Sin Miedo a las Ruinas: Anarquismo, vanguardias artisticas y la crisis de representacion en Espana (1930-1937)

• Type of Material: Book
• Authors: Luis Gonzalez Barrios, Emory University
• Language: Spanish | Castilian
• Date: 2024
• Publisher: University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
• Publication Version: Final Published Version
• Copyright Statement: © 2024 Department of Romance Studies. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
• License: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 International
• Final Published Version (URL): https://cdr.lib.unc.edu/concern/journals/3r0758003?locale=en
• ISBN: 9781469677682
• Place of Publication or Presentation: University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Department of Romance Studies
• Keywords: Luis Buñuel; disruptive atmosphere; Helios Gómez; historical avant-gardes; artistic avant-gardes; revolutionary actions; representation; Wifredo Lam; García Lorca; Second Republic (1931–1939); anarchic; Spain; libertarian workerism; Lucía Sánchez Saornil; National Confederation of Labor (CNT); anarchist movement; Alberto Sánchez
• Research Categories: Art history; European history; Political science

Abstract

When speaking of "artistic avant-gardes" or "historical avant-gardes," it is not unusual to use the adjective "anarchic," which, sometimes ambiguously, alludes to a certain disruptive atmosphere in the first third of the 20th century. In the Spanish case, this situation refers to the coexistence, during the Second Republic (1931–1939), of highly politicized aesthetic isms and a significant anarchist movement. Where do the avant-garde movements of galleries, pavilions, or magazines and the revolutionary actions of the National Confederation of Labor (CNT) converge or diverge? To what extent do the practices of libertarian workerism correspond to the experimental theater of García Lorca, the cinema of Luis Buñuel, or the sculpture of Alberto Sánchez? And what about the feminist literature of Lucía Sánchez Saornil, the proletarian printmaking of Helios Gómez, or the anticolonial painting of Wifredo Lam? Without Fear of Ruins proposes that the answer to these questions lies in the common questioning, by avant-garde movements and anarchists, not only of the dominant system of representation, but of the very concept of "representation" and its supposed transparency. This essay-collage of avant-garde "texts," genres, and authors will invite the reader to rethink the relationship between art and politics in Republican Spain. And wherever representation is in crisis.