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Another Aesthetics Is Possible: Arts of Rebellion in the Fourth World War by Jennifer Ponce de León

2022; University of Pennsylvania Press; Volume: 90; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/hir.2022.0032

1553-0639

Niko Vicario,

Art, Politics, and Modernism

Reviewed by: Another Aesthetics Is Possible: Arts of Rebellion in the Fourth World War by Jennifer Ponce de León Niko Vicario ponce de león, jennifer. Another Aesthetics Is Possible: Arts of Rebellion in the Fourth World War. Duke UP, 2021, 328 pp. In her ambitious and often riveting new book, Jennifer Ponce de León argues for an understanding of aesthetics that extends far beyond the theoretical matrices typically delimiting the analysis of works of art. Here aesthetics is to be "understood in its broad sense as the socially forged sensory composition of a world" (4). She marshals this more capacious aesthetics, acknowledging Jacques Rancière but sharpening the materialist bite, in writing about the ways in which artistic practices have been "articulated—in different ways, and always in specific contexts—with ongoing antisystemic movements and social struggles rooted in different parts of the Americas … all part of the global movement against capitalism and the oppression on which it depends" (3). With "fourth world war," Another Aesthetics takes up the concept developed by Subcomandante Marcos, spokesperson of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation, that the neoliberal policies that have run rampant since the end of the Cold War are the antagonist against which activists and other members of the Left must do battle. Rather than positing artistic practice as a response, a reaction, or even a negotiation of political and economic conditions, processes and events, Ponce de León argues for the power of art to fully participate in, intervene in, and alter reality, as the latter is constructed, both in ideological and sensory registers, by hegemonic powers. She asserts that another world is not only possible, but "already exists" (250). Thanks to this theoretical intervention, and buttressed by its thorough case studies, Another Aesthetics is an important contribution to scholarship exploring the relationship between art and capitalism, between aesthetics and politics, and between contemporary art and history. After its bold introduction, Another Aesthetics proceeds with two chapters that explore, in very different ways, the relationship between what is now [End Page 473] Mexico and the history of imperialism. In the first, Ponce de León analyzes Raiders of the Lost Crown (2013), an alternate reality game—moving between actual and virtual spaces—concerning a stolen Aztec artifact, an ancient feather headdress known as the Penacho, currently housed at Vienna's World Museum. In this game, artist Fran Ilich, sometimes posing as the Diego de la Vega Cooperative Media Conglomerate, enacts what Ponce de León terms "a collective exercise of speculative decolonial imagination," (36) in which he draws considerably from the Zapatistas' emphasis on the continuity of colonialism, neocolonialism, and neoliberalism. Ilich's complex and multimodal project echoes the stance of the Pocho Research Society of Erased and Invisible History: "What is history but a battleground of the present" (81). In Chapter 2, Ponce de León investigates the PRS, founded by Sandra de la Loza in 2002, and in particular its historical markers unofficially installed around Los Angeles to mark obfuscated and repressed Mexican, indigenous, colonial, and queer histories tied to particular sites. Ponce de León reads these textual interventions, offering other perspectives on the histories of place, as a form of "critical mimicry" of official signage and plaques and their false "claims to universality" (81). In turn, she argues that the PRS both raises the question and redistributes the power of who produces history, rather than understanding history as merely something by which the subject is unconsciously molded or as a transparent, factual given. In both chapters, the author impressively extrapolates from these nuanced projects to convincingly argue for their value as counterhegemonic reimaginings. In its third and fourth chapters, Another Aesthetics shifts the geographical focus from North to South America to home in on the activities of art collectives Etcétera… and Grupo de Arte Callejero (GAC), both based in Argentina and both founded in 1997. Ponce de León contextualizes both groups in relation to escraches (exposure protests accusing and seeking to hold accountable those involved in the country's most recent military dictatorship, which ended in 1983) and in relation to human rights and security discourses as they have developed since...