{"id":12572,"date":"2019-09-30T13:45:22","date_gmt":"2019-09-30T13:45:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/artjournalstg.wpenginepowered.com\/?p=12572"},"modified":"2020-07-16T14:44:17","modified_gmt":"2020-07-16T14:44:17","slug":"the-challenge-of-a-global-modernism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/?p=12572","title":{"rendered":"The Challenge of a  Global Modernism"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<h4 class=\"wp-block-heading\"> <br><span style=\"color:#abb8c3\" class=\"tadv-color\">From <\/span><em><span style=\"color:#abb8c3\" class=\"tadv-color\">Art Journal <\/span><\/em><span style=\"color:#abb8c3\" class=\"tadv-color\">78, no. 3 (Fall 2019) <\/span><\/h4>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Kaira M. Caba\u00f1as. <em>Learning from Madness: Brazilian Modernism and Global Contemporary Art. <\/em><\/strong> Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018. 240 pp.; 61 b\/w ills. $45, $10\u201345 ebook <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Sarah J. Townsend. <em>The Unfinished Art of Theater: Avant-Garde Intellectuals in Mexico and Brazil. <\/em><\/strong> Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2018. 312 pp.; 35 b\/w ills. $99.95, $34.95 paper, $34.95 ebook <\/p>\n\n\n\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator\"\/>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Latin America has long occupied a precarious position within a \u201cglobal\u201d history of modernism written from the center: the region\u2019s art has been either dismissed as derivative or celebrated for ocular affinity with \u201cmainstream\u201d Euro-American forms. Although the past few decades have seen a proliferation of serious scholarship on post\u2013World War II Latin American art, the prewar period has garnered significantly less attention. At least part of this neglect derives from the comparative scarcity of painters and sculptors working in the region in the 1920s and the dominance of social realism in the 1930s and 1940s, often slighted as anachronistic and doctrinaire. Two new studies redress these gaps by looking beyond avant-garde art as traditionally conceived and mining sources more germane to the specificities of Latin America\u2019s discrepant modernities. Sarah J. Townsend\u2019s <em>The Unfinished Art of Theater: Avant-Garde Intellectuals in Mexico and Brazil<\/em> explores an array of performative gestures broadly classified as \u201ctheater\u201d to understand what it meant to be \u201cavant-garde\u201d in the 1920s and 1930s on capitalism\u2019s periphery, where development and underdevelopment were part and parcel of a single modernist project. Kaira M. Caba\u00f1as\u2019s <em>Learning from Madness: Brazilian Modernism and Global Contemporary Art<\/em>, in turn, examines the influence of the art of psychiatric patients on emergent theories and institutions of modern art in Brazil from the 1920s to the 1960s. Brazil\u2019s singular impulse to position the art of the insane not as expressions of pure alterity but as internal to a local discourse of modernism provides a cogent model of provincial specificity by which Caba\u00f1as rethinks notions of \u201cinclusion\u201d as they play out in the \u201cglobal\u201d contemporary.<sup class='footnote'><a href='#fn-12572-1' id='fnref-12572-1' onclick='return fdfootnote_show(12572)'>1<\/a><\/sup> Read together, these books suggest both the revisionist promise and the methodological challenge of writing a genuinely global art history able to evaluate local modernism on its own terms and treat modernity not as universal but as complex, heterogeneous, and fundamentally situated.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-gallery aligncenter columns-2 is-cropped wp-block-gallery-1 is-layout-flex wp-block-gallery-is-layout-flex\"><ul class=\"blocks-gallery-grid\"><li class=\"blocks-gallery-item\"><figure><a href=\"http:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/09\/Cabanas.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"370\" height=\"533\" src=\"http:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/09\/Cabanas.jpg\" alt=\"\" data-id=\"12575\" data-link=\"http:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/?attachment_id=12575\" class=\"wp-image-12575\" srcset=\"https:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/09\/Cabanas.jpg 370w, https:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/09\/Cabanas-139x200.jpg 139w, https:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/09\/Cabanas-347x500.jpg 347w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 370px) 100vw, 370px\" \/><\/a><\/figure><\/li><li class=\"blocks-gallery-item\"><figure><a href=\"http:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/09\/Townsend.