react/review: a responsive journal for art & architecture

In “Confection and the Aesthetic of Collapse,” Ashleigh Deosaran situates Vasquez La Roche’s multimedia artwork within Trinidadian history by setting the farcically conciliatory colonial discourse about the region’s sugar plantations and its workers, found in prints and postcards dated from the nineteenth to the early twentieth century, against Vasquez La Roche’s prescient performance. The artist’s engagement with an aesthetic of collapse is described as threefold by Deosaran: a physical collapse of sculptures that melt and become undone; a temporal collapse, as he substantiates the continuities between the colonial archive and contemporary culture and its biases; and a conceptual collapse, conceiving aesthetics for a decolonial, post-capitalist future where the rusting ruins of historical violence attest to the failure of ideologies of empire. Deosaran’s aesthetic of collapse is a productive framework in observing the work of another Latin American artist, sculptor Feliza Bursztyn (1933-1982), known for her junk metal assemblages and kinetic sculptures. Assemblages Flor (Flower, 1974) and Chatarra de Automóvil (Automobile Junk, 1980-81), analyzed here, provide insight into her artistic praxis—saturated, as it shall be demonstrated, with collapse.