Overview

Sabotage is the deliberate disruption of a dominant system, be it political, military or economic. Yet in recent decades, sabotage has also become an artistic strategy most notably in Latin America. In Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, Chile and Argentina, artists are producing radical, unruly or even iconoclastic work that resists state violence, social conformity and the commodification of art. Sabotage Art reveals how contemporary Latin American artists have resorted to sabotage strategies as a means to bridge the gap between aesthetics and politics. The global status of and market for Latin American art is growing rapidly. This book is essential reading for those who want to understand this new, dissident work, as well as its mystification, co-option and commercialization within current academic historiographies and art-world curatorial initiatives.

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9781350276611

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Reviews

Nelly Richard once commented on the difficulty of reading the politics of Latin American contemporary art abroad without reducing the works to a testimonial function or, alternatively, stripping them of their incisive concreteness. This wonderful collection speaks to the emergence of a critical discourse on Latin American art that manages to hold form and politics not just in the balance but to read one through the other: a truly groundbreaking achievement. * Jens Andermann, Professor of Latin American Studies, University of Zurich, Switzerland * Sabotage Art provides a welcome shift of emphasis amidst perennial redefinitions of political art in Latin America. Framing sabotage as a positional choice with regard to the institution allows Halart, Polgovsky Ezcurra and their collaborators to critically interrogate the longstanding association of Latin American art with struggle or adversity for both historical case studies and the market delirium over contemporary art . This book makes for an excellent teaching resource on overlooked artists such as Paulo Bruscky, Enrique Guzman, Marcos Kurtycz, and Edgardo Antonio Vigo, offers fresh examinations of canonized avant-gardes in Argentina and Chile, and considers recent participatory projects in Bogota and Mexico City. Yet it is most valuable in the sum total of its discrete chapters, which together demonstrate a range of new methods for a field now hitting its stride. * Daniel Quiles, Assistant Professor, Department of Art History, Theory & Criticism, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, USA *

Author Information

Sophie Halart is a Visiting Teaching Fellow at the Universidad Catolica de Chile, Santiago de Chile and a Teaching Fellow at University College London, UK, where she received her PhD on contemporary women artists in the Southern Cone. Mara Polgovsky Ezcurra is Lecturer in History of Art at Birkbeck, University of London, UK and received her PhD in Latin American Cultural Studies from the University of Cambridge, UK.

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