Review of New Territories: Laboratories for Design, Craft and Art in Latin America

spend a lot of time in face-to-face encounters in order to progress the students’ education. This is unhurried design education at its best. The section on the ‘Documentation Program’ is in the form of an annotated bibliography that provides information on a particular form of research at which the institute has excelled—that of documenting material culture. The craft documentation that has been undertaken by students and staff over the decades is currently the best repository of documentation on Indian craft. Boo New Territories: Laboratories for Design, Crat and Art in Latin America doi:10.1093/jdh/epv043 Advance Access publication 29 October 2015 Lowery Stokes Sims (ed.), Turner, 2014. 264 pp., 200 illus, cloth, $54.95. ISBN: 9788415832850 Dr Soumitri Varadarajan School of Architecture and Design, RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia E-mail: [email protected] Book Reviews ‘New Territories: Laboratories for Design, Craft and Art in Latin America’, organized at the Museum of Arts and Design (MAD), was, alongside ‘Moderno: Design for Living in Brazil, Mexico, and Venezuela, 1940–1978’ (Americas Society) and ‘Latin America in Construction: Architecture 1955–1980’ (Museum of Modern Art), one of three major exhibitions devoted to architecture and design produced in Latin America that were organized in New York City during the last year. The latter two exhibitions revisited formative moments in the history of modernist architectural and design culture, while MAD’s exhibition expanded the conversation to the very recent past and immediate present. Much like its eponymous exhibition, the volume entitled New Territories showcases a wide range of recent design developments in a series of ‘focus cities’: Havana, Mexico City, Oaxaca, Caracas, São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Santiago, Buenos Aires, San Salvador and San Juan. Each of these sites is examined through a broad thematic focus that expands the book’s overall purview beyond the geographical limits of these locations. 441 Downloaded from http://jdh.oxfordjournals.org/ by guest on December 5, 2015 This is a lavish book. The sections are clearly demarcated by coloured separators. Because of its size, detail and textured account, this book is a brilliant effort. It is a people story more than a material culture story. There are relections, there are events and there are a very large number of visitors mentioned; it is unlikely any international visitor has been missed in this account. This is an institution that has incessantly taken selies since the day it was created. The pages are illed with beautiful people. The text of the book wears a ‘mandate’ and describes a government institution questioning itself constantly about what ought to be the appropriate approach to design for India. This is fascinating material for anyone interested in design for social good and the community orientation of design. Lowery Sims, MAD’s chief curator, suggests that this focus on cities and themes ‘as opposed to genres of creativity or general themes alone’ connects the exhibition and publication to contemporary ways of examining ‘hubs of creativity’ (p. 13). The ‘new territories’ alluded to in the title are thus twofold: they refer to geographical sites of production that have not been central to discussions of design in the past (this is generally the case with all the locations in the book but especially so in the cases of Oaxaca, Havana, San Salvador and San Juan); and they also engage designer Gaetano Pesce’s claim about the ability of unorthodox interventions to open up new spaces for production and debate about design, something which the volume ambitiously sets out to do (p. 13). While the issues discussed in the essays are grounded in a close analysis of many of the artefacts in the catalogue, 442 One major thread connecting the presentation of these diverse works and writings concerns the ethical dimension of design. The essays address this crucial question in various ways, and many of the works thematize them as well. For instance, Caracas-based Pepe López’s Geometrías Marginales (2014) maps out the informal settlements of his home city into an iron maquette, while Liliana Angulo Cortés’s Project Quieto Pelo (2009) examines the construction of racial difference and gender inequalities through the hairstyling expressions of Afro-Colombians in her home city of Bogotá; Vik Muniz’s Marat, from the Pictures of Garbage series (2008) mobilizes the detritus of the urban margins of Rio de Janeiro in order to restage a canonical image drawn from the realm of ‘high’ art. Far from taking for granted the presumed ethical stance of these gestures, the volume invites a critical look at their potential and limitations. To that effect, Adriana Kertzer argues that although ‘mainstream market-based focus on certain populations, social matters, and urban spaces can stylize and fetishize very real issues to the Fig 1. Cubotoy, Angello García Bassi, 2013. Book Reviews Downloaded from http://jdh.oxfordjournals.org/ by guest on December 5, 2015 New Territories combines focused historical and contemporary case studies with texts that examine broader theoretical questions. The former cover themes as far-ranging as recent transformations in the culinary industry of Latin America, developments in toy design during the