Contra el canon

About this book

The fall of Paris during World War II marks a turning point in cultural history: the art world becomes a centerless space. With Europe devastated, the utopian impulse, the imagination that it was possible to delineate a future for forms, moves and begins to take place in different settings. After the postwar period, and especially since the sixties, the transformation of languages,typical of the avant-garde and neo-avant-garde unfolds from different scenes in a plot of simultaneities: everywhere and at the same time. Focusing on Latin American art, Andrea Giunta uses a comparative view that manages to break the evolutionary model and demonstrate that innovation does not occur in one place and then replicates in another, as a mechanism that radiates from the centers to the peripheries. The territory in which he tests his hypotheses is broad: the post-war avant-gardes in Buenos Aires, Mexico and Brazil; indigenismo and its reappropriation of traditions, from Xul Solar and Torres García to Punto Poncho; the postcolonial plot in Mohamedi's work and the Brazilian abstraction; Joan Miró and solidarity with Chile; the arguments and platform of second wave feminism in the Ramona de Berni series and Godard's filmography; the sixties and the explosion of the happening, between the Cold War, revolution and dictatorships.