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"370\" height=\"555\" src=\"http:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/09\/Townsend.jpg\" alt=\"\" data-id=\"12576\" data-link=\"http:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/?attachment_id=12576\" class=\"wp-image-12576\" srcset=\"https:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/09\/Townsend.jpg 370w, https:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/09\/Townsend-133x200.jpg 133w, https:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/09\/Townsend-333x500.jpg 333w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 370px) 100vw, 370px\" \/><\/a><\/figure><\/li><\/ul><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">A situated history of modernism by no means implies isolation, as these volumes attest. The curious appearance of a drawing by an \u201cunknown psychiatric patient from S\u00e3o Paulo\u201d in a Parisian exhibition of art brut organized by Jean Dubuffet in 1949 constitutes a signal event in <em>Learning from Madness<\/em>, establishing a flurry of intellectual and artistic exchange in both directions across the Atlantic. The international notoriety of noted Brazilian physician Os\u00f3rio C\u00e9sar explains the inclusion of the painting, which also exemplifies the cross-cultural development of modernism and advances globalization\u2019s timeline by half a century<em>.<\/em> C\u00e9sar is one of the central protagonists in Caba\u00f1as\u2019s study; his research on the art of his patients at the Juquery hospital outside S\u00e3o Paulo in the 1920s established him among a pioneering psychiatric coterie that included renowned German physician\/art historian Hans Prinzhorn. Like Prinzhorn, C\u00e9sar was also an art critic who published widely on modern art. Yet Caba\u00f1as\u2019s close reading of their early writings yields subtle albeit consequential distinctions in their clinical and critical approaches to patient art. Caba\u00f1as argues that Prinzhorn\u2019s use of patient art as a diagnostic tool preserved the patient\u2019s marginality, reifying the pure alterity that attracted Surrealists and other European modernists to the art of the alienated (as the Surrealists would have called it). C\u00e9sar, in contrast, employed psychoanalytic theory to interpret the art\u2019s symbolism, preserving the objects\u2019 autonomy while positioning patient art within a broader engagement among Brazilian modernists with the writings of Sigmund Freud.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">How the autonomy of patients\u2019 art was institutionalized through its exhibition occupies much of the first two chapters of <em>Learning from Madness<\/em>. Chapter 1 details C\u00e9sar\u2019s collaboration with iconoclastic modern artist Fl\u00e1vio de Carvalho, a friendship that personifies the deeply imbricated relationship of modern psychiatry and modern art in Brazil. A frequent visitor to Juquery, Carvalho was a devotee of Freud who conducted his own experiments with collective psychology (most notoriously walking hatless against a public religious procession, resulting in calls for the artist\u2019s lynching\u2014an event Caba\u00f1as relates in rich analytical and anecdotal detail). Together, Carvalho and C\u00e9sar mounted the first public exhibition of patients\u2019 art in Brazil in 1933, held not in the asylum but in one of the few institutions of modern art in Brazil at the time, the politically and artistically radical Modern Artists\u2019 Club (CAM). Contrasted with Andr\u00e9 Breton\u2019s famed Surrealist exhibition of 1938, which included art of the mentally ill as illustrations of modernist principals, Brazil\u2019s inaugural exhibition\u2014informed by its avant-garde context\u2014set a curatorial precedent, respecting \u201cidentity and provenance\u201d of the artists as artists and their art as art.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Caba\u00f1as turns, in chapter 2, to the place of madness in contentious critical and institutional debates over what the form and character of modern art would constitute in Brazil. Within a year of the founding of South America\u2019s first museum of modern art in S\u00e3o Paulo in 1948, the institution opened a landmark exhibition featuring work by nine patient-artists. Produced under the care of physician Nise da Silveira of Rio de Janeiro\u2019s Engenho de Dentro hospital, the exhibition at S\u00e3o Paulo\u2019s Museu de Arte Moderna (MAM-SP) predated similar efforts in Europe and the United States by more than a decade. Caba\u00f1as argues that the institutionalization of modern art produced a policing of patient art, eschewing those who produced figurative work as incompatible with Brazilian modernism. The curatorial mandate for abstraction suggested that madness could accommodate Brazilian modernity, but only so long as it \u201cassimilate to a particular conception of aesthetic modernism based on autonomy and aesthetic quality\u201d (58). Adherents of figuration, in turn, decried abstraction\u2019s association with madness, seeing in it a deficiency of reason and expertise at odds with modernity. In Brazil and France the value of patient art for the avant-garde