Beyond the Fantastic: Contemporary Art Criticism from Latin America

By: Gerardo Mosquera

Copublished with the Institute of International Visual Arts, London This anthology, edited by Cuban art historian and critic Gerardo Mosquera, offers a wide selection of writings by some of the most important cultural theoreticians of contemporary Latin America. Together they comprise a distinctive corpus of new theoretical discourses, critical of modernity and solidly and pragmatically anti-utopian. The collection balances traditional and popular aesthetic-symbolic production as well as Afro- and Indo-American presences in the visual arts, and covers the whole of the Americans, including the Caribbean and the United States. Contributors: M???a Amor. Pierre E. Bocquet. Gustavo Buntinx. Luis Camnitzer. N??or Garc? Canclini. Ticio Escobar. Andrea Giunta. Guillermo G???-Pe?? Paulo Herkenhoff. Mirko Lauer. Celeste Olalquiaga. Gabriel Peluffo Linari. Carolina Ponce de Le?? Mari Carmen Ram??z. Nelly Richard. Tom??? Ybarra-Frausto. George Y'.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0262631725
• ISBN13: 9780262631723
• Release Date: March 1996
• Publisher: Mit Pr
• Length: 344 Pages
• Weight: 2.00 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.3" x 1.3" x 7.3"

Customer Reviews

must-read

Gerardo Mosquera is a very influential and important art historian. Therefore, it is a really good idea to read ANYTHING he writes. I saw him speak at a university in Mexico DF and he is actually an amazing speaker. (it's much more FUN to hear him talk about his ideas in person...and in Spanish!)

Online-Review in Universes in Universe

Please see "Beyond the Fantastic" an review by Gerhard Haupt. http://www.kulturbox.de/univers/america/beyond/e_haupt.htm //// It is without doubt interesting and significant to note that although Latin American art has, in recent decades, gained growing recognition and distribution throughout the world, the texts by critics and theorists from Latin America have been given little international attention. These texts have appeared in isolated form in journals and exhibition catalogs, most often organized by European or North American curators. This means that outside the sub-continent Latin American art has in many cases not been transmitted by Latin Americans themselves. An external vision can without doubt offer some revealing insights, but in the case of this region, the vision is often too generalized, full of commonplaces or simply the product of a Eurocentric understanding of modernity. It is to this point that the title of this anthology edited by Gerardo Mosquera refers. For the first time, the English-speaking public is offered a collection of major critical and theoretical essays which provide a multiple vision of this art »beyond the fantastic«. In most of these texts, the art of Latin America is the starting point for theoretical analysis and reflection, which make an essential contribution to our understanding of the complexity of contemporary art in general. Thus it cannot be over-emphasized that although this is criticism from Latin America, it is not only for Latin America. The book is important not only to the relatively small number of specialists in Latin American art. Although in the »West« there is recognition of the increasingly polycentric development of the globalizing processes, not enough attention is being paid to the potential for innovation coming from the supposedly »cultural peripheries«. Wolf Lepenies, Rector of the College of Science of Berlin, was quite right to say last year, in the presence of leading personalities from German economic scene, that European societies should leave aside the role of being »teaching« cultures and become »learning« cultures. It is time to finally revise the obsolete structures of thought which pervade the international art debate - still dominated by a »central« point of view and its media machinery - in order to do justice to the complexity and growing interconnection of the art processes across the world. It can't be a matter of enlarging the Western building of thought with just some more rooms around its nucleous. The whole decaying edifice should be demolished and rebuilt in a new collective effort by all its participants. Some progress in this direction would have been made if a book such as Beyond the Fantastic had been recognized not only as a regional study but as an important contribution to the general debate.