last two decades, design culture during Cuba’s Special Period and the panorama of exhibition and distribution of the work of contemporary designers in Mexico. The latter texts focus on issues of cultural identity and tensions between art, craft and design, as well as design’s abilities to engage critical issues such as sustainability, urban transformations and long-standing social divisions in Latin America along racial, class and gender lines. Mari Carmen Ramírez argues that while the interest in the artefacts in this publication may indeed be new, the relationship between art and design runs deep through the history of avant-garde culture in this part of the world (p. 37). Jorge Rivas underscores the centrality of strategies of cultural hybridization to design practices in the heterogeneous region. These strategies, he argues, have over the course of the last century deined the work of designers and continue to inform contemporary production in ways that challenge any narrow characterization of the cultural proile of works in the volume as ‘Latin American’ (p. 61). Gabriela Rangel situates the analysis of design culture in relation to the study of material culture, and argues that approaches hoping to grasp the complexity of the contemporary panorama should consider ‘production, consumption, and the movement of objects and artifacts as conceived according to a de-territorialized, contingent, hybrid model that is founded not on planning and serial production but on an allegorical interpretation of the pulse of genres, conventions, and symbolic constructions manifest in the mere fact of its manufacture’ (p. 57). the thematic cacophony of these objects extends beyond their purview, perhaps to a degree that is unwieldy. Thus, designer Rolando Peña’s Double Seat Barrel (2013–2014) repurposes steel drums, artefacts intimately tied to the geopolitical situation of his home city of Caracas into seats; Guatemala City-born Mauricio Paniagua and Sydney-born Tony Moxham, who collaborate as DFC in Mexico City, produce, among other objects, wallpaper, wall consoles and mirrors that relect the cultural hybridity of their adopted megalopolis; Santiago-based Angello García Bassi, for his part, creates in Cubotoy fanciful paper characters drawn from the worlds of advertising, graphic design and cartoons [1]. point of pure commodiication’, other cases of design interventions ‘relect earnest engagement by makers with their subjects’ (p. 74). What Kertzer describes as the ‘favelization’ of contemporary culture, or the supericial celebration of these urban settlements often used as a marketing device, represents one end of design’s ethical spectrum. At the other, however, are efforts such as those of the collectives DFC and Lima-based Glimpt, ‘who engage craftspeople in Mexico and Peru, respectively, acknowledging their participation in terms of value, not altruism’ (p. 75). The production of the Oaxi-fornia lamp provides a similar case of a collaborative effort where all the participants are given equal credit, ‘whether an artisan from Oaxaca, or a student from the California College of the Arts, or the project director/ designer Raul Cabra’. Some of these examples, Kertzer suggests, could ‘illuminate what some best practices or strategies’ for these kinds of collaborations could be in the future (p. 75). doi:10.1093/jdh/epv028 Advance Access publication 8 September 2015 Luis M Castañeda Syracuse University—Art and Music Histories, New York, USA E-mail: [email protected] he Making of European Consumption: Facing the American Challenge Per Lundin and Thomas Kaiserfeld (eds), Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. 280 pp., cloth, $90.00. ISBN: 9781137374035 This volume of essays examines the inluence of the USA on patterns of household consumption, mostly in NorthWest Europe in the period 1948–1965. It re-enters a debate about the Americanization of European consumption which, as David Nye notes in his chapter, is now more than twenty-ive years old. An earlier volume, Victoria de Grazia’s 2005 Irresistible Empire: America’s Advance through Twentieth-Century Europe (add endnote here) provided the background for evaluating the extent to which an American regime of mass consumption was adopted by, or imposed upon, European societies. The Making of European Consumption comprises an introduction, two essays of general reference, which I ind the most interesting, and seven chapters which are ield, Book Reviews 443 Downloaded from http://jdh.oxfordjournals.org/ by guest on December 5, 2015 It is to the publication’s credit that, while tackling a broad and complex horizon of design production, New Territories does not aim to oversimplify its subject matter, perhaps to the point of risking a sense of inconsistency about its overall focus. However, it would be dificult to provide such a vast panorama of interventions with any overarching theoretical or thematic cohesion, or with the sense of hermeneutical closure that the immediate present resists even more obviously than the more distant past. Signiicantly, while the volume is focused on design production in a speciic, if heterogeneous, part of the world, many of the issues it raises are very relevant to studies of contemporary design across the world. Indeed, the story that this volume begins to tell its readers is, as Mari Carmen Ramírez reminds us, ‘not only far from written but, least of all, exhausted’ (p. 37). B