Visual culture in Spain and Mexico analyses films, paintings and museum
exhibitions to show how aspects of Hispanic visual culture 'manage' or
'mediate' risk, as articulated stylistically and ideologically in the
visual artefact. The book is divided into six chapters plus an
introduction. The first three chapters deal with Mexico or more
accurately aspects of life in Mexico City; the other three with Spain or
more precisely with the Basque Country and aspects of cultural
appropriation which include but also exceed Basque cultural politics.
The book is at one and the same time a fine set of specific, detailed
essays on visual cultural artefacts and their histories/modes of
consumption and reception, and a broader meditation on the role of
visual culture in an age increasingly characterised by doom-laden
analyses of global panics, pandemics and jihads. The study also reflects
the continuing hybridization of Hispanic Studies into the eclecticism of
Cultural and Visual Studies, and the re-siting of well known cultural
objects and institutions - such as the Guggenheim and Picasso's
Guernica - into new frames of reference, generating new approaches,
ideas and modes of understanding.