resided in its challenge to bourgeois artistic and social norms, yet Caba\u00f1as critiques the French reception of patient art as \u201cpure spontaneous expression\u201d for \u201cupholding madness as a myth\u201d (76). <em>Learning from Madness <\/em>depicts a Brazilian context where artists and critics worked within the art studios of mental institutions, which expanded significantly with the increased interest in patient art. Although not explicitly stated, it is suggested that this experience exposed the Brazilian art world to \u201cdisciplinary subjugation\u201d (77) that informed patient creativity, which was denied by the French avant-garde, and is critical to Caba\u00f1as\u2019s broader critique of contemporary practices posed in the second half of the book.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The twofold connotations of \u201cautonomy\u201d implied in these debates\u2014conflating the autonomy of patients\u2019 art with national cultural autonomy\u2014are confirmed in chapter 3, which turns from the institutional to the theoretical. The chapter delivers a critical reassessment of the implications of Gestalt theory in the writings of M\u00e1rio Pedrosa in light of his work with Silveira at Engenho de Dentro and his publications on patient art. Caba\u00f1as\u2019s identification of what she calls a \u201cphysiognomic turn\u201d in Pedrosa\u2019s interpretation of Gestalt\u2014which softened the emphasis on reason and vision with \u201cphysiognomic\u201d faculties sensitive to the more affective properties of form\u2014has stunning implications for the history of postwar Brazilian modernism. The late 1950s witnessed what historiography has consecrated as a \u201crupture\u201d between the generally two-dimensional, geometric aesthetics of concrete art and its neoconcrete reaction, which focused on the corporeal and the participatory. Yet Pedrosa\u2019s \u201cphysiognomic turn\u201d reduces the distance between the Gestalt theories that underpinned concretism and the interest in phenomenology that galvanized neoconcretism, suggesting less rupture than continuity. More than a trivial question of terminology, this revision calls into question the foreign origins of the country\u2019s most highly regarded modernist patrimony in that Max Bill\u2019s participation in the 1951 S\u00e3o Paulo Biennial is widely considered the flash point of neoconcretist thought. The influence of Silveira\u2019s patients on Pedrosa\u2019s thinking repositions neoconcretism within a unique national trajectory dating to the 1920s, thus provocatively placing its inception in the eminently local forms of abstraction produced through patients\u2019 art.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">This locally situated history of Brazilian modernism serves as a point of departure for the reassessment of curatorial strategies of inclusion that, in the second half of the book, reveals they at once herald the global contemporary and vex its practices. The final two chapters employ the example of Brazilian mental patient Arthur Bispo do R\u00f3sario as conduit between the historic-aesthetic inquiries that opened the book and the polemic-ethical focus of its conclusion. Chapter 4 outlines a rich profile of this immensely popular yet misunderstood figure known as \u201cBispo,\u201d institutionalized since the 1930s, who became posthumously famous in the 1980s for his apparel and constructions made from found objects. Caba\u00f1as analyzes his work not as \u201cart\u201d (which Bispo himself denied) but as a resistant counterpower against his institutionalization, critiquing Brazilian curators and critics for their formalist approaches that \u201caffirm the pure autonomy of his work\u201d (121), thus allowing its exhibition as modern art. In a gesture anathema to the discursive legacies documented in the first three chapters, Caba\u00f1as calls for recognition of Bispo\u2019s psychological and physical abjection so as not to merely liberate his work from \u201cone type of epistemic control (psychiatry)\u201d only to \u201cinscribe the work within another\u201d (11). Chapter 5 extends this critique to contemporary exhibition circuits. Discussing Bispo\u2019s prominence at the 2012 S\u00e3o Paulo Biennial and 2013 Venice Biennale, she reproaches the tendency toward pseudomorphism\u2014the assumption that \u201cvisually similar forms yield similar meanings\u201d (123) that has facilitated the fraught entrance of outsider art into the global contemporary. Yet Caba\u00f1as\u2019s study suggests how difficult a truly situated interpretation can be, in that her focus on the clinical and critical is at the expense of the social and political context. Indeed, the discourses of madness and modernism so meticulously delineated in the first three chapters appear oddly hermetic. Removed as this narrative is from the machinations of history and society, the fact that it unfolds in Brazil seems oddly irrelevant, as if it could have happened anywhere.