“Subheritage” : Empire, Mimesis, and Infrastructure in Modern Austria and Mexico.
eScholarship, University of California, 2019
Online
unknown
This Dissertation attends to examine the significance of the key notions empire, mimesisand infrastructure through the study of selected historical materials and concepts distilled frommy artistic practice. In the former case, the historical deploys a narrative upon the aesthetic andmaterial dimensions of monumental heritage in the Austro Hungarian Empire and the MexicanSecond Empire. As for the artistic side, it produces its own diagram, whose material existenceallows to weave theoretical and practice-based concepts throughout the entire work. In thissense, my approach attempts to treat selected narrative sources as materials rather than themes orperiods, relating them by means of transitions, conceptual ramifications and the consequences ofsystematic critique. In this Dissertation there is no central character nor period, for its main aimis to articulate, through a theoretical pipetting, the interrelations between my artistic practice andthe use of historical materials.The notion of mimesis is posited as a medium whose uniformity problematizes therepresentation of imperial colonialism, establishing a conceptual framework so as to understandit less as an instrument than a medium tending toward isotropy. This hallucinatory dimension ofmimesis is explored further by examining the interplay between identity and representationaccording to its ideological scope, where distinct figures (the subaltern, the minority, themelancholic) led to fundamental relationships between allegory and death. Understood inmaterial terms, such interplay can be translated according to tensions between the city and theurban, the classical and the baroque, the allegory and the metaphor. The imperial city of Viennaserves as the locus for the materialization of the dilemma between identity and representation,the place where the existence of monuments build the sense of the antique as by-product of themodern. The notion of Empathy proves crucial here as it relates the psychological meaning ofarchitecture and of the modern, but only insofar as it conceals its own hallucinatory dimension,one that articulates the unevenness between manual and intellectual labor. During the MexicanSecond Empire, the translation of mimesis into the material becomes radicalized with theimplementation of infrastructures such as roads and railways which are indebted to the ruins ofbygone empires. Finally, the empathy toward monuments acquires a messianic dimension, onethat is tracing the promise of an imminent rupture with the imperial sense of time.
Titel: |
“Subheritage” : Empire, Mimesis, and Infrastructure in Modern Austria and Mexico.
|
---|---|
Autor/in / Beteiligte Person: | Fresneda, Francisco Javier |
Link: | |
Veröffentlichung: | eScholarship, University of California, 2019 |
Medientyp: | unknown |
Schlagwort: |
|
Sonstiges: |
|