Reading Images: Art, Aesthetics, and the Imagery of the Future in Argentine Science Fiction

• In Event: Disrupting Textual Boundaries

Abstract

Since the Dada period, aesthetic lines have become increasingly blurred and the distinction between art forms and media, between high and low cultural production, and also between the perception of centers and peripheries seem to have splintered into almost non-existent concepts. In the case of science fiction, this porosity makes up the scaffolding of an aesthetic that operates from naturalism but with the instruments of pop surrealism, with the languages of pop and op arts and with the rigor of realism and cubism. Such complex operations can be traced both in book covers and magazine illustrations as well as in graphic novels, where the complexity of visual language disputes the space of political and ideological narratives. From the stunning images of the famed Péndulo magazine, to the visual universe of graphic novels by Ricardo Barreiro or Diego Agrimbau’s imagery, Argentine science fiction has reworked its relationship with art and literature as a way not simply to claim a space for itself in the cultural field, but to rework Argentina’s surrealist tradition. This paper explores the construction of an aesthetic that draws on a variety of sources in order to think about relationships between different areas of cultural production, as well as aesthetic objects (and the media in which they are supported). It questions not only how science fiction has evolved and changed the relationships between different forms of art, but how far different media and vocabularies have been merged into a common redefined cultural agenda after modernity.

Author

• Silvia G Kurlat Ares