Sovereign (In)hospitality: Politics and the Staging of Equality in Revolutionary Mexico

Abstract

In Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility Walter Benjamin observes that just as the entire mode of existence of human collectives changes over long historical periods, so too does their mode of perception. The way in which human perception is organized the medium in which it occurs is conditioned not only by nature but by history (255). In twentiethcentury Mexico the historical spectacle of the revolution the convergence between the advent of technological reproducibility and the forcible entry of the masses into the realm of sovereignty moved the image out of the realm of aesthetic distinction into that of social function, and ushered in a fundamental shift in collective perception. The immense photographic and filmic production of the revolutionary decade is an inventory of human action, an imagistic grasping of the concrete conditions of life in its (often cruel) immediacy, and the exposure of a new political optic that revolutionized the social function of art in Mexico and beyond. Within this vast inventory of technologically reproducible photographic and filmic images perhaps the most widely recognized, the most permanent and historically durable, has been that of Francisco Villa en la silla presidencial, two interchangeable photographs that can be