Political Art Takes Center Stage in Jennifer Ponce de León’s Another Aesthetics is Possible

Ila N. Sheren

A review of Another Aesthetics is Possible: Arts of Rebellion in the Fourth World War by Jennifer Ponce de León. Durham: Duke University Press, 2021.

Towards the end of the third chapter of Another Aesthetics is Possible: Arts of Rebellion in the Fourth World War, author Jennifer Ponce de León describes an evocative demonstration at the Argentinean Congress building in Buenos Aires. In early February of 2002, the political art group Etcétera . . . organized El Mierdazo, or the “Big Shit,” a protest performance that “channeled working Argentines’ furious repudiation of the economic system and political class” (187). The artists, their allies, and other citizens, including many seniors, carried bags of excrement to the steps of the National Congress Building, where they placed a red carpet and a toilet. As Ponce de Léon writes:

The performance’s protagonist . . . wore a suit, tie, and a sheep mask. He lowered his pants and took a seat on the toilet. Around his neck hung a sign reading “Me cago en el sistema” (I shit on the system). His role in the performance was the literalization of this phrase. With his duty discharged, he unsheepishly leaped to his feet and all of the other protestors hurled their own shit, in unison, onto the Congress building (188).

The rich analysis that follows this account is typical of Ponce de León’s approach in this book. She interweaves the socio-economic conditions of the protest, including the devaluation of Argentina’s currency, with firsthand accounts by the artists and organizers (who pointedly describe the event as a “laxative”). Ponce de León then elevates the abjection inherent to El Mierdazo, positioning the performance within a dialectic of theater and politics. In her analysis, the toilet humor of the demonstration springs from genuine popular political sentiment, but the artists then choreograph an aesthetic experience that itself “call[s] our attention to the ways that aesthetic dimensions of political practices—and direct actions in particular—shape their pedagogical function” (190). Ultimately, she argues, the performance serves as both direct social protest and an allegory of that protest as a movement from oppression to collective revolt.

This brief account gives the reader a sense of the many contributions of Another Aesthetics is Possible. The book engages a series of rich, multilayered case studies that span street performance, poetry, text, game design, new media, and visual art, often embedded within the same work. The geography they chart is that of a neoliberal Latin America, including Mexico City, Buenos Aires, and Los Angeles, as well as its colonial armature, as in her analysis of a Zapatista aligned intervention in Vienna. Ponce de León purposefully avoids a single disciplinary framework to address these complex events, relying instead on a Marxist reading of the politico-economic apparatus each seeks to dismantle. She encourages a retelling of history that is palimpsestic, avoiding the pitfalls of the progress narratives so often imposed on Latin America. In doing so, Ponce de León successfully argues for a continuity of oppression: as the colonial state gave way first to dictatorial regimes and then democratic ones, the preexisting power structures remained firmly in place. Another Aesthetics is Possible navigates the ways that power shapes both the narratives of history and the ways by which that history makes itself felt. In locating this perceived history within a spatial regime, the artists and collectives catalogued within work to actively alter these feelings, to effect change by addressing the aesthetic apparatus itself, rather than through traditional methods of representational democracy.

The “Fourth World War” indicated in the book’s subtitle refers to the Zapatistas’ periodization of the era of globalized capitalism. With this, Ponce de León refers to a twofold process of globalization as “a continuation of the process that began with European colonialism and the consolidation of the capitalist world-system” and the 1970s era “neoliberal restructuring” of production processes (11). Latin America’s position as an early battleground of the Fourth World War is due to the ways that neoliberal policies were first tested in the region, imposed by US-backed dictatorships. Ponce de León argues that the increasing democratization of the region, including the leftist governments of the “Pink Tide,” are yet another manifestation of this war, rather than its resolution. The artists chronicled in this study are at war with the concept of representation itself, cognizant of the ways that “the naturalization of representation as the ideological basis of hegemonic governance under liberalism is . . . an aesthetic endeavor—that is, one that marshals myriad aesthetic practices to capture people’s imaginations” (17).

