Cosmopolitanism in Mexican Visual Culture

6. Visualizing the Future: Estridentismo, Technology, and Art

194 Estridentismo, Technology, and Art Visualizing the Future F A 6 In the twentieth century Mexico extended its reach toward modernity. Technologies such as telephones, electric lighting, automobiles, cinema, and radio; industrial materials such as glass, steel, and cement; modern building styles, air travel, and television were disseminated to a wider proportion of society than in the preceding century.1 These technologies enabled flows actual and imaginary between Mexico and the outside and extensively shaped Mexico’s cosmopolitanism. As in the culture of the Porfiriato, the country’s modernity was inflected by omnipresent remnants of its ancient and colonial history and by the realities of underdevelopment. Hence representations of Mexico anchored in the cultural legacies of its past coexisted with visions of the nation as already modern. The convergence of these imaginings engendered regional and nationalistic cosmopolitanisms, comparable with the vernacular cosmopolitanisms of previous centuries. The art-historical record consistently has stressed the nativistic roots of modern Mexican art and excluded or downplayed those aspects of modernity that link Mexico to the developed world, primarily the reception, representation , and use of modern technologies. This omission contributed to reify the notion that technological modernity was exclusive to the developed world and effectively to transform technology into an instrument of marginalization invested with superior cultural values if only by association.2 Because primitivism , surrealism, and revolution are frequently invoked to characterize Latin American art, only a handful of scholars of Mexican art have recognized technologyasasubjectworthyofattention .3Historiesofnineteenth-andtwentiethcentury architecture usually acknowledge the introduction to Mexico of modern building materials such as cement and steel.4 In the last decade of the twentieth century art historians such as Irene Herner de Larrea, Terry Smith, Jennifer Jolly, and myself, among others, investigated selected Mexican artists’ engagements with technology.5 More recently, comparative literature scholar Rubén Gallo, inspired by the now-classic works of the German media theorist 195 ■ Visualizing the Future Friedrich Kittler, Discourse Networks, 1800–1900 (1990) and Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (1999), explored the effects of cameras, typewriters, radio, cement, and stadiums on the cultural production of early twentieth-century Mexican vanguards and the centrality of these technologies to Mexican utopian thought. Gallo’s study was to my knowledge the first to identify technological media as integral to Mexican modernity.6 To assess the relationship of art, technology, and society, few approaches are more destructive than the customary academic compartmentalization of technology, art, and literature. In actuality all these practices occur simultaneously and often merge. Cultural products can be linked by migratory ideas and affects. This chapter makes these unstable relations evident through an explorationofvisionsofmodernitythroughtechnologyinestridentistaliteratureand in selected murals, with some attention to images of biomechanical creatures, composites of machines and organisms, which remain futuristic today. These figures eloquently illustrate artists’ and writers’ understandings of the profound effects of technology on society and nature as well as the anxieties and aspirations associated with these phenomena. My discussion aims neither to document direct connections among specific artists nor to assemble a comprehensive catalog of these images but to foreground the technological imaginary as constitutive of Mexican writers’ and artists’ understandings of modernity. This assumes modernity not only as a determinate set of material conditions but also as an evolving complex virtual and actual, not unlike Arjun Appadurai ’s theorization of the contemporary global cultural economy.7My discussion also presupposes technology to be an indispensable aspect of modernity and as such to constitute a global domain subject to reimagination and reconstitution from multiple geographic and cultural perspectives. Consequently my readings of literary and visual representations of technology all stress the artists’ attention to technology’s potentials. My emphasis on imaginary dimensions of modernity, which is not limited to utopian constructs, differs from Gallo’s work and from other studies of Mexican modernism. Modern technologies began arriving in Mexico during the late nineteenth century. In the second decade of the twentieth century Mexican writers and artists already perceived the potential for change that then-new technologies such as the railroad, streetcars, the telephone, radio, and movies posed to society and to individuals.8 Even if the country was significantly less industrialized and modern than England and the United States, these visualizations virtually integrated Mexico into a greater cosmopolitan sphere. Estridentista literature creates potent sensual images of the modern city and technologized nature. It presents a world in which technology is omnipresent, 196 ■ Cosmopolitanism in Mexican Visual Culture invading not only cities but also bodies and...