"The first exhibition to offer a critical assessment of the artistic experimentation that took place in Mexico during the last three decades of the twentieth century. The exhibition carefully analyzes the origins and emergence of techniques, strategies, andmodes of operation at a particularly significant moment of Mexican history, beginning with the 1968 Student Movement, until the Zapatista upraising in the State of Chiapas. Theshow includes work by a wide range of artists, including Francis Alys, Vicente Rojo, Jimmie Durham, Helen Escobedo, Julio Galán, Felipe Ehrenberg, José Bedia,Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Francisco Toledo, Carlos Amorales, Melanie Smith, and Alejandro Jodorowsky, among many others. The edition is illustrated with 612 full-colorplates of the art produced during these last three decades of the twentieth century reflect the social, political and technical developments in Mexico and ranged from painting andphotography to poster design, installation, performance, experimental theatre, super-8 cinema, video, music, poetry and popular culture like the films and ephemeral actionsof 'Panic' by Alejandro Jodorowsky, Pedro Friedeberg's pop art, the conceptual art, infrarrealists and urban independent photography, artists books, the development ofcontemporary political photography, the participation of Mexican artists in Fluxus in the seventies and the contribution of Ulises Carrión to the international artist book movement and popular rock music, the pictorial battles of the eighties and the emergence of a variant of neo-conceptual art in 1990. The exhibition is curated by Olivier Debroise, Pilar García de Germenos, Cuauhtémoc Medina, Álvaro Vázquez Mantecón"--Provided by vendor.

The concept of the avant garde is highly contested, whether one consigns it to history or claims it for present-day or future uses. The first volume of The Idea of the Avant Garde – And What It Means Today provided a lively forum on the kinds of radical art theory and partisan practices that are possible in today’s world of global art markets and creative industry entrepreneurialism. This second volume presents the work of another 50 artists and writers, exploring the diverse ways that avant-gardism develops reflexive and experimental combinations of aesthetic and political praxis. The manifest strategies, temporalities, and genealogies of avant-garde art and politics are expressed through an international, intergenerational, and interdisciplinary convocation of ideas that covers the fields of film, video, architecture, visual art, art activism, literature, poetry, theatre, performance, intermedia and music.

"Non-literary Fiction examines contemporary art produced in Latin America in reaction to the growing tide of neoliberalism with its purging of specific social, ethnic, and racial meanings. Over decades, military juntas throughout South and Central America (often supported by the US) have brutally restricted freedom of movement and speech and caused whole segments of their populations to "disappear." Gabara shows how many Latin American artists since the late 1950s have strategically positioned their art as "fictions" in response to the social death and unspeakable violence that undergirds their experience. By "fictions," Gabara means a kind of art that encourages a beholder or participant to create the work's meaning for herself, out of her own experience, thus engaging in fabulation. She brings together artists working across Latin America, in diaspora, and in the US to offer a pathway out of the nationalistic frameworks that generally attend Latin American studies ("Mexican art," "Brazilian art," etc.) She builds a case regarding nonliterary fictions through nuanced readings of works by many artists, from famous ones such as Lygia Clark, Hélio Oiticica, and Francis Alÿs to emerging artists Abraham Cruzvillegas, Amalia Pica, and Chemi Rosado-Seijo, to Latinx artists such as Asco, Raphael Montañez Ortiz, and Ruben Ortiz Torres, engaging work within the political frameworks of Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the US"--

This anthology of articles selected from The Journal of Artists’ Books contains some of the best critical writing on artists’ books produced in the last quarter of a century. Driven by the editorial vision of artist Brad Freeman, JAB began as a provocative pamphlet and expanded to become a significant journal documenting artists’ books from multiple perspectives. With its range of participants and approaches, JAB provided a unique venue for sustained critical writing in the field and developed a broad subscriber base among institutional and private collectors and readers. More than two hundred writers and artists from nearly two dozen countries around the globe were published in its pages. The JAB Anthology contains contributions by many renowned figures in the field including: Anne Moeglin-Delcroix, Janet Zweig, Monica Carroll, Adam Dickerson, Alisa Scudamore, Mary Jo Pauly, April Sheridan, Doro Boehme, Gerrit Jan de Rook, Océane Delleaux, Brandon Graham, Jérôme Dupeyrat, Ward Tietz, Paulo Silveira, Philip Cabau, Leszek Brogowski, Lyn Ashby, Tim Mosely, Debra Parr, Pedro Moura, Levi Sherman, Catarina Figueiredo Cardoso, Isabel Baraona, and the editors.

With insightful essays and interviews, this volume examines how artists have experimented with the medium of video across different regions of Latin America since the 1960s. The emergence of video art in Latin America is marked by multiple points of development, across more than a dozen artistic centers, over a period of more than twenty-five years. When first introduced during the 1960s, video was seen as empowering: the portability of early equipment and the possibility of instant playback allowed artists to challenge and at times subvert the mainstream media. Video art in Latin America was—and still is—closely related to the desire for social change. Themes related to gender, ethnic, and racial identity as well as the consequences of social inequality and ecological disasters have been fundamental to many artists’ practices. This compendium explores the history and current state of artistic experimentation with video throughout Latin America. Departing from the relatively small body of existing scholarship in English, much of which focuses on individual countries, this volume approaches the topic thematically, positioning video artworks from different periods and regions throughout Latin America in dialogue with each other. Organized in four broad sections—Encounters, Networks and Archives, Memory and Crisis, and Indigenous Perspectives—the book’s essays and interviews encourage readers to examine the medium of video across varied chronologies and geographies.

By Betty Bright.