Mexican Modernity: The Avant-garde And The Technological Revolution

by Rubén Gallo

Katherine Singer Kovacs Prize (Modern Language Association) 2005

In Mexican Modernity , Ruben Gallo tells the story of a second Mexican Revolution, a battle fought on the front of cultural representation. The new revolutionaries were not rebels or outlaws but artists and writers; their weapons were cameras, typewriters, radios, and other technological artifacts, and their goal was not to topple a dictator but to dethrone nineteenth-century aesthetics. Gallo tells the story of this other revolution by focusing on five artifacts that left a deep mark on the literature and the arts of the 1920s and 1930 the camera and its novel techniques for seeing the modern world; the typewriter and its mechanization of literary aesthetics; radio and poetic experiments with wireless communication; cement architecture and its celebration of functional internationalism; and the stadium and its deployment as a mass medium for political spectacle.

Gallo traces the ways artists and writers, armed with these artifacts, revolutionized representation by breaking with the traditional modes of production that had dominated Mexican cultural Tina Modotti rose against the conventions of "artistic" photography by promoting a radically modern photographic aesthetics; typewriting authors rejected the literary precepts of modernismo to celebrate the stridencies of mechanical writing; and young architects abandoned older building materials for the symbolic strength of reinforced concrete.

Gallo uncovers a secret history of Mexican modernity that includes a number of fascinating the pictorialist backlash against Modotti and Edward Weston; the postcolonial Remingtont typewriter; Mexican radio in the North Pole; the campaign to aestheticize cement through journals and artistic competitions; and the protofascist political spectacles held at Mexico City's National Stadium in the 1920s.

Genres: Nonfiction, Art

268 pages, Hardcover

First published December 19, 2005

About the author

Hola, soy Rubén Gallo, autor de Muerte en La Habana, una novela policial ambientada en la noche habanera. He publicado otros libros sobre Cuba — Teoría y práctica de La Habana (2017), Crónicas de una pequeña ciudad mexicana en La Habana (2020) — además de ensayos sobre la cultura mexicana y latinoamericana como Freud en México: historia de un delirio (2015) y Los latinoamericanos de Proust (2016)

Vivo en Nueva York desde hace tiempo y soy fan de André Pieyre de Mandiargues.

Reviews

[Phillip · Rating 3 out of 5]

pretty good survey of modernist movements in mexico, mostly how various artistic disciplines intersected with new technologies (photography, radio, etc.). there's maybe not a great deal of depth in the observations, it feels like a polite introduction, and the writer has a habit of repeating points more than i needed to have them repeated. nonetheless, i was happy to get some perspective on certain mexican modernist artists that i knew only by name. probably a petty comment on my part, but the book is an odd-shaped edition that was difficult to read in bed or lying down or reading in any position other than sitting at a desk with the book on the surface.

[Mills College Library]

701.05097 G172 2010

[Giovanni Gregory · Rating 4 out of 5]

Universalizing Tepito.

[Justin · Rating 3 out of 5]

The book is entertaining and insightful about the influence of modern technologies on Mexico's avant-garde artists and writers. The writing is crisp and the photos are excellent. The chapter on radio, the topic I am most familiar with, is, however, seriously flawed in parts, mainly a result of poor research and hasty mistakes. Some examples: In the photo of the Grand Radio Fair, it is President Obregon in the picture, not, as Gallo writes, El Buen Tono's Ernesto Pugibet, who had been dead for eight years. Apollinaire did not write the poem "Lettre-Ocean" about radio messages sent from his brother in Mexico to France (Mexican radio could not reach past Florida in 1914 and could not reach Europe until 1918), and the expedition in the artic that Gallo discusses did, contrary to his findings, pick up a radio signal from Mexico City--there are a number of 1920s newspaper articles that discuss it. Despite the errors, the book still does a solid job conveying the importance of new technologizes to the cultural landscape of 1920s Mexico.

[Jjmarsh · Rating 2 out of 5]

Great format and conceit, slightly unsurprising in its exposition.