GALLO, RUBEN. Mexican Modernity: The Avant-Garde and the Technological Revolution Cambridge: MIITP, 2005. ix + 268 pp.Ruben Gallo has written a fascinating study of early-twentieth century Mexican culture. Inspired, in particular, by Friedrich A. Kittler's Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, Gallo aims at understanding . . . ] the Mexican revolution: the cultural transformations triggered by media in the years after the armed conflict of 1910 to 1920 (1). That is, Mexican Modernity focuses on a span of roughly twenty years following the Revolution, which make up this other revolution. Through a series of chapters (Cameras, Radio, Cement, and Stadiums) the book studies the technocultural forms that founded an incipient modernity through tremendous, constitutive interventions in the visual imaginary, the practice of writing, the sonic landscape, and public space. In the process, Gallo develops a truly capacious corpus, reading narrative texts, poetry, architecture, advertisements, murals, and more. The winner of the MLA's prestigious Katherine Singer Kovacs prize, the book is also beautiful, filled with numerous illustrations, all contained within Erin Hasley's attractive design.In the introduction, Media and Modernity in Mexico, Gallo takes up Diego mural Detroit Industry by way of clearly elucidating the book's central concerns. According to Gallo, Detroit Industry features a merely thematic fascination with and media that ignores or, more strongly, refuses to think technological and mediatic novelty as its conditions of possibility. Indeed, Gallo argues, Detroit Industry seems to repress or domesticate reflection upon the real consequences for art of the very technocultural moment that it claims as object. As Gallo puts it, Rivera's work celebrates the way in which [ . . . ] media have transformed our understanding of the world, but it does so [ . . . ] from a purely thematic approach. The more pressing question of how these technological inventions have transformed the possibilities of artistic representation are conspicuously absent from his murals. Questions about media were a blind spot in vision of technology (17). By way of correcting this blind spot, Gallo's aim is to . . . ] address the many questions that Rivera left unanswered (18). In response to Rivera, Gallo reconstructs a multi-disciplinary and cosmopolitan avant-garde that accepted, admired, and advanced technological innovation. His approach engages three guiding assumptions. First, Gallo suggests, new technologies of representation introduced a radically perception of reality (19). Second, mediatic innovation does not serve representation, but rather, provides (and renews) the conditions of possibility for representation. Finally, media emerge in a historically determined fashion (21).Gallo organizes the first chapter, Cameras, around the photography of Edward Weston and Tina Modotti, whose anti-pictorialism is read as an expurgation of the impurities of portraiture and painting that always threaten the photograph from achieving its mediatic singularity. Gallo emphasizes the autographic quality of the photograph, which links it to the automatic nature of mechanical/ industrial production. The second chapter, Typewriters, takes up what Gallo acknowledges as the slightly more difficult task of cataloguing the impact of writing machines on textuality. Indeed, Gallo notes a keen difference that definitively separates the typewriter from the technocultural phenomena engaged: photographs look different from paintings, but published texts have the same appearance whether they are printed from a manuscript or a typescript (68). …