UC San Diego

This dissertation explores four Argentine and Mexican twentieth century art practices that mobilized the profile of the Latin American avant-garde at home and abroad by inscribing context, regionality, objectivity and the future in innovative and sharply contrasting ways : Diego Rivera and Gabriel Orozco in Mexico, and Tucumán Arde and Guillermo Kuitca in Argentina. Building on recent Latin American scholarship that has recovered aspects of the local avant-garde formerly relegated to canonic obscurity, the text explores the specific interest the artists had in context and the way they inscribed it in their work. Two diverging tendencies emerge. In one the ventures into exteriority allow the artists to intermingle with changing but constituted discourses and institutions and establish speculative, imprecise, suspensive counter terms in projected futures. In the other the ventures into exteriority allow the artists to register and inscribe as truth value circumscribed experiences of context that are not projected onto desired futures but made to fuel polysemy