Communal Forms of Resistance: On Jennifer Ponce de León's "Another Aesthetics is Possible"
Jennifer Ponce de León | Another Aesthetics is Possible: Arts of Rebellion in the Fourth World War | Duke University Press | 2021 | 328 pages
For anyone convinced that capitalism has eroded all valid forms of mental or perceptual resistance available in art, Jennifer Ponce de León’s Another Aesthetics is Possible will serve as testimony that this conclusion is not only premature but fundamentally wrong. Examining artists and activists of social movements from Latin and South America, Ponce de León shows how a decades-long struggle—a Fourth World War (taking the Cold War as the Third)—to uncover and resist state-led strategies of domestication and servitude through aesthetic tactics continues to this day.
The book takes aim at the bourgeois monopoly on defining what art is and how that monopoly remains allied to a neoliberal order. Ponce de León ambitiously defines aesthetics as that captivation which expands perception organically. No less ambitious is the criteria for qualifying as an artist: only an activist can be an artist, and one that usually remains anonymous within a group; art creation and appreciation remain unquestionably communal experiences; representation is complicit in a (neo)liberal and neocolonial worldview.
“Through an Anticolonial Looking Glass”—the book’s first chapter—specifies alternative ways of engaging with anticolonial aesthetic strategies that are not only counterintuitive to nationalism but stand in diametrical opposition to it. Ponce de León notes one experimental movement in Mexico, started by artist and activist Fran Ilich, which addresses colonial pillage while remaining equally alert to neocolonial effects. Blending humor, irony, and interactive media, Ilich’s alternative reality game Raiders of the Lost Crown engages the player in a hunt inside a Vienna museum. The mission is to recover the Penacho de Moctezuma (Moctezuma’s Headdress), ownership of which has been the subject of contention between Austrian and Mexican authorities. But as players move through the story, the game slowly shifts focus away from an artifact lost over 500 years ago to engage with the impoverished and destitute living conditions of large numbers of contemporary Mexicans.
Chapter two, “Historiography of the Invisible,” discusses how one subaltern movement has been challenging a hegemonic aesthetics of space and time. The poems on plaques placed at historical sites by the Pochx Research Society of Erased and Invisible History (PRS), founded by artist and activist Sandra de la Loza, produce a subversive historical counter-narrative that speaks to the experiences of Chicana immigrants to Los Angeles—both documented and undocumented as well as members of indigenous groups. Nationalist historical logic in the US is built around keeping immigrants vulnerable: scapegoats for systemic social problems, competitors for jobs “whose dwindling is actually owed to capitalists’ relocation of production in search of greater profits.” (100) Through such guerrilla art installations, PRS provides context for why immigrants from Latin and South America are ‘flooding’ US cities. They deploy techniques such as rasquache—Chicano found art or assemblage of the discarded—that resonate with the working class and the marginalized in general.
Chapter three, “Reframing Violence and Justice: Human Rights and Class Warfare,” traces how the Argentine artist group Etcétera is redefining political activism following the decimation of the traditional left in national politics. Members note that in expressing solidarity with families of the disappeared (victims of military dictatorships in Argentina), human rights groups obfuscate the original demands of the activism for which the victims became victims in the first place. Ponce de León shows how the group has performed remarkable human rights work while also drawing attention to the inherent injustice (cultural, economic, political) that feeds neoliberal policies. Through escrache performances and plays, Etcétera ridicules the logic pursed by both the military junta and its civilian successor.
Chapter four, “State Theatre, Security, T/Errorism,” further teases out the work of the guerilla art group Etcétera, and its affiliated troop International Errorista by shedding light on the neoliberal agenda of normalization headed by Argentine Presidents Kirchner (husband and wife, 2003-2015). Interventions by these artists showcase how policies of security and antiterrorism normalize class division by fostering, if not engineering, a docile populace that not only overlooks but even resists counterhegemonic art. Ponce de León illustrates how performances like El Ganso, flyers such as Limpieza General, poetry projects such as Peoma visual, and videos like Error Errorista intervene through puns and other devices to uncover the regressive and hegemonic strategies pursued by the state in order to pacify and neutralize antisystemic movements and all groups with anticapitalistic worldviews.
With Another Aesthetics is Possible, Ponce de León raises the bar for cultural critics, particularly those on the left, by arguing that they should register and study people’s innovative ways of resisting oppression within the framework of collectively lived experience rather than the fantasy of the narcissist individual. Still, it is not clear whether it is indeed these groups or the author’s portrayal of them that indicates these antisystemic movements are campaigning for reform. I suspect if given the chance the spontaneous progression of such radicalism as eruditely characterized in Another Aesthetics is Possible will ever propagate towards the founding of just another politics and another economy.