Visual culture in Spain and Mexico analyses films, paintings and museum exhibitions to show how aspects of hispanic visual culture ‘manage’ or ‘mediate’ risk, as articulated stylistically and ideologically in the visual artefact. The book is divided into six chapters plus an Introduction. The first three chapters deal with Mexico or more accurately aspects of life in Mexico City; the other three with Spain or more precisely with the Basque Country and aspects of cultural appropriation which include but also exceed Basque cultural politics.
The book is at one and the same time a fine set of specific, detailed essays on visual cultural artefacts and their histories/modes of consumption and reception, and a broader meditation on the role of visual culture in an age increasingly characterised by doom-laden analyses of global panics, pandemics and jihads. The study also reflects the continuing hybridization of Hispanic Studies into the eclecticism of Cultural and Visual Studies, and the re-siting of well known cultural objects and institutions - such as the Guggenheim and Picasso’s Guernica - into new frames of reference, generating new approaches, ideas and modes of understanding.