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><em>The Unfinished Art of Theater<\/em>, in contrast, positions Mexican and Brazilian artistic production in a rich ideological and social landscape of the 1920s and 1930s marked by a tension between rapid progress and the delay, dependency, and discontinuity it produced in Latin America. \u201cUnfinishedness\u201d becomes a central metaphor for the antinomies of modernity, invoking a host of unrealized modernist spectacles, alternately frustrated by developmentalist utopian ambitions and the dystopian realities of underdevelopment. Unlike in Caba\u00f1as\u2019s account, the state looms large in Townsend\u2019s study, appearing as modernism\u2019s custodian and antagonist as represented by antithetical anecdotes that bookend the volume. The book opens in Mexico with a pharaonic celebration of the revolution\u2019s youth and progress in the newly constructed sixty-thousand-seat national stadium. The performance by some five thousand schoolgirls is interrupted by dozens of them fainting from sunstroke, an eerie harbinger of the failure that will see the razing of the state-of-the-art stadium (due to shoddy construction) ten years later. The book concludes with the closure of Fl\u00e1vio de Carvalho\u2019s experimental theater by Brazil\u2019s notorious secret police during the authoritarian Vargas regime of the 1930s, which, ironically, thwarted the staging of an unperformable production intended to feature an all-black cast of thousands and fantastical talking horses.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Between these spectacular benchmarks unfolds a dizzying panoply of oddly unstageable proposals and interrupted, incomplete, or unrepeated undertakings of \u201ctheater,\u201d broadly conceived to include ethnographic opera, puppetry, radio, phonographic recording, and architecture. The first two chapters treat theater in its more familiar form to rethink the central trope of synthesis relative to revolutionary ideology. Exemplary of Townsend\u2019s penchant for wordplay and coincidence that animates her text is her exploitation of the double meaning of <em>ensaio<\/em>, which translates as both \u201cessay\u201d and \u201crehearsal,\u201d to offer a revisionist account of Jos\u00e9 Vasconcelos\u2019s seminal essay on Mexican identity, <em>La raza c\u00f3smica<\/em> (<em>The Cosmic Race<\/em>)<em>. <\/em>The secretary of public education in charge of the development of postrevolutionary culture, Vasconcelos embodies the unevenness at the crux of Townsend\u2019s inquiries: a conservative bureaucrat with a predilection for classicism who conscripted the avant-garde to a massive popular (re)education project. Townsend consults a range of eclectic sources, including the design of the national theater-stadium, rehearsals for a massive performance to be staged within, and other Vasconcelos texts, most importantly a little-known \u201ccloset drama\u201d (a play never intended to be performed) entitled <em>Prometeo vencedor <\/em>(<em>Prometheus Triumphant<\/em>), to probe the divide between art and ideology and to liberate Vasconcelos\u2019s construction of \u201csynthesis\u201d from the narrow racialist ideologies misattributed to it.<sup class='footnote'><a href='#fn-12572-2' id='fnref-12572-2' onclick='return fdfootnote_show(12572)'>2<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Chapter 2 examines the regional theater project spearheaded by Vasconcelos and the Secretariat of Public Education (SEP) aimed at incorporating indigenous tradition into national culture. The chapter focuses primarily on the only dramatic performance ever produced by the avant-garde Estridentistas, <em>Teatro del Murci\u00e9lago <\/em>(<em>Theater of the Bat<\/em>)\u2014which the author notes was \u201ccuriously un-avant-garde.\u201d Townsend contrasts the Estridentista project to the synthetic theater of the Paris-based Soviet \u00e9migr\u00e9 group Chauve-Souris, which inspired the Mexican version. Whereas Chauve-Souris\u2019s synthesis of class and labor aimed to critique and transgress the exploitative nature of primitivist accumulation, <em>Teatro del Murci\u00e9lago<\/em> performed folk and indigenous cultures inscribed in \u201cpost-revolutionary labor regimes and institutions.\u201d The divergent contexts and forms prompt Townsend to distance Mexico\u2019s synthetic theater from its predecessor\u2019s critique of capital, repositioning it in an affective economy in which emotion circulated with the itinerant performance of popular traditions, where it amassed emotional and cultural capital with which to bolster national identity and foreign economic alliances.