Alejandra Uslenghi

The Latin American Fin de Siècle Revisited: Expanding the Literary Field and Archive

Abstract:“The Latin American Fin de Siècle Revisited: Expanding the Literary Field and Archive” REVIEW ESSAY OF: Cathy Jrade. Delmira Agustini, Sexual Seduction, and Vampiric Conquest; Andrew Reynolds. The Spanish American Crónica Modernista, Temporality, and Material Culture: Modernismo’s Unstoppable Presses. Maite Conde. Consuming Visions: Cinema, Writing, and Modernity in Rio de Janeiro

A Migrant Modernism. Grete Stern's Photomontages

The article analyses the photomontage production of German-Argentine photographer Grete Stern, exploring the continuities and reconfigurations of both formal concerns and socio-political valences between her formative years in Berlin and her work in Buenos Aires, especially with regard to the visual deconstruction of dominant perceptions of femininity and the (female) body in relation to a modernizing culture. The comparative analysis aims at disarticulating a derivative or causal relationship between her Bauhaus roots and her ground-breaking Argentine production, as well as connecting them through a focus on processes of social and aesthetic migration. The articles claim is that by introducing photographic photomontage in the popular female press in late 1940s and early 1950s, Sterns Sueños series not only helped establish a working and middle-class female audience for photographic modernism, but also trained her readers in the visual language of modern culture.

Special Issue on Modern Argentine Photography: Horacio Coppola and Grete Stern

Over the last decade modern and contemporary Latin American art has gained an increased visibility in major museums and universities in the USA and Europe. This has been partly generated as a result of a ‘global turn’ that has invested in making visible artistic production from parts of the world – mainly Latin America, Africa and the Middle East – that had until recently received little or no attention, and also in recognition that attributes like ‘modern’ and ‘contemporary’ were categories that could be applied to productions beyond the US-Western Europe axis. MoMA’s ‘Contemporary and Modern Art Perspectives in a Global Age Initiative (C-MAP)’, the Guggenheim’s ‘UBS MAP Global Art Initiative’, the Getty’s ‘Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA’, and the ‘Estrellita Brodsky’ curatorships in contemporary Latin American art at the Metropolitan Museum, the Tate Modern and MoMA are but some of the venues and platforms through which this move has taken on an institutional form. At the same time, Departments of Art History throughout the USA have begun faculty hires in lines broadly defined as ‘global modernism’ and ‘global contemporary’. If on one hand this widening of the scope of modern and contemporary art is clearly a gain because of the visibility and recognition of artistic practices previously overlooked, and because it means a move beyond past conceptualizations of modernity in those geographical areas deemed marginal, peripheral or primitive (to name only but a few obvious rubrics), on the other hand, the ‘global’ in this scope is sometimes a problematic framework. The often incompatible temporalities and sociopolitical transformations between different regions of the world get frequently eclipsed under the ‘good neighbour policy’ of global initiatives. Simultaneity, homogeneity, and a-historical universalism are the major problems of these kinds of globalisms. But the global today, more than ever, is impossible to deny, thus making crucial the space for new articulations of commonalities and specificities of production from these regions now included and made visible within the USA and Western European academia. This special issue on Horacio Coppola (Argentina 1906–2012) and Grete Stern (Germany 1904–Argentina 1999) is a critical intervention within this broader problem of modern and contemporary global art through a detailed study of the vast majority of the work of these photographers. Given the recent prominence Coppola and Stern have gained both in Europe and in the USA through these ‘global’ initiatives on ‘global modernism’ the intervention is timely and needed. The articles in this issue work against the assumption that modern photography ‘arrived’ in Latin America, immersing their practices in a more complex set of relations and trajectories. The trajectories of Stern and Coppola are explored in their full scope, and the essays dig into the many

Remnants of a Dream World

This epigraph is itself a quote, just as the ideas that this essay presents are prefigured in the image-based historical sensibility that Walter Benjamin formulated as a genuine form of cultural and historical interpretation of the nineteenth century. Benjamin cited Michelet in the first section of his expose for Das Passagen-Werk (The Arcades Project; 1982), “Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth-Century,” and again as the epigraph to “Convolute F: Iron Construction.” The phrase becomes a historiographic leitmotif for his later research and encapsulates the utopian impulse in the capacity of imagination to anticipate what is not yet actual, but conceived as possible: those dream images in which the inadequacies of the social organization are transfigured, and the collective that brings its historical experience into remembrance. In the intricate relationship between these wish images and the residues of their material expression, Benjamin traces the historical origins of the cultural forms of industrial modernity and also deems them the storehouse for humanity’s expressions of utopian desires. He writes in the 1935 expose, “[T]he experiences of such a society … engender, through interpenetration with what is new, the utopia that has left its trace in a thousand configurations of life, from enduring edifices to passing fashions” (Benjamin 5).1 These material configurations of life in the nineteenth century are precisely the stuff that collective utopian dreams were made of. Though viewed from the twentieth century as modernity’s debris and ruins, dusty images, outdated commodities, and remnants of a world once enchanted by the new, they constitute the historical traces of latent utopia.