Sabotage Art

Nelly Richard once commented on the difficulty of reading the politics of Latin American contemporary art abroad without reducing the works to a testimonial function or, alternatively, stripping them of their incisive concreteness. This wonderful collection speaks to the emergence of a critical discourse on Latin American art that manages to hold form and politics not just in the balance but to read one through the other: a truly groundbreaking achievement. * Jens Andermann, Professor of Latin American Studies, University of Zurich, Switzerland * Sabotage Art provides a welcome shift of emphasis amidst perennial redefinitions of “political art” in Latin America. Framing sabotage as a “positional choice with regard to the institution” allows Halart, Polgovsky Ezcurra and their collaborators to critically interrogate the longstanding association of Latin American art with struggle or “adversity” for both historical case studies and the market delirium over “contemporary art”. This book makes for an excellent teaching resource on overlooked artists such as Paulo Bruscky, Enrique Guzman, Marcos Kurtycz, and Edgardo Antonio Vigo, offers fresh examinations of canonized avant-gardes in Argentina and Chile, and considers recent participatory projects in Bogotá and Mexico City. Yet it is most valuable in the sum total of its discrete chapters, which together demonstrate a range of new methods for a field now hitting its stride. * Daniel Quiles, Assistant Professor, Department of Art History, Theory & Criticism, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, USA *