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The book\u2019s inclusion of the Estridentistas is one of its most compelling contributions, revealing a nuanced image of the Mexican avant-garde often obscured by the pictorial and historiographic bombast of revolutionary muralism. The examination of Estridentistas forays into radio and puppet theater in chapter 3 presents one of the book\u2019s most cogent allusions to the regional vagaries of capitalism and the local avant-garde\u2019s arbitration thereof through the playful robot puppet Troka el Poderosa (Troka the Powerful). Puppet theater was a consummately traditional art form, employed by the SEP in its massive literacy campaigns in which several ex-Estridentistas (for by then the movement had collapsed) were instrumental. Despite the importance of Troka to Townsend\u2019s analysis, the puppet\u2019s identity as an Estridentista marionette relies on an \u201cunsubstantiated\u201d claim that he appeared in puppet theater and a contemporary toy theater production celebrating Estridentismo (122). That the science-fiction character entered the state\u2019s folk-based ideological repertoire as a means to naturalize the demands of industry in a largely agricultural society charged Troka with contradiction, only exacerbated by the puppet\u2019s move to radio when he appeared in several broadcasts in 1933. Townsend\u2019s inquiries concern the reception of new media, a consideration that complicates the equation of technology and progress often measured solely by production. Underscoring the discontinuities of modernity, the chapter ends with a whimsical image of children drawing their own versions of the archaic-futuristic Troka and sending them in to the radio station, thus embodying the disembodied voice of Troka and making the one-way broadcast of the state dialogic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><em>The Unfinished Art of Theater<\/em> comprises six discrete essays loosely tied together by common themes and intersecting inquiries. Thus the author makes little effort to connect the final three chapters on Brazil to any prior observations about Mexico. Situated in the industrial mecca of S\u00e3o Paulo, the chapters consider how modernism\u2019s relation to capitalism appears quite different in Brazil. Chapters 4 and 5 look primarily at poet M\u00e1rio de Andrade in the interdisciplinary undertakings that earned him the moniker \u201cPope of Modernism.\u201d Chapter 4 positions him as a dramatic participant in the 1922 Week of Modern Art, a movement famously born in S\u00e3o Paulo\u2019s stately Theatro Municipal that, as Townsend points out, ironically produced no avant-garde theater. Andrade\u2019s discourse on modernism at the event, which was not presented on the stage but shouted in a stairwell over the jeers of the public, precipitates a profile of shame and abjection tied to his mixed-race, queer identity, which Townsend extends to national aesthetics. Chapter 5, in turn, presents him as an ethnographer, juxtaposing his explorations of Brazil\u2019s remote cultures with a fascinating account of the arrival of phonographic recording and the location of the Victoria Talking Machine Company in S\u00e3o Paulo. Intended to distribute foreign music, namely opera, against which modernism mobilized, the recording industry arrived amid growing national enthusiasm for popular music such as samba, and nationalized its enterprise. Townsend explores Andrade\u2019s recordings of popular music, his avant-garde novella <em>Macuna\u00edma<\/em> (famous for its traversal of Brazil\u2019s cultural heterogeneity), and his little-known plans to adapt the story to opera to examine how all of these endeavors alternately sought to decontextualize, recontextualize, and archive national culture.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Chapter 6 functions as a sort of conclusion, bringing the study into its contemporary relevance and issuing a trenchant defense of the necessity of peripheral modernisms to the understanding of modernism writ large. The chapter examines Fl\u00e1vio de Carvalho\u2019s experimental theater, staged at the CAM, a critical institution in the development of Brazilian modernism that also appears in Caba\u00f1as\u2019s study and warrants significantly more scholarly attention. Townsend examines poet Oswald de Andrade\u2019s unstageable play <em>O homem e o cavalo<\/em> (The man and the horse) to expand the definition of total theater. Defying interpretations of the play as a \u201charbinger of a theatrical revolution that never made it across the Atlantic\u201d (211)\u2014a characterization that, nonetheless, epitomizes the unfinishedness, dependency, and delay she attributes to the avant-garde\u2014Townsend studies the play on its own terms, claiming its author uses avant-garde forms to create a different model of art \u201cpremised on the work\u2019s incompletion and its incompatibility within revolution and within capitalism itself\u201d (212). Her positioning of the resultant form not as indebted to Europe but as anti-imperialist resistance is not to claim Oswald de Andrade\u2019s removal from total theater but to expand the concept of total theater through the inclusion of Brazil.