From Portrait to Landscape: Art Against Objects / Art Beyond Culture

From Portrait to Landscape: Art Against Objects / Art Beyond Culture presents an alternative approach to literary modernism and its afterlife advancing the conceptual ligature between literature and the visual arts to forge a model of inquiry that geographically and conceptually resituates modernist aesthetic practice. Bridging the U.S. and Latin American literary and art-critical traditions to address, first, what was at stake in the idea that the commitment to a painterly genre like the portrait could function as a model for the modernist text, and second, the notion that the alternative genre of the landscape could provide a way to overcome and reframe that modernism, this project aligns US modernist, Latin American post-Boom, and New Mexican Cinema figures whose works grapple with the problems of modernism and the cultural and aesthetic legacy of the landscape long after art’s end.