Mexican Modernity: The Avant-Garde and the Technological Revolution (review)

Rubén Gallo's Mexican Modernity could almost qualify as a coffee-table book in the beauty of its design and its many reproductions of Mexican modernist photographs, socialist-realist art, and Futurist-inspired woodcuts celebrating new technologies of the 1920s through the 1940s. The oversize format and attention to chapter layout make the book a visual feast of Mexico's (or at least its elite's) love affair with the five technologies to which the book's chapters are devoted: the camera, the typewriter, the radio, cement, and the stadium. Gallo's framework for reading these artists' reception of new technologies is, as the title tells us, heavily weighted toward theories of the avant-garde. Thus Gallo attends to what he calls the "other revolution" in Mexico, the artistic one which rejected "nationalist obsession … in favor of a cosmopolitan avant-gardism" (2). The avant-garde, for Gallo, rests on esthetic transformations of the artistic process through the conditions of mechanical reproduction. Each chapter then is built on comparisons between artists who merely incorporated new technology into their art whilst using older techniques, styles, or ideas and those who presumably allowed technology to change the art form itself. Thus, Chapter One, "Cameras," gives center place to Italian-born Tina Modotti's abstract photography, comparing it to her teacher/partner Edward Weston's and Mexican Gustavo Silva's approaches to Mexico as a "picturesque" and pictorial place. The second chapter, "Typewriters," discusses both the differences between specific brands of typewriters of the time, and the ways writers such as Mariano Azuela (author of one of the best-known revolutionary novels, Los de abajo), the Futurist-indebted estridentista (stridentist) poet Manuel Maples Arce, and Brazilian poet Mario de Andrade either attempted to create via the typewriter a "machine esthetics" or discussed but rejected the typewriter in favor of more traditional forms. Chapter Three, "Radio," draws distinctions between those artists who merely mentioned the new and exciting technology of radio in their work and those who attempted to write, or represent, a "radiogenic" art. Here, Gallo turns again to Arce's work on (and in) radio, which he compares to Apollinaire's well-known Lettre-Océan, a work inspired by the missives which his brother sent from Mexico. The last two chapters, "Cement" and "Stadiums," are conceptually linked through the fact that it was concrete which enabled the building of massive stadiums in Mexico in the 1920s and 1930s. In these chapters, Gallo looks at the politico-intelligentsia such as José Vasconcelos who commissioned such massive projects, as well as at the founding, and career, of the Committee to Propagate the Use of Portland Cement under the aegis of the remarkably influential publicist, Federico Sánchez Fogarty.

The strength of Gallo's book is in part connected to the wealth of its visual material: Gallo collects fascinating facts and anecdotes about these five technologies and their reception not only by artists but also by the media of the time, especially advertising. An example is the chapter "Radio," which devotes some time to telling how the Mexican tobacco company El Buen Tono seized upon radio as a way to promote their product, launching a new brand of cigarettes called "Radio" (people could save the cigarette boxes, and turn them in for radio parts; if you smoked enough "Radio" cigarettes, you could build yourself a radio); a photo at the first radio fair in 1925, with women dressed with radio antennae on their heads, together with examples of estridentista-designed ads for the product, are marvelous in their own right. The chapter on cement documents the growing Mexican interest in cement not only as cheap, durable, and safe but also as a material which came to exemplify progress toward a better and brighter future: as Gallo comments, "for broken countries, cement emerges as the perfect social glue" (179). In this chapter Gallo tells the story of how Mexican cement manufacturers formed the Committee to Propagate...