The term “aesthetic endeavor” is, here, a telling one, and it is worth expanding on the theoretical frameworks that Ponce de León engages throughout the text. Her understanding of “aesthetics” is grounded in Marxist thought, specifically that “human cognition and sensuous perception are bound together and are the product of historical processes” (4). Although closely aligned with Jacques Rancière’s established idea of the distribution of the sensible, Ponce de León’s reading of aesthetics instead privileges the “complex social totality” within which human experience takes place (5). Such an approach centers Marxist theories of ideology, augmented and clarified by thinkers such as Antonio Gramsci and Raúl Zibechi—specifically that consciousness of oneself and one’s relation to the world is constructed and informed by ideology. It is important to note as well that many of the artists in Ponce de León’s study subscribe to this Marxist framework of aesthetics, seeing themselves as enacting “ideological struggles” within their various movements. The “other aesthetics” of the book’s title, then, aligns itself with the formation of other possible worlds, those “already being built in the interstices of the dominant capitalist order” (8). This is an aesthetics of process, being continually reconstituted at the margins of society, with tangible material traces hinting at myriad possible futures.

The aesthetic interventions detailed in this study are the product of artists and collectives working outside of the dominant industries of visual art and literature. The artists organize themselves into official-sounding entities, such as the Diego de la Vega Cooperative Media Conglomerate, or the Pocho Research Society of Erased and Invisible History. These titles play on both the institutionalization and commodification of art during the neoliberal era, evoking the likes of corporate media and think tanks. The spirit of collectivism and the subsuming of individual authorship in favor of group identity is a political strategy that evokes the artistic movements of the 1960s and 1970s in Latin America and beyond. In fact, the artists Ponce de León engages are all part of the “hinge generation” that came of age after that canonical period, beginning their careers in the late 1980s and early 1990s. In an interview with Ponce de León, Mexican artist Fran Ilich referred to this as the “generation of rupture” who “wanted international socialism” but “had to make do with Zapatismo.”1 In this way, the shadow of the late 1960s hovers over the pages of Another Aesthetics is Possible; it is an acknowledgment of that earlier generation’s promise and ultimate failure that drives the creativity and savviness of these later movements.

Ponce de León has spent years developing relationships with these artists and, in some cases, participating in the work herself. This methodology makes itself felt within Another Aesthetics is Possible, as she quotes lengthy excerpts from interviews and the reader gets a sense of the various personalities and behind-the-scenes machinations involved. In many cases, the long duration of her engagement means that the interactions unfold over a series of years, sometimes over a decade. Ponce de León’s method is aligned with that of art historians like Grant H. Kester, whose 2011 book The One and the Many: Contemporary Collaborative Art in a Global Context modeled a similarly embedded (and entangled) approach. At times, however, Another Aesthetics is Possible relies almost solely on firsthand accounts while foregoing the basics of a given event. For example, in Ponce de León’s description of El Mierdazo, the members of Etcétera . . . give impressions of crowd size and the range of participants involved, but at no point does the reader get a sense of the numbers involved. In another instance, the first chapter relies heavily on the use of an Alternate Reality Game (ARG) to upend narratives of colonialism. Yet the reader never gets a sense of how this game is played or who were the main participants. These facts—a sense of reach, involvement, and the reception generated by a given performance—are not incidental to the analysis of political action; rather, they are integral to our understanding of it. Still, the extensive personal contact Ponce de León has undertaken gives the reader valuable insights into the thought processes and influences undergirding the work, allowing for a deep engagement with these antisystemic movements and their aesthetic output. Ponce de León’s positioning from within the movement also helps to underscore that there is no outside vantage point from which to consider these interventions. We, the readers, are active participants in this Fourth World War, regardless of our location, class, or political leanings.

