A new reality for the art object has emerged in the world of contemporary art: it is now experienced less as an autonomous, inanimate form and more as an active material agent. In this book, Kaira M. Cabañas describes how such a shift in conceptions of art’s materiality came to occur, exploring key artistic practices in Venezuela, Brazil, and Western Europe from the mid-twentieth century to the present. Immanent Vitalities expands the discourse of new materialisms by charting how artists, ranging from Gego to Laura Lima, distance themselves from dualisms such as mind-matter, culture-nature, human-nonhuman, and even Western–non-Western in order to impact our understanding of what is animate. Tracing migrations of people, objects, and ideas between South America and Europe, Cabañas historicizes changing perceptions about art’s agency while prompting readers to remain attentive to the ethical dimensions of materiality and of social difference and lived experience.
"Immensely interesting and thought provoking. Dr. Cabañas’s work is a great example of how art historians can interweave multiple areas, histories, and theories to explore art and innovation." - Book Riot
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"Immanent Vitalities is an important, theoretically sophisticated contribution to the scholarship on art in Latin America, one that admirably integrates this art into a global modern and contemporary context."
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"An important contribution to studies on Latin American art." - Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture
