Juan Acha and Cultural Revolution in Post-1968 Mexico City

American Comparative Literature Association Annual Meeting

June 15-18, 2022
Virtual

Conference Presentation by Ian Erickson-Kery (Duke)

In 1970, Peruvian art theorist Juan Acha published a text on “La revolución cultural” (“Cultural Revolution”), which diagnosed an imperative for new forms of cultural subjectivity in Third World contexts undergoing rapid urbanization and technological modernization. Exiled permanently to Mexico City in 1972, Acha became a fundamental interlocutor to a generation of artists known as Los Grupos, who challenged the political and cultural hegemony of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) through often-fraught alliances with emerging urban-popular social movements. Acha’s critical and curatorial interventions in this period were characterized by an insistence on aesthetics as a privileged and fundamentally separate, if not autonomous, sphere of action vis-à-vis politics, one proper not exclusively to artists but to the social field writ large. This paper assesses the specificity of Acha’s thought, first in relation to concepts of cultural revolution and everyday life tied to the Parisian 1968 uprising, in which he participated, and then in relation to conflicting strains in Los Grupos insistent on more conventional forms of political militancy and didactic “political art.” Acha’s writings and associated artistic tendencies challenge narratives of the so-called "aestheticization of politics" in the period since the 1960s, revising the very definition of the aesthetic object and the modes of domination and subordination it is often assumed to sustain.