Another Aesthetics is Possible consists of an introduction that sets the multidisciplinary framework, scope, and stakes of the interventions to come, followed by four substantial body chapters each focusing on a single theme. In terms of geography, the first chapter takes a transnational (and decolonial) look at Mexico and Austria, while the second focuses on Los Angeles. The final two chapters, which make up the last half of the book, unfold a rich history of Argentina during the early 2000s focusing on discourses of human rights and national/personal security, respectively. The first chapter, titled “Through an Anticolonial Looking Glass,” chronicles the efforts of Zapatista-aligned artist Fran Ilich to repatriate the Penacho de Moctezuma, a feathered headdress currently held in Vienna’s World Museum. Ilich, working within his own “meta-artwork” of the Diego de la Vega Cooperative Media Conglomerate, devised an ARG titled Raiders of the Lost Crown, which was played over the first half of 2013, culminating in Ilich’s presence at the donaufestival in Krems, Austria. Ponce de León uses the concept of “stereoscopic aesthetics” to analyze Ilich’s critique as one that “holds together in a single field of vision the materiality of colonial practices and their systemic disavowal” and “puts into relief the ways in which colonialism is also a comprehensive aesthetic and epistemic project that proliferates worldviews organized around systemic misapprehensions and effacements” (36). Nowhere is this more evocative than in Ilich’s “souvenir” postcard depicting the Penacho that reframes the colonial era as the American Holocaust and carries its timeline into the present. Ponce de León argues that in doing so, Ilich implicates the museum as tool for an ongoing and violent colonialism, one that uses selective language to obscure its own role in these hegemonic formations.

The second chapter feels particularly relevant in the wake of calls to remove Confederate monuments in the United States and the resulting debates about the way history is commemorated. Titled “Historiographers of the Invisible,” this section analyzes artist Sandra de la Loza and her efforts with the Pocho Research Society (PRS) to inscribe alternate historical markers within the city of Los Angeles. Ponce de León focuses on specific plaques installed by the PRS, including one about the painting and subsequent whitewashing of David Alfaro Siquieros’s mural America Tropical, another detailing the displacement of working-class Mexicans from the site of Dodger stadium, and El Otro Ellis, a plaque placed on L.A.’s Bicentennial Monument that commemorates the site’s role as a “sanctuary for refugees fleeing the violence exasperated by US-backed death squads and paramilitaries.”2 Ponce de León argues for these plaques as “footnotes,” that “form an integral part of a multilayered narrative” rather than rewriting the original altogether (94). As such, she argues for this palimpsestic narrative of a history that is felt rather than chronicled, and distinctly attuned to the ways that our perception of space shapes lived experience. The chapter shifts to an analysis of a later PRS intervention, Echoes in the Echo, which used poetry to commemorate former queer Latinx spaces now displaced by urban redevelopment. Ponce de León’s deft literary analysis takes up the sensorial qualities of one such poem, positioning its evocation of sound, touch, and smell as a rebuke to gentrification’s overly visual aesthetic regime.

The final two chapters focus on Argentina in the early 2000s, taking up the work of Grupo de Arte Callejero3 (GAC) and Etcétera . . . in relation to human rights discourses and the security state. Chapter Three, “Reframing Violence and Justice” looks at the ways that human rights has become increasingly aligned with the neoliberal state as a way to distance itself from the injustices of the past. By presenting history as a rupture and the period of state violence as a time of exception, such narratives allow the present regime to maintain similar practices without confronting a crisis of illegitimacy. Ponce de León writes of the popular practice of the escrache, a public procession to the homes of former military officials and other perpetrators, as a way of reinscribing these histories into the present. GAC and Etcétera . . . take this performance a step further, turning the escrache into a kind of street theater informed, in Ponce de León’s assessment, by the ideas of Bertolt Brecht and the “Invisible Theater” of Augusto Boal. These politico-aesthetic actions target not just the perpetrators of state violence, but the architects of what the artists term “economic genocide”—the academics, economists, lobbyists, and others responsible for this ongoing harm. In another escrache performance, the artists of Etcétera . . . staged Argentina vs. Argentina, a 1998 performance that allegorized war as soccer match, ultimately opening up the possibility for productive and popular dissent within the nation. Ponce de León argues that this work constitutes a kind of “situated materialist theater” that aims to “transform the theatrical apparatus so that it can help produce subjects who are able to apprehend the actual character of social relations” (166).

