Irradiador: revista de vanguardia, 1–3 (1923) [Spanish]
Filed under magazine | Tags: · art, avant-garde, concrete poetry, estridentismo, literature, mexico, poetry, politics
“The Irradiador journal was edited by the artist Fermín Revueltas (1902-1935) and was the major early voice for the Mexican avant-garde movement called Estridentismo. The journal was short-lived, and only saw three issues: September, October, and November of 1923. Still, it saw contributions by major players in the international avant-gardes, all the while staying carefully attuned to Estridentismo‘s present social concerns for post-revolutionary Mexico.
The journal’s foremost concern was the propagation of the new aesthetics in Mexico, and furthering the cultural project of the Mexican revolution. Irradiador, it promised in its motto, ‘Will make reactionaries lose sleep, and will affirm all the anxieties of the present hour.’
The journal featured woodcuts, sculptures, paintings, poems, and articles on subjects as diverse as archaeology and the petroleum industry. Its first issue contains a calligram by none other than the muralist Diego Rivera–an important endorsement for a nascent avant-garde movement like Estridentismo. It also contained a poem by the Argentine Jorge Luis Borges, which bolsters the international credibility of the Mexican movement.
Other important poets, writers, and artists to be featured over the three issues: Salvador Gallardo, Germán List Arzubide, Kyn Tanya, Juan José Tablada, and the U.S. photographer Edward Weston, whom the magazine inexplicably calls ‘Dwad Weston’ (Irradiador 3, inside cover).
The magazine’s aesthetic is a combination of Mexican images–such as Charlot’s woodcuts of indigenous workers–and modern technology, promoting the ‘Jazz Band, petroleum, New York. The city all polarized crackling in the radiotelephonic antennas…’ (‘Inaugural Irradiation’, 1).” (sourced from Kelly Scott Franklin’s blog)
Scans via The Jean Charlot Collection & the University of Hawaii at Manoa
Commentary by Evorio Escalante (video, 3 min, in Spanish)
Comment (0)James M. Harding, John Rouse (eds.): Not the Other Avant-Garde: The Transnational Foundations of Avant-Garde Performance (2006)
Filed under book | Tags: · africa, argentina, art history, avant-garde, fluxus, india, japan, mexico, middle east, music history, performance, performance art, theatre
“Almost without exception, studies of the avant-garde take for granted the premise that the influential experimental practices associated with the avant-garde began primarily as a European phenomenon that in turn spread around the world. These ten original essays, especially commissioned for Not the Other Avant-Garde, forge a radically new conception of the avant-garde by demonstrating the many ways in which the first—and second—wave avant-gardes were always already a transnational phenomenon, an amalgam of often contradictory performance traditions and practices developed in various cultural locations around the world, including Africa, the Middle East, Mexico, Argentina, India, and Japan. Essays from leading scholars and critics—including Marvin Carlson, Sudipto Chatterjee, John Conteh-Morgan, Peter Eckersall, Harry J. Elam Jr., Joachim Fiebach, David G. Goodman, Jean Graham-Jones, Hannah Higgins, and Adam Versényi—suggest collectively that the very concept of the avant-garde is possible only if conceptualized beyond the limitations of Eurocentric paradigms.
Not the Other Avant-Garde is groundbreaking in both avant-garde studies and performance studies and will be a valuable contribution to the fields of theater studies, modernist studies, art history, literature, and music history.”
Publisher University of Michigan Press, 2006
Theater: Theory/Text/Performance series
ISBN 0472069314, 9780472099313
312 pages
PDF (updated on 2017-7-11)
Comment (0)Nahui Olin: una mujer de los tiempos modernos, 2nd ed (1993) [Spanish]
Filed under book, catalogue | Tags: · activism, art, art history, literature, mexico, painting, poetry
Extensive catalogue of an exhibition of Mexican artist’s model, painter and poet Carmen Mondragón, also known as Nahui Olin (1893-1978). She is considered one of the talented and revolutionary women who formed the 1920s and 1930s in Mexico by activism and creativity, like Guadalupe Marín, Antonieta Rivas Mercado, Frida Kahlo, Tina Modotti, Lupe Vélez and María Izquierdo.
Publisher Museo Estudio Diego Rivera, Mexico, 1993
ISBN 9682946697
173 pages