Aesthetic cuts: Enrique Chagoya + Yinka Shonibare

• In Event: Re-Membering Ourselves: Afro-Atlantic Praxes of Memory, Pleasure, and the Sacred

Abstract

This paper pairs contemporary artists, Enrique Chagoya and Yinka Shonibare, and follows their aesthetic cuts in mixed media collage and installation to offer a cut away from hegemonic avant-garde teleologies. The cut is mapped onto a political artistic Latin American tradition that mobilizes tropes of cannibalism and opens out through the Black Atlantic to consider the shared specter of the. In his work Chagoya’s line drawings intermingle with collage in arrangements of pre-Columbian images, popular culture icons and doctored masterpieces of western art. Featuring US hemispheric iterations of European aesthetic traditions, the contemporary legacies of these traditions in the United States, and the colonial encounters that forged his birthplace, Mexico, Chavoya brings into relief the histories of global circuits of empire. Paralleling the aesthetic gesture that cuts across colonial traditions suggested by Chagoya, Shonibare’s haunting installations offer further sites of reflection on colonial encroachment. Shonibare’s installations present familiar compositions of famous 18th century paintings achieved with dynamically posed headless mannequins whose period clothing has been cut from African (Dutch wax-print) fabric. Bold and vivid in color and captured movement, the installations display the reliance of cultures of taste and distinction on the concurrent development of empires. The installation however, puts on display an aesthetic cut that dismembers the bearers cloaked in this tradition setting the scene for alternate organization. Together, their works dis- and re-membered subjects fill collage and installation visualscapes highlighting circuits of empire past and present while exhibiting gestures of re-formation facilitated by the performative cut.

Author

• Leticia Alvarado, Brown University, American Studies