Aquí se reúnen cuatro décadas del trabajo intelectual de Ida Rodríguez Prampolini; textos antes dispersos en diferentes publicaciones o que incluso nunca habían visto la luz pública. El trabajo de la autora, presentado cronológicamente, permite seguir hechos históricos, vinculados en numerosas ocasiones a las prácticas artísticas. La obra se acopmpaña de cuatro ensayos preliminares a cargo de Rita Eder, Jennifer Josten, James Oles y Cristóbal Andrés Jácome.
En esta obra póstuma, Carlos Monsiváis, con su estilo y erudición únicos, recorre un siglo de la vida cultural de México, si bien, como él mismo confiesa, ésta es una tarea inacabable a la que además se suma la brevedad de la obra, que le obliga a cerrar su crónica en la década de 1980, dejando fuera los movimientos y creadores de los dos últimos decenios del siglo XX. Su recorrido parte de la época del modernismo y pasa por todas las manifestaciones culturales que se desarrollan a lo largo de las siguientes décadas, como la narrativa de la Revolución, el muralismo, la cultura en los años veinte, los Contemporáneos, la poesía de la generación del 50 hasta llegar al año de la ruptura que representa 1968 y las manifestaciones culturales que de él se desprenden.
The first major work in English on Mathias Goeritz (1915-1990), this book illuminates the artist's pivotal role within the landscape of twentieth-century modernism. Goeritz became recognized as an abstract sculptor after arriving in Mexico from Germany by way of Spain in 1949. His call to integrate abstract forms into civic and religious architecture, outlined in his "Emotional Architecture" manifesto, had a transformative impact on midcentury Mexican art and design. While best known for the experimental museum El Eco and his collaborations with the architect Luis Barrag n, including the brightly colored towers of Satellite City, Goeritz also shaped the Bauhaus-inspired curriculum at Guadalajara's School of Architecture and the iconic Cultural Program of Mexico City's 1968 Olympic Games. Josten addresses the Cold War implications of these and other initiatives that pitted Goeritz, an advocate of internationalist abstraction, against Diego Rivera and David Alfaro Siqueiros, ardent defenders of the realist style that prevailed in official Mexican art during the postrevolutionary period. Exploring Goeritz's dialogues with leading figures among the Parisian and New York avant-gardes, such as Yves Klein and Philip Johnson, Josten shows how Goeritz's approach to modernism, which was highly attuned to politics and place, formed part of a global enterprise.
Older people negotiating dance routines, intimacy, and racialized differences provide a focal point for an ethnography of danzón in Veracruz, the Mexican city closely associated with the music-dance genre. Hettie Malcomson draws upon on-site research with semi-professional musicians and amateur dancers to reveal how danzón connects, and does not connect, to blackness, joyousness, nostalgia, ageing, and romance. Challenging pervasive utopian views of danzón, Malcomson uses the idea of ambivalence to explore the frictions and opportunities created by seemingly contrary sentiments, ideas, sensations, and impulses. Interspersed with experimental ethnographic vignettes, her account takes readers into black and mestizo elements of local identity in Veracruz, nostalgic and newer styles of music and dance, and the friendships, romances, and rivalries at the heart of regular danzón performance and its complex social world. Fine-grained and evocative, Danzón Days journeys to one of the genre’s essential cities to provide new perspectives on aging and romance and new explorations of nostalgia and ambivalence.
Alfredo Boulton (1908-1995) was Venezuela's foremost cultural and aesthetic observer of the 20th century. An art critic, cultural historian and photographer, he was highly influential in the development of modernist art and discourse, and of cultural self-definition, in Venezuela and the surrounding region. Boulton's diverse contributions serve as a point of departure in this remarkable selection of art-historical and critical texts by many of the prominent Latin American thinkers of this period, figures whose works and ideas helped to shape the face of contemporary Venezuela. Through the manifestos, correspondences and critical writings of these notable voices of the day, this anthology traces Venezuela's struggle toward modernity and toward a successful, autonomous identify on the international cultural scene. In addition to historical writings, the volume includes newly written critical and explanatory essays by contemporary scholars, providing context and insight to these significant texts that have become constant reference points for generations of artists, critics and art historians.
This concisely written book gives an elementary introduction to a classical area of mathematics—approximation theory—in a way that naturally leads to the modern field of wavelets. The exposition, driven by ideas rather than technical details and proofs, demonstrates the dynamic nature of mathematics and the influence of classical disciplines on many areas of modern mathematics and applications. Key features and topics: * Description of wavelets in words rather than mathematical symbols * Elementary introduction to approximation using polynomials (Weierstrass’ and Taylor’s theorems) * Introduction to infinite series, with emphasis on approximation-theoretic aspects * Introduction to Fourier analysis * Numerous classical, illustrative examples and constructions * Discussion of the role of wavelets in digital signal processing and data compression, such as the FBI’s use of wavelets to store fingerprints * Minimal prerequisites: elementary calculus * Exercises that may be used in undergraduate and graduate courses on infinite series and Fourier series Approximation Theory: From Taylor Polynomials to Wavelets will be an excellent textbook or self-study reference for students and instructors in pure and applied mathematics, mathematical physics, and engineering. Readers will find motivation and background material pointing toward advanced literature and research topics in pure and applied harmonic analysis and related areas.
The art world has become a point of contention within a range of debates and yet, strangely enough, while art criticism has been discussed at length, very little is said about art critics. Following in the footsteps of Lionello Venturi’s History of Art Criticism, in the current volume Lorente provides an updated reassessment of the great art critics from the Enlightenment down to the turn of the millennium. Conceived as a didactic handbook with a recommended bibliography at the end of each chapter, this concise work tells the history of a profession in permanent crisis, while also paying homage to its most infl uential practitioners in different cultural contexts.
Essays on the rise of community-focused art projects and anti-monuments in Mexico since the 1980s. Mexico has long been lauded and studied for its post-revolutionary public art, but recent artistic practices have raised questions about how public art is created and for whom it is intended. In The New Public Art, Mara Polgovsky Ezcurra, together with a number of scholars, artists, and activists, looks at the rise of community-focused art projects, from collective cinema to off-stage dance and theatre, and the creation of anti-monuments that have redefined what public art is and how people have engaged with it across the country since the 1980s. The New Public Art investigates the reemergence of collective practices in response to privatization, individualism, and alienating violence. Focusing on the intersection of art, politics, and notions of public participation and belonging, contributors argue that a new, non-state-led understanding of "the public" came into being in Mexico between the mid-1980s and the late 2010s. During this period, community-based public art bore witness to the human costs of abuses of state and economic power while proposing alternative forms of artistic creation, activism, and cultural organization.
Pierre Bourdieu in Hispanic Literature and Culture is a collective reflection on the value of French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s work for the study of Spanish and Latin American literature and culture. The authors deploy Bourdieu’s concepts in the study of Modernismo, avant-garde Mexico, contemporary Puerto Rican literature, Hispanism, Latin American cultural production, and more. Each essay is also a contribution to the study of the politics and economics of culture in Spain and Latin America. The book, as a whole, is in dialogue with recent methodological and theoretical interventions in cultural sociology and Latin American and Iberian studies.
