Author Description

"A common truism about art is that it flourishes in times of uncertainty and instability. Not surprisingly, over the last fifty years, this has proven to be the case in areas of limited freedoms across Latin America. In Touched Bodies, Mara Polgovsky Ezcurra examines the politics and ethics of performance art and other body-oriented artistic projects in Latin America from the late 1970s until the early 1990s. She looks at the work of artists from Argentina, Chile, and Mexico, and discusses the flourishing of this type of performance in the times of authoritarianism found in those countries, and considers the role of embodied art in the aftermath of dictatorship. She argues that in the rush to include Latin American artists in collections and in museums, there has been a rush of scholarship on the work of the 2000s, and that more is known of these modern artists than we know about the art of the 1970s and 1980s. Seeking to rectify that and to broaden the conversation, Polgovsky Ezcurra considers the work of Diamela Eltit and Raul Zurita from Chile, Leon Ferrari and Liliana Maresca from Argentina, and Marcos Kurtycz and the No Grupo art collective from Mexico. The comparative study of the work of these artists attests to a performance turn in Latin American art during the 1980s that, like photography and film before, revolutionized the artistic field as a whole, changing the ways that we perceive art and understand its role in society"--