![]() Aesthetics as a “way of seeing” means, for Ponce de León, not a study of art per se but “the socially forged sensory composition of a world” in which artistic practices actively participate and battle with hegemonic representations of what makes for a literal “common sense”: how people intuitively perceive their world. The theoretical import of Ponce de León’s analysis of her case studies is captured in her title, Another Aesthetics Is Possible, which borrows from the Zapatistas’ assertion that “another world is possible,” as well as the claim of one of Ponce de León’s interlocutors, Fran Ilich: “There is no other culture without an other aesthetics, that is to say: an other way of seeing” (48). ![]() Like other groups and artists discussed in this book, Etcétera treats public space as a medium like any other these are aesthetic practices that work not on canvas but on street, building wall, and supermarket window. ![]() Etcétera parodied political theatres-both the spectacles of human rights “truth commissions” and of democratic “electoral pageantry”-through an alternative “materialist theatre” in the tradition of Bertolt Brecht and Augusto Boal that, rather than pacifying its audience with the balm of representation, incites social action (199). This signage not only bypassed the state’s rights-based monopoly on justice through community action it also culture-jammed the state’s monopoly on visually “impos meanings on public spaces and organiz movement.” In doing so, GAC connected a critique of violence under dictatorship with the everyday violence of state-organized class warfare. GAC evolved the grassroots practice of escraches, which used street signs to publicly shame and harass perpetrators of human rights abuses. The book turns to the activities of Etcétera and Grupo de Arte Callejero (GAC) in Buenos Aires in chapters 3 and 4, focusing on different forms of guerrilla urban signage and street theater in the 1990s and early 2000s. Bracho, Ponce de León shows how its queer heightening of somatic and olfactory senses undermines gentrification’s visual logics of zoning and beautification. In a particularly compelling reading of the text of one plaque, a eulogy for the gay bar The Score written by Ricardo A. In the process, it provided a “stereoscopic aesthetics” that enabled players (who interacted both in real-world and virtual space) to “ together in a single field of vision the materiality of colonial practices and their systemic disavowal” (36).Ĭhapter 2 attends to the counter-monuments created by the Pocho Research Society of Erased and Invisible History (PRS), founded by Sandra de la Loza, including the historical plaques erected from 2002–2008 throughout Los Angeles to call attention to Chicanx histories erased by ongoing gentrification and progress narratives, not just displaced “mom and pop” businesses but also queer cruising grounds and other marginalized sex public spaces. Chapter 1 focuses on the alternate reality game Raiders of the Lost Crown (2013), organized by the Diego de la Vega Cooperative Media Conglomerate and its CEO, Fran Ilich, with the premise of recapturing an Aztec headdress from a museum in Vienna. ![]() In four chapters after a theoretical introduction, Ponce de León combines formal readings of aesthetic practices with journalistic coverage and interviews of artists and collaborators. Jennifer Ponce de León’s Another Aesthetics is Possible: Arts of Rebellion in the Fourth World War takes on this project in her study of experimental, trans-disciplinary, and collaborative works of media production and interventions in urban space that advance anticapitalist and anticolonial movements in Argentina, Mexico, and the United States from the past twenty-five years. #Age of rebellion art how toUS List: $27.95.Īs global systems of racial capitalist violence entangle with the decimation of the humanities in the neoliberal university, we in cultural studies need to approach aesthetic practices not just as objects of analysis but as theoretical partners that actively bring into view a fuller account of the world and how to fashion a different one. Durham, NC: Duke University Press 2021, 328 pp. Another Aesthetics is Possible: Arts of Rebellion in the Fourth World War. ![]()
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