Date of Award
9-14-2023
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Degree Type
Dissertation
Abstract
This dissertation examines an array of case studies across twenty-first century Mexican aesthetics, primarily based in literature and contemporary art, that draw on the social, collectivity, collaboration, and participation, in tandem with concerns around cultural infrastructure. Drawing on Mexican artist and museum educator Pablo Helguera’s notion of ‘rewriting the script,’ I think of these cases as drawing on forms of the social in connection with an interest to ‘rewrite’ or modify in some way the ‘script’ of art or literature and its infrastructure. These desires on the part of writers and artists to intervene in the infrastructural script of art or literature and its structural operations comes amid a series of concrete transformations that have affected cultural infrastructures in contemporary Mexico, in both literature and the arts. Part of what this dissertation argues, then, is the need for a mode of reading that accounts for the ways in which authors and writers are increasingly experimenting with conceptual or extra-textual strategies in relation to concrete concerns around transformations in writing and literature affecting the way texts are produced and circulate. I suggest that this might be understood as reading ‘in(form)ally,’ or a mode of reading called ‘in(form)alism,’ accounting for the ways in which such strategies index a lessened investment in traditional ‘forms’ and genres, toward interdisciplinarity and experimentation. I understand such cases as part of a wider expansion in extra-textual conceptual experimentation taking place in Latin American literature and writing that explores grounded concerns and transformations in the structural conditions affecting writing, literature, and publication. In certain cases examined in this dissertation, part of the aesthetic project involves a kind of concern and visibilization of the ways the neoliberalization of cultural sectors has impacted writing, cultural production, and art. Part of what this dissertation seeks to make clear, then, is the way certain strategies on the part of writers are based in a grounded concern, and a negotiation and visibilization through aesthetics, of concrete structural transformations affecting the capacity for a supposedly ‘autonomous’ operation of the bounded, internal and representational text. In this sense, these strategies involve a questioning and renegotiation of longstanding understandings of literary or artistic autonomy, thus redefining aesthetics as heteronomous, and (inter)dependent upon a range of supporting infrastructures, materialities, and labors. The cases examined throughout this dissertation, and particularly those in the second half, also evince a kind of investment in the potential and capacity for ‘structure’ and institutionality for the purposes of the political. This is the kind of trend and thinking encapsulated in the notion of ‘social structures,’ a term I use in the second half of this project to indicate a pattern of drawing on a physical-architectural structure in the desire to organize social relations, either as the ‘artwork’ itself or in relation to an aesthetic practice. The cases examined in the final chapter also complicate the valence and possibilities of what might be meant by such categories as the ‘social,’ the ‘commons,’ or a ‘community,’ such as that posed in other cases examined throughout the dissertation in their appeals to such categories.
Language
English (en)
Chair and Committee
Ignacio Sánchez Prado
Recommended Citation
McQuoid-Greason, Lauris, "Social Structures: Social Practices and Cultural Infrastructure in Mexican Aesthetics (2000-2020)" (2023). Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations. 3179.
https://openscholarship.wustl.edu/art_sci_etds/3179