the context of a global regime. It argues that there are specific types of temporalities in those oeuvres that secure their entry into the ranks of \"contemporary art\" as the global market around art was configured in the late neoliberal moment. The article suggests that reification in Gabriel Orozco's work, mourning in Doris Salcedo's, and theology in Adrián Villar Rojas's figure temporalities that pass as forms of critique while in fact reinforcing the economic and political mechanisms of the global order. The article ends by proposing a way out of the temporality allowed by the global and contemporary art world.","PeriodicalId":44636,"journal":{"name":"Revista Hispanica Moderna","volume":"72 1","pages":"135 - 147"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2019-12-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1353/rhm.2019.0012","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41541859","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"No hay nación para este sexo: la Re(d)pública transatlántica de las Letras: escritoras españolas y latino-americanas (1824–1936) ed. by Pura Fernández (review)","authors":"R. Briggs","doi":"10.1353/rhm.2019.0022","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/rhm.2019.0022","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44636,"journal":{"name":"Revista Hispanica Moderna","volume":"72 1","pages":"246 - 248"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2019-12-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1353/rhm.2019.0022","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45981890","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Forging the Past: Invented Histories in Counter-Reformation Spain by Katrina B. Olds (review)","authors":"C. Cañete","doi":"10.1353/rhm.2019.0020","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/rhm.2019.0020","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44636,"journal":{"name":"Revista Hispanica Moderna","volume":"72 1","pages":"252 - 255"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2019-12-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1353/rhm.2019.0020","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45290520","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Conversations: The Television Interview in Jaime Davidovich and David Lamelas","authors":"Daniel R. Quiles","doi":"10.1353/rhm.2019.0023","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/rhm.2019.0023","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This article examines the motif of the television interview in the film, video and television work of two Argentinean artists: David Lamelas and Jaime Davidovich. Like many of their generation, Lamelas and Davidovich migrated to the Global North amidst the political instability of the 1960s. Television and the mass media remained central themes of Lamelas's work, from his conceptual art in the late 1960s through his experimental films of the early 1970s to his embrace of video from the mid-1970s onward. In an early series of videos made in Los Angeles, Lamelas staged parodic news interviews as if the viewer were actually watching a television program, making ambiguous reference to ongoing political situations. Davidovich moved to New York in 1963 and remained there until his passing in 2016. He pioneered public-access cable production in the mid-1970s, co-founding the Artists Television Network in 1978 and producing his own show, The Live! Show, in 1979. Interviews with artists, critics and curators—some serious and journalistic, some playful or even farcical—were a fundamental component of both projects. While political hardship and migration were indisputably part of their biographies, both artists used the television interview precisely to undermine geographic or political authenticity as markers of identity. Their television works repeatedly stage encounters in which quasi-journalists engage with outsiders, as if perpetually restaging their own incomplete yet insightful integration into their new contexts of production.","PeriodicalId":44636,"journal":{"name":"Revista Hispanica Moderna","volume":"72 1","pages":"183 - 208"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2019-12-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1353/rhm.2019.0023","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45964177","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}