TRANSPLANTES
I teach art/design history at Syracuse University. En inglés y español.
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Pedro Ramírez Vázquez y Rafael Mijares, Museo de Arte Moderno, Ciudad de México, 1964
Espacio Escultórico, UNAM, Ciudad de México, Mathias Goeritz, Federico Silva, Sebastián, Helen Escobedo, Manuel Felguérez, Hersúa, 1979 (Fotos mías aquí).
This cover of the book La Conquista del Perú por los Peruanos (1959) by architect-politician Fernando Belaúnde Terry (1912-2002) presents an interesting visual reinterpretation of the Inca architectural site of Machu Picchu. The book presents this modernist architect’s agenda to promote an infrastructural renaissance of Peru that emulated the long-lost grandeur of the country’s pre-Columbian ancestors. I discuss the history behind some of these aspirations here, yet this image, among the more interesting of the myriad representations of this fascinating place, is intriguing in its own right.
“Cali: De Película,” cinta documental sobre la ciudad colombiana producida en 1973 (Luis Ospina/Carlos Mayolo) pinta un retrato complejo e interesante de una de las ciudades más fascinantes de América Latina.
Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth
R. Buckminster FullerWe’re in for a ride.
Buckminster Fuller’s perspective on the history of human civilization, and where we can go from here, grabs you by the hair and hurls you into orbit; only then can you catch a glimpse of what he means when he talks about our Spaceship Earth.
Great Pirates were the forefathers of civilization: the early adventurers, explorers, capitalists, entrepreneurs and innovators. They built boats, traveled around the world, and discovered the connections between distant lands, peoples, resources, and later, disciplines of thought. They generalized their thinking, advancing their abstract and comprehensive understandings; and they forced (“encouraged”) others to specialize, so as to become more lethal weapons for the Great Pirate’s wielding. These Great Pirates assembled teams, voyaged on missions, conducted trade, and occasionally established proxy leaders of vulnerable regions all across the globe (his hypothesis on England is pretty entertaining for parties).
And then the end of WWI marked the end of the Great Pirates’ rule. The Second Industrial Revolution brought about a new age of science and technology, and the Great Pirates could no longer manage their specialists. As Bucky puts it, the Great Pirates became specialists themselves, specialists at making money, and ultimately doomed themselves.
With the advent of the computer, and especially the Internet, humanity has all it needs to consolidate its resources and optimize the planet to provide for every individual’s needs and creative desires. Nations are from the age of Great Pirates; computers herald the rise of scientists and engineers as our next leaders, leaders of a united planet.
We are a crew aboard a spacecraft hurtling through space at thousands of miles per hour. Once we quit fighting each other, things can really start to happen.
(via design-voyager)
CUBA COLECTIVA
The making of the Cuba Colectiva Mural, (Havana, 1967), involved the simultaneous participation of a number of artists who collectively produced a large-scale work that sought to chart the future course of the then-young revolution. One of the most significant works of post-revolutionary Cuban art, the mural also belongs to broader histories of participatory art production in the twentieth century. Among other things, the creation of this mural was an attempt to produce socially-involved art in a more inclusive way than mural painting produced in previous decades and in other places. A point of reference for Cuba Colectiva was the history of Mexican Muralism (we see Diego Rivera producing a mural in 1932 above as well), where the authorship of politically-charged murals remained problematically tied to the personas of a small group of heroic artists. Like Mexican Muralism, which extended beyond Mexico’s boundaries (Diego Rivera completed the commission seen above for the Detroit Institute of the Arts), Cuba Colectiva thus belongs to a transnational history of politically-invested mural art, the geographies of which we are only now beginning to better understand.
Mexico Pavilion, Expo ‘67, Montreal, 1967. Defined by a ‘fan’ of hyperbolic paraboloids, the ‘half’ of Mexico’s pavilion for this fair, seen here (the other ‘half’ of the pavilion featured a replica of an ancient Maya structure), is only one of many fascinating artifacts of midcentury exhibitionary culture to be examined in my forthcoming book, The Exhibitionist State: Image Economies of the Mexican ‘Miracle’ (2014).
The cover of Willie Colón’s 1971 LP The Big Break speaks to the image -part real, part constructed- of criminality that many early salsa music records cultivated in order to promote this genre as emblematic of the urban marginality of Latinos in places like New York. Colón’s sound, defined by his use of the trombone, supplemented images like this one with a hard, edgy sound that became distinctive of New York salsa.
The cover of percussionist Ray Barretto’s album Que Viva la Música (1972) exemplifies the intimate relationship between salsa music and the urban imagination. Barretto’s tumbadora appears as a part of his body, and is literally chained to the buildings and streets of Manhattan. This is meant to show that salsa as a musical genre is inseparable from the urban experience of expanding cities like New York, one of the genre’s many ‘birthplaces.’ A course I am co-teaching this spring with ethnomusicologist Sydney Hutchinson (http://buscando-america-salsa.blogspot.com/) explores this expansive context.
The Ghosts of Muralism
http://artsy.net/luis/post/the-ghosts-of-muralism
Some views on Damián Ortega,Controller of the Universe (2007)
DOCUMENTAL DE HELIO OITICICA / HELIO OITICICA FILM
El fascinante documental “H.O.” de Ivan Cardoso (1979) muestra al artista conceptual Hélio Oiticica hablando de su proceso artístico dentro de un contexto de represión política, poco antes de su trágica muerte (1980). Vale la pena una mirada. / Ivan Cardoso’s fascinating film “H.O.” (1979), show conceptual artist Hélio Oiticica discussing his creative process in the midst of a context of political repression, soon before his tragic death (1980). Worth a look.
Frida Kahlo’s Closet is Opened 58 years After Her Death
Frida circa 1926, photo taken by her dad Guillermo.If you are a Frida Kahlo fan – and really, who isn’t – check out the new exhibit at the Frida Kahlo Museum in Mexico City. It opened this past weekend and it takes us inside Frida’s long-locked closet.
Amazing!
(via museumoflatinamericanart)
Image-Machine: Félix Candela’s Palacio de los Deportes
Myth has it that for years Félix Candela’s Sports Palace, which he designed in collaboration with architects Enrique Castañeda and Alfonso Peyrí for the 1968 Olympics held in Mexico City, was so visually striking that it proved potentially detrimental to those visiting the Mexican capital by plane. Clad in rhomboid copper plates attached to an elliptical frame of steel, aluminum, and reinforced concrete, its roof was so reflective of sun-light that airplane pilots landing in the city during the day found it dangerously distracting. In order to prevent such tragic consequences, so the story goes, the roof’s reflectivity was mysteriously dimmed down, its blinding effect somewhat diminished.
