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Available From UC Press
Dematerialization
Art and Design in Latin America
Dematerialization examines the intertwined experimental practices and critical discourses of art and industrial design in Argentina, Mexico, and Chile in the 1960s and 1970s. Provocative in nature, this book investigates the way that artists, critics, and designers considered the relationship between the crisis of the modernist concept of artistic medium and the radical social transformation brought about by the accelerated capitalist development of the preceding decades. Beginning with Oscar Masotta’s sui generis definition of the term, Karen Benezra proposes dematerialization as a concept that allows us to see how disputes over the materiality of the art and design object functioned in order to address questions concerning the role of appearance, myth, and ideology in the dynamic logic structuring social relations in contemporary discussions of aesthetics, artistic collectivism, and industrial design. Dematerialization brings new insights to the fields of contemporary art history, critical theory, and Latin American cultural studies.
Karen Benezra is Assistant Professor in the Department of Latin American and Iberian Cultures at Columbia University and an editor of ArtMargins.
"Highly insightful and theoretically sophisticated, Dematerialization presents an original perspective on how artists, designers, and critics working in Latin America sparked a far-reaching transformation in twentieth-century art."—Pedro Erber, author of Breaching the Frame: The Rise of Contemporary Art in Brazil and Japan
"Approaching dematerialization as an interpretative framework, this monograph is both a highly original critical study as well as an exploration of a transformative period in Latin American art, design, and criticism."—Claire F. Fox, author of Making Art Panamerican: Cultural Policy and the Cold War
"In Dematerialization, Karen Benezra breaks new ground by examining Latin American artists and critics who were concerned less with transformations of the art object itself and more with art’s capacity for reflecting on the social—and for generating social transformation. With laser-sharp focus, this smart, concise study pushes against broad brush applications of the label of 'dematerialization' and instead insists that specifically Latin American responses to late capitalism fundamentally foregrounded the question of art’s relationship to society."—Rachel Price, author of Planet/Cuba: Art, Culture, and the Future of the Island
"Approaching dematerialization as an interpretative framework, this monograph is both a highly original critical study as well as an exploration of a transformative period in Latin American art, design, and criticism."—Claire F. Fox, author of Making Art Panamerican: Cultural Policy and the Cold War
"In Dematerialization, Karen Benezra breaks new ground by examining Latin American artists and critics who were concerned less with transformations of the art object itself and more with art’s capacity for reflecting on the social—and for generating social transformation. With laser-sharp focus, this smart, concise study pushes against broad brush applications of the label of 'dematerialization' and instead insists that specifically Latin American responses to late capitalism fundamentally foregrounded the question of art’s relationship to society."—Rachel Price, author of Planet/Cuba: Art, Culture, and the Future of the Island