PROGRAM IN LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES
PLAS Graduate Works-in-Progress: Ingrid Brioso Rieumont & Benjamin Murphy - - - "The Time of the Cadaver: Machado de Assis's The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas' - - - Ingrid Brioso Rieumont, Spanish and Portuguese~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~- - - "Technology, Sociology, and the Problem of Observation: Video at the Centro de Arte y Comunicación in Buenos Aires" - - - Benjamin Murphy, Art and Arcaheology - - - This talk analyzes the emergence of video art in Argentina through an investigation of the Centro de Arte y Comunicación (CAYC), a Buenos-Aires based experimental art space that served as an early promoter of this new artistic practice during the 1970s. In accordance with the CAYC's own inter-disciplinary mission, the artists who experimented with video technology in the Center's spaces and under its institutional auspices sought to intervene within debates that had begun to animate various branches of the social sciences regarding the phenomena of mass media and communication. Sociology, a discipline which by the end of the previous decade had become a vanguard field for such debates in Argentina, became for the CAYC and its associated artists a forum for investigating and critiquing the ways in which the country's turbulent political process was both observed and represented through media. By focusing on the work of an individual artist, Lea Lublin, as it was shown at several of the CAYC's most emblematic video art exhibitions, I attempt to demonstrate how early video art constitutes an important component of the intellectual history of sociology in Argentina at the moment when the discipline became a principal platform for debates about populism and dependency in the 1970s. - - - Benjamin Murphy is a fifth-year PhD student in the Department of Art and Archaeology who studies modern and contemporary art from Latin America. He is currently at work on his dissertation, which addresses the emergence of video art in Latin America during the 1970s. Through a series of interconnected case studies that examine early manifestations of this artistic practice in Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, and among Latin American artists in the United States, the dissertation proposes that Latin American video art offers a unique intervention within methodological debates about observation that were occurring during the same time period in diverse fields across the social sciences such as anthropology, sociology, and communication studies. Benjamin has spent the fall 2018 term researching in Argentina with the support of a Donald and Mary Hyde Fellowship from Princeton, and in spring of next year he will begin a Fulbright grant in Brazil.- - - Event webpage: https://plas.princeton.edu/events