In the chapter that follows “State Theater, Security, T/Errorism,” Ponce de León analyzes the shift GAC and Etcétera . . . undertook in the wake of the Argentine popular uprising of 2001–2002 and the nominal reforms imposed by the state. Exacerbated by the global war on terror and a perceived popular desire for “normalcy,” the state was able to quell antisystemic mobilizations. Both groups, she argues “shifted toward the practice of ideology critique situated in scenarios and spaces that were immediate sites of political-ideological struggle,” what she terms a “defensive” strategy rather than an offensive one (193). One of this chapter’s case studies continues the critique of human rights discourse as it was employed by the left-leaning Kirchner administration and its alliance with groups including the Madres de la Plaza de Mayo. Limpieza General,4 an Etcétera . . . poem and performance, mocks the regime change implied by Kirchner’s use of political theater to inaugurate the “Espacio,” a space for reflection on human rights. Transforming the site of a former detention and torture center into a museum of memory, the artists implied, was a form of whitewashing akin to the former regime’s brainwashing tactics.

From these brief summaries, it should be clear that Another Aesthetics is Possible is an engaging read, the case studies evocative and Ponce de León’s treatment of them supremely nuanced. Yet I found myself at times wishing for a stronger disciplinary apparatus. Perhaps this is due to my own bias as an art historian, but there are key moments when a broader look at art and tactical media in particular would have proved helpful. For example, notably absent from the discussion is that of the larger framework of media hoaxing and culture jamming as a contemporary political aesthetic strategy. Other groups, such as the Yes Men, Billionaires for Bush, Ztohoven, Critical Art Ensemble, and the Billboard Liberation Front, were working in this manner during the same period as the events covered in Another Aesthetics is Possible. As the 2004 Interventionists exhibition at MASS MoCA catalogued, the late 1990s to mid 2000s were a high point for the genre of tactical media. While I admire Ponce de León’s centering of these less commonly discussed interventions and her rigorous analysis of each on its own terms, they were not created in an artistic vacuum. When Ponce de León describes the Errorist film Error Errorista towards the end of the fourth chapter, for example, she provides an analysis of the “split, asymmetrical structure” that “contains two different, noncontinuous ‘realities’” (239). Yet this concept potentially maps onto the idea of the “secondary audience” explicated by Yes Men Boyd and Bichlbaum in 2012’s Beautiful Trouble. This could have been a moment to zoom out and understand how the International Errorists positioned themselves in regard to these larger movements in political art, or how, the language used to describe a tactic in one geopolitical circumstances fails to account for the nuances of another.

These caveats aside, Another Aesthetics is Possible is a beautifully written, important, and timely contribution to the literature on Latin American political art, and to the study of activist aesthetics in general. Ponce de León’s analysis will be of use to scholars working far outside the geographic reach of this text, and I would argue that it should be required reading for anyone grappling with the question of political art. With her focus on the early 2000s and the “hinge generation” it indexes, Ponce de León presents a compelling portrait of a period that is both familiar and yet strangely distant from the current moment. In doing so, she unearths a wave of interventions that have continuing resonance in the present. After all, the emotional heft of history, the politics of cultural patrimony, the tentacular reach of the security state, and the bureaucratic appropriation of human rights discourse are all issues that artists and activists grapple with today. We would be well served to examine the tactical and aesthetic interventions that made ripples a mere generation ago.

Ila N. Sheren is Associate Professor of Art History in the Department of Art History & Archaeology at Washington University in St. Louis. She is the author of Portable Borders: Performance Art and Politics on the U.S. Frontera since 1984 (University of Texas Press, 2015), and the forthcoming Border Ecology: Art and Environmental Crisis on the Margins (Palgrave Macmillan).