Modernism Notes

‘One is never rasquache, it is always someone else, someone of a lower status, who is judged to be outside the demarcators of approved taste and decorum’ (p. 58, Mercer)

‘Latin America is the interwining process of politics, economics, and culture. Latin America is no exception, even as the modernization meant to inaugurate new forms of human relations has yielded contrary results in the region’s deeply unequal societies. We look at terms like ‘modernization’, ‘modernity’ and ‘modernism’ as wel as authors who consider Latin America a ‘problem’ that has allowed artists and intellectuals to ask important questions about nationhood, identity, and modern life.’ (p. 284, Coffee & Tejada)

“The encounter between Europe and the ‘Indies’, and the ‘subjection of one by the other, has been known throughout history by several names: invasion, migration or foundation’ (p.284 Coffee & Tejada)

‘Latin American modernism, by necessity, engages with the effects of colonization and its contemporary legacies. This dialectic between past and presents differs from the rhetorical rejection of the past that European modernists often proclaimed. Likewise, Latin American modernists recognized their ‘errancy’ within the ‘wesr’’ (p. 284, Coffee & Tejada)

‘indigenous subjects , wmen, and peoples of African descent qwew often depicted as compulorsy to national culture but estranged from modern life, or so generalized and idyllic as to be emptied of active historical meaning’ (p.287, Coffee & Tejada)

‘Race is central to Latin American modernism in figurative traditions… Frida Kahlo’s The Two Fridas (1939).. engages with regional identity and the legacies of conquest… depicts a divided self redoubled in the viewers vision split between an indigenous Tehuana dress and European Victorian attire.’ (p. 288, Coffee & Tejada)

“Kahlo has us watch what women undergo with their bodies, from birth to death, by nature and by accident” (p. 22, in her own image)

“altering certain fatcs, such as her date of birth … to make it coincide with the 1910 Mexican Revolution and called herself ‘the daughter of the revolution” (p,. 74, in her own image)

“the mob grabed Frida’s hands and clung to them, refudsing to let go of this woman who had come to symbolize Mexico … Frida’s seemingly private self portraits were also allegories of Mexico’s public search for a utopian social body in its embattled post-Revolution state.” (p. 88, in her own image)

“Latin Americans have lived in a representational universe stigmatized by the trauma of an identity fractured by the conflict between the European paradigm of a universalizing culture and a substrata of experiences considered irreducible to the imposed logic of historical rationalization and cultural symbolism ” (p.139, beond the fantastic)

“To suppress or to neutralize considersations of gender … is tantamount to playing directly into the hands of the hegemonic male-dominated culture” (p.145, beyond the fantastic)

“at the core of this problem lies the inadequacy of the conceptual framework that informs North American curatorial practise to deal with the complex logic that gave rise to modern art in a continent… described… as the continent of ‘semi’, i.e. semi-modern, semi-developed, semi- European, semi-indigenous” (p.231, beond the fantastic)

“questioning the validity of the term ‘Latin American art’ itself, for in reality no single identity for the countries south of the boarder exist” (p. 231, beond the fantastic)

“At the heart of the Euro-American modernism there has always been an unilinear concept of enlightened progress that was destined to justify colonialism… led in turn to the compilation of a vast reservoir of ‘primitive’, ‘exotic’ sources that since the early part of the twentieth century has resulted in an alternative projection of modernity based on the irrational, the primitive and the unconscious.” (p, 232, beyond the fantastic)

“From the point of view of a North American of European curator, only Surrealism cab provide the repertoire of irrational, exotic sources by which to accommodate the development of the types of societies represented in Latin America.” (p. 232, Beyond the fantastic)

“they thought I was a surrealist, but I wasn’t. I never painted dreams. I painted my own reality.” (p. 87, in her own image)

ABOUT IMAGES OF MEXICO“taking places amid attempted by national elites to modernize countries long subsumed under colonialism, their efforts are generally recognized by Latin Americans as leading to the birth of a self-consciousness (or identiy) for Latin American art… enabled the viewer to appreciate the ways in which Latin American artists approached the styles of European movements and adapted them to the necessities of their own time and place. ” (p. 234, beyond the fantastic)

“this process implied… revising and tearing apart artistic codes in order to reconstruct them from their own critical perspective. Such was the case for the Mexican muralists… combined the formal experiments of post-First World war cubism and futurism with indigenous and historical subject matter.” (p.234, beyond the fantastic)