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Like <em>Learning from Madness<\/em>,<em> The Unfinished Art of Theater<\/em> thus bespeaks a more pluralistic conceptualization of modernism based on a multiplicity of experiences with modernity that complicates claims of universalism. Accommodating the vital exchange that attended modernism\u2019s global itineraries, Townsend demonstrates an encyclopedic command of both Western theory and Latin American intellectual and cultural history. Yet at times the assiduous references and comparisons beyond Latin America beg a certain intellectual pseudomorphism, that is, a tendency to employ Western theory less as a hermeneutic strategy than for legitimacy, or to quote Caba\u00f1as, \u201cas a way of lifting the work into the realm of high art\u201d (122). After a paragraph engaging Ezra Pound, W. B. Yeats, Georg Simmel, \u00c9mile Jaques-Dalcroze, and Richard Wagner, among others, to understand Vasconcelos, Townsend remarks that \u201cVasconcelos doesn\u2019t cite any of these ideas\u201d (41). This concession prompted me to wonder how often scholars of Western art employ non-European theory to expand <em>their <\/em>analysis. If this happens, it is not often enough. By example and polemic both of these books issue a call not just for situated approaches to Latin American and other \u201cperipheral\u201d modernisms, but likewise for the provincialization of American and European narratives of modern art through which we can construct a genuinely inclusive account of global modernism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator\"\/>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><a href=\"https:\/\/stonecenter.tulane.edu\/articles\/detail\/38\/Edith-Wolfe\"><strong>Edith A. G. Wolfe<\/strong><\/a> is administrative assistant professor and assistant director of the Stone Center for Latin American Studies at Tulane University, New Orleans. She has a PhD in art history from the University of Texas at Austin with a focus on Latin American modern art. Her writing has appeared in <em>The Art Bulletin<\/em>, <em>The Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology<\/em>, and <em>KulturConfus\u00e3o: On German-Brazilian Interculturalities<\/em> (De Gruyter, 2015) and will appear in the Museum of Modern Art\u2019s forthcoming <em>Among Others: Blackness at MoMA<\/em>. Her interests include comparative cosmopolitanisms, transnational and diasporic cultures\/identities, postcolonialism and subaltern expression, and the cultural politics of exhibition practices.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator\"\/>\n\n\n<div class='footnotes' id='footnotes-12572'><div class='footnotedivider'><\/div><ol><li id='fn-12572-1'> Caba\u00f1as explains in a note on terminology (11) that she opts for the use of the terms \u201cpatient-artist,\u201d \u201cpatient art,\u201d and \u201cpatient\u2019s creative production.\u201d She also at times uses \u201casylum art,\u201d \u201cart of the insane,\u201d \u201cart of the alienated,\u201d and \u201cpsychopathological art\u201d in their historical usage. <span class='footnotereverse'><a href='#fnref-12572-1'>&#8617;<\/a><\/span><\/li><li id='fn-12572-2'> <em>The Cosmic Race <\/em>has been read canonically as a call for racial homogenization, which at the time of its publication seemed radical (in its defying of social Darwinist predictions of racial degeneration) but was also code for \u201cwhitening.\u201d Townsend argues that the work is not crucial in Vasconcelos\u2019s oeuvre (and even that it is a \u201cprologue,\u201d not a true essay) and that if one reads these related materials, \u201csynthesis\u201d applies to more than race, extending to spirituality, culture, and \u201cliterary genres.\u201d This critiques the ideological co-optation of Vasconcelos and his recent discrediting by scholars who associate him with the politically bankrupt Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) that held power until 2000. She argues that <em>Prometheus Triumphant<\/em> is not ideology but rather a deconstruction of how ideology functions; the stadium, meanwhile, functions as an ideology. <span class='footnotereverse'><a href='#fnref-12572-2'>&#8617;<\/a><\/span><\/li><\/ol><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Edith A. G. Wolfe on two recent studies of &#8220;discrepant modernities&#8221; in Latin America<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":12583,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"kia_subtitle":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12572","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-from-art-journal",""],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12572","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=12572"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12572\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/12583"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=12572"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=12572"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=12572"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}