Review: Vital Voids: Cavities and Holes in Mesoamerican Material Culture, by Andrew Finegold

Abstract

Book Review| April 01 2023 Review: Vital Voids: Cavities and Holes in Mesoamerican Material Culture, by Andrew Finegold Vital Voids: Cavities and Holes in Mesoamerican Material Culture, by Andrew Finegold. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2021. 165 pages. Hardcover $60.00. Jillian Mollenhauer Jillian Mollenhauer Metropolitan State University of Denver Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture (2023) 5 (2): 147–148. https://doi.org/10.1525/lavc.2023.5.2.147 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Jillian Mollenhauer; Review: Vital Voids: Cavities and Holes in Mesoamerican Material Culture, by Andrew Finegold. Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture 1 April 2023; 5 (2): 147–148. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/lavc.2023.5.2.147 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentLatin American and Latinx Visual Culture Search In 1958, Yves Klein’s exhibition La spécialisation de la sensibilité à l'état matière première en sensibilité picturale stabilisée, Le Vide (The Specialization of Sensibility in the Raw Material State of Stabilized Pictorial Sensibility, The Void) firmly embedded artistic notions of the void within a specifically Western, modernist framework of absence and the immaterial. Klein’s exhibition can be situated as part of a continuum of formal experimentation in the twentieth century that was preceded by the pictorial holes of Rauschenberg's “blank” white canvases and Erased de Kooning Drawing (1953), and later succeeded by numerous examples of individual works and entire exhibitions evoking empty space or palpable absence. Within this field of what might be considered the “aesthetics of absence,” Andrew Finegold’s Vital Voids stands as an important counterpoint, highlighting an aesthetic and metaphysical system that positions the void as a space of creation, fecundity, and transformation. Books about Indigenous aesthetics in... You do not currently have access to this content.