Cosmopolitanism in Mexican Visual Culture

Since the colonial era, Mexican art has emerged from an ongoing process of negotiation between the local and the global, which frequently involves invention, synthesis, and transformation of diverse discursive and artistic traditions. In this pathfinding book, María Fernández uses the concept of cosmopolitanism to explore this important aspect of Mexican art, in which visual culture and power relations unite the local and the global, the national and the international, the universal and the particular. She argues that in Mexico, as in other colonized regions, colonization constructed power dynamics and forms of violence that persisted in the independent nation-state. Accordingly, Fernández presents not only the visual qualities of objects, but also the discourses, ideas, desires, and practices that are fundamental to the very existence of visual objects. Fernández organizes episodes in the history of Mexican art and architecture, ranging from the seventeenth century to the end of the twentieth century, around the consistent but unacknowledged historical theme of cosmopolitanism, allowing readers to discern relationships among various historical periods and works that are new and yet simultaneously dependent on their predecessors. She uses case studies of art and architecture produced in response to government commissions to demonstrate that established visual forms and meanings in Mexican art reflect and inform desires, expectations, memories, and ways of being in the world—in short, that visual culture and cosmopolitanism are fundamental to processes of subjectification and identity.

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgments Introduction Chapter 1. Vernacular Cosmopolitanism: Sigüenza y Góngora's Teatro de Virtudes Políticas Chapter 2. Castas, Monstrous Bodies, and Soft Buildings Chapter 3. Experiments in the Representation of National Identity: The Pavilion of Mexico in the 1889 Universal Exposition in Paris and the Palacio de Bellas Artes Chapter 4. Of Ruins and Ghosts: The Social Functions of Pre-Hispanic Antiquity in Nineteenth-Century Mexico Chapter 5. Traces of the Past: Reevaluating Eclecticism in Nineteenth-Century Mexican Architecture Chapter 6. Visualizing the Future: Estridentismo, Technology, and Art Chapter 7. Re-creating the Past: Ignacio Marquina's Reconstruction of the Templo Mayor de Tenochtitlan Chapter 8. Transnational Culture at the End of the Millennium: Rafael Lozano-Hemmer's "Relational Architectures" Conclusion Notes References Index

About the Author :
Maria Fernandez is Associate Professor of Art History at Cornell University. Her work has appeared in journals and edited volumes, including The Art of Art History: A Critical Anthology, The Feminism and Visual Culture Reader, Hacia otra historia del arte en Mexico: La amplitud del modernismo y la modernidad (1861-1920), and At a Distance: Precursors to Art and Activism on the Internet."

Review :
"The sweep of Fernández's study is ambitious, and her ability to navigate discourses and archival materials from so many periods and in several languages is impressive." (Latin American Research Review)