Delirious Consumption: Aesthetics and Consumer Capitalism in Mexico and Brazil by Sergio Delgado Moya (review)

Delirious Consumption: Aesthetics and Consumer Capitalism in Mexico and Brazil charts how key figures of Latin America's two largest culture industries—muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros, Brazilian concrete poets Augusto de Campos and Décio Pignatari, writer Octavio Paz, and artist Lygia Clark—responded to the reconfiguration of the senses and the public sphere under consumer capitalism. Focusing on the three decades following World War II, a period of rapid economic growth in both nations, the volume charts literature and visual art's intersections with the expanding fields of advertising, design, and modernist architecture. Author Sergio Delgado Moya proposes four aesthetic protocols used by creators to address consumer publics and activate consumption's emancipatory potential: distraction (a mode of mass reception opposed to bourgeois contemplation), fascination (a form of sensuous engagement marked by regression to a presymbolic order), replication (a repetition with a difference that simultaneously mimics and responds to consumer culture), and homemaking (the construction of affectively charged configurations of space, objects, and self).

Delirious Consumption's opening chapter delves into the first of these protocols, tracing how David Alfaro Siqueiros reoriented his politically engaged mural art to cater to a mobilized, mass gaze with works designed to be viewed in public spaces by a spectator in motion. Noting this mobilized gaze's affinities with visual technologies, Delgado Moya examines Siqueiros's investment in cinema and photography as tools for both producing and disseminating his work, which parallel Walter Benjamin's contemporaneous reflections on the mechanical reproducibility of art and the productively distracted character of mass reception. Delgado Moya highlights Siqueiros's adoption of the tools of commercial art (such as the spray-paint gun) in the interest of speed and ideological expediency, arguing for a productive tension between market forces and political commitment in the muralist's career rather than the gradual co-optation identified by other critics.

The remaining chapters of Delirious Consumption alternate between case studies of Brazilian and Mexican cultural figures, linking the two national contexts through the reverberations of concretism (marked by an emphasis on the graphic and material qualities of language, geometric abstraction, and an appeal to the instrumental reason that characterizes modernity) and neoconcretism (distinguished by a turn from formal purity and rationality towards emotion and sensation). In chapter two, Delgado Moya challenges existing assessments of Brazilian concretism that unproblematically align it with capitalist modernization, contending that the movement does not merely reproduce the seductive verbal and visual discourse of advertising. Rather, concrete poetry pushes this discourse to extremes and fascinates the reader/viewer; it generates a form of sensory engagement that exceeds capitalism's instrumentalization of meaning in service of consumption (the logic of advertising). Situating concrete poetry within a shifting landscape of print media and graphic design, the author stresses how the uncompromising corporeality of its subject matter—ingestion, elimination, copulation—activates critique.

Highlighting Octavio Paz's connections with Brazil's concrete poetry movement, Delirious Consumption's third chapter examines his engagement with mass culture and modernity after his return to a Mexico City radically transformed by capitalist development in 1953. Delgado Moya examines Paz's claims in essays from the period (following Heidegger) that technological modernity has evacuated both the human-built environment and the word of organic meaning by harnessing them to expediency. Responding to this shift, Paz's Discos visuales (1968), a series of rotating discs printed with phrases modeled on an airline advertisement, and his tripartite poem Blanco (1967), printed on an accordion-like series of twenty-three panels, demand an embodied mode of reading, gesturing towards the re-enchantment of a language instrumentalized by capitalism.

Delirious Consumption's final chapter examines neoconcretist artist Lygia Clark's "studies in framing, envelopment, environment, and embodiment" and her objetos relacionais (relational objects) crafted from everyday materials and activated through interaction with a user, reading them as modes of domesticity that exceed the home's status as "a battleground of every major effort to expand commodity capitalism and...